Open Sourcing a Failed Startup - <AUTHOR> http://nirvdrum.com/2014/11/20/open-sourcing-mogotest.html <comment><USER2> I really feel for nirvdrum here, we had exactly the same hard process with Microcosm.

We were somewhat better placed to open it up, we had separated various parts more completely, hadn't put in the full billing engine, and had no third party code or other things that we were distributing that might be an issue.

But... one of the things nirvdrum didn't touch upon was that we just hadn't designed it to be a single-server, single-customer install.

We designed it as a platform, and made assumptions along the way. I didn't mind opening the embarrassing code (everyone's shit smells), but the people who were asking all seemed to want a single, well-documented install... and we were having to walk away and go get a day job.

We _did_ choose to open it in the end, and you'll find our work here: [https://github.com/microcosm-cc/](https://github.com/microcosm-cc/)

But I only know of a few people who have actually installed it to date (and struggled, because it's not well documented). All of the effort to open-source it just found another set of tyre kickers.

Sigh. It's tough. Just letting go. And it's definitely made tougher by wrangling with these questions and trying to do the right thing without investing so much at a time when you're exhausted, broke and likely quite down about things.

<comment><USER3> As one of buro9's users, I have to say I was very happy to hear that the software was going to be Open Sourced, however I was dreading having to migrate it all to my server.

In the end I'm _much_ happier that buro9 found a way to keep it ticking over. Given the choice of continued service vs. Open Source I definitely would have chosen continued service - but it's even better to have both!

<comment><USER2> > the end I'm much happier that buro9 found a way to keep it ticking over

It's worth noting for people that don't know, that I ate my own dogfood. The communities and forums I run are now hosted on Microcosm.

So when we were facing the "What next?" moment, I knew I had to install and setup my own instance of the platform just to give my users an uninterrupted service.

What I did, was for every customer already on the platform who had stuck with us, loved what we'd done... I offered them space on my instance.

I never wanted to leave even a single customer in the lurch. I think it sucks that startups do, especially if a way can be found.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Honestly, I'm not quite sure how I feel about this.

I have people that ask me to open-source my current side-project all the time (one that is paid), and I find it insanely disrespectful.

"Yes, let me just hand over the source code for my commercial product. How about not."

I'm not trying to sound greedy, but money speaks. If these companies want the software open sourced, they should be pitching in for the cost. If you don't think something is worth money, you don't value it at all.

EDIT: Perhaps this is a good place to drop the "challenge" I gave myself and invited other developers to join me a few months ago.

DEVELOPERS - I challenge you to spend some money TODAY:

[https://mattkremer.com/developers-you-need-to-stop-being- so-...](https://mattkremer.com/developers-you-need-to-stop-being-so-stingy/)

<comment><USER5> I'm not a developer, I'm a DevOps admin, so perhaps I don't understand as well as I would if I was a developer (blood, sweat, time, all that jazz).

I can see it being rude for people asking you to open source an ongoing concern side-project. But if your startup failed, your application didn't have any value in the marketplace (or you weren't able to execute).

As you said: "If you don't think something is worth money, you don't value it at all." If the market doesn't value it, and it failed, why would people pay to open source it?

<comment><USER4> You're completely correct in my opinion, but I'd like to add one crucial point:

If people are asking/begging for the tool to be open sourced, then they do indeed value it. Otherwise, why would they care if it just withered and died?

They may not have valued it as much as the product was charging for, but that's a different debate entirely. I'm assuming there was some discussion of commercial viability, lowering prices, etc. before they chose to shut down. (You pretty much said this part in your second paragraph, this is the "execution" part.)

<comment><USER6> >If people are asking/begging for the tool to be open sourced, then they do indeed value it. Otherwise, why would they care if it just withered and died?

If we are talking about a start up, what about current clients? Maybe your business could not be sustained by the number of clients you had, they do find value in but they can not by themselves sustain your business.

<comment><USER7> Yes it's totally allowed to _sell_ a product under GPL, for example to give it only to the real customers who paid for it. Those are then free to share, but since they know how much it cost them, they may choose not to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _" I decided to try a crowd-sourced campaign to help with the open sourcing effort. Precisely zero of the companies that have been begging me to open- source the code have contributed in any capacity."_

Wow, that speaks volumes. Good call on not open sourcing your code.

<comment><USER9> I think the same goes for those trying to pressure twitpic's owners to give up all of the company's IP for $15k in bandwidth bills. If it's really an indispensable historical archive, as they claim, surely someone is willing to put up some dough and see that twitpic is fairly compensated for relinquishing control of that archive. This goes double now that Twitter is a public company. The fact of the matter is that twitpic is not considered that valuable, or they'd be able to raise some money for the data dump.

<comment><USER10> As far as I knew, several serious parties affiliated with archive.org offered, contacted them directly, and made plenty of waves to try and buy this capacity.

So twitpic might be different, but I agree with the general point: if you care so much and you are making money with it, pay, otherwise go build it yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love and contribute to OSS, but the community often has a toxic entitlement mentality. It has somehow become for-profit corporations' God-given right to expect free labor from white-collar professionals. Ahem, _what_?

I have gotten asked about whether I'd OSS my services if I was unable to continue maintaining them commercially. Nope. Not a chance. If they need a soft landing, that soft landing will be a 6 month warning to get your data out, prior to them going into the big bit bucket in the sky. It is _extraordinarily difficult_ to take a multi-tenant SaaS app and turn it into a single-tenant appliance. There are people who do _exactly that_ as a consulting service, and they charge tens of thousands of dollars for it, for a reason. (Plug: take a look at jidoteki.com, which is attempting to productize that particular space.)

Just doing the license review is something that they pay serious professionals with high-three-figures-an-hour bill rates to walk on a file-by-file and function-by-function basis in the case of e.g. an acquisition. If a forgotten subsystem got written by a freelancer 4 years ago and you don't have an IP assignment readily at hand your options are a) locating the freelancer and convincing them to sign additional contracts or b) doing a quick cleanroom reimplementation of code you might not even have know existed.

It's not like OSSing the code will quiet the criticism, either. Some folks simply want to see it OSSed for the same reason they want to see their football team win, but some of the folks have the notion that they're actually going to use it. When it doesn't work (and it _won 't work_), they're going to expect you to fix that for them. For free, naturally. This will often entail doing free tech support for other people's software -- in some cases, other people's very expensive software that they should probably be paying professionals to support for their customers.

If any of this discomfits OSS users, the mint prints out paper ballots which allow you to allocate your votes on desired outcomes for the future. See that some go to the people responsible for software you can't live without.

<comment><AUTHOR> This was a large part of why I decided not to. It took me 6 hours or so to realize that was the path I was heading down. But the end of the 14th hour, I was certain it was a bad call. Releasing something I know was broken and that everyone knew I was the best person to fix just sounded like a recipe for a bad situation.

I wish I had realized it a bit sooner. But, hey, I feel more comfortable having thoroughly exhausted the option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There is a real problem with the perceived value of software. The public sees Google giving everything away, not understanding the underlying business model, and assumes all software has little or no value. Software is not made of physical materials, so why should it be compensated?

The public sees Apple apps for 99¢, so shouldn't all software be priced like that?

I recently dealt with a customer demanding a free upgrade. She paid $29 nine years ago, and was seething mad at having to pay for an upgrade. How do you deal with that?

I'm just looking for an Opens Source banker who will give me an Open Source mortgage.

<comment><USER13> Ask the customer when was the last time Microsoft gave a free upgrade for Office.

<comment><USER14> Sadly, about two weeks ago...

If you're asking why sadly: if you're not paying... etc

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm always brought back to the time I decided to literally sell everything I had and leave the country. A few weeks before leaving I listed each item I had for extremely reasonable prices.

A $400 couch for $200, table for $20, beautiful custom framed long print of an old possibly rare poster for $50. Laser printer for $20. Ridiculously reasonable prices on everything on and on.

Nobody bought anything and every thing I managed to sell was preceded by an arduous process of "oh how about this much". Two days before moving out I listed everything I had left for free, which was basically everything. Immediately the phone was off the hook, people were leaving work to come pick up whatever it was.

What I'm saying is nobody pays shit for anything.

<comment><USER16> I just had to do the same thing, and had a completely different experience.

I sold our stuff on an auction site (TradeMe, the NZ EBay equivalent), with $1 reserve, and applied some of the lessons I've learned from lurking here.

My wife thought I was crazy. She was completely ready with the "I told you so". I argued that we didn't have time to relist it if it didn't sell at the reserve, so $1 it had to be!

Everything sold for more than I expected, dramatically so (frequently more than replacement cost). Even better, when people came to pick up their purchases, they were invariably _happy_ about it!

Going back, I compared my results with those of the same items on the site, my $1 item outsold them.

It helped that ads with pictures, $1 reserve and paid placement got preferential placement.

Things to do:

      1) Put some effort into the copy.
      2) Track down the user's guide.
      3) Track down a product review.
      4) Take pictures - Make sure they are in focus!
      5) Show the label indicating model number clearly.
      6) Answer all questions promptly.
      7) If people ask for Buy Now price, decline. :)
      8) Pay to be top of the results!

I also learned that 50% of the bids arrived in the last day.

<comment><USER17> I'm really interested in this, any chance you have the hard numbers on what you spent vs what you made? Marketing is a skill that I'm not great at so this kind of explicit example is very helpful.

<comment><USER18> Honestly, if you want advice on selling items such as furniture or personal items online, you might want to ask in one of the flipping comunities like /r/flipping on reddit. They don't usually try to get rid of their own stuff, but they sell stock from yard sales, thrift stores craiglist offers, retail arbitage, ect. In fact, you might have drawn some flippers with your free offer. They're usually quite helpful if you ask concrete questions , especially regarding presenting your wares, and there'll proably be members who can tell you what percentage of their revenue goes to shipping and other fees.

[[http://www.reddit.com/r/Flipping/wiki/index](http://www.reddit.com/r/Flipping/wiki/index)]

<comment><USER17> Thanks! I'd never heard of /r/Flipping and the direct link to the wiki was very useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Having been through this kind of decision before, this really resonates with me. Especially the pettiness.

When your business fails after years of struggle because people didn't want to pay for your software, and those same people make you feel guilty for not supporting the codebase after you can't pay the bills... that breeds the kind of resentment that creates real-life Walter Whites. It's hard to understand the experience unless you've been through it.

One thing that came out of it is that now I always try to find a way to pay for the things I use. _Especially_ when I don't have to -- because I know I'm in the minority. And when I don't pay for something and that something goes away, I don't get frustrated anymore. I know i'm getting what I pay for.

In short, please pay for your software.

<comment><USER20> > In short, please pay for your software.

I regularly donate to several free software projects (kde, gimp, vlc, firefox, and occasionally others) because they respect my freedom.

I strive to avoid proprietary products. If other developers want my money, I want my software freedoms. Those that provide them get money from me. I do understand this is not the norm behavior, and it is awful that it takes developers disrespecting the users of their software to have them pay for it. Just nobody sees the value in software freedom (and yes, even if you cannot write code you benefit from being able to pay any developer to fix your problems, and you can also pay auditors to inspect the code whereas with a proprietary product you are screwed).

<comment><USER21> Given that developers prefer not to starve and companies prefer to stay in business, if we're going to switch to a world where software is open source and everybody pays/donates even though the source is there, consumers need to make the change first.

As long as consumers don't pay/donate for opensource software, producers cannot afford to pull the ripcord and switch things over, even if they want to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Work on letting the pettiness go because it will only make your own emotional recovery more difficult. Honestly, it might take years for you to fully recover mentally but cynicism will just prolong it.

If it helps you financially to not open the code because someone may yet still pay or because it saves you time then thats a good choice, don't feel bad one bit about it. But forget people who "should have paid" if it has no relevance now other than to torment you.

You also may have an adjustment period as you go back to working for another company. It's weird because you feel like you've already grown out of that yet will be expected to fit in as a corporate soldier.

I can offer hope you will eventually see an upside in personal growth. You'll realize that you've gained experience and expertise in running a company that's rare and extremely hard to come by any other way.

Good luck on your road to recovery, don't give up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the concern. I've sorta gone through this before. I ran another company (Servprise International) for 4.5 years and went through the adjustment back to a full-time job. The biggest difference is this time I'm older and wanted to think about something I could reasonably see myself doing for 3 - 4 years, at least.

I'm actually fairly at ease with things. Making the decision to leave it behind was liberating. Dealing with the BS required to shutdown a company is just annoying. But, the open source question has come up quite a few times. I wanted to give it more than a simple "no" answer and explain why. I feel like it's really a loaded question to ask a start-up that just shutdown, especially when it's not often asked of start-ups still running.

I threw the pettiness quip in there to be intellectually honest. Taken out, I don't think it materially changes the decision. But I wanted to address it. I'm human. I certainly have irrational tendencies and I'm rather okay with that. Sure, I'll work on them, but humans aren't perfect automata even if this forum is wont to linking to Wikipedia pages on logical fallacies. Even after challenging that part, I couldn't find a strong enough set of pros to outweigh the cons in spending more time to give it away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Luckily this is one decision I'll never have to make if we ever fail and shutdown. All of our code is Open Source, ASLv2 licensed, and has been from day 0. Well, OK, maybe not a few internal tools and things, but all of our _product_ code is OSS already, on GitHub and ready to go.

We consider this a strong selling point to our current prospects, actually. There's no fear of vendor lock-in, they can kick us out tomorrow and get a new vendor to support them, they have 100% freedom to modify the code and tailor it to their needs if we don't provide what they need, and - if we close up shop - they have options for future support, whether it means supporting it themselves, or paying someone else to do it. But access to the code will never be a problem.

<comment><USER24> Well, that's great and all but be careful not to be to flippant about it.

It's a very different business model, with different advantages and disadvantages that are very hard to compare directly. It's not an easy decision to make.

My current project was Closed Source for a year and a half and has now been Open Source for a year.

Open Source was always something I thought about, and sometimes people asked, but the thing that made me flip over was the realisation one morning after some bad sales meetings that with either a Open Source or Closed Source project, making a project that users both actually want and you can get some money for was very hard work, and if I was going to do all that work anyway I may as well do the one I personally preferred.

So I Open Sourced it, and I feel I did so from a position of strength. It's been a great year for the project, and I don't regret it.

I've also been on the flip side of that; Open Sourcing a project from a position of weakness. We had talked about Open Sourcing it from the start but never did, then the project never took off and in the final stages before we finally killed it we Open Sourced it. It never gave us or anyone else that I know off any benefit, and was a waste of time.

Thanks nirvdrum for a honest and good post - I'm actually talking about Open Sourcing my project in a week and would like to quote your blog - with a link and credit, of course. Good luck for the future ...

<comment><AUTHOR> By all means, quote away. Writing this was cathartic for me. If it helps others, even better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm the competitor nirvdrum was mentioning (Browserbite). We had a very nice founder-to-founder talk and we have gone through quite a few of the same failures that he has. I have all the respect for nirvdrum. Most people don't manage to hang on that long.

To be honest, I was sorry to see mogotest go, because it shows that there might not be any business in cross browser testing. But there is! In my eyes it was a valid effort on all fronts - trying to build a community and handling lots of browser vendor irregularities. He was one of the first ones. But the market wasn't there, yet.

Good luck! The cross browser testing space will miss him!

</comment><comment><USER26> Giving your customers a soft landing is really important to maintain trust. They loved your product, and proved that the market existed--but it wasn't as big as you thought.

When closing down, has anyone explored not completely shuttering the company, but instead continuing to exist as a licensing entity? License the source code itself to your existing customers so that they can continue using it, without all the messiness involved in open sourcing it completely?

Probably a terrible idea, but it's what this blog left me thinking.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did think about licensing. There are two big problems with that:

1) The costs of running a single instance of the application far exceed the plans I was selling. It requires a certain amount of amortization to become cost effective for a lot of people. Dealing with Windows and Mac licensing and the hardware required just to get the browsers going, let alone the analysis engine, is too much for most of our customers.

2) Browser vendors pump out releases every 6 weeks. Without some form of ongoing support, the app would become obsoleted in fairly short order.

As such, the licensing model only makes sense for those that are comfortable messing around with the source. While the article makes it sound like it's a coupled nightmare, most things are actually laid out very nicely. But, it's still a level of complexity a lot of people aren't going to want to tackle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What I hate is that some people feel _entitled_ to getting one's hard work for free.

<comment><USER28> No, that's not the issue. People object to useful IP rotting in the back of a filing cabinet, unused. It's not about getting it free, it's about being able to get it at all.

(Some people may _want_ things for free but that's a different issue.)

<comment><USER29> That objection is a form of entitlement.

<comment><USER30> No, it's not. Some of us actually believe that the advance of humanity comes from the reuse of its own previous work.

<comment><USER29> You're not rebutting my argument; you're merely saying that the "entitlement" isn't in this case negative. You've confounded a positive argument with a normative one.

Either way: it clearly is entitlement. Someone writes something, conjuring something new out of thin air. An unrelated person believes they have a moral claim to that thing. QED.

I do happen to think this entitlement is negative, if for no other reason than that it prevents people from publishing or even talking about publishing for fear of having to deal with entitled strangers arguing with them about what to do with their work. Whatever "good" that sense of entitlement does is, I think, outweighed by the bad.

You obviously disagree.

<comment><USER31> It is a sense of entitlement, but it's far more reasonable. If you spent years working on a codebase which at least a few people liked enough to use, is it really worth dumping all that code in the trash for all of eternity just because you'd incidentally end up capitulating to some obnoxious people when you open source it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Setting aside the licensing issues, and assuming it's just because I don't feel like dealing with obnoxious people, something still doesn't make sense to me. Prior to announcing the shutdown, no one had access to the source. I've made a lot of it available since then, but not all of it. Today, they still don't have access to that source. How is society any worse off?

Unless your belief is simply that all code should be open source. And that's fine, but then it doesn't really seem tied to the shutdown of the company.

<comment><USER31> No, I don't think all code should be open source at all.

Humanity isn't worse off for it if you don't release the source, but you could _potentially_ make humanity better off by releasing it. If you keep it to yourself forever, never to be used or seen again, you reduce the chance of helping someone's project or improving someone's life to 0%.

If you do release it, there's that chance that a few people out there will borrow some of its ideas to help them out, or perhaps they'll actually use the entire codebase so they don't reinvent the wheel. This could save them a lot of time and effort. Or maybe a non-coder will use it because they genuinely want to use the app. And who knows, maybe it'll be a lot more than a few people.

It's just a bit existentially sad to essentially lock all that code produced out of so many man hours in a little sphere that is never opened again.

For a good example of this, look at Isaac Newton's unreleased works.

If you really don't want to appease obnoxious beggars from companies, you can just release it with a license that restricts all, or certain kinds, of commercial use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> There's a cost to open sourcing software. I like that the OP pointed that there was software that was sub-licensed and needed to be excised. Netscape took close to a year to open source their browser as Firefox using _every_ significant company resource.

<comment><USER33> He should have always been (trying to be) aware of all the licenses he was using from the start. You can't just use any code you find on the net and staple it into your project.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was well aware of the licenses. I was optimizing for delivering value to my customers, not for the best way to give everything away should I go out of business. The world of licensing gets considerably more complicated once you decide to distribute it. There are plenty of things I'm free to use in a service capacity because I'm not distributing them. The issue of linking or derived works or license compatibility doesn't come into play for many licenses if you're not actually distributing software.

And that says nothing of the commercial products I licensed that I knew I wouldn't be able to sublicense. But, the name of the game was expediency. I liked the theme on WrapBootstrap. I paid ~$20 for it and got up and running in a weekend. Recreating that would have been considerably more effort at significantly more cost. I made a trade-off, as businesses need to do. It's technical debt, one I'm not obligated to pay and don't see the long-term value being worth it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> most of the time it's extremely hard to just go open source when a startup dies. There's issues of ownership and also the amount of work needed to get a typical startup codebase clean, refactored and open source ready is difficult. It's kinda like having a garage sale and giving everything away - it's hard to give away or sell every single thing, but parts of it might be useful to the community.

<comment><USER35> AFIK, AngularJS was the result of improving and open-sourcing the code of a failed startup, after taking it to Google, adding a tone of features to the codebase and using it in internal projects before open sourcing it.

<comment><USER36> Got a source for that? That's a very different story from the one that Brad and Misko told at the ng-conf ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1A1VR0ibIQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1A1VR0ibIQ))

<comment><USER35> In wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AngularJS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AngularJS) is says "AngularJS was originally developed in 2009 by Miško Hevery and Adam Abrons [10] at Brat Tech LLC[11] as the software behind an online JSON storage service, that would have been priced by the megabyte, for easy-to-make applications for the enterprise. This venture was located at the web domain "GetAngular.com",[11] and had a few subscribers, before the two decided to abandon the business idea and release Angular as an open-source library"

I think here they mention it in the adventures in Angular podcast that Misko took it from a previous company which was a startup between him and another developer that did not went through -> [http://devchat.tv/adventures-in- angular/001-aia-the-birth-of...](http://devchat.tv/adventures-in- angular/001-aia-the-birth-of-angular-1)

It might also have been here or one of the the Javascript Jabber Angular episodes (their search functionality seems to be down for the moment)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I actually had a lot of success with Open Sourcing. After a year of making virtually nothing out of selling Espruino as software (while being bombarded with sometimes abusive comments about the fact it wasn't Open), I decided to put it on KickStarter as Open Source hardware a year ago - and the result was very good. My second KickStarter is about to finish in 24 hours too.

It's a shame yours didn't work out - I think I was lucky I had something that could be crowdfunded more easily.

Having said that, _none_ of the people that berated me for being Open Source have contributed anything back (others have been very helpful though). I've also had to cope with cheap clones, the possibility of competitors using my own software, and a huge support burden from users of other hardware.

<comment><USER3> Just to add: Overall open source has been great in my case. It's just that it's very easy for someone to make a comment on the internet - it doesn't mean they're particularly bothered about it or are prepared to do anything about it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Went through a similar experience with a simple puzzle game that relied on a UDP p2p networking library I was working on. I lost 2 years battling NAT and the nondeterministic nature of networking before I had to throw in the towel. I lost a similar amount, perhaps $40,000 in the form of credit card debt. Took me forever to get out from under it and it destroyed my credit, so I haven't used a credit card since 2008, other than a $500 one for medical emergencies.

This is a rough business and I'm not sure if I would want to open source the library either. For one thing, we have better replacements now like ZeroMQ and Firebase. Also the idea of giving up on all that work (that I someday may be able to still use) leaves an awful taste in my mouth.

</comment><comment><USER38> Fantastic write up! I have long wondered why failed companies and products just don't throw their code into github. Like google reader which bit me big time.

</comment><comment><USER39> I knew I recognized you from somewhere! For those who don't know, nirvdrum's one of the primary contributors to rubber [https://github.com/rubber/rubber](https://github.com/rubber/rubber) (it's a pretty critical part of our current infrastructure)

In my book at least, you've already contributed a huge amount to open source and I wouldn't worry about needing to do more :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I do what I can. And thanks for your contributions to the project over the years :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I think this approach is both pragmatic and reasonable. You felt that open- sourcing the code has certain amount of value and the act of open-sourcing has a certain cost. If someone wanted that, they should have funded the crowdsourcing campaign.

It didn't work out because it seems everyone asking wanted it for free. That's their problem. You did everything right.

</comment><comment><USER41> So what now? Did you get a day job?

Honestly, there shouldn't be any rush to do anything. You released some good tools, and that's fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> I came to the realization that Mogotest didn't have a future, at least with me, over the summer. I've evaluated a lot of opportunities in that time. The hardest part being that I didn't really have a clue what I wanted to do. My strategy was to cast a wide net and see if anything excited me.

It took a while, but I'm happy to say I joined as a researcher at Oracle Labs working on their JRuby/Truffle implementation. I started this week and while it's early days yet, I feel relieved in a way I haven't in years.

<comment><USER42> Currently the only other downstream comment from this post starts with "Bummer to hear that".

So I want to say, congratulations on your new job. It sounds incredibly interesting. I hope you enjoy it, meet new people and learn new things.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I don't think the other comment was meant to be negative. It was a bummer to shut it down. And it's one of those events you sorta relive every time you talk to someone. "Hey, how's the company doing?" Fortunately, I've gotten a lot of those out of the way by now :-)

So far, the new gig has been great. I was extremely reticent to join such a massive company, but it's the sort of work virtually no start-up would ever be able to justify spending resources on. The change of pace and the new experience should be worthwhile. And rather than working in a silo, I'm surrounded by some of the top people in their respective fields. It's ... different :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> If you use the term "Open Source" as a verb, you're probably Doing It Wrong.

If you develop a piece of software in the open, preferably with a community around it, then you won't be able to get away with it being impossible to deploy or containing inappropriately-licensed subcomponents. If you don't, you'll likely run into all of the problems the author mentions, and more, when you go to 'Open Source' it. Not only that, but there'll be nobody to maintain the resulting project, and it's likely that nobody will actually benefit.

Open Source is great (FWIW I work exclusively on Open Source at the moment), but it isn't like a condiment you can spread on after the fact. It needs to be baked in to your strategy.

</comment><comment><USER44> There needs to exist a place to simply dump code with no obligations.

One of his minor arguments against open sourcing was having to maintain the code base, and i've heard this from others too. With a dumping ground there would be no such obligation.

<comment><USER45> Why? Dump it in github with the right license, and anyone can fork it.

<comment><AUTHOR> One reason is because you'll invariably be criticized for not merging some pull request.

<comment><USER33> Create an account with a throwaway address, put the project up, then walk away.

I have a few projects on Github that aren't under my name because I don't want to be pestered about them, ever. And I never have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I would offer your clients the chance to purchase a software license and send along a list of DevOps contractors you would recommend. You might make some money, your clients will appreciate the offer, and your DevOps friends make gain a client. Win, win, win.

</comment><comment><USER47> AccelerEyes recently did the same with their product arrayfire(github.com/arrayfire), though I cannot tell if they are successful or not.

</comment><comment><USER48> This is a great post, thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER49> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIXz80LnDjo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIXz80LnDjo)

</comment><comment><USER50> One word: music

</comment><comment><USER51> Is it possible that you failed at commercialization, and now you can't bear the thought that open sourcing your creation might lead to zero stars and forks on Github?

Is it possible that the "bombardment of questions" you claim was nothing more than a handful, maybe in the half-dozen or so range, of people who wanted to offer you emotional support because that is free for them to do while paying you for a product they did not want is not?

We don't all get immediate success. What matters is perseverance and determination - never giving up. Not making excuses for why the world failed you. You'll never get anywhere that way.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be clear, since you made another snarky comment that you deleted, I did have paying customers and it was cash-flow positive. But, I couldn't hire a team on current revenues. And given I had bootstrapped a slow-and-steady business, I didn't have that awesome hockey-stick most people lie about, making raising substantially harder. It wasn't some 6 month operation that failed so I pivoted and I didn't piss through investor money. By any objective measure, I was quite dedicated to it -- to the point that I suffer from intense hand pain due to the amount of typing I do daily.

At the end of the day, I didn't want to waste away on a slow-but-steady company. I wanted to lighten my load so I didn't need another hand surgery. I wanted to spend more time with 1.5 year old child. And I wanted to work with smart people learning new stuff.

But, by all means, take a single sentence intentionally devoid of context and continue to extrapolate.

<comment><USER52> don't let armchair quarterback assholes get to you. the beauty of entrepreneurship is it was your decision to start, and your decision to stop. you don't need to justify it to anyone but yourself.

the experience of having founded and run a company for 5 years is a skill that will be valuable. put it on your resume and sell it as experience few others have, because that's true.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Without a doubt, one of my biggest weaknesses is taking troll bait.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Open source… the dumpster of the startup world.

<comment><USER54> The quality of open source from startups vary significantly, but so does open source in general.

<comment><USER55> The quality of software varies significantly in general, we just get to see the open source.</comment></comment></comment>


Peter Drucker - Career Moves for ages 20 to 70 (Psychology Today 1992) - <AUTHOR> http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199211/career-moves-ages-20-70

<comment><AUTHOR> Drucker: I'd put off elementary school if I had my way. I am not a great believer in school. School is primarily an institution for the perpetuation of adolescence.</comment>


WhatsApp Forensic Artifacts: Chats Aren't Being Deleted - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=6143 <comment><USER2> To be fair (and to summarize for those who come to comments first), this isn't exclusively a WhatsApp issue. Yes, architectural decisions could be made to secure on-device data, and they should have, but they're not alone in not doing so.

WhatsApp, like many iOS and Android apps, uses SQLite as their datastore. When a row is deleted from SQLite, the pages used by that row aren't deleted from the physical storage medium. Many databases behave this way; zeroing out physical blocks would be cost prohibitive, and may cause solid state storage to fail prematurely due to the "digital wear" of flipping bits too many times.

So... WhatsApp deletes rows from tables in a SQLite database... which may have an iCloud backup... which is not nearly as secure as the database on the device. This is true for most of the apps that we all run on our phones.

<comment><USER3> I think it would be fair to have apps advertised as secure messengers be more aggressive about how they handle data given the intended use as long as people understand the tradeoff.

I'm willing to trade off wear for security.

Also, a reason why I do not use iCloud in it's current incarnation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This isn't surprising.

I put in scripts to vacuum SQLite databases on the Palm Pre phones back when I was still using them.

This is also relevant to OS X where the list of downloaded files need to be cleared out.

See [http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2012071702530516...](http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20120717025305161)

</comment><comment><USER4> In the past the Whatapp SQLlite databas was clear text readable.

You could use a iphone backup tool that mount the file system and just read out the chat records.</comment>


ConfigR: Look Mom, No XML - <AUTHOR> http://codeopinion.com/configr-look-mom-no-xml/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the great blog post!</comment>


LLVM-based JIT compiler for C++ - <AUTHOR> http://www.loopperfect.com/blog/jyt-0.2-enters-public-beta/ <comment><USER2> In the divide between AOT and JIT, and not being able to have them both, is the deoptimize question. You come back from JITted code to a specific call site; which is easily available to you if you're in an interpreter, but might have been compiled away if you're in an AOT. Plus all tricky aspects of safety, synchronization, performance associated with this.

From their front page, the following makes me think that they don't do AOT at all:

> Explore

> Jyt enables explorative C++ programming using a REPL.

> Patch

> Hot-swap functionality at run-time. Deploy fixes with zero down-time.

<comment><USER2> Alright, reading further takes us to Cling [1], which is an interactive C++ interpreter

[1] [https://root.cern.ch/cling](https://root.cern.ch/cling)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11702322](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11702322)</comment>


The Code Writers Workshop – Where developers are creative writers - <AUTHOR> https://codewritersworkshop.com/ <comment><USER2> When I hear creative writing, I think of limiteless possibilities where the writers personality effects the mood. When I think of code, I think my understanding/lack of effects the effeciency of the problem I'm trying to solve. Similarly, I think of many patterns are strictly worse than others however the more effecient option often can be uglier than the easier (which is a problem with the language).

While I respect the idea of new people entering into the wonderful world of programming to make their dreams (or get paid to make other people's dreams) come true. I don't want to lie to new comers and say its a creative endeavor. But I don't want to lie to new comers and say it's not wonderful to know and feel that your power is limited by you ability to problem solve. Improvision is a good way to get started, organization and planning is the best way to master.

Personal Opinion of course, I may be wrong. I've been wrong before, I don't doubt I can be wrong again.</comment>


How Memory Management Works on iOS - <AUTHOR> http://www.gaiagps.com/news/article/(Technical%20Post)%20How%20Memory%20Works%20on%20iOS

<comment><USER2> _3\. When you type self.foo = bar, there is an implied retain. If you set a class variable without the "self," there is no implied retain._

No no no no no... That is absolutely incorrect. Only properties declared "retain" do that.

      @property (nonatomic, assign) NSObject *foo;  // doesn't retain
      @property (nonatomic, copy) NSObject *bar;  // doesn't retain
      @property (nonatomic, retain) NSObject *baz;  // *does* retain

(The 'nonatomic' isn't related to the retain/no-retain semantics, but most properties are declared nonatomic, as atomic properties have some locking overhead.)

On a side note, a discussion of iOS/Mac memory management isn't very useful if it doesn't talk about how autorelease pools work.

<comment><USER3> The same thing applies to "copy" properties. If you do "self.foo = bar;" when foo is a copy property, you have taken ownership of that object, and need to release it later (hopefully by doing "self.foo = nil;".

<comment><USER2> Similar, but not the same, though yes, releasing it can be done in the same manner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Apple's Memory Management Programming Guide: [http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/...](http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/MemoryMgmt/Articles/mmRules.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> This:

      - (void) setFoo:(NSString*) bar {
        [foo release];
        foo = [bar retain];
      }

should be:

      - (void) setFoo:(NSString*) bar {
        if(bar == foo)
           return;
        [foo release];
        foo = [bar retain];
      }

so that you can do without crashing:

      obj.foo = obj.foo;

<comment><USER6> In the same line of thinking, for object that don't hold memory space I need to mark on the spot, I use :

      - (void) setFoo:(NSString*) bar {
        [foo autorelease];
        foo = [bar retain];
      }

which I expect to do nothing (retain count is unchanged) when foo == bar. I do it for concision, am I missing something?

<comment><USER7> The cleanest version IMO is

      - (void) setFoo:(NSString*)bar {
        [bar retain];
        [foo release];
        foo = bar;
      }

which harmlessly increments and decrements for self-assignment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > 2\. When you type "alloc" there is an implied retain.

It's not quite that simple. The official rule from Apple's Memory Management Programming Guide most succinctly states "You take ownership of an object if you create it using a method whose name begins with "alloc", "new", "copy", or "mutableCopy" (for example, alloc, newObject, or mutableCopy), or if you send it a retain message."

</comment><comment><USER8> This article gives bad advice. If you use his examples your program will crash; see tylerc230's comment. Also, it does not follow generally accepted style practices, such as the lack of a space after a closing bracket [[like]this].

</comment><comment><USER3> > "Typing self.foo releases and nils the variables." Yes, if it's a retain or > copy property.

> "Just typing foo = nil is a memory leak." Yes, if you had retained the > object, but not if it were a weak reference. Admittedly, this is a semi-rare > scenario.

</comment><comment><USER9> it also help when you understand how the dot-notation works in objective-c... it's not like other languages where you are just accessing a member of an object.

        foo = object.bar;
        is syntactic sugar for
        foo = [object bar]; //where 'bar' is a method call

and

        object.foo = bar;
        is syntactic sugar for:
        [object setFoo:bar];

I dealt with a lot of goofy memory errors trying to figure out why using 'self.foo' and just 'foo' inside of a class acted differently. Now it makes much more sense.

<comment><USER10> A lot of developers (myself included) don't use the dot syntax for property access for this reason and another:

x.foo = z; becomes an ambiguous statement in obj-c when you use dot access. Is x an object? then this is a message send. Is x a struct? then this is an assignment.

Typically in my interface file, I explicitly define my member variables with a leading '_';

@interface Foo { NSObject __bar; }

@property(nonatomic, retain) NSObject _bar;

@implementation Foo @synthesize bar=_bar; @end

And if I want to access bar I use [x bar], [x setBar:y]; it is easy to visually scan for direct use of member values by looking for the leading '_'

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good article, though it kinda violates rule #1 of Cocoa memory management: don't try to summarize the rules, because you'll probably miss a subtlety. Link to the Apple docs instead.

<comment><USER12> I lived in doubt of my code until I decided to fully understand memory management. Now that I understand it, it seems simple enough to summarize... but thats the trick</comment></comment>


After 25 years in jail, the Internet blew my mind  - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/14/after_25_years_in_jail_the_internet_blew_my_mind_partner/ <comment><USER2> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_G._Santos>

_While in prison, he divorced, got married, received a college degree from Mercer University in 1992, a master's degree from Hofstra University in 1995, began a doctorate, and developed programs and resources for inmates and their families._

well, you can say he got a lot of time for that in there, but still, wow.

<comment><USER3> The whole time reading this article, I thought, sounds good, but having spent 25 years in jail he must have done something pretty bad.

Then I read that Wikipedia article and it turns out he was caught selling cocaine in his 20s...

Man, say whatever you want for drugs being bad, but that's kind of a BS reason to rob someone of their youth like that. For 25 years I thought maybe he'd killed a guy.

<comment><USER4> I completely disagree with you. Think how many lives he destroyed by hooking people to cocaine. I have a friend who became a cocaine addict by falling for a nice guy who turned out to be dealer. She's still struggling, but she'll never get last 10 years of her life back. Now, multiply that with 30+ people he was dealing to, and you get much more than 25 years. Punishment should be hard unless we want to see more and more people doing it. It's all about perceived risk and profit, after all and if risk is higher there would be less people doing it.

<comment><USER5> However, the dealer is not wholly to blame for that. It's the person's choice to use the drugs in the first place, and, sometimes with help, you can quit.

A gun store is not blamed for someone dying at the hand of a gun they sold.

<comment><USER6> I don't think I agree completely with your second statement. You are comparing the drug dealer with the gun store, while in fact you should be comparing a drug store to a pharmacy, in the sense that both sell stuff that can be misused but has lots of other uses, and where both have a code they are expected to adhere to.

A drug dealer, on the other hand, has a business model based on addicting his customers to his product (unless there are dealers who advice their customers to stop buying and try and keep their addiction in line, as it is hurting them and their loved ones).

A better comparison, I think, would be a drug dealer and an arms dealer selling AK-47 on Irak.

<comment><USER7> _A drug dealer, on the other hand, has a business model based on addicting his customers_

It's clear you haven't known many (or any) drug dealers. Drugs are taken for pleasure, and drug dealers (who are often primarily also users just trying to make ends meet) sell pleasure to people who are gladly buying it.

What the criminal did in this case is no different at all from what major supermarkets do all the time with alcohol, with the sole exception that it's illegal because society has some very naive and stupid laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The story is amazing. But what continuously went through my head was how different our world will be 25 years from now. It'll be 2038...what will technology be like?

If you take a second to realize what it was 25 years ago, what it is now, and then ask yourself what it WILL be in 25 years...well shit, I was left speechless.

<comment><USER9> My great-aunt remembers the time the first car arrived in her village in the 1800s. She lived to fly across the Atlantic in a jetliner, and see the moon landings.

<comment><USER10> She _remembers_? Wow. That's amazing. How old is she now then?

<comment><USER9> She passed in the 1980's. She was born in 1890 or so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> <http://youtu.be/A1mhhtpmXfo> \-- last mile in Norway.

Instead of condemning inmates, rehabilitate them.

<comment><USER12> It was Sweden (with a similar system to Norway) where Frank Abagnale[1] (Catch Me If You Can) spent some time and spoke highly of the penal system of the Scandinavian countries. I think he mentioned they were paid a fair wage, able to take real college courses (not just correspondence) and made other attempts at real rehabilitation.

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

<comment><USER13> The Swedish system tries to rehabilitate prisoners using various evidence- based methods. For some types of prisoners it works very well.

Prisoners are paid but only a few cents per hour. They generally spend it all on buying cigarettes.

The punishments are much lower in Sweden than in the US. Drug smuggling offences and murders carry the longest penalties. I would say on average penalties are a factor 5x or 10x lower. This seems to be good for both criminal and society. Prisoners know they will have a life again after prison so they want to rehabilitate and prepare.

However, the last 10 years of very high immigration from the muslim countres of middle east and north africa is rapidly filling Swedish prisons. The chief of Kumla maximum security facility was recently in the news saying that 80% of his prison are muslim. Politicians don't want to touch the subject out of fears of being branded racist, but it's vividly discussed on the net in forums such as flashback.net

<comment><USER12> Wow, thanks for the insight. I didn't realize things had changed so drastically in Sweden in the past decade.

So just statistically speaking, has the overall crime rate gone up drastically in Sweden throughout the past decade or is it more of a slight bump? Just wondering if it has gone up enough that the average person notices in their daily lives or if it's more of a news report/sound bite for politicians? I'm not an expert by any means on Sweden, but I always thought of it as having a progressive legal system and low crime rate.

<comment><USER13> Crime is up.

Statistics are complicated and there's no simple truth, but the number of _reported_ crimes have risen dramatically since the 1950s (when immigration started). [1] As soon as you start discussion why there is an increase you're holding a very hot potato. For example, if you look at the armed robberies in 1987 and compare with 2011, the number of armed robberies by Swedish citizens are constant, but the number of armed robberies in Sweden by foreign citizens have quadrupled in absolute terms, or relatively speaking, the percentage of armed robberies have gone from 40% to 70% foreign citizens. From 1975 to 2006, violent crime is up 200%

Some say Sweden's crime rate is out of control [4]

Mind you, I still perceive Sweden as a land with a low crime rate. It seems international crime statistics are very hard to compare. For intentional homicides, the rate in 1997 was 1.77 for Sweden, 0.54 for Japan, and 6.80 for USA. For major assaults, the rate in 1997 was 37.93 for Sweden, compared with 20.91 for Japan, and 382.31 for USA. For rapes, the rate in 1997 was 14.71 for Sweden, 1.31 for Japan, and 35.93 for USA. For robberies, the rate in 1997 was 75.04 for Sweden, 2.23 for Japan, and 186.27 for USA. [5]

[1] Wikipedia has a trend graph : <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden>

[2] Robberies graph, blue citizens red foreigners: [http://affes.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/ran_1987_1999_2011....](http://affes.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/ran_1987_1999_2011.png?w=720)

[3] violent crime graph: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anm%C3%A4ld_misshandel_197...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anm%C3%A4ld_misshandel_1975-2006.svg)

[4] [http://cavatus.wordpress.com/2011/07/10/sweden%E2%80%99s-cri...](http://cavatus.wordpress.com/2011/07/10/sweden%E2%80%99s-crime- rate-out-of-control/)

[5] [http://www- rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/rwinslow/europe/sweden.htm...](http://www- rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/rwinslow/europe/sweden.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't think I could handle a quarter century in prison. That's just insane. Had his sentence been closer to 30 years, he would have served his first term the year my dad graduated from college, and he would have been released the year I intend to graduate. Crazy. 25 years is longer than I tend to think. It's from, like, black-and-white Beatle-mania to the Apple Macintosh. Or, in this case, from the Macintosh to the iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER15> What kind of idiotic policy is it to keep prisoners from using the internet, computers, or electric typewriters? Are they _trying_ to make it so that prisoners have no options but crime once they get out?

<comment><USER16> I'd believe that.

<comment><USER17> It would be harder to monitor inmates. Prisons have to monitor written letters, phone calls, and visits. As a taxpayer, would you want to allocate more of your hard earned money for computers for prisoners?

<comment><USER15> >As a taxpayer, would you want to allocate more of your hard earned money for computers for prisoners?

Yes. Helping prisoners build skill sets that allow them to get jobs outside of crime prevents recidivism. Considering that computer hardware becomes obsolete at a breakneck rate, the ROI of throwing old hardware at prisoners is pretty high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Another page about the exact same thing was here the other day. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5593659>

<comment><USER19> I KNOW! I am a bit surprised that people are talking about it again. Well, it is an amazing story...

<comment><USER18> Don't get me wrong, it's a good read, and Michael should be so proud of what he's achieved within those 25 years and be excited for the future. I wish him the best of luck.

I'm just amazed that this story is being regurgitated by an audience who will probably visit HN every day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20>
       "Staff members oversaw policies that placed enormous barriers between the
        people inside boundaries and society. In the prisons where I served my
        sentence, prisoners were even prohibited from accessing electronic
        typewriters. They had their reasons, I suppose, but blocking people inside
        from using technology did not go far in preparing them for success upon
        release."

They have a very good reason actually. Any mechanism for communication will let people on the outside order people they know on the inside to murder other people they know on the inside. Prisons have to go to great lengths to prevent message passing and compartmentalize prisoners from each other. Quiet a few are just itching to kill each other, apparently.

<comment><USER21> Well, they could work harder on the 2nd part and relaxing the first.

Prisions have a LOT of wrong things with them, which vary from country to country.

In my country there's so much overcrowding that Human Rights people aren't exactly clamoring for Internet access - there was an atrocious fire a while back which killed a lot of inmates, there simply aren't enough prisions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I cannot imagine how shocked he must have been to have such immense amounts of knowledge at his fingertips. Coming out of prison and seeing new incredible technologies would be amazing. When I was a teenager I worked at a grocery store and I was washing my hands in the bathroom. The faucets were motion activated. A man walked up to them and looked at them and then looked at me and said, "How do you turn these on?" I told him that you just put your hands underneath and they turn on automatically. He said, "Wow, I've been in prison for a while."

</comment><comment><USER23> This is awesome. I doubt it'll get much attention on here, but this guy has done something amazing from an otherwise terrible experience and made a difference.

If anyone wants to dig a little deeper, there are a lot of organizations working with prisoners for success stories like this. Check out <http://thelastmile.org>, and <http://startupnow.org.uk>

</comment><comment><USER19> I had a recent post about how this guy got married in the jail: [http://www.quora.com/Prisons/How-do-you-nurture-and- maintain...](http://www.quora.com/Prisons/How-do-you-nurture-and-maintain-a- marriage-from-prison)

I think the story was a bit too good to be true. If it is completely true, it is just too amazing!!!

</comment><comment><USER24> He writes as a man who is grateful to enjoy the freedom of outside life again. I posted the article to my Facebook wall with the tagline, "He really appreciates what he was missing."

Since the big comment subthread here is about the author's criminal history and what that means to society, I should probably comment on that issue too. I've lived in east Asia, and once upon a time, I thought that there was a generation of Americans who had all heard of the Opium Wars and understood the historical context of why several countries in that part of the world want nothing to do with their common people having access to most drugs. Harsh drug laws in some places--including the death penalty for what seems to Americans like dealing rather small amounts of drugs--is a reaction to a historical experience in which whole countries were ruined by foreign drug dealers (British imperialists trading in opium) and their local agents. I'm not personally in favor of the death penalty for all drug dealers, but I can empathize with (for example) a parent of a child who started using drugs who would want the child's dealer in prison for the rest of his life or even dead.

Of course we want to look to other countries for historical examples too. In Europe, where the historical experience was different, there has been some decriminalization, but very little "legalization" of drugs.

[http://www.holland.com/us/tourism/article/dutch-drug- policy....](http://www.holland.com/us/tourism/article/dutch-drug-policy.htm)

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/03/dutch- dr...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/03/dutch-drug-policy- pragmatic)

[http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/time-to-end-the-war- on...](http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/time-to-end-the-war-on-drugs)

I am tentatively convinced that a national drug policy that focuses mostly on keeping users from harming other people and on helping users to stop using is perhaps a better national drug policy than harsh criminal penalties for dealing in drugs--in countries that have already established a drug-using culture. But east Asia, with very harsh drug laws and a culture of limited use, is doing well in human progress,

[http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/15/singapore...](http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/15/singapore- worlds-richest-country-by-2050/)

[http://www.economist.com/news/21566430-where-be- born-2013-lo...](http://www.economist.com/news/21566430-where-be- born-2013-lottery-life)

so that policy choice has to be put in the mix too in evaluating what will work well as the United State reforms a national drug policy that everyone seems to decry.

<comment><USER25> I was under the impression that the Opium Wars were not primarily about opium, but rather imperialism. The British wanted control, so did the Chinese. If it hadn't been opium, it would have been, god knows what, silk or pepper.

> I can empathize with (for example) a parent of a child who started using > drugs would want the child's dealer in prison for the rest of his life or > even dead.

I can empathize too, but this runs counter to the idea of justice. I'd want to have the hand chopped off the guy who stole my bicycle (actually, I'd want to do it myself), but justice must separate the passion of the victim from an objective measure of the damage the crime did to society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Must watch video: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wPd2eVd0rrE#at=1696)

<comment><USER27> This guy is dangerously naive. He seems to think (with ardent passion) that regimes in the middle east fell because "Twitter made that happen."

Okay, sir. Time to settle down and reel that nonsense back in.

He speaks emotionally about things that aren't necessarily tethered to reality and his facts aren't precise, and maybe he has the amnesia of a politician.

His message is that prisons are bad, and that we should rethink the manner of punishment we exact on people. His passion is very obviously motivated by personal experience, and that doesn't invalidate his message. Essentially, I agree with him. But. I'm not drinking his kool-ade about "OMG INTERNETZ."

Yes, I'll entertain his notions about prison being an inefficient and destructive practice that mostly leaves inmates as damaged wrecks, and possibly transforms many into more terrible criminals than they might've been without jail time. But I'm going to take his message with a grain of salt.

When I say dangerous, I mean it. He is too new to the internet, to extoll its virtues. In the same talk in which he absolutely RAILS against the privatization of prisons (which is an evil all its own, and yeah I'll agree with his points on that) his next words advocate just haphazardly dumping absolutely anything into the hands of large, corporate, profit-driven nigh- monopolies like Facebook. There's a cognitive dissonance in those two concepts that he very obviously hasn't thought deeply about (and to be fair, maybe he hasn't been given the time yet).

Which is surprising, I might add, considering that he's a man who had his mail read by prison staff, his phone calls monitored, and was displaced across 19 prisons during his time served.

He needs to acclimate himself with some of the debacles of the recent internet over the past 5 years in particular, and maybe familiarize himself with personalities like Julian Assange. If he can bring himself to understand certain realities about the internet, and how it can enable evil as well as good, maybe he wouldn't be so quick to proclaim that it's some kind of universal salve, which can cure all our ills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> In a hundred years from now, they will look at the war on terror end the criminalization of it as one of the most useless and primitive forms of legislation ever made.

Tens of thousands of innocent people gets killed every year, because we don't want people who have made far more conscious "choices" to become heroine addict.

</comment><comment><USER29> This article has been posted so many times now... c'mon people...

<comment><USER30> At this moment it's in first position, I guess that's because most of HN readers (including me) haven't read it before, so the repost is totally worth it.

<comment><USER31> I agree but I think, as a general rule on HN, that any repost - or maybe any article dated earlier than the current date - should include the date in the title.</comment></comment></comment>


Access the App Store from the Web - <AUTHOR> http://fnd.io

<comment><USER2> The footer ...</comment>


What Does $14 Million Worth of PageRank Look Like? - <AUTHOR> http://www.seobook.com/buy-cheap-pagerank <comment><USER2> Reminds me of the Polaroid acquisition:

[http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/private- equity-...](http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/private-equity-group- buys-polaroid-for-59-million/)

It was mentioned that Polaroid was one of the most recognized brands in the world and $59 million was a relative bargain.

 _Update:_ See corrected link and figure ($89 million) below.

<comment><USER3> Unrelated, but I think Knight's Bridge actually got them -- and for a lot more: [http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS174749+17-Ap...](http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS174749+17-Apr-2009+MW20090417)

<comment><USER2> You're absolutely right. I couldn't remember the PE group and CNN and NY Times both showed Patriarch Partners for the acquirer when I googled it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I worked for a company that had 3 completely different websites selling electronics. The backend was the same (i.e. same products and descriptions), but the prices were different.

Essentially they competed with themself. They actually got some orders on the more pricey site! And the price checkers were happy thinking they checked a few sites, and found the lower one.

<comment><USER2> Managing the SEO/PPC for those 3 sites had to be a massive headache.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but that's not a 1-man job. And that company is EXTREMELY smart.

It may sound stupid to compete with yourself, but what about 'owning' a google search term? Good SEO on all 3 sites may result in 3 top 10 rankings for a single product, 1 on each site.

If you owned position 1, 2 and 3 - what % of that search traffic do you think you would get?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am I right in assuming that not much is paid to so called search engine optimization among start ups? The products and services market themselves virally(?).

<comment><USER2> It really depends. If you're in a very competitive market ( _cough_ tickets _cough_ ) SEO is essential.

Also, good SEO has _made_ some startups. Examples: About.com, Yelp.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> thats just stupid, pagerank != brand equity, not by a long shot.

<comment><USER2> Agreed, but the rest of the article acknowledges that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I might be wrong in my thinking but:

Isn't this a kind of a weird buy I mean everyone saw that circuit city went bankrupt and out of business it was highly public through many news outlets including headline news for many weeks doesn't that destroy a brand and make the website much less trusted?</comment>


Pmilter is a simple and programmable mail filter server software - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/matsumoto-r/pmilter <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Show HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your advice!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Pmilter is a smple and programmable mail filter server software. You can control smtp server like postfix or sendmail via some mruby scripts. Pmilter is one-binary. So you can deploy and setup environment very easily. Enjoy!!

<comment><AUTHOR> pmilter.conf and mruby handlers

[https://github.com/matsumoto-r/pmilter#pmilterconf-and- mruby...](https://github.com/matsumoto-r/pmilter#pmilterconf-and-mruby- handlers)</comment></comment>


Human running speed of 35-40 mph may be biologically possible - <AUTHOR> http://blog.smu.edu/research/2010/01/21/human-running-speed-of-35-40-mph-may-be-biologically-possible/ <comment><USER2> I've always been curious: in an enclosed stadium on the moon, would humans run the 100 yard dash faster or slower?

I think the first reaction people have is "faster, since you weigh less". But I think the answer is slower, because you would actually be near-floating and contact the ground less.

I got into a fight with people on ask.metafilter when I asked this same question, so I had to let it go. But still I hope someday the Olympics are held on the moon so I can get my answer.

<comment><USER3> You would certainly accelerate much more slowly, since the upper limit of acceleration is bounded by your friction with the ground, which is bounded by your weight, i.e., your mass times gravity.

What's not clear is whether you could reach a faster peak speed. I think it would be tough to reach a fast speed since your joints would need to oscillate rapidly in order to push off ground moving as fast. And each time you push off the ground you'd achieve less force, due to the friction thing. To summarize, I think I agree with you that humans will run more slowly in a low-gravity environment.

An interesting parallel question is: under 1.3, 1.5, or 2x gravity, how much more quickly could you run? And what's the optimal gravity for running if it's not 1.0 Earth?

<comment><USER4> Would a 2x gravity be similar to running with a 100 pounds backpack? Then I guess it's going to be substantially slower than 1G running.

<comment><USER5> No. The runner still has the same mass, so accelerating takes the same amount of energy as 1x gravity. It's like shifting to a higher gear on your bike.

<comment><USER6> Not exactly. Horizontal acceleration takes the same amount of energy. The mass of the body must also be supported upon landing, which obviously takes more energy with more gravity.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. So it will feel like your normal weight in the horizontal dimension, but it will feel like wearing a 100-pound backpack in the vertical dimension.

Your ultimate running speed then depends on how strong you are. That 100 pound "backpack" will push you into the ground and give you far more acceleration than your normal weight would allow: it will feel like you have ultra- traction. But when you push to the side and accelerate your body, you're only accelerating your normal body weight.

Marathon times will likely suffer, but perhaps some short sprints will be faster in gravity over 1g.

<comment><USER6> Exactly, although inertia might be more correct, particularly for the horizontal dimension.

More gravity, to a point, will increase running speed. Would be interesting for someone to calculate the optimal gravity for running.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Title had me confused for a bit. The article says that it was previously thought that the amount of force a limb can apply to the ground was the limiting factor in speed. However, it turns out that the actual limiting factor is how fast the muscles can apply that force. If muscles could apply the full force in the fraction of time that feet touch the ground, then that person would achieve those speeds.

Interesting result.

<comment><USER8> > If muscles could apply the full force in the fraction of time that feet > touch the ground

Or if they could touch the ground for longer. We need human mounted wings to provide some downforce :)

Or more realistically an elastic belt strapped to the runner, and running on a track underneath them.

<comment><USER9> So, we need longer feet. Or longer shoes.

<comment><USER10> More legs!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> More frequent steps per minute (higher frequency gait) might enable higher speeds because of more contact with the ground and less vertical motion. More contact with the ground provides more friction with which to hurl the body forward. However it also requires more energy.

I've modified my running gait to about 186 steps per minute to reduce vertical motion (about 6 cm as measured by the PT at the runner's clinic). I'm still building up the muscles to maintain this gait longer than a minute or two, though.

It would be interesting if a new and improved (or reconstructed Paleolithic) method of running is developed that would enable the average person to reach speeds of 35 MPH (56 KPH) or even faster.

If I could run that fast, I'd get rid of my car and run to work every day. They'd have to have running lanes, maybe even issue speeding tickets to runners who race through a school zone. Road rage would take on a whole new dimension, as well. The economy would be transformed as millions of cars are discarded, gasoline consumption plummets, and people become thinner and healthier.

<comment><USER12> That's some wishful thinking right there, I love it.

<comment><USER11> Yup I waxed a bit hyperbolic there, but wouldn't it be great?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [2010], but fascinating all the same.

If you'd asked me how fast an elite sprinter could run today, I would probably have thought of running 100m in a little under 10s, but I don't think I would have connected that mentally with the idea that Usain Bolt runs almost as fast as a car on our 30mph streets, albeit very briefly.

<comment><USER14> I'm as astonished to think that marathon runners can sustain 20 km/h for 2 hours. 20 km/h is my average speed on bike ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wind resistance has to be a factor after 25mph, I mean it is on my electric bicycle.

And holy cow, even 25mph is crazy fast, 35? If you tripped and fell at 35-40mph you could seriously injure yourself.

I think I have a good question for the xkcd q&a site: how fast could Usain Bolt run on the moon (ignoring the oxygen problem).

Ah I see someone beat me to the moon problem. Here's another thought, without strong gravity to help return mass to the ground, running is probably much harder.

<comment><USER16> This analysis says Usain Bolt expends >90% of his energy on drag:

[http://iopscience.iop.org/0143-0807/34/5/1227/article](http://iopscience.iop.org/0143-0807/34/5/1227/article)

(That is, yes, you are correct.)

Answering my own question, he took 41 steps when he set the world record.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > "Despite how large the running forces can be, we found that the limbs are > capable of applying much greater ground forces than those present during > top-speed forward running."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if they extrapolated this from one-legged hops, which put all of your weight on a single leg, isn't that more akin to measuring the ground force from jumping than it is to running?

<comment><USER18> > isn't that more akin to measuring the ground force from jumping than it is > to running?

The point is that the limiting factor is _not_ how much force the limb can exert, and that's what was demonstrated by the one-leg hopping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> More about Usain Bolt's peak performance: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2378698/Scien...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2378698/Scientists- reveal-Usain-Bolt-energetic-speeding-bullet--reach-speeds-27MPH.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> Running on a treadmill (as in this experiment) is quite different from running on an all weather track as sprinters do. I wouldn't be surprised if they got quite different results if somehow they were able to measure this on a non- moving track.

<comment><USER21> I can't see how it'd make any difference for this experiment. They were measuring ground forces applied by the runners and how fast those forces are applied, so unless the all weather track has artificial gravity…

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> nah, not going to do that

it hurts my knees anyway</comment>


An Oddball in YouTube's World - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/an-oddball-in-youtubes-world/ <comment><USER2> Enjoyed this. For people who like this kind of writing about small businesses with staying power, I suggest the articles The Distance put out before they became a podcast (understandable, but sad!) They're linked at the bottom of this page: [https://thedistance.com/](https://thedistance.com/)</comment>


I started a doc to document startup leadership best practices - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/whosken/Startup-Leadership-Best-Practices

<comment><AUTHOR> I've experienced many self-proclaimed agile teams and lean startups. While there are many approaches for development and business functions, there are few to none for organizations and team management.

I have no grounds to say that I know the best practices, but I wanted to start the conversation with this document and see where the community takes it!

</comment><comment><USER2> Check out "The Founder's Dilemmas" by Noam Wasserman. Lots of great tips based on a huge dataset of startups.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will do. Thanks!</comment></comment>