Ask HN: Can there be a true real-time collaboration over any distance on earth? - <AUTHOR>

It might be a stupid question due to my lack of knowledge in physics and low-level networks, but I don't see how there can be a true feel for a real-time (with imperceptible to the human brain latency) collaboration.
I made the following simple calculation - the biggest distance on earth between 2 points would be 1/2 * 40000km (the circumference of the Earth on the equator) = 20000km.
Lets say these 2 points are connected with an absolutely straight optical fibre. For simplicity's sake, there are no penalties for signal amplification and repetition and the speed of the signal is 300000 km/s.
From these const's we get that the latency (in milliseconds) of this signal would be:
1000 / ( 300000 / 20000 ) ~ 67 milliseconds.
So, 2 people, 1 in Sydney AS and the other in London UK, will have a theoretical min latency = 1000 / ( 300000 / 16983 ) ~ 57 milliseconds.
While this might seem OK, its far away from it - when a piano player plays on a midi keyboard, the perceptible latency between hitting a key and hearing the sound starts from 10 milliseconds, grows annoying on 20 and for most becomes hard (even impossible) to play from >30 milliseconds.
If I was to attempt to design a solution I would probably divide earth's area on regions, but still I am not sure what the real distance would be for latency <=10 milliseconds?
It will be really interesting to read your thoughts on this topic. <comment><USER2> The first-person shooter crowd has probably run into these limits so that's a good market to go see what works and what doesn't. Your music example may be a little misleading. Although we can detect small delays (10 or 20ms) our reaction time for input is an order of magnitude greater (100ms or more), so we may be able to tell a note is off by 10ms but we only do it 100ms after the fact. Depending on what you're doing that distinction can be important. For human communication for example a 500ms roundtrip time would still allow a conversation easily.

Your math is also slightly off because the speed of light in fiber optic is only 200000km/s, so the minimum latency between two opposite points on the globe using fiber is 100ms.

PS: The circumference of the earth is also 40 thousand km not 40km, so I suppose the correct notation is 40Mm, although that's unusual.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even if the reaction time is higher than what we detect as a latency, it's still a bad news, but delivered ... later. :)

I left 300000 km/s, because I thought that maybe this is the absolute theoretical limit (there might be some breakthrough in reflective materials, who knows?).

Sorry for the typo of the circumference of the earth, I think I've fixed it before your comment. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7862387](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7862387)

<comment><USER2> >Even if the reaction time is higher than what we detect as a latency, it's still a bad news, but delivered ... later. :)

It would be hard to do a distributed band. It's an interesting case because it's not a question-response situation where the roundtrip is crucial, because for the most part each musician is playing independently and only listening to the rest to stay in sync. I wonder if you could do this:

1) Have every member stream to every other member directly with an accurate absolute timecode (good NTP-adjusted or even GPS clocks)

2) Have every member mix in all the streams using the absolute time code and buffering as much as needed for the slowest stream (so you'd have 100ms of buffer in the worst case).

This would give you a synced up band where every member listens to the same mixed stream and yet everyone is listening to themselves on a slight delay. I wonder how well our brains could cope with that introduced delay and if it would then screw up live performance, or if we can adapt to that sort of thing quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Maybe it would be possible if you can circumvent the human sensory organs and directly feed the signal to higher brain areas. The delays in sensory modalities are anyway very diverse and not at all synchronously processed in real-time. Even within the same modality the signal is disintegrated in the brain. For example an image from the retina is processed with completely different delays in the ventral and dorsal stream. The ventral stream has latencies of several 100 ms [1]. It is still an open question in neuroscience how these different latencies are combined in higher areas in a way that they are perceived as synchronous.

So even if you are in a conversation with people directly in front of you, you do not actually have a real-time system. It takes roughly 400 ms until the image of a face of a person standing in front of you is processed in the ventral stream and is actually detected. On the other hand there is the auditory modality which is much more sensitive to latencies. But in the end the brain gives you the illusion that anything you perceive is actually real- time, although it is not. So if your brain decides to give a motor signal to actually press a piano key, then only many 100 ms later the actual sound will arrive. The perceptible latency of hearing a sound is actually only because the brain itself takes into account the delays in itself.

So in the end it comes down to trick the brain into believing something is real-time. This is for example done in multiplayer ego-shooters where the motions of other players are actually interpolated into the future and later on corrected if the other player actually changed their last motion command.

[1] Barragan-Jason G, Besson G, Ceccaldi M and Barbeau EJ (2013) Fast and famous: looking for the fastest speed at which a face can be recognized. Front. Psychol. 4:100. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00100

</comment><comment><USER4> As a data point, an organist may have to deal with latencies between few hundreds to seconds. So it's not that we can't deal with latency at all.

Ninjam[1] arranges realtime music collaboration by exploiting musical structure and its construction in intervals. Human collaboration which can be similarly structured could still be arranged to work with.

Counter examples: games appear to work over latencies because a lot of them are about restricting other's agency and making an experience worse (i.e. not true collaboration) 2d fighting game can be seen for instance as two game designers attempts to make a game worse for the others. It would be interesting to study why games like left4dead (which requires team play and collaboration) still work.

[1] [http://www.cockos.com/ninjam/](http://www.cockos.com/ninjam/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Even when jamming in my personal studio anything above 5ms latency on my electric drum set can be noticed. I have to lower the IO buffer size to about 64 samples to get above 5ms latency.

I would love to be able to jam with friends over long distances. For this to actually be enjoyable without frustration the latency would have to be no more than 5-10ms.

I wonder how much latency a local telephone call would use? Then maybe it is possible to set something up where you jam over the telephone line and each musician can hear each other just fine.

<comment><USER6> One way to do this is to jam based on a loop, so everyone can be off by one bar. I think there are some services that do this.

<comment><USER7> Specific pointers? I'm curious how this would work in practice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> An interesting point to consider is that `(speed of sound) * 67ms ~ 25yds`. A musician could elaborate on the challenges involved in playing in a large symphony orchestra, and yet it's accomplished.

<comment><USER9> That's one of the reasons you need a conductor. Orchestra players learn pretty early that if you listen for your cue you'll come in late.

<comment><USER10> What a wonderful comparison. And it gives hope to the fact that software at either end could play the role of this conductor — it can negotiate a "true" sync time and pre-empt the delay, just like a conductor.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed. Still, it might be enabling to someone who's already used to the delay, but in a 4-10 person band, there isn't such an issue.

I have to check something, though - how do things change if all musicians tracks go through a mixer and everyone listens to his own mix in headphones. On stage, the delay from the main speakers is huge for the perfomers. That's why they have either in-ear headphone or speaker monitor. Can't this work for symphonic orchestras? And does it solve their latency problem?

<comment><USER9> Symphonies are pretty traditional in their methods, and the conductor is already an adequate solution to the problem (and has many other roles).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What exactly is your application (and your budget)?

For videoconferencing, musical-instrument-playing (as in your example), or multiplayer video games with less latency than the speed of light appears to allow, you could take advantage of Libet's work (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will)) showing that with neural interfaces you can reliably predict people's physical actions hundreds of milliseconds before they actually do it … which would give you hundreds of milliseconds to send off the signal and get a response which you play back to them "instantly" when they perform the action.

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't started anything, but I always wanted to be able to have a band not restricted to the local pool of musicians and this is what made me think about it. So I started looking for a solution, I found about the Internet2 project and when I saw that they should be pretty close to the theoretical limit, I decided to check what that limit really is. That's when I realized that I probably couldn't do this for any earth-distance without any prediction of data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> In fighting games people are very sensitive to latency when you get to a high enough level. There is an interesting networking library called GGPO [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GGPO](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GGPO) that cancels lag out using a clever algorithm. I imagine you could apply a similar technique to other problems.

<comment><USER13> The wiki article isn't very clear, but it sounds like GGPO hides part of the network latency by disguising it as the natural delay between deciding to act and the action taking effect, therefore delaying actions in the game in a believable way. Is that right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's an interesting demo of the effects of lag on something like VR. I think it's intended as a statement against avoidable lag, but the conclusion is the same :)

[http://livingwithlag.com](http://livingwithlag.com)

</comment><comment><USER15> Short answer, no.

As you've observed, even under theoretically perfect conditions, the latency is much more than would be tolerable for true real-time applications. And that's not even counting the time spent in hardware, on the various cpus in the path, buffers, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> What about a fragmentation of the area - what would be the radius from your location where you would be able to collaborate with others at <=10 milliseconds of latency?

<comment><USER16> Roughly 2997 kilometres, with C as the speed.

<comment><AUTHOR> What about with C' (being the current state-of-the-art/max)?

I guess the current speed, judging by [1] is about 200000 km/s (for light in optical fibre), which leads to 2000 km radius (or diameter, if more than 2 parties are involved).

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7862412](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7862412)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yes, its' true. It turns out that the speed of light isn't really all that fast.

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

</comment><comment><USER18> The circumference of the earth is roughly 40 _thousand_ kilometers.

<comment><USER19> Fun fact: This is easy to remember if you know that the kilometer was originally defined so that the distance from the equator to the poles was 10000 kilometers. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre#Meridional_definition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre#Meridional_definition)

<comment><USER7> Neat. So 10000km = an "arc" from the equator to a pole. If you assume the Earth is a sphere, the circumference at the equator = 4 * 10,000.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> 67ms isn't too bad. First person shooter games feel pretty much fine at 67ms. Once you get to 100+ does it get very noticeable, and past 150 is when it gets unplayable.

However, it's important to note that FPS games use a lot of tricks with client-side estimations to infer the game state. But depending on the application, you could probably use similar tricks to make things feel responsive.

</comment><comment><USER21> Yes, this can in theory be achieved through quantum entanglement: [http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/30/physicists-claim- reliabil...](http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/30/physicists-claim-reliability- breakthrough-in-quantum-teleportati/)

<comment><USER22> Nope. Quote from the article: "the process still requires the transmission of measurement data from one side to the other via classical communication (read: regular, non-instantaneous communication)".

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> See Stuart Cheshire's ""Latency and the Quest for Interactivity", from way back in 1996: [http://www.stuartcheshire.org/papers/LatencyQuest.html](http://www.stuartcheshire.org/papers/LatencyQuest.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> Check out ninjam, which tries to get around this by exploiting the idea that music "loops" in intervals anyway: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg2UtVdwQYo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg2UtVdwQYo)

</comment><comment><USER25> I think the premise is a bit wrong.

When talking on the phone to someone on a satellite phone in a distant desert, you get a noticeable delay but its not a problem.

"Real time collaboration" anywhere on earth has worked for a century.

</comment><comment><USER26> Through air you get 30ms latency after 10 meters (340 m/s * 30 ms). So, doing a back and forth communication is much harder.

<comment><AUTHOR> Latency of what? Sound? Light? :)</comment></comment>


VMware and GPL – it's about api boundaries, not copy-paste - <AUTHOR> https://www.technovelty.org/linux/on-vmware-and-gpl.html

<comment><USER2> I'm personally more interested in the technical design of ESXi than the legal issues (this is fascinating stuff :), it would be interesting to see an accurate diagram showing where the machine architectural boundaries are when all these pieces are running.

At runtime, where is vmkernel actually executing on a modern x86-64 machine? Where are vmkLinux and the GPL'd drivers executing relative to vmkernel?

</comment><comment><USER3> Just out of curiosity, what's GPL advocates and FSF's attitude toward APIs and implementation? Since vmkernel uses glibc, it has to implement all the Linux system calls right?

Were there any claims for GPLed programs' APIs before?</comment>


Craig Newmark on Net Neutrality - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/345-craig-keep-the-internet-neutral-fair-and-free <comment><USER2> direct link: <http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/06/09/newmark.internet/index.html>

It's a good read, but it's from last year.</comment>


How 'Smart' Do You Want Your Blender to Be? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/magazine/just-how-smart-do-you-want-your-blender-to-be.html <comment><USER3> The most prevalent domestic 'smart' devices (dishwashers? washing machines? automatic transmissions? electric refrigeration?) were once-new concepts in the last 100 years, but have become almost invisible today. They don't shout "smart," and that's OK, but they all integrate a bit of control logic that helps the user do something easier/better/cheaper/faster than was possible before. That's how I define "smart" \-- I think the network-connected / software aspect is more of an implementation detail.

I really don't want a smart blender or a smart fridge.

But a 'smart' thermostat? Might save energy (and money). A 'smart' sprinkler or lighting control system? Might save water or energy (and money). A 'smart' door lock? Might save time and effort getting keys copied or locks changed or letting in guests while away. A 'smart' frying pan? Might cook a salmon fillet to perfection every time and let me master new recipes the first time.

Does the reality of today's smart devices match the potential? Unclear.

But if 'smart' means something that will give me, the user, a superior value -- defined very conventionally and rationally, such as saving time, saving money, making something higher quality, or making something easier -- _and if the superior value outweighs the added complexity and cost,_ then maybe I'll take a look.

(Disclaimer: I make a "smart" frying pan but am not particularly in love with the word "smart." It simply helps people cook easier/better/cheaper/faster. [https://www.pantelligent.com/](https://www.pantelligent.com/) \- comments of all kinds are welcome.)

<comment><USER4> Network connected isn't just an implementation detail.

If it's on a network it has potential security problems and if the functions rely on the network then it needs updates.

Phones commonly don't get security updates after 2-3 years. The idea that a fridge will keep getting security updates for the lifetime of the fridge, say 20 years, is not realistic. Not to mention the problem that people often don't configure devices correctly. Perhaps some here remember VCRs with the perpetual flashing unset time.

The internet of things for companies and organisations that collect data and have staff to handle them and replace them regularly is a big deal. The internet of things in households is pretty dubious.

<comment><USER5> You could always rent your fridge. It could be manufactured by the people who run your grocery store. That's probably where the fridge is headed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't want it to be smart. I don't want a 'smart' blender or a 'smart' fridge or a 'smart' doorbell or whatever else you can think of. Most of this internet of things stuff is a bunch of quasi solutions looking for an actual problem.

I'd rather one that doesn't need replacing as often and works better as a traditional device.

<comment><USER7> I want my blender to be smart enough to soft start the motor and to notice that it's stuck on an ice cube and not blow it's internal fuse. Fuse blowing = Insufficiently Smart Blender. You can avoid this by oversizing electrical components, but being smart is probably cheaper.

Smart doesn't have to mean complicated UI.

Smart appliances could also learn which ones are on the same circuit by watching voltage fluctuation and coordinate current usage. You see this in a primitive form at some older motels where the coffee maker is plugged into the refrigerator. It knows to not run the compressor while heating water.

<comment><USER8> This isn't what "smart" refers to these days though. You're just describing a higher quality product. Smart, today, equals connected and part of the Internet of Things.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. If a blender that shuts off when jammed is "smart" then anything with a circuit breaker is "smart," too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I want my fridge to keep my food cold and cost as little as possible. I want my blender to chop food to a chosen consistency. I want my appliances in general to perform their single function and nothing else.

In Home Depot the other day, I saw a $5000 smart refrigerator that was mechanically similar to $2000 - $3000 fridges. I don't need a $2000 camera+information+entertainment system in my fridge. Maybe I'd like it if it didn't add significant cost and provided a read-only API to monitor the temperature sensors and energy use. Honestly, I don't see myself paying much for smart devices or home automation, and I don't consider mandatory connections to outside services to be a feature.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the worst consumer product I have ever bought in my life, the absolutely abject Samsung "Smart" TV:

[http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/2414066](http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/2414066)

Basically bricked after a hopeless remote update pushed by Samsung, Plex stopped working six months ago, Skype appears to have been deleted but mysteriously appears when my brother calls, nothing else works as advertised.

Replaced once when the panel failed (at great effort, their consumer support was similarly terrible in Australia).

It is an absolute dog. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

<comment><USER12> Ouch. I went through three LG Google TVs about three years ago. They all seemed to have the same firmware issue (which LG refused to acknowledge), resulting in the TV restarting every 5-10 minutes.

LG paid to have the first two repaired. The "repaired" devices stayed on...but they no longer tuned channels. They gave me a TV that lacked the whole "tele-" part! I returned the third one without going through the silly repair process, and got a Sony Bravia. Never had a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is this a trick question? Smart enough (along with the rest of my home) to order the cheapest reliable courier to pick up a quantity of fresh vegetables sufficient for the dietary profile that I need based on my height and weight and dietary restrictions, to order the vegetables from my local grocer for the courier to pick up, to let the courier into my apartment when they arrive and put them in the fridge, and smart enough to get them out of the fridge and make me a smoothie at the time that I've ordered on my smart phone, and then go wash itself in my dishwasher. Why - how dumb do you want _your_ blender to be? Just a spinning blade for you to leave in a grimy corner of your kitchen or stowed away in a cupboard, never to be used?

of course, some of this functionality logically overlaps (why should the blender put itself in my dishwasher rather than my dishwasher taking the blender; is the blender ordering my groceries or is my fridge) but you get the idea....

<comment><USER14> I think there are two seemingly-disjoint perspectives in these discussions, mostly based on whether people have enough time and engage with these appliances as part of a hobby; or whether they are strapped for time and engage with them as necessities.

So, I think a clarifying assumption might help: _assume_ that you already have a _person_ who acts in the role of the "glue" for your household—a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majordomo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majordomo). Assume that they then have further staff under them, to whom they can delegate tasks—but that they also have the option of purchasing technology to automate the same tasks. Under this assumption, all the tasks in your household _will get done_ , "magically", by combining some degree of technology with some degree of human effort.

The question that's really being asked in these discussions of "smart" appliances is: where is the optimum ROI between "fully automated" and "fully done manually by a paid human expert"? For any given task, how should the majordomo best allocate your dollars between paying labor and buying "smarter" equipment?

Automation usually lowers the total amount of human labor that must be expended (both by the expert, and by you to earn the money to pay the expert), but it also tends to lower the quality of the result—or "confine" the result to certain strict output products—compared to the results the human expert could achieve. How "smart" can we make a tool without taking away its precision to achieve great results in expert human hands? How "dumb" must a tool be to continue to allow for optimal results to be achieved, rather than mere satisfactory ones? Etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> When I go to a garage sale, I can sometimes find a 30 year old blender that still works just fine.

I want a "smart" blender that still functions perfectly well in 30 years. I do _not_ want a blender that becomes unusable because software is no longer supported, an API is no longer available, a proprietary connector is no longer in use, etc.

<comment><USER16> You want one of these[1]. I see them all over the place second-hand, and they are damned near indestructible.

Almost like the Kitchen-Aid mixers, that reached the heights of perfection somewhere in the 80s, and have declined and become cheaper and flimsier since.

[1] [https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/236x/ee/16/d3/ee16d37f1...](https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/236x/ee/16/d3/ee16d37f11db310c2833755ba34359e6.jpg)

<comment><USER15> Oh, I have an excellent blender (a Breville). I was more expressing the problem I see with poorly thought out "smart" added to machinery - <USER2> that will become unusable due to bit rot or connector conspiracy in far less time than they otherwise should.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> IoT is just manufacturers trying to apply the SAAS model to their product. Sorry, but I don't want to have to change my thermostats every 2-3 years because the company I bought from decided to break the service it uses cough nest.

</comment><comment><USER18> "Smart" devices now seem to come with Big Brother included. The Times gets this; most of the "smart" is about the thing reporting what you're doing to HQ, not providing the desired function.

First, the "smart" devices just reported if you were home. That was Nest. Then they started listening to your every word. That was Echo. Then they started watching you. That was the Samsung Smart TV.[1]

But it's so convenient. New Echo feature: "Alexa, tell Hacker News to read new headlines". Really.

[1] [http://www.cnet.com/how-to/samsung-smart-tv- spying/](http://www.cnet.com/how-to/samsung-smart-tv-spying/)

</comment><comment><USER19> "Smart" is only really a benefit for devices that I can reasonably want to do something when I'm not there.

Smart blender? When could I possibly want to blend something when I'm not physically near the blender?

Smart thermostat? I don't personally want one, but you can at least make the case that adjusting your home's heating/cooling remotely is a value add.

Smart fridge? When is the last time you even changed a setting on your fridge? I've lived in my current apartment for nearly 2 years and have never once even touched any of the settings. How does adding intelligence to a passive device provide any benefit whatsoever?

</comment><comment><USER20> Hmm smart stuff. Make it so an oven can detect when something catches fire and shut itself off or lower temp. Particularly a toaster oven. Those things are dangerous, but they are so darn useful. When useful, popular and unsafe collide, theres your 'smart' problem to solve. Internet connected, meh. I mean it was cool when I saw my cousins BBQ thermometer notify his phone that the food was done. That was nifty but an alarm that would detect when popcorn burns in microwave means I'm safer from accidents or just arbitrary device variables in operation. Think of the sawstop table saw.

</comment><comment><USER21> As most of the comments in this thread seem to be about "smart" home technologies, I'm curious to hear what people think about the introduction of "smart" things into civic and industrial environments (e.g. dumpster/public trash sensors, Bluetooth beacons for indoor navigation, "smart" bus stops, field sensors on farms, etc)?

<comment><USER12> The civic applications you mention solve an obvious problem. The problem solved by the hypothetical smart blender is not so obvious to most folks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I want a smart combination conventional/convection/microwave oven that will ensure that the food's internal temperature has reached desired amount. Remote management of temperature would be a plus. It should know when it needs to auto-clean itself, it should be child-proof and it should turn itself off it left idle for too long.

I want a combination washer + dryer where I don't have to transload the clothes into a different drum. Dirty clothes go in, clean, dry clothes come out wrinkle-free.

I want a device which debones chicken thighs.

Some of these fit our current definition of 'smart', but some of them are just devices which don't yet exist in the form I want them to take. Right now, our drive to make things 'smart' is a cheap upsell, because it takes categories of appliances that already exist in our homes and tries to add features whose utility isn't always clear.

I want to see a re-imagining of how our homes (and restaurants) need to be outfitted instead.

<comment><USER23> > I want a device which debones chicken thighs.

Probably already exists, but not the scale you'd like.

Edit: I found it, and it's amazing. It can be had for a mere 45 million yen. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrjFWrv_IAw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrjFWrv_IAw)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Smart blender? No. Duh.

Smart robotic house, including a kitchen? A machine/system that does grocery shopping, cooks for either or both of us if we don't feel like it - with the option for remote advance notice - and washes up?

Likewise for laundry, ironing, towel folding, toiletries, and domestic chores in general.

 _That_ could be a thing.

I'd pay money for the option to have breakfast appear on the counter a few minutes after I tell the house I'm up, or dinner waiting for me/us when I get in.

The big problem with IoT is that this kind of automation isn't practical yet. We're getting little piecemeal micro-products that sort of nearly kind of do something useful, but the big opportunity is automating the boring stuff in a more comprehensive and ambitious way - and the technology for that just isn't there today.

</comment><comment><USER25> I follow @internetofshit on Twitter, who provides a running list and commentary on items of this nature.

</comment><comment><USER26> At present, I can't imagine ever _wanting_ a "smart" blender. I've got a 15-year old Vitamix that still powers through my daily smoothies with gusto. I had to replace it's blade assembly, _once_. I can't imagine a smart blender remaining functional for anywhere near that long.

However, I've also been hilariously wrong about tech before. For example, in the late 90's I heard about wireless network research. I didn't get it. What's so hard about plugging in a damned computer to ethernet? Now I have multiple wifi devices and not one of them is a desktop computer.

The payoff for smart devices might be hard for us to imagine right now. The risks, on the other hand, are readily apparent. For example, a smart thermostat could be hacked into and your house's temperature set to something undesirable. For example, if it's winter and you're in a cold climate, turning the heat off completely while you're away could cause your pipes to burst. It's therefore important that we keep security and reliability in mind when making these devices, so that what we might gain isn't offset by a certain loss in reliability. Continuing with the smart thermostat as an example, it should probably not be possible to set it below 0 C unless you have physical access to the device, and it should probably raise some very annoying warnings even then.

It's also important that "smart" devices remain functional for a time period comparable to their more traditional counterparts. We tolerate obscene obsolescence rates in cell phones, mainly because their capabilities are expanding so rapidly. People don't want to buy a new thermostat every couple of years. In fact, most people would expect a thermostat to last a couple of decades, even if it's "smart". That means designing them to last with standards that will be supported for a long time.

In short, we might not see the upside to "smart" appliances just yet, but they could materialize. It is, however, important to insist on "smart" appliances that aren't too "dumb", nor should we accept appliances with short lives as a result of being "smart".

</comment><comment><USER27> It would be really smart if it did the one thing it is supposed to do. That goes for any appliance. Internet connected, high definition, VR toaster? No thanks. $7 and puts out a good toast? Yes, please.

<comment><USER28> The problem is that it seems to be cheaper to add internet crap to a bad toaster than it is to make a good toaster.

On top of this, there's no guarantee nowadays that if you pay more there's any more chance of getting a better quality product. It's just more money on advertising and shiny aesthetics usually.

I would pay double for a toaster that is guaranteed to work for 5 years. It must be possible, in the old days appliances lasted almost forever. It's just heated bread, for god's sake. I have gone through four microwaves in the last 5 years, and I only use the microwave probably every third day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I always think of my microwave.

It has modes for defrost, popcorn and a bunch of other stuff I never ever use. Its always at 100% power, I just punch in a time.

I like my devices generally dumb. Though I do appreciate that microwaves turn off when you open the door (watching people open the office microwave while still on).

</comment><comment> King-Aaron Out of coffee!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Bt0lkpV_U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Bt0lkpV_U)</comment>


Durham Pathfinder Free-School: Self-Directed Learning - <AUTHOR> https://indyweek.com/news/longform/durham-pathfinder-community-school-free-school-self-directed-learning/ <comment><USER2> Can someone help me out here... this is _not_ a charter school, correct?

"Indeed, half of Pathfinder's inaugural class was previously homeschooled, Wilder says.

Legally, they still are. Despite its name, Pathfinder isn't actually a school. It's not accredited and doesn't have a state license, which means it doesn't have to abide by state laws on mandatory attendance and testing. It doesn't award grades, nor will it give out diplomas should it take on high-school-age students. (It will help them create portfolios as part of their college- application process.) Instead, it's a "homeschooling resource center," a place that offers homeschoolers opportunities to socialize and learn in a small- scale, customizable environment. "

</comment><comment><USER3> I am really interested in the new schooling trends although I don't find "traditional school" as something intrinsically bad (typically, everything depends on people who work at school and parents being ready to cooperate with teachers and with each other). So I made an effort to go through that long elaboration and here is my 2 cents.

The claim that current school system "is based on a system that was developed over a hundred years ago to prepare people to be Prussian soldiers" sounds strange. Maybe that was the case in Prussia, but there is quite a lot of countries that didn't have particular reason to follow the Prussian way of education.

Another important thing. This school is not a school. "Pathfinder isn't actually a school. It's not accredited and doesn't have a state license". Legally kids that attend this school are homeschooled so all the responsibility for passing legally required tests lays on their parents. It is hard to say how much work parents has to put into actual pupils preparation and what are results as compared to traditional schools.

This schools is also a private, paid school. The price and ability to pre- selects (recruit) kids automatically filers out many "problematic" kids. Public school system does not have such luxury, they need a system that will provide some way of dealing also with kids having various background (including aggressive, non-cooperating kids with parents with the same attitude).

It is easy to have "open" education and "free" collaboration without any "Prussian discipline" when all kids are smart and well behaving and you have parents that take active part in the education process.

"Consider that every county in America has standing armies of professionals paid to teach children how to read. Then consider that Sudbury Valley has no reading instruction whatsoever, yet its graduates all leave campus perfectly literate." The question is what would happen if they got kids with dyslexia, serious problems with concentration, luck of support at home, etc. Wouldn't they need someone from that "army of professionals" to actually figure out how to deal with such kid?

Next it seems this kind of schools fail often "Wilder says. Sudbury schools have a high failure rate. So, too, did the previous generation of free schools that arose in the sixties and seventies, characterized by their "brief life spans and the often loosely defined nature of their educational practices," as one study put it.".

Apparently something is not working that well, although their approach sounds very cool and people behind that particular schools seems to be passionate about what they are doing.

<comment><USER4> >Public school system does not have such luxury

This is a very important point. Private schools can simple expell troublesome students. At the public school one of my kids goes to, there's a 10 year old who sometimes gets very agressive and lunges at teachers, punching and kicking. The teachers are female, and not much bigger than him. The school is the only one in this district (small town), they can't send him to another town unless transportation is provided for. If it was a private school, he would have been expelled on the first or second episode.

<comment> em-bee right, the problem with most experimental schools is that they are not trying to provide education for everyone. until a school model attempts to scale and reach the general population without being selective we won't know if that model is really going to work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anybody want to do this in Silicon Valley?

I was fairly obsessed with this concept in high school and college and then it got me in so much trouble that I dropped it. My idea is to have parents each spend a day or two a month at the school 'teaching' which would mean just showing what they do, or what interests them, or reading to them, or just talking to the kids about anything. This is really what I think kids need, perspective from a lot of 'real' adults. I think it's possible for about $1500/mo, no profit no salary, and only because I have a volunteer with the right certifications, but I think it's worth it.

</comment><comment><USER6> My kids are homeschooled, and there is a very big self-directed learning movement in the homeschooling community.

What people outside the community often forget is that kids are inherently curious, and can actually do TONS of learning on their own. Learning a language is a huge undertaking, yet every kid below the age of 3 manages to do it without any special teaching.

Self-directed learning is just the extension of that, but for some reason it scares people. It's nice to see that it's gaining a little traction in "schools", even if it's still technically homeschooling.

<comment><USER7> Curious, do you have an opinion on unschooling (leaving kids' learning to their curiosity and then letting them prepare for college when they choose to)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone have any insights what it is like to work as a software developer in RTP? What are the public school systems like in that area?

<comment><USER9> Decent area, incomes are good by non bay-area standards, and the cost of living is extremely low. There are a lot of software jobs but most of them are unexciting. Traffic isn't too bad as long as you work and live in the same general part of RTP. The food is decent if you are into barbecue and southern hipster, but the ethnic options besides Indian are a bit weak. There's a lot happening but if you're into fringe stuff it's a bit slow.

Don't have kids but people who do have told me Raleigh and Chapel Hill have decent school districts but Durham should be avoided. Ironically I think Durham is the most interesting part of the RTP area.

<comment><USER10> +1 that Durham is the most interesting part of the RTP. Having lived in Durham, Raleigh, Cary, Morrisville, and Chapel Hill over the years, I liked Durham the best. But like a lot of cities, gentrification is causing a lot of social and cultural upheaval in Durham and the surrounding suburbs.</comment></comment></comment>


How Is Online Radicalization Changing the World? Brazil Has the Answers - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/11/reader-center/brazil-youtube-radicalization.html <comment><AUTHOR> Apologies for the lightly editorialized title. The actual title "We Wanted to Know How Online Radicalization Was Changing the World. We Started With Brazil." was 11 characters too long.</comment>


A review of the new-fangled "Petrol Powered" car - <AUTHOR> http://www.solidstategroup.com/page/6277/a-review-of-the-new-fangled-petrol-powered-car <comment><USER2> No, it just doesn't work. Electric cars aren't facing challenges because they're just too darned new and people just can't deal with the change, they face issues because on all the metrics that people really care about, electric cars eke out a small win on a couple of them at the cost of major losses on quite a few more of them. They really _are_ inferior solutions for many car use cases, perhaps even the majority of them.

Hopefully that will change, and there's good reasons to believe that's a very plausible outcome (though not guaranteed), but you won't convince people by trying to essentially argue the problem is in the people and not the cars, because frankly, that's _obviously_ not true, to the point of being insulting. Insulting your listeners is not a good argument technique.

<comment><USER3> "on all the metrics that people really care about"

Minor correction, but its really extremely important to the discussion:

"on all the metrics that journalists really care about"

Another important part is all the gas mfgrs ganging up on their advertising salesmen and telling them exactly how the review had better read if they want to continue to get highly profitable advertising.

<comment><USER4> You don't think range is the single most important concern for regular buyers of an electric-only car? The article starting this was all about range.

<comment><USER5> I just want to know who the hell all these people are that need to drive 600 miles a day every day, with no opportunity to stop and charge.

Unless the only employment in the US is "taxi driver", I fail to see the issue...

<comment><USER6> My parents live about 7 hours away, we go visit them a couple times a year.

My wife got a masters degree a couple years ago, that was 2 hours away a couple times a week.

If we only had an electric car, either of these would require renting a gas car for the trip. Which could well be reasonable for a couple times a year, but probably not if we visited my parents more often (say, every month).

Of course this being the US we both have cars, and there wouldn't be any problem if only one of them was electric.

<comment><USER3> There is also an interesting childcare aspect in that for logistical reasons my wife shuffled the kids around when they were little... car seats are expensive and cumbersome to install and a PITA on a 2dr car, therefore while the kids were small, my car-seat-less little commuter car was quite literally limited to my commute only and we always had to take the giant wife-mo-bile on any (including long) family trips.

In practice I really didn't care, although the bigger the vehicle the less comfortable I am on the road (high winds scare me in a tall vehicle, I know if a tall vehicle hits a curb in an accident its rollover time killing everyone unlike my little car, obviously I have to drive more carefully to avoid hitting things because its huge, very low performance by all measures compared to my 2dr sports car, in summary I hate driving big cars). In theory if I experienced the same limitation due to gas vs electric I'm told over and over that I'm supposed to experience extreme agony, although I suspect it would be OK.

The startup lesson is to glom onto existing limitation. Oh you can't take a road trip because it doesn't have those little car seat mounting bracket thingies. Not some spooky hidden techno stuff in the engine compartment. Keep it simple, "Oh you can't road trip because it can't hold a car seat". This is a simpler marketing message.

<comment><USER7> Your perception that increased vehicle size decreases safety is backwards. Larger vehicles (SUVs, minivans) are safer for the occupants, though SUVs impose more risk on other drivers (because of weight).

[http://www.lbl.gov/Science- Articles/Archive/assets/images/20...](http://www.lbl.gov/Science- Articles/Archive/assets/images/2002/Aug-26-2002/SUV-report.pdf)

See graph on page 3: sports cars are far more hazardous to the driver than larger, lower performance vehicles.

"Of all major vehicle types, minivans have the lowest risk"

"sports cars have the highest combined risk, of all vehicle types studied"

And from another paper: "For automotive crash safety, the determining factor is size, not weight: larger vehicles have more crush space to absorb impacts. "

[http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph- Traffic_fatalities_vehicle_weight...](http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph- Traffic_fatalities_vehicle_weight_changes_vehicle_size)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article feels really forced.. No place for bags in front of the car? You have a huge trunk. Car heating in traffic jam? Maybe if there is 30'C outside. Huge amount of mechanical technology? Electric cars are full of far more complex technology, harder and more expensive to fix. And what about refueling, why didn't he mentioned "wow, refueling takes only 2 minutes! I don't have to wait an hour".

I know what was the point of this article, electric cars are quite young and given some time many of the issues will be fixed, but it doesn't mean people can't complain about it right now, I think there is still a huge gap between electric and petrol cars.

<comment><USER9> > _I know what was the point of this article, electric cars are quite > young..._

No. This article is satire, but the best kind as it's grounded in truth.

This article isn't making a point electrics are young, but rather about journalistic integrity. This article is responding to a couple of Tesla reviews that went way out of their way to complain about the Tesla and the idea of electric cars in general, by forcing situations to complain about.

This article's "really forced" gripes mirror the "really forced" gripes of the journalists complaining about their electric test vehicles, e.g., "What, the battery gets lower just sitting in traffic?" And yet, as noted above, it's also truth. If we didn't grow up just accepting fumes killing fellow drivers behind us, we likely wouldn't jump at a technology that introduced those downsides out of the blue.

PS. He specifically did mention refueling speed as a plus for the gas car, one he said wasn't worth it given the downsides.

<comment><USER10> It seems you're almost the only one who understood this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think the issue is about expectations of what has been hyped about electric cars (for better or worse) and the reality of their operation vs. what is already known and accepted about internal combustion engines (ICE). People already understand and accept the tradeoffs and costs of using ICE cars, and the "general joe" is hoping for something that provides a significantly better / different experience with their electric car experience.

This has little to do with reality, but regardless, explains why the TNW article was written as it was and why the parody article analogy doesn't hold as well. Although I understand that at some point, people need to get more "real" about what electric cars can truly offer and their real advantages / disadvantages.

<comment><USER12> Off-topic for non native speakers.

I feel stupid, for the last several days people were using "ICE" acronym in the posts and I was thinking that it was another brand of electric cars... Well no, it refers to "Internal Combustion Engine".

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the tip - I added an acronym decode in the comment above.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Too bad BMW couldn't make the bivalent (Hydrogen) engine very effective. One day I'd like to tank H2O and have my car's engine create the hydrogen using electrolysis. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_Hydrogen_7>

<comment><USER14> Hydrogen cars always seemed like a solution waiting for a problem to me. The fact is if you can distribute and store hydrogen reasonably well then ordinary everyday cars could run it today, as easily as they do petrol except they only produce H20 as exhaust.

If you have to create hydrogen from water and electricity you'd have been just as well using the electricity directly.

<comment><USER13> Well, for electricity the world still burns coal, gas or destroys nature for things like dams.

I imagined it takes a bit of electricity to transform the H2O to hydrogen at first, but than the hydrogen that is released takes over. It would be _so great_ if the only thing cars produce is clean water and oxygen. Imagine entire city's with clean air. That is something to behold.

<comment><USER3> "I imagined it takes a bit of electricity to transform the H2O to hydrogen at first,"

No talk to a chemist or chemeng. Virtually all industrial H2 comes from steam reforming natgas. At red heat in the absence of air, natgas basically "burns" steam generating reformer gas or syngas or whatever which is carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Then at a much lower "cooking" heat you oxidize the toxic / poisonous carbon monoxide to CO2 with more steam. Separating out the CO2 is moderately annoying an energy intensive, too. In summary H2 comes from partial combustion of natgas, using water as an O2 source. Or another way to phrase it is you burn the carbon out of methane at great effort leaving you with just the hydrogen. As you'd imagine its terribly inefficient, even if you fed that H2 into a 100% eff fuel cell (LOL) you'd get more kilowatt-hours per BTU of natgas by simply burning the natgas in a turbine. Even a small turbine (hybrid car sized) would be a higher system efficiency than H2.

In theory is not relevant WRT electrolysis, because in theory you could have a natgas hybrid turbine in a car, or in theory you could have a mr. fusion burning the H2. In practice H2 is just extremely highly processed natgas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, a whole article full of analogies to argue about. Not to mention...

>Exhaust systems need to be replaced every 20,000 miles.

Wha?

>And all this after 80 years of research and development.

I thought this was supposed to a new-fangled petrol car.

<comment><USER5> Exhaust systems need replacing, usually far more frequently than most people do. If you've got a rusty mess of an exhaust system, you're just blowing unburned fuel through your engine.

I think 80 years of R&D is overly generous. There's been no fundamental change to the ICE since its invention apart from the addition of more and more compensatory systems being introduced to mitigate the shortcomings of the traditional four-stroke piston-driven engine. The Otto cycle sucks but we stuck with it because it was the best trade-off between implementation cost and mechanical performance. 120 years ago.

<comment> jack-r-abbit > _I think 80 years of R &D is overly generous. There's been no fundamental > change to the ICE since its invention_

Fuel economy has been greatly improved. That same type of advancement in the electric world should translate directly into longer range (perhaps faster charging and/or easy battery swaps). So in 80 years... do you think we'll still be worried about getting 200 miles out of an electric car? Doubtful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> jack-r-abbit I think the point many are missing is that the electric car is not nearly as developed as today's petrol car. Great advances have been made over the decades to make today's cars safer, more reliable and more fuel efficient. The needs to be done with electric cars. It will come. But only if people believe it can happen. If too many nay-sayers poo-poo all over the advances that have already been made, confidence is going to be shot. The original review this was a parody of could have conveyed the same concerns without thumbing their nose at it. They did seem to have a lot of bias against the car that didn't need to be there.

</comment><comment><USER15> Lets not forgot the millions of American's who cannot charge a car. I don't have a garage and my HOA does not allow fixed structures outside. There was a discussion about changing HOA rules, but it costs thousands of dollars for an attorney, plus residents have to actually vote on it. We can get 3 people out of 200 to attend an HOA meeting.

</comment><comment><USER16> My issue with lekky cars at the moment is one of style. Unless you have a skwillion pounds to spend, you have to get a prius or leaf or something.

There doesn't seem to be a stylish looking electric on the market yet. Something that might change once BMW release the i3.

<comment><USER17> Model S isn't that expensive, if you factor in the long term costs. Quoting from ([http://teslarumors.com/USA-Residental-Energy-Cost-2011-by- St...](http://teslarumors.com/USA-Residental-Energy-Cost-2011-by-State.html)):

        Based on a price of $3.75 for gasoline, a 15 mpg vehicle will incur a cost of 25 cents per mile, while a 30mpg vehicle will incur a cost of 12 cents per mile.

Model S gets 3-5c per mile in most states.

<comment><USER6> The trouble is that that $3.75 includes taxes that are supposed to cover road maintenance. And sooner or later those taxes will have to be replaced by something else, likely paid when you renew your license plates and likely designed to be more expensive for cars that use less/no gas.

<comment><USER17> I think the portion of gasoline tax for road maintenance amounts to less than a cent per mile, while the frequently quoted cost for road maintenance is 5-6c per mile per car. Thus it is already being funded from other sources.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stop claiming you're profitable - <AUTHOR> http://blog.asmartbear.com/ramen-profitable.html <comment><USER2> The beauty of phrases like "beer money profitable" and "ramen profitable" is that people will understand what you really mean. Even a VC will understand that "beer money profitable" means that you clear $200 above raw expenses without accounting for the cost of your time (ie, it's a hobby that doesn't lose money).

The key in any communication is accurately conveying the facts. So use words that will be understood in context by the audience. For example, my own friends would use the same standard as a professional investor to define the term "profitable". They would think I'd lost my marbles if I claimed I was profitable making just $200 a month.

But if you're a high school student, and you're talking to your Aunt Nelly, sure you can use the term "profitable" to describe making $200 a month above expenses. In fact, if you were making $200K a month you would have to say "WAAAY more than profitable", lest she assume that "profitable" meant $200 a month.

Just be clear so that you're understood, in context.

<comment><USER3> Note that "ramen profitable", as I understand the term, means "throwing off enough money that the operators of the business can pay for adequate shelter and enough ramen-quality calories to avoid starvation".

That sounds like a pedantic distinction but it's not: ramen-profitability have runways denominated by the willpower of the founders, not extrinsic factors like "founders will soon be homeless".

Beer-money profitable carries none of the same connotations.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that GP were saying "ramen-profitable" and "beer-profitable" were synonyms, just that both terms are sub-categories of the more general term "profitable." If you're talking to a VC, you should prefer one of these more specific terms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is pretty inconsistent with how the phrase "profitable business" has long been used. Maybe the startup world wants to invents its own metric, but to most small businessmen, whether a business is _profitable enough_ for you to live on the profits is a separate question from whether the business is turning a profit in the first place, i.e. whether your endeavor is bringing you more income than it's producing in expenses. A business that's making $1000/mo is profitable, but not necessarily profitable enough to live on.

The idea of paying a founder a salary and accounting for that is also pretty atypical; most small businessmen are sole proprietors, and do not pay themselves salaries. You don't "deserve" some specific hourly rate as an owner, as that's the whole difference between owning a company and working for an hourly wage.

This doesn't seem very complex in other areas of business. If your business is turning a small profit, but not enough to live on, that's what you say. "Q: How's the restaurant doing? A: It's turning a modest profit now, but not really enough for it to be a living yet."

<comment><USER6> In some (many? most?) countries you are legally required to pay yourself at least the minimum wage. Even if you are the sole proprietor and sole employee in the business.

Minimum wage might not be enough to "live" on, but it should be enough to survive on.

Or maybe this is a recent-ish development where I live because people were using small businesses to avoid paying taxes, retirement funds and so on. Or maybe the government has just recently-ish started really clamping down on not paying yourself a minimum wage. Not really sure about the specifics.

<comment><USER7> This depends on the business structure. In the US, if you have what is called an 'S' corp, then you are required to pay yourself a market rate salary. Otherwise, you are dodging social security, medicare, and other employment taxes. If you have a 'C' corp(as most startups seem to have) then you pay a separate corporate tax so you aren't really dodging taxes. Sole proprietors and LLCs pay "self-employment" tax on pass through earnings, so there is no tax dodging.

<comment><USER3> S Corp owners are _not_ required to pay themselves market salaries.

What they are required to do is account for their income as if at least a market-salary's worth of it was salary.

You can pay yourself $1/year at an S Corp and be just fine, as long as you don't also issue yourself $200,000 in distributions in that same year and claim to have earned no salary.

This is because ( _this may set off a little brush fire in the threads, but hey, it beats the silly semantic argument over what the word "profitable" means_ ) S Corps are a giant scam.

For the benefit of the class:

An S Corp, like an LLC, is a pass-through tax entity: the tax liability in an S goes straight to the owners.

LLC owners generally don't make salaries _at all_. They are paid entirely in distributions (ie, "profit sharing"). LLC owners are subject to self- employment tax on all that income; in fact, an LLC owner must typically pay taxes quarterly, instead of at the end of the year as W2 employees are accustomed. The LLC structure does not (that I know of) afford a huge and obvious opportunity to cheat on your taxes.

Owners of S Corps _do_ take salaries, and do withholding in much the same way as a W2 employee would.

Additionally, as company owners, S Corp owners routinely pay themselves bonuses (profit sharing, distribution, whatever you want to call it). This is normal and reasonable. The business does well, payroll is made, money is reinvested in the company, and what's left over is distributed back to the owners.

The scam is that this money is not for tax purposes treated as payroll. In particular, that money isn't subject to FICA.

As a result, S Corp owners are incentivized to claim the lowest possible salary (today, "lowest" meaning "lowest you could reasonably get away with calling a market salary"). That's because the salary money is going to be subject to FICA. If the remainder of what the owner should fairly have been paid is issued in distributions, that money avoids FICA liability.

And so the IRS case files are littered with lawyers and doctors and dentists who set up their practices as S Corps and then try to claim the fair market rate for their participation in the company is, say, $5,000/year ("oh, I only come in on alternate Tuesdays!"). Their secretaries pay the full bite of FICA while living paycheck to paycheck, while the business owner makes payments on a vacation house with the money they save from this trick.

<comment><USER8> You comment alone Sir, needs its own blog post. Pretty interesting. My accountant never told me this.

<comment><USER9> A relative of mine is an IRS auditor for small businesses. The cheating S Corps, as described by tptacek, take up the majority of his time. I got the same description from him, and he also said doctors were the biggest offenders.

If anyone is doing this, or interested in doing this, the way they deal with these cases is as follows: he picks a number based on a combination of what salary surveys say and what kind of mood he is in, multiplies it by 7 (since you've probably been doing this for 7 years by the time he gets it, which is how far they can go back), and assesses that as unreported income. They then tack on penalties and interest for the tax liability of said income. That makes for a really bad day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Profitable does not mean 'making more money than you could otherwise', profitable does not mean 'worthwhile', profitable does not mean 'sustainable without ones founders.'

Profitable means making a profit. End of story.

This is a petty, semantic issue. if a company is making $50/month in profits, then the issue isn't that they're calling themselves profitable, its that they're only making $50/month.

<comment><USER11> It's really a question of how time factors into your accounting. If you're spending 10 hours to make $50, then it's tough to claim that as a $50 profit unless your time is worth less than $5 an hour.

Of course there are cases in which your time is worth less than $5 an hour (you don't have any other prospects for making money). Or if you enjoy what you're doing it might only be 1 hour of "work" with 9 hours of enjoyment. The point is that completely ignoring time spent is just bad accounting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The point is that a business (at least from this point of view) is an entity in its own right. The founders are a bit like a life-support machine – if you switch them off, does the business die? (Of course, even a profitable business might die if the business can't hire some people to replace the founders.)

Because the business is supposed to be an entity in its own right, you have to value the founder's contribution somehow in deciding whether it is profitable. One way might be to consider what the salary would be to hire someone to take it over such that it continues to produce the same revenue. Another way might be to pay the founders their living expenses (ramen-profitable.) But discounting the cost of the founders working on it to zero? As the article says, that is meaningless.

It's like the old joke: Q: How can you quickly make a million dollars? A: Invest two million dollars in $TOPICAL_RISKY_ACTIVITY

If you hack it together on weekends and with no oversight it is reliably making a $100 more than hosting a month and will do for the foreseeable future, it's profitable (albeit at a small level and not necessarily sustainable).

But if you're living off savings and working full time on it, and it's making $1000 dollars a month, its not profitable.

</comment><comment><USER13> Potential Investor: "I loved your pitch, and I think your business model is great, but in going over your projected financials, I see you're planning on taking a $4,000/mo salary from day one. Don't you think you should have a little more skin in the game?"

Entrepreneur: "At my last consulting gig, I was making $8,000/mo before I left to start this company. I haven't been taking any salary for the last two months while I built a prototype, so I would certainly say I've got skin in the game. At the same time, this business is going to sustain a lot more than just one $4,000/mo salary - if you don't think it can, then you shouldn't invest in the first place"

<comment><USER14> There was a Shark Tank a few months back of a guy starting a "design your own shoes" clothing company -- When Mark Cuban asked him what salary he could comfortably live with, the guy said "I guess I could be comfortable with anything over six figures"

Of course Cuban then said he was out, stating he wanted the kid to be sweating on a mac 'n cheese diet in order to ensure he was working his ass off as opposed to living the "LA lifestyle." Was a pretty interesting conversation, because the kid was currently turning a decent profit already and claimed he had already done the blood sweat and tears thing.

<comment><USER15> I saw it. That shoe guy is exactly the kind of guy you should fund. He wasn't saying he demanded a high lifestyle income they were asking what he was working _for_ and then they pretend like he was expecting that _now_.

The whole show is really quite hilarious. I think it gives people the wrong impression though.

The sharks pass if a company is profitable and the owner wants a fair valuation. The sharks pass if the company has no traction yet.

What the sharks really bite on is profitable companies (or high potential companies) where they can get a controlling stake for cheap, or a minority stake for super cheap.

The show is correctly named, that's for sure.

<comment><USER16> I recently saw this episode and you misheard.

He did say that he wanted a 6 figure salary to "live the L.A. life", and he repeated that statement more than once.

I like the show but agree with a lot of your points, my understanding is that these pitches are more than an hour so we only get to see the "juicy" parts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Well, that wasn't what I expected from a post on asmartbear. Trite quibbling over minor semantic distinctions? For an early stage startup, spending even two seconds worrying about the exact definition of "profitable" and whether or not your definition is suitable to someone else, is two seconds one could have spent writing code or doing something productive.

Pretty much a useless article, as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER3> Wow do I ever think you (and even 'damoncali below) are wrong about this. This is the opposite of a "useless post". This is a post about how lying to yourself about the definition of "profitable" can cost you tens of thousands of dollars.

The idea Cohen is expressing is so extraordinarily simple it would almost be banal, if it didn't target such a widely held misconception:

 _You cannot factor out opportunity costs when accounting for your business_.

When a new founder with a business throwing off $1500/mo after line-item costs like hosting claims to be "profitable", what they are effectively saying is that their own time is worth $0/mo.

In reality, that founder is almost definitely losing at least $11,000 per month --- by taking a SWAG at what any person capable of booting up a product to reliable $1500/mo can earn as an employee or freelance consultant, that SWAG being almost certainly so lowballed as to be insulting.

To my mind, not being able to tell the difference between "profitable to the tune of $1500/mo" and "losing 5 figures a month" is an alarming difference that is very much worth calling out.

<comment><USER18> Again, what is the entrepreneur is happy with this scenario?

Say you can earn $20k a month as a consultant.

If you are only making $19k from your own small business, are you therefore making a loss?

I would take the latter scenario all day long. If that's a loss, please bring it on.

<comment><USER19> That's more like "I took a pay-cut in exchange for a better quality of life", which is understandable and totally a choice I might make. But the important bit is that you would, in fact, take a pay-cut.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The article ignores the sentiment that applies to me and probably others on this site. I would rather earn the $1k working on my own products than $10k working for someone else.

There is also the potential that the $1k will grow over time.

I therefore don't think it's reasonable to value my time at $10k for the purpose calculating my profits.

[The figures will obviously vary on a person by person basis.]

More broadly, I view this from the E-Myth [1] perspective:

If you work within the business as a job, you're selling yourself short if your business is generating $1k a month when you could be earning $10k working for someone else. The money you have left on the table has a real opportunity cost to you as an individual and should probably be valued closer to the shortfall you are taking of $9k.

However, if you view your business as a system - something that has money going out (product, marketing, people you pay) and money coming in (sales) then that money is a genuine excess that the system is kicking out and into the entrepreneurs pocket and is most certainly profit from his endeavor, whether $1 or $1MM.

[1] <http://www.e-myth.com/>

<comment><USER2> I left Apple to start my first business in 1991.

A year later I ran into my former boss from Apple when I was out eating lunch. He asked how it's going, I said well. Then he asked, "Ok, are you making more, or less, than you were at Apple?"

Embarassed by the question, I admitted the answer was "more".

I think his question captured perfectly the real issue here.

<comment><USER17> _I think his question captured perfectly the real issue here._

I guess it depends on your perspective. If the only goal of doing a startup is to make more money, then sure. But if your goals involve having more control over your own destiny, fulfilling a desire to build something for the sake of building it, or having a kind of freedom you could never have when working for $BIGCORP, then it doesn't really matter if you're making more or less than you would at $BIGCORP. As long as you are either "ramen profitable" or have runway left to burn, you still have a shot at fulfilling that ambition, which is what matters, IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is definitely not a useless article. If you've ever read an article or blog post where someone is talking about how they built their business and said something about being profitable at some x point in time, then they proceed to NOT describe what they exactly mean, then I just end up disregarding the whole thing because I can't take what they say at face value. I'm glad someone spoke up about this because it should (hopefully) mean higher quality articles in the future.

<comment><USER21> Let's not redefined profits to mean "this busienss can pay for X people's salary".

What if I have five businessses, but none can pay for my salary individually, though in aggregate they make me fairly well off.

Can't I call any one of the busineseses (seperate entities, mind you, not just apps in the store) profitable?

<comment><USER22> One of my businesses can easily pay the wages of an employee for the time they are needed, but being highly seasonal work, it would not pay for an employee year round. Or to put it another way: On a per hour of work basis, it makes a programmers salaries look like chump-change, but amortized out to a yearly income it's not enough to sustain a living.

Is that profitable?

<comment><USER23> Sure - that's the same as "my business is profitable, but can't afford to hire another employee yet", only it's a fractional employee that you can't afford to hire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great post. If someone is trying to sell you an idea or technique and they use their own profitability to justify this technique, then the definition of "profitable" is very relevant.

In my mind, a business that excludes the time spent by its founder from its expenses is not honestly assessing its profitability.

<comment><USER17> _Great post. If someone is trying to sell you an idea or technique and they use their own profitability to justify this technique, then the definition of "profitable" is very relevant._

Right, but if somebody is selling you something, you're going to do due diligence and probe this stuff. If it turns out that they are only "profitable" in the narrowest sense, but not "sustainably profitable," then that's a good thing to find out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The article makes the point that a business should only be considered profitable when it is sustainably profitable - e.g. when it can pay its workers for their time.

Given the debate that this idea appears to be generating perhaps another way of looking his idea is to say that the business has no value as a business until it is sustainably profitable (even though it may control assets that may be valuable when liquidated such as a web domain or even talent which another company may wish to acquire) - i.e. until it is sustainably profitable a business has no value as an ongoing enterprise and can only be sold for the value of its assets.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm not going to say the author stole my post from yesterday, but it sure is eerily similar... What a coincidence!

[http://jerzygangi.com/2012/06/17/youre-making-money-but- are-...](http://jerzygangi.com/2012/06/17/youre-making-money-but-are-you- making-a-profit/)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4126955>

</comment><comment><USER27> Having worked in finance 16 years, I do not understand this fuss about semantics - "ramen", "beer", "sushi" ... profitable.

For starters, for any business, let's look at the numbers:

\- market size, market share, market dynamics

\- gross & net revenue - abs $ and % growth

\- gross margin, gross profit, operating income, net income - abs $, % of revenue & % growth

\- Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Cash Flow

Then we can talk semantics.

Edit: formatting

</comment><comment><USER28> Love this: "So now that I've perhaps unfairly ridiculed you, let's just recognize what's really going on, because it's wonderful and amazing and fantastic and exciting"

Most posts like this just bitch and moan, but he actually provides valuable advice.

</comment><comment><USER29> "profitable" is not equal to true or false. People who understand business use numbers to represent it and evaluate accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER30> Let's try more succinctly. "Stop claiming your lemonade stand is profitable if it only pays for itself if you don't count the person selling the lemonade."

That's fair. But the Internet doesn't work that way. If you develop something once, you don't need to keep standing there and keep developing it. The whole reason the article is wrong can be boiled down to this. For more nuanced response you can see my other comments.

Basically, it would be like saying, "A restaurant that makes 50,000 per month in profit isn't profitable if the person who made it is Bill Gates."

Since, "automatically" Bill Gate's time is worth a lot more doing just about anything else other than launching a restaurant. But come on. When it comes time to buy the restaurant and see how much it makes in profit so you can see how much you will pay for it - do you really think you'll reconsider the whole thing as unprofitable just because Bill Gates spent way more of his time on it than can possibly be valued at as low as that?

Get real. From an investment standpoint, nobody cares about the founder's development time. And guess what the article is about? Investment standpoint.

<comment><USER3> Nobody disagrees with this. If the business runs without your consistent involvement, the value of your time doesn't factor in, because your time isn't one of the costs of the business.

If you have a business that throws off $1500/mo and requires _one hour_ of your time in each of those months on average, you absolutely are ~$1300/mo profitable. That much is obvious.

The problem is when your business is throwing off $1500/mo and you are spending more than 8 hours on it in a month.

<comment><USER30> The author does disagree with this. He's saying if you're still sinking your time into the development, you have to subtract it from sales before you can cry "profit!", even if the profit is the result of previously sunk development costs that don't require ongoing involvement. The author doesn't differentiate types of development costs on this point. Most Internet development is invested into future profit: it's not standing in front of your lemonade stand.

<comment><USER3> He's right about that.

Nobody, however, is saying that once you've recouped your investment, your hourly bill rate needs to somehow factor into your profitability.

<comment><USER30> I will just say that people very much _are_ saying that. You're pretty much saying that as demand for you goes up and down elsewhere, the profitability of your business goes up and down. And if someone wants to make your business unprofitable, they can just offer you a hundred million dollars to go work for them and drop it - even if you continue on the business, it's suddenly unprofitable.

This is obviously totally false.

Let's do this thought experiment.

Say I would accept this if the author said that true profitability is only the amount that the company would clear if you spent less than a minimal frictional amount of time hiring someone (from company revenue) at rock-bottom wages, to keep running the company.

but if we accept this, notice something interesting. What if the way to get someone at rock-bottom wages is for the company to issue some shares (which means a percentage) and pay the worker in those shares?

Can the company still be profitable (though you're diluting the profit) on those terms? From your point of view, OF COURSE!

The author is talking about the point of view of an investor. ("Stop telling me your company is profitable.") He's not arguing from the point of view of what's worth your time: "stop thinking that if you're profitable it's worth it for you to do that."

The two are totally distinct. If the company has someone on payroll at $0 because they think their work is worth investing in exchange for the 30% equity they have, then the profit the company generates for the 70% stakeholder who doesn't have to put time in is simply 70% of company revenues minus company expenses such as hosting.

That doesn't mean the person who is working for $0 and equity isn't getting screwed. But it also does't mean the company isn't profitable.

The whole article is completely wrong and I've told you why here and in my other comments.

Would you buy a company for a thousand dollars that had paper profits of five thousand dollars a month and will for the next two years, but actually this isn't "real profit" because the founder, who had been earning five hundred thousand as a President at Microsoft, put five years of labor into it unpaid?

Of course you would buy it. That's real profit the company's making. It doesn't have to recoup the founder's lost opportunity cost over the ENTIRE life of the company in order for it to be a profitable company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Breakeven is the term people really should be using. It has been around for a very long time, and it is very clear about what it means.

The thing is, people want to use the term "profitable" because they want to spin where their business is at.

Operationally break-even would mean your income exceeds your hosting expenses.

Breakeven sans salaries, would imply that you're ramen profitable but nobody is getting paid.

And from there you could say "we're profitable enough to hire one programmer, but no more" or whatever.

The thing is people would rather say "ramen profitable" than break-even. Sure, ramen profitable has a specific meaning with more nuance, but it also has the magic word "profit" in it.

I think founders and investors should both work towards more level headed straightforward language.

I've been watching a lot of startup pitches lately, and combined with what I've seen in the last 2 decades, hyperbole has become quite the turnoff. Maybe it works on investors, they sure all seem to do it (e.g.: watch the Founder Fuel pitches) but for me it undermines credibility.

Kinda like dealing with a used car salesman-- have I got a startup for you! It has the most excellent traction you've ever seen!

</comment><comment><USER30> Disagree completely. EDIT: it's an important distinction to make, and when you say "profitable since day one" obvoiusly nobody expects that you made seventeen thousand dollars in sales your first day. Maybe there is a better word for it (scantily profitable over the direct-but-not-opportunity-costs since day 1?) but if it's something you can claim, go ahead and do so for contextualization. This is why:

There's a whole type of startup (call it type "1" whereas article is about type "2"), which is more traditional, and the only possible model in many sectors such as hotels, restaurants, retail, etcetcetc, that is based on launching a business (as opposed to 'bootstrapping') from sizeable funds - often 20k-50k or more - and not even attempting to become profitable within 3-5 months, during which you expect to continue to pay out one or two thousand on office rental space, equipment, hosting, whatever. An optimistic plan is to scratch the surface of breaking even around the one year mark.

When someone is, and has been, "profitable" since day one, ("type 2") this is in stark contrast to this model. This is the "in our first few months we spent three-fifty on hosting while servicing our five paying customers and working hard coding and developing so we can grow our customer base and make our equity worth enough to sell some of it and raise a round, or at least have enough money coming in to grow organically and bootstrap to sizeable revenues."

There's nothing wrong with either of the two models. It's also probably the most important fact you need to know to contextualize a conversation about your business. And the type 2 business that has paying customers but can't even meet it's hosting bills is fundamentally broken. Hell, I can do that just by hosting up to five hundred gigabytes of files per person for five dollars per decade.

If you're not broken - and running this type of model - go ahead and boast. And if boasting isn't enough, keep growing.

<comment><USER3> You haven't rebutted his point at all. Jason Cohen been around the block a couple times. He saw the "type 2" startup argument coming and addressed it very early on. Specifically: you are _losing money_ if you are not accounting for the fair market value of your time, no matter what your pro forma cash flows in Excel tell you is going on.

Also: if the only reasonable trajectory for your business is to "raise a round"...

This, it seems to me, is one of the most common mistakes people make when talking about their businesses on HN.

<comment><USER30> Well, what do you suggest instead of "profitable"? It's an extremely useful fact and contextualization, and obviously no one thinks you _really_ mean "profitable"? What do you suggest we call it? "monetarily self-sustaining hobby that pays for the direct - but not opportunity - costs the founders, er, hobbyists, incur in, uh, playing with it, which they are doing in the hopes that beyond paying for the current direct costs, in the future the hobby's revenue is able to be used, either through sale of the hobbyist's ownership at a rate commensurate with a multiple of the hobby's then-present revenues and which valuation will factor in the ability - as of the extent to which it will have been proven by that future date, of the founders to use outside money to generate value for the outside shareholder, -- or, in lieu of such a sale of ownership, through sufficient growth of revenue, to have made the hobby a more valuable use of the founders' time, in retrospect, than the amount of money they lost by not doing something different?"

I humbly submit that "profitable from day 1" (or day 7 or 14 )is a useful shortcut to name all of the above. Of course it doesn't mean _really_ profitable.

But it also doesn't mean that you're hosting a news a blog that has readerships but hasn't made a penny.

<comment><USER3> Profit = Revenue - Costs.

The mistake Cohen is talking about is mostly about not fully accounting for costs.

If, after factoring in opportunity cost (ie: what your full-time salary would be had you done something other than start your venture), that equation produces a _negative number_ , you are not "profitable".

It's weird that this should generate so much controversy. The concept of opportunity cost is not controversial among businesspeople, among investors, or among economists.

The term you are looking for to describe the "kind of profitable" to which you're referring is "cash flow positive".

<comment><USER31> That actually isn't his point. He's very clear that what he's talking about is that your cost of living should be counted as a business cost. Once your business is covering your cost of living, he says that you should count it as profitable, even though you're not yet making the salary that you could.

<comment><USER30> But that's obviously stupid. See my other comments. If you stop working on it and pay someone 800 per month to maintain it and do nothing else, and ten years later the account payments go into has 200k in it, what, is that 200k from another dimension? This is so obviously wrong. The article is completely wrong economically, and can be summarized as: "Don't say you're profitable from day 1: say what you mean, that your business is cash-flow positive with respect to its own business expenses other than your original time in developing it." whoop-de-doo. not an important semantic distinction, but I will grant the author it.

I will not grand the author the contention that you shouldn't tell people if this is the case.

<comment><USER31> The difference is that the author is implicitly assuming that you've got a business that requires your active involvement to keep going.

If the business requires 0 energy from you, and makes money, then his point becomes much less relevant. But most of the businesses in question are not like that. You have paperwork to keep them going, decisions to make, customers to serve...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I normally agree with Jason but I don't think he should be so upset on this one. "ramen profitable" the amount of profits you have to plow back into the company are as much as the cost of a Ramen package. It is a way of saying you're not profitable to a significant degree, but you are covering your expenses and thus you're not in the process of dying. This is an important milestone, because it means the company is sustainable and the stress level on the founders is going to be a lot less than ones who are slowly depleting their life savings (or quickly depleting it.) And it also means that any additional money will be going into growth, rather than into keeping the startup alive. This is pretty important, or should be, to investors.

I think this is a much better metric to seek than the "we've grown our user base by 1 million percent!" from a company that isn't taking in any money from its users, and whose users would never pay money to use the service (perfect example: Facebook) but _has_ also gotten $1M+ in investment and has spent significant money. How do you tell the difference between that and buying users? The latest thing these days is to say "we got X users and we didn't spend any money on marketing".

Really? So you don't know what your acquisition cost really is? You want me to think that your social network for accountants is going viral? When your user base is about the size I'd expect it to be when all the other "Social Network for X" founders from Angel.co show up to see what you're up to?

Back to the article-- I think he's spot on to point out the difference between ramen profitable and profitable enough to hire an employee who's getting a real salary. That is another milestone.

But I think "we're profitable from day one" is really not a bad thing, because many of the other companies out there have no path to profitability without a whole lot more funding (Eg: Facebook, which took a lot of money.) It did pay off for Facebook, but your social network for taxidermists is not another Facebook.

So, "we're profitable from day one, even though we're only covering operational expenses and not covering employee living expenses yet" is still a significant piece of information compared to the companies that will take another $5-$50M to get even to that point.

Also, FWIW, my startup, which will likely be "profitable from day one" (but not ramen profitable) will be requiring about $300 a month in hosting-- and that's getting a dirt cheap deal. Not all of us are just a website that can run on a single server... we're building a cluster of dedicated machines and we need to do that before we open the doors. Fortunately, $300 a month for ~5-6 dedicated machines is kinda amazing![1] This is also one way where "immediately profitable" is more achievable than it was a decade ago.

[1] Hetzner.de has dedicated machines for cheap. Our product is very amendable to a CDN, and our major partner is hosting a lot of the higher bandwidth stuff on their own global CDN anyway, so locating in germany is not nearly the issue it would be for us if we were doing a social network for philatelists.</comment>


Life on Mars? Fossil find shows it's possible - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/21/us-fossils-life-idUSTRE77K1TE20110821 <comment><USER2> This is a nice find, boosting existing theories, but it's certainly not news that the early life probably thrived in a reducing, oxygen-free environment. Actually, the rise of photosynthetizing blue-green bacteria and the subsequent rapid climb of atmospheric molecular oxygen levels[1] may have caused a catastrophic extinction event, wiping out most of the contemporary life forms, undefended against the dangerously reactive chemical.

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

<comment><USER3> ? That's what the article is about. For reasons not explained om detail in this write-up, the authors believe that early life was thriving in that region of the world. The mass extinction(s) that followed are kinda irrelevant.

<comment><USER4> _That's what the article is about._

I think the OP's point is that this has been well established for a while, article makes it sound like a new theory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't quite see how this find sheds new information on possibility of life on Mars. I though the greatest challenges to life on Mars were large temperature variations and lack of liquid water. It is already known that life could thrive in an oxygen-free environment, after all it had to start on Earth some-how.</comment>