Startups Are Hard. So Work More, Cry Less, And Quit All The Whining - <AUTHOR> http://uncrunched.com/2011/11/27/startups-are-hard-so-work-more-cry-less-and-quit-all-the-whining/ <comment><USER2> This is _insane_. You realize that all the quotes are from a post called the author describes as a 'cautionary tale'? (<http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html>)

I think jwz sums it up best in another post, where he talks about the best case scenario: becoming rich from your startup:

 _I've known dozens of instant-millionaires so far (from Netscape as well as other companies), and basically, I don't speak to any of them any more, because the money changed them and turned them into fairly creepy people. People who spend $10k on a wristwatch and then brag about it (while trying to aloofly sound like they're not bragging about it.) People whose sense of self- worth has gone nonlinear, because when they look at their brokerage statement, they forget that, while skill was certainly a component of why they got to where they did, luck was also a huge component. Most of these people have never worked for a company that built a good product and failed anyway. They don't have any understanding of the fact that skill is often necessary, but always insufficient. They believe their hype._

\-- <http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/corleone.html>

<comment><USER3> I don't think people appreciate the money aspect enough. It does change people and not always along a vector you would expect. It also changes people who don't get rich.

Your a low number employee and your company goes public, woohoo you are rich, but people who work with you and came later and are doing the same job as you are not. The cognitive dissonance is huge, people sometimes feel guilty that they are rich and their co-workers aren't, sometimes they feel like they 'must be smarter' because they are rich and their co-workers aren't. Newly rich people want to marvel in it, and share how amazing it is that they _can_ spend 10K on a watch if they feel like it, and the people around them, doing the same work and not rich, well they often aren't all that appreciative of what it must be like.

Those relationships get awkward quickly. And people separate so that they can be with other people where their lifestyle (or lack of it) won't be a source of awkwardness.

Not a lot of people talk about the side effects of 'success' but they should think about it.

<comment><USER2> My point in quoting that wasn't that success is necessarily bad for you (Alex Ohanian seems to be doing okay, and jwz is himself a counterexample) it's that success in that sort of business has a large random component.

The point of the OP's post is that huge sacrifices are necessary for great rewards. I think the truth is more like, _your_ huge sacrifices are necessary so that _our_ investment strategy works.

Meanwhile, guys like patio11 and the 37 Signals team have shown there's plenty of different paths to success. And if you think about what people like Jimmy Wales or Tim Berners-Lee have done, there's lots of ways to "make a dent in the universe" without even forming a traditional company. I know this is crazy talk, but not all roads to greatness involve making a VC rich.

But you know, now that I think about it, I think people are going to read what I just posted and only zero in on the "dozens of instant millionaires" sentence and ask _how can I get in on that?_

<comment><USER4> The definition of success itself varies among most of the people. Some people wish to make a dent in the universe, some people just want money. Some people want both.

Some people just want to be famous and remembered. Some people want to be something important part of an ecosystem who get to decide a lot of things. Some people just like Power and social status. Some people are in just for the fun of the game.

Some people just want to be happy. List can be really long. Basically its what you truly want.

Depending on that there are different things you need to be successful. There is no silver bullet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Work hard. Cry less. And realize you're part of history_

No, sorry, but you probably aren't. Zynga isn't changing the world and neither are 99.9% of the startups coming out of SV.

The over-working culture is exactly that - a culture. It has nothing to do with actual reality, and everything to do with perceived reality. Great, long- term companies aren't built by entrepreneurs who sleep 2 hours a night.

P.S.: not getting enough sleep decreases productivity. The 37Signals guys have covered this a few hundred times at this point. I also seem to recall Richard Branson saying that he "needs his 8 hours."

<comment><USER6> Well, sort of. Working all the time isn't sustainable. But the point of starting a startup isn't to do things that are long-term sustainable, it's to build as much as you can in a short period of time to outrace competitors and adapt quickly to whatever comes up.

And I say that as someone who needs work-life balance -- that's why I don't have a startup. I want to spend time with my wife and kids and hobbies and things, so I have a nice job that I can go to every day and then come home again.

Expecting to maintain work-life balance while creating a startup is bringing a knife to a gunfight.

<comment><USER7> Sleeping 2 hours a night is a sprint. Unless you are a superhuman, you can't sleep 2 hours a night for more than a week and still be more productive than someone on a normal schedule.

The point being, you can sprint in a crunch. You can sprint to meet a deadline next week. But unless you expect your company to be bought a week after you found it, you should probably be pacing yourself at least a little. Go ahead and give up work/life balance- for a medium-term project you can risk burnout- and go ahead and work 16 hours a day. But get 8 hours of sleep.

<comment><USER6> Ok, that sounds fair. Two hours is indeed not sustainable except in sprints. Though I've known spooky people who seem to be able to get by with not much more than that on a sustained basis.

<comment><USER8> > Though I've known spooky people who seem to be able to get by with not much > more than that on a sustained basis.

Yes, but these people are (physiologically) the exception not the rule (this characteristic is not uncommon for sailors, for some types of race sailing it's pretty much a base requirement).

<comment><USER9> You are talking about polyphasic sleep, which when you train and skill is a great tool to sleep less, but I think these guys are not talking about that, they talk about being "la tête dans le guidon" as we say in France => head in the handlebar litteraly, or "sous l'eau" => underwater. It is a myth. Startups are all about creativity. If you don't sleep enough, you are not creative. PERIOD.

<comment><USER10> Let me add more: not creative, not logical, not coherent. Incapable of being social.

Studies show that chronic lack of sleep is equivalent of being drunk when driving. Do we really want the cognitive equivalent of drunk workers "changing the world"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There's work. Then there's productive work. What pisses me off is having to pull an all-nighter doing ultimately meaningless work. In startups there can be a lot of meaningless work unless you have all your ducks lined up both strategically and tactically. The older I get, the more I realize that having your ducks lined up requires presence of mind, clarity, and focus, all characteristics that are fleeting when you're sleep-deprived and being powered by Red Bulls and coffee.

In startups, marathon work sessions should be kept to a minimum. _They're valuable and they're a useful tool_. But they come at a massive cost. The more you rely on them, the less effective they become and the harder it is for the person who participates in them to reach their original productivity without massive amounts of downtime in between sessions. If you're going to commit to some crazy over-working session, you better have a damn good reason. Most startups who push this culture don't.

<comment><USER12> As a student, I agree completely with your above philosophy. It seems to me that just about everything in your article could be generalized to just all sorts of work, rather than just the sort of works in startups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm so glad I was pushing 30 before I really became aware of this startup scene. The general impression that comes off, to me at least, is work hard, stop moaning, accept pennies and one day you'll be rich - assuming that unlikely outcome happens and we don't use of the thousand ways possible to screw you out of any riches.

To me at least, and as an outsider, I'd say things like this may hold up for founders, but as a non-founder you better be young and have very little in the way of commitments. Get the experience and use what you've learned to found something yourself.

As a caveat, I am obviously not well in on the startup scene, but from what I've seen & heard over the years, there's very little to tempt me as an employee.

<comment><USER14> I'm in my early 20s. Startups seem to be the only way out of 40 years of mediocrity in TPS-land for me, so I don't really think I have much of a choice. It's startups or nothing for me.

Or maybe I am being myopic? Are there more options to be had in life than mediocrity/wageslavery vs glory/startups?

<comment><USER2> You are believing exactly what investors and VCs want you to believe. You aren't escaping wage slavery, you are just substituting a different slavemaster. Wake up.

There are billions of people on this planet. Do you think that the ones who aren't in Silicon Valley startups are all _miserable_? Their lives aren't worth living?

Ok, but more specifically. Let's say you want to lead a creative existence, working with technology, and you love the SF scene so much you just _have_ to live here. You don't need to be in a startup for that. As they tell you to be frugal with a startup, be frugal with you life and all sorts of possibilities open up.

I know a number of people living in "hacker homes" where they drift in between working on startups, technology jobs, and then working on projects that just interest them. Sometimes they'll take an entire year off work to do something with no monetary gain, like a Burning Man or an open source project. You might have to live in an less desirable area with a lot of housemates, but once your rent is sub-$1000 and you cook most of your own food, you can live for an entire year once you've pulled off a couple of consulting gigs.

You're young, and I presume you don't have a spouse or kids, so this option is _very_ possible for you.

<comment><USER14> Thanks, that's some cool ideas right there! Upvoted for truth and justice.

I'm all for exploring unconventional lifestyle design patterns. And I _have_ been nursing certain plans of becoming a techno-hippie :)

<comment><USER2> Thanks. By the way -- another possibility is to work for technology projects which aren't really in the startup game.

A lot of my friends work for the Wikimedia Foundation, Thunderbird, Mozilla, Tor, and so on. There's no possibility of walking away as a zillionaire, but neither do you have to work with (or for) dickwads who are only in it for the money and who are out to screw you out of your share. And if you're any good, there's a guarantee of doing something significant that you can point to later on your resume, should you want to go the entrepreneurial route. These organizations are global, so you get to do a fair bit of travelling too.

Non-profits have their own special brand of problems, but if you tally up the pros and cons they are definitely an option.

<comment><USER14> How do I get started?

<comment><USER2> <http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings>

<http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/careers.html>

I don't think you get a job at Tor without being personally known to the developers. Volunteer, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The more I think about this post, the more conflicted I am about it.

On the surface, there are some obvious truths. Startups are hard; they're definitely not 9-to-5, 5-days-a-week jobs. There are also way too many people who think they're like a normal job but with added rockstar status and the potential to suddenly become fabulously wealthy, as if by random.

But. As Arrington says, it's a mindset thing. It obviously does take huge amounts of effort to get something off the ground, and the people you work with should be selected for their motivation to do that when it's required. The danger is that people will interpret his article to mean that everyone should work long hours all the time; that's simply not right. They should work the hours it takes to reach the goal, assuming the goal is reachable. Machismo is not productive.

While it's true that there's a lot of hard work involved and a lot of people are simply not cut out for it, here are some other truths. Balance leads to creative thinking. Lack of sleep leads to loss in productivity. Burn-out leads to no productivity. A business where you ask your employees to give their lives to the product is fundamentally unsustainable. A company is a community of people, and you have to understand their human needs to keep them motivated.

It's also true that if your employees aren't motivated to reach the goal, something is wrong - either the employee isn't right, or your goal isn't right. It comes down to hiring the right people, having a killer idea that motivates people, and being a good leader.

I also bristle at his comment about unionization. I don't think unions are a bad thing - but any unionization would have to be context-specific for Silicon Valley. There's nothing wrong with collectively bargaining for rights, but it can't be a cookie-cutter solution. I'm pretty sure smart tech people are capable of creating a 21st-century union that supports their rights while keeping the creative flame of their industry alive.

<comment><USER15> Also, the more I think about it, the less appropriate his post is in the light of recent tragic events.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Work hard

Yes - a strong work ethic is needed to build a company. But hard work won't save a mediocre idea or flawed business model. Don't work hard, work smart - which means working long hours and pushing a deadline when needed. It also means being skeptical and ruthless with your business model, validating your ideas and pivoting when needed.

> Cry less

No. Cry more. Vent and complain. Give yourself emotional release. Your brain needs it. And how can you code optimally or run a company properly when your brain is working at partial capacity?

If you are smiling, happy and confident all the time when building a startup you are probably a deluded idiot. That being said - always exude confidence to your customers and strategic business partnerships. (insert witty remark here about sausage being made) However ALWAYS be brutally honest with yourself and your team. If you are honestly challenging and validating your idea and business model you will lose faith from time to time and may even slip into a funk. THIS IS NORMAL. If you're honest with your team they will find a way to help you through.

> And realize you're part of history.

This is true in the sense that you are living and breathing and working during the early 21st century - you are a part of history (by this definition every dog is also a part a history, so don't get too excited). But it's highly unlikely that you will _make_ history. Like most people (and most dogs) your startup will toil and die in obscurity. It's absurd to concern yourself with your legacy before you've built something of value. Build a great company and let history make up it's own mind.

</comment><comment><USER17> My day job is just hitting 5 years. Of the original team hired under the founders only about 30% of us are left (we've hired some replacements), and the founders were part of the group that was cut.

Watching the founders leave was the hardest because you could watch them slowly come to terms over the first couple of years that:

a) this actually is harder work than what we left

b) it's not just somebody tossing money at you to go work on your pet projects and screw around, treating the expense account like a personal luxury account

c) there is a reasonable expectation by the investors at the end of all of this that they will make their money back off of your work

Surprisingly, making the transition to a professional management team was easier than working with the original founders. During the tenure with the founders they made all of the mistakes above, plus acted like petulant children when they ran into each of these problems. Whining, foot stomping (literally), crying, flying cross-country to be away from the team and showing up unannounced at a satellite office. Bizarre behavior.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's not just the work that's hard. It's the intestinal fortitude to deal with technology, business and people, day in and day out -- especially when all three of those things are often acting at odds with each other that makes startup life hard, and being small, with startups those things can be magnified out of all proportion. Minor office quibbles turn into nuclear explosions, a broken technology stack a looming iceberg, lack of sales ability into a waiting sink hole.

People often remark about the perks of working at a startup, but it's those perks that make the often miserable part of the work tolerable. Or at least act as transparent incentives to work more, cry less and quit all the whining -- because at least you get three free meals a day!

</comment><comment><USER18> My favorite numbers for startups are that they have a 1-in-20 chance of succeeding.

I don't know where I got those numbers from -- seems like I've heard PG use a 1-in-10 chance, but you get the general feel for the situation. You should work in such a way as to acknowledge those numbers. I'm not saying don't work hard -- far from it. Just work as if this is stage 1 of a 20-stage process, each stage lasting a year or two. If you're not working in such a fashion that you can go a decade or two, logic says you have mis-configured your work habits.

I had this same attitude when I moved from the commercial world into startups, _get your ass in gear and buck up!_ That was a few years ago, and I've moderated my views quite a bit due to brutal reality. I think part of the problem for me was that I was trying to compare the startup world to either the academic world or to the commercial software world. In both of those scenarios you worked as hard as hell for a limited period of time and then _you delivered_. You took the test, you released the product, you passed the class.

Startups aren't like that because _the work is never done_. There is no huge finish line you sprint through. It just keeps going and going. The cutesy way of saying this is "it's a marathon, not a sprint" but I'm not sure that even covers it adequately. It's not a race at all. It's just a long, hard slog. Yeah sure, if you've got traction it is a hell of a roller-coaster ride, but I'd worry about then if-and-only-if that day actually arrives. Work like Facebook did to get their first million users when you actually start attracting hundreds of thousands of users and you're looking that potential in the face, not before.

<comment><USER19> PG also said that the 1-in-10 chance is an _average_ , across many different people, and individual circumstances may dramatically alter those odds. Some startups are virtually certain to succeed. Others probably have a 1 in a 1000 chance.

I think you're better off working really hard for a while - enough to fully explore the problem space you've gotten in - and then taking stock of the situation and learning your lessons. Then, hopefully your odds are better next time, and with any luck, the process eventually converges on success.

<comment><USER20> > Some startups are virtually certain to succeed.

If your execution is good and your definition of success is sufficiently modest, that's probably true. But for big successes? It's hard to think of many examples, even in retrospect.

<comment><USER19> I'm guessing PG's definition of success is "likely to generate a return on investment if YC invests". For that, there're a bunch that are no-brainers, even if they end up as just a talent acquisition. Parakey, for example: even if it failed, some company was bound to buy it just to get Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt (and Facebook did). Ditto Friendfeed; yes, it was ultimately a talent acquisition, but the founders and investors didn't do all that badly on it.

I don't think you could predict the overwhelming success of a Facebook or Google in any reasonable timeframe. However, you could probably be fairly certain that Mark Zuckerburg was sitting on _something_ useful once he got a few thousand people to sign up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Your startup is not part of history. You couldn't find better evidence that SV is an intellectual bubble than this post.

<comment><USER22> Agreed, most people have an inflated view of their own startup seemingly because subconsciously they probably feel they deserve it for the hours they put in.

What will be a part of history is the bubble itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Work more, cry less, and quite all the whining... is this SV or Full Metal Jacket?

That's not advice. It's ignorance.

If you cannot get your work done in eight hours a day there is probably something that's off. Maybe you're underestimating the work. Maybe you're being optimistic about your deadlines. Maybe you're not being honest with yourself about how efficiently you're using your time in the day.

After eight hours of working on one thing I'm done. If I've used every hour of that day to it's full potential I don't have the will or inclination to keep working. I usually feel pretty good about going home. Tomorrow's another day at the dream factory. I'll decompress, read a book, hack on something fun, hang out with my wife, get my sleep and tomorrow I'll wake up fresh and ready for the new set of challenges.

Whenever a manager or project lead tells me something along the lines of, "just do what you have to do and get it done," I just want to instinctively tackle them and slap them hard across the face. Not because I hate working but because they're standing on the tracks and there's a big freight train coming that they're not seeing. Managers who do that are lazy and are just passing the buck. If they don't want to hear why they're about to get hit by a giant freight train you owe it to the team to do something about it.

You don't do that by keeping your mouth shut and your nose to the grind stone.

 _Edit_ : Fixed some spelling issues.

<comment><USER4> There is always, repeat always who is going to do more work than you. That's fundamentally how competition works. And the one who does more work than you do, will always have an edge over you. Both on the shorter and the longer run. There are rewards to do that extra. And that motivation will always drive a person to do more work than you do. And trust me inevitable he will end up being successful someday.

You may do a quick comparison and call that extra work 'not worth it' when you compare against other aspects of your life that demand time. But after say a decade when you look back and find that guy to have taken a huge leap ahead of you, suddenly you get that thought that occupies every person in such a situation:

'Why couldn't have I done that?'

And then starts the analysis. You will end up finding that you were a lot more intelligent than him yet the guy somehow manage to beat you.

That's when you will realize the most dangerous fact of the world.

Hard work * time gives surprising success.

In my case I will rather take my chances do more work than my peers and even fail. Then have a regret that I could have worked hard and won but I didn't.

<comment><USER24> Your basing your argument on the idea that everyone is in some linear race and we will all do an assessment of ourselves and everyone else at the age of 40 to see who is ahead. Unfortunately many of the typically unhappiest people do this and they base their assessment on money and job titles. Success is not just about money and job titles. We all (well atleast some of us) have our own versions. One person who goes home after 8 hours may end up dedicating their extra time to building a great family life or hobby while pittying his past high performing coworker who now has made CEO. Who do you think is happier when they look back - the person who followed what they wanted to do or the person who 'won' against their peers?

<comment><USER4> I would still say the CEO.

As a I CEO I will have all the money in the world to chase any hobby/fun activity I will ever want. Also my kids and family are enjoying luxury and privileges which other families aren't so even they are happy.

Also I have time and patience only for one hobby. Most of the time even with a touch schedule I manage to work on my hobby.

<comment><USER25> Except most people who follow your advice are never going to be CEO. They're going to throw their whole life away chasing this, never to reach it. Other's may get a lot of money exploiting such people though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> No. You don't need to work harder. Work smarter. I was able to work for $15/hour two years ago. I did actually work for such rates, but I ended up increasing my productivity. Learning new tools, techniques, patterns, two monitors, better working conditions, reading blogs and books...

Now I work less and make more money. I'm still brushing my skills, and the more I do the more I realize that I can go further. Before you start a Start- up, make sure you have the necessary skills and that you have mastered them quite well.

Make a plan. Put 8-10/hours of work per day. Take at least 7 hours of sleep. Practice sport. Meet with your friends (but don't let them distract you). If you plan the time required for your startup to get up and running (coding, testing, papers, marketing, capital...), then you'll be able to work in healthy conditions and meet deadlines.

And doing that you'll be called a HARD WORKING person. Because no one else (or few) is doing it. If you are doing what the author suggests then you might possibly end up destroying your startup, health, relations and life.

</comment><comment><USER24> Meh - honestly working insane hours becomes unproductive and is foolishly glorified by many around SV. Getting 2 hours of sleep on a regular basis is just going to make you non-functional after a while and will lead to shooting yourself in the foot. This culture seems to be manufactured by VC-backed startups with limited runways and some of the more tyranical managers who hear about the greats like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates that drove people incredibly hard and achieved enormous success. I think the better path is to work toward a certain direction that you enjoy, focus on enjoying your work and not trying to hit some "level", and treat yourself well so you can produce well. Your enjoyment and health should be your top priority and in return I'd bet your efforts will be much more effective.

<comment><USER27> People seem to only take part of the stories of those successful people as well. Steve Jobs was at times a workaholic, but at other times a total dilettante who moved to India to seek enlightenment from a guru, and did a lot of drugs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The quality of posts that make it to #1 on ycombinator lately leave me unmotivated to check the site as frequently as I used to. As a result I work more, cry less and quit whining.

<comment><USER29> i check about the same, but probably click and read a lot less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I don't see a problem here. If people are working too hard, let them vent. What's it to you? Especially if they haven't struck it rich yet. It's not like you are forced to read their complaints, unless you are their boss, but then I would question your motives.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's worth quoting pg here:

"Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast."

<http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html>

I don't really understand all the backlash in this thread against hard work in pursuit of a big goal.

<comment><USER32> I don't think people are arguing against working hard, I think they're just pointing out the untold part of pg's wealth essay. Namely, you can work your butt off for that 4 years and still not make it. Sadly, that's a far more probable outcome than acquiring 40+ years of working income at the end of your 4 year stint.

Having said that, if you're young, dedicated and focussed and it interests you - hell, have a crack. But know what you're doing - startups are _always_ a gamble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Ugh. Silly VC propaganda is now making the front page?

Honestly this is a great attitude to instill in your employees, they will kill themselves for the company and when they burn out you can hire some more. You really can get a lot done when you can convince people to sacrifice their lives. Just make sure you and your technical advisers get enough sleep and downtime to think clearly and stay motivated and sharp.

If you are a developer then hopefully you've read enough about your profession to know how real work gets done.

Maybe you are too naive to know that there are people who are more than happy to sell you a dream so you'll work yourself stupid, selling a chunk of your life for a lottery ticket (but hey, some of them do pay off).

That naiveté won't last long in this business, so don't worry, you'll learn one way or another.

</comment><comment><USER22> Tim Ferriss described very much the opposite mentality of that of the 22-hour- work-day SV startup scene in his book "The 4 Hour Work Week." A takeaway that I've always held close is you have to be aware of whether you are working effectively vs. working efficiently. While Netscape reached their deadline (I assume) and enjoyed a successful launch, I have to wonder if they could have made the same amount of progress by equalizing their hours of sleep/hours of work, which would have made their work hours more effective. Just speaking from school experience, on 2 hours of sleep personally I know if I continue to try working much I start making mistakes that cost me a lot of time, and my pace just slows in general.

</comment><comment><USER34> This post is disappointing to see after all the talk about people working in start ups being depressed last week. If you are hurting at a start up, you should definitely take a good look at your life and figure out what you can change to make it better. I am glad the article says "if you work at a startup and you think you're working too hard and sacrificing too much, find a job somewhere else that will cater to your needs", but I think working with your start up to try to arrange a job that is more compatible with you is an option as well. Please do not just suck it up, if you're feeling bad, start making a plan that will make you feel better.

</comment><comment><USER35> Some time ago go i read an article about an ex CEO of some biotech firm who wanted to complete a very hard multiple days bike race and trained for over a year. He knew he couldnt keep up with the pros who didnt sleep at all and were nearly killing themselves, instead he tried to get good sleep everyday while the pros raced on. In the morning he ended up overtaking many of the guys that didnt sleep at all and genereally felt very fit throughout the whole race. Of course he didnt win, but as far as i remember had a very respectable finish. It was an excerpt from a book but i cant remember the name nor any details about the race :/

<comment><USER8> At the other end of the choice, there's Cliff Young[0]

> In 1983, the 61-year-old potato farmer won the first Westfield Sydney to > Melbourne Ultra Marathon (875 kilometres, 544 miles). The race was run > between what were then Australia's two largest shopping centres: Westfield > Parramatta, in Sydney, and Westfield Doncaster, in Melbourne. Cliff arrived > at the start line with overalls and gumboots. He ran at a slow loping pace > and trailed the leaders for most of the course, but by denying himself sleep > and running while the others slept, he slowly gained on them and eventually > won by a large margin.

> [...]

> The Westfield run took him five days, 15 hours and four minutes, trimming > almost two days off the record for any previous run between Sydney and > Melbourne. All of the six competitors who finished the race broke the > previous record, but Young beat them by running while they were sleeping.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Young_(athlete)#Westfield...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Young_\(athlete\)#Westfield_Sydney_to_Melbourne_Ultra_Marathon)

<comment><USER25> Interesting story. Physical labor is totally different than mental labor, but if your business is about doing lots of physical labor doing long hours could make sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Sometimes, it seems like a lot of startups end up working this hard because they aren't being realistic about their chances of survival. It feels like there are a disproportionate amount of chiefs but not enough Indians.

Lacy cites companies like Twitter and Zynga as success stories. Neither of these were created by newbies. Evan Williams spent five years at Blogger. Marc Pincus had already sold one company and has a Wharton MBA. I've seen startups created by people who haven't even seen functional companies exist. That doesn't exactly inspire confidence in VCs, employees, or customers.

If you don't have experience and connections, partner with someone who does, whether it be an incubator, a co-founder, or an angel investor. Suck it up and give them a cut disproportionate to their efforts on your project. Just make sure they have valid advice and connections, and that they actually answer your emails. This is the model YC companies take as well as what fueled Facebook (Zuck/Parker).

If there is no decision maker in or closely tied to your company with relevant experience, you will _most likely_ have to work this hard to get anything off the ground. You will cry. You will suffer exhaustion. Why? Because you are competing against experienced people who have a vested interest in your failure. Even if you are in a different space entirely, you still compete with them for funding, mindshare and talent.

You can work yourself to death. If your model is flawed because you've never actually seen a functional company work, much of the work you do is spent simply spinning your wheels to find traction.

</comment><comment><USER37> > And realize you're part of history.

You're a part of history whatever you do. Spend time with your friends and family, volunteer to help others, get outdoors and enjoy the world. Take some college classes if you like, and drop out if you like. Learn something beautiful and utterly useless like calligraphy. Travel to India. Explore ideas, meditation, and Zen. I daresay your startup will be better, stronger, faster, and make a bigger dent in the universe.

<comment><USER38> This post is trying to say be a part of history in a significant way. But in reality your Lolcats/Facebook/Whatever wannabe site isnt important in the least. The only part of history that the people in SV startup land will become is the part of history where investors were throwing money at companies that had ideas with no products or execution or strategy for making money at all. We'll end up as the part of history that's remembered for I justified valuations, hype, and a huge busted bubble that ruins everything for the few companies that actually _are_ worth funding. Most of the new trendy startups I've seen can be run on $50,000 a year max and I'm being generous. All you need is a server and some code, not a billion dollar valuation for a CRUD web app.

Very few startups are destined to be great or even decent. Very, very few. It's a shame that so many are getting so much hype without justification these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Fuck this investment banking bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER40> As someone that's bootstrapped for 3 years, I can say that working hard is imperative, but can also be incredibly detrimental to your business. I believe in the spirit of the blog post, as long as you don't get caught up in absolutes, because obviously burnout is counter-productive.

Most startups I see are weekend projects, or 3-6 month endeavors that really don't qualify as being a part of history and are dominated by goal of making money. However, considering the author it's safe to say that Arrington is assuming that you're actually trying to MAKE A DIFFERENCE, instead of building the next coupon loyalty program with game theory and achievements. It's probably also safe to say that someone with his universally accepted work ethic is probably seeing alot more 'whining' in his current role than previously exposed to.

</comment><comment><USER41> Caterina Fake, working hard is overrated <http://caterina.net/archive/001196.html>

> Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing > to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing > patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. > Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place > where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can > be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right > thing. Working hard, even, if that's what you like to do.

</comment><comment> brown9-2 It is a logical fallacy to believe that in order to mimic someone else's success you must also mimic all of the steps they took to get there.

Just because Microsoft, Facebook, or Netscape had long and crazy hours in the startup days doesn't mean you need to do the same thing to build the next Microsoft, Facebook, or Microsoft.

It's rather immature thinking to assume there is only one way to do something like this, or even that "this is just the way things work" when your company is based in a certain area of the country (Silicon Valley, California).

</comment><comment><USER42> There has been done large amounts of research on heavy overtime's effect on the productivity of software developers.

It doesn't take very much overtime for productivity to absolutely plummet. We're not talking just a small time drop here. Rather it's a free fall of 80% or so. This means that even if an engineer works 120 hours every week, he will _still not be as productive as if he worked the standard 40-50_!

More goofing-off time, running errands during work, an extreme increases in defect rates etc, are just some of the reasons.

Steve McConnel discusses this at length in his 1996 book "Rapid development", citing large amounts of case studies, books and other research.

The irony is that these guys who give the bravado laden "quit the whining, put in the hours" speech, are actually _reducing their time-to-market_ , while simultaneously destroying their developers!

</comment><comment><USER43> This is crazy. If you took this attitude to its logical conclusion, you'd end up with a culture in which human need is almost entirely subsumed by corporate need. Oh, no, wait...

</comment><comment><USER44> This article seems like a strawman. When was the last time you read people complaining about startup work ethic?

</comment><comment><USER45> "If it does, all the really necessary people will just leave and do their thing somewhere else."

Uh yeah, the developers, who are reading this and thinking "what a dick."

Maybe he should go somewhere else.

</comment><comment><USER46> The overworking has nothing to do with changing the world - rather, it runs contrary to it. If perpetual overworking is necessary for a startup, it's not pushing anything revolutionary enough to be considered changing the world, as the overworking serves entirely to get a product to market faster than someone else, given that someone else can produce an equivalent or superior product.

</comment><comment><USER38> It's natural for people to whine. I do it all the time but in the end I'm far happier with my life than I was when I didn't work for myself.

Some whining is not justified and done by people who are in it solely for the money. Founders are a tough bunch but even we have to vent at times.

At the same time I'd submit that if you're working all night and day you're not doing it right. There are times we must put in a 16 hour day but constantly killing yourself over work hurts you in the long run. The more punishment you dole out to yourself the less productive you are and the longer you have to work to catch up.

A lot of whining would cease if people stopped trying to keep up with the other guy for the sale of keeping up. Become what you're meant to become and fuck expectations and what other people are doing. Grow to the size you need to be. Too many startups start taking money too soon and are run as if they're a huge company when all they need is a single server and a guy to write code. Premature scaling can probably account for a large portion of the whining _and_ failure out there.

I see way too many startups trying to be something they're not and shouldn't be which leads to burn out and failure. This business is tough and a little whining is to be expected but if we quit making the mistakes I mentioned then the whining will cease to come from cry babies and will only be heard from hard working people who truly need to and should be allowed to vent.

</comment><comment><USER14> Either I am way under-estimating the difficulty of executing a startup, or I am some kind of superman able to tolerate way more of life's shit sandwiches (without crying myself to sleep every night).

Which one is it? I kinda need to know before I start a startup :p

Feel free to downwote for hubris (reverse psychology, hah).

</comment><comment><USER47> And that's why my hiring criteria has always hinged on the level of compulsion said candidate exhibits. Sleep needs to be a secondary concern when stacked against a deadline.

Although, I will be the first to admit that every now and then I fully rest up and swear I'm going to get more sleep because I can actually see the productivity increase. That thought is often a quickly fleeting thought however....

<comment><USER48> > Sleep needs to be a secondary concern when stacked against a deadline.

Do you tell the candidate this during their interview?

<comment><USER47> I wouldn't hire someone if I didn't believe they possessed the same mentality. Is it really a big deal given that the chances of having to pull all nighters in college to meet an assignment deadline is so common? How is work (especially in a startup) any different or less important?</comment></comment></comment>


Quantum Computer Factory - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/quantum-computing-factory-taking-on-google-ibm/ <comment><USER2> I'm Dan and work at Rigetti as a software engineer. Be sure to see this post about Forest 1.0: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14595290](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14595290)

See this discussion there for a Q/A, or start one here!

</comment><comment><USER3> What is the difference between the approaches that Rigetti and say Google and IBM are taking?

<comment><USER4> I'm a software engineer at Rigetti, so I'll talk a little bit from that perspective.

One thing we are really emphasizing is having a full stack of software to enable hybrid classical/quantum computation. We believe that leveraging current computing resources as much as possible in a quantum computation will be important for near-term algorithms. Quantum algorithms such as the quantum approximate optimization algorithm very naturally fit into this hybrid computing regime.

There are lots of details about our quantum computing architecture which differ from the other players out there. There are different kinds of qubit- qubit interactions that we do compared to IBM. I will defer questions about these to other folks and our recently released white papers [0, 1, 2, 3].

From a company standpoint, our goal is to build the most powerful computer. Not anything else. We don't do ads. We don't build business machines. We build quantum computers and make them available with software. When you depend on it to survive, you definitely work a little bit harder and smarter to achieve your goals.

[0] [http://www.rigetti.com/papers/Demonstration_of_Universal_Par...](http://www.rigetti.com/papers/Demonstration_of_Universal_Parametric_Entangling_Gates_on_a_Multi- Qubit_Lattice.pdf)

[1] [http://www.rigetti.com/papers/Parametrically- Activated_Entan...](http://www.rigetti.com/papers/Parametrically- Activated_Entangling_Gates_Using_Transmon_Qubits.pdf)

[2] [http://www.rigetti.com/papers/Analytical_Modeling_of_Paramet...](http://www.rigetti.com/papers/Analytical_Modeling_of_Parametrically- Modulated_Transmon_Qubits.pdf)

[3] (paywall) [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7738703/](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7738703/)</comment></comment>


After the boomers, meet the children dubbed 'baby losers' - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/11/spain.france

<comment><USER2> Not to worry, there are still some good jobs in Europe.

Like, say, being a journalist for the Guardian. You can spend a week travelling around Europe, collect a few quotes from people who feel like whining about their financial situation, throw in a few fairly-meaningless numbers (Spain's government cut its growth forecast slightly!) and call it an article.

One interesting fact though: he had trouble finding a German with much to complain about. The best he could do was some guy on a perfectly reasonable salary of 2700 a month (about $US50K a year) in Berlin who admits his money is okay but isn't doing what he "dreamed" of doing. Yeah, you and everyone else with a degree in history and photography, buddy.

<comment><USER3> Where in Germany? $50k/yr in San Francisco or New York metro is what McDonalds store managers make.

<comment><USER4> I might be totally wrong (and if I am, I apologize!) but I sense you're implying $50k is low because it's what a mere McDonald's manager makes?

If so, McDonald's outlet managers might not seem culturally important or as well qualified as historians, architects, and the like, but in terms of raw capitalism, they provide a lot more value and have control over a real cash cow and provider to the economy. This is why their salaries are pretty good compared to the minions below them.

$50k/yr is a good salary on almost any part of the planet. It's the median personal salary in the United Kingdom, for instance.

<comment><USER5> "On Friday night, Lorenzo, 35, was on a train heading to work a nightshift for a major American sales website's Berlin branch."

This part of the article is pretty useless, it doesn't actually tell us what his job is. It sounds like it's not related to his qualifications as a historian/photographer (whatever they are, again there are no details), in which case you would expect his pay to be lower than if he had relevant skills.

On the other hand, if it's a white-collar job, he's working nights regularly, and only getting the $50,000 salary, this would be low pay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think this phenomenon is limited to Europe. I'm 31, I have an advanced degree in a highly technical field, and it's unlikely that I'm going to earn enough money to afford to buy a home (w/o ridiculous leverage) in the places where I can find work in my field.

When my parents were my age, they had two children, a house and two cars on a single electrical engineer's income. There's no way that's possible today.

<comment><USER7> It is the cost of housing that is the real problem.

<comment><USER6> Largely agreed. Cost of energy is bad too, though, and that's driving increases for nearly everything else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >There is a political swing towards what were once considered the ideas of the political left such as minimum wages, benefits and so on,' said Holgar Schaefer, labour economist at the Cologne Institute of Economics. 'It is a tendency that is only likely to become more obvious in coming years.'

Uhhh..isn't tight regulation of the economy what fucked up their job markets in the first place?</comment>


Ask HN: Can programming be less about tuning and more about playing? - <AUTHOR> When I compare with a musical instrument, I feel like computer programming is too much about tuning and not enough about playing.
I wish it was more reactive, less dull.
For now brain computer interfaces are still science fiction so...
Do you know of any piece of technology that exists today, that would help create more playfully with the computer ? <comment> Liber-Abaci Yes that technology is called Common Lisp. You hack together whatever you want at the highest possible abstraction level, pluck out just what you changed, and play with it by hand to test it. No writing tests, no types, no complex syntax to learn, no limits on macros hackery, no guarantees anything will work either but you're likely just doing it for a hobby and not in a highly complex professional setting. I would imagine professional musicians also feel like they're doing too much tuning and not enough playing because it's work, and most of the material out there for programming is for/by people in the professional industry which is probably why you don't like it just like you wouldn't want to read professional music theory journals or studio engineering documentation.

</comment><comment><USER2> You might find this talk by Brett Victor interesting: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII#](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII#)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you that was very interesting !

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Maybe programming with my voice could be fun. Is anybody using this kind of stuff on a daily basis ? [http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html](http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I always see the unit test lights turning green as 'points earned', is that the sort of thing you mean?

<comment><USER4> Unit testing seems a lot like tuning to me. There's usually a pretty straightforward definition of "correct" (A=440Hz...), but it's -- at best -- distantly related to the audience's experience of the performance.

<comment><USER3> Okay can you clarify your analogy - what is 'playing' in programming terms?

<comment><USER4> That's a great question, and I'll admit I find it easier to define in the negative than in the positive. And obviously, I'm not the original asker, so it would be interesting to hear their version as well.

For me, I think that a key difference might be one of "directness". That is, building things that directly relate to what the user experiences, rather than following processes which you have to trust will lead to the eventual creation of something enjoyable or valuable.

Paul Graham wrote something which, for me, does a pretty good job of capturing how things feel when you're working in this kind of way[1], and also explaining why there's an impedance mismatch between this and what larger organisations tend to be looking for.

[1] [http://paulgraham.com/head.html](http://paulgraham.com/head.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Which programming languages and IDEs have you used? Are they efficient at solving your problems or do you need pay tons on attention to every tiny detail?

I'm hinting towards functional programming ;)

</comment><comment><USER6> If you want to play programs you need to became SRE or DevOps. Guys which run code in production. In resource-constrained environements programmers also run their code in production.</comment>


Trello in 4096 bytes - <AUTHOR> http://danlec.com/blog/trello-in-4096-bytes?hn=y

<comment><USER2> ...um, no, you can't have access to all my trello boards.

<comment><USER3> So create a test account or don't use it?</comment></comment>


Smart Terminal, Dumb Terminal - <AUTHOR> http://jasoncrawford.org/2009/11/smart-terminal-dumb-terminal/ <comment><AUTHOR> (Once again submitting my own post.) Anyone know enough about the history of computing to add some perspective on smart vs. dumb terminals (or thick vs. thin clients, or whatever?)</comment>


Nikola Tesla predicted mobile phones in 1909 - <AUTHOR> http://recombu.com/news/nikola-tesla-predicted-mobile-phones-in-1909_M11683.html

<comment><USER2> His "World System" pretty much describes a large part of the tech world today to me...

1\. The inter-connection of the existing telegraph exchanges or offices all over the world

2\. The establishment of a secret and non-interferable government telegraph services

3\. The inter-connection of all the present telephone exchanges or offices on the Globe

4\. The universal distribution of general news, by telegraph or telephone, in connection with the Press

5\. The establishment of such a "World System" of intelligence transmission for exclusive private use

6\. The inter-connecting and operation of all stock tickers of the world

7\. The establishment of the World-System of musical distribution, etc.

8\. The universal registration of time by inexpensive clocks indicating the hour with astronomical precision and requiring no attention whatever

9\. The world transmission of typed or hand-written characters, letters, checks, etc.

10\. The establishment of a universal marine service enabling the navigators of all ships to steer perfectly without compass, to determine the exact location, hour and speed, to prevent collisions and disasters

11\. The inauguration of a system of world-printing on land and sea

12\. The world reproduction of photographic pictures and all kinds of record

</comment><comment><USER3> Not to diminish Tesla's genius, but doesn't this read more like he predicted the hand-held radio instead of the mobile phone?

"The song of a great singer [...] may thus be delivered to an audience all over the world" sounds like radio to me. And the part about the businessman dictating in New York is followed by the qualifier "from his desk"--I'm not sold.

While technically radio transmission was invented earlier, according to Wikipedia the first radio station only went online in 1920 so there was still plenty of room for this kind of prediction in 1909.

<comment><USER4> _"It will soon be possible, for instance, for a business man in New York to dictate instructions and have the appear instantly in type in London or elsewhere. He will be able to cal up from his desk and talk with any telephone subscriber in the world. It will only be necessary to carry an inexpensive instrument not bigger than a watch, which will enable its bearer to hear anywhere on sea or land for distances of thousands of miles."_

The passage you quoted predicted broadcast radio, but the passage before that sounds more like a telephone to me. As with many others it underestimated the difficulty of transcribing voice into print, but otherwise....

<comment><USER5> And all of those together comprises Internet, basically... ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Usually when inventors take off on flights of fancy regarding the implications of their inventions, they embarrass themselves. Witness Dean Kamen and his goofy little scooter.

Tesla is a whole different thing. Its not only fascinating to read how many things he foresaw, but also some of the things he predicted that still haven't happened and might. He was good at predicting both how devices would work and how they would effect society almost to the point where you start to wonder if he didn't invent that time machine after all and managed to keep it a secret.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's a pity that schools teach more about Edison than Tesla. Tesla was a genius, just as much if not more so than Edison.

<comment><USER8> Isn't that because Edison was a much better business man than Tesla. In modern terms Edison was the 'entrepreneur' while Tesla was the 'hacker'.

<comment><USER9> Absolutely; it is something of a shame that Edison is often treated as that era's only example of a great inventor - he was a smart guy for certain, but had many flaws. Not least a ruthless business side that often crossed into the nasty and vindictive, and a single mindedness that meant he wouldn't accept his beliefs could be incorrect (hence sticking to promotion of DC for so long).

Tesla had numerous flaws as well; but he was much more a pure inventor and ultimately uninterested in money. Probably the smarter of the two, and certainly his work was fundamental to modern life (i.e. AC power transmission).

There is probably a lot to take away from learning about both men equally :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have often wondered whether modern computers would have been possible with Tesla's envisioned wireless power permeating the air. Large-scale wireless power transmission is the only thing in that article that hasn't yet been integrated into society.

<comment><USER11> Its probably not possible.

Tesla was a genius, but had little formal EE theory - he somehow intuited much of what he did. His high-frequency coils were not mathematically understood until well after his death.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Tesla was an undisputed genius. Crazy, yes (I particularly liked his portrayal in "the Prestige"). But one of those rare super geniuses that history looks back on reveres as something just a step up the evolutionary ladder.

</comment><comment><USER13> Great related read: <http://www.badassoftheweek.com/tesla.html>

</comment><comment><USER14> Not bad considering the first mobile phone call (from a car) wasn't placed until 37 years later, in 1946.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I never realized the extent of Tesla's clairvoyance. This is a pretty cool read.

</comment><comment><USER15> He seems to be confused between wireless transmission of information and transmission of power. He says he can power a boat from shore, which is ridiculous, but I assume he's only controlling it from shore. Did people understand the difference back then?

<comment><USER16> No, he was not. For Marconi, wireless transmission of information was just a byproduct of the far more important wireless transmission of power. In the linked text he is explicitly distinguishing his idea from the mere wireless transmission of information with electric waves which are quickly damped out.

Yes, he was completely wrong about that.

And ubiquitous wireless communication was a widespread idea at the time, here is an example from 1897: [http://www.citizenarcane.com/index.php/archives/2005/03/28/e...](http://www.citizenarcane.com/index.php/archives/2005/03/28/et- phone-home)

<comment><USER15> Huh.. so from Tesla's claim that he could efficiently transmit power thousands of miles and that he already had a remotely powered boat, we can assume that he was not so prophetic after all and maybe even fibbing a bit?

<comment><USER11> Yes. This was his ambition, and he was always looking for funding. He never achieved this goal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> why dont we have wireless power then?

<comment><USER18> >why dont we have wireless power then?

It's hugely inefficient to transmit power wirelessly.

About 8 years ago I conceived a plan to harvest power from electromagnetic waves permeating a particular space (my house I guess). It looks like free power (but of course isn't). If you can have a wireless radio then you can use that same power to trickle charge a battery, multiply by the various frequencies with powerful signals, etc., etc.. [I'm sure many others here have had a similar idea].

On a very short range this has come out as a gadget in the form of wireless charging pads (eg <http://www.powermat.com/>) and reports are out of using the trick above to charge lower power devices over long distances (<http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/22764/?a=f>).

Haven't seen anything of this sort in the shops yet though. I suspect it might not be legal in my jurisdiction.

<comment><USER19> "It's hugely inefficient to transmit power wirelessly."

Just because it hasn't been done yet, doesn't mean it can't be done. There may well be physical properties of our reality which haven't been discovered yet that will allow the efficient transmission of power through the atmosphere.

If you look at it from a needs basis...the world needs much more power (every Indian and Chinese family is eventually going to buy a fridge and a TV, and ricecooker etc etc). We can't go on indefinitely building billion dollar power stations to support that need.

There are two alternatives. An efficient way of transporting power long distances (continent to continent)...or...eventually localised power harvesting will be so cheap and ubitiquious that transporting power long distances won't be necessary. (Solar panels so cheap, like newspaper, they can be put on the roof and walls of every mud brick house).

Never say never is all I'm saying.

<comment><USER18> >Just because it hasn't been done yet, doesn't mean it can't be done.

Indubitably, implicit in my statement is "It's [currently¹] hugely inefficient to transmit power wirelessly.".

I can imagine harvesting extra-dimensional power sources or vacuum-energy or as you say ultra cheap solar power conversion.

¹ No pun intended.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Reuters Should Be Responding To The AP's Suicide - <AUTHOR> http://techdirt.com/articles/20090724/1533155652.shtml <comment><USER2> _"Dear AP: your RSS feed is for syndicating your stories. If you don't want the content out there, don't syndicate the content!"_

Have to disagree there. Just because my blog has an RSS feed, doesn't mean you can repost the contents on another site.

As someone who has had spam sites set up based on my feeds, it's pretty friggin' annoying.

<comment><USER3> I can understand your complaints. But syndication (the last S in RSS acronym) means exactly that. And that's what the protocol is intended for. Feed readers came later.

<comment><USER4> Posting your content in RSS means you allow anyone to read it. It does not mean you have granted permission for it to be copied and reposted - as the copyright holder, others have to ask you for the right to copy the content. The fact that it is easy to copy does not mean it is legal.

<comment><USER3> If I add a widget with the titles and the teasers of your posts on my website - technically - I'm not copying anything.

This is what syndication is for. I choose what to syndicate, to add value to my website. And you gain exposure from appearing on many different websites. That's why most publish just a teaser of each post and not the full body.

Again, I'm not arguing about what is right (or fair) and what is wrong. I'm just saying that the protocol has been developed for this use.

<comment><USER2> Assuming that the teasers are of an approriate length and meet the standards for fair use, I see no problem with that.

I like to include full feeds because it greatly improves the experience of people consuming my content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reuters could do nothing and come out ahead while the AP wastes money on this. They don't even have to make a statement. All they have to do is not follow the AP's footsteps.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, but the larger issue is that wire services are hurting as some newspapers fail and others cut back on expenses. Obviously they shouldn't do what AP is doing, but Reuters probably does have to make some changes to survive long term.

<comment><USER6> Do remember that Reuters is in the information dissemination business. They do have multiple sources of revenue, and don't have to rely on direct revenues from the news business.

<http://thomsonreuters.com/about/>

A good example is ThomsonReuters have some excellent trading platforms that are actually market leaders in their respective asset classes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As an aside: Reuters pushed for an open syndication standard--NewsML--back in 2001 (<http://about.reuters.com/newsml/>). It's become a standard endorsed by the International Press Telecommunications Council.

<comment><USER8> Yep I did a lot of work on that - we rebuilt reuters.com from a normal corporate site into a news publishing system, ATG Dynamo on top of the TIBCO back end, running out of an otherwise empty datacentre in New Jersey. Chicken parm subs for lunch every day. Good times.

ATG's Droplets were way nicer than the EJBs that everyone else was using, but the writing was on the wall for them... JBoss is only just now catching up to what ATG had back then.</comment></comment>


Neural Networks - A Systematic Introduction (Free pdf) - <AUTHOR> http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/rojas/neural/index.html.html#forword

<comment><USER2> thank you right-click save-as!

<comment><USER3> My downloads directory has about 20 different insanely interesting sounding PDF books that I know I'll never get a chance to read :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What a great (free) resource. Does anyone know of a good resource for RNNs ?</comment>


TWA Hotel Inside Eero Saarinen's JFK Airport Terminal Open for Reservations - <AUTHOR> https://www.dezeen.com/2019/02/17/twa-hotel-eero-saarinen-jfk-airport-new-york-city/ <comment><USER2> I visited the terminal a few years ago as part of the Open House New York weekend -- it's _amazing_ , simultaneously feels like you're time-traveling to the past (an actual _Mad Men_ -era cocktail bar that hadn't been restored yet) as well as the past's idea of the future (like you're on a _Star Trek_ set). It was such an imaginative space, so earnestly futuristic without a trace of irony or embarrassment.

Apparently Open House New York was instrumental in preventing the terminal from being abolished -- once the public was able to see it for the first time, there was then enough public pressure to keep it.

I find it strange that the photos in this article only show the terminal itself (used as a lobby) and the inside of the hotel rooms, but not a single photo of the exterior of the hotel towers.

Here's a gallery that gives a much better idea of the hotel itself, under construction:

[https://ny.curbed.com/2018/3/26/17164804/twa-hotel-eero- saar...](https://ny.curbed.com/2018/3/26/17164804/twa-hotel-eero-saarinen-jfk- airport)

<comment><USER3> The main buildings are just big blocks, maybe nothing to show. But they must contain all these restaurants etc, not just rooms -- so guests will probably only walk through the lobby a few times. Have a drink there, I guess.

Still, it's really great that they kept the building. Super hard to imagine this being the right scale for an airport, where would you put the endless snaking queue for the x-ray machines?

<comment><USER4> At the time that the terminal was being closed down, I mentioned it to someone at my company who had been a higher-up at an airline (very post-TWA) which used that terminal. His comment was basically that it was a really awful terminal :-)

<comment><USER3> I had to check but it only closed in 2001, I'm sure it was really awful to use by then! Never went there, but can confirm air travel was not very Mad Men by that point.

<comment><USER4> You throwing the date out there made me realize I was confused. I was a bit surprised to read TWA when I was thinking that it was Pan Am's terminal. And, indeed, that was the one I was thinking of and that one was actually demolished a few years back. [1] It was also quite iconic.

I probably flew through there at some point. My dad used to travel internationally on Pan Am all the time and he told me that that's where he always got his hair cut.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldport_(Pan_Am)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldport_\(Pan_Am\))

<comment><USER5> The old Pan Am terminal was truly atrocious. There were tarps, hoses, and buckets everywhere for the leaking roof. Also there was limited seating for any of the gates because there of course had to be tons of Hudson News shops. I'm definitely one to feel airline nostalgia but that place definitely needed to go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article doesn't have a picture of one of the most striking features of the TWA terminal: its iconic Tunnel to the gates. Walking through it really made you feel like you were leaving one world and entering another, futuristic, one.

Here's one image that doesn't quite do it justice — the bottom of [http://edgeofthecityblog.blogspot.com/2015/04/jfk-twa- termin...](http://edgeofthecityblog.blogspot.com/2015/04/jfk-twa-terminal-may- finally-become.html)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for that reference, I was sure I've seen that tunnel somewhere before. It was used in Catch me if you can.

[https://untappedcities.com/2013/11/19/film-locations- leonard...](https://untappedcities.com/2013/11/19/film-locations-leonardo- dicaprio-jfk-airport-twa-flight-center-terminal-catch-me-if-you-can/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm just happy the gorgeous building is being used again, not being demolished.

<comment><USER9> Opened up the article to look at the pictures, and I have to say that they exceeded my expectations. It's a really nice looking building!

<comment><USER10> Good quality 1960s buildings made of concrete with stone flagging and wood paneling inside are nice spaces. I always remember the feeling of light and space in the 1960s blocks I worked in at University (1980s, buildings then 20 years old)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hopefully they've got a good supply of that TWA-logo-embossed glasswear, because those are definitely going to go missing.

</comment><comment><USER12> One picture shows a rotary phone on a side table. I really hope that is the actual phone model that each room will have!

<comment><USER13> The rooms at The Ned in London (a restored 1920s Bank, complete with a vault turned into a cocktail bar) also has Bakelites as phones in every room.

<comment><USER14> I suspect the TWA hotel ones are not bakelite telephones (cf. images from [https://www.google.com/search?q=bakelite+telephone](https://www.google.com/search?q=bakelite+telephone) ).

The bakelite phones had some edges and were really heavy. The photo seems a later 70s/80s model with a softer plastic shell that would not really hurt if tossed at you. I think they had to weigh those down with some metal inside,

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Eero Saarinen had amazing neo-futuristic style.

IBM, Thomas J. Watson Research Center is another example of his work with similar style.

Sans the asbestos and lead paint these buildings are amazing.

<comment><USER4> For anyone in the Boston/Cambridge area, there are a couple nice examples at MIT as well. (Kresge Auditorium and the Chapel.) He also did the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It just occurred to me that the chairs are a very similar color to the chairs in the space station Hilton in 2001 A Space Odyssey:

[https://filmandfurniture.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/04/2001...](https://filmandfurniture.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/04/2001-space-station-5-lobby.jpg)

<comment><USER16> That was basically what everyone agreed the future would look like in the 1960s. :) In fact I seem to remember reading somewhere that Kubrick was inspired by this terminal, but I can't find that now, so my mind may have made that up.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know if Kubrick ever traveled through the terminal since he apparently had a serious fear of flying. It seems likely that some of the people involved with the production of 2001 would have, though. And it would have been brand new at the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's nice that this has been saved, but it is unfortunate that the arguably more interesting Pan Am Worldport wasn't.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldport_(Pan_Am)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldport_\(Pan_Am\))</comment>


The Marginal Cost of a SMS Message is 0 - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=433536&cid=22219254

<comment><AUTHOR> I want to start a business where I sell a mediumly priced device that is made only for texting, kinda like a phone, but has a QWERTY keyboard, etc, and comes with cheap texting service. CHEAP, I tell you. Maybe only a dollar a month. Sound crazy? But everybody uses it, and those cell phone companies need real competition. Even if my company died and I went bankrupt, it would be worth doing America a favor by dropping the insane price down to how cheap it should be. There's no way they would let me use those cell phone towers though, and there's no way I could raise enough capital to build them myself.

<comment><USER2> I do not think users will really want a keyboard. Otherwise they would have already bought them.

They have to be big to be comfortable - but then they are too big for the pocket, I guess. (And Qwerty is not exactly the best layout - but nobody seems to care.)

<comment><AUTHOR> What I mean by that is just a device that is made solely for texting and thus does a good job at making it easy.

By the way I'm a Dvorak user :)

<comment><USER2> I use it, too. I still have to fork over the money and buy a Kinesis Contoured one day. Or perhaps I will find one on the roadside when I am in San Francisco in fall.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Imposter Syndrome? Or Just a Screwed Up Culture? - <AUTHOR> http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/12/imposter-syndrome-or-just-screwed-up.html

<comment><USER2> This is a boring brag journal</comment>


Coders are not hackers. Hacker culture is dead and coders have killed it - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/hyonschu/status/1216484082042863616 <comment><USER3> I don't know. This seems overly harsh, and a pretty classic case of othering people who are different than the author.

For example, I'm pretty sure a "hacker" could learn at Khan Academy. In fact, considering anything other than someone's skill seems somehow anti-hacker.

<comment><USER4> > In fact, considering anything other than someone's skill seems somehow anti- > hacker.

The term hacker was never about pure skill or knowledge, it's about ethos and mentality. A fast implementation is nothing if it doesn't carry an interesting twist that got it there, for example.

<comment><USER5> Twist, or a lot of trial-and-error, happy accidents and incremental improvements.

Reminds me in undergrad when architecting a MIC-1 microcode implementation:

\- I built a macro-instruction profiling emulator to Huffman encode the micro- instructions from all of the sample programs.

\- Every micro-instruction served several purposes (it was similar to VLIW but shorter).

\- I used progressive decoding to save micro-ops.

Then, the resulting project was not only the shortest micro-code by far (37 micro-ops long) but significantly faster in terms of total micro-ops executed than the next submission.

Note 0: I refuse to call myself a "hacker," it would be like referring to myself with a title like "king" or "lord" in the third-person.

Note 1: I first learned to code without manuals per se or the internet, but sitting in front of the incredibly-complete and useable Turbo Pascal IDE and obsessively trial-and-error-ing. Then adding inline assembly, Borland C++, and so on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Agree with the first sentence if it's read as "they are not equivalent groups". Very much disagree with both halves of the second.

Just because not everyone programming computers is a "hacker" anymore doesn't mean either of those things.

</comment><comment><USER7> The scars on my hands and the memories of high voltage shocks past received digitally or even orally agree with this sentiment.

I'm a shit coder. I'm a _great_ hacker. This weekend I just set up a peertube instance, grabbed some body parts for a project car from the junkyard, and ALMOST got my 3d print recycling machine working (just needs a damned 9mm socket adapter). Ain't a programmer. It's just a thing I do when I have no other alternative. i++

</comment><comment><USER8> The second tweet might be better expressed as "[h]ackers don't _ _just_ _ go to Lambda School or Khan Academy". They do a lot more than that, surely - <USER2> creative and aesthetic impulse is quite real.

Of course these things tend to go in cycles - we all remember the dotcom environment of the 1990s, where even "knowing some HTML" was enough to be hired as a coder. Hackerdom will rise again, there's no doubting that.

</comment><comment><USER5> Rhetorical, purist, black-and-white-thinking nonsense.

Step 0. Don't call oneself a "hacker." It's like claiming to be a Navy SEAL. Identity labels are garbage, oversimplified mental shortcuts that trivialize people anyhow.

Step 1. Be infinitely curious and playful without bounds. Try to break things, use things improperly, dig deeper and void warranties. Coloring outside the lines and then some.

Step 2. No odd clothing, jewelry, tats, colored hair or nom de guerre are prerequisite. The better one can blend-in, the better they can hide in plain sight.

Step 3. Find a tribe. If there isn't one, start one.

Step 4. Dent the universe, or at least have a good time and live it up.</comment>


Ask HN: Why isn't ThePumpkinLady being protected by CloudFlare? - <AUTHOR>

I just read this glowing article (#1) about how great CloudFlare has been for ThePumpkinLady (#2). I clicked on the link, expecting that her site would not only come up without any problems, but that it would do so blazingly fast. Instead, I got the following message, which has been repeated, each time, after several attempts.
"Website Offline, No Cached Version Available
The website you are trying to access is currently offline. The most likely causes are the server is down for maintenance, there may be a network problem, or the site may be experiencing excessive load.
The site uses CloudFlare in order to help keep it online when the server is down by serving cached copies of pages where they are available. Unfortunately, a cached copy of the page you requested is not available, but you may be able to reach other cached pages on the site.
If you continue to receive this error after you believe the site is back online, you can retry a live version of the site."
How can there not be a cached copy of the main page? The reason I care is because I was about to sign up for a paid account with CloudFlare, and figured I would first look at a real example. ThePumpkinLady could not be a more real example, given that Halloween is only two days away. Does anyone have information about the problem in this specific case, or any specifics regarding problems that you have had with using CloudFlare on your own site, especially when under heavy load? Thanks, in advance, for any useful information or advice.
#1: http://blog.cloudflare.com/tales-from-the-pumpkin-patch
#2: http://pumpkinlady.com <comment><USER2> I get a cached copy when I click on the link in the blog post. Not so when I type the URL directly.</comment>


'Intelligent' crows to pick up litter at French theme park - <AUTHOR> https://www.expatica.com/fr/news/country-news/France-tourism-birds-offbeat_2031808.html <comment><USER2> I read somewhere about training crows to pickup cigarette butts in exchange food. I've always wondered if it would be possible to train a crow to pick up loose coins for food. I imagine the actual machine would be fairly easy to build but the most difficult part would be keeping the coin pathway free of non-coins as the crows are likely to pick up bottle caps, key rings and other junk. The other problem would be dealing with your neighbours as there would always be crows hanging around.

Side note: All the crows in Vancouver roost on a single street. Every day around sundown there are 10s of thousands of crows flying east and creating a chaotic scene at times. I've seen hundreds of crows ripping up a lawn looking for worms once and it felt like a scene from a movie. Here is a video of all the crows causing ruckus: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_QuEjaG4Ghs](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_QuEjaG4Ghs)

Also we have one crow here in Vancouver who was raised by a human so he is essentially part of the population. He takes the sktrain, walks into McDonald's and even stole a knife from a crime scene once. It's an absolute hoot. He even has his own Instagram page: [https://instagram.com/canuckthecrow](https://instagram.com/canuckthecrow)

<comment><USER3> _> I read somewhere about training crows to pickup cigarette butts in exchange food. I've always wondered if it would be possible to train a crow to pick up loose coins for food._

Probably not. It probably seems like I'm shilling this researcher's blog in this thread at this point but this commentary [1] gives a short explanation of why.

One of my hobbies is actually bird watching, particularly with crows. I love the animals, they're very fascinating creatures. I've had the opportunity to interact with many of them because I set out peanuts for them near my neighborhood. They've very gradually become acclimated to this routine, and they reliably arrive to pick up food if I make a particular noise and they're in the area.

But I'm very skeptical that I could "train" them to start exchanging items for food. In captivity a crow's intelligence can be especially fostered and trained because there's no other source of food to distract it. If you want it to proceed through a puzzle [2] to get food it has to do so. But wild crows are very, very cautious and (like most animals) very economically rational in their feeding habits. To date none of the wild crows who give people items have been trained to do so, it's been a happy accident (it's never happened to me, unfortunately). If you start imposing an exchange system on the food dispensary, you might find that the crows simply go elsewhere for easier meals.

_____________

1\. I read somewhere about training crows to pickup cigarette butts in exchange food. I've always wondered if it would be possible to train a crow to pick up loose coins for food.

2\. [https://youtu.be/ZerUbHmuY04](https://youtu.be/ZerUbHmuY04)

<comment><USER4> Clearly an economically rational animal can still be influenced to a certain behavior, if you make the reward attractive enough.

It's not like crows are not willing to work for food. They have been documented breaking open stubborn mollusks by repeatedly flying them high above a road and dropping them until they crack, or throwing them under oncoming traffic to be smashed open.

<comment><USER3> Yeah that's true, and I've seen a number of corvid species (including crows) taking my peanuts and dropping them a few stories. They also like to soak almonds in water to soften them for chewing.

The thing is that there are ample other food sources so whatever you provide needs to be truly exceptional insofar as rewards go. And the crows might not know it's a great reward until they solve the puzzle to get it.

I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just pessimistic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel like they should teach crows to swoop anyone who litters instead.

<comment><USER6> There are seagulls for that

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reminds me of the fantastic Crowbox ([http://www.thecrowbox.com/](http://www.thecrowbox.com/)).

Interested to see how this will work, for how long, and whether it's just PR.

<comment><USER3> I'm a huge fan of corvids, but evidence that the crowbox works is dubious [1].

Incidentally if you enjoy reading about crows take a look at the author's other posts on that blog. She's a scientist who writes about them (and her work) very frequently.

__________

1\. [https://corvidresearch.blog/2015/03/12/a-scientists- thoughts...](https://corvidresearch.blog/2015/03/12/a-scientists-thoughts-on- the-crow-box/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's the Puy du Fou, about an hour drive from where I live: [https://www.puydufou.com/en](https://www.puydufou.com/en)

They already have many birds, and a falconry show so they certainly have the skills to train birds to do what they want.

[https://www.puydufou.com/en/lallee-des- volieres](https://www.puydufou.com/en/lallee-des-volieres)

The park is usually pretty clean, not that many people litter anyway so as suspect it's more for the novelty and as a fun project for the falconry staff than to save on cleaning.

<comment><USER9> It's also a very controversial theme park that promotes an extremely religious version of history (cf. in French, the French Wikipedia article [https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puy_du_Fou#Controverses](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puy_du_Fou#Controverses) \- and this blog post about the bizarre revisionism of every attaction [https://culturespub.wordpress.com/2010/09/02/le-puy-du- fou-c...](https://culturespub.wordpress.com/2010/09/02/le-puy-du-fou- chretien/)).

The owners of the park are also working with ultraorthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeev to create similar parks in Russia and Crimea ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Malofeev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Malofeev)).

>He has teamed with a French developer to build two "Tsargrad" theme parks in Crimea that will present a family-friendly recounting of Russian history. He's also developing Tsargrad TV, a cable network—for now it's just a YouTube channel—that will provide a conservative Orthodox perspective on the news. "We want to build up [a network based on] Orthodox principles the way Fox News was built," he says. "We want to show the news in the way that Orthodox people, who are 70 to 80 percent of the population, see it." (Jack Hanick, a former Fox News employee, will be a producer for the network.) I ask if Russia's existing TV networks aren't conservative enough. "Aren't Orthodox enough," he counters.

>But his goals go beyond making Russia a more religious society. A self- described monarchist, he favors a full return of the Russian Empire, including the restoration of the czar. "Monarchies have been alive in history for thousands of years," he says. "Republics, just for several centuries, yet we assume that monarchies belong to the past and republics to the future." He points out that seven of the 10 wealthiest countries in the world are monarchies.

[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/10/konstantin_malofeev_one_of_vladimir_putin_s_favorite_businessmen_wants_to.html)

Puy du Fou is using some of its revenues to finance religious/royalist French organizations and discreetly supports anti-abortion campaigns ([https://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2015/07/08/2140471-puy- fou-...](https://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2015/07/08/2140471-puy-fou- donne-50-000e-association-anti-ivg-anti-euthanasie.html)).

<comment><USER10> Accusing the park of revisionism is a bit extreme. It depicts romanized events that are deliberately avoided by French schools, like the Chouannerie.

<comment><USER9> Really? Did you watch the "Anneau de Jeanne d'Arc" show?

<comment><USER10> Jeanne d'arc is a myth in French history. Just like the other shows about King Arthur's and Les trois Mousquetaires. The park is more about culture and folklore than royalist propaganda.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm continually fascinated by how corvids seem to show this level of intelligence without any of the brain structures that we usually associate with it. Can someone point me to a source that explains this?

<comment><USER12> I have magpies outside my window and they are very intelligent and nice creatures. They sit in trees two together, close to each other, enjoying each other's company. I've seen them group together in bigger numbers to fend off cats and I've seen them tease cats in situations where they know the cat can't reach them.

They are known to recognize faces of people and have stunning memory, remembering hundreds of places where they stash their food reserves etc. I think they are awesome.

<comment><USER13> I'm not gone on them, they persecute the local song bird population, we have a plague of them and the even more unwelcome grey crow. The magpie's call is either a horrible squeal or an equally unpleasant chchchchchch sound

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How about just teach people to throw away their own trash? It's amazing they taught the crows but my guess is it will end up with the unintended consequence of encouraging people to just dump their trash whereever even more since "it's the crows' job to clean up"

<comment><USER15> As awful as this sounds, I think it might be easier to train crows to pick up people's trash than to train people how to throw away their trash. People are apparently not as easily teachable as literal birdbrains.

<comment><USER16> Using people to pick up trash and throw them properly is the solution that has been used for centuries. Crows are paid peanuts (literally) for bringing back trash. They are employees.

And I am sure that if you were to offer people a dollar as a reward each time they bring back a trash to a trashcan, the parks would be clean.

In Berlin glass bottles are reused and there is a reward for bringing them back to specific bins. I have seen homeless people looking for trash and filling carts of these.

<comment><USER17> That reward as you call it, has created a 2nd level economy in Germany.

It is not only homeless, people with very low pensions or not able to get a proper full time job also hunt for them, everywhere.

On the streets, trains, subway, beach, lakes, you name it.

To the point that many people don't throw away bottles anymore, leaving them grouped outside the trash cans, as means to help those people pick them without messing with trash.

There are even trash cans in the Rhein region that have bottle holders around them.

So yeah it helps keep the street clean from bottles, but fighting the causes of this 2nd level economy would probably be a better idea.

<comment><USER16> What is the correct word for the reward? That's one of this weird case where I know the word in French and German but not English...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In theory it works, I've seen it work. But in practice I'm afraid a theme park will be so full of edible trash that the crows might question the reasoning behind picking non-edible trash up to get a reward.

<comment><USER19> Give the Brawndo, it's what plants crave. Seriously give them what they like to eat. Make it addictive like we do for fast food. Not only will you have birds that do your bidding, but they'll be nice and fat so you can catch 'em if you need to later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there any consideration for the health effects of carrying a carcinogen in their beaks? Cigarette butts are _nasty_ and also poisonous.

<comment><USER21> Your comment sounds a bit hyperbolic.

I guess eating them isn't going to be good, but is picking them up and depositing them going to be poisonous to the crow?

<comment><USER22> I think it's what the above poster was specifically asking. Is this safe for the crows? It's a cute circus trick, but has anyone checked that it's actually safe for them?

<comment> Digit-Al As far as I am aware it is only inhaling the smoke that is carcinogenic. That being the case, just holding a butt in their beak should be safe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Nothing would seem to stop the crows from throwing rocks into the machine instead of the pieces of garbage that we want them to pick up.

<comment><USER24> There's a similar story about dolphins who were trained to pick up any litter in their pool and give it to their trainer in return for fish. The dolphins began to hide the trash and tear off pieces so that they could get multiple fish.

<comment><USER25> That's pretty impressive! I wonder how long it took them to figure this out :)

<comment><USER26> Also shows the dangers of optimizing for metrics without thinking really hard about what kind of metric your optimizing for and what kind of side-effects it can have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What will keep them from attacking smokers and grabbing their cigarettes for treats?

<comment> Digit-Al I guess that would reduce the number of cigarette butts littering the park, if smokers were too terrified to smoke there :-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> There is a nice ted talk (from 2008, 10min) about crow intelligence and teaching crows how to pick up trash. It has stuck with me ever since I first saw it, highly recommended.

[https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_o...](https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of_crows)

<comment><USER3> You should read this short commentary [1] from a corvid researcher. There will probably be replication issues with trying to get wild crows to pick up food using his crowbox idea.

____________

1\. [https://corvidresearch.blog/2015/03/12/a-scientists- thoughts...](https://corvidresearch.blog/2015/03/12/a-scientists-thoughts-on- the-crow-box/)

<comment><USER28> Thanks! That is disheartening, however the spirit of the talk is still inspiring and this HN post reinforces the idea.

The motivational part is after all a bit orthogonal to the intelligence claim. So the answer to the question "could we teach crows to do this?" might instead be "absolutely, however wild crows choose not to participate". Which is quite different depending on which viewpoint you have.

The other anecdotes from that talk are still valid and equally fascinating.

Can't recommend that talk any more though, at least not without preceding it with the information you linked...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If "litter collecting crows" produces an amusing mental image, just imagine my momentary initial misreading of that healine with "intelligent cows" and somehow it seems to fit the "theme park" idiom far more appropriately.

</comment><comment><USER30> I thought it said cows, which got me thinking...

</comment><comment><USER31> This is so sad. Now we are "training" the birds to pick up our trash.

<comment><USER32> Agreed. And can't we just employ humans to do this? Give them a job and such?

<comment><USER33> Are you eager to apply for this job?</comment></comment></comment>