Success, and Farming vs. Mining - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wilshipley.com/2011/04/success-and-farming-vs-mining.html <comment><USER4> You have to be very careful when following advice like this, because a lot of the time things that look stupid and shortsighted simply reflect a deeper understanding of what the _actual_ product is.

For example, for many VC-funded and fast-growing startups, the product is not the website, software, whatever that they're showing users. It's the _knowledge_ that users have a particular need, and that need can be satisfied in a certain way. Startups are effectively outsourced R&D for big companies here.

It's quite possible that the most economically efficient way to satisfy that need is to simply fold the startup into some big company's other products. If that happens, the code, most of the employees, cash, and even existing userbase are essentially disposable. They can all be replaced at a larger scale once the company's been acquired. The actual assets that the acquirer is paying millions for is the detailed knowledge of the problem domain - <USER2> employees, key algorithms, history of other ideas that tried and failed, and any patents or other intellectual property. That's why acquisitions usually are contingent upon certain employees coming on-board, yet the acquirer is often all too happy to fire other employees.

<comment><USER5> I don't think this writer has much opposition to the sale of a company itself, but the attitude with which many founders are creating their companies. I think he's using recent results to establish that usual pretense for many startup is not very pure or quality oriented. I think he'd acknowledge that selling a startup is often the right choice, but creating a startup with no care for quality or long term product stability is not.

<comment><USER6> I agree. I think the article speaks to the founder and his/her vision and intent rather than the product.

Sometimes the planted flag is much different from the fully implemented product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I come from Montana, and I _hate_ this dichotomy.

The fundamental law of resources in this world is: if you can't farm it, you must mine it. They're a yin and yang. I come from Montana, a state which basically has only two industries: farming and mining. When you live that close to the land, it becomes very apparent who the actual producers are.

Everything else is wanking. Productive wanking, but wanking nonetheless. The welder is nothing without the miner. Without the farmer, he can't even eat. Me, as a software engineer, I'm so far removed from those who are actually producing things that what I do is as ephemeral as the wind. I change states on a magnetic disk all day. I lift weights, run, and have a stand-up desk so my body doesn't decay while I do this ludicrously minimal amount of work each day, but because I know how to shape those bits in a certain way, society values me much more than the guy who feeds me, or the guy who mines the rare earths that make my job possible.

<comment><USER8> Miners use software to find minerals to mine, farmers use Combines and harvesters run with software. The farmers plant seeds and use fertilizers and pesticides that were created with the help of software. Mining and farming equipment is designed and built using software. If a farmer or miner gets sick, a doctor might use software to display and interpret their MRI or ultrasound.

We have come a long way from subsistance farming, and computers, software, and the people who create them have helped make miners and farmers (and everyone else's) lives much easier and better than they would be if people only mined and farmed.

So, congratulations for doing important work!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wil's metaphor is brilliant and the values he describes are exactly what our industry needs to hear. I have been jumping from product to product for years, with the expectation of dump trucks arriving one day out front and unloading tons of money. I'm doing it again with my current company. We have a solid niche, strong traction and are leaders in our space, but rather than making what is good, really excellent, I'm considering jumping to the next shiny ball that may be the home run. This blog entry has caused me to reevaluate.

<comment><USER10> I once read a quote that goes something like: "If a book causes a reader to reevaluate their own life, it says more about the reader than the book".

That has happened to me a couple of times. Most recently was probably reading "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. I had pigeonholed that book as something that banking types read and presupposed the book advocated "Mining" (to use Wil's analogy). However, the protagonists in the book are hard-working (in spite of family wealth) and innovative. In the book, the protagonists opt out of what the world at large deems as the "right" way to do things.

Ignore the mythology that glorifies "mining". It's nonsense. Find different people to look up to.

This interview with David Heinemeier Hansson reinforces Wil's point of view: [http://mixergy.com/david-heinemeier-hansson-37signals- interv...](http://mixergy.com/david-heinemeier-hansson-37signals-intervie/)

</comment></comment><comment> DanI-S On a slight tangent, modern farming techniques are more akin to the mining he describes than they are to farming. It's not just the software industry that is affected by this short-term thinking; it's the majority of human endeavour.

It's hard to tell whether the stock market is a cause or a symptom - <USER3> primary mode of 'investing in the future' is so prone to being short-circuited for short term gain.

<comment><USER11> Large scale conventional farming is akin to mining. I guess it's always the little guy who gets enlightened first. There are a lot of small farms practicing sustainable agriculture. It feels like it's taking way too long to persuade conventional farmers to clean up their act (and to persuade consumers to make better food choices), but the number of acres involved in sustainable farming has grown quite a bit in the past decade. Human nature being what it is, I don't know if we'll ever get the majority of people to behave responsibly over the long-term. But, the current trends do look promising.

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

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For those who don't know, Wil Shipley is the author of Delicious Library. <[http://delicious-monster.com/>](http://delicious-monster.com/>); A perennially popular MacOS app. It is a great way to catalog most everything you own.

It started off being only for books, but since has acquired the ability to keep track of just about anything.

<comment><USER13> Delicious Library: one of the apps that makes me wish I could afford a Mac. Genius stuff; shame there doesn't seem to be a Windows equivalent.

<comment><USER14> Have you thought about buying one second hand or refurbished?

<comment><USER13> Oh, many a time. Spent a couple days just browsing eBay for Mac Minis.

Truth is, though, I really won't have the kind of money to drop on a system for quite some time. Hell, I wouldn't even have a laptop if I wasn't lucky to enough to receive a CR-48 :p

Some day, when I have money, I'll probably sell off the CR-48 (it's a nice little system, once you get the BIOS flashed and ChromeOS replaced) and put that towards a plastic Macbook. Until then, I'll just continue lusting over Delicious Library, TextMate, and everything Panic Software puts out...

<comment><USER15> How much [cw]ould you pay for a mac mini? I have one sitting across the room from me that I hardly use. It's an early intel model with 1gb.

I want to buy a new one to run OpenCyc (which requires 4gb) on but I can't bring myself to just scrap the old one.

<comment><USER16> Just give it to him already. Ask him to pay shipping, and bask in the good deed while you wait for your new machine. Rather than asking him to part with a small amount of money he probably can't really afford and you likely don't really need, tell him to pass the favor on to someone else someday.

<comment><USER15> Perhaps he's too proud to accept charity from a stranger.

Offering to sell it to him for whatever he can comfortably pay (no matter how small) is both generous and respectful.

If he cannot afford even a penny, I'm happy to pay shipping as well...

<comment><USER13> Uh... wow.

This actually came at a crappy time for me, since right now I don't have a lot of disposable income - I'm 17 and jobless (no available transportation...). I would try to pay at least $100 or something, but right now I'm almost flat broke.

If you're okay with going total charity, you can email me at email@example.com so we can work it out, but if you're not, I understand.

<comment><USER15> You have mail.

<comment><USER13> Dude, you're awesome. Thanks :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> No when you're mining you use the capital you acquired to start more mines. There are lots of unprofitable mines, software is much more akin to mining in that your market is generally unknown, it requires a lot of capital cost and the the payoffs if you strike gold are enormous, however most will not strike gold. As we've discovered in Canada once you've dug that hole you can make decent coin by allowing cities to fill it with their trash.

Producing software is a capital intensive business with large pay offs that are irrespective of the amount of labour/capital inputted, consulting is a business in which one makes a slight profit over labour. Software that you own outright is a labour intensive capital good. If you're advocating the farming market of the software business then you're advocating consultancy which if done right can make you decent coin, the problem is that if you can actually make software that people want to use then you're generally better off moving towards the mining market.

What the OP is talking about is largely the difference between owning a mine and being a mining industry consultant / mine worker. Mining is an industry that is unpopular and his impression of farming is largely that of something that last existed in the 1920s.

Modern farming has nothing to do with returning the land to it's native state and has everything to do with pumping it full of nitrogen, spraying it with pesticides and hiring low wage workers, applying for gov't subsidies so that you can eek out 1-3% profit with enormous capital costs. The picture in the supermarket of a farmer is not reality.

<comment><USER18> "As we've discovered in Canada once you've dug that hole you can make decent coin by allowing cities to fill it with their trash."

Ah ha! The mining industries version of a "pivot" huh?

Seriously though, I assume that actually means "you can attempt to recover some tiny part of your existing loss" instead of "make decent coin".

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems this guy is basically just describing the markets and calling traits problems. Obviously you need to invest in a company before its popular for it to be a good investment. A company with a fully stable profit won't even take your investment most of the time. "Mining" is just the process of investment! However, I do not think this is the point. The important point I think he's getting at is not that the markets are evil, but that founders shouldn't be investors. If you start a company, you should be interested in BUILDING A COMPANY, not selling a big company and making a boatload. Obviously, people want to make money, but for some reason the misconception that the cash in hand for a crappy company is worth more than the cash in stock for a great and growing company. And even further, the founder interested in building a great company is more likely to reach that amount of money faster, just because they are invested in making a good company, and will make efficient and secure progress toward his or her vision with every day of work. Great companies start with people who want the company to succeed and investors who wan to make a buck, not the other way around.

</comment><comment><USER19> Ex-mining engineer here. Mining is very different to what Will describes. In fact, mining has very many similarities with the lifecycle of a software company.

Firstly there is the prospecting phase. This is akin to customer development. You look for where there might be traces of customers, and if you encounter them you drill a bit further to define the customers a bit better. Next, you do economic analysis to determine whether you are going to make a profit on this, or whether this is the right size/risk for your company. There is also a technical phase where you need to run trials to determine whether you will be able to successfully separate the minerals from the waste given whatever impurities that exist. You keep iterating, drilling, testing until you've hit the equivalent of product-market fit.

Then you have the expensive issue of scaling up. To build a mine takes great investment that will take years before it turns a profit. This is where the model diverges, because at this stage, the mining company has a defined asset but they do not build the mine themselves. These are done by a major contractor. It is like a giant civil engineering project and is managed as such.

When the mine is built (and roads, rails, port facilities are put in), the mining company then operates the mine. Operations is not anything like prospecting. It is dealing with daily issues and doing strategic planning, developing markets etc.. People live and work on a pretty steady basis, with rosters etc. In contrast, life as a prospector can be pretty rough. :)

Many startups function around the prospecting stages, since entry costs is lower but it is very risky. The rewards are high at this stage of course, but the prospectors have little ability to execute if they hit upon a mother load. Outside money will have to be brought in, or the prospector might sell up and get a nice exit.

</comment><comment><USER20> > What's upsetting is the number of people who have come to me with the idea > of becoming miners: "I know nothing about software, but I can see there's > gold in them thar' hills, and so I want to start up a company and make my > million dollars! I've got an idea and everything, just tell me what magic > incantation you did to get rich and I'll be on my way."

Reminds me of an interview I heard with Steve Martin (promoting his book _Born Standing Up_ ), where he talks about the advice he gives to aspiring comedians. When they ask him what the trick is to getting famous, he just says "hard work". He said they usually seem disappointed, because that's not what they wanted to hear.

</comment><comment><USER21> The miner in this reminds me of the movie Easy Rider, make a big score, then take the money and do what ever you want, which in the end turns out to not be what they thought it was. I've never had the fortune of making it into the industry, so from an outsiders perspective. I wonder since it seems a lot of what internet start ups are based on, is having a following, as in, your app is useless unless its got users to go with it. If some of the mining is similar to creating a product and selling it to someone with the ability to manufacture it. Like if I thought of a cool toy, patented it, and then sold that to Mattel, because I don't have the resources to capitalize on it. In the start up internet world, to prove the worth of the design, you need users. So the mining concept is just the adjustment needed in the internet world, for inventors to sell their inventions. Seems kind of similar. For me at least, I would probably want out as soon as possible, the business side of it, isn't as interesting as the building side of it, I would loose money on a successful business for sure, but it would give me the lateral mobility to pursue my interests, which are not being a CEO of a company.

</comment><comment><USER22> _The stock market ... what's important ... is the potential growth of your sales, not your current sales, since the point of buying stock is to sell the stock to someone else later on, at a higher price._

Or to receive dividends. Heard of blue chip investors? Buy-and-hold strategy?

"Mining" versus "farming" is disputed in the stock market as well. That's why people talk about P/E ratio.

</comment><comment><USER5> At first glance, it seems this guy is basically just describing the markets and calling traits problems. Obviously you need to invest in a company before its popular for it to be a good investment. A company with a fully stable profit won't even take your investment most of the time. "Mining" is just the process of investment! However, I do not think this is the point. The important point I think he's getting at is not that the markets are evil, but that founders shouldn't be investors. If you start a company, you should be interested in BUILDING A COMPANY, not selling a big company and making a boatload. Obviously, people want to make money, but for some reason the misconception that the cash in hand for a crappy company is worth more than the cash in stock for a great and growing company. Great companies start with people who want the company to succeed and investors who wan to make a buck, not the other way around.

</comment><comment><USER23> One thread that is interwoven throughout the piece but surprisingly _not_ called out explicitly is the role of the tech media in the glamorization of high-growth, high-exit-return startups and their investors. Nostrademons has some good points about the virtues of startups that Wil didn't touch upon (though I'm sure he's aware of them. His piece doesn't strike me as though he's blanket-bashing venture-capitalized startups).

The dollar amounts attached to these "lottery" startups (whether in investment or in exit) are awesome, but not outrageous, especially given who the investors are. The one thing that Wil said that _did_ bother me was his assertion that a funded started is necessarily a "mining" startup, to use his metaphor. I see it his way, and it brought me down a little bit, even though I already knew it inside.

</comment><comment><USER24> The stories of Google, Facebook, and Twitter show that VC has values. We want more investments to start-ups, rather than the opposite. Let the market decide itself: the money will flow where the value is, eventually. I think success is hard either way: faming or mining, it is better than not trying.

</comment><comment><USER25> Hmmm, to torture the idea even further... what about permaculture farming that minimizes the amount of back-breaking work you have to do while building up the soil to be richer than before (albeit at a slow pace)? What's the software company equivalent?

<comment><USER26> Testing. Put the hard yards in early and it'll look after you later. Build up the quality by starting slower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> As long as there are VCs that are willing to fund, companies that are willing to acquire (demand), there will be developers looking to 'mine' (supply). If enough people who made 'loss' in this ecosystem were to exit this ecosystem then 'mining' will be obsoleted. However, there are always people/companies looking for a quick-buck/fix to inflate their bank balance or complement their product line, therefore perpetuating 'mining'.

</comment><comment><USER26> See also "built to last" by Jim Collins which covers the same ground from a different angle.

</comment><comment><USER28> Wil is a great writer and worth reading. In this case, I'm going to raise objections to his thesis, but I have tremendous respect for his credentials. That said, I think the comparison to mining is a stretch, also farming, but lets start with mining.

Wil makes it sound like most mines blow up or explode at the first touch of a nugget of whatever you're trying to uncover. Or alternately that after taking investor money and building all the mine infrastructure, you sell it off as soon as you strike it rich. I would think the opposite is true, the last thing the mine owner would want to do is flog it off just when it starts making big money.

Eventually mines run out this is true, but sometimes they last for decades if not hundreds of years (the hundreds of years was probably more common before modern methods).

Secondly, with the mines if you read Jared Diamond's† book, I think it is called _Collapse_ , he talks about this in great detail. And the biggest problem with mining is actually what happens when the mine closes. According to his research, nowadays the mining company is required to estimate the cleanup costs, and over the lifetime of the mine they contribute to a fund to cover the cleanup cost. Sounds good, right? The problem of course is that it is _the company_ that estimates the costs, and they have an incentive to grossly underestimate the costs of cleanup. The usual discrepancy is something like two orders of magnitude. Ie assuming a large mine the company estimates costs of 10 million, hands the state govt a cheque for that as it closes shop. Then when the state govt discovers the actual cost is approx 1 Billion (maybe more) the company (which has long paid out all its funds as dividends to its shareholders) shrugs and declares bankruptcy.

I don't think that there is really any parallel in IT in terms of cleanup costs. You could argue that Y2K was similar, but I would point out that wasn't a uniquely mining only problem. All kinds of software was effected, from mining (startups on steroids), farming (slow and steady startups, the tortoise vs the hare), vendors, universities, consultants and even your big software retailers (Microsoft) all had this problem.

Okay, he admits he's stretching the metaphor (on the rack as it were). :D

What about farming? Personally I'm a fan of farming in the software sense, but farming in the real world is a nightmare. Assuming you don't manage to destroy the land, farmers I've talked to say that in good years they are making ~4% (return on capital), and in bad years they are losing 2-3%, and there are more bad years than good years. How do they survive? Typically by taking loans out against the (ever increasing) value of the property. But if the value of the property doesn't keep going up, or if the banks decide not to loan the farmers money, or if there is a particularly bad drought... then farming is much worse than mining and you get farmers walking away from their land, or just dying on it. Jared talks a little bit about how bad mining is, but the main thrust of his book is that improperly managed farming _KILLS ENTIRE CIVILIZATIONS_. In terms of cost/benefit, I think dirty water from mining >>> extinction. :D

He touches on another metaphor, the Lottery. Lotteries are usually regarded as a bad thing (a tax on people who are bad at math). The problem is that for every $1.00 you put in you get back out say $0.40 on average. In other words, all lotteries have a negative expectancy (with the notable exception of the UK Lottery, because even though you are unlikely to win, at the end of the day you can still get back all the money you spent on it (it is more similar to a savings account with pathetically low interest, and a miniscule chance of some excitement).

Okay, fine, lets take it as given that 'lotteries' with negative expectancy are bad....

If the 'software mining' (ie startup) industry was a lottery, would it have a negative expectancy? I suggest probably not. What if there was a lottery that for every $1 ticket there is a 1% chance of winning $200? That'd be a positive expectancy! I'd play that, _you'd have to be bad at maths not to_. Moreover, even if it was break even (ie for every millionaire ten people have to gamble and lose their house), as the mining example shows, sometimes there are hidden costs/benefits. I'm _guessing_ that the startup 'lottery' has a positive expectancy (especially in silicon Valley, perhaps not everywhere else in the world), but if someone argued that the benefit to society of all the startups is negative I'd think they were crazy.

An example: I've heard it said that since the beginning of commercial flight in the US that the industry as a whole has barely (or not even) broken even. But to suggest that I personally don't benefit from the ability to fly round the world in 30 hours as compared to sailing round the world in six months is ludicrous. Even if the airline industry didn't make their average investor rich, it provided more than enough benefit to society to be able to justify its existence.

Lastly, and I suspect this is very wall of text so I apologise, there is a logical flaw underpinning Wil's entire thesis. He assumes that somehow the IT industry is special. He assumes if you launch a _software_ company with an exit strategy that is somehow different (bad) compared to say launching a _furniture_ company with an exit strategy.

I think that rather than just assuming that software is different in this regard, I think he should at least try to make an argument to that effect.

†If the name is familiar, he wrote Guns Germs and Steel as well, which is one of those books that lots of people have heard of, but few have read :D</comment>


Goes to eleven ... - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12226192

<comment><AUTHOR> In case you're wondering, it appears that the volume control on the video player goes to eleven. There's a hacker somewhere in the BBC with a sense of humor.

<comment><USER2> This is the standard flash video player used across the BBC, most notably on the iPlayer but also as seen here on the news site.

It has always gone up to 11, ever since the flash version of the iplayer first started its beta. It makes me smile that they have still managed to keep it, this many meetings later :)

This is the kind of 'eccentric' stuff that british people self-consciously obsess over though. As a nation we think it makes us 'interesting.' I imagine if they did change it so it only went to 10, they would be inundated with more letters of complaint than they could open, both ironic and terrifyingly serious.

<comment><USER3> Please dont forget to mention that an official review will be ordered in order to satisfy the regulators that the transition from 11 to 10 will not affect civil liberties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I noticed this myself just this week (having recently moved to the UK and, in a budget move, decided not to buy a TV or pay the TV licence).

Yes - the BBC iPlayer (which plays delayed or catch-up programs from the BBC TV channels) does have a volume control that goes to 11.

If that means nothing to you, you have a task for this weekend - it begins here <http://www.spinaltapfan.com/>

<comment><USER5> Note that legally (at least currently) you can't watch the live streams on iPlayer without a TV licence. Watching them later, or downloading them is fine.

[http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/help/playing_tv_progs/...](http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/help/playing_tv_progs/tvlicence)

<comment><USER6> I'm no expert, but I suspect you will always get away with watching live streams online without paying for the license, certainly far easier to hide it than if you have an actual TV + aerial.

That said, I would encourage people to pay anyway, including people like JacobAldridge, if they can afford to - not because of the law, or because watching delayed TV isn't a good enough service, but because the BBC is something that ought to be supported.

Stephen Fry gave a great speech to that effect a year or two ago which you could watch at <http://www.corincole.com/misc/Briefings_Stephen_fry.avi> (ironically my hosting that BBC content is illegal, but somehow I feel the morality is on my side given it's a pro-BBC pro-license fee speech).

<comment><USER4> True - I probably should have described it as a "temporary budget move" while I build my business here in London. After all, even free legal downloads of great programs can create the same problem as illegal downloading in regards to the producers not having enough money to fund future great programs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have a Presonus Firebox audio interface, take a look at the headphone volume scale. I suspect it's capable of destroying low impedance headphones at even lower settings.

<http://www.presonus.com/products/detail.aspx?productid=4>

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm guessing to see it one needs to use the BBC 'iPlayer' stuff and possibly it requires being inside the UK. Any chance of a screen shot?

<comment><AUTHOR> It certainly doesn't need iPlayer, and I viewed items like this from Australia recently. However, I'll try to get a screenshot, or a photo.

<comment><USER8> Thank you, and I'm sorry but it seems I have most likely wasted your time due to my own self-inflicted wound of avoiding in-browser 'players' (flash, vlc, mplayer, iplayer, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Its like you read my mind! I only just noticed that on the iPlayer last night!</comment>


Your Top Management is F*cked - <AUTHOR> http://www.charlesbai.com/your-top-management-is-fcked/ <comment><USER2> One thing that always got traction at my small section of Apple was to say "there's no way my technologically illiterate mom [or other family member] would ever figure this out".

Usually the other person would look at it again and maybe change it.

You could even fire one of these critiques in a radar to some other unrelated part of the company and get some traction.

The important thing was that everyone knew what our mission was and who our target user was. We all spoke a common language of discoverability.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hard to agree with this. Google and Amazon (AWS) are two largely successful companies (for working at, for investing in, for consuming etc.), and both have a traditionally "non-homogenous" product line that looks like it is different pieces glued together.

<comment><USER4> I see your point...I think that this post is railing against those companies that are floundering and don't have a clear direction and goal.

Amazon & Google may have multiple goals: retail, servers, search, home automation, etc. but I don't feel that any of their product line feels particularly "out of place" within the context of a 'tech' company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yawn.

Oversimplifying this stuff after the fact is easy. I can do it too:

The first 2 paragraphs of this blog post look like 3 paragraphs. The sloppiness of a blog post's formatting is a reflection on the author's diligence in thinking about the content. Sloppy formatting = sloppy logic/content.

Steve didn't work in a vacuum. Give "Creativity, Inc" by Ed Catmull a read. (edit: There were some anecdotes of Ed's interaction with Steve that demonstrated how people enabled Steve to do his job well and vice versa).</comment>


Google's co-founders are trying to live forever - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/31/google-co-founders-and-silicon-valley-billionaires-try-to-live-forever.html <comment><USER2> Young blood for the win!</comment>


Ask HN: Do you prefer Laravel or Ruby on Rails for your projects? Why? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Laravel, Rails, Django, and a few others, are all pretty much interchangeable.

If you want the right framework for your productivity, choose the one that uses the language you have most experience with.

If you want the one that is fastest, re-evaluate your choices, none of these are "fast".

If you want the one that gives you the most maintainable code, I think that might be Django, but highly dependent on the first point, and I'm biased on this.

If you want the one where the code looks nicest, go for Rails, it's again subjective, but Ruby code is often very pretty (debatable whether thats useful).

If you want the one that is easiest to deploy, go for Laravel, you can stick a bunch of files in a webroot on shared hosting and it might work.

I don't prefer any one of these, each is better for different people, teams, requirements and restrictions, but none of these is a clear winner.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good points!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I prefer rails. It might not be the fastest, but the rails way is very close to my ideal way of doing things and the community is so wide and pleasant to be in. There's gems for a lot of stuff and there's people inspecting gems for security issues.

It's also very easy to take in any developer and have them learn ruby. Rails is a bit more strict but if there's a "mentor" available I'd say it's a quick process to get new devs up and running.

<comment><AUTHOR> Most of what you said is also true for Laravel. There are packages, a very large and friendly community.

About the mentor.. I think Jeffrey Way is the only mentor you need when you're developing with Laravel :D

Your ideal way of doing things as in MVC structure or what do you mean exactly?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They're both high quality and pretty similar in terms of features. Use the one whose language you're most comfortable with.

Just kidding, rewrite everything in Go.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha, definitely will consider this :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I prefer Rails solely because of Ruby. (And I'm more productive in it.) I'm not a huge fan of PHP, but I know that's probably because I started my career as a WP developer, so I still have that hatred looming in the back of my mind. Either way, Laravel also looks top notch and I periodically check out Laracasts to keep up to date on where it's going.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't know if you're still developing for WP, but I hated it so much until I came acros roots.io. Their bedrock installation and sage theme are a breeze to work with. So much better than anything else I've tried.

<comment><USER6> Is there anything that allows using templates with wp instead of the unbearable fragmented patchwork of functions and code?

Something like twig maybe?

I come from rails and trying to develop for Wordpress caused a lot of wtf and disgust.

<comment><AUTHOR> WP is terrible with its template inheritance, and Sage theme essentially solves that problem for you.

You will need to write absolute minimum for your templates using standard PHP. Here is a link to their latest beta version which uses webpack and all the new goodies: [https://github.com/roots/sage](https://github.com/roots/sage)

However, if you're more comfortable with using Twig, there is a fork of Sage that uses Twig: [https://github.com/studiorabota/sage-twig- theme](https://github.com/studiorabota/sage-twig-theme) (but it uses gulp and older tech).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Laravel hands down.

It's easy to learn, there are lots of good resources, and it's growing in popularity.

Ruby tries to force you to do things in a certain way, and quite often people just end up programming their way around the framework instead of using it the way it was intended. This is probably true for any framework, but anecdotally I see this happen more in ruby.

I think the big factors are where your skills lie, and whether or not you are going to have other people working on the project. If you are, I would choose Laravel, as it's much easier to find php developers than it is to find ruby developers and even the php developers that don't know Laravel can usually pick it up quickly.

Again, this is just my own experience.

<comment><USER8> I don't know Larval but i do know Django.

Django doesn't force you to do things it's own way but when you do go for the Django way everything else is so much easier. Class Based Views, for example are a bit difficult at first, but once you get the hang of them its fast to produce nice maintainable code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I moved from Rails to Laravel due to clients/projects.

I like both, I prefer Laravel.

Great community, easy to reach out and connect with people.

I like the frequent releases, always great new features coming out.

Amazing packages.

LaravelShift.com is a great tool to updating repos to the next release.

Deployment is a breeze with forge and envoyer.

It's fun to develop in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah agree with you. And deploying it even without Forge and Envoyer is a breeze. Spin up a DO instance and git pull from your repo and point nginx root to pulled down repo and you're good to go, almost :)

Laravel is great, and I find PHP a lot prettier and easier than Ruby. Just wondering why all the big start ups are using Ruby on Rails? Twitter, AirBnB, BrainTree, Shopify. Literally no big startup uses Laravel, other than Slack, which is just PHP.

<comment><USER10> One possible reason: Laravel didn't exist when any of those companies started.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is exactly what I missed! Great point and now it all makes sense!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> At the risk of being flagged hipster, I used to prefer Laravel, but I've migrated almost completely to Elixir & Phoenix. I just find myself infinitely more productive in a functional environment. Perhaps it just clicks better for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Care to explain why you prefer Elixir + Phoenix set up to Laravel? Always interested to learn new tech</comment></comment>


If free will isn't real, why does it seem so real? - <AUTHOR> http://ideasurfer.tumblr.com/post/116705791/if-free-will-isnt-real-why-does-it-seem-so-real

<comment><USER2> Why try to frame this in terms of "evolutionary advantage"? There's absolutely no reason to believe that the belief in free will is not epiphenomenal, or a spandrel.

I know that evolution is a very impressive hammer, but that still doesn't make every trait a nail.

</comment><comment><USER3> Free will is doing (or at least imagining) what you want or feel is best. Your moods, whims, desires, and so forth can be controlled by inevitable subatomic physics, and those are synthesized by your thought processes to take a course of action. Since your brain wiring and chemical balance will be unique in a subtle way, that gives you a personality you can call your own. Imagine if everyone were required to change at least one line of code in their software before running it. The different computers would seem like they had all kinds of strange motives.

<comment><USER4> Your comment suggests that "free will" in a human mind is a result of small differences in the makeup/brain chemistry of the individual.

Its my understanding that the 'free will theorem" <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem> is not that. It says "if we have a certain amount of "free will", then, subject to certain assumptions, so do some elementary particles."

It may well be that both your perspective _and_ the free will theorem are at play.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps free will seems unreal because you believe that you can only make one choice in any situation, and that this choice is predetermined by physics.

However, according to the many-worlds interpretation of QM, you do in fact make every possible decision, in every situation.</comment>


Logstalgia: website access log visualization - <AUTHOR> https://code.google.com/p/logstalgia/

<comment><USER2> This reminds me of a very old project (can't remember the name) which visualized traffic logs as a town. There were buildings for different pages of the site and buses would arrive labelled with referrer headers. People wandered around the town in a manner similar to how the site was browsed. I only ever saw video, never tried it for myself. But it seemed pretty impressive.

</comment><comment><USER3> Reminds me of Splunk Replay back in the day: [http://blogs.splunk.com/2008/03/06/splunk-replay-search- resu...](http://blogs.splunk.com/2008/03/06/splunk-replay-search-results-in- motion/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I love tools like this, there's also Gource [1] which visualizes your version history.

[1] [https://code.google.com/p/gource/](https://code.google.com/p/gource/)</comment>


Why The UK Is a Great Place to Build a Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.centernetworks.com/startup-uk

<comment><USER2> This surely does not apply to early stage startups. Outsourcing to Romania? How many starups outsource in Valley? And don't get me started about cost of living in the UK.</comment>


Eliminating the Class of Cofounder Problems - <AUTHOR> https://blog.notbad.software/post/classes_of_error <comment><USER2> This post is totally accurate. Not having a cofounder eliminates an entire class of problems. Joint decision making, maintaining shared goals (especially over time) communication and trust all are sources of difficulty on a co- founder relationship. (Source, have been a co-founder and watched multiple founding teams including some who split and some who exited.)

However, as the op points out, nothing is free (tanstaafl). Being a solo founder provides a whole new set of problems as well.

The biggest one in my mind is emotional support. Building a business is hard, and you have up and down days. I have had some miserable days as a company founder and derived enormous comfort from my co-founder. Yes, other people can help a bit, but they don't (and can't) have all the context.

The second biggest one is time. Depending on your business and runway and skills, two or more people can get a business up and running more effectively than one. Yes, as a software developer you can make sales calls. But when you are doing so, no one is writing code.

Finally, all the communication, goal setting, trust building and joint decision making that you get to skip when you are a solo founder? Eventually you have to do all of that with your employees (even if you only grow to a team of three or four). Not saying you should have a co-founder only to practice that stuff (which is hard) but don't think you're going to avoid it forever (unless you remain a solopreneur, in which case more power to you. You either have an enviable business model or a job you can't leave).

<comment><AUTHOR> Very true! I think it's actually an interesting constraint to place on business model ideation. When you restrict yourself to opportunities that you could reasonably pursue solo it forces you to be more creative. The upside is that your total addressable market doesn't need to be nearly as large.

<comment><USER3> Large addressable markets are important to outside investors such as angels and VC's of the startup world. The startup model is not the only model. It's not the best model for every business. I only mention outside investment on the startup model because it is not aligned with what you are saying and expectations for capital infusion should be tailored to the difference in model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What a coincidence, I'm working on an article called "Eliminating garden work by not having a garden".</comment>


Lua in the Kernel? - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/830154/ <comment><USER3> > _Scripts should not be able to crash the system, run indefinitely, or > corrupt other parts of the system. To ensure that, Lunatik uses the Lua VM > facilities for sandboxing the scripts so that they run in a safe execution > environment [...] the number of instructions can be limited, so that > infinite loops are not possible._

Lua's sandbox should be able to prevent scripts from crashing or corrupting the system, but I'd be surprised if it could prevent a script from running indefinitely. In particular, limiting the number of Lua bytecode instructions is insufficient - even a single call to `string.find` can lock up the CPU [0].

> _They are using the standard Lua, rather than the LuaJIT fork, Neto said, in > answer to another question._

Using LuaJIT would make sandboxing significantly more difficult, because it's much more complex than regular Lua and hence more likely to have exploitable bugs. This is the reason that game consoles disallow JIT-compilation - <USER2> hence games tend to use regular Lua rather than LuaJIT.

[0] [http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2011-02/msg01595.html](http://lua- users.org/lists/lua-l/2011-02/msg01595.html)

<comment><USER4> You can't prevent infinite loops unless you've solved the halting problem right?

They could of course just limit the run time if they really wanted to make sure scripts don't run indefinitely.

<comment><USER5> > _You can 't prevent infinite loops unless you've solved the halting problem > right?_

Only in general arbitrary turing complete runtimes. For restricted subsets of instructions and specific implementations of runtimes you can. E.g. one could trivially disallow "jump" control flow, and limit loops to N iterations.

<comment><USER6> It's more simple than that: pull the plug on the entire turing machine. Lua runs in a VM, so you can stop it from the outside, which wouldn't be possible if the code was running directly in the CPU (Without an OS underneath it, that is).

<comment><USER7> You could argue this doesn't really count as preventing though. It's preventing a symptom instead of the underlying problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Freebsd has used lua in its bootloader for a few years now.

[https://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2014/LuaLoader](https://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2014/LuaLoader)

[https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- current/2018-Feb...](https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- current/2018-February/068464.html)

<comment><USER9> Wow, it actually sounds like a very elegant idea. I always viewed GRUB as overly complex and rather unpleasant to configure. I wonder why they hadn't gone this way.

<comment><USER10> Note that we haven't yet introduced .lua configuration capabilities (that's a project branch off to the side), but it does certainly make modifying menu entries and other fun stuff a lot more palatable in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> NetBSD supports Lua in the kernel since 2012.

[https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/mbalmer/fosdem2...](https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/mbalmer/fosdem2012/kernel_mode_lua.pdf)

<comment><USER12> It's in fact exactly the same thing, since NetBSD Lua started as a port of Lunatik, which is the topic of this article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's only a matter of time until we have metered WebAssembly in the kernel :)

<comment><USER14> Actually, why not? The main reason that "in the kernel" is concerning is because untrusted code needs some kind of sandboxing, either by static analysis or by run-time checks. (Most modern systems do a combination of both).

After all, the whole "in the kernel" vs. "in userland" distinction only exists because we get hardware-accelerated sandboxing from the CPU and OS combined.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, my comment is actually unironic :)

There are a few ways to limit the execution time of wasm programs:

\- inject code after a set of instructions with a certain duration and in each loop that calls an external function which meters and destroys/suspends execution when a limit is reached (e.g. [https://github.com/ewasm/wasm- metering](https://github.com/ewasm/wasm-metering))

\- use a VM which counts instructions (e.g. [https://github.com/perlin- network/life](https://github.com/perlin-network/life))

\- use hardware interrupts

More random thoughts: [https://esolangs.org/wiki/RarVM](https://esolangs.org/wiki/RarVM)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > _Investigation of a "typed Lua" for compilation is something on the roadmap. > That is the approach that the main Lua project is taking to compete with > LuaJIT on performance._

I haven't heard anything about an official "typed Lua". Is there information about it somewhere?

<comment><USER15> * Typed Lua: [https://github.com/andremm/typedlua](https://github.com/andremm/typedlua) (not actively maintained)

* tl: [https://github.com/teal-language/tl](https://github.com/teal-language/tl) a compiler for Teal a typed dialect of lua. (actively maintained)

<comment><USER16> Indeed, Teal looks like it has the right brains behind it (author was involved with several earlier attempts at typed Lua) and is actively maintained. I'm personally watching it for future game development usage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Smells like an attack vector waiting to happen to me. Malformed network request, sandbox escape, front page of Hacker News like 8-10 years from now?

I am often irrationally paranoid about this sort of thing however.

<comment><USER6> The neat thing about Lua is: It's simple. It's reasonable to expect that a sandbox can be proven to be inescapable considering there's only a very limited set of features that would allow this sort of thing in the first place (mainly the `debug` library, which I doubt will be exposed)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What happened to the implementation of a Scheme interpreter in Linux from quite a while back? I can't immediately find a reference, and don't remember details. I vaguely remember there was something similar for SunOS too (in the '90s?).

</comment><comment><USER19> ZFS compiles a modified version Lua 5.2 into zfs.ko and loaded into Linux kernel.

<comment><USER20> To expand slightly, it's used for "channel programs", scripts that can interact with ZFS to create or modify datasets and similar tasks. There's a write-up here[1] about the feature.

Main advantage is that it allows for multiple operations to be applied atomically, as well as better error handling.

[1]: [https://www.delphix.com/blog/delphix-engineering/zfs- channel...](https://www.delphix.com/blog/delphix-engineering/zfs-channel- programs)</comment></comment>


Software pirate gets two-years in prison for selling counterfeit software - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/software-pirate-gets-two-years-prison-selling

<comment><USER2> _Undercover purchases made by BSA revealed that software purchased via Jones' websites came infected with malware-exposing buyers to potential viruses and other threats according to a Business Software Alliance press release issued after the sentencing._

It would be interesting to see if any of those malware/viri impacted the customers and to what scale.</comment>


Realistically colorized historical photos - <AUTHOR> http://twentytwowords.com/2013/11/06/realistically-colorized-historical-photos-make-the-past-seem-incredibly-real-36-pictures/

<comment><USER2> I love seeing old photos with the color they deserve. It's so easy to look at an old photo and it just feels like a still from an old movie; no emotional attachment to the events depicted.

Coloring the photo brings it to LIFE, and you can relate to it. Or maybe I'm just weird.

<comment><USER3> You aren't weird. To me, black and white version = "an illustration", colored version = "holy shit, these things actually existed!".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> These photos are beautiful.

I have question though: How does a recovery artist estimate and arrive at colors of things, clothes and other objects from a black and white picture? Are these simply imagination and guesswork, or there is some sort of technique/algorithm to get to say the _exact shade of blue_ on Albert Einstein's shorts in the Long Island, 1939 picture?

<comment><USER5> Basically, no. You'd have to use references and do research to find out what the likely color of every object in the scene is.

If you know what type of black and white film was used and how it was developed, you might be able to eliminate some colors that would have appeared much darker or much lighter. If you had several black and white pictures from the same occasion shot with different film, you might be able to start to triangulate the possible colors of different objects based on how they appear differently in the different images.

But I really don't think that's how most of these are done, it's probably more about creativity and getting something that looks realistic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, these are really good. I made a website to help colorize photos since I don't have photoshop. It's [http://www.colorizephoto.com](http://www.colorizephoto.com) if you want to try yourself.

<comment><USER7> Dude, thanks for posting this. My uncle just gave me some black and whites of my dad and I know he is going to flip to see them in color. Just never thought about it before I saw this, cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The artists listed in the webpage are also active redditors (in what else? /r/colorizedhistory). This set of photos were recently posted in a pretty high trending /r/pics post. The top comments and responses have a bunch of extra information about the process.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1q34jl/colorized_histo...](http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1q34jl/colorized_historical_photos_can_make_the_past/)</comment>


Could this ex-NSA hotshot protect your email from hacking? - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2015/09/24/will-ackerly-virtru-ex-nsa-anti-hacker/ <comment><USER2> The security industry is full of "ex-NSA hotshots". Having worked at NSA is hardly a powerful hook for an article. For starters: only a tiny minority of those working in tech at NSA are experts on encryption.

<comment><USER3> ... and given that Ackerly was first in IAD working on cross-domain solutions and then SNIP, I doubt he is an expert on encryption.

What do you think of Virtru? I was hoping you would comment on this article since you're an actual crypto expert.

Encryption-by-plugin seems less bad than encryption-by-javascript, but their entire business model depends on us trusting Virtru for key escrow. This doesn't seem any better than trusting Apple for iMessage or Google for Gmail. Am I missing anything?

Edit: I guess a malicious attacker would need to take two steps for the information. One for the encryption key hosted at Virtru, then a second step to actually capture the emailed message.

<comment><USER4> I need more details that I can't find in their FAQ[1] and it's not all open source yet[2]. My main question is about metadata which you cannot really protect that well w/ how SMTP works. The second question would be how different this is from PGP/Mailvelope[3] and where the keys are stored for a user (i.e. the "trusting" you are talking about).

1 - [https://www.virtru.com/faq/](https://www.virtru.com/faq/) 2 - [https://www.virtru.com/blog/virtrus-open-source- strategy/](https://www.virtru.com/blog/virtrus-open-source-strategy/) 3 - [https://www.mailvelope.com/](https://www.mailvelope.com/)

<comment><USER3> Virtru escrows the keys, at least that's how I interpret this diagram: [https://www.virtru.com/technology/](https://www.virtru.com/technology/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It was a very interesting story to read. Glad they managed to build something that's is potentially strong while easy to use. That's difficult to bootstrap. Unfortunately, it's so difficult to design good cryptosystems, protocols, etc. that I can't trust the product until it gets strong, peer review from a diverse audience. Both the level of screw-ups in the field and massive investments in subversion by nation-states means a tool like this needs to be fully open-source plus local, build option. Note that they can do open-source w/ proprietary license.

The escrow is also a problem. There's the risk of hackers, malicious insiders, courts in regular legal system, and the court in the secret legal system. If you do escrow, it needs to run on the most secure and tamper-resistant systems you can throw at it w/ 3rd parties verifying this. Given above risks, it's better if they _don 't_ do escrow and instead switch to a private/public key model. Bernstein et al have given us some really fast and secure software for that, too. They just auto-generate the key-pairs locally & handle the public key management instead. Would be a nice improvement.

</comment><comment><USER3> Congratulations to the Virtru team for your success! I remember in 2012 when 2 of the guys were working on a cryptographic binding contract and left to join this startup.</comment>


Chomsky: Work, Learning and Freedom - <AUTHOR> http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/work_learning_and_freedom <comment><USER4> _What he discovered was that as these methods were devised there was a choice – whether to design the methods so that control would be in the hands of skilled machinists or whether it would be controlled by management. They picked the second, although it was not more profitable – when they did studies they found there was no profit advantage to it but it's just so important to keep workers under control than to have skilled machinists run the industrial process. One reason is that if that mentality spreads sooner or later workers are going to demand what seems obvious to them anyway – that they should just take over the factories and get rid of the bosses who don't do anything but get in their way._

This is a good observation -- that management tends to take as much control as it can get, without any regard to costs and benefits -- but his analysis depends on some cultural assumptions about authority. In some cultures, a person with authority over another person is a different kind of person, a superior one. North Korea is a caricature of this attitude: Kim Jong Il, being at the apex of the power structure, had to be wiser, a better golfer, and a genius at every subject compared to everyone under him. In such a culture you can speak of the workers kicking out management and taking over, because workers and managers are distinct classes of people.

In other cultures, authority inheres not in the person but in the social role they play. A manager is just a guy who has a certain limited authority at work because of his role as manager. He is not assumed to be a better golfer, dancer, or calligrapher. He may be less talented or less virtuous than the people he orders around, and that doesn't threaten his authority as long as the company is happy with his job performance. One expects that people promoted or hired into management show more than typical interest and ability at management, but other than that, if management and workers are systematically different in any way, it is because of different patterns of _déformation professionnelle_ due to their different job concerns.

In the latter kind of culture, the idea of workers kicking out management and taking over makes no sense. If you kick out the guys wearing manager hats, take away their manager hats, and give them to guys who used to wear worker hats, then you're left with the same number of manager hats, and therefore the same number of managers. You haven't kicked out management, you've kicked out the guys who used to be management.

<comment><USER5> Interestingly, you see very anarchic power structures in some of the world's best software companies. Facebook, for instance, has very little hierarchy, and nearly all the manager are engineers. Valve has literally zero hierarchy, workers choose what they work on and decisions are made by consensus.

<comment><USER6> But: who owns Valve, and is "who gets how much from the profit" also among the decisions made by consensus?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> His point about the commissioned artist vs. the self-motivated artist is very interesting to me as a freelance developer. I often feel bored/discouraged doing projects for hire, yet when building something for myself I'll dedicate 18-hour days to it - even if it's basically the same project. A similar psychology is likely what caused me to excel as a self-taught hacker but fail as a student.

On a similar note, with all the hubbub about how worthwhile college is, it seems that curiosity and self motivation are some powerful deciding factors. Perhaps the current standard of going straight to college after high school is not the right way to go about it.

<comment><USER8> > On a similar note, with all the hubbub about how worthwhile college is, it > seems that curiosity and self motivation are some powerful deciding factors. > Perhaps the current standard of going straight to college after high school > is not the right way to go about it.

The problem is deeper in culture than that. All education as a whole should not be about raw numbers or facts, it should be about exposure and lighting a creative or investigative spark. We never _had_ an education system centered around motivating interest in topics rather than route fact memorization (insert the Einstien quote about don't memorize what you can look up vis-a-vis the internet) but I think that has to be the end goal of education for humans in general. You can't be content teaching a topic, taking a test, and calling it quits. It has to be about inspiring people to persue more, and Chomsky really hits on that.

I have the same thing you do with software. I'll spend hundreds of hours on personal projects in a month, but for school assignments I'd do semester long assignments the last day. It is about what you are interested in vs what others force upon you to accomplish in that structured environment, the former is the goal and the latter is the failure in that objective.

Mainly because on some projects in my CS undergrad I _would_ put in those hundred hour sessions. I wrote my own shell, for example, that I spent a combined ~100 hours on over 2 weeks, where most people did it in ~10, and I had autocompletion, history, pipes, and primitive variable / looping implemented. Most other people couldn't even do a proper execvP.

<comment><USER9> I've had the similar experience, of working on personal projects quite close to undergrad coursework yet having a huge difference in my motivation between them. What helped me was the modules that really fit with levelling up my knowledge (for instance a report on System/360 microprogramming).

It's always seemed to me that this kind of person should be a good candidate for postgraduate degrees: driven in their own exploration, effort on interesting things, etc. I've never managed to really find out the reality though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am missing something here, and I am genuinely curious what it is I'm missing.

If a capitalist starts a manufacturing business with the goal of making money, and if he then discovers that the business would run much more effectively by letting the skilled workers make the decisions than by hiring a layer of management ... then why wouldn't the capitalist go with the more effective approach?

TL;DR rephrase -- why would a business owner maintain a layer of management if that was truly a less effective way to go?

Is Chomsky (or Noble) claiming there's something like a "conspiracy" amongst the "managerial class" to create _fake_ jobs for managers, merely to maintain class power? (Or, if not, what am I missing from his argument?)

<comment><USER11> > then why wouldn't the capitalist go with the more effective approach?

"Making money for me" and "making money for everyone" are not the same thing.

For example, if your business has 1MM in profits, and you own half, then you get 500k. If you ran that as a cooperative, you made 2MM in profits the next year, but you own 10%, you made $200k. Worse for you, better for everyone else and the group overall.

<comment><USER10> OK, that makes sense but doesn't connect all the dots for me.

I am starting with the assumption that no one gets an ownership stake for free. You can start a business if you want, and you can either bootstrap it or take investment. Either way, the owners are not _handed_ their ownership ... they "buy" it with what they put in.

Is this Chomsky/Noble point of view arguing that workers should be _granted_ a degree of ownership by virtue of the work they do?

<comment><USER11> The basic tenet of socialism is that democracy is good: the traditional corporate model is dictatorship, and it should be reformed into democracy instead.

> the owners are not handed their ownership ... they "buy" it with what they > put in.

Sure, but then they have it, and that's great. Being rewarded for your work is good. Problem is, they have to do nothing to maintain it. After an initial period of work, they have it forever. Whereas a worker who comes in afterward has no access, and even though they also put in a lot of work, they won't get any ownership. Those people are not being rewarded for the work that they do, which we all agree is bad.

> workers should be granted a degree of ownership by virtue of the work they > do?

Basically, yes. People should be in control of themselves, and their situations. Ownership == control.

Please note that I'm painting in _very_, _very_ broad strokes here. There is a ton of space under this tent.

<comment><USER12> _the traditional corporate model is dictatorship_

Huh? The traditional corporate model is representative democracy. Shareholders elect a board of directors who then elect upper management, who then appoint lower level positions.

 _Whereas a worker who comes in afterward has no access, and even though they also put in a lot of work, they won't get any ownership._

This is false for any publicly traded corporation. Any worker can open up an ETrade account and trade their salary for part of the corporation.

As far as I know, most workers choose not to. Why do you feel these workers (myself included) are making the wrong choice?

<comment><USER11> Please see my statement about broad strokes. That said....

> Shareholders elect

There's your error. Shareholders elect. Not workers. Maybe "oligarchy" is a better word than dictatorship, but as I said, trying to keep it simple to get the concept across.

Workers do not have a vote. Traditional corporate structures are not a democracy.

> This is false for any publicly traded corporation. Any worker can open up an > ETrade account and trade their salary for part of the corporation.

Only if that company is publicly traded. Even then, if it is, acquiring ownership comes through spending capital, not by virtue of having control over yourself and what you do.

> As far as I know, most workers choose not to. Why do you feel these workers > (myself included) are making the wrong choice?

Most people do not have the ability to work in a place that's run cooperatively because there aren't enough places that are cooperative. Even GitHub and Valve are socialist in social structure only: Both are private companies, but I'm pretty sure that everyone does not own a portion of the company. I could be wrong on this.

Secondly, post-Cold War, 'socialism' became such a scare term that people would shy away from it even if it were a rationally better choice for them. The notion of 'ideology' is useful here.

<comment><USER13> You don't need the word socialism to make me skeptical, I'm skeptical that democracy would produce better results in a business context. Also, I have a hard time believing you've read any Marx. You're not doing his work very much justice.

I don't even trust democracy in politics all that much, my state (California) is a complete and utter failure as an exercise in democracy.

<comment><USER14> _Also, I have a hard time believing you've read any Marx. You're not doing his work very much justice._

I call foul. That's personal, and it's unsubstantiated, which makes it unfair not only to the GP but to the rest of us reading the thread. If you're going to make a comment like this, instead of being mean why don't you share with us some of what you've learned about (in this case) Marx? I for one would be interested to hear it.

<comment><USER13> >And the victorious party" (in a revolution) "must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that authority?. - <USER3>

>As, therefore, the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one's adversaries by force, it is sheer nonsense to talk of a 'free people's state'; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist - <USER3>

Democracy is a threat to the midwife State and the final state of what Marxism aims to achieve.

<comment><USER15> So what was Marx's end goal? Some sort of utopian paradox in the vein of John's Galt, where each person is free to realize his own potential? The last quote from Engel seems to suggest that Marx was actually pushing for something much closer to Anarcho-Libertarianism.

<comment><USER13> Marx was pushing for a utopia somewhat opposite of Galt. Namely, communism.

Voluntary communist utopias are referred to as anarcho-communism.

Anarcho-libertarianism assumes a free market is involved.

Communism assumes all resources are pooled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > People are supposed to be passive and apathetic and doing what they're told > by the responsible people who are in control.

That is the fundamental struggle -- to control the masses. Get them brainwashed, scared, addicted, distracted. One way is to carefully control the information they receive that was very easy up until the Internet showed up. Now it has become a lot harder. China just built up a firewall, here it is a bit more difficult. So it still all has to rely on sophisticated spin and propaganda models.

Take Chomsky for example, most people might not even know who he is. They wouldn't have seen (or at least anything positive about) him on TV or mass media. Chances are they read something about him on the Internet or heard from their friends. Sure there were local activist groups, underground zines, but the cost of spreading information that way was pretty high, now the cost is much lower.

As propaganda and media control was becoming more sophisticated it seemed like nothing could stop it, until the Internet exploded. For example, I haven't went searching for news to any of the popular American news outlets in years. It is funny (or scary) that I trust some silly site like reddit.com to deliver better news than CNN, Fox or other such thing.

</comment><comment><USER17> Chomsky is incoherent and sensationalist. He consistently paints a narrative of class struggle and weaves it into everything, ignoring any kind of contextual reality.

What a sad, paranoid, naive old man.

<comment><USER14> A troll, yet I feel like responding anyway.

How you get that from this interview is beyond me; it seems to me full of joy and love from start to finish – joy of learning, love of freedom and play.

I saw your comment before I finished the article and was going to mention that about the only thing I bet Chomsky was very sad about was the death of his wife, by all accounts the love of his life. And then he brought it up at the very end.

Chomsky has his issues like anyone, but it has always been plain to me that there is something very beautiful at the core of the man.</comment></comment>


TweetPing: See real-time tweets on world map - <AUTHOR> http://tweetping.net/

<comment><USER2> Very cool. Now I need something like this to be projected up on the giant- screen of my secret underground lair.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is awesome.</comment>


What is the oldest website in the world - <AUTHOR>

I'm just wondering what is the oldest functioning website in the world <comment><USER2> [http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html](http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html)

<comment><USER3> And that's not only the oldest, it is also the very first.</comment></comment>


Why poor people make poor decisions - <AUTHOR> https://thecorrespondent.com/283/why-poor-people-make-poor-decisions/37442933638-a4773584 <comment><USER2> > Poverty is not a lack of character – it's a lack of cash.

No. Poverty is a lack of education and, more importantly, mentorship.

I am battling this right now with my next door neighbors, who use HOC, a Maryland social service that basically puts poor people in middle class neighborhoods by subsidizing rent.

My neighbors have money. They spend it extremely poorly. It's a single mom with 2 kids. Both kids have iPhones, iPads, PS4s, cable TV, you name it. I'm constantly cleaning up scratch-offs and cigarette butts from the shared sidewalk. Yet they are also on food stamps (SNAP) and near the end of the month the 11 year old boy inevitably starts coming over to our house for snacks because they are out of food. Just recently he boasted that his mom is going to buy him a brand new $1500 gaming rig. I remarked that seemed quite expensive and wondered where the money would come from. "tax return" he replied non-chalantly. He also said once they got their tax return they would be going to Disneyland.

I see this 11 year old boy on a trajectory for poverty. I've tried to help him with his math homework and with reading, but he is at a level far below his grade and seems to be constantly skipping school. He hates reading because his reading comprehension is low which means it will never improve because there are no adults in his life (other than me) trying to get him to read books. It's a viscious cycle. He has virtually no adult supervision or guidance (other than what I can offer when he occasionally comes over) because his single mom is always absent or in the hospital or sleeping or working or with boyfriend.

It would require an insane amount of cash to make it so the single mom didn't have to work, and even then, she is uneducated, can't help her kids with their homework, doesn't see the value in school having not used it herself, doesn't know how to be a good parent, not having had them herself, etc.

These kids need mentors more than they need cash. They need adults they can emulate who can help them break free from the viscious cycle.

<comment><USER3> I agree, but I also think there's social cost to not spending your money on status symbols. You will be ostracized by the rich and educated groups for not fitting in, and then how will you acclimate to a higher social sphere? Example[1]

[1] [https://gizmodo.com/im-buying-an-iphone-because-im- ashamed-o...](https://gizmodo.com/im-buying-an-iphone-because-im-ashamed-of- my-green-bubb-1787965756)

edit: Ok this obviously isn't black and white, but I'm saying this should be considered among other things.

<comment><USER4> Depending on which class you're trying to signal as, buying the latest iPhone could do the opposite of what's intended.

For the most part class signaling on the easier end (looks, mostly) has more to do with choices than outright spending. It's why a relatively poor college professor on the East coast can still look "upper middle". Their clothes may be a bit worn, some hand-me-downs, some thrifted, but they're the _right_ clothes. Swapping the legible t-shirt & hoodie for a cotton button-up and wool cardigan or a blazer and the $100-150 sneakers for $100-150 (clearance, seconds, or used) leather loafers will do a lot more to signal higher class than an iPhone, and none of those clothes need look new—making the mistake of spending money on stuff like electronics or boldly-branded expensive clothes while getting other things very wrong _is_ a class marker, but not one most would intentionally choose to display if they understood it.

[EDIT] in short, always having new phones and video game consoles and such only signals wealth & higher status to poor people—absent other markers of higher class they'll actual read as _low_ class to everyone else.

<comment><USER5> This is an excellent point.

Teachers in my children's schools make a point to widen their verbal culture in addition to what they teach. Also (if not mostly) so that they send the right signals (which in France is among others your general culture)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've always thought it was unintended apathy. Making a (relatively) better choice will seemingly have no effect on lifting them out of poverty any time soon, so why bother? Do the thing that maximizes their pleasure, comfort, hope, etc. in the short term, because things are never going to change in the long term. This article seems to hint at this perspective when talking about not being able to take a break from poverty, but it never seems to make that leap.

<comment><USER7> _> No. Poverty is a lack of education and, more importantly, mentorship._

Yep, you nailed it. A friend of mine was ranting on how the poor people(in Europe) spend their money on iPhones, cigars, alcohol and cable TV instead of saving it. Lately, I realized that poor people spend their money on those things since it's their way of short term escapism from feeling poor and if they were to save it, the amount would be too small to suddenly lift them out of poverty so they don't even bother.

However, if poor people were clever, or had good mentorship, they would save that money and spend it on some courses in tech like sys-admin or getting certified as a professional plumber for example and get a better paying job, leading to a path out of poverty.

Unfortunately, most popele don't have the will or the guidance to figure this out by themselves.

Edit: Sorry, replied to the wrong parent

<comment><USER8> >spend their money on iPhones, cigars, alcohol and cable TV instead of saving it

Do _you_ spend your money on those things instead of saving it?

<comment><USER7> Just to humour you, I work in tech, I have a 4 year old mid-range phone, 4 year old mid-range laptop, no cable, no TV, except for some gadgets that increase my quality of life both mentality and physically, I don't smoke and rarely drink but I do buy the best quality food that I can for cooking and rarely go to restaurants.

Since I don't come from money, I try to save as much as I can so I can buy my own place and start my own business in the future.

Meanwhile one of my youngest friends who works as a bike food delivery agent, owns a MacBook Pro, the latest iPhone, a PS4 with an ever increasing library of games, goes clubbing a lot and complains he can't _find a good job_.<face:palm>

Unfortunately, the latter example is an ever growing category in Europe of future failures since youngsters are told they can be and do whatever they want and opportunities will just come to you if you're patient and if that fails, the government is there to support you.

Not saying I'm a poster child for financial success, far from it, I have my own guilty pleasures that keep my sanity intact, everybody has, but most people born in lower class families seem to be clueless about how to get out and it ain't by frivolous spending.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article cites several research studies as well as the results of the casino in North Carolina and is a great read - and I hope people read it, digest it, and then comment (rather than comment based on the title).

This is actually what presidential candidate Andrew Yang is trying to change. He calls this the "Scarcity mindset" and it doesn't just affect poor decisions, but also inability to think about things like climate change.

This is why his proposal for Universal Basic Income of $1000 is believed to raise the poor's IQ by 13 points because having no money decrease your IQ by 13 points.

[https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/how-to-increase-your- iq...](https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/how-to-increase-your-iq- by-13-points-adopt-an-abundance-mindset.html)

New Hampshire votes today for the Democrat primary...if you're in NH, you can change the country.

</comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me of a great Matt Levine article from last year where he discusses his rules for personal finance and mocks the usual cliche advice.

""" The important rules of personal finance are:

        1. Make a lot of money. (This one is key!)
        2. Spend less than you make.
        3. Don't invest in scams.

Meanwhile most actually available personal finance advice seems to come down to these considerably less helpful teachings 2 :

        1. Don't spend any money on coffee, food, cars or other nice things.
        2. Compound interest!

""" [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-29/elon-m...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-29/elon- musk-gets-some-new-twitter-rules)

<comment><USER11> Everyone glosses over making more money and assumes people are just fixed to their current situation in life

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> People don't need cash. That's the easy way out for intellectuals. And they sure as shit don't need a casino in their town.

They need social infrastructure (families, extended families, social institutions like churches and service organizations), cultural infrastructure, and economic opportunity within this stable social structure.

All of which the intellectual class has been helping the financial elites destroy for the past century or more.

<comment><USER13> I think churches fuel poverty more than they help. Religion teaches people that they are the way they are because that's how 'God' intended them to be and that they'll be rewarded with riches when they go to 'heaven'.

<comment><USER14> Even as an atheist myself, I can tell how ridiculously uninformed this view of Christianity (and probably most other religions) is.

<comment><USER10> Can you explain how that post was ridiculous? It matches my understanding of Christianity pretty well.

The idea that suffering in this life is OK because it will pay off in the afterlife seems to be a common theme in the bible and helps explain why Christianity has been so consistently successful within poor communities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think this applies to companies as well. Continuous economical stress starts to take unproductive attention such as focusing on finance instruments (funding) instead of revenue.

</comment><comment><USER16> Poverty is not a lack of cash alone...

Its a lack of cash, education-mentoring, and lack of good choices..ie no economic difference between all the bad choices before them

<comment><USER17> \+ A lack of feeling okay

\+ A lack of hope

\+ A dearth of empirical evidence supporting the above

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A lot of people are poor because they trade education and learning for cheap short-term entertainment. People that remain poor aren't thinking about the long-term. They spend a ton of money on fast food, they do unneeded impulse purchases, they go for quick dopamine rushes and fall back into depression when it wears off. Many people get 'comfortable' in their low wage jobs complaining everyday how much they hate it, but when they go home they go straight to watching Netflix instead of improving their skills to make themselves more valuable. A lot of the time, poverty is a mindset.

</comment><comment><USER18> The one point that is sometimes missed is that in some pockets of poverty, those who are bettering themselves get mocked for it. It is strange mentality that requires betterment in isolation.

</comment><comment><USER19> I am totally open to the idea as espoused in the comments that poverty is not about money but about decisions and mentorship.

Can I ask if anyone can actually point to any studies to highlight that? The linked article is very well sourced and I'd like to see sources that point to mentorship programs.

<comment><USER20> > Can anyone source articles that fit my specific viewpoint instead of the > well sourced article that disagrees with my viewpoint?

Is that what you're going for?

<comment><USER19> No; the above article is well-sourced but the comments heavily disagree with it. I'd like for these comments to cite an equally sourced article so I, an undecided reader, can decide for myself what I find more compelling.

<comment><USER20> Gotcha, that does seem fair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There's too often conflation and confusion surrounding two larger principles:

a. The layers of beliefs that build on each other that lead to amplified productivity, wealth, success, popularity and such.

b. that poverty isn't an innate quality or fate, but a prison of the mind most people get attached to and will defend. They can escape it if they so choose.

a.)

1\. Locus-of-control - Poor people exist in world where they are made to feel like criminals and everything is a zero sum game. So, it doesn't _seem_ to matter about saving a dollar here or a dollar there. (External locus-of- control/learned helplessness). Contrast this with people who make a game, and get a thrill, out of buying something on closeout and getting to use a coupon on top of it. Costco: it's hard to get a poverty-oriented person excited about saving money at Costco

2\. Saving - People who are poor don't choose to have high Marginal Propensity to Consume (MPC), they have unmet needs and emergencies all of the time.

3\. Investing and ownership - People who don't have any savings and don't have internal locus-of-control can't conceive on multiplying money with money, so they can't really build balance sheet affluence. And if workers were rational, they would consider what profits they were giving away to their employers for a pittance, and take collective action to improve their lot or form another company (co-op's/worked-owned enterprises). Also, people in a poverty-mindset will often believe that lottery tickets, celebrity or special talents (magical thinking) are their "way out."

b.) Poverty isn't strictly income or balance sheet, it begins with either elements of virtuous-cycle or self-defeating, vicious-cycle attitudes. When people believe a certain way or lack confidence, they continually sabotage themselves with every choice and missed opportunity in live.

On the flip-side, continued wealth is never assured: people can convince themselves they are invincible, have infinite money and/or otherwise sabotage their cash cows like pissing-off their customers.

</comment><comment><USER22> It seems to me that the amount of politics discussed on a platform is related to how popular that platform is. I like how in some technical IRC channels they just ban any political discussions outright. It seems to keep the channel on-topic even with thousands of users. Not saying HN should follow this course... but this thought crosses my mind sometimes. Sometimes there's too much political discussions on HN for my taste.

</comment><comment><USER23> And poor decisions make people poor.

<comment><USER24> Those poor decisions however need not be theirs.

<comment><USER25> That may be so, but this idea does absolutely nothing to help someone get out of poverty. If you were born to financially illiterate parents and grow up poor or end up poor as a result, pointing to how it was stuff out of your control that made you poor will lead to nothing else but continuing to stay poor until you start doing things and making choices that lead you out of that situation.

It sucks and isn't really fair, but the person best equipped to extract you from poverty is you. No one can make your choices for you, and you're far better off taking your life into your own hands and working to improve it than hoping that greater society will intervene on your behalf simply because your situation isn't favourable to you or because you're not entirely to blame for ending up in it.</comment></comment></comment>


A Cavity-Fighting Liquid Lets Kids Avoid Dentists' Drills - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/health/silver-diamine-fluoride-dentist-cavities.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> How about avoiding sugar and brushing teeth after eating?

<comment><USER3> So don't eat fruits either or any food that has sugar in it, which in US is pretty much in everything nowadays?

Brushing your teeth more than twice a day is likely to do more damage than helping. A lot of people brush the wrong way and that often resulted in gum issues as well.</comment></comment>


What we can learn from AirBNB and ransackgate - tomh- https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/eT6Zar6WM1X

<comment><AUTHOR> Any web business that does #2 is cutting their own throat. Closing down lines of communication makes it look like you have something to hide even if you don't. _Especially_ to many, maybe even a large majority of, people on the web.

>We can tell whether you are lying or not. When I see text I can't tell, but video is far more convincing.

You might find it more convincing, or less convincing, but it is BS. Go read Overcoming Bias for a while. People often believe they can tell when someone else is lying, but they are often wrong (usually about 50%, that is the same as randomly guessing). Actually paying attention to the information they provide, that is reading what they have written, is much more accurate.

Only in #4 does he actually give good advice. " _Fix the freaking problem_ ".

</comment><comment><USER2> Normally I don't pay much attention to Scoble, but he's making a lot of sense here.</comment>


Lobsters launched 8 years ago today - <AUTHOR> https://lobste.rs/s/orrpdv/lobsters_launched_8_years_ago_today <comment><USER2> And I still don't have an invite!</comment>


DIY SSH Bastion Host - <AUTHOR> https://smallstep.com/blog/diy-ssh-bastion-host/ <comment><USER2> Is there any way to create a bastion or proxy without messing with the client configs? something like a transparent proxy like nginx but talks SSH.</comment>