No evidence that testosterone reduces cognitive empathy - <AUTHOR> https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/largest-study-its-kind-no-evidence-testosterone-reduces-cognitive-empathy <comment><USER2> Abstract of the original paper:

> The capacity to infer others' mental states (known as 'mind reading' and > 'cognitive empathy') is essential for social interactions across species, > and its impairment characterizes psychopathological conditions such as > autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia. Previous studies reported that > testosterone administration impaired cognitive empathy in healthy humans, > and that a putative biomarker of prenatal testosterone exposure (finger > digit ratios) moderated the effect. However, empirical support for the > relationship has relied on small sample studies with mixed evidence. We > investigate the reliability and generalizability of the relationship in two > large-scale double-blind placebo-controlled experiments in young men (n = > 243 and n = 400), using two different testosterone administration protocols. > We find no evidence that cognitive empathy is impaired by testosterone > administration or associated with digit ratios. With an unprecedented > combined sample size, these results counter current theories and previous > high-profile reports, and demonstrate that previous investigations of this > topic have been statistically underpowered.

From: [https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.106...](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.1062)

<comment><USER3> So... is this a tentative win for the nurture crowd then? Or did they strictly only show that there is no correlation between testosterone, without going into alternative options?

EDIT: glaugh's comment[0] explains why it is not. TLDR: this research debunks earlier research with a similar scope, but more long-term effects of testosterone are not accounted for.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21143846](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21143846)

<comment><USER4> Nature versus nurture is such a boring debate, honestly. The driving force behind the nature versus nurture debate seems to be people attempting to use science to justify their positions on pop philosophy, but the science rarely actually connects to the pop philosophy position. It's basically: take a specific scientific fact, try to use it to prove a very nonspecific idea (nature or nurture?) and then use that nonspecific idea to prove a very specific idea (for example: criminals can be rehabilitated because it's their nurture, not their nature, that causes them to commit crimes). But that's just thinly-veiled Bulverism: we can just study those specific ideas directly (we know that current rehabilitation methods work well for some crimes and not for others) and the very general ideas of nature versus nurture add nothing to the conversation.

<comment><USER5> >(we know that current rehabilitation methods work well for some crimes and not for others)

Somewhat off-topic but I find this interesting, can you elaborate on which ones we know this for?

<comment><USER4> I don't have anything resembling a full list, but rehabilitation seems to be effective for drug-related crimes[1]. I was going to say that sex offenders seem resistant to rehabilitation, but apparently that is no longer the case[2] (good news!). The cited meta-analysis of studies from 1995-2002 found little- no benefit from rehabilitation then, but the 2015 meta-analysis I linked shows rehabilitation to have "proven" or at least "promising" results--this is probably due to progress in rehabilitation methods.

It's widely believed that serial killers can't be rehabilitated, but as far as I can tell there really isn't data to back that up (most of them stay in jail forever, so we don't have recidivism data). So I don't think we can add serial killers to the list of non-rehabilitatable (sp?) crimes.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recidivism#Drug- related_crime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recidivism#Drug-related_crime)

[2] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25575803](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25575803)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another victim in the "replication crisis" bloodbath for psychology.

Personally, I'm probably going to wait 5 years before I believe any psychology science claim. Especially if it confirms something I already believe in :)

<comment><USER7> It's a kind HN received wisdom that all psychology studies are false or invalid.

Personally, I see this blanket dismissal as one of the blind spots of our otherwise intelligent community.

Perhaps because so many of us are engineers, and that it strokes our egos to see the softer sciences fail?

<comment><USER8> > It's a kind HN received wisdom that all psychology studies are false or > invalid.

Not _ALL_ , but the replication crisis has demonstrated that at least 2/3 of such studies can't be replicated.

If you had a communication channel where 2/3 of your packets failed to deliver, I'd say a statement like "this channel isn't reliable" is very justified.

<comment><USER9> That's 2/3rd of medical research paper where the standards are the highest. I'd be shocked if the rate was only a mere 66% everywhere else. You'd have to be a fool to take on faith anything published today that wasn't replicated, hopefully more than once.

<comment><USER8> According to [1], replication rates in psychology varied from 23% to 38%. Social psychology was around 25%, while the more rigourous cognitive psychology was around 50%.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_replication_rates)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Most of the effects of administering testosterone (at least to men with clinically low levels) take weeks or months to appear. For example, interest in sex takes 3+ weeks to increase.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3188848/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3188848/)

And much of the impact of testosterone happens in utero (Young boys and girls have similar levels; behavioral differences are driven by in utero exposure.)

This study seems to test a very narrow area where testosterone could influence empathy

<comment><USER11> So did the previous studies of testosterone exposure, from what I've understood. So, this study still serves perfectly well to debunk them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> >In the largest study of its kind, results challenge the notion of autism as reflecting an "extreme male brain."

I don't see how this is related, unless you think the only 'maleness' that can exist in a brain is testosterone levels. There are so many things that could be tested and analyzed here besides testosterone levels.

<comment><USER13> What's cool is that if people take a more nuanced view of gender and sex than saying it can be measured by one test with only two options, it means they can't take the narrow view that either of those things are binary. Here's hoping!

<comment><USER14> I don't think that's what's being suggested at here at all. In the past few years, there has been an overemphasis on "maleness" being bad and leading to negative. In a lot of western social history (and even a lot of eastern societies) there has always been the concept of "the divine feminine" (Mother earth, goddesses and so fourth).

We've seen the growing emphasis of bad men and toxic masculinity; as if the man has a propensity for toxicity (anecdotally we've all known toxic people who were both men and women. They might generally be toxic in different ways, but that does change that no biological sex has a monopoly on being shitty human beings).

I think what's more interesting from the study is all the statements about correlation with small samples sizes. As mentioned by other comments, even this study doesn't seem remotely conclusive. It's focused on testosterone, because men generally have way more of it. I think it's more of a conversation starter on more research that should be done than anything else.

<comment><USER15> Toxic masculinity isn't "being masculine is bad" it's "being so caught up in social stereotypes of supposed masculinity that you become bad." Toxic masculinity vs. healthy masculinity. At least in people that use the phrase seriously that I've interacted with conversationally. Not to dispute that some people think maleness is inherently bad (or that the supposed duality of gender reflects a supposed duality of morality, what ever the sign of correlation). Those simplistic thinkers are very persistent.

<comment> another-one-off I'm struggling to think of any aspects of masculinity that I could safely class as 'healthy' in the current climate.

For example, traditionally the view that males should be providers for the family would have been considered a healthy aspect of masculinity. That doesn't go unchallenged any more; for example there is a real concern out there that men are too competitive and effective at securing high paid jobs.

It is an anecdote I suppose, but those involved in the gender activist communities don't seem to allow such a thing as 'healthy masculinity' because it supposes there is something positive can be exclusively/predominantly masculine and the girls don't get involved. Bit of a non-starter as ideas go.

<comment><USER16> > _For example, traditionally the view that males should be providers for the > family would have been considered a healthy aspect of masculinity. That > doesn 't go unchallenged any more; for example there is a real concern out > there that men are too competitive and effective at securing high paid > jobs._

I wonder if people in Asia and Africa feel the same. Or perhaps even in South- America. To me it seems to be mostly a "Western" issue. I live in Thailand and through the (admittedly limited) news sources I follow (Bangkok Post, South China Morning Post, ThaiVisa) there doesn't seem to be much discussion/concern here on gender, roles, what is and isn't toxic masculinity, etc...

<comment><USER17> Which is also interesting because of the "third" sex, the large number of _katoeys_ (ladyboys) in the country. The last time I was there, there was a big demonstration to support and legally recognise them (a laudable aim). It seems Thai expression of sexuality and gender doesn't rely on a denigration of masculinity, which personally, I take as a clue to the legitimacy of efforts to do so in the Anglosphere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think a lot more work needs to be done in quantifying "cognitive empathy" before we can begin to do studies like this. Their methodology for quantification of something so complex is extremely primitive.

<comment><USER19> I agree. At least the authors are more modest about the findings than the headline:

> "[...] it's important to note that the absence of evidence is not evidence > of absence. We found that there is no evidence to support this effect of > testosterone, but that doesn't rule out any possible effects. From what we > know, though, it seems that if testosterone does have an influence, the > effect is complex, not linear. Reality is typically not that simple."

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Curious they built up so much steam about refuting past notions... but chose a poor method (viewing actor's eyes). Paul Ekman has noted that assessing the emotional state from a single picture is difficult. Not to mention unless using genuine emotional faces, you're having actors "play" an emotion rather than feel it (Method vs. Mamet style acting ignored)

<comment><USER21> Couldn't agree with you more about the need for authenticity in tests of reading emotions. How could you possibly say someone got it wrong when they did not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> What I'm more interested in seeing is whether or not being in a dominant group in society reduces empathy. Historically, we might have looked at the lack of empathy of specific groups and made assumptions about the group in general, but perhaps it simply has to do with whether or not that group finds itself dominant in society whether it be economically, politically, or socially.

All of these groups in Western societies have been, and often still are, dominated by men. Looking at how things are changing, with women slowly gaining power in the workplace, I'm finding a lot of men are behaving differently than I remember 30 years ago. Whether or not this is due to gaining empathy, or due to fear of punitive measures, I don't know, but for me personally I feel it is the former.

<comment><USER23> > All of these groups in Western societies have been, and often still are, > dominated by men.

But not by all men. If all of the top 1% are men, for instance, there are still 49% of men out there that are both make and not elite.

It's possible you are just observing different men now. Or observing men differently.

<comment><USER22> I agree. I'm not denying this. This is exactly why it should be called dominance and not privilege. And it does have real impacts on both groups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> We already had a large study five years ago (n = 453) showing that testosterone didn't have a significant effect on cognitive empathy (RMET). However it found significant effects of testosterone on trait empathy, both positive and negative depending on cortisol levels.

[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs40750-014-0017-...](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs40750-014-0017-x)

Not sure why it wasn't cited in this paper.

</comment><comment><USER25> > "Of course, the primary suspect when we have something that is sharply > differentiated by sex is testosterone," says Gideon Nave, an assistant > professor of marketing in Penn's Wharton School.

Is this a spoof article? Why would a professor of marketing at Wharton be talking on this point? "Of course", this is a nonsense thing to say.

Maybe it needed a marketing expert to get funding for this.

<comment><USER26> > Is this a spoof article? Why would a professor of marketing at Wharton be > talking on this point?

Because he's a co-author of the paper, people in research collaborate, and his publication list doesn't make this topic seem off in any way? Literally clicking on the first instance of the name of the person you're complaining about gives you enough information to make this comment unnecessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> >Prior to this work, the strongest evidence for a link between testosterone exposure and reduced cognitive empathy came in 2011 in a study that found administering testosterone to healthy women reduced their performance on a test of reading emotions. The results suggested the testosterone impaired their performance.

That's interesting. Adult males typically have 7-8 times the levels that females do, and females are more sensitive to it. I'd hypothesize that injecting females with extra testosterone was just plain mentally disorienting. I know a trans man who, after a few months of testosterone, claimed it was "night and day" in how they felt about and processed the world. Female biology isn't adapted to high levels of testosterone like a males biology is.

<comment><USER28> Trans woman here.

Cisgender men and women have different brain structures, and transgender people's brain structures tend to resemble that of the gender that they identify as[1]. So, for example, a trans woman like myself who was born male will have a brain structure that resembles that of a cis woman, not a man.

> I know a trans man who, after a few months of testosterone, claimed it was > "night and day" in how they felt about and processed the world

This has been my experience as well (except, the opposite direction, obviously). The way I look at it, before I realized I am transgender, when testosterone was the dominant sex hormone in my body, it was like putting the wrong fuel in a car. It caused a whole slew of serious mental health problems. Estrogen has allowed me to think more clearly, and process thoughts, feelings, and emotions like I never could before. I'll never go back.

1\. [https://health.clevelandclinic.org/research-on-the- transgend...](https://health.clevelandclinic.org/research-on-the-transgender- brain-what-you-should-know/)

<comment><USER29> >Tend to resemble that of the gender that they identify as

I hear this claim a lot but I've never actually understood what "resembles" actually means. The brain structures that transgender people have don't match typical male or female brains but how do you determine which brain transgender brains resemble the most? What is the criteria? To me to determine which brain trans brains were more similar to you would have to study a LOT of dimorphic brain structures.

Some structures in transgender brains do resemble their sex or are sort of androgynous and inbetween. So I don't know how accurate trans woman = "resembles" a woman's brain actually is as a sweeping statement. In my experience trans women have rarely acted completely like either gender. I've seen trans women disperportionately engaging in masculine hobbies like computers compared to the average cis woman.

<comment><USER30> Trans woman here. I agree that the neuroscience feels kind of flimsy. I would further argue that neuroscience shouldn't be used as an argument in favor of "accept trans women as being women" because, among other things, it can just as quickly be turned around by people who seek to pull the You're Not Really Trans Unless A Doctor Says So card on other trans folks.

We're women because we say we are - and that's really all there is to say about it.

We are disproportionately into things like coding because, growing up, the vast majority of us are socialized the same way as boys would be. Amazingly, it turns out that in a vacuum, the activity of programming a computer isn't actually gendered.

<comment><USER31> > Amazingly, it turns out that in a vacuum, the activity of programming a > computer isn't actually gendered.

Also mirrored by the fact that other cultures do not experience this issue so acutely.

<comment><USER32> Including US culture 50 or more years ago, when most programmers were women.

<comment><USER33> I'm of the impression that this is a misconception. 50 years ago, "programmer" was a different job. Imagine if executives were just called secretaries now and that's a decent analogy for what I think happened to programmers and architects.

<comment><USER13> I'm of the impression that back in 1959 when COBOL was released, with a team of 7 designers with 3 women on it, based off the groundwork laid by Grace Hopper, that the technical skill required to be a programmer was actually much higher, and that the women involved in coding were making very technical decisions about that field.

<comment><USER24> Back then programming was basically applied mathematics, a field with many women. Today programming is gluing together components in order to build systems which is much more similar to engineering, a field with few women.

There are still many women among those who program mathematics (statisticians etc), just that they are usually not called programmers. Also there is much less demand for people who can program math than people who can glue together libraries and create crud apps, so even if all math programmers are included in the statistics they would get dwarfed by the app programmers.

Source of the combination mathematics and statistics being a gender balanced field, above 40% women: [https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17310/digest/fod- wome...](https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17310/digest/fod- women/mathematics-and-statistics.cfm)

Engineering always being male dominated, around 15% women: [https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17310/digest/fod- wome...](https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17310/digest/fod- women/engineering.cfm)

Computer science gender balance getting lowered to engineering levels: [https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17310/digest/fod- wome...](https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17310/digest/fod- women/computer-sciences.cfm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Does anyone have access to the paper, and not just the abstract?

I'm curious to see what the measured testosterone levels in the subjects' blood ended up being. Did they push their testosterone levels to the high end of "natural", something like 700 ng/dL, or did they push them into supra- physiological bodybuilder levels?

(I'd love to see a study about the cognitive effects of harder anabolic steroids, but somehow I doubt you could get an institutional review board to sanction a double-blind experiment using trenbolone.)

<comment><USER24> You can read the preprint here: [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/516344v3.full](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/516344v3.full)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> What is "cognitive empathy"? Is it a subtype of empathy where the brain is making a conscious work, or just a fancy way to say it ?

<comment><USER36> Cognitive empathy is distinguished from affective empathy; put simply cognitive empathy is your perception of another persons emotional state and affective empathy is your perception of the correct emotional response to another persons emotional state.

<comment><USER37> Interesting, I wonder if theres is a term for people with good cognitive empathy but poor affective empathy because I often feel like I can read someone body language and signals but usually have trouble expressing sympathy to the extent that when I hear someone died I have to monitor closely to try to react appropriately and not say anything weird.

<comment><USER38> Those would be the psychopaths and sociopaths, but I don't think you're among them. These folks basically _lack_ the relevant social emotions altogether, so they end up being quite materialistic and self-centered. They can and do figure out that other emotions somehow exist and that they're socially expected to show them, but they have no "hardwired" intuition for their affective implications, so they'll have a _whole lot of trouble_ negotiating constructively with others. They're deeply prone to thinking that everyone else is just like themselves, self-centered and quite willing to screw others in pursuit of their own goals.

I.e. their affective impairments do have significant implications on the theory-of-mind/'cognitive' side of things, but those implications are _very_ different from the troubles of someone on the autistic spectrum. In a way, they're the very opposite!

(In fact, if you're somewhat on the spectrum _and_ basically aware of what makes psychopaths tick, you can even have a lot of fun spotting them _and_ interacting with them. Their attempts at superficial charm will most likely fall flat, while their lack of deep integrity and engagement will be blatantly obvious to you - but they'll probably be assuming the very opposite! So it's quite easy to figure out what they're going for and anticipate their moves.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Petersonian here:

Testosterone known to raise competitiveness. Perhaps those with higher testosterone that are higher up in the dominance hierarchy just seem like they lack empathy because they have less males to seek approval from.

</comment><comment><USER40> "the 2011 study included women and the current one included men"

So, testosterone application doesn't instantly affect cognitive empathy in men. But might still do in women.

</comment><comment><USER41> What was the timescale and number of administrations?

Is it possible that repeated exposure to elevated testosterone over a long time period is the cause? Could studies be done on steroid users?

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm reminded of a science fiction story I read long ago. A group of space explorers discovers an enormous metallic sphere. They open a port in its side and climb down a ladder. They discover that the whole of the interior is a vast machine, far beyond their capacity to understand. The last man out before the port is closed accidentally drops a wrench. They listen to it clatter down beyond earshot.

"Science is one thing, wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers." — Sir Arthur Eddington

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm really glad this stuff is being researched, male stereotypes like that have never held true in my experience.

</comment><comment><USER44> Isn't testosterone simply a byproduct of other hormonal processes? More of a measurement of effect than cause?

<comment><USER45> Ah, no. Adding extra testosterone to any human will cause them to become more male by any measure of maleness.

<comment><USER46> And also more female as the testosterone is aromatized in estrogen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> First world problems.

</comment><comment><USER48> It's amazing that something so sexist could have been suggested without backlash.

Imagine if studies indicated that low testosterone limited or in some way hindered another desirable human capability. People have been fired for it and reputations ruined.

Suggesting men are emotionally stunted. Oh that's fine.

<comment><USER49> I mean, you should be able to claim either if you have evidence. We should be looking for truth, not virtue signalling by withholding findings because it might hurt some people's feelings.

<comment><USER50> James Damore referenced scientific papers in his post and his intent got twisted, he got vilified and subsequently fired by Google. He never said women were unfit for engineering or women weren't as smart as men, he said that Google should change the nature of engineering such that the career is more appealing to a higher percentage of females.

Do you really want to be the one that endures an unfair attack and have your intent twisted and ruin your career, just to try to prove a point? You would be a stronger person than me, I would just pass at this point and move on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> EDIT: Disregard

Comment was:

This is testosterone administered to a fully formed brain. While it's still an interesting result, I would hesitate to make extrapolations to brain- developmental environments or developmental disorders.

<comment><USER52> Did you overlook the part about finger digit ratios, which are a proxy for testosterone exposure during development?

<comment><USER51> Ah, it seems I did overlook the significance of that part.

My apologies.

<comment><USER53> Kudos for an extremely humble reply! I think you might still have a good point, though. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Many people online report positive effects from taking testosterone replacement therapy boosting their T level to the upper end of the natural range.

I'm curious if this is worth doing (for no particular reason), as a sort of steroid use. Apparently it can have slight balding effect but is worth it.

Has anyone here tried it, just for kicks? Could you list the effects on you? I am curious how it would effect the HN demographic (which I'm part of.)

</comment><comment><USER55> Notice the keen implication in the title that testosterone causes reduction in cognitive empathy - making the reader now brainstorm ways to prove the hypothesis instead of considering if its the correct question to be asking in the first place.

To illustrate my point, consider if this was the title: There is no evidence that being female reduces cognitive function.

<comment><USER56> The paper's abstract mentions that, "previous studies reported that testosterone administration impaired cognitive empathy in healthy humans."

When you're trying to replicate previous studies but get a null result, it's reasonable to put that right in the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Ok cool, so I'm allowed to be a man again? Or is that still unacceptable according to PC rules?

<comment><USER58> Please be the kind of man who doesn't do this here.</comment></comment>


Do your clients use Video Calls with you? - <AUTHOR> It's very interesting to see, that with all the remote culture growing, more and more people have always on video for calls.<p>But it seems that not many people outside tech do use video. What was your experience? <comment><USER2> I'm a development program manager, and right now about 20% of my clients request video. None of them are primarily in tech.

The deciding factor is location and not tech savvy: I only make video calls when that client and I are both in professional settings. For example, I won't join a video stream from an airport lounge, or from inside my office where there are multiple client projects on the board behind me.

<comment><AUTHOR> why do they require video? how large are your clients?

Great points on professional setting and sensitive info.

<comment><USER2> They do not "require it", but I try to honor request when they raise it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think people should use it more. For many practical reasons people use it less than they should. For instance they have a crummy camera, don't want to install Skype, Hangouts, Discord, ...

I do find that practically I do get better results w/ audio and video as opposed to text chat.</comment>


What happens when silicon can shrink no more?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026851.700-what-happens-when-silicon-can-shrink-no-more.html

<comment><USER2> The beat _always_ goes on :) There are so many avenues to skip down. Three dimensional chips, a total rethink on what a microprocessor _is_ , die size increases, moving into quantum computing...

We can be assured of one thing. The semiconductor industry is never going to become boring.</comment>


Show HN: Code4Startup - Learn to code by cloning real life startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.code4startup.com <comment><USER3> Neat idea. This is how I first learned to code HTML when I was 10 - <USER2> and pasting my friend's HTML on angelfire, and later, copying matts script archive for perl code.

I wonder what long term strategy is for customer retention? Once you get some of the core skills at a basic level, there can be a desire to reverse engineer websites on your own. I also see opportunities down the road for more hand holding, some students where they can't quite get the self serve to work on their own.

</comment><comment><USER4> Please be aware that your homepage's background video is not being positioned correctly (jumps 50% to left) on Safari 9 — could be just me. -- hope it helps you squash any bugs in your page layout :)

Great idea though!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for picking this up we're deploying the fix now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great idea. This is how I learnt to code when I was young. If I found a cool or interesting website that I liked, I'd have a go at cloning it by copying the frontend exactly and writing the code for the backend myself.

I eventually even started selling some of these websites as turnkey scripts for a little while, so others could buy them and setup their own version (often in their own language for their country). Supporting and updating/bugfixing these was eventually too much for 15 year old me so I stopped.

<comment><USER6> That's damn true! We felt the same way and that was why we came up with Code4Startup.

"Learn to code, Create a Startup & F __king rule this world "

Leo Co-Founder of Code4Startup

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is one of the problems in Silicon Valley, you should be building startups that are hard to duplicate, difficult to clone. Build the next Google, not the next Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER8> The page for the AirBnB clone seems to still have the Code4Startup description:

[https://code4startup.com/projects/airalien-clone-airbnb- with...](https://code4startup.com/projects/airalien-clone-airbnb-with-ruby-on- rails-bootstrap-jquery-and-paypal)

"In this project, I will walk you through steps to develop Code4Startup with full functionalities from scratch based on my own experience."

<comment><USER6> Thanks a ton to point it out for us. Updated!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> They should add Code4Startup to the list.

..And this is a good idea.

<comment><USER6> We do have a project in which we teach students how to clone Code4Startup :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there a way to try it for free? I find that I learn horribly via online tutorials and would never pay unless it was something I would actually use and learn from. Being able to trial the methods of teaching are fundamental to me ever spending a dollar.

<comment><USER11> Two projects seem to be free. They are called "Start Bootstrap" and a clone of code4startup itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pricing is a bit steep. I'd pay $15 begrudgingly, $10 I wouldn't think about. $39 is a huge stretch. Just my two cents.

<comment><USER6> Normally, I would think the same way. I might be biased but when I ask my student what they got after learning how to build those project, the answer might amaze you :)

Would love to hear any feedbacks from community!

<comment><USER13> I paid for a Team Treehouse subscription in their early days because of the quality.

I first tried a 2 week free trial, which I canceled because while good quality there was not enough content to justify paying. I returned later once there was more content (Ruby/RoR was added) I did a 50% off the first month trial and kept the subscription for 4-6 months.

I think it would be good to offer a one month 50% off discount, or maybe a similar "cancel in 2 weeks and you pay nothing" trial. With the number of products available, I was always hesitant to base my opinion on the free lessons except for maybe Code School. They were not comparable in scope to the other lessons offered and I was worried of a bait and switch, with the added kicker of being out $25-50 I could have used for another book or course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can vouch for this -- awesome courses.

<comment><USER6> Thanks Hanna! Is that you, Hannah? ha

<comment><USER14> Yes! Hello :-D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Isn't this also known as RocketInternet?

</comment><comment><USER16> How is this different from Team Treehouse?

<comment><USER6> Team Treehouse and other code schools mainly rely on theory but here we focus on product or app that we teach students how to build like AirBnb, TaskRabbit, Medium, KichStarter... That we called POA - Product Oriented Approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Great concept. Really.

</comment><comment><USER18> Very clever.

</comment><comment><USER19> brilliant</comment>


What to Do If the Domain Name You Want Is Taken - <AUTHOR>

A large telecom owns a domain name that would be perfect. It was used as a portal for their dial-up service back in the day and is not being used; however, it looks like they have auto-renewal.How would one go about getting the domain? Should I apply for a job in their IT deparment and talk to someone on the inside?! <comment><USER2> I have had some luck in contacting the owners directly via their whois info in a professional manner. This seems to only work well though with broke people who own a domain on an expensive ($100+/year) TLD.

</comment><comment><USER3> Assuming that you have other copyright or trademark protections in place, arbitration may be an option. ICANN uses the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy ("UDRP") which provides for mandatory arbitration proceedings for registrants of domain names. <http://www.icann.org/udrp/>.

</comment><comment><USER4> 1) find new name 2) if you don't want to do #1, domain name aftermarket, you can get it, just try hard, or you can use Godaddy or another 3rd party agent.

</comment><comment><USER5> realistically, find a new name.

<comment><USER6> Seconded. Originally ourdoings.com was not the domain I wanted, but it's grown on me, and now I wouldn't trade it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> one word: icanhazcheezburger.com

Just find something else, people aren't relying on domain names as much as anymore as they are on how well you show up in a google search.</comment>


Most Kickstarter Projects Fail to Deliver on Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2413382,00.asp

<comment><USER2> The article this article quotes was on HN yesterday [1]. It was Baloney then its baloney now. CNNMoney came to faulty conclusions , and pcmag appears to have extrapolated those faulty conclusions, CNN Money stated that most of the _top_ projects were late. pcmag using that article as a reference now says _most_ projects fail to deliver on time. Big difference in those two statements.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4937929>

</comment><comment><USER3> ...and water is wet. In a kickstarter project, features and staff are constrained. The only thing left to play with is schedule.

</comment><comment><USER4> I started out thinking that Kickstarter was a publishing platform for VC-by- association 'groups', where one enters a temporary group by pledge. And that it wasn't really even that far, the least developed of the ones I looked at were fully fleshed out designs that had never been held by anyone.

I still don't know how to give others this skeptical judgement, publishing that one or two pages is a skill almost entirely unrelated to producing a decent product, especially as Kickstarter's few successes get well covered and don't do much more marketing.

</comment><comment><USER5> What percentage of traditionally funded ventures of a similar type ship on time according to the the initial plan? Isn't knowing that vital to understanding the results of this study.</comment>


Just how smart is an octopus? - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/just-how-smart-is-an-octopus/2017/01/06/a2f1ed22-acd0-11e6-8b45-f8e493f06fcd_story.html <comment><USER2> Total anecdote here, but when I volunteered at our aquarium in Charleston, SC (amazing aquarium, go check it out), we had a problem where our flounder were vanishing from their tank. We suspected theft and so put a camera up in the back room. The next time flounder disappeared we checked the feed - one of our octopi was escaping from his tank that we thought we had already anti- octopus'd, climbing over the walls, breaking into the flounder tank, eating a flounder, and then _breaking back out of the flounder tank and back into his_.

The weird thing isn't that he went to go eat a flounder, it's that he broke back into his own tank after, leaving us scratching our head for weeks over where the flounder were going. Obviously if we came in one day to see an octopus in the flounder tank the mystery would be solved day 1.

Anyway we put carpet on the walls so his little suckers couldn't stick and let him carouse around the aquarium like some sort of aquatic monkey.

<comment><USER3> Pedantic mode here: linguistically it should be octopodes (but nobody who isn't speaking Greek would say that); by usage it should be octopuses; octopi or octopii are just wrong (it's not a second declension noun, despite the 'us' ending)

<comment><USER4> Octopus has three acceptable pluralizations in English.

      Octopuses is correct by English rules.
      Octopodes is correct by strict etymological Greek-origin rules.
      Octopi is correct by English's pseudo-Latin cognate rules.

The latter means that any singular noun ending in a consonant and "-us" can be pluralized by chopping off the "-us" and appending an "-i" or "-ii", like alumnus, hippopotamus, virus, bacillus, hummus, lotus, oculus, cactus, and platypus. This has even been abused to facetiously pluralize similar-sounding endings, like Elvis or Winklevoss.

This is likely due to the many Anglophone schoolchildren subjected to Latin language lessons over the centuries who simply never cared about proper Latin grammar rules.

<comment><USER5> Except there is no single authority of the English language (as seen in other language academies). As I mentioned in another comment, you may fall into a prescriptivist or descriptivist camp, but there's no authority to which one can appeal for a single answer.

Generally speaking, octopuses is preferred by most if not all well known dictionaries in modern usage, and the pseudo-Latin cognate has fallen out of favor. I don't think it's reflective of reality to argue that all three are equivalently correct.

<comment><USER4> Neither the prescriptivists nor the descriptivists are correct.

There is, in fact, a way to assume greater authority over the English language than the power wielded by the median speaker. The person who can inject a memorable phrase into the popular culture--whether by writing a line that is read by many, or by speaking one that is heard by many--can steer the language closer to the path they may prefer.

For all our quibbling over technical correctness, if an author or scriptwriter decides to keep "octopi" alive, all they have to do is write it, with no explanation or justification necessary.

Stam that in your rassoodock and let it digimmer. It could make you frumious or mimsy, but you will grok who the lords of language are.

<comment><USER6> The goal of descriptivists is to collect information about how words are being used currently and to compile a dictionary based on that information, so what you said about viral memes is compatible with descriptivism.

The best argument for prescriptivism has less to do with authority and more to do with people who have an interest in being able to communicate clearly. A better word than "prescriptivism" might be "subscriptivism". Presumably, we subscribe to the normal rules of the English language so that we mitigate miscommunication.

Purpose matters. The person who demands that everyone use "octopuses" is just an elitist asshole. The science institution, which demands that its members conform to a precise standard of language, is just doing its job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love how completely alien they are compared to us. The sort of decentralized nature of their nervous system compared to our path of evolution. (I'm no marine/evolutionary biologist so I'm probably butchering the terminology...)

I loved reading the two pieces Sy Montgomery wrote that are in Orion Magazine.

[https://orionmagazine.org/article/deep- intellect/](https://orionmagazine.org/article/deep-intellect/)

And the follow-up:

[https://orionmagazine.org/2011/11/interviews-with-an- octopus...](https://orionmagazine.org/2011/11/interviews-with-an-octopus/)

(Edit: Si -> Sy)

<comment><USER8> If you like reading about minds that are fundamentally different from our own, you might also enjoy the science fiction novel "Blindsight" by Peter Watts. Exploring the space of possible minds in the universe is a fundamental theme of that work.

<comment><USER9> To give a bit more context for others, the novel is a really well done first contact story. I'd highly recommend it, especially because Watts makes it available online for free.

[http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm](http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm)

<comment><USER10> Just to run down this alley, highly seconded. It is a great, if somewhat depressing, novel. _Echopraxia_ is a continuation of the themes/story, and is just as good (and also depressing).

I personally put Watts near the top of the list of first-rate, active science fiction authors.

<comment><USER9> His eye for hard science is very keen. I love that he has notes at the end of Blindsight that try to dig deeper into the approaches he had taken in the writing and add background.

I couldn't put Echophraxia down. I might hazard that I like it more than Blindsight but it'd be hard to put in words.

Which do you enjoy more?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Weird pupils let octopuses see their colorful gardens (berkeley.edu) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13084534](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13084534)

</comment><comment><USER12> Smart enough to hunt on BOTH land and sea: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar5WJrQik2o&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar5WJrQik2o&feature=youtu.be&t=15)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFzpC_e44Tg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFzpC_e44Tg)

</comment><comment><USER13> Way to make me feel worse about eating them.

<comment><USER14> Why worry? They'd eat you. Realize that all animal ethics are entirely manmade and foreign to the background of the Universe's amorality.

Edit: Really down voting because you don't agree? The comment was on topic, provided a view, and contributed to the conversation in some way. If you want to down vote, please be responsible enough to say why.

<comment><USER15> There's quite a bit of philosophical support behind the view that there are objective moral truths. See [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral- realism/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/) for a not so brief overview.

Also related is moral cognitivism and/or noncognitivism (are moral statements factual statements, or more like expressions of emotion, preference or command?). [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral- cognitivism/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/)

Here's a drastically simplified argument for moral realism:

1\. I have the intuition that everyone ought to avoid causing unecessary suffering.

2\. When I mean that everyone ought to avoid causing unecessary suffering, I am personally making a factual claim.

3\. My intuition of 1. provides at least some evidence that 1 may be true. Addendum: When dealing with philosophy, often intuitions are the best evidence we've got.

4\. If I have the intuition described in 1, 1 is a factual claim, and my intuition of 1 provides at least some evidence for 1, then there is some evidence of an objective moral fact.

C. Therefore, there is some evidence of an objective moral fact.

Finally, here's a survey of academic philosophers. You can Ctrl-F for "moral realism" and "cognitivism" to see what proportion of philosophers hold these views. You'll note that both views have >50% support.

[https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl](https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl)

Of course, a view's popularity doesn't guarantee its truth. But Philosphers aren't dummies, so it does show that it's at least plausible.

Edit: formatting & philpapers link

<comment><USER14> I'm a theist. I totally agree that there are absolute truths. You're logic breaks down at step 2. If I don't agree with 1, your whole argument breaks down. In my experience debating philosophy throughout my education, seldom is there a Joker as in Heath Ledger's character. If a person fully believes that others don't count, at all, then the rule breaks down.

Take a counter example: homosexuals. Most societies, regardless of source, were anti-homosexual. This is historically accurate (modern times are uprooting them, but let's say we're in the 1950's).

1\. I have the intuition that everyone ought to avoid homosexuality. 2\. When I mean that everyone ought to avoid homosexuality, I am personally making a factual claim. 3\. My intuition of 1 provides at least some evidence that 1 may be true. 4\. If I have the intuition describe in 1, 1 is a factual claim, and my intuition of 1 provides at least some evidence for 1, then there is some evidence of an objective moral fact. C. Therefore, there is some evidence for any objective moral fact.

We've now shown an implication that homosexuality is in fact immoral in a general sense. Are we ok with this? Why? Why not? Our ethics and morality, sans a center like an unmoved mover, can vacillate. Sometimes this is "good" (such as gay or interracial marriage [I am neither]) for me as it brings improved economic conditions that selfishly improve my lot directly or possibly, which I arbitrarily deem as good, from an agnostic world view. Sometimes it's "bad" (for example expelling Jews from the Spain since it took the engineers and literate people, which limited economic freedom and would have probably negatively impacted my Spanish life if my present personality and general thoughtful profession was true then).

As a quick aside for the postulate of cultural issues with homosexuality, [http://news.trust.org//item/20140516162146-jipm9/](http://news.trust.org//item/20140516162146-jipm9/) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_ancient_Rome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_ancient_Rome) which shows that Rome did not really have a great view of homosexual relationship. You didn't want to be the receiver. If you were, you were property.

<comment><USER15> You might be interested in experimental philosophy. It's where philosophers quiz people to probe at how common a given intuition is. There's ongoing debate regarding whether the results pose a problem for certain meta-ethical positions (e.g. moral-realism). [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/experimental- moral/#MorJu...](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/experimental- moral/#MorJudInt)

Also of note is Utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is a moral theory that we ought to maximize the amount of happiness in the world/universe/multiverse while minimizing the amount of suffering. And that the morality of an action just relates to its consequences. So it's ok to lie/cheat/steal for the greater good.

Often, objections to Utilitarianism come in the form of "consider situation X. In X, maximizing utility requires us to do something horrible. Our intuitions scream not to do it, so utilitarianism is wrong". However, if these intuitions are unreliable, then so are the objections. Utilitarians can then come out and say 'the intuitions required for our theory are much more obvious/reliable/<other positive adjectives>, so our theory is better supported'.

But I don't want to say that Utilitarianism is the be all end all. For instance, there's Kant, who built his moral theory on abstract first principles rather than situational intuitions. I, unfortunately, am not well versed in him, so that's all the detail that I'll go into.

Now, there are a couple of points that you made which I'd like to respond to.

> If I don't agree with 1, your whole argument breaks down.

As an addendum, this is a good thing! It means that this premise, if true, directly supports the conclusion. Arguments with unnecessary premises get confusing. They're bad practice - just like dead code is bad. It's expected that you need to accept all of the premises in order to get to the conclusion.

Oh, and I think that your points above are really a rebuttal of (3.), not (1.). Even if other people have other intuitions, hopefully you still believe that (1.) I have the intuition that everyone ought to avoid causing unecessary suffering? It's just not clear that (3.) my intuition of 1. provides at least some evidence that 1 may be true.

> <virmundi's examples of questionable intuitions>

Your examples are all great, but I disagree with the point you're trying to make. 100% consensus on moral intuitions isn't necessary. They're clearly a flawed sense that is prone to error. The important question is, rather, do they lead to truth more often than they lead to falsehood? I don't know the answer to that question, but it's the vital one.

> seldom is there a Joker as in Heath Ledger's character. If a person fully > believes that others don't count, at all, then the rule breaks down.

I want to take a hit at this one separately too. The existence of s/a hypothetical Joker/very real sociopaths/ is not necessarily proof against moral intuitions. These people might just have an impaired ability to sense moral truths.

And all of this leads us back to whether moral intuitions are generally mostly sort-of good indicators of truth. Here experimental philosophers could disprove this by showing great enough variance in moral intuitions. Or close off this avenue of criticism by showing a high degree of correlation between many moral views of many people.

Otherwise, questioning whether moral intuitions are evidence go pretty deep into Epistomology, the study of how we know what we know. That's a giant pile of worms. Great fun, but I've already created a monster with this post so I'll leave it.

TL;DR: It's all really a question of whether or not moral intuitions provide solid evidence for moral claims. Also, I want to see Batman again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How smart inevitably limits the question by applying a human measure to it.

What I am more interested in, is to know how it is smart, not how much. How does it perceive? How does it connect and process information? How does it interract?

Is there a way to approach this subject besides shape shifting into an octopus?

<comment><USER17> It's like an octopus dismissing humans as inferior because our appendages lack suckers.

I don't think humans can ever fully understanding other species. Yet, the more we observe, cut, and process other animals, the more of ourselves we discover. Rats dream and laugh! Crows use tools! Dogs understand fairness! Is it really any surprise that we have so much in common?

<comment><USER16> Exactly.

> We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Octopuses are solitary animals, so they have little in terms of learned behavior. What they accomplish is generated by thoughts originating from themselves.

<comment><USER19> I used to think that this was the case, however more recent research (popular news article form of it) [0] seems to suggest that that may not be the case.

0\. [http://www.businessinsider.com/researchers-have-found-an- oct...](http://www.businessinsider.com/researchers-have-found-an-octopus- village-off-australia-that-reveals-the-creatures-social-side-2016-1)

<comment><USER20> Wow. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm reminded of Paul the Octopus in the Sea Life Centre in Germany, who at least reportedly likes watching soccer. Crowds have taken to watching his behavior like an aquatic Punxsutawney Phil - looking for signs of Paul feeling optimistic or depressed - and leading crowds through an exercise to imagine that Paul is able to predict the outcomes of games.

While not really equipt with fortune-telling capabilities, Paul and most other octopi (as aquarists will share) have very distinct personalities, have favorite caretakers they can individually recognize, and in the wild will save food, trade rocks and have learned to pull diving masks off humans who bother them.

</comment><comment><USER22> Octopi? Pah. Cuttlefish are fucking brilliant.

<comment><USER23> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4PWP8uL-1o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4PWP8uL-1o)

<comment><USER24> Original video posted by merriam-webster:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFyY2mK8pxk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFyY2mK8pxk)

But they weren't arguing about the plural form, but that cuttlefish win in a battle of intelligence. Also, if you watch the video it says all are correct.

<comment><USER23> I never said OP wasn't correct

<comment><USER22> I didn't know that octopus, unlike most names in science, was Greek-derived, rather than Latin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Good article up to the end when speculation about the uniqeness of humans are presented. "Humans, perhaps uniquely, have gained the ability to step outside ourselves"

AFAIK we have established that quite a few animals for example apes such as the Orangutan are able to identify and reason about themselves in relation to the rest of the world. They are capable of deception, cooperation etc. And of course a range of complex feelings.

The color changing and arms of an octopus would at least allow for complex information communication.

</comment><comment><USER26> Anybody have a pet octopus and can comment on what that's like?

</comment><comment><USER27> Also check out Sy Montgomery's book,The Soul of an Octopus, fascinating. Did you know "Three fifths of octopuses' neurons are not in the brain..." Here is an excerpt: [http://www.delanceyplace.com/view- archives.php?p=3054](http://www.delanceyplace.com/view-archives.php?p=3054)

</comment><comment><USER28> TL;DR Not a scientific article and doesnt arrive at many conclusions.

</comment><comment><USER29> > And yet . . . could we be missing something here? While they can't see much > of their own kaleidoscopic skins, they can clearly sense inside what they > are doing. Remote cameras on the seabed show octopuses crackling with color > changes, even when there is no other creature present to observe them. > Godfrey-Smith believes this is just a byproduct of neural activity, no more > than an expressive quirk. But maybe it isn't. Perhaps they are talking to > themselves.

God I hate science reporting. It's like they can't help but interject spasmodic blather into an article.

<comment><USER30> Isn't Godfrey-Smith's belief in fact also "just a byproduct of neural activity"?

<comment><USER31> That depends on your philosophical assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Well I feel slightly bad for wanting to eat it alive.

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

<comment><USER33> Woah, it's real-life gagh!

<comment><USER32> it tastes better than it looks or so I hear. The only concerning point is that people have choked on this while drunk as it sticks to whatever it can latch on to and throat is not the ideal place....need to chew this until it stops squirming....your life may depend on it, more so when you are drunk and think this is hangover food.

This will be one of the first things I will try if and when I am in Korea. I'm not bothered by it since I'm Korean but I can understand the reaction, I'm sure Hindus aren't too thrilled by our cow consumption either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I just like to imagine Octopus dominance if they banded together and decided not to die at 3 years old.

Pretty smart for mass produced babies. Humans wouldn't stand a chance.

</comment><comment><USER20> Hacker news is what reddit should have been [imho]

</comment><comment><USER35> Don't tell the Greeks. We are probably the world's largest consumer of octopus (after cheese, that is)

<comment><USER24> I am almost certain that cheese does not consume octopus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Smarter than us, obviously!

</comment><comment><USER37> Saving you a click: "Are they capable of conscious thought? Godfrey-Smith treks through some rather testing philosophical and psychological terrain to conclude in the negative. While cephalopods are capable of exceptional complexity in their signalling, the machinery of interpretation is too limited. Humans, perhaps uniquely, have gained the ability to step outside ourselves, to think about our thoughts by means of an unstoppable internal monologue."

<comment><USER38> The next paragraph:

"And yet... could we be missing something here? While they can't see much of their own kaleidoscopic skins, they can clearly sense inside what they are doing. Remote cameras on the seabed show octopuses crackling with color changes, even when there is no other creature present to observe them. Godfrey-Smith believes this is just a byproduct of neural activity, no more than an expressive quirk. But maybe it isn't. Perhaps they are talking to themselves."

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> 3x smarter than a managing director

<comment><USER40> You've posted plenty of unsubstantive comments to HN. We ban accounts that keep doing that, so please stop doing that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Animals have always seemed to me smarter than humans in some (important) ways. Squirrels, for instance, are extremely resourceful and can survive in conditions few, if any, humans could. If that isn't being "smart", I don't know what is.

In any case, the smart/brain weight ratio is not in humans' favor here, that is for sure!

<comment><USER42> Where do squirrels live that humans don't?

<comment><USER43> my attic</comment></comment></comment>


Lessons from working for startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.quirkey.com/blog/2010/07/29/lessons-from-working-for-startups/ <comment><USER2> Good article, but _please_ learn the difference between you're and your, they're and their and there, and so on... It's actually physically painful to read an article that manages to get almost every single one of these wrong.</comment>


U.S. Postal Service To Launch Experimental Same-Day Delivery Service In November - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/12/u-s-postal-service-plans-to-launch-experimental-same-day-delivery-service-in-november/ <comment><USER2> Here is maybe a silly question: I order food every day. I make a phone call or use a website, and an hour later, a pizza or sandwich shows up to my door.

What is prohibitive about doing this for groceries, toiletries, or other other arbitrary merchandise?

It seems like if I order "banana pudding" from my local pizza place, I get it in an hour. If I order "a banana and cup of pudding" from FreshDirect, I have to wait for them to deliver it the next day within a 4-hour window.

Is there something fundamentally different about shipping goods as compared to shipping ready-made food? Why don't we already see more of this?

<comment><USER3> I was at a hackathon last weeked called Hackfood[1] that.. well, sounds exactly like the name would imply.

Someone made a really quick hack called DeliveryHop that was actually a really interesting idea. Basically, a system for 'free agents' to pick up orders from restaurants and deliver them, rather than restaurants using their own employees. It seems like it has a ton of benefits (for one, the delivery guy could pick up from multiple restaurants delivering to the same area = efficiency), and could easily expand beyond restaurants.

I have no idea how much restaurants really care about the cost of deliveries, though- in a not-insignificant number of cases it's probably the owner's son doing the delivery, or similar. Still, a fascinating idea.

[1] [http://pandodaily.com/2012/10/08/hacking-food-deliciously- wi...](http://pandodaily.com/2012/10/08/hacking-food-deliciously-with-ordr- ins-api-now-expanded-to-nyc-philly-and-boston/)

<comment><USER4> We had a similar thing in my home town in Australia at some point too: the big selling point for me, at least, was that when you were hanging out at a friend's place and you decided that you just wanted to order in, you no longer had to agree on what to get :)

Another business that used to operate, at least, was a liquor delivery service, but only to restaurants. Back there, at least, a restaurant can be licensed to serve liquor, or licensed for BYO (which I presume was cheaper). So what would happen would be a restaurant would be licensed for BYO, but still have a wine menu: when you ordered off the menu, you were technically ordering through the delivery service and they would drop the wine off (they were driving around all the time). So you may have waited a little longer, but it was cheaper for everyone...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> USPS is a national treasure. A fantastically efficient organization and an example of a publicly owned and operated entity running well. USPS needs to be increasing services, not cutting services. Saturday delivery should not be cut. Sunday delivery should be added.

USPS is indispensable infrastructure, and crucial to e-commerce.

Amazon is owning retail, and USPS should be fighting to make every Prime delivery in the nation, even on Sunday.

Local post offices have great reach and location. Right now they are prohibited by law from engaging in other services. That law is obsolete.

<comment><USER6> I agree with some elements of where you are going with this, but caution the general reader to not put too much stake in "new services" or "growth". The USPS needs to shrink, as over 40% of their business is <delivering junk mail>[1]. That was their latest "growth" initiative. Now they overexpanded their overhead, and are facing cuts. New services (not junk) should be added to replace declining 1st class, but the USPS needs to be radically re-scalled and made efficient. This does no mean closing branches, it means cutting overhead. US taxpayers should be subsisizing a communications infrastructure, not be subsidizing a direct-marketing operation.

________________

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising_mail>

<comment><USER5> The junk mail operation needs to be reigned in. Right now the Post Office does not need subsidies, that may change in the future. Delivering junk mail is hurting the brand with the tax payers that may be asked to give the subsidy.

The thrust of my argument, that services need to be added and not cut, is to say that the Post Office should be made more useful and not less.

If the utility of the USPS dwindles, and we first cut Saturday delivery, and we close neighborhood Post Offices and make cuts to service so that you cant pick up the phone and get a local employee on to help you. If we go that route, and that is the direction we are headed now, the chorus of voices allied against the Post Office will be bolstered. The public will say, with some justification, that the Post Office is not that useful and therefore should be let go.

A national, publicly owned and operated non-profit efficient distribution network: indispensable to our modern economy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A better feature would be to add an 'opt out' function for junk mail.

<comment><USER8> i was just thinking about this. i would collect all mail addressed to "current resident" or something equally vague and every christmas drop it off in front of the post office.

<comment><USER9> Would you then receive it back in your mailbox? I haven't mailed a letter in years, so I'm not sure junkmail gets stamp-canceled.</comment></comment></comment>


Using the Quick Raise of Matrices to a Power to Write a Fast Interpreter - <AUTHOR> http://kukuruku.co/hub/algorithms/using-the-quick-raise-of-matrices-to-power-to-write-a-very-fast-interpreter-of-a-simple-programming-language

<comment><USER2> This is an instance of the "Maximally Powerful, Minimally Useful" principle from a few days ago [0]. Because the language being described is sufficiently minimal it has multiple valid, meaningful interpretations including the direct "just execute it" interpretation, a theoretical "compile this to some kind of other language and interpret it there", and, most interestingly, interpret these relations as a linear algebra problem.

It should be quite clear that a more "powerful" language would not admit this last meaning/interpretation/denotation.

[0] [http://blog.higher-order.com/blog/2014/12/21/maximally- power...](http://blog.higher-order.com/blog/2014/12/21/maximally-powerful/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Arithmetic confined to addition, subtraction, and multiplication by constants is Presburger arithmetic. It's decidable; there are automatic theorem provers for statements in it. The classic Oppen-Nelson prover converts theorems to be proven to matrices, then uses linear programming on rational numbers as a solution mechanism. That may be isomorphic to this approach.

<comment><USER4> The problem of interest to the OP is not determining the truth value of sentences in Presburger arithmetic (that is, sentences using addition, equations/inequalities, Boolean operations, and the quantifiers "There exists an integer such that" and "For all integers, it is the case that"), which, although algorithmically decidable, is nonetheless in general very computationally taxing (the time to compute whether such a sentence is true or false is doubly exponential in the size of the sentence).

Rather, the OP is simply interested in carrying out arithmetic calculations of a sort which are trivially computable (after all, the inputs the OP is dealing with are the very programs which would compute the answer!), but notes that one can in a principled way transform naive specifications of these computations (including loops like "Do this a million times") into faster methods of attaining the same answer (by thinking of such loops as matrix exponentiations and then using quick, rather than naive, exponentiation).

<comment><USER3> Statements in Presberger arithmetic are equivalent to systems of linear equations/inequalities, which are representable as matrices. That's why both provers and this exponentiation scheme work. If you have two variables multiplied together, you're beyond Presberger arithmetic and linear equations. The simple matrix representation no longer applies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _" The exponentiation algorithm is quite simple:

If the power is zero, we will return the identity matrix. If the power is even (2N), we can recursively compute M^N, and then return the square of the obtained matrix. If the power is odd (2N+1), it's enough to recursively compute M^2N value, and return the obtained matrix, that has been multiplied by M."_

Tidbit: that likely is the best approach in practice, but perhaps surprisingly, it is not optimal in the number of matrix multiplications. See [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addition- chain_exponentiation](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addition- chain_exponentiation) and [https://oeis.org/A003313](https://oeis.org/A003313). Wikipedia has a link mentioning addition-subtraction chains, so it may even be beneficial to compute the inverse of the matrix in some cases (M^1023 likely is such a case, if inverting M isn't too hard)

<comment><USER6> Well -- the thing about using addition chains is, which addition chain do you use? If we're talking about a general algorithm for any n, rather than for a specific n, then we need to algorithmically generate our addition chain. So going with the shortest addition chain is a bad idea, because it will take you too long to find it. Any method of finding short addition chains based on factoring is similarly a bad idea.

(It's worth noting that while finding short addition chains isn't known to be NP-complete, a slight variant of the problem is.)

I think there are methods of finding short addition chains that reliably do better than the binary method, though; in TAOCP volume 2, "Evaluation of powers" section (which is a very good reference on addition chains in general!), Knuth talks about the power tree method, which from a brief skim seems like it might be better even when you include the time to find the chain. I think there might also be better methods based on continued fractions, going from memory.

<comment><USER7> Would an optimizing compiler be able to understand these chains such that it would be a net gain on execution time?

<comment><USER6> I'm not certain I understand what's being asked. I'm going to assume you mean, "Could an optimizing compiler for a language with a built-in exponentiation operator use short addition chains to speed up exponentiation at runtime?" In which case, again, the answer depends on whether the exponent is fixed or is allowed to vary.

For a fixed exponent, certainly; you could just spend additional time in the compiler finding short addition chains for all the exponents that are used. When exponents are allowed to vary, then we're in the case I described in my post above -- maybe using the power-tree method, or certain other methods, would improve on the binary method; but finding the _shortest_ addition chain at runtime would not. (By which I mean, not with existing methods, and it seems unlikely that there's any fast way.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How about computing any Fibonacci number in __constant __time? This can be done using the eigendecomposition trick for computing powers of matrices:[http://minireference.com/static/excerpts/fibonacci_in_consta...](http://minireference.com/static/excerpts/fibonacci_in_constant_time.pdf)

caveat: will fail for large N due to limited precision of floats... works fine on paper though.

[update] caveat 2: assumes a model of computation where ϕ^N can be computed in constant time, which only works on paper.

<comment><USER9> Raising numbers to large powers is still O(log n), though. Even if it's a single term when written out as an equation.

<comment><USER8> Thx for pointing this out. I updated the comment. It seems O(log n) is as low as it will go, still I find it to be a neat (theoretical) trick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The author needs to be careful in what model they are using to show asymptotic runtime. Sure, this reduces to O(log n) matrix multiplications, but matrix multiplication is not a constant time operation (and is actually between quadratic/cubic in the dimension of the matrix, assuming arithmetic operations are performed in constant time, which is also not always a great assumption).

</comment><comment><USER11> Link bait ?

Original article: [http://habrahabr.ru/post/148901/](http://habrahabr.ru/post/148901/) Post date: 2012

More from the same author: [http://habrahabr.ru/users/skidanovalex/topics/](http://habrahabr.ru/users/skidanovalex/topics/)

<comment><USER12> Articles on habrahabr are published under CC-BY-3.0, a very permissive license, that allows articles to be shared and adapted (in particular, translated), so these guys don't really do anything that authors (in this particular case myself) didn't let them do originally by publishing the material on habrahabr.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure "this is permitted under the license" and "this is clickbait" are mutually exclusive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> More good ideas in this direction: Hashlife [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife)

</comment><comment><USER15> > […] will calculate the 1 000 001st and 1 000 002nd numbers in 4 seconds. > Classic version would take much more time, as the program has to operate > with multi-thousand-digit numbers.

I'm not sure what classical algorithm of computing Fibonacci numbers OP is mentioning, but using Mathematica on my machine takes about 4 ms to compute the 1,000,001st Fibonacci number exactly…

Maybe by classical he means naive, in that case: doesn't it ever get tired to pick as an example an algorithm that will be optimized away by any half-decent compiler?

<comment><USER16> There's a closed formula for computing the nth fibonacci number - however it remains a good example in numeric contexts, a Hello World equivalent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So basically this interpreter checks if a loop contains only linear transformations of the variables in the lexical scope, and if so it builds the corresponding matrix and computes the appropriate power of it.

If so that's fine but it's probably a rare use case, since loops usually have conditional branches, don't they? If they don't the algorithm is poorly written in the first place as it should have been noticed that there was a linear transformation involved.

</comment><comment><USER18> (Slightly tangential)

> I have recently read an article about calculating the Nth Fibonacci number > in O(log N) arithmetic operations.

Either you assume fixed-precision integers, in which case you just use a lookup table and call it O(1), or you assume arbitrary-precision integers, in which case you _cannot_ have anything less than a O(n) algorithm, as the number of digits of the Nth Fibonacci number is O(n) (as the Fibonacci sequence is exponential).

I see this all over the place, and it's frustrating every time.

<comment><USER19> I believe OP is aware of this as he specifically uses the phrase "arithmetic operations" instead of "time", so adding two very large numbers only counts once. It's true that you can't have an O(log N) time algorithm, as arithmetic operations cannot be performed in constant time.

A similar situation arises in, say, mergesort when we say that the algorithm takes O(n log n) comparisons. That's not the same as an O(n log n) time algorithm; for instance if you think of sorting distinct integers, each integer will take at least O(log n) bits to represent, and to compare two integers you could potentially need to read all the bits.

<comment><USER18> In which case, as I said, just use a lookup table, which is constant-time under those same constraints, and has the bonus of automatically caching frequently used values for you.

And as the Fibonacci sequence is exponential, any lookup table will be relatively small. (The maximum number of elements in your lookup table is linear w.r.t. the number of digits of your (fixed-precision) integers. I mean, even a 128-bit return value only requires 185 elements in the table, for a total of 2960 bytes.)

> A similar situation arises in, say, mergesort

This is why you have to specify exactly what you mean by the big-O notation you specify. Do you mean comparisons? Time? Time assuming everything but the variables specified are constant? Etc.

>It's true that you can't have an O(log N) time algorithm, as arithmetic operations cannot be performed in constant time.

Yep. You can perform some operations in sublinear time w.r.t. the number of bits, however, by exploiting hardware-level parallelization. It would be interesting to see what the best (in terms of big-O) possible implementation of fib(n) would be, given constant-time operations for a fixed-length machine word.

<comment><USER19> > This is why you have to specify exactly what you mean by the big-O notation > you specify.

He did specify it, it's O(log N) arithmetic operations.

Note: I don't mean "assuming arithmetic operations take constant time, we can compute F(n) in O(log N) time", in which case you can correctly say that, since arithmetic operations don't take constant time in arbitrary precision arithmetic, we must be using fixed precision (or something essentially equivalent), in which case a lookup table takes O(1) time and O(precision) space. I mean "F(n) can be computed with O(log N) arithmetic operations". If I perform my arithmetic operations over arbitrary precision integers, and I implement simple arithmetic operations (so each arithmetic operation takes O((log n)^2) time), then F(n) takes O((log n)^3) time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I believe this technique is by Valiant?

Leslie G. Valiant: General Context-Free Recognition in Less than Cubic Time. J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 10(2): 308-315 (1975)

</comment><comment><USER21> How about

a+=1; b+=1/a;</comment>


Worked on this app since college. Waste of time? Or a good one? - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/app/id702623928

<comment><USER2> \- Pxture, do you have this app for Android so that I can please test it and give you a feedback? Either way, I don't think it is a waste of time because you learnt something.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately we are not on Android yet. Perhaps in the future.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why does academia still publish in for-profit journals? - <AUTHOR> As a teenager who has just graduated high school, and is evaluating entering the university research scene, this is a question that has stuck in my mind for a while. I have seen countless articles here, and elsewhere, explaining why for-profit journals for scientific papers is a bad idea... Why is the problem still so prolific?<p>Is it a result of the interests of the researchers not aligning with the decision-makers, an issue with lobbying, or something else? <comment><USER2> Academics generally are rated by the prestige and number of their publications when it comes to who gets their contract extended or who gets tenure. Prestigious publications happen in prestigious journals (or often conferences in CS, but same principle), the prestigious journals almost all are for-profit (and of course that causes the ugly feedback loop that the best papers only are submitted to those journals, further establishing them as good journals).

In most fields, submitting to a "lower-quality" venue when you could get into a better one means unnecessarily risking damage to your career (or, in case of established, tenured professors, who don't have to care so much about their own ranking, damage to their co-authors'). Also, most universities have access to all important journals, so they don't feel the pain of closed access so much.

While they might like the idea of alternative venues, the universities incentivize them to optimize for "impact factor".

<comment><USER3> There is something going on with academics being told to maximize their impact factor.

Impact Factor is a score derived from how often the average article in the journal is cited over the last 5 years.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor)

Deriving then from this an academic is then encouraged to maximize their own score and new academics have only a few years to get their score up if they want to compete for tenure.

I'm not sure but there seems to be something in the way your score is calculated to make academics want to publish in certain journals to increase their score.

[http://researchguides.uic.edu/if](http://researchguides.uic.edu/if)

It sounds like a glorified page rank system, with people wanting to keep getting their own page rank up by getting links from the historically highest page rank sites.

I wonder is there a way to hack the system to shift the scoring in favor of open access?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Signalling effects.

Imagine that you are one of five hundred postdocs applying for your dream professorship. Your papers are so highly technical that the hiring committee won't be able to judge them directly (certainly not before you make the short list).

The most important component of your job application is your recommendation letters. But also very important is your CV, and hiring departments will want to see where you have published. Journals like _Inventiones Mathematicae_ , _Journal for die reine und angewandte Mathematik_ , _Publications mathématiques de l 'IHÉS_, and so on have developed a reputation for publishing only outstanding papers, and so your CV will stand out if you have published them. Less so if you have published only in, say, _Indagationes Mathematicae_.

Same when you are applying for tenure, promotion, grants, etc. Basically any time you need to demonstrate to anyone outside your immediate specialty that you are doing top-notch work.

This could be done in other ways; indeed I would have better use for my brain cells than to keep track of a Byzantine hierarchy of journal quality -- but for now the system is quite entrenched.

</comment><comment><USER5> The flip side of all the prestige incentives that everyone mentioned is that there's little downside. Either your institution will foot the bill for the cost of publication or it's built into grants. On the other end, the institutions researchers are affiliated with pay for access to many of the top journals and, even if you don't have direct access to the journal version of a paper, you can normally find it somewhere else, like the author's website.

</comment><comment><USER6> For better or worse, tenure evaluations are a crazy important part of academic life in the US. You have roughly five years to produce enough research of a high enough quality to earn the right to keep doing said research.

The three common metrics for evaluating are:

1\. citations -- highly cited papers are evidence of contributing to academic society

2\. impact factor -- papers published in highly selective journals that peer reviews submissions are considered better

3\. money -- AFAIK nobody says this out loud, but if your department can't bring in revenue to support you and your researchers, your tenure case is on thin ice.

<comment><USER7> In my field, if you get a TT position and play nice, you usually get tenure. But yeah - it's basically all about money. You can't do good research if you don't have solid funding, you don't get solid funding unless you have good research in high impact journals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> AI publishing is virtually all on Arxiv. Conferences replace the role of journals (for example getting a paper accepted at NIPS, ICLR, ICML, etc). And I find out about important papers on Arxiv Sanity or even Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great point by detaro. Issue is convincing the ivy league or some league of universities to adopt open public standards. Better yet make a taxes being used unfairly argument to make a law that every instituion that takes public money has to open access their work.

<comment><USER10> fwiw, it's important to remember that there's a lot of diversity involved.

In my university, for example, the library pushes _hard_ for movement toward open public standards. I've also seen junior faculty make efforts to publish in open journals. But then those junior faculty get slammed by [some] senior faculty for not publishing in higher profile journals and not having enough of an impact factor.

There's also a lot of legitimate grievances against open journals, due to the financial incentives that are created and the types of review processes that are encouraged by their policies.

So there's a chicken-and-egg factor and a lot of disagreement about what should be happening.

Personally, I think there should be a huge shift in publishing practices in academics, but it's going to take some time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> They don't have the strength to revolt. These are the people who give away their creative output for pennies, suckered by the fake dream of recognition, when they could be capturing so much more of the value they create, if they weren't willing slaves to publishers, governments and nasty corporations that exploit their idealism to suck them dry, and instead acted entrepreneurially. Academia is the exploited worker class of the knowledge economy, and I'm a capitalist.

</comment><comment><USER12> Probably one of the biggest scams of all time!

\- You do a lot of work and put a lot of effort doing state of art and novel research (by mostly using tax payers money through research grants coming from government)

\- You pay for publishing while giving up all your rights (including copyright) and violating tax payers rights by punting the results of their money behind a paid wall!

-Someone will sell that research results to another researcher (maybe the colleague next door!) and make profit

3 wastes of money and 2 absolutely pointless profits made using this ill phased circle.

</comment><comment><USER13> There is a lively debate in the Western world about just how free the free market should be, but very few even on the political left think that "for- profit" == "evil". If the publishing business model works for the researchers, the universities, and the publishers, what's wrong with it? No need to fix what isn't broken.

</comment><comment><USER14> "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"

</comment><comment><USER15> Prestige, Resume and Career. We have system in place for this. You don't get hired without credentials. In academia it is publications and only big publishers like Elsevier, Springer, Wiley etc are acknowledged. Kinda like Microsoft, Google, Apple in software.

<comment><USER16> I seem to remember one of my lecturers having to get their doctoral research published in a journal before they could pass the course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> AI publishes in arXiv. There's still hope ;)

<comment><USER5> Many fields do but everyone, including AI, submits to conferences and journals because arXiv is not peer reviewed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> what if legally compel to publish public funded research results only in open access journals?

<comment><USER2> Some funding sources do that, but note that open access does not mean non- commercial: in case of commercial journals it typically means paying a publishing fee.</comment></comment>


Small Business Software - Intranet - <AUTHOR> http://www.worketc.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Rather than using several web 2.0 services to manage your business, we've wrapped all the core small business systems into the single customized intranet.

Critical business process tools such as time tracking, billing, project management, online calendars, shared documents and help desk software have now been integrated into a single, easy-to-use web 2.0 application. Here is a 1 page tour: <http://www.worketc.com/tour>

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi - we are about to announce our free trial. Head over to www.WORKetc.com to get started.

<comment><USER2> Instead of free trial, I would find it more useful if you had staggered pricing. $45/month for 2 users seems a little steep.</comment></comment></comment>


TC Disrupt Experience - Seriously, What Problem are You Solving? - <AUTHOR> http://www.zachboerger.com/post/31422688826/thoughts-on-tc-disrupt-seriously-what-problem-are?6fbe7100

<comment><USER2> Wait, what? You're writing a rant about other entrepreneurs not solving problems when your startup is "google alerts for video games and movies" with no apparent business model?

 _> > You need to be a painkiller, not a vitamin._

If you read that article, he actually says "very few are (painkillers)" ... being a vitamin isn't bad, it's just easier to market a painkiller ...

 _> > I feel like an asshole for saying all this, because I never want to talk badly about fellow entrepreneurs._

The fact that you have to add this to your post is a good clue that it may have been unwarranted or poorly worded.

Look, my startups don't cure cancer but I like to think they solve problems for people. If people ask me for honest advice about their startup or pitch, I will definitely give it. But I don't go to conferences and then publicly rip the participants (or most of them).

<comment><USER3> Going to a conference and then publicly ripping the participants (while being or not being a hypocrite about it) is just about as trendy as starting a startup. I bet there will be 199 more posts strewn about HN just like this by the time the conference is done.

Edit: I want to add that everyone loves to repeat all the smart things they read on other blogs on their own blogs in some vain attempt to seem wise but how many people actually get it or even follow their own advice? Saying something isn't the same as doing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "What problem are you solving" is dogma. At the earliest stage, a startup is an experiment to see if people want something.

There are tons of examples of companies that started as toys, and ultimately became businesses. In hindsight you can always come up a description of the problem they were solving at the time, even if nobody knew the problem existed. You could do this for Twitter today: they solved the problem of (exercise to the reader).

<comment><USER3> Thank you for this! That's one thought I had but forgot to mention in another comment below. Dogma is the perfect word for it too. I also believe the people repeating that dogma are doing it either out of ignorance or some attempt to make themselves feel important and world changing. That's where your second point comes in - those same people will do all sorts of mental gymnastics to explain the problem which may not even exist. Your example of Twitter is perfect too! They now say its some novel communication platform. Well, I'm pretty sure it started as what basically amounted to Facebook status updates on a site called Twitter. Now people are rewriting history to make the legend true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> While it's important to initially form an idea around a problem to be solved, the focus really should be on building a product to solve a problem in such a way that it would be painful for your customer to stop using your product.

That's how you create enough demand to properly charge for your product versus offering it for free and it being considered just a really cool idea.

That being said, there's quite a few "startups" launching every week that are really just neat projects or ideas, but aren't proper startups/products/businesses. That doesn't make them bad, just not in the same category as something that charges money. They're essentially trying to solve a problem they created themselves...said another way, they're a solution in search of a problem.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think some of this gets back to talking to customers asap and getting over the fear of them telling you that they don't want your product. The faster they tell you what pains they really are having, the faster you can move in the right direction. But good pitches need the one sentence "here's who we are" followed by the one sentence "here's how we're solving your problem". Get that correct and people will at least know why you are worthy of taking their cash. And as he referenced, vitamins = where you spend spare change, health care (painkillers) = large $$

</comment><comment><USER7> I agree with you.

But we're wrong. We're just saying this because in our eyes, these "problems" aren't worth solving. We're not interested in them.

matchist (matchist.com), my current venture, wants to help freelance developers cut out all the bad things about freelancing. We want to save you time, money, and headaches.

I love this problem. It NEEDS to be solved.

But you might think it's the stupidest problem around.

<comment><USER8> I don't identify with your problem, but I totally believe that it's a problem. I was at Disrupt and saw a lot of really cool companies solving real problems. That said, I also saw a lot of sexy apps and sites that really aren't addressing problems at all. They do cool things, look nice, and work well, but they really aren't addressing problems. Thoughts?

<comment><USER3> The startup gods have proclaimed that you must solve a problem and now everyone seems to be taking it as an absolute truth. The startup gods are wrong.

Listen, solving a problem is what we need more of in this world. It's hard, its rewarding, and the idea of it is sexy though the problem itself may not be. That said, solving some problem is not the only way to succeed or be relevant. Some things can be cool and sexy and total non-needs and still be a huge hit. Some things that are just fun and entertainment are not just successful but important in our lives! Yes, important! Like Zynga. I fucking hate them but they make freaking games and they're doing damn well (their downward spiral is irrelevant and unrelated to my point). How about the cheeseburger network (you know, Lolcats, I can has cheeseburger and all that?). Useless, entertaining, non-problem-solving ideas that are big hits.

I honestly say fuck solving problems. You know whats really important when it comes to starting a startup no matter if it solves a problem or not? It's this question:

Can I get people to give me money for this?

If the answer is yes then it's a good idea. Solving problems is awesome and if you think of something that solves a problem that you'll get money from that's even more awesome. But all this talk of solving problems seems more about people trying to make themselves feel superior or trick themselves into thinking they're changing the world rather than anything having to do with business.

<comment><USER9> Brilliant. You said it all.

Gaming is a huge industry. Tell me what problems this whole industry solves, vitamin or painkiller? I would argue that it is a huge waste for the society. Same goes with alcohol. Do they acutally "create" more problems?

The truth is that people want to spend money to buy vitamins and many useless things. If you provide them and people buy, you have a business.

The notion of a startup having to solve a problem and the argument of vitamin or painkiller are stupid and amateur.

For OP, indeed, you are trying to solve a problem. But you create a new problem for me - I have to remember to go to your site to learn whatever I want to know, on top of many things I do everyday - cnn, wsj, techcrunch, gmail, YC news, facebook, twitter. I already get more information than what I can digest. I cannot remember to go to your site and will not have incentive to do it. Until you provide something unique that I need, I won't visit your site again. (I visited yesterday.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I know you didn't ask for product feedback, but I think your product has a problem: You need early adopters to start using it, but early adopters naturally hear about the news and developments that you claim to deliver. In otherwords, I shared your product with a few coworkers, we signed up, then we all independently decided that we'd hear about those things naturally, through other channels. Sounds like a vitamin.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally fine with the feedback. Thanks for checking us out! To address your point though, we've actually found that we have a pretty awesome mix of users that consists of both early adopters and more "normal" people. For example, my dad loves movies and gadgets but never reads any tech blogs or hears about this stuff normally. He likes using our site because he can hear about things he is interested in but normally never wouldn't have been exposed to. But again, thanks for the feedback; user acquisition is obviously always an issue.

<comment><USER10> It seems a little weird that someone who loves movies doesn't hear about them through any other sources. While I wanted to sign up for some of the movies, I knew I'd see ads for them on TV, or at bus stops when they launched. I've literally never missed the launch of something that I cared a lot about, because by definition I'd be the kind of person they'd be trying to reach. But the proof is in the data - if you're getting active users, then that's all that matters. Congrats :)

<comment><USER11> There are those of us who are interested in launches but just don't have the time to dedicate to keeping track of their status.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm sure most profitable companies were formed to solve a problem. But a few absurdly successful ones don't really fit that description. You can shoehorn them in, but it seems like a stretch to explain the "pain point" facebook solved. Instead, it seems like in those cases, they provided a new thing no one knew to want before.

</comment><comment><USER13> funny, kelly sutton wrote a similar-ish post on TC Disrupt last year: [http://kellysutton.tumblr.com/post/10164180568/your-idea- is-...](http://kellysutton.tumblr.com/post/10164180568/your-idea-is-terrible)

<comment><USER8> Last line of that post is hilarious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a good idea for a post, but needs specifics.</comment>