Stringbike: Chain-free bike - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-09/20/hungarian-stringbike

<comment><USER2> Chain-free bike designs (and other major hardware changes) come up periodically. Typically, they're belt-driven. While chains and cables for brakes seem inferior to cables and hydraulic brakes, they degrade for more gracefully. It's not a perfect solution, but it's a reasonable local maxima for most people. Professional racers can get away with equipment that's wildly impractical for commuters, mountain bikers, etc., though.

"Although, that would presumably be the least of your worries if a fast- moving, taught, metal wire lashed off its piston next to your leg. Ouch." I've had a couple chains break or skip off (especially on fixed-gear bikes, which don't have a derailleur or chain tensioner to regulate chain slack), and having a taut wire whip at my ankle sounds like a terrible idea. Getting a bit of grease on my ankle or pant leg is rare, and at most a minor annoyance.

<comment><USER3> There's also shaft driven bikes: <http://www.google.com/images?q=drive+shaft+bike>

The design in the wired article, while interesting, seems like an overly complicated solution to the chain "problem".

> "[The] asymmetry [of traditional designs] has been the source of lots of > problems"

I'd like to hear more about that. Sure, the rear wheel is balanced a little differently to account for this, and I imagine the feel is a little different if the both pedals are directly attached to the "cranks" (or their equivalent pulleys here), but I don't see a lot of problems caused by the asymmetry of a traditional design. Am I just blind to it? What are these problems?

<comment><USER4> For people going for the lightest bike possible, the spokes in the driving direction of the wheel are a smaller gauge (heavier)-- not one side or the other, as the hub is a single piece. The frame is reinforced slightly on the chain-side of the bicycle. But these modifications are for racing bikes, normal bikes have no special reinforcement because the weight difference is a couple ounces.

The current system has no problems and most parts are interchangeable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't see where this design has a big advantage above a traditional chain. Maybe their is less oil/grease so your trousers will be happy. But the efficiency of a chain is something around 97% (IMHO). I think with so much moving parts etc. the efficiency will be lower. And i think that the forces will be problematic to handle.

<comment><USER6> It's zero maintenance. For 'serious' bike riders who care about efficiency and clean/oil chains it's useless.

For riders who use the bike for one week/year, put it away when it rains and never touch it otherwise it's great

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Movie is confusing - do the wires change length? How is the leverage applied to the hub? Why not a movie of the bloody bike?

<comment><USER8> Also, there's no explanation of the symmetrical aspect of the design. I'm intrigued by it, but other than vague allusions to its superiority over asymmetrical designs no analysis is given.

So, I ask HN: why aren't chain/belt bike designs symmetrical?

<comment><USER9> The chain goes on one side of the bike.

<comment><USER8> Sorry, my question was unclear. Why do traditional chain designs only have the chain on one side? If symmetrical designs are more efficient (as the article claims) why couldn't the same thing be accomplished with a chain/belt design?

EDIT: as to the article -- more analysis of why symmetrical designs are superior would have been nice.

<comment><USER2> The added weight from a second complete drivetrains (chains, gears, derailleur) and/or extra mechanical complexity would probably negate the efficiency gained by better transmission of force.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not sure I see the advantage of this design. I'd try a belt driven bike first: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt-driven_bicycle>.

</comment><comment><USER11> Couldn't you just put a second chain on the other side? Or am I missing something in this "symmetry" argument?

<comment><USER12> Perhaps it would be difficult to keep them in sync, and if they are not in sync, chaos ensues. No idea, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Neat. I wonder if creating a vertical elliptical pedal path, or even a linear path would be an improvement. That way the cyclist would have more leverage on the down stroke, since at the bottom of a circular stroke you are forcing the pedal mostly rearwards, not downwards.

Also, to me it looks like the two rotating cylinders next to the rear wheel are ratchets, like a socket wrench.

<comment><USER13> That's been done on regular gears, I'd imagine it would work much the same:

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

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the link.

It's funny how people are so resistant to innovation. "Biopace chainrings are often cited as the epitome of a solution looking for a problem among the biking press." While typing on a computer that likely contains a mechanical hard drive spinning at close to 10krpm, the author complains of a slight increase in mechanical complexity that will allow him/her to generate more power. The real question is whether or not the complexity is manageable, will it break down frequently? etc.

<comment><USER14> "People are so resistant to innovation" is one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that sometimes innovation gets far enough ahead of expectations that it can't overcome challenges with user education and linkages to present technology.

I remember using Biopace and the part I remember the most was going up a steep hill and losing traction because of the change in torque. I was riding a bike the way I was accustomed to pedaling but the power output would surge because of the change in mechanical advantage. Maybe I could relearn how to pedal so I could take advantage of Biopace but I really just wanted to ride, not maximize every degree of the pedal arc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Much of the complexity seems to be directed at keeping the pedals going around in a circle. Why not levers or some other reciprocating motion? ANything would work with cables.

</comment><comment><USER15> Some more videos at <http://www.youtube.com/user/stringbike>

</comment><comment><USER16> The only drawback I can see to this system is that you can't spin the pedals backwards while coasting. I do this a lot to stretch my legs and just to pass the time on hills when I don't feel like speeding up. Peddling backwards will engage the forward motion "but along a miserable curve".

<comment><USER17> I don't see any reason why one couldn't put a ratcheting hub in the crankset, allowing backward pedaling...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The inventors talks about similarity with current hard drives where he got the original idea. While this design sounds complicated, it replaces the whole drive chain, including gear shift.</comment>


Peter Thiel's unexpected job requirement - <AUTHOR> http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/14/peter-thiels-unexpected-job-requirement/ <comment><USER2> This is stupid. Do people really think Thiel is personally managing every job opening at every company he's associated with?

Non-sequitur "gotcha" reporting at its worst. I expected better from Yglesias.

<comment><USER3> Of course the flip side is Thiel has been so amazingly vocal about his views on higher education you'd think he would have made a his staff aware that this requirement wasn't aligned with his views.

In the end it is mostly a depiction of how having a degree is a door opener because it is a default filter for almost all hiring managers. Even hiring managers employed by a vocal advocate of skipping college.

<comment><USER4> The job requirements and qualifications for an entrepreneur and a hedge fund analyst are so different that it's not necessarily inconsistent

<comment><USER5> Has Thiel been careful to always specify that his anti-higher-education-in- the-U.S. stance only applies to entrepreneurial people?

<comment><USER6> Peter Thiel's exact words on the topic:

"The elitist view in the U.S. is that even if people concede that college is not for education, the caveat will be that, well, surely it's for all the smart people. What we want to suggest is that there are some very smart and very talented people who don't need college."

[http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/257531/back-future- pe...](http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/257531/back-future-peter-thiel- interview?pg=5)

"...are there 20 of those 60,000 who should perhaps not go to college--that does not seem like a terribly controversial statement. That the more talented you are, the more narrow the set of choices you should make? And that if you're a really smart person, the only thing in the world you can do is to go to Harvard?"

[http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20114584-281/talking- tech-...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20114584-281/talking-tech-with- peter-thiel-investor-and-philanthropist-q-a/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When I was at CWRU in the mid-90's, I was on a student panel which provided large donors (those whose last names were the same as large area companies, mostly) with an opportunity to ask questions of students. Several donors wondered why Case students studied so hard and participated so little in extra-curricular activities. After all, one said, I'd rather hire the interesting, well-rounded student with a 3.0 GPA than the boring one with a 3.7. Several students on the panel explained that many of their peers feared the short-term consequences of low GPAs -- lost scholarships and limited job opportunities. The donors were surprised to learn that most companies (in come cases including their own) would refuse to allow students with less than, say, a 3.5 GPA to even sign-up for on-campus interviews.

</comment><comment><USER8> The job posting itself has already been fixed:

[http://www.linkedin.com/jobs/jobs-Investment- Analyst-w-29013...](http://www.linkedin.com/jobs/jobs-Investment- Analyst-w-2901306)

      Quantitative skills in a field such as computer science,
      mathematics, statistics, physics, or engineering; no
      college degree required

Tempest in a teapot. Obviously someone junior in Thiel's organization who didn't get the message, fixed at the speed of light. Now let's see Yglesias, Slate, and CNN issue addendums.

<comment><USER5> And if not for the tempest, when would this have gotten "fixed," if ever? This isn't about one job, it's about the reality of everyone having an ingrained sense of "education = capability."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is so much grade inflation at schools today that using it as a filtering mechanism for any position seems rather pointless.

Elite schools are especially bad about this. The average GPA at Harvard is 3.45 (it was 2.5 in 1950). Yale is at 3.5 (was 2.5 in 1963). Stanford is at 3.5 (was 2.6 in 1948). At one point, over 90% of the graduating class at Harvard graduated with honors.

If Thiel is requiring a top-tier school, it is because of the network the person brings, not because of the education.

<comment><USER10> I know you've removed it now, but I thought I'd point out the word is "shudder". Normally I don't care about spelling, but the two are very different words.

Apologies; carry on.

<comment><USER9> I'm a bit sleep deprived right now. Not particularly a great time to post on HN. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm sure Peter is a great guy, but I've stopped paying attention to what the newest hype is around what some VC is saying of how you should run your startup and career. Unless they have heavily funded my startup, then I really don't care. It isn't their startup or career. We can't all be them, nor should we be.

We should stop playing follow the leader. Peter's advice will work for many, but not for all. One size does not fit all. Maybe Peter cares about people's university credentials, but when hiring I'll look at each person on a case by case basis as a sum of their parts. There's some great people out there without ivy league degrees, and some terrible people out there with ones. Better to evaluate the stack of history and competency than a single component.

<comment><USER12> I mostly see his name popping up in works by Curtis and similar writers, which makes me wary by default.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's a difference between optimizing for current conditions, and changing future conditions.

Optimizing for current conditions: right now, a lot of the best job applicants have degrees from top-tier schools, and if you need to hire someone today, using education as a job filter is a reasonable choice.

Changing future conditions: there are plausible arguments that universities should not have a monopoly on education and credentialing, and promoting alternatives to a college degree may be a reasonable long-term advocacy and philanthropic goal.

The real story is: what's going on with this new hedge fund? Is the focus on "conclusions that are fundamentally correct but missed by most of the world" an actual strategy or a contrarian buzzword?

</comment><comment><USER14> This brings up an interesting point. Are there jobs where a degree from a "top-tier university" is more highly-valued?

Being an entrepreneur--even a successful one!--doesn't necessarily require a college degree. But are there jobs (perhaps this one?) where college classes are useful enough to warrant this bullet point in the job description?

I'm not sure--I wasn't a stats/math major. But I'd be interested in hearing some informed opinions on this matter.

<comment><USER15> I think you're looking at it backward in some sense. A "top-tier" university doesn't teach any skills that couldn't be learned at most other universities (especially at the undergraduate level). However, the characteristics of an _average_ student can be vastly different between a top-tier university and those lower in the rankings.

These sorts of requirements aren't put in place because there are particular skills necessary to do the job. They are in place to cut down the applicant pool to a reasonable size while raising the average quality (or at least not lowering it). It's classic signaling.

They let the university do most of the screening for them, weeding out the people who aren't smart, driven and dedicated enough to get into and graduate from a top-tier school.

Some extremely prestigious consulting firms won't look at a resume that isn't from one of a handful of schools. They fully realize that this policy results in them outright rejecting hundreds of excellent applicants. But they still end up with top-tier people, and they don't have to wade through tens of thousands of resumes to do it.

Highly sought-after employers can do this. But it doesn't work as well the further down the corporate "food chain" you go. This works especially well in industries like finance where ambition and a drive to perform while working within a fairly narrow set of parameters is paramount.

Peter Thiel is a big name, his companies are big names. Therefore they can use this strategy to their advantage, even if they don't particularly care about any specific set of skills.

<comment><USER16> "weeding out the people who aren't smart, driven and dedicated enough to get into and graduate from a top-tier school."

Wow. Since the rest of your post seems to equate "top-tier school" with the Ivy's (plus maybe MIT/stanford or whatever) this is just amazingly wrong to the point of being offensive.

There are tons of smart, driven and dedicated high school students in America who have no chance of getting into Ivy League schools. If you're lucky enough to be born into the right family so that you can go to the right private jewish prep school in one of a handful of posh suburbs, then being smart, driven and dedicated means you can probably get into one of the Ivy schools.

For every kid going to a public school in the midwest, who has to check the "will need financial assistance" checkbox (if the application fee alone didn't make them skip applying) and doesn't have any legacy or connections, then applying to Harvard is a lottery ticket even with perfect grades, stellar test scores and a long resume of extra-curriculars.

There are plenty of smart, driven and dedicated 18 year olds who won't be heading to Harvard or Yale next fall. Admittance to one of those schools correlates more with growing up privileged than it does about intelligence.

<comment><USER15> I didn't say those are the _only_ people who are weeded out, just that, in general, people who don't have those qualities are less likely to get into "top-tier" schools.

Admissions at these schools actually work a little bit like hiring at prestigious firms in this sense, right? Plenty of awesome applicants get rejected or are priced out of even applying (as you pointed out). But since the average applicant is still quite qualified, that doesn't really matter to the institution, nor to our discussion.

As something of a footnote, I really didn't mean to imply that only Ivy League grads are smart, driven and dedicated. I'm definitely not one, and I like to think I'm reasonably bright.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Using GPAs is so silly, as scales vary widely between universities, and even countries.

In French universities, you get marks between 0 and 20 (you need 10 to pass a class, and in some cases you can pass a class with 8 if it averages out with certain other classes). In some universities (classes préparatoires), marks superior to 10 are extremely rare, with a class average at ~6-7 being common, as professors want to push students to the max.

A student having an average of 15 would be a very, very strong student (the top student in my university, whom I was friends with, had an average of 14.5 or so at graduation).

So would employers just divide that by 5 to get an American GPA? That would barely be a GPA of 3 for top students— I doubt they would get any consideration from such employers, although they're probably much more competent than a top-tier student with a GPA of 3.5+ (I'm not too familiar with undergraduate studies in the US, but it seems that as long as you show up and do the homework, you pretty much get an A in the class).

<comment><USER18> > (I'm not too familiar with undergraduate studies in the US, but it seems > that as long as you show up and do the homework, you pretty much get an A in > the class)

that is emphatically untrue (either that, or myself and all of my classmates are a lot dumber than we think we are)

<comment><USER19> In my experience, it's not true of undergrad studies. It is however (again from my experience) very true at the graduate level. Typically because of the grade compression at grad school - in most cases a C+ is a failing grade, thus the range of acceptable grades is compressed (undergrad A-F, grad A-C+). So a grad B+ takes on the characteristics of a undergrad C+ - essentially a signal that you need to shape up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Obviously the requirements for an entrepreneur are different than the requirements for someone who is going to execute on the entrepreneur's vision. I don't see this being inconsistent with the Thiel Fellowship[0].

[0] [http://www.thielfellowship.org/become-a-fellow/about-the- pro...](http://www.thielfellowship.org/become-a-fellow/about-the-program/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Ridiculous. To say that a top-tier university produces a better employee, or business leader, is to say that a person's individual personality, upbringing or work ethic plays no part.

A high GPA - that's an understandable requirement - but to base it arbitrarily on a 'top-tier' university is depriving qualified, talented employees from consideration.

<comment><USER22> Turning away a qualified candidate isn't the bad outcome for a hiring process - hiring an unqualified worker is. So if the trade off for avoiding the latter is some of the former, it is arguably worth it (and Thiel is likely in a good position to know what the appropriate ratios are)

<comment><USER17> >Turning away a qualified candidate isn't the bad outcome for a hiring process

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Thiel has argued that there is a "bubble" in higher education -- that is, on average, American's over value it. Not that higher education is meaningless or that going to a top school and getting good grades doesn't signal that you are: smart, ambitious, hard working and would fit in with the academic culture at a hedge fund.

</comment><comment><USER24> It amazes me how many people listen to others without understanding their motivation.

Peter is an investor - if he's able to monetize a model where a group of students drop out of college for a startup and on the whole make his fund money, he will do so. There is no fault in that but don't think he is looking out for the good of anyone but his clients and himself - its not evil - its a business model.

The unfortunate part is that many (but certainly not all) develop these critical thinking skills to question everything in the very institutions he is influencing young kids to drop out of. I know this comes off as "stay in school kids" but I'm more hoping that students will think for themselves and identify their own reason for dropping out before leaping.

</comment><comment><USER25> A bit more context is available here: [http://www.businessinsider.com/busted- hypocritical-peter-thi...](http://www.businessinsider.com/busted-hypocritical- peter-thiel-demands-you-have-a-college-education-to-work-at-his-new-hedge- fund-2012-5)

</comment><comment><USER26> _Will their former "top tier" universities allow them to return, or give that spot to someone who values it a bit more?_

The former. I know people who finished their undergrad degrees after stopping out for _years_ , and it wasn't much of a problem at all.

You could very reasonably drop out, start a company, have it fail, finish school, then work for the hedge fund. There's no problem here.

</comment><comment><USER27> Thing is, are people who are capable of graduating from a top tier American university with a high GPA the sort of people who are ever going to lack options, the sort of people we need to worry about?</comment>


Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient - b-man http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm surprised there seems to be so much LaTeX hatred floating around the comments. I don't really know anything about typography, but typesetting my documents using markup is a pleasure. While I often fall into the trap of designing as I type, as soon as I get the styling right, it's _consistent_. Once I get BibTeX references to compile correctly, I can just _\cite_ (even _\possessivecite_ or _\citeasnoun_ ) and not have to worry about dangling bibliography sources that aren't used anywhere in the paper, citation style inconsistencies (where does the volume number go again?), making typos in separate references to the identical source, and so on. Did I change the order of some figures? _\ref_ will still refer to the correct number. I could highlight some word and chord a shortcut to italicize something, then have the processor try to be smarter than me about what should and should not be italicized after that, etc. But I'd rather _\emph_ a word and be done with it (and be able to do things like _\usepackage{ulem}_ to change emphasis to underlines instead). Rather than tabbing back and forth to try to get the proper list structure when the processor gets confused about line breaks, I can textually mark _where_ I want the list to begin/end, where it should nest, etc. Instead of wading through menus and searching for a picture of an A with an umlaut, I can just type _H\"{a}agen-Dazs_ directly. I can do all of this in Vim, where I have productive text-editing commands and even spell-checking. Not to mention typesetting math!

The post's tone is objectionable, I suppose. I'm sure LaTeX is not for everyone. The learning curve's too high for your standard high-school kid writing an English paper, and the payoff is minimal in such cases since word processors have many of the same features for managing bibliographies, header formats, etc. But compared to just _typing_ it in plain text, using a word processor feels horrifically obtuse to me.

<comment><USER2> "Instead of wading through menus and searching for a picture of an A with an umlaut, I can just type H\"{a}agen-Dazs directly."

I just press the ä key.

<comment><USER3> You can do that with LaTeX too. It will take a bit of configuration first, but once you've got it configured you can type Unicode characters in to your source and have them interpreted as LaTeX commands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've seen at least as many technical authors get distracted by the intricacies of LaTeX or DocBook as those trying to "design" in Word or OpenOffice. Using markup doesn't prevent the problem of diverting authorial attention to design. Every composition tool can be abused.

Word and OpenOffice can be used intelligently, if you avoid the design-as-you- write trap. I've never really seen a diffing tool (for prose, mind you) with the readability of a word processor's 'redline' or trackchanges feature. Anyone have recommendations on that front?

</comment><comment><USER5> TeX is a maze of twisty Turing-complete code in a weird programming language nothing like anything else you've ever seen. LaTeX is a bunch of templates you can barely tune and certainly can't create unless you're a TeX wizard. ConTeXt is better but creating templates is still a pain. They all disrupt the flow of your document with meaningless \jibber{jabber}.

If I were planning to first-draft a long document and didn't want to be interrupted with nonsense, I would write it in markdown and render it to whatever output format using pandoc.

<comment><USER6> In principle, there could be a visual text editor that applied default styles to the structure of your text. You wouldn't see \jibber{jabber}, but text that was styled in a default way. Separately, custom styles could be applied to the output, say in a second window. This would allow you to separate the structure from the style without having to see the markup language, and it would be as easy to use as a WYSIWYG editor.

<comment><USER5> LaTeX has LyX, but of course it suffers from the "few templates" problem (made worse by the need for two templates - the original and the GUI rendering), and it isn't a wonderful text editor anyhow. But if you want to compose laTeX quickly, that's the tool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It isn't clear who the author is speaking to here. I hope for his sake that he isn't really speaking to most users of word processors.

For most people, structure in writing __is __visual. It's a paragraph because it has an indent or a blank line before it; it may also represent one complete idea or all that good stuff they say in English class, but that isn't what makes it a paragraph. It was that way before they started using word processors, and it'll continue to be that way - any other means of describing structure is always going to feel like a distraction to most humans with a need to put one word after another.

That said, most people don't care about typographical quality. It satisfies their emotional needs for a memo or letter to look typeset at all.

For these people, telling them to take what's now a one-step process and turning it into two steps, to gain some supposed advantages that either don't demonstrably matter or that you won't ever persuade them to care about, is not gonna fly.

That said, for those writers who __do __care about structure and typography, Ulysses looks pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER8> Word Processors are stupid and inefficient, but the problems have nothing to do with including formatting options. For a one page business document, MS Word is just perfect. You need to be able to create the right formatting (bolds, headers, bullets, numbered lists) in order to get your point across at a skim.

For long documents, there is a big opening in the market.

An ideal word processor would have powerful features for organizational structure. This means drag and drop organization of chapters, subsections, and the ability to add meta-data to them—main characters, affected departments, whatever is appropriate. Color codes attached the the metadata would allow at- a-glance determinations of length, flow, etc. It would also be able to create visualizations of use of names and terms, and assess reading difficulty. The table of contents of your document should be a map that helps shape the work.

It would also need a context-sensitive thesaurus, powerful grammar tools, and revision control in the tradition of programming revision control. I should be able to cut a chapter and effortlessly bring it back in later in the manuscript two revisions later.

There are a few programs that attempt the basics of this for Mac, and nothing that I can find for Windows. Not including typesetting is just the beginning, and only necessary because it gets in the way of the rest.

<comment><USER9> Yes, for all the emphasis about separating structure and style, I think the piece misses the bigger problem: the difficulty of _changing_ that structure while you're writing. The author says "first one types one's text and gets its logical structure right" -- but isn't getting the logical structure right actually the crux of most writing efforts? This is quite apart from the typesetting or formatting of the end result. Most word processors fail at making restructuring simple, but it's not like plaintext fares any better, especially as your project gets longer and more complex.

That's where a tool like Scrivener or Ulysses comes in, one that gives you the ability to rearrange the constituent units of your piece (paragraphs, chapters, scenes, arguments, whatever) to shape and reshape the overarching structure and logical flow. (Besides, both Scrivener and Ulysses allow you to use markup and export to LaTeX, etc., so you're not necessarily losing out on the formatting benefits.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Speaking of which I've become a huge fan of Ulysses for OS X, <http://www.the- soulmen.com/ulysses/>. Costs $$$, but it does exactly what is described in this article - you focus only on writing and document management. Only when you're exporting (to LaTeX for example) do you worry about presentation.

</comment><comment><USER11> The author admits that "there are some sorts of documents for which a WYSIWYG word processor is indeed the natural tool. I'm thinking of short, ad hoc, documents which have a high ratio of formatting ``business'' to textual content: flyers, posters, party invitations and the like".

I think that those ad-hoc, one-page documents represent a majority of documents created by users - even if you count the pages, not the complete documents.

<comment><USER12> You ignore the qualifier at the end "high ratio of formatting ``business'' to textual content". With that in mind i certainly do not think your assertion is right. The average business memo has - or should have - very little formatting.

<comment><USER13> "business" in this context seems to mean 'activity' rather than 'for the purposes of commerce'.

<comment><USER12> I realize that. I used a business memo as an example of a mainstream document type, not as a ref to "business".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The model of the wysiwyg word processor _is_ pretty much broken; but that doesn't mean that LaTeX or separate content/presentation is the answer for this problem set.

Instead, I think if more document processors took the approach of the early DTP apps, users would have a much easier time. Quark XPress 3.3 is an excellent model for how to do it: boxes, that you put on a page and then fill with text or pictures.

If you're just bashing out text, it can works largely as a word processor does today, just with one text box filling the page. But if you want to position or format things with any accuracy, you can manipulate them directly into boxes without the heartaches of doing so in any contemporary word processor.

It's a very simple conceptual model, easy to grasp and easier to use. I skipped both of my parents straight past word processors and after the vaguest of introductions to XPress they're now both producing complicated documents that are effectively impossible to create in Word.

Of course, something like XPress takes processing power, and it wasn't available in the early GUI days -- typing a document straight into XPress or Pagemaker was an exercise in frustration. So developers and users went down the "enhanced typewriter" route of MacWrite.

If we could start again, however, Mid-90s-style DTP would be the way to do it -- you don't need the complexity of something like InDesign: just a few simple tools and a floating palette for fonts and styles. Most of the common frustrations people have creating documents today would just vanish.

Apple has taken steps towards this model with Pages, but they haven't had the gumption to go the whole hog just yet, and what Word Processor DNA remains hampers it a bit. But it's going in the right direction.

<comment><USER15> Anybody else remember Ventura Publisher? An awesome publishing suite from Xerox that worked much like PageMaker or Quark, for DOS. Came with its own GEM runtime environment.

Awesome program. Cumbersome, but ungodly powerful in the right hands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16>
      <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="TtH 1.93">

I was happy to see that he practices what he advocates.

</comment><comment><USER17> You know, I agree with the author. But end users will revolt at the sheer mention of taking WYSIWYG away from them. I think it's unreasonable myself, but then again I'm a computer geek.

<comment><USER10> I also think what the author describes would ring true for writers (a different kind of geek), thus the market viability of writing focused writing tools.

<comment><USER2> Using WYSIWYG with predefined styles is more writing focused than messing around with TeX, I would think. I think the author seriously misrepresents the way Word is poised to be used today (could be that he's accurate about what Word was like back then, though).

<comment><USER10> Styling your text has absolutely nothing to with writing. Consider that if you're writing with pen and paper you're not styling your text, you're just writing. A good writing tool should facilitate focusing on writing (no distractions) and augment the organization of your writing- that's about it.

Presentation is a whole other step that you get to when you've actually written something worth reading.

<comment><USER2> I don't see how adding a predefined style called "level 2 heading" to paragraph would be more distracting than adding a "/this is a level 2 heading" TeX command.

That said, I think having a catalogue of suitable elements for each context and a (modifiable) document structure tree is better than either of the above alternatives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The world is not dichotomous as the author seems to make it (as is usually the case). Word 2007 blurs the distinctions he's making, because it started putting in formats like "Title" and "Body" instead of just "14pt" and "Arial" (or verdanna or whatever). If the author is using these semantic meta-styles appropriately, they can get most of the advantages of a LaTeX style of coding, in a WYSIWYG interface.

I'm more for than against the author's main point fo separation of concerns, even in the realm of text processing, and I think especially for corporate communications that have to be all branded and specified, a LaTeX style document is probably the way to go. However, the overhead of having to code your document, instead of write it, is a big interface barrier, both in terms of adoption, and in terms of productivity. Also, in the cases where you do care about presentation during the construction of your document (which do arise), having a sharp divide between the two processes makes for a lot of annoying context-switching. I'm sure I'm not the only one with a horror story of having to compile a TeX document dozens of times to make a damn picture align correctly. Word isn't perfect in this respect either, but my worst-case horror story is not nearly as bad (5 minutes of drag-and-dropping).

<comment><USER19> The author covers this:

 _You can, if you are careful, achieve effects such as changing the appearance of all section headings with one command. But few users of Word exploit this consistently, and that is not surprising: the WYSIWYG approach does not encourage concern with structure._

<comment><USER2> Yes, but he's talking about people who have no idea how to use Word properly. How would similarly "skilled" people fare with TeX? I mean, what, you don't need to be "careful" writing all that "/this is a level 2 heading" stuff into your ASCII document?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am rather amazed nobody has mentioned LyX yet. Its "what you see is what you mean". You get the pointy-clickety GUI, all the tweaking possibilities you need, and you can still simply focus on content, ignoring the jibber{jabber} until you really need the ERT (evil red text). When it's time to layout, you let LaTeX do all the work.

<http://www.lyx.org/Home>

</comment><comment><USER21> Check out TeXmacs, which gives you the best of WYSIWYG word processors and TeX/LaTeX.

There is no good reason to compromise nowadays.

<comment><USER22> That would be for typesetting letters and invitation cards in latex? That's what WYSIWYG word processors/editors are good at.

<comment><USER21> It's great for math/science writing.

The only problem is that LaTeX is typically required for math/science publications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Well, the LaTeX approach is one extreme, the Word approach is the other extreme. Pretty much everything that somehow fits in between tends to be mostly one or the other. What's really missing is a plausible middle ground. What makes Word so attractive is that you can open it and start typing, and you can format things as you think of them. That sort of control feels nice. For LaTeX, what attracts me to it is being able to not care about format. Knowing this is someone else's problem feels nice. What's really missing is the middle ground. How about something where you type in text and format at will, then apply styles to (that actually work and make it look nice, unlike Word styles) and then apply tweaks to in word processor mode? And no, LyX doesn't do this. It does both sides of the divide badly. The closest I could think of is Scribus and the like, but those lose on the "just start typing" side of things.

</comment><comment><USER24> There's a half-way point between Word/WYSIWYG and LaTeX/markup: desktop publishing tools. Write your text in Notepad (or perhaps Wordpad if you want some italics) and then create a textbox in the layout document and paste/link it in, kerning and leading and weighting and fonting and flowing it to your heart's content, _all WYSIWYG_.

</comment><comment><USER25> If this were a few more years recent, I'd hope the author would revise section 2.5 to be "The virtues of UTF-8", as nearly all modern text editors handle UTF-8 well.

<comment><USER2> Even for ten years ago, forgetting that other countries need to typeset too was kind of lame. ASCII is seriously limited outside American context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> <http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html#tth_sEc2.7>

At this point, it becomes clear that this makes no damn sense at all for most people. Who wants to add steps to their writing process, add a delay between when they make a change and when they see it, and learn all new software to do it?

And then there's the remark about conserving disk space, which might have made sense in 1999, but it's a worthless consideration now.

<comment><USER27> Disk space is virtually free today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Perhaps MS word was worse 10 years ago. I think there is only one argument in the article that has stayed relevant, which is that word is a big complicated crash-prone program, whereas it's preferable to have a lightweight text editor. There are three possible required levels of expertise, depending on how important having a properly typeset document is: (1) using word (2) understanding TeX (3) understanding word.

If your document can be ugly, you can just open word and get cracking. The occasional weird formatting problems that show up in word aren't a huge deal. But if having a proper document is important, you need to either _actually know_ latex or _actually know_ word. Knowing latex is way easier than knowing how word works. MS made word easy to use by hiding all the gears. This is a problem when the gears don't work how you need them to (which sadly still happens too often).

The number of people for whom formatting matters this much is probably limited to publishers and academics, so I guess it probably doesn't matter much in general.

<comment><USER29> A number of problems with "Word" exist. Actually, problems with "Word"'s choice of storage format exist.

1\. No other program really, truly understands it, although large steps have been made in other "word processors".

2\. Can't do a "diff" between versions.

These two factors mean that "Word" format is absolutely and truly useless for any kind of versioned text. Whether "gears" are visible or not doesn't come into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> What I want to know is that why after 25 years or so in MS Word when I open a document (usually somebody else's) and close it the app always asks if I want to save the changes even if I just read it and didn't touch anything.

How come MS Word is not able to detect that there were no changes?

<comment><USER31> Because there's probably something similar to a "Today's Date" field in the document somewhere which _will_ change simply from the act of opening and closing a document.

<comment><USER30> Sure there must be a technical explanation, yours is very plausible but it doesn't change the fact that this annoyance only happens in MS Word (that I know of); it doesn't happen in MS Excel or OpenOffice Writer for example. If there's a 'today's date' then they can just add an 'last updated date' or similar and keep track of the file changes.

It's more aggravating if we take into account how popular, old and big the application is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ah, from 1999 when there were no converters for transforming more human ascii formats to latex with its funny error messages. Today I'm amazed why people still struggle with latex weird syntax when they could also use wiki-like markup languages.

</comment><comment><USER32> The author confuses formatting for presentation ("typesetting") and formatting for authoring.

By ignoring the rich rendering capabilities of WYSIWYG word processors in favor of simple monospaced text, a potentially valuable dimension is lost.</comment>


The pain of tracking down changes in U.S. law - <AUTHOR> https://blog.plover.com/law/citations.html <comment><USER2> I like this idea. Maybe if a github repository was started others can contribute and crowdsourcing can work it's magic.</comment>


New YC competitor: LaunchBox Digital - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2007/11/14/launchbox-digital-set-to-launch/ We can add Launchbox Digital to the mix along with TechStars and Y Europe. <comment><USER2> I don't trust a group of people where everyone looks like a slick businessman with no technical background.

I bet I could bullshit the hell out of them and they wouldn't know it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder at what point angels/vcs will get tired of this sort of thing. I feel like each step down the ladder from Y Combinator becomes exponentially less valuable.

I've often wondered if investors realize that in Tech Stars they're essentially getting Y Combinator rejects. Not only that, but Y Combinator rejects who don't mind living in BFE. Now this group will get Tech Stars rejects. Doesn't seem like something I'd attend, were I an angel.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> They're primarily based around the VA, DC, MD region. The management is formerly AOL, Motley Fool, IAC,, etc.</comment>


Chromebooks and the Cost of Complexity - <AUTHOR> http://stratechery.com/2014/chromebooks-cost-complexity/

<comment><USER2> "...it does so with basically a 0% chance of my screwing something up, or not understanding what is happening."

This, to me, is exactly what is wrong with them. They are teaching people complacency, to be consumers and not have any involvement. Ironically, it's much like how TV used to be before the emergence of the internet and PVRs forced it to change - people have to accept what's handed down to them and discovering features, experimenting and DIY is discouraged if not actively worked against. A classic example is google's steady elimination of anything resembling user choice - if you want something of theirs to work a way other than their imposed default, your options shrink practically every month, as does your privacy.

People who are "scared of computers" are a rapidly dying breed, and designing a product to appeal to them seems counterintuitive compared to encouraging emerging users to experiment, hack and learn.

The best thing about chromebooks is that they can be turned into a cheap low- end linux system.

I considered buying a netbook at one time (decided against it, but after some thought); I've never seriously considered a chromebook appropriate for my own use in its intended use case, and only briefly before discarding the idea as something to root and install linux onto.

<comment><USER3> You can still fulfill your hacking needs by switching it to developer mode. I use mine every day for programming, and even recently some hardware hackery with an Arduino and MicroFlo

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's the return of the netbook. Microsoft and Intel killed the netbook, it took someone the size of Google to bring it back.

This excellent Register piece may need updating: [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/01/goodbye_netbooks/](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/01/goodbye_netbooks/)

Man. I was so happy when netbooks came along. I'd wanted something like a netbook ever since I got onto the Internet. I suspect my next laptop will be a Chromebook with Xubuntu installed.

<comment><USER5> I bought a netbook last year for the express purposes of being a low-powered ssh etc. server for the house. Works good for that.</comment></comment>


Have We Met Before? Doppelgangers Caught On Camera - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2013/01/29/170279625/have-we-met-before-doppelgangers-caught-on-camera

<comment><USER2> In #1 in the series, they are indistinguishable. What would it be like to randomly run into someone who looked that much like you?</comment>


Ruby's Hidden do {} while () Loop - <AUTHOR> http://archive.jvoorhis.com/articles/2007/06/13/ruby-hidden-do-while-loop

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been programming exclusively in Ruby for almost 3 years now and came across this while I was looking at tempfile's source. I was gonna write about it but turns out this guy sums it up pretty good. I apologize since this is a news site and the post is from 2007, but it was news to me and I thought it was a very elegant hack.</comment>


Google Calendar Nightmare Release - <AUTHOR> http://startupmeme.com/2007/04/22/google-calendar-nightmare-release/ <comment><USER2> So this guy is bitching that "public" means "public"? Yawn.

On the other hand, as a practical matter, Google is supposed to look out for its users. I still bet that this is a pretty small fraction of the userbase that's treating "public" as "semi-private", so we can't just say that "Google is ignoring the welfare of its users".

</comment><comment><USER3> Tempest, meet teapot.

Did you know that if you publish your yahoo mail password on geocities, it's PUBLIC, and people can SEARCH for it?!

Do a general search for people who post passwords on the web, and then talk to me about how this story about Google Calendar even makes any sense.</comment>


Come code at Twitter's annotations hackfest - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/05/annotations-hackfest.html

<comment><USER2> I realize I'm late posting this, but I'm a solid Rails hacker and would like to join / form a team for this hackathon. I just moved to the city and think this would be a good chance to meet other coders.

</comment><comment><USER3> liked the idea. events like this one should be announced 1 month before, so you can get prepared, specially if you live far from SF.

<comment><USER4> I couldn't agree more. But then again there will be enough participants anyway I think.

See you there ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Note: It's only limited to 50 registrations...

<comment><USER6> The exact phrasing was "around 50", so I'd assume that there's leeway.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm the dude organizing it at twitter, and yeah, there is leeway. If we get hundreds of applicants, we obviously won't be able to let everyone in. But we'll let in everyone we can reasonably fit.

<comment><USER5> oh, awesome. thanks for clarifying!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Too bad I'm leaving SF on Wednesday... I think annotations are really cool.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've lost interest in their API since they've implemented those ridiculous display requirements. After Facebook's and Twitter's recent changes I've become completely disillusioned about what the use of third party API's entail, especially social media. I don't blame them for looking after their self-interest, well at least not Twitter, but working with social media API's no longer seem fun or interesting. They seem like too much take and not enough give. It's clear they want ownership and control, and the only innovation they want is the kind they can directly benefit from. Again, nothing wrong with that, just not going to be their fucking lap dog.

<comment><USER9> Indeed.

I actually run a (quite profitable) social media app that works with Twitter.

But based on the last 6 months of API changes, I'm going to shut it down. I'd rather direct my energy towards something that I have 100% control of, rather than hobble on making little concessions here and there to comply with Twitter's ToS, as their platform matures. The long term picture doesn't look good for any Twitter app, really. Although on a long enough timeline the same could be said for building on any 3rd-party platform.

Like you say, nothing wrong with what they are doing - it's just good business - but I don't want to keep jumping through hoops anymore.

Building on Twitter was good fun, though. And it certainly helps early traction. But as time goes on and your app starts making more money and you start getting more serious about running it as a business (as opposed to a hobby project), Twitter becomes a liability, not an asset.

YMMV.

<comment><USER10> If its profitable, why don't you sell it instead of just "shutting it down"?

<comment><USER9> I wish it were that straightforward :) Selling it and migrating it to the buyer would be a pretty draining experience. I'd rather spend time on my other project :)

That and, none of the customer subscriptions are transferrable. The new buyer would only earn money from new customers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Machine Intelligence will supercharge recruiting - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@lucdudler/machine-intelligence-will-supercharge-recruiting-2fd340bec612#.tnixc0e9a <comment><USER2> > A major advantage of employing machine intelligence early in the recruitment > process is zero bias; candidates are judged purely on their merits.

I am reminded* of the AI Koan [1]:

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.

"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe" Sussman replied.

"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.

"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.

Minsky then shut his eyes.

"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.

"So that the room will be empty."

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

These kinds of systems terrify me; there was the article yesterday about the mythos of model interpretability, and how ill-defined the term is. I am equally concerned about its complement, model auditability; how well can the system explain its decisions, or have them explained. How opaque is the reasoning of the system behind a given decisions. I agree that there's a fair argument to be made that useful models are often sufficiently complex such as to not be understandable in their whole, but I'm not convinced that that's sufficient reasoning to abandon the cause entirely; it just provides an upper limit on what can be accomplished.

I know this is, functionally, just an ad, but there are an awful lot of ads lately with the same breathless enthusiasm for these kinds of poorly- understood systems.

\---

* Yes, I know this is tantamount to posting "relevant XKCD" or whatever; the default call/response.

[1] [http://catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html](http://catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html)

<comment><USER3> I first heard this koan in high school and dismissed it as nonsense, but it makes a lot more sense now.

Anyways, in most cases, this sort of thing just scales well. It wont do a great job in some cases, but it can do well in many, and if you're hiring tens or hundreds of thousands, thats good enough.

<comment><USER4> > Anyways, in most cases, this sort of thing just scales well. It wont do a > great job in some cases, but it can do well in many, and if you're hiring > tens or hundreds of thousands, thats good enough.

That is a hugely concerning comment. The cases it is least likely do well in are cases involving minorities or existing prejudice. If we're not wary, machine learning powered filtering and scoring of resumes could feed in to all the worst of our existing biases.</comment></comment></comment>


How Justin Kan fundraises - <AUTHOR> https://blog.atrium.co/behind-the-scenes-how-justin-kan-fundraises-6bae1003aabe <comment><USER2> Story time: In early 2012, the startup I was working for, Thumbtack, had struggled for 6-8 months to raise a Series A but finally got to the finish line. Around the same time, Justin Kan co-founded a company called Exec, and within a few months raised a "party round" that was nearly as much as our Series A, with a valuation twice as high. Our company was years old and had serious traction, Kan's company had done essentially nothing. At the time it was a quite upsetting turn of events.

But there was a valuable lesson... How Justin Kan fundraises is irrelevant for you and me, because we aren't Justin Kan. There was no rational basis for Exec to have been worth so much at that time, but when you are Justin Kan that isn't relevant. And look, good for the Justin Kans of the world who can take advantage of that, but that doesn't mean it is helpful advice for the rest of us.

I can say from experience that going into VC meetings with a bunch of false bravado, hoping to "hold the tension" and out-negotiate the VCs is mostly irrelevant advice. By far the most important thing for the average founder is getting the VCs to look up from their phones and care or be interested in your pitch, which isn't going to happen unless you've created the right fundraising dynamic for your company.

One of my favorite Paul Graham essays of all time, "How To Raise Money" [1], fully captures what my experience was in the fundraising realm, both when it went well and when it went poorly. I'd point you there for more practical advice.

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

<comment><USER3> Exactly. It's FOMO rather than anything tangible, which can work quite well as long as you don't mess up completely.

Anybody remember color.com?

[https://www.fastcompany.com/3002341/color-failed-what- happen...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3002341/color-failed-what-happens- its-41-million)

I don't think Bill Nguyen would be able to repeat that sort of raise.

<comment><USER4> I find that a lot of articles shared on HN along the lines of "This is how you do X" conveniently cherry picks anecdotes from the perspective of an individual blind to their own intrinsic edge and attempts to generalize which poses many problems for the average reader.

For example, charging people before you make a software product. Very rarely can you convince someone you never met over the phone or email to give you money for something that doesn't exist yet but this is apparently what you need to do as an average joe.

<comment><USER5> I never understand one point. I am using bunch of paid services and many free services. For paid services, I am paying from first day but in case of free services when they start charging I find alternatives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Dangerous advice. From the article: "if a VC sends a follow-up email asking factual questions, they're already emotionally uninterested. Many entrepreneurs get caught up in this process: they send the VC a fact and citation, which the VC nitpicks, etc., but it's already too late. The entrepreneur has failed by not creating the type of confidence necessary to de-risk the investment."

If you want investors that actually understand what you do generally, or even better yet understand what you do on a technical level, this is terrible advice to follow. Investors literally become co-owners of your company, and there is no easy way to get rid of them. Raising from the right people slowly is better than raising from just anyone fast. It's a positive sign when investors actually dig in with real substantive questions after thinking things over, and an indication of how thoughtful they'll be as co-owners.

<comment><USER7> As an investor, I agree with you and disagree with the article. I dig in with factual questions _because_ I'm excited, not because I'm not. If I'm not interested, that's when I pass instead of asking questions.

FWIW the real truth is somewhere in the middle: some investors invest based on their gut, and if they _are_ asking factual questions then that means they are not emotionally interested enough. Other investors invest based on their brain, and if they _are not_ asking factual questions then that means they are not intellectually interested enough. (Or your presentation answered all of their questions, which is very rare.) Interpreting the actions of both investors in the same way is a mistake.

<comment><USER8> Hey Leo,

There's probably no objective truth, but let me offer a perspective: a founder sees 1 founder (themselves) and 100 VCs and a VC sees 100 founders and 1 VC. In the same way you look for patterns in founders, teams, products and markets to determine who to invest in, founders look for patterns in VCs to see who's likely to invest. A useful and common pattern founders pick up on is VC tire kicking: the ones who are interested enough to dig in but not excited enough to invest immediately. Asking questions in a meeting is one thing, but following up in an e-mail with an itemized list of; "how do you think about [x], what about [y] competitor, have you thought about [z]" is a surefire indicator that an investor's not willing to move _right now_ (not enough confidence in founder, team, product or market) and, as a founder, you need to move on.

So you may sit here and proclaim, "hey, this advice isn't accurate, because I ask questions when I'm interested!" Well... yeah, sure. There's (1) selection bias involved, you're a well-known VC and you're likely meeting with, on average, more experienced founders (by the time a first-time founder gets to you they may have been through an accelerator, faced tens of rejections or more, etc.) and this can lead to more mature relationship building, and (2) for every 1 in 100 founders you invest in this way, you passed on the other 99, making _you_ one of _their_ 99 they need to pattern match and learn from.

Viewed through this lens, founders should _absolutely_ take this advice to heart. If you, as an investor, _really wanted_ to invest in a founder and they snubbed you a bit after a follow up question (not rudely, they just have to choose where to focus), would you suddenly lose interest, or would you pursue a great deal / great opportunity? I have a hard time believing you'd let somebody you thought was the next Zuck walk out of the room without a term sheet. Founders should try to find the investor who thinks they're the next "Zuck", or some reasonable facsimile of such given the product and market.

Hope that helps clarify. I've seen friends put through the ringer by getting too caught up in the weeds with VCs that clearly weren't interested, or were tire-kicking. Can happen to amazing founders and it's wildly distracting.

<comment><USER7> First, thanks for the thoughtful reply. Second, I agree that sometimes VCs aren't that interested but still waste a founder's time. That really sucks. I also agree with you that I have much more data on founder behavior vs. investor behavior because I rarely work with other investors directly. Inversely, founders often have a better view of investor behavior.

Where my opinions differ:

> Asking questions in a meeting is one thing, but following up in an e-mail > with an itemized list of; "how do you think about [x], what about [y] > competitor, have you thought about [z]" is a surefire indicator that an > investor's not willing to move right now

That's not true in my case, and also not true for many funds I sometimes share notes with (w/the founder's permission). I often see Q&A email exchanges that either the founder or an investor in a startup forwards to me. So I can see firsthand that other investors are asking email questions (and then making investments), too.

Furthermore, how much follow-up there is depends on check size. If someone is investing $15k or $50k as an angel, they might make a decision after a single meeting because that meeting is often their sole shot to meaningfully interact with a founder. But if a fund is writing a $400k or $1m check, more diligence will be required. My fund can't write a $1m check just because I really hit it off with someone. That would be extremely irresponsible financially. Similarly, a founder shouldn't take a $1m check from me (or any other investor) without doing some of their own due diligence.

> For every 1 in 100 founders you invest in this way, you passed on the other > 99

Yes, but if most investors (esp. funds) want to do more diligence, and you have to go through more diligence to be the 1 in a 100, then avoiding investors who want to do more diligence means you might not end up _anyone 's_ 1 in a 100. A crude dating analogy: a typical person might need to go on a date with 100 people to find their life partner. But if you set a filter like "if you want a second date before deciding whether we should get married then you obviously don't like me that much," then you might end up filtering out most or all of your suitable partners.

> If you, as an investor, really wanted to invest in a founder and they > snubbed you a bit after a follow up question (not rudely, they just have to > choose where to focus), would you suddenly lose interest, or would you > pursue a great deal / great opportunity?

It depends. If I already want to invest, then being snubbed would give me pause, but I would probably continue trying to make the investment work. If I wasn't sure I wanted to invest, then being snubbed would make it much less likely that I'd try to invest. Whether you're a founder or an investor, how someone treats you during the diligence/courtship process is a decent indicator of what working with them will be like after the investment. Working together might be worse than the preview, but in my experience it's very unlikely to be better.

> I have a hard time believing you'd let somebody you thought was the next > Zuck walk out of the room without a term sheet.

FWIW, my fund has made ~65 investments in the last 5+ years. Exactly one of those investment offers was made during the first meeting while the founder was in the room. The majority of investments took 2-4 meetings, a few email questions between meetings, and several reference calls. From what I know, most funds that write $250k+ checks work in a similar manner.

> I've seen friends put through the ringer by getting too caught up in the > weeds with VCs that clearly weren't interested, or were tire-kicking. Can > happen to amazing founders and it's wildly distracting.

100% agree here. This behavior really upsets me.

<comment><USER8> > FWIW, my fund has made ~65 investments in the last 5+ years. Exactly one of > those investment offers was made during the first meeting while the founder > was in the room. The majority of investments took 2-4 meetings, a few email > questions between meetings, and several reference calls. From what I know, > most funds that write $250k+ checks work in a similar manner.

Sure: but let's dig in. I'm interested. Out of those 65 investments, how many did you explicitly lead? Sure: the majority took 2-4 meetings. But...

(1) What's a meeting to you? Keep in mind that your Principals and / or Associates conducting meetings and diligence should not qualify as meetings. If it's not with a GP it's not really a fundraising meeting and no founder should reasonably consider it such. Yes, I'm adding a semantic layer here, but this semantic layer is _extremely_ important to founder psychology and how we classify meetings, fundraising success and more.

(2) How many of these investments had a term sheet _after only one_ meeting? Not necessarily with the founder in the room, but this is, for all intents and purposes, functionally equivalent to an investment offer made in the room?

On top of that, is the a correlation between _leading_ an investment round and a fewer number of meetings with a founding team before investing? My intuition based on my own experience and anecdotes of other founders would be that there _should be_ a correlation - happy to be wrong, though.

Also, out of the investments that took "2-4 meetings", did the founders ever roadblock you from investing (i.e. it's a meeting but the founder "isn't fundraising"?) - because this is pretty common (some use it as a tactic but often it's just flat out true), in which case "2-4 meetings" isn't actually "2-4 _fundraising_ meetings." If a founder is at this stage, they don't need this Medium Article's advice: they've already developed the maturity to execute upon a fundraising strategy, you just might not see it due to selection and / or survivorship bias (seems natural, and just how things are done). In fact, they're executing the latter part of the strategy outlined here (have found a lead via "focus", or relatively confident in their ability to receive a term sheet when they pull the fundraising trigger).

We're really pulling apart the fabric at the seams here: there's a reason this article isn't a hundred pages or more, which is realistically the volume of information a founder has to internalize while they're developing their own understanding of the fundraising and investment landscape. They'll also find their experience to be very personal. This advice is meant as a launchpad, and I think it's a good starting point for novice founders.

If I were to give advice to new founders (and I do get asked occasionally, but I'm literally _nowhere close_ to a celebrity fundraiser and still a fledgling entrepreneur) it's, "I still don't understand fundraising. Just be yourself and build something you're passionate about, have confidence, be persistent, be kind, and the right people will come along. You'll probably trick yourself into thinking you understand something about the process, but realistically, fundraising is just about people and relationships, and shit is messy. Be humble and thankful, and try not to waste too much time discussing fundraising strategy with investors on Hacker News."

Disclaimer: I often don't follow my own advice.

<comment><USER9> Better example. Imagine, as an investor:

\- an Early Stage, pre-traction startup gave a pitch to you at a meeting

\- you came out feeling "default not invest" (i.e. if nothing new happens you won't invest)

\- you later emailed them a Factual question

\- they replied with an elaborate Graph/Pie/Chart with lots of numbers to clarify some detail, that the founders decided were not important enough to be in the original pitch

\- that Graph/Pie/Chart turned you from "no" to "yes"

when was the last time that happend?

<comment><USER7> Good question. Speaking just for me: if I leave feeling "default not invest" then I will just write a pass email. If I leave feeling interested but wanting to know more, that's when I will ask more questions. If it's 2-5 questions, it'll probably be over email. If it's >5, I'll probably suggest a quick call instead.

Factual answers have sometimes swayed me in a positive direction when I'm skeptical about some number or claim and the founder's answer is strong and changes my mind. They've also swayed me in a negative direction when I'm skeptical or confused about something and a so-so answer takes me from a "maybe" to a "no".

<comment><USER9> Interesting, thanks for the clarification

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How much of this is relevant to other people who are not Justin Kan?

<comment><USER11> Just learn to emulate his mannerisms. Fake it till you make it.

<comment><USER12> Hard to fake a billion dollar exit.

<comment><USER13> Isn't it multiple billion dollar exits?

<comment><USER14> What were the other major exits other than twitch.tv?

<comment><USER15> cruise.

<comment><USER16> He had nothing to do with Cruise.

<comment><USER17> He was in Cruise seed round.

(Cruise was funded entirely by Vogt and a small circle of investors, including Kan and other Twitch veterans.)

<comment><USER16> There were lots of people in Cruise's seed round.

Justin founded Justin.tv and Exec. Justin.tv became Socialcam and Twitch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's worth noting that Atrium's Series A had a mind-boggling 92 investors [0].

Read the article out of curiosity, but understand that this was in no way a normal process.

[0] [https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/atrium-lts- series-a...](https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/atrium-lts-series-a-- 8f3868a1#section-overview)

<comment><USER19> > It's worth noting that Atrium's Series A had a mind-boggling 92 investors > [0].

In the article somewhere it suggested that Justin was more or less testing the waters and getting investors interested as future customers in their product. It sounds like a weird mix between sales and fundraising, but a smart interesting one none the less.

If 100 investors write $50k checks, it's a small amount of money to them compared to the value the legal automation software could potentially deliver.

100 * $50k = $5M let's say for 20% of the company --> $25M round for them. Numbers are hypothetical but that'd be a pretty big A round. I bet he didn't just raise $10M off that many checks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Still an interesting read, but should be framed less as advice and more as a day-in-the-life piece on a rockstar founder with a lot of cred.

</comment><comment><USER21> Klaus raised the money, Justin is just the mascot

</comment><comment><USER8> > Consistently, if a VC sends a follow-up email asking factual questions, > they're already emotionally uninterested. Many entrepreneurs get caught up > in this process: they send the VC a fact and citation, which the VC > nitpicks, etc., but it's already too late.

One million times this. Especially for entrepreneurs (like myself) with an engineering background, this is something that's hard to grasp intuitively at first. If you're asked for financial projections, for example, it's already over. You can win that investor over more reliably by following up a month later with, "[famous Angel investor] joined our round," than responding with a spreadsheet.

I'm nowhere near Justin Kan's level of experience and expertise, but another favorite piece of advice it can take some time to internalize is: "if you didn't get a term sheet, it wasn't a good meeting."

This doesn't mean investors dislike you or won't invest if you don't get a term sheet right away. It's that when you find an investor highly aligned and / or motivated to invest, they will move quickly, like sub-24h quickly. The easiest way to burn yourself out as an entrepreneur is getting too attached to "not good meetings", with "but I really like that firm!" Or "and they were so nice and understood our business!" You'll drive yourself nuts wondering why everybody says nice things and yet nobody wants to invest.

The saying is not that it's a _BAD_ meeting if there's no term sheet, just that it wasn't a _good_ meeting. Stay grounded. It can be a long journey.

Remember: actions speak louder than words, always, and the fundamental action an investor can take to show support is to invest.

[Edit] I will add that, in my own experience, investors can be all over the map and there's actually no such thing as "one size fits all" fundraising advice. Fundraising is a hyperpersonal activity that's just as much about relationship building as anything else, if not moreso. You'll want your first checks from investors that don't fuck around (see above advice) and who are willing to bet on you. As you grow as an entrepreneur and become more confident in your ability to build relationships and "bullshit detect", you'll become more comfortable with long term relationships. In my admittedly limited experience, the people who spend time with you and learn to appreciate you and your business before they invest are _the most valuable_ to both your bottom line and personal psychology.

But, hey, the above one size fits all advice is still a good launchpad :). If you're starting your fundraising journey, good luck, it's a hell of a ride but if you're deeply passionate about your business it is more than worth it!

<comment><USER3> I work with quite a few (European, not SV) investors and while with some investors follow on questions might indicate dis-interest I have never seen a case of that. Asking for follow on questions is usually done after an internal discussion between partners has taken place and whoever is champion of the deal has been asked questions to which they did not yet have the answers. Almost all deals that I've seen that eventually were closed had quite a bit of back-and-forth over details like that prior to agreeing on terms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Hi everyone, I'm Max and I run AI at Atrium. @birken's point is absolutely correct that having sold a previous startup for nearly 1B really is a big part of what makes this strategy viable.

But, on a completely unrelated note, if you're an experienced ML engineer and you want to help distrupt one of the most needing-to-be-disrupted-stodgy-old- industries there is as part of a very fast growing team, drop me a note: max <AT> atrium.co.

</comment><comment><USER23> Justin's previous article was much more helpful on SeriesA strategy & tactics: [https://blog.atrium.co/the-founders-guide-to-raising-a- serie...](https://blog.atrium.co/the-founders-guide-to-raising-a-series-a- venture-financing-1de4f5aff312)

</comment><comment><USER24> Hey, I'm Lisa @ Atrium - here to answer any questions.

I run our fundraising bootcamp Atrium Academy w/Justin to help founders meet the right investors and raise a great Series A.

Check it out/Apply here for our next one in March: www.atrium.co/academy

<comment><USER3> Maybe it would be good to apply some 'star power' discounts here and there, what works for Justin most likely will not work in the same way or even at all for others. Justin has the pick of the litter when it comes to raising funding and some of the advice given really does not translate to 'the real world' of founders doing their first raise.

<comment><USER24> Hey Jacques, you're absolutely right given Justin's background.

We started Atrium Academy to help democratize the fundraising process for founders (ie. speaking with first time founders who just raised their Series A, reviewing pitch decks and narratives with mentors, being matched with recommended investors based on industry and expertise)

<comment><USER25> So you're introducers, taking a 5% fee?

<comment><USER24> Hey Scott,

Atrium Academy doesn't take any fees, or charge any money. Our mission is to help founders by offering free, educational workshops for the startup community.

Check it out here: atrium.co/academy

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> As someone who has been on both sides of the table, this article is basically irrelevant for 99.9% of founders. There is an HOV lane for successful entrepreneurs that the rest of us don't get to take.

</comment><comment><USER27> what if startups got appraisals like real estate. As well as "subject to" appraisals like property that needs repairs.

So, I'd value the company at X but, I'd value the company at X+Y if you added a new phd in XYZ or a CTO from a fortune 1000 company or if you add this many new accounts in this time frame.

<comment><USER28> You can do that, and often times debt providers will attach those sorts of provisions: "we'll lend you X and you can keep it as long as you achieve Y or maintain Z". One of the challenges with that is that you can set up domino effects where you miss one goal, and then as a result you don't get the money you need to hit the next and it spirals downwards.

<comment><USER19> I've been in a company like this and know of others — it's a real pain point when those metrics that funding is tied to turned out to be less relevant than you initially thought or distraction more than true traction indicators. For example, measuring the number of sessions a user has in your app vs the amount of engaged time per user.</comment></comment></comment>


Don't rely on contact-tracing apps - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/05/16/dont-rely-on-contact-tracing-apps <comment><USER2> [http://archive.is/sJLP3](http://archive.is/sJLP3)

Unusually confused piece for the Economist, which says govts should not rely on contact tracing apps as silver bullet, as the apps can have incomplete participation, leading to mistaken/dangerous conclusions, plus they give more power to the tech giants. However, it concludes with

"In this case, though, Google's and Apple's cautious approach is sensible. In a pandemic, experimenting with novel public-health responses such as mass surveillance should be done carefully...."

<comment><USER3> Agreed. It's like when you get an essay prompt in high school English that asks a binary question but you want to be a contrarian so you don't take either side of the issue and end up presenting some garbled middle ground.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The management of this pandemic, both here in the UK and in the US, has been appallingly poor. We're months in and we still don't really know all the symptoms or the various R values or the mortality rates. It's actually insane how badly we've done.

<comment><USER2> This will be downvoted but- in the US, on a national level, "poor management" is a deliberate choice.

The chaos that stems from absence of leadership suits the Chaos Monkey President. Like all grifter/carnival barkers, he despises his customers (marks), whose only option in the absence of information, support, structure, is YOLO, and who will therefore ultimately suffer the most, while continuing to turn to him for his cynical false messaging and identification of an Other to blame for any misfortune.

Those who are not under his spell are beaten into apathy by the sheer unrelenting awfulness and the absence of an alternative national strategy other than "vote in November."

Even states/regions (like mine, NY) where there is less insulation for incompetent or malignant leadership than at the national level and that are finally proceeding rationally and relatively transparently nevertheless failed to act quickly enough at the start, and continue to be presented with grotesque and criminal obstacles by the national government.

It is an appalling state of insanity that we are in, that's for sure.

<comment><USER5> The US health system is not well positioned for command-and-control from a centralized source. This has various advantages and disadvantages, but is a severe hindrance in a pandemic.

There wasn't even a unified diagnosis code for COVID until April 1, and that required a herculean effort and a shirking of normal coding update processes. There were various guidances for coding, but identifying diagnosis in structured data for fast analysis was a difficult ask. (I know this to be true, I've done it across the health records of millions of patients.)

I'm sure some fault lies in the administration, but my belief is that our health system is systemically unable to properly deal with widespread pandemic, especially from a newly discovered illness.

That's one of those trade-offs that have to be considered when looking at how health care in the US should be handled in the future.

<comment><USER6> Are you referring to ICD-10 code U07.01? I thought the US had to wait for the WHO to add the code, so I'm not clear on how our health system was worse than other countries in that respect.

[https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/icd10updates/en/](https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/icd10updates/en/)

<comment><USER5> Yes, U07.1. I was not aware of the WHO aspect (only that it had to be accelerated.) Prior to April 1 there were several CDC guidances for covid that unfortunately were complicated by existing code re-use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://web.archive.org/web/20200515102107/https://www.econo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200515102107/https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/05/16/dont- rely-on-contact-tracing-apps)

<comment><USER8> that archive link is also paywalled

<comment><USER7> Huh. I didn't know logins worked on archive.org</comment></comment></comment>


SecDef Gates on Wikileaks - <AUTHOR> http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2010/11/quotable-secretary-gates-on-wi/

<comment><USER2> It's classy responses like this that really contrast Assange et al as being a bunch of classless amateurs. They got lucky and ended up dumping a bunch of gossip and information that didn't serve any real political purpose than making the U.S. look bad. No widespread conspiracy blown open, no major corruption revealed, nothing but trashy gossip and a few questionable ethical violations, but nothing even worthy of being in the same sentence as the pentagon papers.

This will be, in the end, a net loss for the perception of Wikileaks in the public eye.

<comment><USER3> This classy response by Gates is but a brief glimpse of honesty from an otherwise hysterical, paranoid, and secretive government. A statement like this would never have occurred if Assange had not released these documents.

The standard rhetoric from Washington is that it's important to keep secrets, and that's why so much is classified, and why it needs to remain classified. Assange AND Gates have demonstrated that this is not true, that release of these cables and the earlier military leak (which DoD found did NOT reveal any sensitive intelligence sources or methods) do not seriously threaten our safety.

Contrast that with statements from Sarah Palin, Congressperson Peter King, and others, who are basically calling for Wikileaks to be classified as a terrorist organization. King in particular noted that the requirement seems to be met -- that Wikileaks represents a "clear and present danger" -- which seems to be contradicted by Gates' statement. Also, in academic political science, terrorism is generally defined as -violence- against a non-military target to achieve a political end, so there's no terrorism involved here from an academic perspective. If King is correct and that's the requirement, it is too broad.

Cablegate has thus been valuable in demonstrating hypocrisy among politicians and political hacks. If there's a story here, it's that politicians are trying to whip Americans into a frenzy over some embarrassing but not critical leakage.

<comment><USER4> >This classy response by Gates is but a brief glimpse of honesty from an otherwise hysterical, paranoid, and secretive government.

I think you're making a really careless characterization here, and it's taking me some time to put a finger on why.

Maybe it's that the government has _not_ acted hysterical, paranoid, or secretive in any way throughout this hubbub. It was pretty much like "Yeah, we know what's coming, we're bracing ourselves," with an additional stated position of "It is wrong to release state secrets."

I think you're conflating the media coverage, which _is_ hysterical and paranoid, with the actual government's reaction.

I think in addition, you're conflating what the loudmouths of the political process call for action with the actual government's reaction.

The loudmouths are there for us to consider extreme courses of action.

The reason this took me long to force out was that this brief glimpse of honesty really is in contrast with the reactions of the irked and probably very harassed officials who have been quoted, so I didn't disagree with some part of the statement. However, I expect this is because the government is realizing how it came off pretty well--I would not be surprised to find US policy advanced in some ways, especially Iran. The US was a victim in public world opinion.

So maybe now the government is able to communicate with the media its composure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's a refreshingly honest and frank assessment. It's nice to see someone in his position speaking to reality.

<comment><USER6> I think Gates was the only good hire of the Bush administration.

<comment><USER7> Colin Powell was as well until they decided to throw him under a bus by using his stature to push a bunch of lies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder when Mudge will get off his lazy talentless ass and complete CINDER? ;-)

Whoa! --It's just a joke and pure sarcasm.

If you didn't laugh, you probably don't know about the complexity and difficulty faced by the DARPA CINDER project, or you don't realize how dedicated and talented Pieter "Mudge" Zatko is.

Automating behavioral profiling heuristics is a very heady task and well worth studying even if you only have a passing interest in the topic. If you like "undecidable" problems, you'll really enjoy it.

<http://www.darpa.mil/sto/solicitations/sn10-68/index.html>

Knowing a bit about the goals of the CINDER project will hopefully give a bit of enlightenment to some Sec. Gates statements.

</comment><comment><USER9> In defence of wikileaks - Economist Post:

[http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/11/ov...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/11/overseeing_state_secrecy)</comment>


Study finds reducing carbs and replacing with fats leads to increased metabolism - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/well/eat/how-a-low-carb-diet-might-help-you-maintain-a-healthy-weight.html <comment><USER2> In case anyone is interested, this thread includes a more specific set of methodological critiques made by Dr. Kevin Hall at this week's ObesityWeek conference (unfortunately does not include Dr. Ludwig's rebuttal): [https://twitter.com/YoniFreedhoff/status/1062760576869371910](https://twitter.com/YoniFreedhoff/status/1062760576869371910)

Hall's research focus is on mathematical metabolism models, so his critique comes from that angle: it is possible doubly-labeled water measurements of energy expenditure may behave differently in a lower-carb environment, so the observed EE difference may not be meaningful. Ludwig actually briefly addresses this in their published paper, citing a few other studies suggesting that DLW is accurate and carb intake does not mess with isotopic measurements.

Hard to tell if this is a meaningful advance for the low-carb crowd, or just an artifact of insufficiently validated methodology.

<comment><USER3> I am interested in what the article did not say, as it may shed some light on this critique. Specifically, the weight differences between the groups at the end of the second phase of the study.

The second phase of the study involved breaking the participants into three groups. They were fed the same number of calories. Each group had several biomarkers tracked. This included daily calories burned and ghrelin (a hormone) levels. I understand the critique targets the measurement of calories burned, via the doubly labeled water measurement of the metabolic date.

What I wonder is what the average weight change was for each of the three groups after 5 months. If the claim is that the high-fat diet group burned an average of 250 calories more, then that should be reflected in an additional weight loss of about 10 pounds (250 calories per day * 5 months * 30 days in a month / 3700 calories in 1 pound of fat). This would be because all the people across all groups were fed the same number of calories. If one group used 250 calories more per day, these extra calories had to come from somewhere. They would have to come from fat stores and muscle tissue inside of the body, resulting in a weight loss.

If the weight loss for that group correlates with the doubly labeled water measurement then it gives more credence to the study's results. If it does not correlate with weight loss, it is suspicious to claim that one group of people burned 250 more calories than the other over 5 months while eating the same number of calories but did not lose any weight.

<comment><USER2> Yup - this line of reasoning is also expressed by Dr. Hall, in the slide here [1]. To answer your question, the study specifically states: "On average, body weight changed by less than 1 kg during the test phase, with no significant difference by diet group in either the intention-to-treat (P=0.43) or per protocol (P=0.19) analysis."

It is interesting that the study authors highlight the higher energy expenditure as an advantage for weight loss, but do not seem to directly address that they did not observe this advantage during the 20 week study period.

[1] [https://twitter.com/YoniFreedhoff/status/1062762047677571079](https://twitter.com/YoniFreedhoff/status/1062762047677571079)

<comment><USER4> Already commented elsewhere, but the researchers noted that the fed the participants different amounts of food each day as necessary to maintain weight. They were testing metabolic differences associated with the ratio of carbohydrates in the diet.

Studies have already shown that weight loss affects metabolic rates.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for clarifying - this is an important point and seems to explain why there was no noticeable weight loss.

From the paper: "During the test phase, participants' energy intake was adjusted periodically to maintain weight loss within 2 kg of the level achieved before randomization."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > It found that overweight adults who cut carbohydrates from their diets and > replaced them with fat sharply increased their metabolisms. After five > months on the diet, their bodies burned roughly 250 calories more per day > than people who ate a high-carb, low-fat diet

Is it healthy in the long term to increase metabolism like this? Animal studies strongly suggest that calorie restriction is beneficial to longevity, and there is anecdotal evidence in humans (e.g. Okinawans). A higher resting metabolism means more aerobic respiration, which generates reactive oxygen species, which damages cells. Better to go the hard way and simply eat less.

<comment><USER6> I'm also worried about the increased fat diet that could clog the arteries.

<comment><USER7> simplified: this, again, is a misconception - fat doesn't per se clog the arteries. LDL (bad) to HDL (good) cholesterol levels do that, which are influenced by a lot of factors, like smoking, alcohol, certain kinds of fats and simple carbs (sugar).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >> The trial cost $12 million and was supported largely by a grant from the Nutrition Science Initiative, _a nonprofit research group co-founded by Gary Taubes, a science and health journalist and proponent of low-carbohydrate diets_.

So, a non-profit funded by a gentleman who advocates for low-carbohydrate diets found that low-carbohydrate diets are good for you.

That just don't sound like an unbiased study.

<comment><USER9> > That just don't sound like an unbiased study.

The study looks well run. Because someone paid for a study does not automatically make it biased.

Everyone has biases. In the classic sense, attack the argument and not the debater.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, another study that fails to actually include a low carb diet:

> _" During the test phase, high, moderate, and low carbohydrate diets varied > in carbohydrate (60%, 40%, and 20% of total energy, respectively)"_

A low carb diet is going to be 100g (~ 400 cal or 20% caloric intake) per day at the absolute maximum. Really it should be half to a quarter of that and you will not feel the need to restrict your eating at all. The way it works for getting to a normal weight is that you feel less hungry if you limit your carb intake to those levels.

It's amazing how awful this academic nutrition research is, they just make up their own false definitions about things then draw conclusions about what people care about.

<comment><USER11> "Low-carb" as practiced freely is also dangerous long term, luckily the scientists know better than to go to unreasoned extremes.

<comment><USER12> How is it dangerous if you supplement Minerals?

<comment> barry-cotter Eat fatty meat including organ meats and you can eat nothing but meat for years with no ill effects health wise.

[http://www.mendosa.com/stefansson1.htm](http://www.mendosa.com/stefansson1.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> OMAD + "Keto'like" (dont judge me ! we got terms like REST'like) is magic

</comment><comment><USER14> Haaaaang on.

Given an average human consumption of 2250 calories per day, they're telling us that we could feed ~10% fewer people if we moved to a fat-based diet globally?

<comment><USER3> Depends where the fats come from. It takes a lot more resources to grow 100 calories of animal than 100 calories of plant. I imagine there is still a significant difference of resources needed to produce 100 calories of plant- based fat and 100 calories of animal-based fat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Doesn't faster metabolism cause you to agd faster?

<comment><USER11> Yes, an engine burning through more fuel will deteriorate faster. Carbs are easy fuel that won't wear out the system as much as having to process fats and protein for that same energy benefit.

<comment><USER16> [citation needed]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Can someone shine some light on why in 2018 this hasn't been studied majorly up to this point? Is it funding?

<comment><USER18> Yep. Funding.

The nutritional science community is generally weak on data, because humans are expensive to study. This has led to prominent scientists cherry picking bad data and using correlation to back up shitty hypotheses. The Dr. Hall quoted in the article is a classic example of this. Attacking the study wherever he can, because it demonstrates how crappy his lifetime of low fat diet studies actually are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's not clear to me how any of this is new. What id like to hear is how researchers reconcile this concept with what is seen certain other countries, mostly Asian, where rice is a staple of their diet, and where you don't see the levels of obesity we have in the US.

<comment><USER20> In my country (France) bread used to be a staple of the diet and there was no obesity epidemic at the time.

Perhaps it has to do with total food intake. I live in Bangkok at the moment, rice is a staple food and Thais eat all the time (they remind me of Hobbits). Portions are small though, so perhaps that's why I don't see a lot of overweight people.

<comment><USER21> This is correct from my perspective as well (I live in Japan). Not just portion sizes, but total calories in a meal are dramatically smaller. I went back to the UK a week ago for a visit and I was stunned to see menus with calories listed that had individual meals (without drinks or desert!) listed as considerably over 1000 kcal.

Japanese people often have a good breakfast, but then eat maybe 5-700 kcal for lunch (in the form of a bentou) and maybe the same for dinner. Sometimes you get a set bentou at work and it often works out to about 1000 kcal -- but nobody I know who eats those _ever_ eats dinner. They'll have a drink or two after work with whatever otoshi (side dish imposed on you as a cover charge in the drinking establishment) and maybe some snacks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Diets are superficial solutions to the problem of gluttony.

<comment><USER23> Exactly! People overeat and then they try to speed up their metabolism to counter the effect of gluttony, which is making them sicker and age faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What this article says is true and has been known for quite some time. (Not exactly sure why it's so revalatory in the article)

I've also tried it for years as well to lose and keep weight down. But it's actually not healthy for you. You're better off eating a balanced diet, not too much of it, and exercising.

<comment><USER25> How are you defining 'healthy'?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Not surprising at all. Related article I posted this a couple days ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18437218](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18437218)

</comment><comment><USER27> Well, that's one argument for the double down burger.</comment>