Peter Thiel "Drop Out of School Project": Did It Fail? - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2013/09/11/peter-thiel-promised-flying-cars-instead-we-got-caffeine-spray/#60cdb67c2cb6 <comment><USER2> This article is from 2013... that's why it's missing Ethereum et al.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article seems to be done without any significant research there is OYO Rooms, Ethreum and many more founded by Thiel foundation alumni which are unicorns

<comment><USER4> A hotel reservation service is certainly world changing.

<comment><USER5> So is an online bookstore.

<comment><USER4> So if a Thiel fellow had started an online bookstore, you'd think that was a big deal?

<comment><USER6> Parent is talking about Amazon, which started as an online bookstore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ethereum is currently worth >$83B

The 50 biggest YCombinator companies are worth $100B [0], so I'd argue the project does really good.

[0]: [http://blog.ycombinator.com/2017-yc-annual- letter/](http://blog.ycombinator.com/2017-yc-annual-letter/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think it looks like were going to be able to get the author on this thread. So we can get an understanding as to why.

</comment><comment><USER8> Really? According to my research Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, was accepted into that program. Arguably Ethereum is the only 10B+ product - worldwide! - founded in the last 4 years.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd be curious to know why the writer left that out. I'm going to invite him to come join this thread in conversation.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Your experience with companies not responding to applications? - <AUTHOR>

I began looking for a software job earlier this year and came away with a few frustrations, one of which was the fact that many companies either never responded to my application or initial contact, or fell out of contact. In one case I exchanged several emails, completed a dev exercise, and then never heard back even after a few follow-up emails. I wonder how endemic this is to our industry? Is this confined to first-time devs? I'm a remote worker, so is this a casualty of that choice?
Anecdotally, this is what I've found:
- Hacker News: 100% of the emails I've sent responding to job posts on "who's hiring" have led to a response by someone at the company.
- If a job post requests that I send a personal email, I am very likely to receive a response
- If a job post requests that I submit some formal application, I am very unlikely to receive a response or that response takes a very long time (2 weeks or more)
I'm interested to know what others' experience has been. As I'm starting a new job search I feel myself handicapping companies based on how their job process is posted: if it's on HN I'll apply there first; if I'm required to fill out a form, I'll only apply there after my other avenues have been exhausted. I'm not sure that's a healthy practice or if that is actually a good way to preemptively avoid stress and frustration.
Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> Yeah it's a bit strange, but from my understanding anytime there's a job post that requires a formal application, it's due to a crazy high volume of applicants and/or lack of proper staff to handle the volume.

I've found more success through other channels, such as LinkedIn, or approaching in person through a conference that a dev/representative from that company was attending. This latter way you create a rapport, and helps you show that you are willing to give the extra bit of effort.</comment>


Texting Base Launches New Personalized Marketing Automation Platform - <AUTHOR>

So this is my big announcement…many of you are right.  As of right now, Texting Base is officially launched!  For those who don't like to read, that's it!  Click on the link and see why it took so damn long and let me know what you think.  Accounts are free.  No credit card needed.
For those who like stories of craziness feel free to read on.
3 years and 3 months ago, I did one of the craziest things a human being can do…I started a software company with no money.  This might be an OK idea if I were a programmer but is absolutely insane if a person is NOT a programmer.  I am not a programmer.
No one had built a "group texting" platform for businesses where no matter how many people were in the group, each recipient got their own personal message that they could respond to.
Through a series of miracles that have made me reevaluate my place in the Universe and the existence of a higher power, I am pleased to announce Texting Base is finally out the door.
Without putting in your credit card, you can:
-	Create an account
-	Access the system
-	Upload contacts
-	Create groups
-	Evaluate whether I am crazy or onto something
This is a business tool.  Individuals can use it, but please don't tell individuals about it…I don't want to have to deal with anyone I don't know unless they are a larger user.  If I try to support 10,000 individuals by myself, I will have a heart attack in 6 months.
My heart and soul went into a piece of software that I know for a fact will make lives better, save people time and make people money.  I don't want anyone pressured to sign up.  Selling this is not my concern.  I would like people to take a look at the product, provide feedback and refer anyone they think could use this product. <comment><USER2> The following ur throws an error [http://www.textingbase.com/careers](http://www.textingbase.com/careers)

</comment><comment><USER3> I want to look into your service, but there's no link...

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.textingbase.com](http://www.textingbase.com)

Would love your feedback. Thank you.</comment></comment>


Redis 2.0.0 Stable is out - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/redis/wiki/Redis_2_0_0_Changelog?new

<comment><USER2> Congrats, antirez. I know some of us were scared that VMware's acquisition of you would be a bad thing, but you've clearly been doing just fine. Thanks for everything!

<comment><USER3> Thank you guys, we have a wonderful community :)

VMware was really supportive since the start, it's really an impressive experience, they behave _as part_ of the Redis community, it's amazing as when I talk with VMware they just care about stability, documenting Redis well, making users happy.

Another reason why I'm happy about how things are going for Redis is that it is like an utility. Everybody is starting to use it because it does a simple thing, is simple to build and to use. It's not perfect but it is very accessible. I think this is how software should be in the first place, then we'll have more time to improve, but I hope Redis will never lost his "take it simple" soul.

Thanks!

<comment><USER4> Not sure whether you are going to be able to answer this, but I have been interested in how much use Redis has seen internally at VMware.

<comment><USER3> I don't have reliable data at hand, but what I can say is that VMware is starting to use Redis and will do more in the future :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is so exciting. Redis is an exquisite scalpel of scalability for those of us optimizing legacy apps with hundreds of relational tables.

</comment><comment><USER6> MULTI/EXEC (transactions!) Pub/Sub, virtual memory! wooo!

(if you've been running on one of the betas, the change is that WATCH was taken out.)</comment>


A 1942 List of Hitler's Lies (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/05/a-list-of-hitlers-lies-compiled-by-the-office-of-war-information-in-1942.html <comment><USER2> _> 1935_

 _> May 21, Hitler speech to Reichstag:_

 _> "Every war for the subjection or domination of an alien people sooner or later weakens the victor internally and eventually brings about his defeat."_

Hitler predicted his own downfall. Fascinating!

</comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps one of the most ironic Nazi lies was the last planned Nuremberg Rally, entitled the "Rally of Peace". It was planned for September 1939 but was cancelled when Germany invaded Poland:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Rally#Rallies](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Rally#Rallies)</comment>


Ask HN: Benefits of front-end JavaScript frameworks? - <AUTHOR> Serious question: what are some benefits offered by front-end JS frameworks (e.g. React, Vue, etc..) over Django/Rails monolith on the backend and vanilla CSS & JS on the front-end? Do they even try to solve the same problem? <comment><USER2> Look, you're kinda confusing things.

For instance, I work in a lot of projects with Django on the backend and Angular or React on the frontend.

The gist of all that stuff is: REDUCING COMPLEXITY. Tying your hands, so you can free your mind.

As Django and Rails are a way to better organize stuff on the backend, so are those frameworks a way to organize stuff on the frontend.

For instance, take React+Redux or Vue+Vuex: you bind all the transformations on your UI to a single object. All stuff that happens on the UI is a consequence of a transformation on that object.

So: 1) You just gained undo/redo, if you track alterations on your object. 2) You know the state of your application at all times, just looking at the object. You can also keep it and save it for later use.

Now, compare that to something you would do on jQuery. It is a great tool, but it wasn't built with that complexity in mind. So pretty soon you're dealing with actions happening in 5 different places. It gets way harder to wrap your head around it.

<comment><USER3> But just to be clear, it's really a function of what you're building. The answer isn't simply Angular/React good, jQuery bad. (And I'm sorry if I'm being too reductionist)

For example, I'm shocked how many simple static sites are built with React. It makes sense for complex sites, especially with realtime, but it also adds complexity and maintenance issues. Like all engineering decisions, you have to be thoughtful about the tradeoffs.

<comment><USER4> > But just to be clear, it's really a function of what you're building.

110% agree here. Sometimes I just need a simple selector/UI event lib and don't want to fart around with the verbosity of vanilla JS - so I still pull jQuery (slimmed) in for a some things these days. It's non-opinionated with how I use it and it's almost universally understood by JS frontend devs. It's also very cross-platform friendly.

Now for Angular, React, Vue, etc. Some are less opinionated than others, but I spend too much time thinking about how to do something elegantly within the constraints of the framework to "follow suit" with their established best practices.

ALSO - I've seen FAR too many of these frameworks fall out of favor over the years: Knockout, Backbone, blah blah. My product lifecycle requires 3-10 years worth of forward maintenance/support/features and for the last decade jQuery is/has been the most stable and widely adopted option. (think Debian stable sorta mentality - I still have 1.* in the wild... on purpose for legacy browser support)

> For example, I'm shocked how many simple static sites are built with React.

Man - me too. It's like using a pneumatic hammer for a roofing nail. I mean, it works ... _but why...?_

<comment><USER3> Ha ha, I think we shared the same journey — and realizations.

I wrote some reflections during my last experience:

Chasing the Shiny and New [https://www.nemil.com/musings/shinyandnew.html](https://www.nemil.com/musings/shinyandnew.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What you're essentially asking about is building single-page style web apps versus a conventional backend-rendered web site. The question is essentially whether it makes more sense for your site/app to be rendering independent pages one at a time on the server, or to run what is essentially a JavaScript application in the user's browser that communicates to the server via an API as needed.

As a few example reasons, a JavaScript webapp will be similar to a smartphone app, running in an independent environment and talking to the server via API, so if your product is primarily a smartphone app, this may be a good way to go, as you keep the same APIs and test them well.

If your app is mainly about basic CRUD, showing results from DB queries and adding rows, it's probably simpler to build a conventional site - it's fast and easy to do security and data processing on the server, and you don't need the extra steps of retrieving the data, then rending to JSON or something, then unpacking it on the client site and then rendering it into some sort of display.

Anything expected to behave in a highly interactive way is best done as a JS Webapp - reloading pages from the server will crawl if you're clicking around a lot.

None of these are hard and fast rules, and it takes a decent amount of experience with each and knowledge of your business plan to make a good decision.

</comment><comment><USER6> The title of the question says something else & the description says something else.

Anyways I'll try to answer the title "Benefits of front-end JavaScript frameworks"

I wanted to know the same question a year ago so I tried making a site in Vanilla JS. Here is the demo [0] & here is the code [1] & my thoughts when I wrote it [2].

I tried making the application with Vanilla JavaScript without any frameworks & it sucked. I had to do routing. I had to maintain state & the code organization in a single JavaScript file was terrible.

That's why there are frameworks like React/Vue/Angular that help us make it simple. It handles the client state, routing for you & a lot of complex logic. Try making the same application I made using Vanilla JS & then try making it in any framework. It won't require more than a week but you will know why you require a Framework instead of doing it on your own.

In short, if you're not using a Framework, you're building one.

[0]: [https://deadcoder0904.github.io/AMA- reader](https://deadcoder0904.github.io/AMA-reader) [1]: [https://github.com/deadcoder0904/AMA- reader](https://github.com/deadcoder0904/AMA-reader) [2]: [https://100dayz.js.org/2016/12/02/AMA- Reader](https://100dayz.js.org/2016/12/02/AMA-Reader)

</comment><comment><USER7> Managing complex DOM transformations and avoiding pageloads on every change do carry benefits.

Some examples: chat, Facebook-like functionality, complex custom interfaces.

There is however a strong tendency to build complex front-end apps because of the trend to do so. This increased complexity results in higher costs without significant benefits (I'm very open to changing my mind).

Turbolinks for example is a fantastic backend-agnostic library which eliminates the pageloads in CRUD apps at close to zero development costs and makes the speed almost indistinguishable from SPA implementations.

I highly recommend this talk on managing the complexity of basecamp and sharing a codebase between web and native apps.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SWEts0rlezA](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SWEts0rlezA)

Unless you're building extremely complex interfaces and if you are able to correct for trendiness you may conclude that a monolithic app with possibly Turbolinks and some front end sugar is the best choice.

You can always offload some work to the client once you get to a billion users and servers become too expensive. Until then maybe focus on launching.

</comment><comment><USER8> Off load view rendering to the client to lower server costs.

Having different teams for front-end and backend so they can work and update at different paces.

You can update the front end without taking your servers down.

Front-end developers tend to be cheaper than full stack or wholly backend devs. (And many backend/full stack devs HATE html/css/js). Depending on your app, you might do way more work on the front end than backend, so it'd be a waste to hire full stack devs only to make them do all front end work.

Front-end apps can handle spotty internet connections much better, so they work nicely for websites with a lot of mobile traffic.

User experience tends to be snappier since you aren't always waiting for the server to render your view.

<comment><USER9> > Off load view rendering to the client to lower server costs.

Another way to lower server costs is to change tools. Eg, Phoenix renders HTML _much_ more efficiently than Rails due to its use of IO lists.

[http://nathanmlong.com/2016/11/elixir-and-io-lists- part-2-io...](http://nathanmlong.com/2016/11/elixir-and-io-lists-part-2-io- lists-in-phoenix/)

> User experience tends to be snappier since you aren't always waiting for the > server to render your view.

The "Turbolinks" approach of only re-rendering the `<body>` also makes things feel snappy if the server response is fast.

[https://changelog.com/](https://changelog.com/) is a site that uses Phoenix + Turbolinks to achieve a snappy user experience with very little JS. The source is at [https://github.com/thechangelog/changelog.com](https://github.com/thechangelog/changelog.com)

<comment><USER8> Oh, interesting! Thanks for sharing. But there still is a _little_ bit of server load, whereas front-end has 0.

Honestly, unless you're serving billions of pageviews on a very tight budget, I'm not really sure how much of a savings we're talking about here (server side vs. client side rendering).

<comment><USER9> > But there still is a little bit of server load, whereas front-end has 0.

That's true. OTOH, using a front-end framework has downsides, too. You have another framework involved, a big pile of JS that must be downloaded, more build tools, maybe you need to render server-side anyway for first page load...

> I'm not really sure how much of a savings we're talking about here (server > side vs. client side rendering)

Yeah, me either. I think "what's the easiest way to get & maintain the desired user experience?" is probably the best question.

<comment><USER10> Well, Angular has a very heavy initialization penalty, enough that I know of a few companies that ditched it for React. I'll also add, as your front-end becomes more complex and uses a number of different libraries, the bundle becomes huge. There's ways around this of course, but some of pure JS stuff can get ugly quick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In a nutshell, they come in handy when your 'Vanilla JS' involves a lot of changes to the DOM in response to user interactions or other events, and there are many such events.

</comment><comment><USER12> What you're asking is advantages of SPAs over classic web apps.

For example you write only one REST API for all clients: iOS, Android, Web. They can use the same endpoints. Otherwise you need to write separate controllers/views for web templates, which leads to duplication.

<comment><USER13> > What you're asking is advantages of SPAs over classic web apps.

That's not necessarily true. The OP didn't mention anything about server-side rendering. It's quite possible to build a SPA with the aforementioned stack. (Although personally I think jquery offers a lot of benefits over plain JS for DOM manipulation and event handling.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I see two benefits of frontend JS frameworks:

1\. They are highly optimized for DOM changes. You can use plain JS or jQuery to manipulate DOM but that would get expensive.

2\. They provide some semblance Object Oriented code organization to frontend.

For a simple app, these benefits probably are not worth it but for a complex app, these benefits outweigh the cost of these frameworks.

<comment><USER13> > 1\. They are highly optimized for DOM changes. You can use plain JS or > jQuery to manipulate DOM but that would get expensive.

I keep seeing this claim, or similar ones, postulated, but in my extensive experience, using plain JS or JQuery for DOM manipulation has never resulted in noticeably slow performance, even when there was a great deal of DOM manipulation going on.

And if that were the case, I am quite confident in my ability to optimize my own code to make it performant.

<comment><USER15> Agreed. Furthermore, OO style programming is simple enough with plain JS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Many, possibly most, JS frameworks come out of someone's attempt to refactor their vanilla JS DOM manipulating spaghetti code. Once your front end reaches a certain complexity, you end up inventing one of these anyway, so why not use one that's already mature?

If your front end is fairly simple, then I would stick with vanilla JS.

</comment><comment><USER17> I like the approach of having an SPA on top of a REST service back end in that you have two code bases that deal with distinctly different problems/goals, and you focus your attention when working on one side or the other.

When you are working on the back end, you worry about security, data integrity and speed, focusing on "stateless" actions (other than what is kept in a database, perhaps).

When you are working on the front end, you worry about looks and ease of use and maintaining state transitions, with a fallback perhaps of simply reloading a page + route (w/in page) if things go pear shaped. I guess speed is still an issue on the front, but caching and request count reduction seems to handle most of that.

As an added bonus, I like working in an FP style in Javascript more then OOP style in Java, but that puts me in a minority.

</comment><comment><USER10> Front-end frameworks are going to give you a few things: more control over routing, more "app" like behavior, instant state changes (easily done), and most of all: your front end isn't going to be DOM driven. Lets say you're tasked with redesigning an admin area and one really ugly area are forms. Rather than having the logic and styling bound to classes, that functionality is bound to a component. So, for large front-end applications the maintainability can be tremendous. I would say the big 3: maintainability, app like routing, and instantaneous state changes (across diff portions of your app) without doing much work.

With Rails 5, you get the benefit of both. You're not doing your backend in javascript, but it plays nicely with modern front-end libraries and frameworks.

<comment><USER4> > most of all: your front end isn't going to be DOM driven

I get this and all - but I also want to make a _strong_ case for letting the traditional DOM manage application state.

Putting a "component" abstraction between what is being rendered on the front- end often feels like increasing complexity for perceived developer ergonomics and future-proofing your application. The only time I agree with this abstraction is when there is a clear need for insane complexity on the UI - something I actively try to hedge against during design phases. High UIX complexity generally means crap user experience/design.

 _Also_ \- I would argue on how many different ways do we need to address a front-end component + tie data to it..? We've got ID's for singular selection, classes for group selection, HTML5 elements, name attributes, data attributes, etc etc. Yes, I understand that this conflates the UI DOM node's functionality (JS) and styling (CSS) but I've never felt the need to decouple that since they're both addressing/manipulating the same DOM; Which is what I consider the canonical state representation of the front-end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why not both? It's definitely not an either/or, you might have a beefy monolith of a backend and a beefy monolith of a frontend working in tandem for the best possible user experience. It depends on your projects; it depends on your project's needs; it depends on your user's expectations.

> Do they even try to solve the same problem?

They are different tools for different jobs. If a website wants to be, for instance, offline capable (such as a PWA suggests), you need to do more work on the client side. The more work you do on the client side, the more it likely behooves you to use a framework to help you manage that.

Just as you could write "vanilla" Python or Ruby CGI/WSGI instead of Django/Rails on the backend, you might want that framework to help you manage things like routing or template systems or ORM layers or whatever else you rely on the framework for.

Certainly at face value there's some obvious places of overlap there (hence the rise of "universal" or "isomorphic" frameworks where a NodeJS server can do the exact same rendering as a static site as the framework might do client side "live", sharing a lot of code between them), but that also doesn't mean its a competition between front-end versus back-end and even with universal/isomorphic frameworks it turns out the answer really is "both"; there are benefits to doing a lot of work on the server ahead of time _and_ having the client capable of doing all the same work, to share and split the efforts as needed.

</comment><comment><USER19> Not the same problem they do different things.

Most important thing for frontend is mvvm or mv* you get from frameworks and imopsed structure. If you have popup on page where you edit some object in a list updating that object with jquery is mess. Even better if you have the same object property diaplayed in multiple places. You just have one backing model like scope in angular or model in Vue or Knockout. Then DOM or your html is updated automagically by framework. If you add some custom business rules, good luck maintaining it in jQuery or plain js. You would need to have military grade team not usual (as in herding cats) devs.

</comment><comment><USER20> From ASP.NET WebForms / MVC perspective: In my experience, not needing to post back to the server for changing several fields based on state, and in addition the complex state management logic that needs to exist on the server (either in viewstate or manual in MVC) improves the user experience and saves development time.

While the initial set-up of a page in Knockout/Web API takes relative more time, further development takes less time than otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER21> Short answer: maintainability, performance, cross-browser consistency, community plugins, easier developer on-boarding, and framework updates and maintenance (which amplifies most of the previous).

Obviously a lot depends on the complexity of the website, but for the most part, any web _application_ will be better served by a framework. Heck, most static sites can now be amplified by layering on frameworks if done correctly (ie GatsbyJs).

<comment><USER22> > performance – I can see how a SPA may be slower to load initially but use > fewer data and be more interactive later.

> cross-browser consistency \- do you mean that client-side frameworks are > usually well-tested in different [versions of] browsers, much more so than > vanilla javascript?

> community plugins \- do you mean that ecosystems around JS frameworks are > more developed and powerful than around server-side web-frameworks? Can you > elaborate why?

I still can't understand the points behind "maintainability", "easier developer on-boarding" and "framework updates and maintenance" for client-side frameworks.

<comment><USER21> All of that and more.

\- Performance: most major frameworks use a virtual DOM to minimize the number of repaints. Off the top of my head, Vue has computed properties that cache calculations and React has aysnc/priority rendering. I imagine there's a good deal of other stuff.

\- Cross-browser consistency: React has a synthetic event system that normalizes events between all of the different browsers. There's certainly less "gotchas" between browsers than there used to be, but its nice relying on a web framework with a huge testing suite to ensure those "gotchas" are taken care of.

\- Community plugins: I was more alluding to the number of UI components that are available for use. Have you ever tried to make an accessible, styled dropdown menu? How about one with search capabilities or multiple selections? There's a lot of tricky UI components that have been created by the community at large that you can just drop into your application without having to spend a day or two developing and another month or two debugging.

\- Maintainability: front-end frameworks generally come with conventions. They encourage modular, reusable components. This is much more difficult to achieve with vanilla, and if it is achieved, you have in essence created your own "custom" framework.

\- Easier developer ob-boarding: Like I mentioned above -- framework conventions. In addition, framework documentation and examples by the community. You can't run through a bunch of tutorials if Joe Schmoo "winged" the entire front-end code base with vanilla.js.

\- Framework updates: React just released Fiber, a huge update that dramatically lowered the size of the library, increased the perceived rendering performance, and added additional APIs. There is a huge group of open source contributors continuing to perfect that library. That's pretty sweet.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anybody heard back from HP/Palm on the $149 Touchpad? - <AUTHOR>

This came across HN a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3199739<p>I (and many other HNers, I suspect) jumped through the hoops and emailed HP.  I haven't heard a peep.  Has anyone else? <comment><USER2> Received my voucher last night and ordered my touchpad - assuming most others got theirs now too.

</comment><comment><USER3> Got my response and access code today. Got my UPS tracking# in about 1 hour.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nothing here.

</comment><comment><USER5> nothing here (I had emailed the EMEA adress)</comment>


What is your startup? I've got extra money to possibly invest. - <AUTHOR>

So here's the thing. There are so many startups out there that deserve funding, that don't get it. Many of these startups fail due to lack of funding. Yeah, critics can say startups that were meant to be will succeed with or without funding, but I disagree.
So, to be short, tell me what your startup is. I'm interested. Please have a working demo to show.
By the way, if you want to put a face to this I'm @romilpatel <comment><USER2> You know what, I'm not part of a startup. And I probably won't be able to get one going until I have something to start with (monetarily that is). I'm trying to start writing apps for Windows Phone 7, because I think it's going to be a great platform, with a big margin for expansion. Microsoft hasn't really had a great reputation for wireless OSes, but I really think WP7 is a winner.

To tell you the truth, I'm pretty drunk right now, but I'm still confident in my ability to write code. If I just had enough money to buy a WP7 phone and pay for a plan to go with it I would be set. I've been hacking on the emulator so far, but you can't really get a decent sense of how everything works until you actually have a device. I have done an internship over two summers at the same company doing iOS stuff, so I think I can genuinely say that I have a decent amount of experience with mobile development.

My name is Evan, I'm drunk, and I want to start a company. 500 bucks would definitely be enough for me to buy a phone, start developing, and eventually release some products into the wild. Think about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your email address?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I need $20-$40k to purchase a product curation social network. ~500k page views p/m, ~3k p/m revenue :)</comment>


How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day - <AUTHOR> http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-day.html

<comment><USER2> That was interesting. I have written 16 books, but writing has always been a sideline for me, something that is really recreational. I write in variable blocks of time and simply quit when I want.

+1 on the recommendation to use a pad of paper. I write non-fiction (hopefully :-) but I use the blog author's time away from the computer technique all the time. It really saves time in the long run to have an overview before writing a book chapter. [Same technique works for programming also: it is a real mistake to not spend time aways from a computer, with a pad of paper, planning work.]</comment>


HNRSS Down - <AUTHOR> Anyone has an alternative RSS source similar to HNRSS?  It does not seem to work anymore.<p>https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/ <comment><USER2> the site is working for me</comment>


How Fage Lost the Greek-Yogurt War - <AUTHOR> http://adage.com/article/al-ries/fage-lost-greek-yogurt-war/237558/

<comment><USER2> I disagree with this rationale. Americans have distinct tastes from Europeans, notably they like things sweeter. Chobani and a few of the other greek yoghurts taste more like regular yoghurt than Fage, which tastes to me more like what I'd expect in a Mediterranean restaurant.

In addition, Fage is a bit pricier. Not many people are going to pay that premium for yoghurt.</comment>


Did anyone notice 12-bit jpeg? - <AUTHOR> Apparently the jpeg standard was extended to support 12 bits per color channel. Do any cameras support this format? Does any commercial and/or free software support it? I can't even find an example file with high bit-depth to try opening in <random app>. <comment><USER2> I believe that's to support HDR.</comment>


Jason Fried: Why work doesn't happen at work - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/jason_fried_why_work_doesn_t_happen_at_work.html <comment><USER2> Here are some previous submissions of this item:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1951274> : a few comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1951266> : no comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1941149> : no comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1940035> : no comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1938299> : a few comments</comment>


The Power of Prolog [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFFeNyzCEQDS4KCecugmotg/videos <comment><USER2> If anyone is interested in learning Prolog I can recommend two very good Prolog books: The Power of Prolog (from the author of the video)[1] and Simply Logical: Intelligent Reasoning by Example[2]. I also recommend visiting the Awesome Prolog list[3]. Worth checking also interesting extension of the Prolog - Probabilistic Prolog, aka ProbLog[4]. And modern ISO-compatible implementation in Rust language - Scryer Prolog[5].

[1] [https://www.metalevel.at/prolog](https://www.metalevel.at/prolog)

[2] [https://book.simply-logical.space/](https://book.simply-logical.space/)

[3] [https://github.com/klaussinani/awesome- prolog](https://github.com/klaussinani/awesome-prolog)

[4] [https://github.com/ML-KULeuven/problog](https://github.com/ML- KULeuven/problog)

[5] [https://github.com/mthom/scryer-prolog](https://github.com/mthom/scryer- prolog)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing those resources. With both of the books having online versions, I can easily share them with people interested in logic programming in general and Prolog in specific.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would be gladly writing a lot of stuff in a Prolog-like language if there was a dialect that separated rule construction from traversal manipulation. This is such an obvious thing. I should be able to construct a set of rules and then say "but this time, ignore this branch" (without changing the tree with cuts). Or something like "do depth-first for up to 1000 levels and give me the incomplete set of answers".

In SQL you don't change the database simply because you want to run a different query. You manipulate the query, the indices and the query hints.

<comment><USER5> In fact, you can do this with Prolog already, however, you have restrict yourself to the pure monotonic subset. Many parts of Prolog the do not fit can be replaced by purer counterparts. See library(si), library(reif), library(clpz) for such attempts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some big threads, including one from a month ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22804079](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22804079)

2018: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17121028](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17121028)

2017: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14045987](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14045987)

Although one month is well within the year range for duplicates on HN, the videos weren't posted before. Borderline call but we'll leave it up.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone have any stories of how they used Prolog in production to solve an interesting business problem ?

<comment> j-pb Lots of robotics startups are using prolog for planning.

<comment><USER8> I'm very curious about the recent practical applications of prolog, do you have a link to any of these startups' websites or an article commenting about such applications?

<comment> j-pb Off the top of my head, magazino.eu and knowrob.org

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've seen a bit of Prolog in the wild, but never got deep into it. Syntactically it reminds me of Erlang. Are they at all similar?

<comment><USER10> Early Erlang was based on prolog.

<comment><USER11> More specifically, the first Erlang compiler was written in prolog, and it inherited a lot of its syntax and some of its features.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Resources for Adding Game-Like Elements - <AUTHOR>

I'm starting work on a project where I'm going to need to incorporate some game-like elements to help users motivated to both interact with the application/community as well as motivate themselves.
I know this has been a popular topic over the last year or two, and a ton has been written, but I have no idea what's good or bad since I've never incorporated those sorts of elements into something I was working on.
I don't necessarily want thinks labeled as gamification, since that is pretty new and a lot of the techniques have been around much longer.
I'd really appreciate any links to articles, books, sites, HN threads, or software (esp. written in python!) that you think would be helpful.
To start things off, I've been looking at (but can't vouch for): - AskBot, a StackExchange clone ( https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel )
- Badgeville.  seems like they know what they're doing, but I was a bit sketched out by having to give them contact info to find out more than superficial details.  ( http://www.badgeville.com/ )
- https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges/About -- This is interesting, although I may have privacy concerns which would keep me from integrating it.
- FourSquare -- I just signed up since I hadn't been using it, and it seems to be the poster child for making things into a game
Again, any help would be appreciated! <comment><USER2> We're just starting out (in beta) but we'd be happy to help. Our site focuses on providing simple game mechanics for any site. Visit our site <http://www.uplaude.com> and feel free to send me an email frank at uplaude.com if you have any questions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi there. Check our our platform at IActionable. <http://iactionable.com></comment>


Can Wikileaks cause the end of the Internet as we know it? - <AUTHOR>

We are watching an interestingly dangerous event unfold right before out eyes:  The internet being used for cyber-terrorism and cyber-extortion.  This is dangerous, very dangerous and it can potentially lead to a, perhaps justifiable, hammer coming down hard in the form of legislation, controls and regulation that none of us want.
Maybe this marks the end of an "innocent" era on the internet.  I don't know.  Whether you think that the people behind Wikileaks are ideologically right or wrong, it is hard to argue that this has the potential to cause a lot of damage to the internet community.  The "free" part of the internet might very well be at stake at some levels.
Is this a time for internet power-players to join forces to, effectively, find a way to extinguish the wikileaks fire?  I don't know.
What is true is that their continued actions are tantamount to messing with the bull.  The problem is that we might all get the horns in various forms, not just them.  It doesn't take much to shut down the internet, particularly if government bodies suddenly decide that there are national security risks at hand.  Think about that for a moment when you decide to support or aid these morons in any way at all.
I don't know about you, but I have zero interest in the internet becoming highly controlled and regulated.  That's one of the risks here. <comment><USER2> > The internet being used for cyber-terrorism and cyber-extortion.

That it is news to you does not mean it is news. This has been going on for many years now.

> This is dangerous, very dangerous and it can potentially lead to a, perhaps > justifiable, hammer coming down hard in the form of legislation, controls > and regulation that none of us want.

Good luck with that. The only country in the world that has a chance of effecting such is China and if we change to become China then I think we can safely conclude that we were wrong all along about censorship and such.

What I would hope for (and here I am probably hopelessly naive again) is that the governments the world over will learn that the days of secrets that will never come out or will only come out after you're safely dead is definitely over.

There is a chance that this will lead to a backlash but I think the value of the internet as it is right now vastly exceeds the value of the internet as it might become under those circumstances and I would expect a large enough number of people to recognize the 'bureau of censorship' when such appears.

> Maybe this marks the end of an "innocent" era on the internet.

The innocent era of the internet ended with the establishment of the .com top level domain, since then it's been a long and steady slide towards a more hostile environment, and it will take a while before protocols and infrastructure have been hardened to the point where this kind of thing can be dealt with.

I would not over-react based on this occurrence, though no doubt, like any other fear it will be played for maximum effect.

> it is hard to argue that this has the potential to cause a lot of damage to > the internet community.

I think you meant the opposite, but as you wrote it I agree with you ;)

> Is this a time for internet power-players to join forces to, effectively, > find a way to extinguish the wikileaks fire? I don't know.

And how would you propose they do that ?

> What is true is that their continued actions are tantamount to messing with > the bull.

It is ? I think they've done not too much worse than what the court jester used to be able to do with impunity: show the powers that be that there are limits to their power.

This too shall pass.

> I don't know about you, but I have zero interest in the internet becoming > highly controlled and regulated. That's one of the risks here.

Are you planning on moving to China ? If so you can find out first hand how highly controlled and regulated the internet _could_ be. But if wikileaks could bring that about in the 'free' (I use the term lightly) West then we all deserve what we get.

<comment><USER3> For the Internet, squeezing it down now would be both impossible and unacceptable. Cyber-threats have existed as long as electronic communications, but what makes them more troubling now is the every-where, always-on nature of global communications networks. The real threat is when a coordinated, well planned attack is launched--because nobody is quite sure either how to stop one, or how (or against whom) to retaliate. I wrote THE CHINESE CONSPIRACY as a fictional "thriller" to illustrate how it could be done, using only "known" technologies in a well organized, multi-year plan. I hope it doesn't happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I believe WikiLeaks has highlighted two important weaknesses of the Internet.

1) The DNS situation. It shows how fragile internet navigation is, and the recent discussion (and growing success) of a distributed DNS protocol is trying to fix it.

2) DDoS attacks. Less than one thousand people (figures in another article on HN) should not be able to take down the websites of multi-billion dollar companies, regardless of the botnet and continued hammering.

The solution to #1 is trying to quell such fears as you described.

</comment><comment><USER5> I agree with the possibility of increased control, and that it could be a very bad thing. I disagree with the notion that we should choose to not support Wikileaks based on that chance.

If the politicians are acting like children throwing tantrums, we need to curtly explain to them that this is not appropriate behavior. Giving them lollipops will appease them and shut them up for now, but will only encourage their bad habits and make things worse farther down the road when they've come to expect such treatment.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think freedom (as in speech) is deeply embedded in the very fabric of the Internet.

I believe that regulation is inevitable, but I applaud any force that encourages law makers to abide by the laws they create.

EDIT: FWIF I don't think the DDoS is helpful; that should be illegal if it isn't already.</comment>


Tax the Hell Out of Wall Street and Give it to Main Street - <AUTHOR> http://blogmaverick.com/2010/05/06/tax-the-hell-out-of-wall-street/

<comment><USER2> Another proposal to try to change people's behavior through the tax code.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bump.</comment>


Dart back end for Ceylon - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jvasileff/ceylon-dart <comment><USER2> What's the point if Ceylon already compiles to Javascript?

<comment><USER3> I can think of at least 3 reasons:

\- it's a fun project, if you're into that sort of thing

\- dart has a VM, so you can run server side applications on it

\- more bragging points for ceylon, as it confirms their design as a VM independent language

Now, it would be fun to compare the javascript code produced by ceylon directly with the one produced by the the dart compiler.

<comment><USER4> You can run server side applications in JavaScript too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ceylon is such a mess. Kotlin won the "alternative JVM race" anyway.

</comment><comment><USER5> They don't even support Android, and now they prioritize Dart. HAHAHAHAHA.</comment>


Show HN: An ASCII art music video animated with JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://clad.band/ <comment><USER2> I don't know what I was expecting, but I was a little disappointed that the ASCII art seems to be generated from actual video. (I assume?)

When I first clicked the link I guess in my head I was stressing the _art_ part of ASCII art, and was expecting something other than a super-low-res version of regular video. I was imagining something more hand-crafted. Or at least more visually interesting (like that lego-ized bit in that White Stripes video, which was probably done from real video too I suppose, but surely with manual support in some way).

That said, the video-to-ASCII-art tech is actually pretty neat (and looks like more than a naive convert-to-grayscale-and-map-to-characters approach that I've seen for still images).

And so is the idea of displaying music video via live JavaScript, although that part didn't actually work for me, I had to use the YouTube link to view it.

This probably says more about me than the linked video though. It is pretty cool and creative overall.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking it out. I'm absolutely not a true ASCII artist, so my primary method of creating the images was rotoscoping an initial frame of video, then duplicating and adjusting each frame by hand after that. I'd love to see some proper animated ASCII art by someone more talented than me!

<comment><USER3> Great work though :-) Anybody looking for an easy, web-based editor to create animated ASCII art and export them to animated GIFs try my side-project [https://animasci.com/](https://animasci.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Related - AC/DC had released the music video for their song 'Rock n roll train' as an Excel spreadsheet [https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music- news/ac-dc-turn-roc...](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/ac-dc- turn-rock-n-roll-train-into-worlds-first-excel-video-79807/)

</comment><comment><USER5> While the size of this file is >64kb, it reminds me of the demoscene which does impressive stuff like this, but with much less space. If you're not familiar, this is an introduction [https://www.slideshare.net/dfox288/introduction-to-the- demos...](https://www.slideshare.net/dfox288/introduction-to-the-demoscene)

</comment><comment><USER6> I like this aesthetic used in new ways, like [https://boniver.withspotify.com/](https://boniver.withspotify.com/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I like how the presentation is sometimes ambiguous because of the low resolution. For example I first thought the black lines coming out of the skull (or was it a skull?) were ants but then they started sprouting blossoms. Very nice effect!

</comment><comment><USER8> Anyone remember rickrolling over telnet?

Or this: [https://github.com/keroserene/rickrollrc](https://github.com/keroserene/rickrollrc) (Not over telnet, but same effect.)

</comment><comment><USER9> I can't find the play button, but the video on youtube looks cool.

<comment><USER10> yeah, website doesn't work but looks cool

<comment><AUTHOR> The play button should be above the video. It might be getting pushed off- screen if the viewport is wide but not too tall. I should have been less lazy with the CSS which currently only takes into account screen width for resizing the various page elements. I'll make some adjustments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like your music! Reminds me of early Sikth :)

<comment><USER12> +1 for the music. I'm not usually into this genre but I could see me adding this to my playlist

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This was awesome, great job.

</comment><comment><USER14> Url changed from [https://github.com/bejd/clad- ascii](https://github.com/bejd/clad-ascii) to the project page, which is nicer.</comment>


Snap Jumps in Debut After App Maker Raises $3.4B in IPO - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-02/snap-opens-at-24-a-share-well-above-the-17-dollar-offer-price <comment><USER2> I'm happy for the NYSE that this went well. SNAP has done some pretty large volume so far with no problems.

Interestingly enough, well atleast to someone who cares about the cash equity markets, the NYSE actually did a test run last week to try and simulate the chaos that occurs during any hot IPO.

So now we know that there is atleast some appetite for shares with no controlling interest and no indication of paying out a dividend any time soon. A current market cap of 30 Billion is a pretty darn big accomplishment!

Two big dates in the future to look out for.......

1) July 30 when the first lockup date is over. I'm not sure how many shares come off restriction.

2) May 15 when they do their first earnings report.

I'm interested to see if they try and make people view the company via GAAP accounting(PnL) or non GAAP measures like engagement, monthly users, etc.

<comment><USER3> > So now we know that there is atleast some appetite for shares with no > controlling interest and no indication of paying out a dividend any time > soon. A current market cap of 30 Billion is a pretty darn big > accomplishment!

This is really disturbing. I don't know if its an indicator of too much money in the market, or just the fact that the market itself has expanded so much. Why would investors be OK with losing power?

<comment><USER4> It could be an indicator that a lot of people invest without regard for foundational questions like "does this valuation make sense" or "does my ownership interest grant me any control of the company?"

And I'll be the first to raise my hand on that front. On the face of it, I'm not really interested in owning a stock like this. But I've stopped picking stocks entirely, now I just invest in the stock market through index funds. And there are a lot of people like me -- enough that Vanguard funds own about 5% of just about every public company you can name. People like me are essentially saying, "We don't really care what this company does, how much it costs, or whether its stock can vote, we want to own 5% of it." (And that's just Vanguard -- there are plenty of other passive funds out there, too.)

In an IPO that sells 10 or 15% of the company, these "buy at any price" investors can eat up a pretty big chunk of the available shares. So all it takes is a few investors to say, "yes, we want to buy at this valuation," and the rest of us will blindly follow.

<comment><USER5> Is Snap big enough that indexes tracking the S&P 500 would buy up Snap?

If not, what index funds would?

<comment><USER6> > Is Snap big enough that indexes tracking the S&P 500 would buy up Snap?

With the risk of stating the obvious... index _funds_ tracking the S&P 500 _index_ buy exactly the 500 stocks that form the index, no more no less (modulo some derivatives that are highly correlated with the index).

So they will buy Snap whenever S&P decides to include Snap in the S&P 500 index. Snap has already surpassed the minimum necessary market cap (~U$5 billion). There are other criteria, but ultimately the inclusions and exclusions are decided by committee [0]. When they do decide change the index, they announce it well ahead of the date when the change is effective.

[0] S&P U.S. Indices Methodology [http://us.spindices.com/documents/methodologies/methodology-...](http://us.spindices.com/documents/methodologies/methodology- sp-us-indices.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This $27.8 billion dollar valuation tells me that somewhere along the line, my job and lifestyle have caused me to detach from a significant chunk of society. I've never used Snap or their platform. I don't even really know what the benefit of their service. I am curious if I'm in the minority or if there's lots of developers like me who aren't able to comprehend these valuations.

<comment><USER8> > my job and lifestyle have caused me to detach from a significant chunk of > society

Yeah, the 13-21-year-old chunk of society. Do you, as a Linux Kernel Developer, happen to be within that demographic? Even their IPO roadshow video (which I see has now been removed) talks about their "13-34-year-old" user base, and then emphasizes the far higher levels of engagement and far higher potential among the lower half of that range.

<comment><USER9> Sure the bulk of their users are young, but several of the people I follow are betweeen 28 and 45.

It's not like Snapchat is an esoteric thing. Using it can be a function of how outgoing and expressive you are. Or if you have some purpose.

The same reason you post on Hacker News is why people post on Snapchat -- to interact with others.

<comment><USER10> Posting on HN (or reddit, or...) will never die, because you get to correct people who are wrong on the internet. Snap not so much...

<comment><USER11> I don't think that's quite right. Snapchat does have a chat feature which allows you to essentially send feedback on peoples snaps/stories, so you could absolutely tell people they're wrong for making some statement.

<comment><USER12> I think it was a joke.

<comment><USER13> I think it was a joke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I know that the Snapchat platform is worth something, it has high engagement and adoption of 18-24 year old age segment, and that is worth a lot in terms of attention and advertising $s.

However, this just feels completely out of proportion to earnings and downside does not seem priced in. Willing to be proved wrong of course, but especially seeing as they are non voting shares, I cannot understand this pricing.

<comment><USER8> And that's not their only product:

Bitmoji has been the #1 iPhone app overall since January 11, and it was already the #1 iPhone Utility app since July 22, 2016 (Log in to see) -

[https://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/bitmoji-keyboard- your-...](https://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/bitmoji-keyboard-your- avatar/rank- history/#vtype=day&countries=US&start_date=2014-09-09&end_date=2017-03-02&device=iphone&view=rank&lm=7)

[https://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/top/united- states/overall/...](https://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/top/united- states/overall/iphone/)

And yesterday on eBay, 22 pairs of Spectacles were sold, with one pair went for $229 and 2 others went for $200 each, even though [http://www.spectacles.com](http://www.spectacles.com) has been offering them for $130 since last Monday -

[http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?LH_Complete=1&LH_Sold=1&_from...](http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?LH_Complete=1&LH_Sold=1&_from=R40&_sacat=0&_nkw=snapchat+spectacles&_sop=13)

Then there is the rumored Android Snap Phone:

[http://mashable.com/2017/02/14/snapchat-phone-concept- design...](http://mashable.com/2017/02/14/snapchat-phone-concept-design- mediakix/#yE1hJFZjZPqp)

And Snap Drones, as reported on page 2 of today's NYTimes -

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/technology/snapchat- drone...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/technology/snapchat-drone.html)

[http://i.imgur.com/6Nl0Ymq.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/6Nl0Ymq.jpg)

<comment><USER15> Trend moving from So(cial)-Lo(cal)-Mo(bile) to AI-AR-Dr(one)-SDR(self driving)

<comment><USER8> That is actually quite brilliant. Did you just make that up? I can't find it in Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The SNAP thesis I like the best is - "Twitter-like growth with FB ARPU".

The monetization potential of this company is massive (geofilters, sponsored content, hardware with spectacles, etc.) and there's no direct comp for that. Pokemon Go showed us the bleeding of digital to physical, and Snap has the potential to be the first company to unlock value from it (ex. geofilters). Plus you can view SNAP as a call option on AR and their potential to be the main camera (when something exciting happens, which app do you open first? For at least in my social circle its by far Snapchat not the Camera app/twitter/etc).

That being said, they face a massive threat from Instagram Stories and now WhatsApp Stories. Though a caveat - while their DAU growth has slowed, it's actually been in international markets primarily (and I think wrongly they don't care enough about dealing with low-bandwith, "unexciting" users). If they can keep a healthy growth in US to escape the FB threat they can afford to lose internationally.

Their first 1-2 earning report will be very revealing for SNAP b/c the expectations have been set and I'm looking for them to do the following: 1) Raise ARPU at similar rates 2) Maintain healthy DAU growth in the US 3) Create new product innovation around AR/Spectacles/Lenses.

If they don't hit at least one of those goals (and preferably two or all three), than I would be very concerned for them.

<comment><USER17> >Pokemon Go showed us the bleeding of digital to physical

It also showed how quickly a popular phenomenon can loose cultural relevance.

>when something exciting happens, which app do you open first? One that doesn't automatically delete the photo I took of the exciting thing by default

<comment><USER16> I'd argue it was poor/slow execution that led Pokemon Go to lose cultural relevance. If they had introduced more pokemon, ability to trade/battle, etc. they would still be highly relevant and a behemoth today.

When I post to Stories I also post to "Memories" so everything is saved on the app. Plus I usually go back to snapchat and save pictures from my story manually if I want to have it saved locally. Most people I know do the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My favorite tweet about the whole situation: [https://twitter.com/objective_neo/status/736530568222015489](https://twitter.com/objective_neo/status/736530568222015489)

<comment><USER19> That was my sentiment five years ago for Instagram.

9 Apr 2012

2008:Sun buys MySQL for $1B. 2012:Facebook buys Instagram for $1B. DB tech running half the web+revenue vs hipster photo filter app+no rev.

<comment><USER20> I saw pretty easily how Instagram could be worth a billion to FB, who has a social network and wants to expand their user base / stop competition from rising.

I don't understand how these shares that pay no dividend and give no voting power are worth $24 each. They are basically "SnapChat Fun Bucks." Anyone buying it just hoping another person down the line will pay more for it. On top of that, we know there's a large number of people holding it (employees) that are going to start selling their shares over the next year.

I just don't get how this has any value at all.

<comment><USER21> Short it if you truly believe the stock will go down. Easy money ;).

<comment><USER20> I'm humble (and risk averse) enough to admit I could be wrong. But it baffles me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can someone comment as to what kind of payday this IPO translates to for say the 30th engineer hired by Snap? (I realize that this is impossible to answer accurately, and that there is still a 4 month lockup)

<comment><USER23> Interviewed with Snapchat about 3-4 years ago (sub-100 employees). Did not get an offer, but their interview process was pretty standard and professional. They were giving out 0.001% equity at the time. I'd say it would come out to 250k-500k, but it's very hard to extrapolate.

They were already a mega hit with like 10 employees so I doubt anyone that hasn't been there super early (like first 5 employees) will become a millionaire off this IPO.

<comment><USER24> Assuming the founders held 30%, the employee equity was 1/30,000th that of founders. I don't understand how engineers are ok with their boss getting 30,000X their compensation.

<comment><USER23> First, equity isn't compensation, it's ownership. Second, it's about risk. Third, it's about luck.

So, if you get paid a market salary and benefits, you can't really expect to own much of the company that's providing you with that salary and benefits as it's essentially burning money on you. If you came in and said "can I get 1% ownership if I take 15k a year with no benefits" that would be a different story, but that's not how this works.

<comment><USER25> I don't know about years prior, but Snapchat's executive team is making over a million a year. Not much risk at this point.

<comment><USER23> My comment was in the context of engineering (as that's what I interviewed for). Executive-level positions are a lot more nuanced.

<comment><USER26> Could you expand upon the nuances?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm a light snapchat user (send/receive ~100 snaps/week and post to my story every 3-4 days) and I have a question about its value as an advertising platform. I always skip the ads, and I don't know anyone else who uses snapchat who does't immediately skip the ads. When I do this, is it counted as an impression? I can't imagine advertisers would be happy to know that the ads can be skipped. Also I never use the Discover page and I don't know anyone who does. Yes, I'm one person and this is an anecdote but hopefully advertisers are getting valid engagement metrics.

<comment><USER28> I've wondered this as well, but my guess is that they'll go the Youtube route and make the ads less and less skippable over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think it's generally appropriate to view events like this SNAP IPO as loudly hyped introductions of new vehicles for financial speculation.

SNAP is a shiny new toy for traders and market-makers.

We won't know how the public market truly values SNAP until, IMHO, maybe 12-24 months from now.

</comment><comment><USER30> Snap employees got screwed.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/antonio-garcia-martinez- chaos...](http://www.businessinsider.com/antonio-garcia-martinez-chaos- monkeys-lessons-from-facebooks-ipo-for-snap-stock-pop-2017-3)

</comment><comment><USER31> Economics novice here. How did we get such a huge difference (40%!) between the IPO price and the current price, when both sides had $3.4 billion at stake on getting that price "right"? Is there some huge information disparity here?

Moreover, if investors feel that $24 a share is a fair price, why weren't they swooping in before the IPO and, say, offering $20 a share for the whole chunk?

Sorry if this seems like a ridiculous question, but it seems to me like there should be some extremely large free market force (on the order of $1.4 billion) preventing the founders and employees from missing out on all that money. Am I wrong?

<comment><USER32> > Moreover, if investors feel that $24 a share is a fair price, why weren't > they swooping in before the IPO and, say, offering $20 a share for the whole > chunk?

Well, they were. When a company IPOs, it doesn't sell its stock directly on the market - it sells it to intermediary bankers, who buy it at a price that they think will lock in profit for them when _they_ sell it at the opening bell. (In addition, the early purchasers are also other bankers and trading firms - as an individual, there's zero chance that you'll get the IPO price unless the stock flatlines when it opens).

So, from the company's perspective, the ideal situation is to price that as high as possible, and actually overshoot the market price - that way, they leave no money on the table, and they can raise as much as possible for the number of shares they're selling. In that case, the share price will drop a few minutes after the opening bell, and it'll close trading that day somewhere below the opening price.

Note that that's exactly what happened with Facebook ($FB), and the bankers were pissed off. That's why you saw so many articles about the Facebook IPO being a "failure" at the time. It wasn't a failure for Facebook - they made a ton of money! It was a failure for the bankers who wanted to make a profit on the resale, and instead sold those shares at a loss.

I'm oversimplifying, because there was a lot of other stuff that went into the Facebook IPO that complicated it[0], but that's the general idea.

[0] a lot of people learned the meaning of the "reverse greenshoe" that day!

<comment><USER31> Hmm. To me that just shifts the questions to the bankers.

If people (who don't know anything the bankers don't know) value the stock at $24, shouldn't there also be competing bankers willing to offer $20 a share for the whole lot, igniting a bidding war that converges roughly near the real price?

Obviously bankers need to make some money. But I don't see how this kind of deal has anywhere near a $1.4 billion dollar overhead, and I'm just boggled by the scale of the disparity.

<comment><USER32> > If people (who don't know anything the bankers don't know) value the stock > at $24, shouldn't there also be competing bankers willing to offer $20 a > share for the whole lot, igniting a bidding war that converges roughly near > the real price?

Yes, though with a discount factor applied due to the risk involved. And particularly for a high-profile IPO like $SNAP, and one in which a lot of the sellers on Day 1 will be casual retail investors placing market orders[0], it's hard to gauge exactly how much hype there will be.

[0] ie, as opposed to limit orders

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> As an user in their target age (18-24) I have to say that since Instagram started introducing features like stories and stickers the activity in my Snapchat has diminished enormously. I would say 50-70% less activity.

I don't know if it's something specific to my social circle or more widespread but anyway it's been impressive

<comment><USER34> Plus facebook just rolled out the same feature on WhatsApp. Which has, what, 1 billion active users as well?

Facebook is going full-throttle trying to compete against snap.

<comment><USER35> It's extremely clear that Facebook is setting itself up for an anti-trust action in the next few years. Their very aggressive leveraging of their near- monopoly in social to try to kill Snapchat, will be viewed in hindsight similar to Microsoft attacking Netscape with its OS position. If Facebook succeeds, it'll leave them with an overwhelming monopoly in social, there's no scenario under which they won't be pursued by the government thereafter. Plus, you can bet Snapchat and its investors will begin to howl loudly the harder Facebook presses.

Zuckerberg's lust for market domination, will unravel or stagnate his kingdom if he's not very careful. His behavior at this point is looking ever more Gates-like when it comes to trying to knock-off the competition while possessing a near-monopoly (you can do one or the other, but if you're a $400b company and you try to both kill all your competition while having such a position, good luck).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Reminds me of Facebook IPO, a lot of people were claiming it will plunge and eventually go bankrupt. But companies with such big daily active audience that can be targeted with ads are here to stay.

<comment><USER37> Considering it went smoothly it doesn't remind me of Facebook's IPO at all. Twitter should be all the evidence you need of how hard it is to succeed selling advertising to a big audience. Snap might crush it, but I would give them a few earnings reports before comparing them to anyone.

<comment><USER38> Facebook's market debut showed that Facebook did an excellent job controlling and pricing the IPO. Banks complaining -> Facebook and insiders won.

This debut just shows that Snapchat wasn't in the driver's seat. Major holders are still mega wealthy though.

<comment><USER37> No, it was a disaster that led to years of litigation. NASDAQ admitted it was their technical error and paid millions to settle lawsuits stemming from it.

This obsession by techies that you're leaving money on the table if your shares go up after an IPO is bizarre.

<comment><USER39> > This obsession by techies that you're leaving money on the table if your > shares go up after an IPO is bizarre.

If the company gets $X/share at the beginning of the day, and bankers get $X * 1.5/share at the end of the day, that feels like a big donation to Wall Street. If I'm an investor, I'd rather the company have all the capital than 2/3rds of the capital as well. It feels like if a company would sell a portion of the offering through the traditional channels, and the remainder at market prices throughout the first couple days of trading, it might better capture investment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> A lot of the comments in this thread are missing the point. No one cares if you use Snapchat, no one cares if you like Snapchat. The question is how much market space can Snapchat occupy, and will their bets on new technology (VR, drones, etc) work out.

</comment><comment><USER41> I wonder how much of this is investors with a good understanding of Snap's potential buying because they feel it's a good gamble versus stock market investors not having many opportunities to invest in tech startups because there's so few IPOs.

</comment><comment><USER42> I can't help but think the title should be "Nude selfies startup IPO values firm at $20 billion"

<comment><USER43> Turns out people really want nude selfies.

<comment><USER42> Many thousands of those (so I have heard) can be found on Tumblr. I think it means "people really want to take secure nude selfies".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Ouch, so they collect $1.4 billion less than they could have if they're priced their stock higher.

</comment><comment><USER45> Can someone explain to me how Snap can be valued this much?

I feel like I was asleep for 50 years and I just woke up and I have no idea how society works.

Don't they make a little sexting app? What happened!

<comment><USER46> [https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1564408/000119312517...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1564408/000119312517029199/d270216ds1.htm)

<comment><USER45> Not very helpful.

This is in their timeline: "Lenses launch on Snapchat. Users barf rainbows for the first time".

I feel even more confused.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> ITT: I don't have a Visa card, how can they be worth $1T?

<comment><USER34> Well, VISA only has a $200 billion marketcap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I don't understand how the existence of Snap adds over $30B of utility to the economy.

<comment><USER49> > I don't understand how the existence of [any company ever] adds over [their > current valuation] of utility to the economy; furthermore, if [company] fell > of the face of the earth, everyone would just switch to [their competitor], > and life would resume ut fit. Peter Thiel's quote should be updated: We > wanted flying cars, instead we got 1̶4̶0̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶r̶a̶c̶t̶e̶r̶s > [trivialization of product's value].

These comments surface every time a company goes public. You may have some valuable information driving this viewpoint underneath, but from this comment it just sounds like useless trolling.

To me at least, Snap seems like a good company with cultish user-base. They have done a good job integrating ads and rich content (some paid content) into their core UX. A difficult feat which Twitter still hasn't solved to this day. They also have an interesting perspective on live events that even FB/Instagram has failed to replicate.

<comment><USER48> I had removed the last part from the comment as to seem less trollish, so please forgive me for coming across as such. Anyway, since you asked, here is my formalized argument: (1) [falsifiable axiom] You cannot have meaningful economic growth without technological innovation. Technological innovation is improving the efficiency of existing resources or increasing the availability of resources as compared to previous eras (colloquially, "doing more with less"). (2) [falsifiable axiom] Historically, only the most valuable companies of a given era are technologically innovative. (3) [falsifiable axiom] Under the current valuation, Snap Inc. is currently one of the most valuable companies. (4) [falsifiable axiom] Snap Inc. is not technologically innovative. (5) [logical conclusion given axioms] Snap Inc. should not be valued as one of the most valuable companies of this era.

<comment><USER50> Kids like it. Shouldn't that count for something? You might as well question why video games, or professional sports, or Hollywood, or any other form of commercial entertainment generates so much money.

<comment><USER48> Haha, that's exactly my point! I do question why the entertainment industry siphons so much capital away from other, more productive endeavors. Perhaps no one has any good ideas on how to create the future, so we might as well throw it all at beer and sports.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> This is going to open the floodgates for so many smaller startups that have been waiting to IPO. 2017 is going to be an exciting year for anyone with equity.

</comment><comment><USER52> Santa Monica and Venice are going to get even more expensive in 6 months.

<comment><USER53> Snap is now trying to grow out of Venice because they've already businified/gentrified/grown too much and are getting a lot of local hate

<comment><USER50> Makes me wonder if Spiegel will bite the bullet and open up a SV office, like Tinder has.

<comment><USER54> Snap already has an SF office.

<comment><USER50> Wait, where?!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Snap Interactive, which an unrelated company, also saw a bunch of trading due to the IPO [1]. I'm sure this kind of name confusion happens a lot.

[1] [http://finance.yahoo.com/chart/STVI](http://finance.yahoo.com/chart/STVI)

</comment><comment><USER56> Hopefully now they have no excuse not to implement end-to-end encryption in their app.

</comment><comment><USER57> I would only look at this stock after the first year. Having followed some of the previous high profile IPOs, we will see what happens after their employees are able to dump stock after the first year.

</comment><comment><USER8> The stock is now showing up online:

[http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SNAP](http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SNAP)

[http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/snap](http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/snap)

Not on Google Finance yet:

[https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:SNAP](https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:SNAP)

</comment><comment><USER58> Ignorance is bliss in a world where half the people at YC could develop the core snap chat app in a week.

<comment><USER8> This point was addressed on HN by user ChuckMcM in November 2013, right after Spiegel rejected Zuckerberg's buyout attempt:

> The focus here is on the tech and not the market. A pet rock was 'worthless' > (the rock was just a rock) but the connection with a generation was > valuable. So often in our business we look at something that we feel like we > could build (or could be easily built) and a valuation, and focus on those > two things. The parts we don't see we give little value to (350M snaps? > Seriously? That is a boat load of engagement). Making anything that get 350M > 13-23 yr olds engaged is a pretty huge deal. That is what is valuable with > Snapchat, not the tech.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6671371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6671371)

<comment><USER17> The pet rock was also only on sale for about a year before being discontinued due to poor sales.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Reminds me of Twitter IPO... just wait.

<comment><USER17> I think this will be worse. Snapchat isn't nearly as culturally sticky as Twitter. Sites like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook have a robust friend/follower system, and users have a huge backlog of things they contributed to the platforms. No contributions on Snapchat last more than a single day, so what is motivating users to stay on the platform instead of using Facebook or Instagram's offerings? Their friends lists exist both of those places too. In 10 years we'll look back on Snapchat as a flash in the pan.

<comment><USER60> I think Snap has potential to be huge… anything that wins the race to replace TV is going to be big. Whether they can do it before FB clones them/leverages their network is a big open question.

That said, despite the fact that I love Twitter more than any other network, almost none of my friends use it maybe ~a dozen people I know closely in real life still post to it. Almost all of my friends use Snapchat and complain about my lack of engagement with it.

Anecdotal, but I don't think they are comparable… additionally if your (likely closer nit group of vs. FB's "everyone you know") friends aren't posting, brands are putting up a TON that people seem to really like.

<comment><USER17> Snap is the last thing that would replace TV. Nobody sits down and spends a consecutive hour on Snapchat

<comment><USER61> Neither does anyone an hour watching TV anymore? Everyone within the age range 18-30 in the US definitely spends more time on Snapchat than TV right now.

<comment><USER62> The popularity of HBO prestige dramas would contradict that... plenty of people watch hour long shows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I can't help but remember this Frontline from 2002

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4TlmkhE3Mw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4TlmkhE3Mw)

Is Snapchat really worth more than CBS? More than Thomson Reuters? Intuit? HP? Nokia? Discover? EA? Why?

</comment><comment><USER64> Looks like they are going to close with a market cap approximately three times that of Twitter...

<comment><USER43> It's interesting to compare the two IPOs. Twitter opened at $26 and closed at $44 at a valuation of $25bn. Twitter had $650M revenue in 2013 for EBITDA of -$525M. Snap closed at $28bn valuation, had $404M in revenue in 2016, and EBITDA of -$460M. Twitter had roughly 100M DAUs and 230M MAU whereas Snap has 150M DAU and over 300M MAU. Snap is also 2 years younger than Twitter was and the number of minutes spent on the platform per user is much higher.

So, all the numbers are wacky and who knows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Can we take a second to laugh at the guys wearing spectacles on the trading floor at 9am?

</comment><comment><USER66> What is the justification for celebrating the big jump in first day price? Why isn't it a condemnation of the banks who got SNAP to leave a lot of money on the table?

</comment><comment><USER67> I wonder how much child pornography goes through snapchat. Given the demographics of their users, I'd bet it's quite a lot. Seems like a pretty major business risk.

<comment><USER35> You're incorrect, it's a near-zero business risk. The laws regarding how to deal with it are well developed at this point. Reddit, Imgur, Google, Facebook, Instagram, Viber, Kik, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Twitter etc - all have or have had a similar challenge in dealing with it in regards to scale, but in the case of Google or Facebook they're dealing with a drastically larger scale problem than Snapchat will ever see. All Snapchat has to do is follow the same laws that all the other hundreds of popular Internet companies do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> SNAP's real value lies in its future as an augmented reality company. They've spent something close to $1B in R&D - likely going toward hardware or something...

<comment><USER69> what gave it away? was it the VR hardware announcement they made a few months ago? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> For reference:

\- Snapchat is now worth nearly 10x Facebook's acquisition offer from 2013

\- Snapchat is also worth ~1/14th of Facebook's worth

\- Snapchat is also worth somewhere in the range of 2-3x Twitter

</comment><comment><USER71> >Shares opened at $24 and traded as high as $25.42 apiece Thursday, giving the company a market valuation of about $29 billion

there is no way for me to look at that and not be dumbfounded. some companies are unprofitable but still have a clear mechanism through which they could make money. tesla sells cars, for example. twitter and snap on the other hand have no way to make enough money to justify the hype. they can sell peoples data -- and that is a form of revenue that may face massive backlash and cooling very soon. this market cap is insane and we are in a huge bubble.

</comment><comment><USER72> Interesting. Bitcoin is trading at an all-time high today. I guess the fears of a tech bubble collapse have been staved off for a little while, at least.

<comment><USER73> People have been predicting bubble and collapse since 2012...stopped clock theory

<comment><USER72> Of course, but it still is a good idea to think critically about the possibility that tech companies are seriously overvalued. The chance of a bubble bursting in any given year are probably low, but that there will be a downturn is inevitable. And when that does happen I'll want to be paying attention so I can see it coming as far out as possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Is Snapchat strictly for entertainment, or is it also a way to stay up to date by following Tech influencers (like Twitter)?

</comment><comment><USER73> Bought some shares this morning. With 30-40% profit margin and huge growth, imho this will go higher.

</comment><comment><USER75> So, would you call this a Snap pop?</comment>


National Videogame Museum Chronicles the Power of the Pixelated Arts - <AUTHOR> http://www.dallasobserver.com/arts/friscos-national-videogame-museum-chronicles-the-power-of-the-pixelated-arts-8196105 <comment><USER2> In the Bay Area?

Come visit the MADE! [http://www.themade.org](http://www.themade.org) We're a lot closer!</comment>


My dinner with Peter Thiel - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/nick-bilton-dinner-with-peter-thiel <comment><USER2> Wasn't there a story of some guy who's Tesla order got cancelled after he blasted Elon Musk for not serving good enough food at some event? This reminded me of that story.

There's a point the article is trying to make but in my view the dinner story completely buries it. I don't know how the invitation looked like so I don't know if the author was right to expect a lavish meal. If it said "Please join me for a dinner" and there was no dinner then that sucks and he's a bad host and I would at least say "Hey, I was expecting food so can we at least order some pizza?"

If Thiel offered you a coffee, would you expect an expensive and fancy coffee just because he's rich? If he invited you to a chat at a local Starbucks, would you expect him to pay for the coffee? The article is full of entitlement and I wonder if it's warranted. "He's rich so he can afford it" is not a justification for one's inflated expectations.</comment>


High temperature superconductor created - <AUTHOR> http://www.superconductors.org/254K.htm

<comment><USER2> That's extremely interesting, though the "article" doesn't do a great job of presenting it to people who don't already know it.

The reason high-temperature superconductors are important is because they allow very strong magnetic fields, such as the kind used in MRI scanners in hospitals. Currently those need to be cooled with liquid nitrogen, which is obviously very expensive. At the temperatures described in this article, you could have a a superconductor cooled by a simple freezer unit. This is a lot cheaper and would make MRI much more accessible.

And then, of course, there's a dozen other applications of strong magnetic fields that we don't know about because it's too expensive.

And then, to add onto that, if we can manufacture circuits out of superconductors, we may well find increased efficiencies in running a computer. Superconductors have zero resistance and so they don't heat up when current goes through them. They require less current and less cooling than normal systems. I'm sure Google is looking into ways to use this sort of thing for their data centres.

<comment><USER3> As I understand it, for MRI (and other devices which need high fields, such as magnetic confinement fusion), the biggest limiting factor is not cooling, which is not terribly expensive relative to the cost of all the other equipment (liquid nitrogen is actually cheaper than milk), but the so called critical magnetic field strength, at which the material no longer can maintain its superconductivity. There's been similar progress along these lines as well, but it is not as glamorous -- as the critical field increases, so too may your magnetic fields.

By contrast, room temperature superconductors, if they're cheap enough, are _way_ better than even slightly lower Tc superconductors, because they can be used in situations where cooling would induce a prohibitive efficiency loss and expense. Hence the glamor. :-) It could revolutionize instrumentation, power transmission, generator, transformers, power quality, signal transmission, on and on and on... :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't the critical field issues lie at the root of some of the problems that the LHC has been facing? I seem to remember reading that someplace.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This got posted to slashdot and from the discussion there, it appears likely that this is not true.

[http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1401739&cid=...](http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1401739&cid=29725537)

[http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1401739&cid=...](http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1401739&cid=29727119)

We had a similar incident with the kids who had a hair solar panel. Not knowing much about superconductors, I had no idea what to look for. This being HN, I somehow expected the submitter to be knowledgeable enough.

Can we have some submitter guidelines for preventing people from posting such stuff. Digg and reddit fail pretty regularly at preventing this and it would be great if HN could dodge this bullet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Guidelines exist and can be viewed here:

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

I felt that the veracity of the claim itself would be an interesting discussion on HN. It's been talked about on other sites but we tend to have more informative and knowledgeable discussion here than happens elsewhere so I felt that it was worth posting if only to be able to discuss the deeper implications and the nuances of why, specifically something like this may in fact be impossible as claimed.

As the guidelines say: "If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

There are also some guidelines about the appropriate way to handle submissions that are off-topic which might be helpful to you.

<comment><USER4> Fair enough. I guess I will just have to learn to take HN articles on science with much much bigger grains of salt.

<comment><AUTHOR> I probably should have labeled it to make it clear that I was interested in a skeptical discussion of the claim.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scaling Guild Wars for massive concurrency - <AUTHOR> http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/scaling-guild-wars-for-massive-concurrency <comment><USER2> Has anyone attempted this for regular web apps? We are about to begin the process of creating performance tests from our audit logs, biggest issues we have come across is scrubbing sensitive information.</comment>


Kubernetes explained in pictures - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/danlebrero/kubernetes-explained-in-pictures-the-theme-park-analogy-3d99 <comment><USER2> As someone who has no practical experience of Kubenetes, and have read a few documents this is a pretty useful to me.</comment>


The movement to give every American a trust fund at birth - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/02/01/cash_on_delivery/?page=full <comment><USER2> I found this article fascinating. I don't think it has any hope of working at all, however.

Sci-fi writers and "Futurist Societies" have talked about an "End of Scarcity" which will occur when we can give every new baby it's own super-powerful robot, and the kid can tell the robot to make more robots, and if he wants a castle or spaceship he can tell his robot to make the robots that will make the robots that will make it, and just wait. Predicting a society of lazy slobs or a society of refined scientists is up the particular author's view of humanity.

In late-night bull sessions I have discussed the "End of Scarcity" thing [1], and in particular why it could not be done with investment money. You can immagine everyone having a robot, but if everyone where a trust fund baby, who would borrow the money from the funds and work hard in order to pay back interest ?

Given the current economic and political situation, there is a chance we will actually try this. The conservatives and financial industry love the 401k plans [2], and this could be sold to do them as another 401k plan, and sold to the left as a morally justified leveling of opportunity. It may not happen under the name "universal trust fund", but it could happen under the guise of various similar entitlement programs.

However, the money to put in those trust funds (however they are called) will be borrowed, they will not be funded on a balanced budget. They will therefore be accompanied inflation and mounting debt, and will by correspondingly less for their beneficiaries.

In addition, the proposals discussed in this article do not give the trust fund babies complete freedom in how to spend the money. The money is to be drawn for higher education and housing (both are bubbles, and Americans generally buy more of those than they need), and for "retirement", which is kind of insulting in my opinion -- is 65 the new age of majority ?

What kind of withdrawals are allowed from the funds will likely become an object of a huge amount of corrupt politicing and lobbying, similar to the mortage tax exemption. Rather than an opportunity, the funds might become like a bad inheiritance incumbered by some crazy grand uncle's will. They mention that the funds should hold $20,000 when the beneficiary is in their 20s -- will they beneficiary be allowed to withdraw all the money and attempt to start a business, making them into a kind of nationwide YC program ? It seems unlikely, although that might be the best use of the money for many people. Instead, the money will be used to make a down payment on a plaster board castle in some gaudy neighborhood, tossed into a black hole of college tuition, or used to bolster the social security program which will have been massively damaged by the inflation.

Of course, after all that, it is justified to ask "well, what would you do to address inequality and lack of opportunity ? Offer something constructive !"

I think the most important thing to do is generally assure we have a prosperous nation. That basic fundamental is in doubt. The federal budget should be balanced; those who lend their money to the government through bonds, will be forced to find other ways to spend and invest it anyway, creating a "stimulous" similar to what happened when Clinton/Grinrich last balanced the budget, but without the debt and inflation. This can probably only happen by pissing off conservatives by raising taxes and slashing "defense" spending and pissing off liberals by slashing "education" and "social" spending. For example, we might cancel the "future combat systems" program and also stop medicare / medicaid payments on all medical procedures not statistically shown to improve life expectancy, which would include many things people consider necessities, such as balloon angioplasty.

There are more positive things we can do, other than just halting certain things, and thankfully many of them can be done by individuals and carried out regardless of what bills pass congress. I think that we should revive the idea of apprenticeships, and adapt them to high-tech vocations. I think that making small amounts of credit available to entrepreneurs and business startups through sites like prosper.com is very promissing thing . . . or making more YC clones.

[1] My prediction is that humans couldn't handle the End of Scarcity, and to protect ourselves from it we would create fake needs that could not be adaquately met, and huge propaganda efforts would line the roads with signs and be interspersed into every form of entertainment to remind us that we needed something we couldn't quite afford, but a small subset of humans would see through the propaganda, and live quietly amid the chaos gleaning ample shelter from the packaging of robotically produced artificial-necessities and plenty of cast off over-produced food. I call my fantasy "The Present", and the smart subset are "hobos."

[2] 401k plans are a disaster. The main purpose they served was to increase the amount of money going into the stock market, which benefited the people who run the stock market and hurt the rest of the country and gave us a big bubble. By tying so many people's perception of their financial security to the stock market, the 401k plan also created a dangerous political situation, with the government feeling obligated to take unwise steps to prop up the market, and a possibility for political extremism when that inevitably fails.</comment>


Founders Fund Closes $220 Million Second Fund - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/17/founders-fund-closes-220-million-second-fund/ <comment><USER2> Sorry, not relevant but since when does no one wear a necktie? Check out the picture in the link. I can now see the value of the tie; their general throat, neck, collar area looks a disgrace. You'd think with all the money they've just made, they might want to announce it with a ludicrously expensive and obnoxious tie. When I make my millions I'm going straight out to buy the world's best tie and become the world's most handsomest man when viewed from the navel to the chin.</comment>


Full path length of files - <AUTHOR> ..on your laptop has Mean: 80 StdDev: 40 chars. Try it ;) <comment><USER2> Nope:

      average = 96.1242
      std_dev = 28.1688

So not only wrong, but _way_ wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you include all files of any kind, not just yours?

<comment><USER2> All files?

        Average = 75.4519
        Std_Dev = 23.5872

Still way, way wrong.

Why would you ever think it's 80 and 40?

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course the numbers will be different for others but many systems have a lot common files. I have linux & windows on my laptop so maybe that's why I have a high StdDev. Your mean is similar, but StdDev low compared to mine. What do you have on your laptop?

<comment><USER2> So are you saying you never really thought it would be 80 and 40? If so, why did you ever say it would be?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I did, it is on my laptop. I was not expecting your level of StdDev.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How I resolved my Windows 10 wireless adapter issues - <AUTHOR> http://www.swoo.co.uk/blog/post/30031/windows-10-wireless-issues---no-connections-available-[solved]

<comment><USER2> Interesting read</comment>


Can Apple Fill the Void? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/technology/companies/16apple.html?ref=technology

<comment><USER2> Yes, Jobs has been great for Apple, but all the focus on Jobs obscures the fact that he has worked with and been supported by a number of other competent people within the company. Who's to say that much of Apple's success could have come about Without their help? I've seen a few articles profiling these people (Cook plus about 5 others), but that's it.

Dr. Tantillo ('the marketing doctor') did a post back in July on his branding blog - <http://blog.marketingdoctor.tv> \- asserting that Apple and Jobs are two separate brands. Tantillo argues that Jobs should have a succession plan. I don't necessarily agree, but I do think he makes a good point about Jobs and Apple being two separate brands--Apple would be different without Jobs, but different is not always bad. [http://blog.marketingdoctor.tv/2008/07/24/brand- advisory.asp...](http://blog.marketingdoctor.tv/2008/07/24/brand- advisory.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER3> _The whole world is concerned about Apple. I'm concerned about Silicon Valley, said Mr. Perlman, the entrepreneur. I need Apple to be harrying Microsoft. We need someone stirring the pot. God forbid that there is no one stirring the pot anymore. We'll become Detroit._

This is so true.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not so sure lack of good competition is what killed Detroit. In fact, it might be the automakers inept response to competition that killed them.</comment></comment>