In Silicon Valley wages are down for everyone but the top 10 percent - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/03/in-silicon-valley-wages-are-down-for-everyone-but-the-top-10-percent.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18212980](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18212980)

<comment><USER3> Given that this was last talked about 50 days ago, and I have seen things explicitly reposted that stayed up. What is the guideline on when things become dupes?

<comment><USER2> This is in the FAQ: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

On HN a story counts as a dupe if it has had significant attention in the last year or so. If it hasn't, a small number of reposts is ok.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> They don't make it clear in the article, but presumably the top 10 percent of salaries includes most/all developers?

It's not really surprising that the heart of the tech industry (which drives a large part of the modern economy) would have very wide disparity between service workers and highly skilled specialists working for companies making massive amount of revenue.

</comment><comment><USER5> My takeaway is that the people in the middle get screwed the most (in terms of wages vs. inflation). The poor are still poor, the rich are still rich, and the middle gets thinner as those within the group are either pushed towards the poor side (higher probability) or rich side (lower probability).

I'm not an economist, so feel free to enlighten me further on my speculations.

<comment><USER6> I believe you're correct. Also, we've been churning out CS graduates and coding bootcamp graduates like crazy, so the bottom of the labor market is the only place where supply may meet or exceed demand, while the top (highly experienced) is still a pretty thin pool (relatively speaking)

<comment><USER7> And many of those bootcamp graduates will be a) drowning in work b) be ill equipped to get the skills to join the top 10% where most will be need to be credentialed. That bootcamp certificate is a Wage Slave License.

<comment><USER8> Can you define "credentialed" here?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's important to note that these studies over time don't include the same people. The Silicon Valley wage earners from 1997 overlap with the today's population only slightly.

I think a more telling study would be on an individual basis. Someone earning X in Silicon Valley 20 years ago is earning Y today.

<comment><USER10> That'd be pretty misleading as well. A number of people became independently wealthy off stock options in the dot-com boom and now use that money to indulge in personally-fulfilling but not necessarily lucrative hobbies. (Examples: DNA Lounge and Rabbit's Foot Meadery are both run by Netscape alums, a few rug merchants in Palo Alto got rich off dot-com stock, I had a friend at Google who quit her job after 7 years at Adobe + Google to open a gym, I suspect a number of restaurants in the local downtowns are run by ex- tech engineers, and I stayed at a B&B up in Alaska that was run by a guy who saved all his money working in SV for 20 years and then sailed around the world, bought a couple warehouses in Seward, and turned them into a B&B + restaurant.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The referenced UCSC report doesn't seem to be cited or linked from TFA. A brief and the full report are both linked from here: [https://news.ucsc.edu/2018/10/benner- tightrope.html](https://news.ucsc.edu/2018/10/benner-tightrope.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> Only ~9% left to optimize!

<comment><USER13> Think of how much silicon valley could make once they get ride of those pesky programmers.

Mucking up their perfectly good business models with salaries.

<comment><USER12> One of the hardest problems technology companies face is how to convert salaried developers with benefits into gig economy workers they don't have to pay between keystrokes.

<comment><USER7> An IDE where "Refactor ..." is actually backed by a mechanical turk worker working for hits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Of course, with the caveat that its adjusted for inflation. For example, in 1997, minimum wage in California was $5/hour, and in 2018 it's $10.50-$11/hour [0]. So, minimum wage workers are making over double in current dollars, which the article claims is a 1% decrease in real wages, which would be more accurately described as "flat", not "down".

[0] [https://www.dir.ca.gov/iwc/MinimumWageHistory.htm](https://www.dir.ca.gov/iwc/MinimumWageHistory.htm)

<comment><USER15> In the article they mention minimum wage and the fact that their decrease had been less than average. Middle class workers wages are down 14%

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Most software developers really aren't making that much. If you can't make it into FANG companies or can't be a founder, find a different career</comment>


The "too small to fail" memory-allocation rule - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/Articles/627419/

<comment><USER2> Even if you're not a kernel developer, this article is well worth reading because it provides a warning about doing things in your code that would cause a lot of suffering if you ever had to undo them in the future.

Here's the punch line from the article:

 _The alternative would be to get rid of the "too small to fail" rule and make the allocation functions work the way most kernel developers expect them to. Johannes's message included a patch moving things in that direction; it causes the endless reclaim loop to exit (and fail an allocation request) if attempts at direct reclaim do not succeed in actually freeing any memory. But, as he put it, "the thought of failing order-0 allocations after such a long time is scary."

It is scary for a couple of reasons. One is that not all kernel developers are diligent about checking every memory allocation and thinking about a proper recovery path. But it is worse than that: since small allocations do not fail, almost none of the thousands of error-recovery paths in the kernel now are ever exercised. They could be tested if developers were to make use of the the kernel's fault injection framework, but, in practice, it seems that few developers do so. So those error-recovery paths are not just unused and subject to bit rot; chances are that a discouragingly large portion of them have never been tested in the first place.

If the unwritten "too small to fail" rule were to be repealed, all of those error-recovery paths would become live code for the first time. In a sense, the kernel would gain thousands of lines of untested code that only run in rare circumstances where things are already going wrong. There can be no doubt that a number of obscure bugs and potential security problems would result._</comment>


Functional Analysis Meets Deep Learning [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://statslab.cam.ac.uk/~sp825/slides/fa-ip-dl.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> The source is this Twitter thread: [https://twitter.com/sam_power_825/status/1009192761122271233](https://twitter.com/sam_power_825/status/1009192761122271233) but I think the slideset pdf is easier to link to.</comment>


South Korea: Super fast, and finally Free - <AUTHOR> http://www.h-online.com/open/features/South-Korea-Super-fast-and-finally-free-1034389.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Abstract: _"Imagine a country that has one of the best Internet infrastructures in the world, and yet its government effectively forbids the use of GNU/Linux through a requirement that everyone employ a decade-old Windows-only technology for many key [eg, requiring encryption] online transactions. That country is South Korea, where 1 Gbits/second Internet connections are planned for 2012; and that Windows-only technology is ActiveX."_</comment>


Who Is Cloning Who? Business2.0, try again - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/09/who-is-cloning-who-business20-try-again/ <comment><USER2> Well I'm not cloning this grammar. Humph.</comment>


So you didn't get a YC invite, what next? - <AUTHOR> I think its fair to say that YC only wants founders and businesses that will succeed without YC. With thousands of applications, hundreds of invites and tens of acceptances they can't invite everyone. Not getting an invite does not mean you won't succeed, anymore than getting an invite means you will.
For those that are soul searching, ask yourself a few questions.
Is our team credible; can we really execute?  Do we have enough people with the right skills. Engineers are just more appropriate than english majors.
Will we see the project through… there will be lots of rough spots, will we give up?
If no, fix the problem and apply again.
Am I more than one founder? Solo founders are a risk. Something happens and YC's effort and money is wasted. But probably more important, being a team is an effort multiplier and a barrier against stupid mistakes.
Find a cofounder or realize that you are probably not right for YC.
Is our idea unique? If yes, is it really something people want? If no, is it sufficiently better than what's out there. 10X improvement?
If you don't have a good idea, get one.
So you have a good idea and you can build it. Can you get users? Where is the evidence? Passion for your project can blind reason.
Can it make money?
There are plenty of companies out there that are perfectly viable who received rejections. Who knows why - you didn't fit the YC mold, you didn't submit your application early enough, you're a solo founder, you were too busy programming to correct your grammar mistakes…
if you were rejected because you can't execute, have a bad idea, can't get users or won't make money, then you should really rethink your startup. <comment><USER2> We were rejected 3.5 years ago after interview stage.

We built, we launched, we hustled and we grew. 12 months ago we launched a nationwide TV campaign. OpenRent[1] is now the largest letting agent in the UK (bigger than Foxtons for example), established, and well on the way to fully disrupting one of the oldest industries in the world.

YC rejection was tough, but we believed in the idea and whilst I'm sure YC could have helped us make fewer mistakes, it didn't stop us wanting to solve the problem we all believed in. So we went and did what it took to succeed.

Chin up to anyone facing rejection - use the information learnt from the application process, and go prove them wrong!

[1] - [https://www.openrent.co.uk](https://www.openrent.co.uk)

<comment><USER3> FYI, I'm getting an infinite loader signing in with Gmail (Safari/OSX), error console has some info:

TypeError: null is not an object (evaluating 'a[qa]')

In a script called OriginalFromGoogle, line 2378, shows as:

ca(a[qa], Jc), i.setTimeout(function () {

in the writeMesssageToPopup_ function.

<comment><USER2> Unable to reproduce in Safari 8.0.2 (10600.2.5).

Is it still happening?

Thanks for helping!

<comment><USER3> Hi, Sorry - I missed this reply. Still getting this issue on Safari Version 8.0.4 (10600.4.10.7), OS X version 10.10.2 (14C2513)

To give a little more info, when I visit the site in this browser clicking sign in brings up a dialog with the gmail email I was using - but it asks for a password. I never got to a point where I was asked for a password after the attempted login, but your system seems to have my email and some password. I'm resetting that password since I have no idea what it is or how secure it is.

On a private Safari window though, I get the same issue as before trying to log in.

(FYI I've also emailed you, probably better to discuss there instead of in this old thread)

EDIT: Probably mistaken about the password, sorry for the confusion - I think I did sign up with a different browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I never even thought to apply.

Why? The San Francisco requirement was against my ideals that tech exists everywhere, and that's not how I wanted to build a company.

More so, the stake they required relative to funding was pretty huge.

I would now, to a degree, put YCombinator kind of in the same vein as Shark Tank in outside perceptions - allegedly that show takes 3% of your company whether you get a deal or not. Clearly, advice is offered for either winner, but the deals given out are often not as valuable as the "press" or label in that case.

While a lot of interesting companies have come out of that particular incubator (thanks for the forum, BTW), there's also a lot of business models that I consider on the edge of a bubble, and without the weird investment ecosystem that does exist in the bay area, I don't think many of them would exist. I say this in terms of valuations of what service the business provides to society, and how niche is is, versus "valuations" in the typical investment sense. What is valued is, I don't know, skewed in strange ways.

By all means, if you want to try to create a startup (which I do believe is not for everyone, or even most people), build things your own way if you really believe in the idea. If you can bootstrap things and avoid venture capital entirely, and be your own boss, even better. I'd advise thinking of it as a company from day one, rather than a startup, and don't think of funding as a way to get profitable. That means you'll be free of the venture capitol addiction at a much earlier time, and be in more control of your own destiny.

<comment><USER5> > without the weird investment ecosystem that does exist in the bay area, I > don't think many of them would exist

Probably the wisest words spoken regarding the startup business on HN for months. If you are not able to launch a company without external money, there are two possible reasons behind that. Either you aren't ready to build a company, or your idea is not worth your efforts and there was never an expectable RoI to begin with.

<comment><USER6> A third possibility is investors are lemmings and are too stupid to understand the unique insight you have into a big market.

As an investor who thought Instacart, Uber and BufferBox were really stupid ideas and missed a chance to invest in them (Uber through AngelList), I know this possibility is all too real. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We were rejected last year after doing a very late application and probably because we hadn't quit our jobs nor built a prototype, or even lived in the same city (I hired my co-founder on a remote team before, and took him with me when I left). We probably ticked all the reject boxes.

We kept pitching other investors for a while, then quit and bootstrapped the prototype by taking on consulting work. Pitching was hard and most APAC investors just wanted too much control for our comfort. Bootstrapping was actually easier than we thought, so when we got term sheets from local investors, we turned them down and kept getting consulting gigs (mostly data warehousing work - boring but necessary).

5 months later, and I think the product has gone into much more interesting directions without time and investor pressure than it might have otherwise, whilst we are closer as co-founders having worked together on the gigs and been through a few "client bumps". Some of the work actually helped clarify our own data model and understand our target market better.

It's quite freeing not to have a boss at last; I'd say that was the main factor in not taking money (the banker who thought he might "quit the bank and join you guys to help out with management" was particularly scary). But YC's terms - even excluding all the advantages that come with the network, coaching, reputation etc. - were by far the most generous and founder friendly, especially in their lack of protective provisions.

Not sure what this thread is for, but throwing the story in there since there are so few tales of bootstrapping and it's discouraged by PG in one of his money essays (he argues that it delays the launch). I think our story is most relevant for non-US-based founders who cannot as easily tap into the Valley money, and for more experienced founders who can command a high enough market value to make part time work.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. $1.7M premoney valuation and a chance to get advice from PG and others who have helped 6 unicorns come about and, per @sama, 22 others who can get there is pretty darn good, IMO.

<comment><USER7> On top of that:

\- the brand is enormous. All my funding discussions have been warm intros or a network I built myself, slowly (same for client work with one exception). Saying "we're YC" enables cold emails to actually get read. Same as having candidates to a job ad from MIT, Stanford, Harvard... it gets them a phone call and some attention. It helps not just with funding, but with hiring and even B2B sales (I personally looked at Heap's product for a client and talked to their sales team, only because I heard it was YC funded).

\- valuation, according to a better connected and experienced friend, jumps around 4x post-acceptance on any future funding rounds. Related to first point. If our valuation had gone up that much, the maths wouldn't work out in favour of bootstrapping.

But what makes it really special is the lack of control. For example, I went into the final stages (10+ meetings, legal docs being drafted) of a $400k round... for 30%, with veto rights on practically everything and someone injected into management. It was tempting, especially pre-launch, but would have guaranteed no further rounds and misaligned incentives between us and investors.

Even the <10% offers wanted things like vetos and RFR on any further funding round, that removed virtually all control we had, and would make it a lot harder to raise an A round when the time came.

This, I think, was the major innovation brought about by YC. We're far from the days of Georges Doriot and DEC...

(As an aside Terrence, since you're reading this - you American angels should pop over to other countries some time, valuations are much friendlier!)

<comment><USER6> Great points, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My recommendation is that you should start with a problem you are passionate about. Quite literally, I keep a notebook of stuff that annoys me. Then, every night I review it and try to coalesce it down to the essence of a problem. Youll find that youre probably passionate about 5 or 6 of the problems you come accross.

Fix one of these problems for yourself and 99 times out of 100 someone will be willing to pay for it.

<comment><USER6> Sometimes I wonder if "Make something people want" could be even better if it were "Make something you and other people want".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> we didnt' get an invite from YC. We have a great idea, an excellent team of 5 (1 hustler 4 engineers) and a great "plan". What are the effects of this rejection on us?

None. We never took YC seriously. We believe in our idea and we are very close to alpha launch and we don't need YC to succeed. We only applied to YC so we could have that media boost or the YC title attached to us. We understand why we got rejected, we had alot of plans and zero traction (because of how we built our strategy to get product market fit).

My advice to other founders: YC is just an incubator, they can only give you advice and introduce you to other founders and investors and give you ~100k in seed funding. You can get all of these things without YC. Infact, it's much easier outside. YC won't make you magically succeed if you don't have a great team or a great product, there's only so much they can fix about you in 3 months. So don't ever let that rejection get to you and keep focused on what you're building and keep evolving until you have product market fit!

</comment><comment><USER10> A lot of the rejected companies are confused as to why they didn't get into YC or are behaving as if it's some great mystery. Looking at some of their websites though it kind of seems like they just didn't read Paul's essays. If I can't visit your website and immediately understand your business that is a red flag. People are always fancy-fying and abstracting the descriptions of their businesses. Most of the businesses websites I see applying to YC are less of "We sell apples. Use our product. Get you some apples." and more of "We create high level fruit distribution mechanisms. Currently we are supporting Apples in our network. We plan to support other fruits in the future. We're gonna REVOLUTIONIZE the way you acquire fruit." If I was at YC I would be looking for people who physically described what their company does; I see a lack of that in the rejected companies.

<comment><USER11> I love your apple/fruit example. This is a major problem I see in many startups, their unique value proposition is absolutely confusing. It's hard to get right, but is a very important step for a web business these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Have not noticed this one so started my own:(, but i'll comment here too:)

So you got rejected? Good!

1\. Now you know you KNOW you're on your own! 2\. Next time you apply you will know that accelarator is not THE CHANCE to get to where you wonna be. Its just a SHORTCUT that you can take, or NOT.

Lately I have that feeling that people tend to approach accelerators like they approach Santa: "Dear Santa, I have been a flibustier all my life, and I have a bright idea, and I am really really smart. So please help me get my dreams come true..." Does not work.

If you THINK your idea is something that has to be done. Just go for it. Make it your mission and do whatever it takes to accomplish it. Once I met those guys from UK in Siberia riding their bikes. I asked em WTF? Well, they told me, they are on a mission to go around the globe on bikes.. Why? They had no clue, I had no idea, but they have done it. (find em "tough miles") Thats what a start up is, it may be even tougher.

(thats actually SCARY. Coz you will NOT have support from your friends, family, spouse and any reasonable person.)

IF you do it anyway, sometime you'll KNOW it works (coz you have clients and revenue and the growth). then YOU decide if you want to take the SHORTCUT or not.

Hope that helps. Listen to Iron Maiden - The Trooper There is always a chance.

Sincerely, Mike

PS: I will just go on painting Cathedrals to get the funding. Incorporte in HK. And launch my app for the HardHeads in July 2015:)

</comment><comment><USER13> As someone who didn't get invited either, I feel like this is a great opportunity to look at the business objectively and check off the boxes that as a founder sometimes you don't think much about. Doing the application started it for me and already we are making changes and decisions we probably would not have focused on since we have been focused on execution.

Markets are dynamic so ideas need to be dynamic as well in how we adapt to stay within the framework of the vision but be able to optimize the probability of success. Taking a step back and evaluating team, technology, opportunity and current execution plan takes a lot of time and effort which this process forced us to do.

It all starts with confirming that the idea is good and there is a real problem here to solve but once that is checked off, there are so many variables that come into play. My approach is to try and not dwell as much on why YC did not invite me but focus on what else I can do to fulfill the potential of the idea.

If we get this right, we might not need to apply again and should be on our way. If not we either come back bigger and better or will have decided that this is not the business we want to be in. All good outcomes right?

</comment><comment><USER14> Build it yourself anyways.

Very interesting that so many entrepreneurs - who by definition are bypassing gatekeepers - still tend to look at something like YC as a litmus for whether or not they can move forward or are a "success."

Obviously, there are some company models that need venture money behind them, but it's not an excuse for not doing your idea.

<comment><USER15> This is very true. If someone won't chase an idea because it wasn't validated by YC in the first place, they seem to be on very weak footing to begin with. (Similar to the people who only want a high brand name school.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A lot of the startups YC doesn't fund aren't necessary bad, just too early. And while not getting into YC will never destroy your company, getting in too early actually will -- if you start the clock on your company while you are still missing some basic skills, if your founder and you later break up, if there are still too many technical/product uncertainties, etc.

If your idea isn't inherently bad then just peel away away some layers of risk and try again.

</comment><comment><USER17> Am Benerd From Kenya and my start up dint get an invitation into YC this summer.. I have a great team n awesome prototype but Since I really follow what YC start up school teaches about start ups,They had a reason of Not inviting us for the next batch ,this has made us go back to the drawing board and rethink what we haven't got right yet..infact we have started seeing flaws in our prototype that we didn't see before If a team was invited from Africa ,that is great and it was my dream to have at least an African team in YC.Thanks you guys for the great efforts you are making to see start ups through the emotional roller coaster.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm 18, and my co-founder is just turning 18 in a week.

So we never really expected to get in. We are both completely broke, so we're going to launch a kickstarter campaign to see if we can get the funding for more hosting (and the ability to work full-time over the summer). From there, well, I guess we try to grow and take over the world.

<comment><USER19> Sounds like a workable attitude, best of luck to you! My bet's on you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> YC is not perfect and they have admitted so in several occasions. Plus they can only fund so many startups, so getting rejected doesn't mean you have to rethink your startup.

The way I see it, continue with your startup and apply again.

</comment><comment><USER21> Just got rejected. Most likely because we are so early on, haven't launched and are hardware and software. Too many red flags for YC in an application pool with thousands of established companies. Doesn't mean that this means there is anything wrong with what we are doing. Never give up due to rejection, it takes rejection to succeed. Time to hustle and show YC why they should take a closer look at the underdogs.

</comment><comment><USER17> Most successful tech companies in the world have atleast 2 co-founders,Look even at the company in the World that most founders draw inspiration from(Facebook)..It had technically 5 Co-Founders..A start up is too much work for a single founder,you need to Find people who complement

</comment><comment><USER22> Or just be honest about it - YCs filter isn't that great and then become the next AirBnB anyway.

</comment><comment><USER19> Disclaimer: I applied S15 and they declined to invite me.

How do you know what you were rejected for? It doesn't matter. Either you were rejected because the assessment was it will not work, or you were rejected for a content free reason: 300 others were stellar, you weren't in the 300.

You don't want to know because you want to run the experiment. Any assessment pre-run is fortune telling, which adds zero content. Run the experiment, because the results, +ve or -ve, are valuable.

You don't need YC's or anyone's "approval" to become an oustanding success, or to believe in your idea.

The unfortunate truth I realized today is this: I believed "YC is the best." If they sometimes fail to select the best, that means they actually can't be.

If you believe in yourself, and your idea, as I do, then when someone says, "you and your idea are not as good as theirs", you choose to have a lower opinion of their judgement. And because you have a lower opinion of their judgement the image of YC becomes less than it was, which is unfortunate.

So getting a rejection is unfortunate, because it's a compelling idea that there's really a place that "gets" all the great ideas, and where all the quality founders can mingle.

The thing I realized is this is a fantasy. As good as YC is, if they decline your proposal and you and your idea work, it's not what you're looking for. That's tough, because it's nice and comfortable to think there's a "destination", beside your business, where you can go and meta-discuss all the things about your business around people who embody the traits you respect, and who are creating the successes you admire.

Maybe my idea and me really don't work, and I'm just blind to the ways in which they don't because I don't have the perspective YC has. That's a possibility. I don't believe that's likely, and I choose to believe in myself and my idea.

Even so, feeling like an outsider to this "magical world" of YC is tough. Especially when you spend 40 days through the application period mentally aligning yourself, and convincing yourself that this is really somewhere you and your idea belong. The adjustment period when they say, "no it isn't" takes some getting used to.

But more shocking than this personal readjustment is realizing that actually, no, there is no special place out there that is made just for me and my startup. That's tough, because it's nice to think there is that. Tho for every person for whom that is now a reality, 98 others it's not -- and that's a lot of pain.

My conclusion is really that YC is not that important. It can't be, because there's still so much talent outside it. It's just an image of importance that emerges when any concentration of talent occurs. It's nice to think there's a "leader" there's someone to "guide you", and yet in reality, it works to guide yourself. As people making things, we're the ones who are creating something new that didn't exist before.

That's pretty much the definition of there not being a "destination" or a "point man" for us. We're out the front, ourselves.

To all my other people now 7% (and in numerous other ways) richer, onward!

To everyone who's getting in, I feel a little sorry for you -- because they can't be as good as we imagined because there's so much talent still left on the track.

For my part, I'm happy to be in the bigger, wider world, than in a narrower one. As I read my mail this morning, a strange sense of relief washed over me. Now I can do this thing my way, at my own pace, and not worry about tracking it through a 3-month hot house, which I'm sure feels like a great opportunity, and it is, tho as for that, I'm happy on the road I'm on.

This came to mind:

 _two roads diverged in a yellow wood

and sorry I could not travel them both

and be one traveller long I stood

and looked down one as far as I could

to where it bent in the undergrowth

.

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

.

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference._

.

Robert Frost -- not of YC ;)

</comment><comment><USER23> Apply to bootcamp.mit.edu :)

</comment><comment><USER24> Here is a great sum of your post in one line:

"If you're absent during my struggle, don't expect to be present during my success." - Will Smith

In my view the way YC has been openly crushing morale of solo-founders for years is simply pathetic. Is it a crime to be a solo-founder? Despite equal number of successful startups from solo-ists, they continue to snub the potential and rather host even those who would easily rip-off ideas and interface from others.

Given that they are almost a monopoly and monopsony "middleman" of all things startups and nearly control other movements (media/VCs/other stakeholders) I see this as a dangerous precedent for startups in general.

Last thing we want is an Amazon-like agent that controls our destiny.

<comment><USER25> Robertandy, YC is incredibly encouraging at stages that nobody else is. They have open lectures on how to start a startup. You can watch them for free right now.

I feel your frustration that they don't fund certain things, but this should not be called crushing morale.

Please remember one thing: the reason YCombinator is a monopoly is that others are cowardly, don't know how to invest at the seed stage and help founders build huge, scalable businesses with a community of awesome people around them. This community is a hallmark of YC, and one of the obvious things that must be true about any founding group that has at least 2 members is that by definition they are social enough to keep a group of at least 2 cofounders together.

If you feel YCombinator is a monopoly you have to please by having a cofounder, why don't you get a cofounder?

<comment><USER24> Disagree!

The entire process is rigged against solo-founders and you CANNOT deny that fact. Even your own last sentence in the end contradicts you.

> why don't you get a cofounder.

Dude what about this: I don't want to marry. I do not want to own a house. I do not want a co-founder.

<comment><USER26> The reason single co-founder companies are less likely to be accepted is that, once you start to get to a certain scale, there's just FAR too much work for one person to do.

We're already experiencing this. There are two of us and we need an extra 24 hours in the day to get everything done.

Get a co-founder if at all possible, it'll save your sanity.

<comment><USER27> The idea is to hire as you grow. You can be one founder or 10, at a point, you hire for what you need.

I do agree with GP a bit on the solo founder. Here is the thing, I have enough contacts in the industry that if I wanted, I could form a very good team if I had the money to pay them (thus, the idea of getting investment money as a solo founder), but none of those people would agree to be co-founders as they know the chance of striking it big are very very small and they can clear very very good salaries as employees. Sure, if you are 22 and have a few friends just graduating at the same age, you will find co-founders, but if you are 35+, have 15 or more years under your belt, and most of your network as well, they won't leave very high paid jobs to be co-founders, and honestly, after working with them and knowing what they are capable, I wouldn't want a 22 fresh graduate as a co-founder either (unless he was truly exceptional)

<comment><USER28> Everyone over 30 had been thru this cycle before. I brought a number of great co-founders in when I started my first virtual reality start-up in 2000. Then of course we all got burned when the markets crashed in 2001. I even managed to convince some of them to return in 2004 when we got a large contract. We built the company into one of the best in the world in virtual reality product in the world. Only to be screwed by a partner with a much much larger legal budget. I have come to realize the contract disputes are usually won by the party with the larger legal budget. At this point they all just want to ride their companies into retirement.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The way the police have treated Cliff Richard is unacceptable - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-way-the-police-have-treated-cliff-richard-is-completely-unacceptable-9672367.html

<comment><USER2> (in case it changes, the current title given on HN for this is "Confirmation that the UK is a police state")

From wikipedia: "A police state is a state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic, and political life of the population."

This story in no way establishes that the UK is a police state. It does, I think, show that the police's pursuit of justice was more than a little contaminated by their bumbling idea of PR.

From the HN title, I'd have expected something more along the lines of:

[http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100279865/if-c...](http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100279865/if- cage-has-broken-the-law-let-it-be-prosecuted-this-reeks-of-the-police-state/)

or:

[http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/07/deep-state- data...](http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/07/deep-state-data- surveillance-about-power-not-safety)

or maybe:

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/royal- family-...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/royal-family- granted-new-right-of-secrecy-2179148.html)

or perhaps:

[http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/police-destroyed- lorry-...](http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/police-destroyed-lorry-load- corruption-3258515)

or even:

[http://johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/2014/04/28/g4s-ride-to- the-d...](http://johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/2014/04/28/g4s-ride-to-the-dwps- rescue-bungling-fraud-suspects-handed-huge-government-contract/)

not to even mention:

[http://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/government- accused-...](http://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/government-accused- scraping-legal-barrel-belhaj-rendition-case)

just to pick some recent random examples, any of which might suggest to some that the UK is veering towards quasi-police-statehood.

But not a story showing that the police here try and play a story which is bound to attract huge publicity with some dubious image management in mind (though heaven knows what, exactly.)

(For anyone not following the recent UK news on child abuse allegations, it's certainly true that the police _are_ in need of a bit of image management in regard to that issue, having apparently unreasonably curtailed several investigations into prominent alleged abusers; see, for example: [http://ethicalalliance.org/united-kingdom-corruption- probe-i...](http://ethicalalliance.org/united-kingdom-corruption-probe-into- sacking-of-cop-after-he-named-minister-as-child-abuse-suspect/) which story now seems to have (ahem) disappeared from mirror.co.uk.)</comment>


Good laptops for Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/20knkf/good_laptops_for_linux/ <comment><USER2> I'm super annoyed with the changes that Lenovo did to the Thinkpad line. I've been a longtime user and first they changed the keyboard style, then the layout, and then they got rid of the physical mouse buttons (requiring one to use the trackpad as a mouse button). Frankly, there is literally nothing compelling about Thinkpads anymore.

I'm the market and I test drove the XPS 13, which was very good. That being said, I've had HORRIBLE customer service experience with Dell in the past.

I'm in the market for a new laptop here very soon and I can't honestly think of a reason not to get a MacBook Pro w/ Retina and just throw Ubuntu on it. I know there are issues with the boot order, but seems like most of those are solved now.

Anyone have experience with recent MBP w/ Ubuntu?

<comment><USER3> So the new Thinkpad keyboard and trackpad are at least as crappy as the ones on the MBP/MBA (low-travel chicklet keys, annoying layout, and a single click- anywhere track surface that's painful to use with hi-dpi displays). I have a T520 (1080p) at home with the nice keyboard/trackpad and a newer T540p (3k) at work. Honestly, I'd still buy the T540p again if I had to. Get yourself a mouse, pay the extra $30 for the nice Intel wifi card, skip the second GPU, and sleep well knowing that you're not going to have hardware or driver issues. The same simply cannot be said about the MBP.

<comment><USER2> I have been looking at the T5XX line, but I just don't want something that large! I travel quite a bit and very much prefer a 13" max system. I have X220 right now and the X1 would have been perfect if they didn't completely screw it up.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. X1 or X220 would be ideal machines if Lenovo engineers used their brains.

The X220 was really good. The only thing it needed was a better screen, a decent trackpad, and a slightly less noisy fan.

It got all those improvements, but they messed up with the case, introduced a ULV processor, limited the amount of RAM and upgradeability, botched the keyboard, and many more things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just bought an Acer C720 chromebook as a second machine and am absolutely blown away by how nice it is for $200. You can run Ubuntu (with your choice of window manager) side by side ChromeOS with crouton, or completely replace ChromeOS with chrubuntu. There are some quirks if you try to replace ChromeOS, so IMHO stick with crouton and either xfce or unity.

The screen is low end, and the track pad nothing to write home about, but the battery life and portability are unbelievable--a true 8 hours of usage in a machine about 2.5 lbs. heavy. ChromeOS itself isn't bad for just using as a browser and then crouton to fill in the gaps of missing stuff like a good text editor, development tools, etc. Even with just the basic 2GB memory and 16gb SSD version I have no issues with memory or disk space (about 8gb free once a basic ubuntu + unity install is added).

I really can't say enough good things about this setup. I wouldn't use it exclusively as my only machine since 11" is kind of small, but as a second machine for portability or browsing the web it is fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's weird neither on reddit nor here does anyone mention the HP laptops, I wrote it up on reddit so I will just give the tl;dr version here: the Zbook 14/Elitebook 840 G1 (same machine, different GPU) comes with Suse Linux, user replaceable everything, fairly decent keyboard and a full HD anti glare display. How come noone mentioned them?

</comment><comment><USER6> I just got a Lenovo Thinkpad T540p with a 15" 2880x1620 display. Despite all the changes in this generation's Thinkpad line, I really like my purchase. The keyboard is very good and I'm okay with the trackpad, since I tap rather than click. I'm running XFCE, which works well for the most part with my HiDPI display. I've got Bumblebee installed to switch between my discrete Nvidia and Intel GPUs. For $1200 I got this amazing screen, Intel i5-4200M CPU, 4gb memory (added another 4gb), 500gb disk (swapped for SSD), dual band Intel wifi with support for AC, and 9 cell battery.

</comment><comment><USER7> I would highly recommend Asus F202 laptop that has been my official work laptop (with my employer's) for over a year now. It's a single boot Arch Linux (removed Win 8). I work on Android (Eclipse) and embedded C / C++ (mostly vim and terminal, a little kdevelop). Two things that I love about Arch Linux that made me use it, first and the most important, rolling release and second, excellent docs and forums. Also, I've never had a driver issue.

The specs are good enough, i3 3rd gen, 4gb soldered RAM, 500gb, 11.6inch 1366x768 glossy touchscreen, 1.4kg. (It's like a budget macbook air).

No use for the touchscreen (it's more of a hinderance, when someone touches the screen while pointing out something). Two major essential that I needed for a laptop, small and lightweight, and non-reflective (put a matte screen guard which works great).

Highly recommended.

</comment><comment><USER8> My refurbished Dell XPS 15Z worked fine with Ubuntu however I do have to memorize a few commands for restarting the mouse driver, the network manager and the wifi. Which is fine to a point. At least I don't have to reboot when the mouse stops responding or when I cannot get online. However, if I used the Windows 7 I doubt I would have to do such things.

In my recent experience I think the complaints about driver issues are fairly historical.

There is also a hardware compatibility list thing on an Ubuntu somewhere that someone could theoretically check in advance. However, by the time you get to search and get to that list you are likely to be typing something like 'nvidia bumblebee dell xps 15z' into the Bing! search engine.

</comment><comment><USER9> I am in the same boat - hoping some decent answers come up. I've been looking at a Thinkpad T440s and a MBP 13". The MBP seems a good choice (parallels?) but I don't like that there is no way to update my RAM.

<comment><USER10> I just got a 13'' MBP and put Linux on it. The hardware is great and well supported, but you'll still have a bit of a hard time getting the boot in order.

I tried to fully wipe out the OSX partition, which I ended up reinstalling just to get the `bless` command back so I could boot off the drive. Ugh. So it is setup to dual boot now with Refit.

I am quite happy with it otherwise.

I'm not sure how Linux will look with a Retina display, though. That's why I stuck with the non-Retina 13''. The hi-dpi support in Linux desktops is pretty awful.

<comment><USER11> How does the battery life compare between OSX and Linux?

When I last ran Linux on Mac hardware (several years ago), it was a pretty disappointingly large gap.

<comment><USER12> Doesn't surprise me at all, it's one of the main selling points for Apple.

It's fine on my laptop (Arch Linux), same as in Windows, but with an i7, GTX 660M and no optimus, and a 15.6" screen there's not much power to save.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For all the Linux people who rule out a laptop because of wifi drivers - please get a Linux supported USB wifi dongle for $10.

<comment><USER14> Having a dongle is annoying. I need something small that can go everywhere with me, that will fit in my small-ish bag that I can quickly pull out and do stuff with. A dongle gets in the way.

If I knew my current ThinkPad required proprietary wifi drivers I wouldn't have bought it.

<comment><USER15> Not to mention it consumes a precious USB slot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you want to be sure it runs Linux well (includes all the niceness like keyboard lights etc) go with something like [https://www.system76.com/](https://www.system76.com/) who construct everything to work well with Linux.

<comment><USER17> I'm going to replicate the comment I made on the reddit thread here:

Strongly recommend against [System76]

1) They only test against one version of ubuntu, and they seem to patch the acpi bios specifically for that one, so good luck changing distros or versions.

2) Their bios has fun bugs, like how my serp7 (Serval Professional) turns itself off after 20 minutes on battery because it thinks it's about to die, even though the battery itself thinks otherwise. (It's not happening at the OS level, I already have that part configured correctly, it's the bios coordinating with the EC itself).

3) They don't bother to actually hook up the acpi bios correctly, so many of the generic acpi platform functions (e.g. get_brightness/_BQC and set_brightness/_BCM) don't work correctly. Instead, they rely on (going back to #1) the platform map that Seems To Work As Detected except that it's detected as something similar, but not correct. I had a bunch of things break on kernel upgrade due to the mapping having a bugfix to make it work correctly for the hardware it was intended for, which made it work incorrectly for the serp7 that was squatting on it.

4) When I called support about #3, their answer was "reinstall the ubuntu version it shipped with and try again." I asked for enough documentation to actually solve the problem- I intended to implement a system76-specific acpi driver (think "thinkpad_acpi.ko"); I was informed that that information was proprietary and would not be released under any circumstances.

5) These laptops are fragile. My company bought three different system76s (on my recommendation, ugh) and of those, only mine still works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The X1 Carbon (or any x/t series thinkpad really) is by far the best choice you can make for a linux laptop. The hardware support is 100% and they are the only ones, hardware quality wise, that are close to or at Apple's level.

The dells and the acers are junk.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I agree, but sadly they've botched the keyboard and trackpad in their latest iteration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd be interested to hear from anyone running linux (preferably Ubuntu) on a Dell XPS 13. While most reviews I've found have been positive, there have been some complaints of fan noise and heat.

<comment><USER20> I've been running Ubuntu 13.10 on an 2012 XPS 13 for a while now. The only time I have noticed that the laptop runs hot is when I have it in my lap, because it's pretty easy to cover up the fan inlets on a non-uniform surface. On a flat surface I haven't had any issues though.

Overall I really like it for web development. Everything I've tried works out of the box (volume control, brightness, webcam, etc) with Ubuntu. Before that I was running Arch, with limited success in getting brightness and resume from suspend to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I feel like almost any laptop will work with Linux. Most just happen to come pre-installed with Windows.

<comment><USER22> Configuring the drivers for some hardware can be a huge pain, or require being quite an expert user. Wireless cards are usually the worst, in my experience.

<comment><USER23> Wireless cards used to be an issue 7 or 8 year back. Are they still? I haven't seen any problems for a while....

<comment><USER24> Yup. Anything with a recent Broadcom chipset can be a pain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can't beat the Thinkpads. They're awesome and have excellent Linux driver support.

</comment><comment><USER26> If you're OK with running in a chroot, chromebooks and chromeboxes have great support.</comment>


Django SQL Explorer - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/groveco/django-sql-explorer <comment><USER2> Well...this is a surprise. I wrote SQL Explorer :)

Glad folks are finding it useful!

Happy to answer any questions or take feedback/feature requests (I'm email@example.com)! We use the heck out of this thing internally.

A couple fun notes:

1\. Every SQL statement is logged as a QueryLog object. This really simple data model enables a ton of the functionality:

\- unique, bookmarkable URLs for every single query (including ad-hoc queries)

\- historic runtime/query duration reporting

\- query versioning

\- 'popularity' in the form of run-count

2\. The 'snapshot' feature is incredibly powerful. Tick a box on a saved query and (assuming you have Celery), Explorer will the run query on a cron and save the results to s3. Super useful for mutable data. Like, if you have a product catalog and the prices sometimes change, but not very often, it's great to have a query of 'current prices' that snapshots once per day.

3\. Queries are all exposed as CSV and JSON endpoints (with token auth). A great way to shuffle data between applications.

4\. The only 'django-specific' part of this is that it introspects the Django app metadata to build the 'schema viewer' on the right hand side. If not for this one feature, this would just be a totally general-purpose query tool that happened to be built on Django. One day...

</comment><comment><USER3> Just like to say that django sql explorer has been very useful in getting a few non-technical people (who know sql) investigating the state of our databases, their relations and attempting to express reports they need. I'm hoping their work will be easy to translate into Metabase 'questions' while I pull our reporting project together.

[http://www.metabase.com/](http://www.metabase.com/)

<comment><USER4> I hope you don't mind the self plug: I think Metabase has support for raw SQL, but if you find it hard to translate to Metabase "questions", it sure will be easy to translate into queries in Redash... In Redash you create visualizations from regular SQL queries (although we do support adding parameters and such).

[https://redash.io](https://redash.io) [https://github.com/getredash/redash](https://github.com/getredash/redash)

Disclaimer: I'm the author/founder of Redash.

<comment><USER3> I don't mind the plug at all. I know Metabase supports raw queries, but we're going from normalised schemas to 'flattened' denormalised ones to help the reporting effort.

At the same time, I don't expect the whole organisation to know SQL while I do expect them to make a slight effort to use Metabase's 'Question' interface (if they want data out).

I'll be sure to take a look at Redash

<comment><USER3> Well done on Redash - It looks and feel very nice. I'll definitely keep an eye on it, but Metabase's 'Questions' and visualisations are a bit more polished for now.

<comment><USER4> I guess that's the kind of polish VC money buys :-) I went the bootstrap/community route. But I hope that in about two months we will have funds to hire a UI/UX designer to improve the user experience and general look and feel.

<comment><USER3> > I guess that's the kind of polish VC money buys :-)

quite possibly. I've also read some of their bug threads and they're quite discerning (protective?) of what makes it in from the community. so, money+perfectionism, perhaps.

but honestly - their 'questions' interface is a hell of a lot more fun than sql. thanks to ORMs, my sql knowledge is really quite rusty as well and the simple/constrained "select, filter, aggregate" options on a single table or data source lets me faceroll what I need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Something that we use at my job is Looker ([https://looker.com/](https://looker.com/)). While it's not open-source or free, I didn't know about the product until I joined and I love their features for data visualization and running ad-hoc queries. We just set a read-only user named 'looker' and its good to go. :)

Disclaimer: I'm not a Looker employee or anything, just a happy user of their product.

<comment><USER6> Hey, we're thinking about switching our reporting to Looker. Would you mind sharing your impressions of the tool and maybe how your daily workflow roughly looks like?

You can shoot me an email via jankyri.com (link at the bottom).

<comment><USER7> If you're at the point where you have the need and the budget for a business intelligence tool, Looker is fantastic. Anyone who can pivot in Excel will pick up Looker quickly and be able to get actionable insights.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Really fun to see this on HN:s front page - I started using this last week to give some non technical people access to some queries I usually run for them. Works perfect so far!

<comment><USER2> Woohoo! Thanks and great to hear. If you have any feedback or suggestions, feel free to open a GH issue (...or a pull request), or email me directly: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> An easy way to fix many of the "production" concerns is to run SQL explorer only on syndicated read only slave servers.

Most databases support slave servers.

Probably should be added to the readme.

<comment><USER2> Good idea. Will do!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's trending [https://github.com/trending/python](https://github.com/trending/python)

</comment><comment><USER10> This looks like an interesting tool, and a great way to sharethis sort of knowledge internally.

I'm hankering after a SQLAlchemy version, though.

</comment><comment><USER11> Well done! We built something similar at my company for the same purposes. This functionality is powerful for any team that wants easier data access for casual SQL users.

</comment><comment><USER12> So this has nothing to do with Django, other than being built with it? It took me a while to realize that.

<comment><USER10> What does something that does "have to do with Django" look like to you?

<comment><USER13> I think the parent was expecting this to be more like a plugin for Django.

<comment><USER14> But it _is_ a Django plugin. The readme.md includes instructions for integrating it into your Django app and the use case provided is for exploring your Django database.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


GNU Guix 0.9.0 released – Functional package manager and distribution - <AUTHOR> http://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=8398 <comment><USER2> I'm intrigued by Guix but right now I'm invested in NixOS. Finally I've learned most of the Nix language, which is elegant and quite clever, but it was a little bit of a hurdle. Scheme is more familiar and easy to learn, I think, and I can easily see macros as being extremely useful for system configuration. I'm fully convinced that the Nix/Guix style of package management and system configuration is Teh Future. Anyone who isn't drinking koolaid on that bandwagon yet should hop on and check it out.

<comment><USER3> I also love Nix/Guix, but I have the feeling the future will sadly be giving us container-ized apps systemd-style. Much worse security and sysadmin-wise.

<comment><USER2> I launch containers from systemd in NixOS. My future is a mixed bag.

<comment><USER3> Containers are cool for big things. But imagine every single program stuck inside a container without proper management tools to track dependencies. Now imagine a heartbleed-like scenario where you need to patch a big security hole ASAP. With containers you'd have a hard time.

<comment><USER4> Depends how those "containers" interact with the system at large.

In the Windows world, it's common to have the libraries you need stored in ~/Program Files/Program_name/ . Now, each program dumps in its program home the library, only because it cannot guarantee the library would be in the system.

In Linux, we deal with having different major versions of said library. nd minor versions are clobbered by major. So when someone who wrote stuff using python 2.7.2 and 2.7.3(bugfixes) comes out, there is invariably something that is broken.

A container that encompasses "Python", and holds all the versions would be a great deal. Same with other programs. They could interact, but their install and environment would be encompassed as a complete "Python", regardless of version or bugfix.

<comment><USER5> You are describing NixOS/Guix rather than containers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm just trying to get all of this "package management" sorted out. So could anyone please comment.

Guix is a package manager that is currently limited at 2619 packages [1]

NixOS is a GNU/Linux distro which uses the Nix package manager (makes package management reliable and reproducible. It provides atomic upgrades and rollbacks, side-by-side installation of multiple versions of a package, multi- user package management and easy setup of build environments) and currently provides 11630 packages [2]

Ansible/Chef/Puppet is a package manager oriented at deployment at multiple nodes, which works with multiple GNU/Linux distros.

Vagrant is a package manager. A wrapper around Ansible/Chef/Puppet.

My understanding is that I can fix all problems with NixOS, with the caveat that I'm limited to NixOS, so I can't Nix on a Debian or Ubuntu or Redhat.

Assuming the adoption of NixOS isn't a constraint, why should I bother to learn Ansible/Chef/Puppet and Vagrant?

And if Ansible/Chef/Puppet are still worth learning (and please comment why) besides NixOS, is there any reason to learn Vagrant as well?

[1] [http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/packages/](http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/packages/)

[2] [https://nixos.org/nixos/packages.html](https://nixos.org/nixos/packages.html)

<comment><USER7> You can run Nix on Arch. I think you can run it on other operating systems.

[https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/nix/](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/nix/)

<comment><USER8> You can run Guix on Arch as well (it's what I do)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone else feel like they're just duplicating all the work done by Nix? I guess there's nothing wrong with multiple functional package managers. It just seems wrong to reject Nix just because it allows unfree software.

<comment><USER10> Guix indeed has a strong commitment to user freedom, which makes it a different project.

Technically, I don't see it as "duplicating" Nix: Guix uses low-level parts of Nix that are awesome, and replaces higher-level layers with a more integrated and unified system. See [https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.4584](https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.4584) for the technical rationale or the video on the home page on the concrete impact of those differences. Hacking GuixSD is a very different experience, I think!

(Disclaimer: I maintain Guix and I'm a former NixOS hacker.)

<comment><USER2> Random lazy question: do you know about running GuixSD on AWS EC2? We're very happy with NixOS's AMI images, since they let us provision AWS instances extremely easily.

<comment><USER10> As far as I know nobody has tried so far, but that would be cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looking at the package list I can see:

python-sphinx and python2-sphinx

From this I conclude that python-sphinx is python3 version of sphinx right? Do you think that's sane (from user experience point of view) assuming that /usr/bin/python should point to python2? [https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/)

<comment><USER12> Yes, python-sphinx is the Python 3 version of Sphinx. Note that Guix does not conform to the FHS, and thus has no /usr directory.

<comment><USER11> Yet anyway as a python user I would expect to receive python2 version when installing python-sphinx.

In Fedora we have (most recent change in packaging guidelines):

Source rpm: python-foo which generates binary rpms: python2-foo and python3-foo where python2-foo has virtual provides for python-foo, once Python3 will become THE default python by the upstream merits we will change python-foo provides to python3-foo package.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not sure I fully understand what Guix is. Is it a replacement for pacman / apt-get etc..?

<comment><USER2> Here's an evocative screenshot:

[http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/screenshots/0.8.3/guix- syst...](http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/screenshots/0.8.3/guix-system- vm.png)

It's a distribution of Linux that uses the Scheme language both for defining packages and for configuring the user's system.

In that picture, someone is generating a QEMU image from a certain system configuration. The Guix tools will read the configuration file, and then create a VM that matches its parameters.

You might be reminded of Ansible, Vagrant, and similar tools for "declarative" configuration.

Note how the configuration specifies a list of user accounts. Later, inside the VM, you could modify that list -- say, change Bob's name, add Alice, and also create a common user group for them -- and then tell Guix to update the system. It would then look at its current configuration and figure out what to change.

The same applies for things like defining system services. So you will have a Scheme file that defines, say, that nginx should be running on port 80 with these three different vhost configurations. The distribution will then know how to generate an nginx configuration file, how to setup the init system, and how to reload these things on changes.

(I don't know if Guix has a predefined thing for generating Nginx configurations; if not, you can certainly build one easily with some Scheme expressions.)

I use NixOS, which is an earlier implementation of the same idea. Me and my brother, with whom I work, share a basic system configuration file. That means I can define a new web service, along with whatever package dependencies it may have, even including creating a new user account -- and push that to our repository, so he will pick it up, and then I can say "hey, check out localhost:8050" and it'll just work.

We also use NixOS on our cloud servers. We have one configuration file that declares all of our services (redis, etc) along with our app vhosts (mostly in the form of systemd units that launch Docker containers, using some custom Nix functions). This means that our services are always running the same way on our laptops as on the server, just on different domains (the server's internet domain vs our localhost domains).

<comment><USER14> Guile actually looks good when used declarative!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What does "GNU" icon in the packages list [1] stand for?

[1] [http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/packages/](http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/packages/)

<comment><USER16> They are part of the GNU system.

[http://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html](http://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html)

Btw, some projects are hosted on nongnu.org domain, those are not part of the GNU system.

<comment><USER17> And we'd love to see more! Information and instructions for submitting your project are in the link above.

(I'm part of the GNU evaluation team.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does Guix have (the equivalent of) package signing? Last I checked Nix wasn't very concerned about this.

<comment><USER19> Package signing is relatively useless. All it tells you is that a given person signed a binary, but it does nothing to tell you whether the contents of that binary match the source code (and currently, no such tooling exists to perform this verification.)

Nix and Guix on the other hand, are primarily source code based. Packages are given an identity which is a secure hash of their source code and complete build instructions. This makes it infeasible to make any modifications to the source code, as intentionally malicious modifications would result in a different hash, and source code changes are detectable in commit logs.

While binary versions of these packages are available via Hydra, one can always use the source code versions if they're worried about security. Long term goals for Nix and Guix are to have completely reproducible binary packages, whereby we can assert that given a package definition, the resulting binaries will be bit identical when compiled from different machines. Instead of relying on a hash of the source code, we'll have a hash of binaries matching a package definition.

And when we get to this stage, we can completely stop worrying about _who_ packaged a piece of software, because the result should be the same regardless. Instead, we can start looking at an alternative model of distribution where several independant parties, chosen by the user, reach a consensus on the binary hash which corresponds to a given package definition, and have that package retreivable through a distributed network (a DHT).

<comment><USER20> Does this also include the compiler and versions of the compiler used, assuming that build and compiler options are identical?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to find investors? - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently a third year Computer Science student, along with my two other founders. All three of us are programmers with little to no business experience. In the past year, we've put together a little startup and have created our first product, a mobile app. We would currently like investors, but we're very unsure of how to go about this. Our first thought was to try AngelList, and while shooting for a low goal, we have yet to see any activity. Granted, our app is currently in the beta testing phase at the moment. My question is, how do we find investors? Should we contact people directly? What are some tips? <comment><USER2> I think this assumption is one of the problems that many hackers face. The media likes to present (and we like to believe) that having business experience is NOT very necessary. That's right as long as you don't have to raise money.

Even google's terms of financing required a season businessman as a CEO (Eric Schmidt).

Bootstrap or get a founder with business experience. Three CS co-founders makes it even more difficult to raise investor capital, but much easier for finding additional hires.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's only one path to investment that doesn't involve being born on 3rd base or getting unbelievably lucky. It's 3 things:

1\. Grow. Grow convincingly on your own, without investment. Be confident in your product, know where users come from, in fact know everything about your product and your market (everything), and have a graph that is up and to the right.

2\. Network. Go to meetups, clubs, professors, friends, family friends, etc and leverage the fact that you have a "growing" app to make those people EXCITED to introduce you to people with money.

3\. When you meet investors, don't go for the hard sell just let them ask questions. Keep updating them as growth milestones (even if it's just every 2 weeks how much you grew) are achieved. Tell them you're raising money early on but that you're not sure when - pick the right moment to say "we're raising" when growth AND # of investors you've met is at peak.

If you're like me when I first started out, you're hearing this and thinking "ok, anybody got any easier ideas? That sounds basically impossible I'm kind of looking for a silver bullet here - I think I deserve it I mean everyone is getting seed money and we're pretty good!".

There's no silver bullet. I'm telling you straight up it doesn't exist, especially if you haven't built something successful before. You have to grind, you have to grow, and you have to network. And it takes time. If you're not ready for that, consider your app a side project and move on.

</comment><comment><USER4> It sounds like it's far too early and you would blow your chances with investors, and probably even angels. If you could manage to take on experienced business co-founder, that might signal some validation that the venture might have legs. But you're not going to get very far in the jungle of business on a wing and a prayer alone, you need someone and/or advisors with experience. If you could convince someone that has exited before, that would add to overall perception and validation. If investment were absolutely required for a venture to survive, it often comes across as desperation and a red flag to investors that makes them wary of the founders' ability to manage money and contain costs... ignorance is no excuse when it comes to money. That said, it is imperative for founders to track and minimize costs to demonstrate penny- and pound-wisdom to potential investors. Demonstrating religious accounting hygiene may mean the difference between investment and non- investment (see also: Felix Dennis).

I hope your venture is successful and be sure to keep the team together and pivot into something else if the current thing doesn't work out... good teams are hard to come by. (The more valuable thing than success is learning what mistakes were made and what move/s would have been better.)

</comment><comment><USER5> It doesn't matter if you would like investors. You need to make investors want to own a chunk of your business so much that they'll give you a good amount of cash despite the dismal odds of failure for very early stage startups, such as yours that you say is in beta. To do that you have to paint a picture of how big this concept could get and how roughly you intend to get there. Assuming you have your pitch well formulated, then as for actual logistics of how to contact investors, typically having trusted people vouch for you is a good first step. You can contact people directly too. Do so succinctly and with an eye to why you think they in particular would be interested. Friends and family are also a typical source of very initial capital. Since at the earliest stage all anyone has to go on is how competent you are, and to some extent how compelling the concept is. People who know you are much better judges of how competent you are than are total strangers. Other startup founders you may know may also be able to provide introductions to angel investors. Prepare for it bang your head against the wall. Raising seed capital is hard and frustrating, but as they say, it's still one of the simplest things you'll do in the life of your startup.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why do you want investors should be your first question. Raising money means dilution and being put on a vesting schedule along with having to deal with liquidation preferences or headaches of convertible debt (see this book[1] to understand some of these terms). Second, finding investors usually takes connections. For young CS grads, easiest way would be through the university's tech commercialization office. Another would be an accelerator or incubator. Then you could reach out to mutual connections in your network to find angel investors or seed funds. Hope that helps. If you need more help feel free to contact me (my email is in my profile). Good luck!

1) [http://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer- Capitalis...](http://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer- Capitalist/dp/1118443616)

</comment><comment><USER7> In our case, it was all about network. One of our co-founders is part of the fellowship program, Venture for America. Through VFA he made contacts, and those contacts have put us in touch with investors (those investors then help put you in touch with other investors).

I would start reaching out to people in your network (professors, entrepreneurs at your school, executives you may know, anyone who you may have credibility, etc). Set meetings with them, and ask who if they know anyone who many be interested in investing. It's not an easy road, but if they connect you with enough people you may land some investors.

Also, your first investor definitely plays a big role in determining your terms. Don't jump at the first person who offers you money.

</comment><comment><USER8> The first thing you need to do is get traction. If you have traction, you will start getting inbound interest from investors.

Connect with other experienced founders relevant to your industry. Build trust, and they will introduce you to their investors.

Most investors don't respond to cold emails. Introductions from trusted people is the primary source for most investors.

I would recommend you to apply to incubators like Y Combinator and TechStars. They don't require an introduction, they will help you groom and connect you with other investors. Their alumni network is also very helpful, which can open a lot of doors for you.

</comment><comment><USER9> As an aside, you're going to want to find someone that has that business experience, and probably before you start poking your head around asking for money.

</comment><comment><USER10> You probably need users before you can get investors.

Look at it from their perspective -- why would they take college students seriously until you can lead with "we have X000 users"?

That said, there's no harm approaching them -- try to get a sense of what would need to change before they'd be sold on investing. Even better if you can get it in writing.

</comment><comment><USER11> You aren't asking the right question.

Why do you need investors?

Yes, it's true that many startups get handouts from investors _just because_. That's just nepotism at work. If you have to ask, then you aren't part of that, so you have to make a real case for what you would need money for. It's supposed to be an "investment", after all.</comment>


KDE Ships Second Beta of Next Generation Plasma Workspace - <AUTHOR> http://kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0-beta2/ <comment><USER2> About 4 years ago, I switched from KDE/Kubuntu to OSX. Not because I hated KDE, but because my job needed OSX. It takes divvy, sizeup, apptivate, bartenderapp to do, what I was able to do with KDE out of box. The dual monitor support in OSX is still not in par with KDE.

I have been using Kubuntu/KDE as my main workstation for last couple of months and I love depth of how much is possible with window environment. I think KDE works pretty well for powerusers as well as beginners and I am excited to see its new update!

<comment><USER3> and yet every OSX diehard will think you're on crack and KDE is inferior.

<comment><USER4> Please don't stir conflict by only reasoning in terms superior and inferior.

Things are _different_ , no need to order them, especially on one single axis.

<comment><USER5> You made the point I was trying to make far better than I did. Whether or not it's the poster's intent, the terms superior and inferior imply that there is some objective judgement being made about the thing being discussed that is independent of one's personal preferences.

I honestly think that almost all pointless flamewars in tech forums about the relative merits of various languages/operating systems/editors/desktop environments/whatever stem from confusion among the participants over whether personal preferences or objective qualities are being discussed. It doesn't help that for a lot of people in the larval hacker stage, there is no distinction between objective and subjective judgements- if they happen to prefer vi to emacs, they interpret that as meaning that vi is intrinsically better in some way, and isn't just a better fit for their particular workflow or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This screenshot: [http://kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0-beta2/plasma50b2-netw...](http://kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0-beta2/plasma50b2-networks.png)

Is this supposed to illustrate the "beta-ness" of the release? Because it's an atrocious UI. Two different-sized "wrench" icons next to each other? What are those checkboxes for? What does the little blue bar above the wireless symbol supposed to indicate? The blue lock is lost in the wireless icon in the network list (the eye is terrible at distinguishing blue shapes on a noisy background like that). It goes on and on...

<comment><USER7> It has some minor issues, sure, but I'm completely missing the atrocious part. In fact, I think it's quite nice, hope to use this UI soon. It would be great if you could send an email to the developers with your observations as, you know, it's a beta and some help is always needed.

I wonder why so many design-related critiques sound as if someone comitted a crime against humanity. C'est la vie, I suppose.

<comment><USER8> > I wonder why so many design-related critiques sound as if someone comitted a > crime against humanity. C'est la vie, I suppose.

The comments here were even more virulent with the last beta. I didn't even bother to comment then, what can you say to people who expect multi-million dollar polished U/I out of a beta from one of the last large community- developed open source projects, as if KDE has some sort of hidden pool of paid artists and capital development programs?

Even Firefox on Linux still looks worse than KDE (IMHO) but people (even on HN) don't stop to base their opinion on Firefox based only on that.

As for me, I'm incredibly proud of those who develop the visual design for KDE, especially since they do so with no compensation. KDE has come a _very_ long way since KDE 2 and 3 and that is almost entirely from true volunteer effort; while there is always room for improvement I think KDE looks good. Not even "good for what resources we have", but good _per se_ , and if the screenshot of this beta is any indication KDE's Plasma 5 will look even better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Based on the screenshots it seem KDE devs tone down their interface to simpler visuals (icons, colours, shades and all the blingbling I usually associate KDE with).

Is that the trend for the next iteration of KDE ? (I like it)

<comment><USER10> Yes, they have a new design project: [http://wheeldesign.blogspot.fi/](http://wheeldesign.blogspot.fi/)

Although in my opinion their work hasn't exactly been a huge improvement so far. It's just a flatter coat of paint with the same issues that already plague KDE: inconsistent padding and spacing, terrible organization (think system settings) and so on.

<comment><USER11> You link to a blog and yet you apparently don't read it. KDE System Settings is being redisigned as well. Just scroll down a bit: [http://wheeldesign.blogspot.fi/2014/05/system-settings- and-n...](http://wheeldesign.blogspot.fi/2014/05/system-settings-and-new-vdg- members.html)

The redesign is not in this beta and, depending how long it takes, maybe won't make it into the first final release either. Partially it's even by design. It's not intended that Plasma 5 diverges too much from the current release to ease the transition.

<comment><USER12> I have to say, this[1] looks downright impressive. Congrats everyone!

Edit: To add a bit more to the conversation, does the change from Canonical to Blue Systems[2] changed much to the development of Kubuntu/KDE?

[1] [https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-asFPvnoidnw/U4cXbGCcv2I/AAAAAAAAM...](https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-asFPvnoidnw/U4cXbGCcv2I/AAAAAAAAM3I/dEIyVSNFf_w/s1600/SystemSettings- New_zpsce8cb0ac.png)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Systems)

<comment><USER13> Only my opinion and probably wrong BUT

KUbuntu = Worst KDE integration and the cause for why so many people have a negative view of KDE!

OpenSUSE = Best KDE integration

<comment><USER14> What makes you say KDE is badly integrated in Kubuntu?

<comment><USER11> Kubuntu constantly ships pre-release software. One example in the current "stable" LTS is this touchpad config panel: [http://imgur.com/JIuCNqg](http://imgur.com/JIuCNqg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm enthusiast of KDE. Keep up the good work guys!

BTW I'm using KDevelop to edit PHP. It's come a long way since its introduction, and is now almost on par (feature-wise) with Netbeans, which makes it the second best free PHP IDE for Linux!

</comment><comment><USER16> This tickles me: "With a substantial new toolkit stack below come exciting new crashes and problems that need time to be shaken out." I think I'll refer to all crashes as "exciting" from now on.

</comment><comment><USER17> I found it hilarious that the first screenshot links to a thumbnail ending in '-wee.png' and goes to full size when 'wee' removed. I'm easily amused. Are developers Scottish?

</comment><comment><USER18> I like KDE a lot for its UI/UX. KDE actually has the potential to intuitively replace Windows in many households with shared systems and also in educational institutions. But the only major problem with KDE is that its very heavy and takes a lot of resources.

Does the next generation workspace just change the UI/UX or optimize stuff too? The post doesn't talk much about that.

<comment><USER11> Actually more optimization is taking place than visual refreshes. Porting the stuff to Qt5 (esp. QtQuick2) should speed everything up on non-ancient PCs. Visual refreshes are just easier to explain. ;-)

<comment><USER18> Its not speed I'm bothered about. KDE is more or less very smooth at that. Its the resources it takes! The CPU is always nearly being utilized on a small- medium scale, and nearly 700mb is taken away at boot-time and gathers upto 2gb upon usage. That's too high, at least I think so.

Would KDE actually require so much for all the features it gives or can that actually come down?

<comment><USER19> Why would it matter if a piece of software uses CPU and RAM if it doesn't negatively affect the performance of the system?

<comment><USER20> It may not impact the performance, but it certainly does the battery life and fan noise in a laptop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is there an easy way with KDE4/dbus to get functionality similar to KDE3/dcop?

Example task:

1) inspect running konsole task to find exposed interfaces

2) find one related to background colour

3) script up "change background colour to red in current konsole" command

Last time I looked at the KDE+dbus situation (early KDE4) it seemed this was really hard.

<comment><USER22> Of course. It's DBUS. You can trigger dbus functions using QDbus. `qdbus org.kde.konsole` shows you available functionality. Browse through it.

<comment><USER21> Thanks. qdbusviewer shows some available interfaces.

Looks like a bunch of konsole stuff never got implemented as dbus interfaces in KDE4. This specific use case seems to be covered by the konsoleprofile command (I wonder why the devs chose that route instead of exposing a dbus interface).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Kickstart me some decent icons already, geez. I think it's the number one complain every single time somebody opens a KDE thread.

Anyway, I don't use KDE but I think it does a lot of good things and I wish them luck. Using XFCE right now and couldn't be happier.

Also: they could take a very clean approach, like really minimal design and leverage their customization options (that they are famous for) to a few themes and let the community do the rest. Like "sane defaults" that don't scare newbies. I know it's not easy.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think what strikes me about DE upgrades like this is that they don't appear to add anything fundamentally new or promise to provide me with a meaningfully improved or more efficient experience.

For my part - ever since switching to i3, I can't really see myself using any other WM. Once I got used to not touching the mouse, I lost all desire to use a traditional mouse centric GUI.

<comment><USER14> I use KDE at work and rarely touch the mouse to switch between windows. I have two monitors, and a couple of keyboard shortcuts, but power-usage comes with a price. I bet i3 needs a little tinkering too.

<comment><USER24> > _I bet i3 needs a little tinkering too._

IIRC, the only real tinkering I did was to re-jig the navigation shortcuts to resemble VIM bindings. From a user's perspective i3 is comparable to xmonad, but configuration wise it's an order of magnitude simpler.

i3 does, however, come at a price. Not being inside a fully functional DE means a lot of normally trivial tasks require active thought and engagement, at least at first, since they will have to either be handled via the command line or by seeking out the correct application (e.g. managing wi-fi connections, handling dual-monitors & monitor rotation, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can I press super/win-key, type [name of application], press enter and it brings up the [application]? It didn't when I last tried, and I don't want a window manager that doesn't behave in that way. Windows, Gnome shell and Unity does it - it's not hard.

<comment><USER26> Alt+F2 in KDE to bring up KRunner but you can change it to whatever keys you like

<comment><USER25> Nice. I don't get why they can't just use the super key by default like everyone else, but it's not a very big problem. Is it a fuzzy search? How does it handle "term" and "temrinal"?

<comment><USER11> They can use the key. They just don't change default keyboard shortcuts during a release cycle (first generation Plasma precedes both Unity and Gnome Shell).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> For God's sake. I don't care a dime about fancy UIs. I mean, I really, really, really don't care. I want a robust and reliable system that doesn't change all the time for no good reason. I want a worthy Outlook alternative. Outlook is much more than just an email client. Kontact, Evolution and Thunderbird+Lightning just aren't good enough (they're simply full of bugs and I've tried all 3 of them). Why waste all those manhours in useless ice candy and not improve those instead?

<comment><USER11> People who develop desktop themes are NOT the same who program PIM software.

<comment><USER27> You're right. After all, what we're seeing here is just a small theme revamp.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> KDE is slowly losing ground. It used to be my desktop of choice but that was in the knoppix days. Now there is of course Kubuntu but I switched (more or less by accident rather than by design) a while ago and I don't think I'll be switching back. My desktop is practically invisible to me anyway, all I run on a normal workday is firefox, a terminal window and thunderbird.

The one piece of software from the KDE distro that I really love is Konsole.

<comment><USER29> If you love Konsole, give yakuake a try. It is Konsole in quake fashion; you press F12 and a terminal drops down. I can't imagine life without it.

<comment><USER30> I absolutely love yakuake. One of the reason why I'm still using KDE.

<comment><USER31> There's Guake for GNOME (and Unity): [https://github.com/Guake/guake/](https://github.com/Guake/guake/)

<comment><USER32> Guake in GNOME3 was pretty broken the last time I used it (a lot of time ago, it was the thing that made me switch to a tiling WM). Something changed lately?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I see they got rid of that peanut to manage widgets in the panel. I never liked that.

</comment><comment><USER34> The latest update really disappointed. I'd rather re-built the distro myself.

</comment><comment><USER35> I wish we had a way to run KDE on a retina MBP...

</comment><comment><USER36> I would be so happy if when companies make announcements, they included a link at the top telling you what their product is.</comment>


Show HN: QuiCol - Your collaborative notebook (host on your own Webspace) - <AUTHOR> http://www.databay.de/quicol/#

<comment><AUTHOR> It's an easy replacement for overweight etherpad or another cloud-hosted solutions. This is a one-file-tool which you can host on your own server to keep your secret notes with you, but still have the ability to collaborate.</comment>


Hate the Laffer Curve? Try Woodhill's - <AUTHOR> http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2010/09/15/hate_the_laffer_curve__try_woodhills_98671.html

<comment><USER2> Where do the Woodhill Curve figures come from? The article just asserts them as facts, without indicating how they were derived.

<comment><USER3> He argues that tax cuts create permanent compounding growth in the economy. With even a small addition to the growth rates, the eventual tax returns eventually will pay for the loss of the taxes (even counting compounding interest on the debt accrued due to loss of the tax).

Of course the effects he's talking about are very small, nobody knows how to measure them (they are basically rounding errors in a "what if" projection), and any attempts to quantify them are open to argument. So basically anyone who doesn't like taxes will like the idea, and anyone who doubts the benefits of that will be entirely unconvinced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My problem with this article is that he basically asks us to assume what he wants to demonstrate:

"Anyone who believes that repealing the corporate income tax, the capital gains tax, and the death/gift tax would not increase economic growth by at least 0.12 percentage points needs to consult a psychiatrist, not an economist."

Edit: The more I think about it, this analysis is silly. Sure, a sustained increase in GDP growth rate will dominate a decreased tax rate in the long term. Unfortunately, what happens during the "me and/or my kids are still alive" term matters. For example in his "you're insane if you don't believe it" scenario where a 3% decrease in tax rate leads to a .12% sustained increase in economic growth, the government would take in less revenue for the first 150 years. In his "what I'd like to believe" scenario with the 3% cut and a .26% sustained growth increase, it would only take like 70 years to break even.

Nice try.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Taking out the partisan-baiting in the article, this could be a nice economics hack. Also note that the author is a software engineer, entrepreneur, and the creator of the hack.</comment>