The Surprisingly Large Cost of Telling Small Lies - <AUTHOR> http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/the-surprisingly-large-cost-of-telling-small-lies/ <comment><USER3> The setup for the article theorizes on the cost of lying on the person's stress levels. I'm sure that's a factor, but I think that pales in comparison to the empirical evidence the author has found in her own life -- the benefit of _transparency_.

There's an episode of How I Met Your Mother where a character always asks "Where's the poop?"[1] when she can tell someone is lying. She had a dog that always made he same face when it was hiding that it had pooped in the house.

I think the truth is that we all know in business there is _always_ some poop somewhere. Whenever we lie, we leave our audience with an uneasy feeling, wondering what the catch is.

When we come right out and tell them what the catch is, we get past that barrier, which builds a relationship of trust from the start and allows the audience to weigh the values of our proposal on its true merits. This is the real power of telling the truth.

[1]: [http://how-i-met-your- mother.wikia.com/wiki/Where's_the_poop...](http://how-i-met-your- mother.wikia.com/wiki/Where's_the_poop%3F)

<comment><USER4> Actually, I think you just suggested the power of more devious lying: If you don't want them to know about the actual poop, tell them about some _lesser_ poop (either real, but lesser; or in fact more or less imaginary), so they won't think "Where's the poop", but will think "Ah, I know where the poop is, and I can handle that poop", eliminating the uneasy feeling when someone's giving you no poop at all but you know there must be some poop, but still not realizing the real poop is still hidden.

<comment><USER5> That kind of lying is even more powerful in stressing yourself out and breaking your own spirit. The more time goes the worst it gets.

You fool yourself everytime you fool others, and the lies do catch up to you, that was the point of the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> During my studies (conflict resolution), I had the opportunity to ask several mediators and negotiators who had worked on high-profile political cases about lying.

It occurred often, but was by far the least favorite item in the toolbox of a negotiator. Many would rather make emotional / moral appeals to the opposing side than lie.

Not because it wasn't effective (in some cases it could be quite effective), but because the results were very unpredictable. Being called out may undermine the rest of their position... or if they stuck to the lie to avoid this situation they may force themselves into defending a non-ideal positions.

It gets worse! There are now a lot more variables for you to consider, as the hitherto rational party on the other side of the table has been forced to question all of your statements. He is now much more likely to miscalculate true statements and positions as being false. You've now turned your negotiation partner into an (effectively) irrational actor.

<comment><USER7> Then again, in Poker, honesty is not really a winning strategy.

<comment><USER8> Actually, for most hands, honesty is helpful for arbitraging risk.

You need lying in poker, but it should be the exception. No one will buy your biggest bluffs otherwise.

<comment><USER7> How is that fundamentally different from lying outside of poker?

<comment><USER9> Poker lies are short lived. Once the hand is over, it is done. But in real life you have to remember and maintain your lies. It takes a toll.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One difficulty with not "lying" to yourself is complexity. It's often quite demanding to articulate exactly what you know and what you don't. And in the process of trying, you'll often find that your model of the situation is subtly wrong... but it's hard to say exactly how. To really be in contact with reality, you're a scientist, trying to discern truth.

That is, sometimes we lie because it's simpler and less work to articulate. A little similar to advertising hyperbole, lacking nuance. Absolutes are simpler to say, to understand, to reason about.

But the article is just talking about active lying: asserting something that you _know_ isn't true (or, that you know you're not sure of).

</comment><comment><USER11> Some 'game theory', by way of metaphor...

I spent a lot of time playing Scrabble where winning would not strictly be the aim, goal and objective. Being 'in the zone' and able to repeatedly put down all seven letters and hit the triple word scores would be where I wanted to be.

Sometimes I played against those that might rummage in the letters bag, perhaps to take an extra tile out and have to 'correct' their mistake by returning a less than desirable letter back into the bag. Obviously on detecting such cheating one could call them out and storm off from the table. However this I did not do because I did actually want to win :-) I realised that the time they spent doing things they should not be doing in order to get 'ideal' letters meant that they were not able to focus in the way I could.

Guess who won?

Scrabble was not the only game played. Bridge was another game played quite extensively where there was room for cheating. Again, honesty won out. However, with other card games - played for money - cheating was a viable strategy, no amount of focus on an honest game could help you to win against the guy that had all the aces under the table.

And my point is...

There are some areas of endeavour where telling the truth and being honest will pay dividends. However there are plenty of other areas where those that are less than honest will win.

<comment><USER12> That's the first thought that came to me when reading the article.

Honesty is the best policy small lies are always counter productive and increase expectations to an unreasonable level sometimes making you putting a lot of effort into meeting it.

There's very few situations where lying is a good idea however 100% complete honesty is probably not a good idea either there's some things in business you just can't reveal however outright refusing to answer the question is probably a good solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article reminded me of the "four agreements": "Be impeccable with your word. Don't take anything personally. Don't make assumptions. Always do your best." Not lying falling under the first.

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure what's included in "be impeccable with your word" that isn't also included in the more mellifluous "don't lie".

<comment><USER15> Ruiz means by "be impeccable with your word": don't have negative thoughts about yourself. Basically don't be hard on yourself, rather you should have a good self image.

<comment><USER16> That appears to be a small part of his meaning, based on this quote copied from Wikipedia: "Be Impeccable With Your Word. Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _> "Every time he sees a pitch, he waits until the end of the presentation before asking the entrepreneurs to go back through the deck and point out every lie they have just told."_

This isn't honesty so much as self-righteousness.

 _> "If you are reading this post and thinking, "This doesn't apply to me — I never lie," you are probably lying to yourself."_

Same deal here.

I find this to be the most frustrating part of practicing honesty - <USER2> with people who project their own present or past failure to practice it onto everyone else. Sure, some people never figure this out, but others will grasp it long before the mid-30s epiphany the author is relating.

There's probably some eloquent quote or bit of game theory that sums that up better than I can, but I'll try and say this "You're working against the practice of honesty to assume dishonesty from everyone else. "

<comment><USER18> Psychological tests reduce your points on honesty if you say yes to "I never lie"

<comment><USER19> that's why I lie on those tests and say no

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wow - I read the article this morning, shortly before I had to present to managers on the current status of a project. Thought I'd try putting it into practice. The results: (a) I'm quite shocked at the number of (to be fair, very little) lies I would normally tell in such a situation, (b) It was weirdly relaxing being able to just sit there and tell the truth, (c) I've never received such good feedback from a presentation!

A lesson learnt...

<comment><USER21> That's very interesting, can you elaborate on the "small lies" you found yourself telling? (obviously without disclosing anything personal or confidential).

<comment><USER20> Interestingly, I think most such "small lies" would have affected nobody but me (and would only have affected me by adding to my stress). e.g. Saying something's complete when in fact it's 95% complete, and will be complete by the end of the week, regardless of whether or not I claim right now that it's complete. There's nobody urgently waiting on this thing. The only difference then being whether I complete it in a relatively relaxed manner, or under the additional stress of hoping nobody asks to see it before the end of the week.

Other instances were based on how I felt about certain aspects of the project. e.g. Q: Do you think the remaining deliverables of the project will follow the plan? (True) A: Actually no. And here's why.

Previously I would probably just have said yes, and dealt with any upcoming issues as and when. The truthful approach led to a brief discussion about what will be different and why. Everyone now understands the issues. They're not major. Nobody died. Everyone (including me) left happy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Surprisingly the article doesn't mention the biggest benefit of telling the truth....

Truth forces you to confront your own shortcomings - its an opportunity for self-improvement.

If I miss a deadline I could makeup some baloney and lay the blame elsewhere or I can face my own inadequacy and tell the truth.

Its painful to admit I am behind.... but pain is a growth stimulus - it forces me to deal with the shortcoming. Its easier to lie, tell them what they want to hear - but you miss out on the chance for your own self improvement.

Embrace the pain - its growth. What happens when you lift weights? Sore muscles leads to growing bigger muscles. Swing a hammer for a week, leads to blisters leads to growing calluses.

</comment><comment><USER23> I really like this. My interpretation is the concept of stealth mode. I do believe there is a small set of use cases for which stealth is justifiable (e.g., patents), but I also feel like too many people are caught up in the cool, mystery factor surrounding stealth.

I've talked to so many people about my idea who have told me to shut up about it, or did I want them to sign an NDA? The answer is NO. I blog about my entire process, if there's a post missing it's because I haven't written it down yet.

Perhaps it's because my idea is driven by a social vision--if it's succeed I don't care who gets there first. You want to steal my idea? Great, let me help you because I'd like to think I'm smart and I've definitely been thinking about this for awhile.

When Buffer radically opened up their pay information, the community reacted in shock. Events like this inspires me. I want to strive for radical transparency in business.

I will make one tiny caveat though. I don't think radical transparency and never lying are the same thing. I do lie as well, and in many cases, I think it's justified. My mother is the worrying type. If she thought I were out at the bar or club, she literally would not sleep until I returned home. I'm lying for her health. Is it a slippery slope? Maybe, but then I have articles like this and wonderful friends who keep me more on the straight and narrow!

FYI you can read about everything related to my idea here: [https://medium.com/@bsemaj](https://medium.com/@bsemaj)

</comment><comment><USER24> The real problem with lying (apart from the obvious moral one) is the risk you might start to actually believe your own lies. Once you can't tell what is true and what is not then you are on track to mess-up big time.

All the times I have been really side-swiped by someone it is when they have told themselves so many lies that they can no longer act in their own best interest.

<comment> T-hawk That's pretty much what the article said. When an entrepreneur fudges facts about cash flow or profitability, they tend to start believing that fudged reality and thus start reacting incorrectly to the real one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I always thought that lies seem so "costly" (as in brainpower sucking, stress etc.) because I never learned to lie well. And I always thought that instead of teaching my children to be honest I will teach them to lie well from very young age, so that when they have to lie as adults it will take them very little energy and they will do it very well. Training your "lying" muscles just like a professional athlete trains his muscles.

...but this theory of lying being bad because it detaches us from present reality sounds like it has something to it. Or maybe someone with very well trained "lying muscles" can lie a lot and still be 99.9% focused on the present and aware of the real reality?

<comment><USER21> Apparently, lying at a young age is a predictor of success, so you might be onto something there :) :

[http://www.mamiverse.com/children-who-lie-more-likely-to- be-...](http://www.mamiverse.com/children-who-lie-more-likely-to-be- successful-11834/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I cannot agree with this more. I don't know when it was, maybe a few years ago now, that a wise man I met pointed out that brutal, total honesty makes life easier to live for yourself. He was right, overall -- I'm still not 100% perfect, but I took it to heart and tell the truth even when it will hurt me, or is difficult. This has a flow on effect in my life, where I am more motivated to do the right thing from the start: that way, I don't _have_ to lie :)

<comment><USER27> > total honesty makes life easier to live for yourself

That may all be true, but let's not forget we are talking about a successful life, not an easy one. And I don't expect success to be easy to come by.

The secret to a successful life is to never lie to yourself, to get people to trust you (for example, convincingly claim that you never lie), and then lie them intelligently so that they never figure it out or when they do they can't do anything about it anymore.

This is fiendishly complex trick to pull and requires some sociopathic inclinations, so it should not surprise us that many successful business leaders are indeed sociopaths. We are not talking about famous singers or athletes who succeed based on their talent. In the business world, the talent is convincing people better than the competition and that, unless you have built the perfect company with the perfect product and the perfect employees, requires lying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting how so far the comments on this story overwhelmingly agree with the article that it's not worth it to lie. Regardless of how true this point is I have to wonder whether such unanimity in the discussion might be in part because the people who found that lying works quite well for them are more reluctant to share their opinion, for obvious reasons.

<comment><USER14> I suspect rather that such people are quite active in the comments; they may be more reluctant to share an _honest_ opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I deal with this everyday selling software, and it's much more complex than being truthful and lying.

My job as a technical consultant to our sales staff is to bridge the gap between needs assessment and salesmanship. I have a 0 tolerance policy about lying during sales (I have to be to keep our sales guys from making false promises), but I struggle with finding that delicate balance between the truth, focusing on what's important to a prospect, and the manner in which you talk about capabilities you don't have. You cannot simply tell a prospect you don't have a feature if they don't actually need it because there's a lot of psychology at play. A competitor told them they needed that feature so you now have to mitigate their concerns. You essentially need to find a way to be truthful while simultaneously transferring emphasis to your selling points or to their needs.

<comment><USER30> _I struggle with finding that delicate balance between the truth ..._

Oh, so you lie, but lie by omission? Or one of the other forms of lying we tend to morally wallpaper over? I don't see how else to read that because you said your goal was to avoid making false promises, not to avoid "bending" the truth.

<comment><USER31> If a 5 year old child asks you if he will be killed by pirates (yes this has really happened to me), would you say no? If so, you're lying, but I don't think there is any "moral wallpaper" here, it's simply letting a kid sleep at night.

Not to say there aren't many dishonest people out there, but the parallels between sales (especially software) and this story are all too common.

<comment><USER30> _If so, you 're lying, but I don't think there is any "moral wallpaper" here, it's simply letting a kid sleep at night._

If the reasoning starts with "This lie is OK because..." you're using the fact it's easy to argue that the lie was moral to extinguish the weight typically associated with _lying_.

The reasoning here is based on the idea the child is really asking is if there are monsters under the bed/in the closet/down the street. You lie because the truth wouldn't be reassuring, because they can't handle the complexities of the answer "Anything can happen, but the chances are infinitesimally small if you stay out if international waters."

So, are you making bad analogies or do you consider your clients children that couldn't handle the idea you're selling a complex product? It's fine if you do, people can be real dumb sometimes, I won't mind.

It just seems like you're trying to build yourself a cozy little nest between the "truth" and "lying" that extends beyond genuine misunderstandings. The weight of a lie exists on a scale. I do lie to children, but don't consider it not lying, I just don't worry about it too much. I do tend to believe in telling less "white lies" to children than is typical but that's a tangent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> "The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else." — George Bernard Shaw

<comment><USER33> Well, yes and no. Quite a few intelligent authors have argued that habitual lying makes one more credulous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> My friend etuttle once told me, "Lying is like taking out a loan. You will typically have to pay interest on it: remembering that you told it, and remembering who you told it to... so it's usually not worth it. But once in a while it is."

<comment><USER35> "Ethical debt."

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> There have been times when I was completely honest and transparent even in the face of short term costs specifically because I knew it would help build my reputation for honesty. I assume I'm not the only one who's done this, so I wouldn't take it as a sign that a person is 100% trustworthy.

On the other hand, a pattern of honesty probably is the best indicator of an honest person.

</comment><comment><USER37> One of my favorite quotes goes like this:

Lies propagate, that's what I'm saying. You've got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that's connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you'd even have to start lying about the general laws of thought. Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn't work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn't work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they've got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn't exist and there's no such thing as objective reality. A lot of common wisdom like that isn't just mistaken, it's anti-epistemology, it's systematically wrong. Every rule of rationality that tells you how to find the truth, there's someone out there who needs you to believe the opposite. If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there's a lot of people out there telling lies... [0]

If you haven't read "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" I highly recommend it. I've gone through the chapters that are online twice now and will probably read them all once more when the final story arch is released toward the end of the year.

[0] [http://hpmor.com/chapter/65](http://hpmor.com/chapter/65)

<comment><USER38> Somewhat ironic given how the main character is found consistently lying through his teeth.

<comment><USER37> Harry? He might selectively tell the truth but pretty much always refuses an outright lie. With the exception of a few times after the azkaban sequence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> As others have said there are lies and then there are _lies_ , and it also depends on who tells them.

PR people for example are basically trained to lie, but with subtlety. They wont outright lie but rather deviate the conversation by pointing out other facts which are actually irrelevant but serve the purpose to steer looks away and do some damage control.

A lot of founders lie but they avoid the examples given in the article and instead choose to overhype the context in which their product works by using weaselwords and also try to downplay the obstacles or don't even mention them.

I was in a pitch event once and this guy who could sell ice in Siberia went from salesman supreme to sweating bullets when someone in the audience destroyed the RDF he built around himself and the product by pointing out a simple fact that turned to be the achilles heel of the app.

I'm sure a lot of people were thinking about the same, but most weren't, so if the pitch guy didn't mention it, was he lying? or was he expecting you to know it and be okay with it?

At the end it depends on who you are and where you are standing, for example how do the snapchat founders fit into this? the oust of the third member was one thing but after that the remaining two lied openly and abundantly about everything from the "story" of the idea to how it came to be, the involvement of the ex-cofounder and even about the logo he created which is why they had to modify it.

Then again when you are a company with the momentum to reject a 3 billion dollar acquisition offer its a whole different position from that of the guy in the pitch event above.

</comment><comment><USER40> I am utterly amazed - it's true. I have held myself back in the fear a small lie will get found out. Nothing compared to the expenses of MPs or the affairs of the adulterous.

But we hold back unable to give our all.

A great lesson to give our kids.

</comment><comment><USER41> I have to say, I lost a bit of respect for the author when he says

> _" polygraph tests measuring blood pressure, perspiration, pulse and skin > conductivity can pinpoint a lie with tremendous accuracy."_

I'm sure polygraphs aren't useless, but to say that they have "tremendous accuracy" seems exaggerated.

see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph#Validity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph#Validity)

</comment><comment><USER42> This theory depends entirely on how you define success.

We often define success as prosperity; by the means of increasing our wealth we gain more security in a lot of parts in our lives. If you then think of wealth as success, we can see why a lot of stammers could be called successful.

</comment><comment><USER36> The way the investor thanked her for her honesty: "I really appreciate how transparent you've been with me," made me wonder if the simple choice to be truthful put her in a tiny minority of those seeking capital.

</comment><comment><USER43> This reminds me of the idea of Radical Honesty. Here's a good feature on it: [http://www.esquire.com/features/honesty0707](http://www.esquire.com/features/honesty0707)

<comment><USER44> I never liked this, because there is a way to tell someone the truth with grace.

The canonical example: "Does this make me look fat?"

The answer is "That cut doesn't flatter you." It's honest, but it isn't harsh.

Further, instead of encouraging vulnerability, it masks vulnerability behind an aggressive facade.

I'd prefer Brene Brown's approach to honesty, myself.

<comment><USER45> I tell people the truth with humor. Examples:

Wife: "Does this make me look fat?"

Me: doot doot diddiddit doot doot.. (circus music which is our code for "Circus fat." Once upon a time super fat people were rare enough to qualify as circus attractions i.e. the Fat Man/Woman.)

Wife: "Does this look trashy?"

Me: "Well _I_ like it but I think everyone else will think it looks kinda slutty."

Wife: "What do you think of this? (Wearing insulated underwear as a top. It's a Maine thing)

Me: (In a fashion runway voice) "It's the look that says Trailer Park."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> So nuke marketing, pr and send all politicians in exile?

I would say something else dont bullshit. No dont lie. A lie can be forgiven and managed. Spinning the language and saying I told the truth creates much more poisonous effects.

</comment><comment><USER47> The problem arises when everyone else lies - when you sit there as a sole honest voice amidst a torrent of fantasy, telling the truth gets you branded a liar, as you tell truths people do not want to hear.

</comment><comment><USER48> Anyone has a copy of the article that isn't behind a paywall?

<comment><USER49> Incognito window.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> You also have to look at the motivations. As an investor his primary goal is determining what is a lie and what isn't so that he can correctly value a prospect. As an entrepreneur it's not necessarily the main key to success, at least not higher than keep trying. This doesn't mean I'm saying lie by any means, just that you should always look at the source of motivation from the one giving the advice and how it applies to you.

</comment><comment><USER51> question for everyone: do you subconsciously equate an honest person as being (more) dependable/trustworthy/reliable?

I ask because I can't help but group these qualities together. When someone earns my trust from a track record of being honest, I find it hard not to take their word on things.

I guess I equate being honest with having good overall intentions. Is this an innate (human) quality or just wishful thinking on my part?

</comment><comment><USER52> Does anyone know who "Peter" is? I liked his advice and was really interested to see what else he's invested in, so I looked on CrunchBase, AngelList, Posse's website, etc. but I can't track down a Posse angel investor named Peter. I kind of hope this article about telling the whole truth even if it makes you vulnerable isn't using a pseudonym for the investor.

</comment><comment><USER42> how about all the succesful scammers? or lying to your "customers". I know I don't want to do what they do. But I happen to know some people in some industries in IT where it is pretty much the business model. I do get a bit jealous when they expose their flamboyant luxurous lifestyle on Facebook to be honest. so how do you define success? money or happiness ?

</comment><comment><USER53> I often feel like always telling the truth is the result of privilege. And that people who are more insecure for whatever reasons have much more cause to lie. That being said, I have very little patience for colleagues who lie about work-related knowledge. It's a huge waste of time.

<comment><USER54> > I often feel like always telling the truth is the result of privilege.

Maybe, but the converse seems to also be supported: that ease in lying is the result of privilege: [http://mors.haas.berkeley.edu/papers/Carney.HowPowerCorrupts...](http://mors.haas.berkeley.edu/papers/Carney.HowPowerCorrupts.pdf)

If both the ability to lie frequently and/or tell the truth as a rule are the result of privilege, what explanatory effect does privilege have?

<comment><USER53> Yeah, maybe "result" is wrong. It's not a cause and effect. I probably should have said that having social and economic resources makes it easier to tell the truth, specifically in instances where the person knows they can easily withstand any negative consequences.

As an example: leaving a note when you accidentally damage another person's car.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> This reminds me of Grice's Maxims[1]. Lying is an impediment to communication.

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle)

</comment><comment><USER56> Maybe my memory is bad, or perhaps I'm subconsciously "lying to myself," but I don't think I lie anywhere near as often as the author believes she and other people do, even about tiny things.

<comment><USER57> I'd be surprised if you don't tell small lies in 'conversational mode'.

In natural speech, people generally make simplifications that edge towards oversimplification, or omissions that could be considered misleading if the omission is not fully understood by both parties, or false statements just because of a personal misconception (perhaps only realised later). That's a natural part of communicating at a reasonable speed.

Eliminating those occasions takes real effort towards communicating well.

Perhaps you don't consider those "lying" as such, because they're not deliberate attempts to mislead. But the boundary between these and deliberate "lying" is blurred. Your motivation for communicating with these shortcuts is a deliberate choice that is worth reconsidering occasionally.

If you can avoid those white-type lies 100% of the time, I applaud you. I don't think it's easy and few people manage it.

<comment><USER56> I don't feel like I actively avoid white lies, but I can't think of many that I've told recently. When I was a kid, sure, I'd lie to my parents about little things, and in school I would invent or exaggerate excuses for late assignments, etc. But now I don't feel like there's much need to do that.

Of course, when you get into simplification and omission, things get more complicated. I've absolutely simplified basic things like where I'm from, or the exact timeline of my education, etc. And every time I say anything, I'm omitting, well, everyone that I _don 't_ say. The line there is definitely blurry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I read a few paragraphs and then the article vanished and I was asked to log in. Why? Either don't show it to me or show it to me. Changing it after I started reading is pathetic.

</comment><comment><USER59> This article comes to mind:

[http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/Virtue1.html](http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/Virtue1.html)

</comment><comment><USER60> "The webs we weave when we learn to deceive"

<comment><USER61> I've heard a few versions of that chestnut, but the only one which both rhymes and scans is this: 'Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.'

<comment><USER62> ...

"But when we've practiced quite a while How vastly we improve our style!"

( - J. R. Pope, A Word of Encouragement. Collected in The New Oxford Book of English Light Verse, 1978.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Don't Fake it So that you Make it?

</comment><comment><USER64> Paywall.</comment>


Ask HN: Talent acquisition, how much are we worth? - <AUTHOR>

A company is interested in doing a talent acquisition of our startup. I don't know how to value each of us, but I think the HN community could explain what typical deals look like regarding initial cash, stock options and earn-out periods. I don't want to undersell myself, nor do I want to look like a greedy fool.<p>I'm begin vague and using a throwaway account for obvious reasons. <comment><USER2> How many people are being acquired?

What is the nature of their skills (what areas of expertise and what level of expertise)?

How long will you have to work for the acquiring company?

<comment><AUTHOR> 2 people. I'm both a designer and a developer, I guess a unique combination where I can program an app and make it look very good and usable. The other is strictly a developer.

I don't know about the last question yet since I'm sure that would be part of the negotiation. What's typical?

<comment><USER3> Do you have any products at all, is there is a product in the pipeline that will be finished or scrapped or is it an all out talent acquisition? How rare are your skills you say development and design, but is it Ruby, Java, Objective-C? To me if it is totally a talent acquisition and your company has no product and no product on the horizon then you really have nothing to lose other than income from contracting (assuming that is what you are doing). That being said and if it is the case, I would figure out what I believe that I could realistically earn annually, take out health and other perks, make sure their are some options and ask for that rate along with some up front money say a half a years salary for the risk and lost opportunity. IF you have a rare skill and are in a tight market you could ask for a years salary up front. But this is very subjective, if you have some very rare skills that they are in need of, you could be underselling yourself even at that rate.</comment></comment></comment>


Cayley – An open-source graph database - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cayleygraph/cayley <comment><USER2> Maintainer here, good to see Cayley on HN again :)

We've got a lot of new features on master, (GraphQL support, Gephi interfaces, Recursive iterators, etc) and are cutting a release next week.

Active work in the coming releases on tightening down the indexing and really bringing it into prod.

EDIT: Feel free to join the new Slack or the Discourse mailing list/discussion board!

<comment><USER3> What's the difference between Cayley and Neo4J?

<comment><USER4> Think about Datomic. It can use Riak as a backend or something else but it is still seen ad Datomic to the outside world. (You can also compare it to Lucene vs Solr)

<comment><USER5> Wait, Datomic with Riak as the backend? That seems a ridiculous level of abstraction, since Riak itself uses pluggable backend stores (Bitcask or LevelDB). Like creating a programming language whose interpreter runs on the JVM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We have Elasticsearch as a generic document search engine, each document has a non-trivial amount of properties (let's say 50 or so). It's incredibly performant for all sort of searches, the details of each of which this solution wasn't specifically designed for, hence me calling it a _generic_ search engine. Every time I contemplate of bringing graph relationships, that exist between these documents, into the mix, I get stuck. Elasticsearch doesn't quite do graph (natively), but the graph databases I tried don't do properties too well (OrientDB, Neo4J). I'm not talking about one or two properties, but multiple properties across multiple hops in the graph that I envision querying for. Let alone full text searches. I emailed back and forth with the helpful folks at Orient, but it always came down to optimising for specific queries, gone the "generic". Is anyone solving that problem? Cayley?

<comment><USER7> Sounds like something ArangoDB could be a good solution for. Full disclosure I'm from ArangoDB team and happy to help. If you like just drop me a line to jan.stuecke (at) arangodb.com

<comment><USER8> Being a graph database user, i always have to manage a replication of the "molecules"of my graph in ES for a user-friendly search experience. Ca arangodb help for such a use case? Or may be dgraph?

<comment><USER7> With ArangoDB you can choose between synchronous replication and asynchronous. With the Agency of ArangoDB you also have a RAFT based consensus protocol which holds the state of the cluster. My team mate wrote a nice article about our approach. You might want to have a look: [https://www.arangodb.com/2017/01/reaching-harnessing- consens...](https://www.arangodb.com/2017/01/reaching-harnessing-consensus- arangodb/). In single instance you have full transactional guarantees with multi collection and multi document transactions. In cluster mode we provide single document transactions. More guarantees will follow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What exactly is this? The GitHub page speaks of different backends, and those appear to just be databases or key-value stores in themselves (e.g, Postgres and Bolt).

Is Cayley basically a query rewritter, that is it has some tables in the backend and when queried, Cayley then goes to the "real" (for lack of a better word) database? Cayley's query language might be more full featured, but it isn't a storage mechanism in itself?

There are two things from that:

1\. There is no way for Cayley to take the graph structure of the data into account when laying it out on disk or when executing the query. Is this the long-term decision, or is this just a stop-gap until a storage mechanism can be done?

2\. This would seem to imply that the abstraction layer from Cayley to the backend storage would be relatively slim. How difficult is it to add another storage driver for another SQL database or for one with a custom query language?

Another thing I noticed:

> query -- films starring X and Y -- takes ~150ms

Even on two year old hardware that seems dog slow - less than 7 queries a second - for a very simple query.

<comment><USER10> Cayley's graph data layout is most similar to a Hexastore-style [1] triple store, though IIRC it doesn't do the full six-way index that the original Hexastore paper describes. The Redis page on secondary indexing [2] has a great quick intro to what this actually entails (search the page for Hexastore).

As you might guess from the Redis link, this style of graph lends itself well to KV stores, so the answer to your question #1 might be that it's a long-term decision, but the style of graph is really designed for a KV store anyway. But I haven't discussed this at all with the Cayley devs so I can't actually speak for them.

I'm using it with the BoltDB backend and have been pleased with the performance overall. I haven't looked at the backends for more complex databases like Postgres in detail, but it does appear that the backend interface has potential for predicate pushdown as well. The repository's graph directory [3] contains the various backends if you want to check it out. Overall it doesn't look very difficult to add another backend type, but I haven't tried it yet. Looking at the existing SQL backend, it appears to already support MySQL, PostgreSQL, and CockroachDB (but I've tried none of these with Cayley).

[1] [http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/1/1453965.pdf](http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/1/1453965.pdf) [2] [https://redis.io/topics/indexes](https://redis.io/topics/indexes) [3] [https://github.com/cayleygraph/cayley/tree/master/graph](https://github.com/cayleygraph/cayley/tree/master/graph)

<comment><USER11> Speaking of which, take a look at this Redis module that marries Hexastore and neo4j-like queries: [https://github.com/RedisLabsModules/redis-module- graph](https://github.com/RedisLabsModules/redis-module-graph)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Good work! An alternative is Dgraph [https://dgraph.io/](https://dgraph.io/) which I am considering for my next project.

<comment> dyu- Note that they changed the license from APL to AGPL just recently (13 days ago, based from their commits)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here are my experiences with Cayley. 100% positive for building graph microservices.

1\. Use Cayley as a library 2\. Put metadata in separate nodes.

<comment><USER10> This is the approach I ended up using too. Works great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone use Cayley in prod? An old job used Neo4j, and the graph concept was great for specific use cases. As a lightweight graph store, Cayley was really exciting when it came out, but I haven't had a need for it since I left that job. It strikes me as really well made, and I'd love to hear any war stories.

<comment><USER15> Tried to use it in production a couple of years ago hosting a mirror copy of Freebase with mixed results:

\- There were a couple of issue loading the data that we fixed and contributed back the patch

\- Loading the data was really slow, and it got slower every time a new entry was added (Loading the full freebase dump required 1 week on a very beefy machine with SSD. Used LevelDB)

\- Then the queries were relatively slow. Without going too much into details, we were using the data to analyze texts and extract entities, and the relationship between them, and even parallelizing the queries, they were relatively slow (depending on complexity between 0.1 and 1 sec on average). We solved the issue implementing a robust caching layer in front of it and carefully planning the queries.

\- In general, it was stable and performant enough for a backend service. But we were pushing really the envelope of what it could do.

All in all, I would say that I was happy with it. In comparison, I tried a year earlier to use Neo4J in a similar role and I give up after 2 weeks because I wasn't even able to get it loading part of the dataset without crashing on a similar hardware.

<comment><USER16> What's the best way to load Freebase in 2017? Cayley with Postgres storage? Or some other RDF/graph DB? Or ElasticSearch? Or dump it in Postgres/MySQL? I am not interested in complex queries, but simple queries that execute reasonable fast.

<comment><USER17> We have it loaded on a Dgraph instance. In case you want to play around with it at [https://play.dgraph.io](https://play.dgraph.io)

<comment><USER18> How is Dgraph licensed? I see both Apache and AGPL in GitHub.

<comment><USER19> Dgraph follows MongoDB licensing. The clients are all in Apache, and the server code is AGPL. This doesn't affect anyone using Dgraph for commercial purposes; but if they make changes to the server code, they'll have to release them under AGPL. Blog post here: [https://open.dgraph.io/post/licensing/](https://open.dgraph.io/post/licensing/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I can't understand how to use the query language. It all seems so magical!

I tried building something with Cayley once but couldn't fetch all the data I wanted in a single query, or didn't know how to, then got frustrated and deleted everything.

<comment><USER21> Which of the three query languages are you having trouble with? All of them? MQL has been around a long long time (2006). Gizmo is new but based on & very similar to Gremlin (2009). GraphQL is the newest (2015). Did you try them all? Or is one in particular rough?

<comment><USER20> I'm talking about that Gizmo/Gremlin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Very nice! any plans to use it as a backend for google's badwolf[1] (a temporal graph store)?

[https://github.com/google/badwolf](https://github.com/google/badwolf)

<comment><USER2> The thing badwolf brings to the table (and respect to the author -- super nice fellow) is adding metadata (namely, a timestamp) to the links.

The topic of 'reification' found throughout our recent discussion is how we can generally add metadata to links, thereby making it a lot easier to fit the two models together.

<comment><USER22> awesome :) thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Being on HN while doc is lorem ipsum ([https://cayley.io/1-getting- started/](https://cayley.io/1-getting-started/)), damned !

<comment><USER2> Yeah, we're still getting the marketing site up, complete with docs. Til then, there's [https://github.com/cayleygraph/cayley/tree/master/docs](https://github.com/cayleygraph/cayley/tree/master/docs) with the content

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> There is an asterisk in the docs behind "inspired" but no footnote for it. What does it mean?

</comment><comment><USER25> Can anyone give concrete examples of datasets that are better suited for a graph database and why?

<comment><USER26> Anything Social. Product or Person hierarchies. Network datasets. Ancestry (genetic or data), etc.

They are better suited for Graph Databases because the queries tend to be many joins traversing paths both deep and wide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Any screenshots of the visualizer?

</comment><comment><USER16> How matured is it? Has someone used it for big datasets? Last time I tried it wasn't ready to cope with a 250 GB N-Triples RDF. (two years ago)

<comment><USER16> I see Cayley now supports other backends beside LevelDB. "PostgreSQL and MongoDB for distributed stores" \- that's good to read.

<comment><USER8> is there a description of the RDBMS low-level model? Is it something like a single s,p,o table, with indexes (s, so, spo, , po, etc)?

<comment><USER2> Exactly so, for the RDBMS model. Yeah, this has it's own issues, but it's the most direct method. We do a little extra trick with the indexing; joining on fixed hashes instead of the full value, but nothing crazy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I've Climbed Everest 21 Times. It's Not the Mountain It Used to Be - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/154201/ive-climbed-everest-21-times-its-not-mountain-used-be <comment><USER2> Then: "<Insert activity> is really dangerous. Very few people have done it. It requires a lot of capital, and your health and life may be in danger"

Adventurers, explorers, inventors: "The risk is worth the reward. We must push the boundaries of human reach and understanding further"

Now: "<Same activity> is really dangerous. Very few people have done it. It requires a lot of capital, and your health and life may be in danger. But not because the activity itself is dangerous or novel anymore - that's been solved and perfected decades ago. No, because the only people that still do this activity are doing it for ego not for humanity, are overfunded, but underprepared, and the sheer volume of them doing the activity at the same time creates an environment more dangerous than it naturally needs to be."

Rich conceited assholes: "The risk is worth the reward. I'm going to get to drop in 'You know, this reminds me of the time I climbed Mount Everest' into every soiree, pitch meeting, and networking event I'll be at for the rest of my life."

<comment><USER3> What's the difference between "rich conceited asshole doing it for ego" and "adventurer doing it for humanity"? At the end of the day there's no practical benefit, only that person's experience.

<comment><USER4> _What?_ Are you saying the people that colonized Europe didn't give any practical benefit to humanity?

<comment><USER5> Who colonized Europe?

<comment><USER6> Africans. It was a very long time ago (hundreds of thousands of years), slightly later than colonizing the Fertile Crescent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's actually a piece about:

A. Climate change. Most of the problem with the mountain is not tourism per se, but global warming.

B. How the locals need better and more varied economic opportunities, education, etc.

The author is founder of The Apa Sherpa Foundation: [https://www.apasherpafoundation.org/](https://www.apasherpafoundation.org/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I did not know that Sherpa is an ethnicity. That it is, logically means that it's weird to use that word in English to refer to the person who guides climbers on the mountain.

"My Sherpa set up the tent" is a weird thing to say. Like "the Japanese made us some sushi" or "my Finn started the sauna".

<comment><USER8> Sherpa refers to the ethnic group, sherpa refers to the profession

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem here isn't Everest, it's poverty. Nepal is a very poor country. As much as everyone likes to hate on the rich people climbing mountains, they miss the fact that without the mountain, the people would be even worse off.

Yes, of course when a western luxury income collides with third world poverty, of course there is ugliness. It's just here that it's visible.

And it's easy to make fun of the ego-driven climbers, despite the fact that it's no less meaningful a pursuit as pretty much any other hobby.

</comment><comment><USER10> People should be forced to carry their own waste down at least! I'm also shocked how many people claim they "climbed Mt. Everest" when their Sherpa guide did 99% of the heavy lifting.

</comment><comment><USER11> I really feel sad for these sherpas that have to work as care givers for these unprepared losers from the west (most of them seem to be) that just want to impress their kin back home.

I suggest the book "Into Thin Air" (and the movie version "Everest") if you want to know more about how the commercial side of Everest climbing works (and about a really sad tragedy).

<comment><USER12> > I really feel sad for these sherpa that have to work as care givers for > these unprepared losers from the west (most of them seem to be) that just > want to impress their kin back home.

Do you climb mountains? It's hard to explain the motivation if you don't do it yourself. Most people I know who have done big climbs are not trying to impress their kin. George Mallory answered the question why with "Because it's there." That's still about the best answer.

<comment><USER11> That's not the kind of people I'm referring to, I was talking about unqualified "climbers"[1], like those cited by John Oliver or some of those of the Rob Hall expedition.

[1][https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2147998/Mount- Evere...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2147998/Mount-Everest- deaths-Shirya-Shah-Klorfines-words-dying-base-camp-save-me.html)

<comment><USER12> Unqualified or unlucky? It's hard to say from the article you cited; bad weather and crowding also seem to have been factors. 8000m peaks have high rates of fatalities under the best of conditions. But this is true of any large mountain range.

Take the Alps for example. On one day in the summer of 1979 12 people died on climbs around Chamonix, which is a single valley. It was a beautiful day with ideal climbing conditions around much of Mt. Blanc. I remember it well, because I was in the valley watching helicopters bringing down bodies all afternoon.

Most of the deaths were on the Tour Ronde. [1] The uppermost of 3 climbing parties fell on a steep couloir and took out two parties below them. Perhaps the first party was unqualified but the second and third parties?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tour_Ronde#Events_and_incident...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tour_Ronde#Events_and_incidents)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In case someone wants to watch a video about the same topic, Everest: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bchx0mS7XOY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bchx0mS7XOY)

<comment><USER14> It was really interesting that there is a HUGE line of people coming up and down the mountain. It's hard to believe that so many people have the resources.

The other thing is the reliance on the Sherpa moving all that stuff up and down the mountain. (Capital S is the people) Being a sherpa is a super hard and dangerous job for some thrill seekers.

<comment><USER15> The cost is on the order of ~$50,000.

That's not a _whim_ purchase for most people, and probably out of reach of e.g. the lower 50% of US incomes, but for a huge number of people it's an achievable amount if climbing Everest is your lifetime dream.

<comment><USER16> This is more like "rich westerners chasing FOMO feels".

I have a hard time supporting politically that we owe deference to a minority experiencing shallow novelty and calling them life dreams, given the externalized costs foisted on society as a whole.

There are peaks closer and the difference in sensory experience is marginal.

This is just "more money than I can spend so I'll shovel it a little at everything." Which is politically indefensible given how society is manipulated to enable it.

<comment><USER17> It's more that Everest is the highest peak in the world. If there was another mountain 10m higher than Everest, Everest would get 5-10% of the traffic it currently does.

How many people know the second highest mountain in the world? It's K2, most people have at least heard of it. How about the third highest? Kangchenjunga. Never heard of it, had to Google it.

So for people who want a recognizable achievement, Everest is pretty much the top. Not just in climbing, but any physical achievement. Unless Nepal restricts the number of climbers, it will only get worse.

<comment><USER18> K2 and Kangchenjunga are also much harder to _get to_ than Everest. For example, the Indian government does not permit access to Kangchenjunga, and the northern routes from Nepal are in (relatively, for Nepal) remote areas.

K2 is so remote that there was no local name for it (hence, the designation K2).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> EDIT: As noted below, I should have read the article first; I made a grand assumption about the article, and had I read it (which I intend to do - but I read enough of it to see what it's really about - and that should be interesting), my questions would have been answered, and this dumb comment of mine wouldn't be here.

My apologies, everyone. I'll do better in the future...

\--- Original Comment Below ---

I'm not a mountain climber, so maybe I just don't "get it" \- but I can see why someone might want to do this once, or maybe even twice - in a lifetime.

But why 21 times?

What possesses someone to spend those kinds of resources, both monetarily and physically, to do this kind of thing? What are they attempting to prove to themselves?

Furthermore, does this amount of climbing activity on the part of one individual have any bearing on the context of the mountain not being what it used to be?

<comment><USER2> * Step 1: Read the article

* Step 2: Comment on the article.

You got it backwards.

<comment><USER19> Caught me. I'm a dumba __... I 'm sorry.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: travel.meteor.com: clone of mywanderlust in Meteor  - <AUTHOR> The basis of this project is a discussion started earlier today about a wonderful, open source project: http://mywanderlust.co/ The discussion thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6653827
My claim was that a project that took weeks or months to implement in RoR and Angular could be completely implemented in Meteor in 1 hour or so. My statements were not meant to attack the original author because he did a great job thinking out the UI, user flows and structure of the project, which I simply copied. Many users got angry at my claims and downvoted me, challenging me to prove my assertion.
Meteor is perfect for this type of rapid prototyping and I wanted to show the community what could be completed in 1 hour (56 minutes to be precise) on a Friday evening after work.
As promised, I cloned the functionality of the showcased project in Meteor in 1 hour. Finished product: https://travel.meteor.com Source code: https://github.com/andreioprisan/meteor-trave
I'd love to get some feedback or answer any questions about the project or Meteor. <comment><USER2> That is a bizarre statement claiming "I am implemented this in days what was taken by a team of people over Months"

Similar to the Pintreest clones copying the original site design and idea

Finding an Idea, working out the idea, design and workflow takes time, after which a clone like you can copy it in days....

<comment><AUTHOR> Again, I think you're missing the point of this cloning process. My entire point was that while yes, there is considerable thought and consideration going into actually coming up with the user flows, interface etc., the best platform from an ease and speed of development for this type of real-time web application would be something like Meteor. I then proceeded to put my money (or time, in this case) where my mouth is, by building out the entire clone in 1 hour. I never stated nor would think that conceptualizing everything would only take 1 hour, not even close; however, the development speed in doing things in Meteor _if you know how to use it and have built a few projects_ compared to the same thing in RoR and Angular.. well, it speaks for itself. Not months, not weeks, not days. Hour(s).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm getting the same error message as rywalker.

In the console, I'm getting this:

The page at [https://travel.meteor.com/trip/2f64d588f9e05193ef5fd022a4a00...](https://travel.meteor.com/trip/2f64d588f9e05193ef5fd022a4a004f8) displayed insecure content from [http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/staticmap?center=51.5112...](http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/staticmap?center=51.51121389999999,-0.1198244&zoom=11&size=200x200&sensor=false). 2f64d588f9e05193ef5fd022a4a004f8:1 insert failed: Access denied

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed, this was a bug. I included [http://](http://) to get the map image when in fact it needed //, since when hosted on meteor.com it defaults to https. This is now fixed in the repo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think I saw your comment was kind of hoping you showed the guy who replied that he or she was wrong.

With Meteor it kind of becomes that the bottleneck is the lack of clarity in the idea. What I mean is if you know exactly what you want to do (design and all) its pretty much a 1 day job tops.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Wow, it looks like over 20k API calls were made any my API key won't work anymore. [http://imgur.com/b6ZnAyc](http://imgur.com/b6ZnAyc) That's a lot of traffic in such a short period of time. Let me get a few more API keys..

</comment><comment><USER5> just checked how many LOC each project had, only counting the lines in .js, .html, .rb, and .erb files for each project, I got this number

952 LOC - Meteor Travel 4068 LOC - MyWanderLust (Ruby on Rails/Angular)

The numbers speak for themselves

<comment><AUTHOR> I just trimmed another hundred or so lines. There was some leftover CSS that got copied over from a different project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Doesn't seem to be working for me - just get message "we dispatched the elves to get your trip details, hold tight"

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, are you still seeing this issue? Can you share any console logs?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Clicky: [http://travel.meteor.com](http://travel.meteor.com)

</comment><comment><USER8> So, you think meteor is for prototypes not for production?

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely for both, but again it depends on what you're trying to build using Meteor, it may not always be the best tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> good work, Meteor is the fastest framework to get things done for sure if your familiar with it

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I get your point :)</comment>


The Art of Condolence - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/style/how-to-express-sympathy.html <comment><USER2> This article reminds of George Carlin. He could have taught more about this art. What a person !!

I miss him a lot.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to understand how or why this reminds you of George Carlin, but yeah, Carlin is legit, and he is to be missed.

<comment><USER2> He made fun of euphemism and the way people mourn over or feel hurt because of choice of words.

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

This article asks us to avoid the d word (death, dead). This is bit too extreme for me. English is my third language and I have hurt people at multiple occasions because of poor choice of words. I wish it goes away, so that my life can be easier. It is not easy to live in society as an autistic person and I have no interest in learning manners of society when I believe I have more meaningful interests to pursue.

If you are a social person, you will not like my opinion and it's fine. I am used to that. Check what Linus has to say about it in his TEDx talk.

[https://www.ted.com/talks/linus_torvalds_the_mind_behind_lin...](https://www.ted.com/talks/linus_torvalds_the_mind_behind_linux?language=en)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the follow-up. That wasn't a challenge of any sort. I was curious because I enjoy Carlin, I didn't connect the dots, but I understand the train of thought now.

<comment><USER2> Sorry for cryptic and indirect. Next time, I will be more clear about what I want to say. I understand no one here is looking for putting pieces of puzzle together.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Benefits of Speaking at Tech Conferences - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/umaar/the-benefits-of-speaking-at-tech-conferences-1ic4 <comment><USER2> Agree in general that speaking is good for your career and developing your presentation mojo. As is writing/blogging. But watch out for the food and alcohol. I gained 50 pounds on the speaking circuit.

That said there is a value disconnect in being a speaker. The conference organizer gets tons of content to fill its agenda and typically pays the speakers in "exposure." Figure out when you should transition to being a paid speaker. Until COVID that was my primary source of income. If you are a big name author you can command $20K+. Experts tend to get anywhere from $6k to $15K. Travel, including a car to pick you up at the airport, is usually included.</comment>


Minimal design website gallery - <AUTHOR> http://www.minimalsites.com/

<comment><USER2> Those aren't minimal.

This is minimal:

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<comment><USER3> Try Vimperator (<http://vimperator.org/trac/wiki/Vimperator>).

My Firefox is only a tab bar and a status bar/vimperator command line (I used Hide Chrome to get rid of the top window bar). It won't make websites more minimal, but it will make your browser much less obtrusive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Honestly, I don't get what makes those minimal. Tumblelogs could be called minimal, or the original Google search page. If those are minimal, you can argue that all websites have only the necessary things on them and are thus minimal. I'm sure you could even try to make that point for, say, Yahoo! or some other portal ;)

<comment><USER5> I guess they didn't think enough about the difference between graphic design an web design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Vanity pages are fun.</comment>


Startup Quote: Magnus Jepson, co-founder, WooThemes - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/1529838953

<comment><AUTHOR> I doubt I'll ever go back to corporate work. Once you see the light, there is no turning back.

\- Magnus Jepson (@mjepson)

<http://startupquote.com/post/1529838953></comment>


We Have Always Coded - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/weird-future/2acc5ba75929

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know why, but this was posted before ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6389664](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6389664)) and removed. Great article though that provides interesting commentary though satire on the state of women in software development. Worthy of more than an hour on Hacker News.</comment>


Google's cloud business under Greene was plagued by internal clashes - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/21/google-cloud-plagued-by-internal-clashes-in-its-effort-to-catch-amazon.html <comment><USER2> This just feels like an internally contradictory hit piece...

It complains Google wasn't good at sales, but then lists "numerous companies" brought on. It complains that the offerings are "learner than AWS" but then admits Google has shown up "extremely competitively". A competitor (of course) claims "Google is just not a factor" but close to the end the choice becomes a "close call".

So which is it? Considering how late Google got into the cloud game, it seems to be doing respectably well, given all of the catch-up it's needed to do first.

<comment><USER3> I think everyone agrees that AWS is a clear leader, but both Microsoft and Google report bundled Office Suite/Cloud Computing revenue as a single number, so it's completely unclear who is actually in second place.

<comment><USER4> I wish this falsehood would die. Google isn't even #3 in cloud revenues, IBM is, Oracle is #4. Google is far, far, behind Azure and AWS. They have ~$1B/quarter in cloud revenues (that includes GSuite.) Even if you made the assumption that Office 365 made up 80% of Microsoft's quarterly cloud revenues it would still be bigger than Google's cloud (including GSuite.) This is based on their earnings fy 2018.

I don't get why people are in denial that Azure is doing well. If you want to know why Google isn't doing -great- in the cloud, it's because people are afraid they will kill the project. It's because they don't have a "hook" like AWS and Azure have. AWS has a massive user base already, good reason to adopt it. Azure hooks into so many other Microsoft services and developer tools, good reason to adopt it. GCS has...what? Sure, some cool things, but we're talking about compute, compute where where the money is. Even if you adopt GCS for some edge or AI projects, that's not a lot of spend.

<comment><USER5> > GCS has...what?

The best Kubernetes hosting?

<comment><USER4> A tool that arguably 99% of people don't need and is even up for constant debate here on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting, I'm in the US and I think of GCP as the best of the three factoring cost and reliability of their features.

For AWS it seems like to get things that "work" you almost always need to do it yourself instead of using Amazon's offerings.

For Google you may not want to get locked in, but the offerings seem to offer some really good benefits and work correctly.

Maybe this is just "grass is greener" thinking, but what is the experience using GCP like?

<comment><USER7> > For AWS it seems like to get things that "work" you almost always need to do > it yourself instead of using Amazon's offerings.

So our company spends tens of millions a month with AWS across our 50+ teams.

Never once heard of AWS services not working and never once saw people needing to roll their own replacement Redis, PostgreSQL or ElasticSearch instances. And at least with AWS you have options to have these managed services where as the product offering from GCP is extremely limited. Not to mention that GCP is absent entirely from the serverless discussion which is a game changer.

Can you be more specific as to why GCP implements things correctly and AWS doesn't ?

<comment><USER8> Arent GAE and FireBase part of GCP which are both very much serverless products?

<comment><USER9> And GCF

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So, as far as I always understood, there is a rule [1] that says there can always be only two leaders in a single space. UPS and FedEx, Coca Cola and Pepsi, Oracle and MSSQL, etc.

From my professional perspective (integration specialist of a database vendor), all enterprises are either going to AWS or Azure. I think this is almost inevitable: the differences between the clouds are simply not big enough to make a difference from an executive's perspective, so to manage risk, you either go with what you know (Azure) or the market leader (AWS).

Where would this possibly leave Google? All I can see is that, since it would be impossible for them to get a decent position in the cloud market, they will have to completely reinvent this space and create their own, new market which makes the cloud as we know it obsolete.

I just don't see this happening under their new cloud leadership (former Oracle, sales-oriented exec). It would have to be driven by massive innovation, not by "doing the same stuff as AWS but then slightly better/cheaper".

What are HN's thought about this?

(Obligatory disclaimer: on a personal level I absolutely love Google Cloud and think it's a much more developer-friendly environment, but professionally I just can't make a strong case for why, say, a financial institution should use Google Cloud rather than AWS or Azure.)

EDIT: Did not expect this topic to be downvoted this far. Is this not an appropriate discussion / violate any rules?

[1] "Law of Duality" [https://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Marketing- Violate/d...](https://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Marketing- Violate/dp/0887306667)

<comment><USER11> 1\. Google will do this anyway, because it's not going to run on AWS or azure, so why not keep some skin in the game?

2\. Isn't k8s a play to reinvent this space?

<comment><USER12> 1\. Because it is a very different thing to have an internally managed cloud than it is to offer this as a product with the massive support required for enterprise, something that Google has never put much resource into.

Amazon and MS have vast support networks because enterprise wants to feel like they have some control and feedback on their systems.

Also, unless you can innovate in the space (or go really cheap), why would I ever choose a smaller player over a larger one?

This is another example of the problem these rich companies have where cash is not a problem but identity and direction is.

<comment><USER13> There are technical reasons.

Azure is doing quite well leveraging Microsoft's existing enterprise relationships. I'm not sure how much success folks are having "lifting and shifting" their Microsoft infrastructure into the cloud, some, maybe?

However, everyone that I've heard of that understands cloud native type architectures that has attempted to deploy into Azure is looking to leave.

<comment><USER14> >However, everyone that I've heard of that understands cloud native type architectures that has attempted to deploy into Azure is looking to leave.

Extremely unsurprising, but I'd be interested to read more.

<comment><USER13> Kind of ignored this because it's a long list of stuff. I don't really want to repeat stuff that I've "heard". Friend of mine does consulting for a few big orgs, and he tells me that things are bad enough that many of his customers are looking to move in spite of being heavily subsidized by Microsoft. He mentioned numbers like >$1m in credits. Unfortunately, my friend isn't very technical so when I press him on details, I get very little.

However, that correlates pretty closely with my own personal experience. I've worked with a fair bit of the Azure products and it feels to me very much like a work in progress.

The identity management stuff has been a moving target since day one. That is, how to authorize against the service itself. This is apparent in many of the Python libraries where this is documented.

The Python libraries that I've seen look like they were produced by interns. I'm performance with ADL is pretty rough.

My main goal with Azure was to deploy Kubernetes clusters there. The list of problems is very long and has been documented ad nauseum in many Medium articles. In the 14 or so months I've been working with Azure, it hasn't improved as quickly as I'm accustomed to with AWS and GCP.

A year ago, I shifted the majority of my production infrastructure from AWS to GCP. By comparison to Azure, I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the products from GCP. My company uses GSuite which made identity management and RBAC a breeze. The GKE product is way, way better than anything else, and there are a handful of things that I like better than AWS.

I wouldn't encourage anyone to shift from AWS unless they were planning a large Kubernetes implementation. I would encourage folks to try GCP and especially GKE to get a sense of the differences.

There's nothing about Azure that I've discovered yet that would cause me to recommend it to anyone. It's possible that if a company had a heavier investment in MS products that it might be worthwhile, but that's not the case for mine. We only ever use MSSQL occasionally for development purposes and I've found that I can spin up an instance of that quite nicely in k8s with the Microsoft authored helm chart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In the US Google is often referred to as part of the "big 3", but my understanding is GCP is globally in 4th place behind AWS, Azure and Alibaba cloud.

Alibaba is extremely dominant in South-East Asia and if you're doing any work in Indonesia, and Malaysia in particular which have "data sovereignty" regulations, they are the only game in town. AWS and Azure have some inroads (both have AZs in Japan, Korea, Singapore, HK and mainland China) but GCP is nowhere distinctively interesting (unless you want to do something in Taiwan I guess?).

So at least if you're trying to roll out in Asia there's really little reason to even consider GCP. You'd go Alibaba if you want the dominant regional player and AWS or Azure if that's what you use everywhere else.

<comment><USER16> "GCP is globally in 4th place behind AWS, Azure and Alibaba cloud."

Maybe GCP should be renamed to something beginning with 'A'?

<comment><USER17> Alphabet Cloud?

<comment><USER18> Needs a pithy TLA. Alphabet Business Cloud / ABC?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Diane Greene is and never was a good executive to lead an enterprise business. She is more of a technologist/scientist and better at small/medium sized businesses.

She built VMware which was a great technology but stupidly sold to EMC for $60M, leaving a lot of money on the table. EMC rightly fired her because she couldn't scale and replaced her with Paul Maritz who was more suitable for this job.

The idea that she could handle a large and diverse org like GCP was a gamble at best, and it looks like it lost, again.

<comment><USER20> That's a little harsh. I mean hindsight is always 20-20. Under her leadership Google Cloud did acquire big name customers. Google's struggle to gain foothold in enterprises and reasons are well discussed on various HN threads over years. It's a lot to expect from one executive to turn it around in face of fierce competition.

<comment><USER21> No, that's exactly what should be expected from a CEO.

<comment><USER20> And she did deliver, a lot[0].

 _After Diane took over the reins, Google Cloud managed to get solid enterprise wins. 20th Century Fox, Colgate, Disney, eBay, HSBC, LATAM Airlines, LG CNS, The Home Depot, The New York Times, Schlumberger, Target and Verizon are some of the key enterprises using Google Cloud.

The most notable win for Google Cloud came from Twitter which has moved large- scale Hadoop clusters to GCP, with a total of about 300 PB of data migrated.

Netflix, a loyal AWS customer, is using Google Cloud Platform for disaster recovery and business continuity.

Google Cloud made impressive progress in establishing itself as an enterprise cloud platform._

[0] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2018/11/18/5-ways-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2018/11/18/5-ways- diane-green-transformed-google-cloud-business/amp/)

<comment><USER22> She should of at least help Google Cloud out-compete Microsoft, which apparently they didn't. And I can partially see why, because in the market where I'm located (Eastern-Europe, a reasonably well-developed IT market) MS has become very, very aggressive in selling Azure, it has been that way for the last 3 years (I'd say), for them it's "sell Azure first and then everything else will follow", while I haven't even heard of Google Cloud being mentioned as a cloud alternative because their sales people are missing. For the record I know people who sell IT solutions for both enterprise and Government entities.

Maybe in the States or in other parts of Europe the situation is different and Google does indeed push their cloud solution down clients' throats but over- here they're absent.

<comment><USER23> Europe a separate discussion from the US, as far as I know the problem is that Google refuses to sign any kind of guarantees that the data doesn't leave the EU. Probably because hosting companies that have US DCs can be compelled to give up data from EU datacenters too by the USgovt.

Microsoft does give those guarantees, it has a weird setup with Deutsche Telekom operating their datacenters.

So institutions like universities can't necessarily use Google cloud services. Even consultancies aren't necessarily so hot on providing Google cloud stuff, as some customers can't use them. All this, however, is anecdotal.

You can read more on HN, e.g. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16858597](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16858597)

<comment><USER24> Yes, but this setup with Deutsche Telekom will end in 2019 and does not accept new customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I personally didn't understand their niche until I went to work for a county school district and saw how embedded they were. Surprisingly there are a lot of business opportunities to sell to school districts if you are GCP friendly. Unfortunately the sales model is very phobic to monthly subscriptions, which doesn't fit the cloud very well.

<comment><USER26> Could you elaborate on your experience? I've heard a lot about how well google got into schools with gdocs and chrome books but I've never heard much more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > _...while AWS and Microsoft are geared toward serving customers and > responding quickly to their requests, Google touts its own technology, > selling what it thinks clients need._

This sums it up, and is the core problem with GCP.

Unfortunately the replacement CEO is the person who ran Oracle Cloud, which is far worse currently than GCP. The future does not look bright.

</comment><comment><USER28> The primary issue is Google's complete lack of knowledge and apathy regarding Enterprise sales. I'm sure they have plenty of employees with experience and understanding of the Enterprise business but their entire culture and management layer is way too heavily weighted toward engineering to successfully sell to the Enterprise. Slootman was probably right in that Google needs a major aquisition to bring in a global sales culture rather than trying to build it from scratch. And then the old guard needs to not crush that culture. Activist employees won't make it any easier to grow their Enterprise business as every company in the world has things you can protest about.

Perhaps Google should focus on undercutting Amazon and Micosoft at the low end while building up their cloud capabilities and Enterprise sales culture. And then really go after the large customers 2 years from now.

<comment><USER29> I keep hearing that Google seems to be lacking in the enterprise sales area, but from what I've heard, G Suite seems to be doing quite well. What explains that?

<comment><USER28> G Suite basically sells itself and doesn't really require an enterprise sales force in the traditional sense. This works because G Suite is implemented from the bottom up, i.e. individuals and workgroups begin using G Suite and then pressure management to adopt it department/company wide.

This is very different from large scale enterprise software or infrastructure sales (cloud in this case) where you need to respond to RFPs, establish a relationship with the C suite, run POCs tailored to the customer's particular use cases, present a compelling product roadmap, convince the customer that you're in it for the long term partnership, etc. These are not things Google currently excels at.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> To be succeeded by Thomas Kurian, president of product development at Oracle... (for 12 years!)

Now I know nothing about the man, and Google definitely needs to learn how to deal with enterprise customers.

But this doesn't exactly fill me with hope.

<comment><USER31> Here's testimony from Cameron Purdy, he used to work for Kurian at Oracle - [https://www.quora.com/Have-you-worked-for-Thomas-Kurian- at-O...](https://www.quora.com/Have-you-worked-for-Thomas-Kurian-at-Oracle-He- is-the-new-CEO-of-Google-Cloud-What-is-he-like)

<comment><USER32> _Some people speak quietly, and use words that do not convey exactly what they are feeling. TK is very good at speaking at an amply audible level and using very efficient words (often no more than 4 letters long)_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> People here are complaining about the enterprise, but I'm not really part of that segment (the complete IT dept of my company is about 10 employees) and I also feel ignored by Google in my small microcosm.

With the change of leadership I guess small dev teams like mine will become even more ignored as it seems GCP's will focus on the big whales instead of small fish with different needs.

Anyway, from my perspective, it really feels like GCP is living 5 years ago and has zero ambition or understanding of what's going on in the dev space. Also I have to say its marketing is generally doing a poor job at convincing people to use their services.

Some concrete examples to expand on the previous points:

I want a simple and convenient Heroku-like service (and hopefully a better price). For years I had no idea App Engine even existed and after checking it out a couple of times I still have no idea how it compares in terms of pricing.

I want GraphQL services like AWS AppSync, Prisma, or Hasura. Google has zero GraphQL services (AFAIK).

I want serverless solutions like AWS Lambda or like Zeit Now v2. AWS recently even announced Aurora serverless (a relational database unlike the usual NoSQL). The serverless offerings by Google are quite frankly mediocre. Our team is moving away from Firebase and Google's cloud functions offerings are really lagging behind Lambda.

</comment><comment><USER34> Wondering why again SAP isn't even mentioned...

</comment><comment><USER35> They literally should stop pilling up crap like kubernetes and look back at what 9P and Plan9 were and why. Especially that they have almost the whole Plan9 team employed.

Making analogues of J2EE Application Servers for native code is the wrong way. It is against intelligence.

<comment><USER36> It is the return of the mainframe and time-sharing, just with prettier interfaces.

Enterprise loves them.

As for Plan 9, the end of the road was Inferno and Limbo actually. Plan 9 was the stepping stone.</comment></comment>


Introducing Amazon One - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/gca37opgyo4u53v <comment><USER2> Amazon tries to squeeze every last bit of efficiency out of a process. This is just another way for them to cut costs. In a possible reality, it wont be long before amazon starts dropping drones out of the back of planes in order to simplify the last mile.

Maybe we should all start building landing delivery landing pads on our roofs next to the solar panels. ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> So is it expected that they'll open this up eventually (like AWS) or keep it to themselves?

</comment><comment> d-sc I wonder what this does to fedex/ups business model?

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm glad to see this as lately "two day prime delivery" is really three day. Also had another delivery that said it would arrive on a Thursday (!) after ordering on Friday instead come on Friday.

In the 10 years or whatever I've been using Prime I've never had packages take this long as they have been over the last 6 months. Maybe they are testing out new algorithms?

<comment><USER5> Here in Israel packages take weeks, so I don't have an intuition about this but I'm curious - at what point this fast shipping stops becoming something important, a competitive advantage - 3/2/1 day ? And why ?

<comment><USER6> IMHO: Predictability is more important than the difference between 2/3 days: if it says "delivery in 2 days", it has to be there in 2 days. If it says 3 days and I need it in 2, then I'll have to find an alternative, but that's better than ordering it, thinking it's going to be there and then it isn't.

1 (next) day is a really nice difference if you need it: e.g. something broke and you want a replacement _now_ , having it the next day is great and saves a trip to the local electronics store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A single plane can do what?!

<comment><USER8> Form the first part of a logistics chain? Even a single plane has significant capacity to help distribute stuff, and you'll note from the blog the initial roll out is going to be 40 planes over the next couple of years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> They still have to get packages from the airport to your front door.

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting....</comment>


Zenefits and Tableau now have engineering offices in Vancouver. Fluke or trend? - <AUTHOR> A trend of big US companies setting up in Vancouver, that is.
The reason why I have a hunch it could be a fluke is:
1. For Zenefits, the WorkBC job postings (https://www.workbc.ca/Job-Seekers/Employer-Profile/117670/Zenefits-Development,-Inc.aspx) mention the job type as "temporary". It's the company's first office outside of SF so there's a chance the its primary purpose is a L-1 visa holding tank.
2. Tableau's co-founder Chris Stolte is a Vancouver native and an SFU computing science graduate. Maybe he was just homesick.
Further complicating things is the news that Hired.com's Canadian arm (Hired.ca), which went live yesterday, will soon roll out in Vancouver as well (source: http://betakit.com/hired-launches-in-canada-as-talent-crunch-grows/). I can't see how that's not promising, although it's possible that the emphasis is on poaching Vancouver talent for Seattle jobs.
What do you think? <comment><USER2> I honestly believe it's a trend. If I'm not mistaken, there are quite a few tech companies that have set up shop in Vancouver.

Canadian tech labour is generally comparable to the States and have almost the same work culture as well. With the Canadian dollar dropping, companies are paying great talent for less. It's a no brainer. The visa/immigration laws are also more lax making it easier to get the best foreign talent in.

In my opinion, it's a pretty smart move.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know if the critical mass of tech companies is here yet. The real estate prices probably scare off senior staff as well.

Obviously Amazon and Microsoft have expanded here, SalesForce.com is also expanding but they're more of a darkhorse company that doesn't get a lot of media attention.

I've taken notice of Slack and Joyent coming up here. They were followed by Zenefits (assuming they're hiring locals), and Tableau. I read this morning that the secure chat app developers OxCEPT (out of Oxford University, got lots of funding from the UK government) are opening an office here by the end of the year. So Slack, Joyent, Zenefits, Tableau and OxCEPT are the five non- local companies that have legitimately gotten my attention. Plus Hired.com is coming to Vancouver soon.

But I come back to the critical mass of tech companies. I'm not sure Vancouver's there yet. Still no Facebook, no Google, no Pinterest, no Yelp, no Palantir, no Quora, no Dropbox, no Square. These are all companies with offices in Seattle, Toronto, K-W, Ottawa or Montreal, if I'm not mistaken. Vancouver is close to SF and Seattle, and APEGBC doesn't regulate the title "software engineer" (PEO regulates it, so Google's K-W office hires "software developers"). Yet big companies are looking at Ontario or Quebec, not BC. This needs to change. Our average salaries are lower than even Cleveland or Pittsburgh.

Do you know any specifics about the difference between Canadian and US immigration laws?

<comment><USER2> You're right. It might not be there yet but I think it may eventually get there. The talent is there but I think because the majority of current economic activity is mostly on the East coast (apart from oil and gas in Alberta), that's probably the draw right now.

But I would look to see Vancouver (and B.C.) slowly prop up once the ecosystem starts to build and there's less reliance on the East coast. As more talented engineers start setting up their homes in Vancouver, I'm expecting to see more startups propping up which means more opportunities and thus, the West coast can stand up against its own. It's something that's puzzled me quite abit. Vancouver and B.C. is in a great position to be an economic powerhouse with a close proximity to China, India and Japan. You guys are practically our gateway!

Unfortunately, I'm not too sure about the specifics between the Canadian and US immigration laws. I do know that my relative had a really tough time being recognized as a PR and citizen in the US as she had to prove a number of things. Another relative came to study in Canada and you're allowed to stay as a permanent resident if you can find a job within certain period of time after you graduate. Canada is also part of the Commonwealth so member countries also have privileges to work here and then convert. The TN visas that Canadians can receive may also be another factor.</comment></comment></comment>