900 out of 1000 people say a car is blue, what's the probability it is blue? - <AUTHOR> https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/298917/if-900-out-of-1000-people-say-a-car-is-blue-what-is-the-probability-that-it-is <comment><USER2> Lest you think this is merely an academic problem, I ran into a catastrophic, real-world case where it mattered.

I lost a notebook at a big box store. It had major sentimental value to me[1]. I called their Lost & Found and asked if someone had returned a green notebook. They insisted they didn't have one.

When I went to the store in person, they had it. Because they felt that it wasn't green, but blue. And (presumably) that no one would describe it as green, so they should return False for "matches what a green-notebook-seeking human wants?"

Here's the notebook: [http://i.imgur.com/AlQAZBJ.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/AlQAZBJ.jpg)

So, for the linked question: whenever answering a question, you need to know _why_ you're answering it. It affects the answer! Consider these purposes:

1) "I want to know if other people will agree that this is a green notebook."

2) "I want to know if I should say this definitely-doesn't-match when someone comes looking for a green notebook."

3) "I want to know if this notebook reflects almost entirely green light."

Case 2 is the one I was interested in. In that case, 10% respondents are enough to say "hey, that might be a match".

[1] I know, "you shouldn't have brought it out with you".

<comment><USER3> > Because they felt that it wasn't green, but blue.

This is just bizarre on their part. "Guys calling in about a green notebook, one of the _three_ items in our lost and found _is_ a notebook, but... oh it's a blue one. Just tell him we don't have it."

<comment><USER4> Yeah, this points to "employee is a jerk".

Normal employee: "We have a notebook here. Can you describe it more? Something written on the inside, maybe?"

<comment><USER2> Yes! Fortunately, I did have my name in the back. But I never anticipated that someone would so adamantly think it was some other color. I could understand someone calling it blue, but not "definitely not green".

<comment><USER5> There's a wall at my parents house which to me always looked green. I referred to it as green and my sister and mother seemed to get downright angry, insisting it was blue. I don't really care either way, it just looks green to me. I can't stop seeing it as green.

If you were to analyze the wavelengths of light the wall, or your notebook, consist of, you'll find a certain amount of blue and a certain amount of green. The thresholds which are detected by our eyes, and the thresholds relative to that where we subjectively determine the dominant color, has high variance.

But people take their subjective perception dead serious, since their perspective is the only one which matters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's kind of a poorly stated problem. It would be better if they said:

1000 people were asked the question "Is this car blue?" and 900 answered yes, what is the probability that the car is blue.

or

1000 people were asked the question "What is the color of this car?" and 900 answered "blue", what is the probability that the car is blue.

The second question is far more likely to produce responses like "navy", "turquoise", etc that aren't exactly blue, but are very similar.

<comment><USER7> Even that doesn't fully specify the problem since we don't know the prior probability of a random car being blue. Reword the question to be "rainbow", "chartreuse" or some other less common car color and the probability _should_ go down.

<comment><USER8> > we don't know the prior probability of a random car being blue

That's true, but irrelevant. The problem stipulated that _this_ car is in fact blue, so the prior in its being blue is 1.

<comment><USER7> The person being asked what the probability is doesn't know the fact, so the prior probability from their perspective isn't 1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't think this can really be answered. The mathematical probability arguments are ignoring important implications of the result.

If 999 out of 1000 said it was blue, you could dismiss the last guy as crazy or blind or something. But 10% providing a different answer means something strange is going on. Maybe the color is some borderline shade, or the lighting is weird, or people are being coerced, or.... Without more information, we can't really tell what's going on, so the answer pretty much has to be "who knows?"

<comment><USER10> I'd like to imagine that those 100 people are either colorblind or said "cerulean" or "navy" or something like that.

<comment><USER11> My personal headcanon is that the car was repainted after asking the first 100 people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Zero. No car produced in the last 30 years has been the color "blue". They are all named things like "Electric zen" or "Caribbean surf".

<comment><USER13> Correct answer. My car's color is Blue Sensation...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A very slightly different question is much easier to answer:

>900 out of 1000 people say a car is blue. What's the probability that, when asked, you'd say that the car is blue?

This is, IMO, 90%. Whatever skew there is between car-is-blue and survey- response-is-blue should be about the same between you and the general population. Unless, of course, you have some reason to believe that you're different than the overall population.

It doesn't matter how the question is asked either, or why people are saying what they're saying. 10% of people could be trolls who say that the car is colored "like a lizard person".

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't know, perhaps the car is cyan, perhaps it is painted with a 3 stage pearl and most viewed from the same direction. Most people are not very sophisticated in their discerning of color. I cannot trust that the author is certain that the car is blue to start with. Pure statistics are not enough here.

<comment><USER16> It's an interesting idea executed poorly. What if we changed it to:

"1000 people were asked how many lights were lit up in a row of 4 lit up lights. 900 people said there were 4 lights."

<comment><USER17> Is this a Star Trek: TNG reference?

<comment><USER16> There. Are. FOUR. LIGHTS!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I feel like all the mucking about with Bayes' Theorem, while technically correct, is completely missing the point. 100 people getting a color wrong seems impossible, so if it were to happen, I would look for deeper explanations rather than jumping to probabilities. Perhaps it's because those people are from a country/culture that doesn't distinguish blue and green (many don't, see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language)).

While this particular example is unimportant, I think it illustrates a point that just paving over statistical oddities can cause you to skip important investigations.

<comment><USER19> I think we can go a step further and say that the basic Bayes treatment shown is mathematically incorrect. It assumes conditional independence and equal accuracy between judges, which is almost certainly not the case here.

If a full 10% of people who observe a car say that it is _not_ blue, I strongly doubt their evaluations are independent. Rather, I would guess that most of them are making the same assessment, like "my culture doesn't distinguish blue and green" or "I am a person who does not consider cyan to be blue". So simply calculating odds based on 1000 conditionally-independent assessments isn't a valid approach.

Less formally: I expect a car with 900 votes for 'blue' to be a different color than a car with 999 votes for 'blue'. Is each car blue in the binary sense we're talking about? Well, for that we'd need an objective standard of blue, which the problem quietly failed to set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> There is no probability - you can't apply probability theory at all since it's easy to make "Dutch Book" against any numerical answer (this can be accomplished by selecting the initial pool of 1000 as you please.) All this hinges on:

"All they know is that 900 people said it was blue, and 100 did not."

Meaning, those who are being asked for a probability don't know who selected those people or how.

This crops up with many false descriptions of the "Monty Hall Paradox" as well. Some descriptions also allow Dutch Book defeats, so probability can't be applied to the problem as it is (falsely) described.

The principle here is that you can't and shouldn't apply probability to questions about a deck of cards, if someone else can select which cards are in the deck, including 52 copies of the same card, either before or after your guess or bet. They'll take your money.

When Anderson et al changed the meaning, mid-game, of "Triple A rating" for subprime bonds, etc, before 2008 they pulled exactly this sort of trick; thus fooling those who thought they could apply calculations of probability to a situation where probability didn't apply; since the only thing that mattered was some executive's guess about how likely it was that he would end up in jail for rigging the system. (Not at all likely, we know now!)

When I was young there were a lot of "nine out of ten doctors recommend our cigarettes" ads also based on the same trick, and it must have worked on a lot of people, 'cause it was very common.

As with the common misdescriptions of the Monty Hall Problem, it's possible the writer meant to describe a quite different problem, but as the problem is described here no probability can be inferred.

</comment><comment><USER21> Can Bayes's formula be applied usefully to controversial public arguments? For example (and here I'm attempting to choose a real example but also avoid a political discussion), if 900 out of 1000 people believe the OJ Simpson murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and 100 out of 1000 people believe he didn't, does this provide any useful information about the likelihood that Simpson murdered Nicole Brown?

This might be what the original question-poster was attempting to answer with his blue car question, using a cleaned-up example.

<comment><USER3> > if 900 out of 1000 people believe the OJ Simpson murdered Nicole Brown > Simpson and 100 out of 1000 people believe he didn't, does this provide any > useful information about the likelihood that Simpson murdered Nicole Brown?

Not in the same way. Note the key assumption in the accepted answer: a 10% false positive rate. That is, we assume (for good reason) that on average the population is fairly accurate at identifying and naming colors correctly.

The analogous assumption in the OJ example would be "given media-filtered information about an emotionally-charged murder trial, most people accurately assess guilt with 90% probability." This is clearly false.

But note that our entire criminal justice system _does_ assume that "given all the facts as presented by a prosecutor and defense attorney over the course of a trial, people instructed to vote 'not guilty' unless they are sure of guilt 'beyond a reasonable doubt' will have a very low false positive rate." And here the exponent is only 12.

<comment><USER22> That was not a key assumption. Changing it to a 49% false positive rate did not affect the result substantially.

<comment><USER3> Well, ok, fair enough, but I was using that number as an example. The point is you can look at the term (false positive)^900 and see that its tininess will dominate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The SE answer looks like it assumes that blue cars aren't "stupidly rare", but I don't see that reflected in any of the math.

Is there a word for that assumption in statistics? I'm guessing this is something that is so obvious to a statistician that they don't even think to include it. But without seeing the work the layperson is likely to throw up their arms and say, "Not enough information."

<comment><USER3> The assumption is worked in. He assumes a base rate of only 0.1% of all cars are blue, and then shows that even with this it is astronomically unlikely the car isn't blue. He could have explicitly calculated how low a base rate you'd need for, say, a 50% chance the car is blue, and that number would be astronomically small as well.

While working the numbers was needed for the SE answer, I actually think it obscures the intuition.

The high order bit here is that there's only a 10% chance of a false positive, and so you're raising 0.1 to the 900th power. Everything else is a second order term relative to that, and you can instantly see the answer will be "nearly certain".

<comment><USER11> The answer calculates a likelihood ratio of 10^763, so for a 50% chance you'd need a prior probability of less than 1/(10^763 - 1) ≈ 10^(-763), which would imply that there is most likely not a single blue car in the universe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Not really related to the article (well..perhaps it is..) but we recently acquired a Subaru that is officially "gray" but looks quite clearly blue most of the time. Strangely though it looks non-blue sometimes. My best theory is that it is reflecting the sky color. I've since come across other people who own the same color Subaru and report the same controversy over its color.

<comment><USER25> What is the official color? carbide gray?

<comment><USER24> Yep.

Tungsten Carbide is definitely silver, not blue, fwiw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Well, what is "blue"?

(900 of 1000 people say a person is funny. What is the probability the person is funny?)

<comment><USER19> Yeah, I think this question is underspecified. We're happily saying "not all judges are accurate, so use statistics to get an answer", but we aren't setting any actual boundary.

If only 600 people said the car was blue, I'd expect blue-green or blue-grey paint, and the answer to "is it blue?" would depend on who defined blue.

<comment><USER26> As far as I know, color is interpreted differently between cultures, so you'd have to know how the people define "blue" (which you touched on), or how many of them even speak a language that has a word for it.

A question like this has a lot of assumptions built into it. We prefer to ignore such messy details, and assume our own experience as universal, in pursuit of what we like to call "rationality".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> There is an issue with colour blind people but also with a few tones of "blue" (or "green").

I had this argument in real life, many years ago, about what is called "petrol blue" in some car offerings, in front of the same car, I saw it as blue, and a friend of mine saw it as green.

After long discussions, and having observed the car from all possible angles, taking into account the light, etc. we came to agree that it was BOTH blue and green.

Try yourself a range (roughly) between RGB 07636E and RGB 1D4D6E.

As an example here (set 22 steps):

[http://www.perbang.dk/rgbgradient/](http://www.perbang.dk/rgbgradient/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Off topic but this reminds me of the _New riddle of induction_ [1]. This is philosophical argument about predicates (i.e. properties that things have that are either true or false) and what it means to use induction to confirm such predicates. An example used in the paper is determining that all emeralds are green. It turns out to be quite a riddle.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction)

</comment><comment><USER29> The problem is much wider and is faced also by content creators (e.g. youtube): What is the probability that my videos are good based on the likes and dislikes I get?

<comment><USER30> Good is fairly subjective. Is coloration subjective?

I am no help. I am partially colorblind. I defer to others when it comes to colors.

<comment><USER31> Coloration is absolutely subjective, in that different people see colors differently, even without obvious vision problems like colorblindness.

My wife and I often argue about whether something is blue or green, or blue or purple. We're both rather good at discerning tiny changes in hue (I'm one of the few men that are gifted in this, I believe) but we're both certain of our answers.

<comment><USER30> I see some blues as black, or so I am told. I can't really tell, because it looks black to me. Assuming they are correct, I am objectively wrong. No?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Considering that in just about every poll I see, even if it's asking "should parents be legally allowed to barbecue their infant children on a spit and serve them for dinner?" there is invariably 10% who are "undecided", I'm going to go with an answer of "0.999999".

Though the top-voted answer does a better job of giving a reasonably sound defensible answer, we both come to the same conclusion.

<comment><USER33> I'm the jerkwad who always answers undecided, because invariably these multiple choice answers force you to choose between poorly-defined extremes.

This one is pretty clear, but I could see in some context in some (perhaps post apocalyptic) society where legally killing and eating your young is a morally justified position. It's certainly seen in the natural world with chimpanzees and many other creatures.

I didn't always do well academically because of this, but I like to think it might help me as a programmer?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> > You have a blue car (by some objective scientific measure - it is blue).

Makes all other facts irrelevant.

Now what if 900 out of 1000 say god exist. What is the probability that god exists ?

<comment><USER35> One high answer uses Bayes' formula and requires estimating probabilities like the probability that a random car is blue. ... Following the metaphor, you'd have to ... estimate the probability that god exists first in order to decide what the poll means about the probability that god exists.

Another answer comes with a disclaimer that the problem only works out in a straight-forward way if blue cars aren't a super-rare unbelievable occurrence. I don't think a poll about gods lends itself to an obvious answer similarly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The top answers are essentially well-thought-out probability arguments describing the Lizardman Constant [1]. Essentially, random humans who don't care very much about your survey are likely to respond in arbitrary or perverse ways, making them a very noisy data source. Small signals (e.g., 10% or less of a sample) are likely to be meaningless. Its nice to know that there's a solid argument that this doesn't compromise the validity of large signals, at least.

[1] Which for some reason doesn't have a Wikipedia page, even though it's a phrase that seems to turn up a lot in certain circles. I suppose the best reference is [http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results- and-...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and- reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/).</comment>


Ruslan Kogan: Improve your website - <AUTHOR> http://www.brw.com.au/Page/Uuid/bf5beb5e-b526-11e0-b28e-d5639ec9af02

<comment><USER2> This site has the weirdest anti-copy system I've ever see.

I noticed because I usualy browse with javascript disabled. Have a look at the source:

    	 .u972bf{position:relative;text-indent:-10000px;}.y34{position:relative;text-indent:-10000px;}.r834db{position:relative;text-indent:-10000px;}

And that's the mess behind the text:

to If ©afr.com I ©afr.com Based had ©afr.com  accustomed and  $1

Should this be an example of "how to improve a website"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, yeah maybe BRW should read their own articles :-P</comment></comment>


Network Boot to the Rescue, with UEFI and IPv6 - <AUTHOR> https://tech.showmax.com/2019/04/network-boot-to-the-rescue/ <comment><USER2> One point from me: UEFI 2.0+ can boot from server over _WAN_.

And if you are a lucky one with BIOS implementing the spec perfectly, it will pass on DHCP boot options on the command line to the kernel.

So yeah, you can boot over the internet these days!

<comment><USER3> You can pxe boot from the internet too, as long as you can control dhcp to send the next server, pxe is happy to tftp to that through the dhcp provided default route, and that should take you to the internet too (as long as any NAT there works fine for tftp)

<comment><USER2> In case of PXE, that's not given in 100%. Some IP stacks on option roms or bioses don't know of routing.

And EFI does HTTP(S), routing, DNS if the firmware is 100% standard compliant.

So far, it is the client command line that is bugged the most, so you can't reliably pass boot parameters to kernel

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> we use PXE in datacenter environment and in our Ceph based software defined storage solution called croit.io since years and we never ever had problems with that.

save yourself some lifetime and boot a pregenerated os over network, it's amazing

</comment><comment><USER5> ctrl-f ssl

ctrl-f tls

ctrl-f vpn

ctrl-f secur

All zeroes.

<comment><USER6> From the article:

 _HTTPS boot exists, but has gained limited support so far. Due to the lack of support for HTTPS boot in the UEFI versions used, we do not use this feature at all._

Still no better than what you're implying :(

<comment><USER7> However, once you're in iPXE, that has features for downloading images over HTTPS: [http://ipxe.org/crypto](http://ipxe.org/crypto)

(plus it's probably easier to upgrade than your motherboard's network boot implementation).</comment></comment></comment>


Calico, Google's Anti-Aging Company, Announces New Research Facility - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/googles-anti-aging-company-announces-new-research-facility/?ref=technology <comment><USER2> This is another point of reinforcement for my view that this effort is going to look much like a mix of the Ellison Medical Foundation plus Sirtris: vastly expensive and with little other than knowledge to show for it once investors give up, because the researchers are from the outset trying to do something that is very hard, and which even if achieved will produce only small benefits. (Which is to say carry on trying to make drug candidates like Rapamycin do something useful enough to become a clinical treatment, bashing the square pegs at hand into the circular holes of regulation and clinical benefit).

"The AbbVie partnership seemingly makes it clear that Calico will be a drug discovery and development company, which is what many observers expected based on Mr. Levinson's background in drug development."

In the best scenario, five years of this will raise the water level enough for more meaningful approaches than calorie restriction mimetics, autophagy inducers, and other attempts at slow-aging drugs that have consumed billions to date with nothing to show for it, to raise significant funds themselves. In the worst scenario, it burns investors for a decade on the whole topic.

It is a real time of choice and opportunity at the present. The lumbering monolith of mainstream research can continue to pursue things like Human Longevity Inc and rapamycin derivatives that are probably going to be profitable yet achieve next to no useful gain of human life span (because again they are doing hard things that can only achieve small benefits at best) or, hopefully, some form of disruption for a better path will overtake enough of the community to make a difference.

It is clear that far from everyone in the research community thinks that old school drug discovery, farming the natural world to take potshots at restructuring metabolism so as to work slightly better when damaged by age (without in any way fixing the underlying damage!) is the smart way forward. There is SENS, there are the European researchers behind the Hallmarks of Aging manifesto, there are some of the Russian contingent with novel ideas. The near future doesn't have to be an enormous waste of time and money that will go nowhere but to generate voluminous databases, entirely bypassing any realistic opportunity for achieving actual rejuvenation and repair of the causes of aging. But I fear that it will, based on what we're seeing the big money do.

<comment><USER3> Don't forget Telomerase-restoration and protection factors. And don't underestimate the reverse-correlation of nutrition and mortality age. It's definitely statistically significant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This sounds like emperor Chin's quest for immortality to me, e.g. pure hubris ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Shi_Huang#Elixir_of_Life](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Shi_Huang#Elixir_of_Life)). I'm really not looking forward to a world where a few rich and powerful old geezers are cementing their power through being virtually immortal (think of a mix of Kim Jon-un or Fidel Castro, but in a corporate setting like the russian oligarchs). The youth and new ideas will be subtly supressed by the 'better arguments and wisdom' of the elder. It would make a good dystopian science- fiction book though ;)

<comment><USER5> One man's hubris is another's refusal to keep being bullied by nature. I don't see anything bad with wanting to live longer. I don't see anything bad with fighting the "natural state of things" to achieve it. It's sad that throughout history, most humans are just willing to lie down and die.

Preventing it from turning into dystopia is another matter though, well worth of discussing.

<comment><USER4> Well to be a bit more clear: Enabling everyone to reach an old age by fighting diseases is an honorable and good goal (as long as this is available to everybody and not just those few with deep pockets). But on the other hand, I'm sure that death serves a goal as well. It is not a "problem", but very likely a solution to evolve the species. We should first aim for our 'granted' 120 years life span. I think if we are a very long living species, we will also become a very slowly evolving, very conservative species. I'm also afraid that we cannot know the longterm consequences (sort of like the Soviet project to irrigate the Karakum desert, which resulted in the death of Lake Aral half a century later).

<comment><USER5> > _Well to be a bit more clear: Enabling everyone to reach an old age by > fighting diseases is an honorable and good goal (as long as this is > available to everybody and not just those few with deep pockets)._

We might need to settle for a middle ground. Like for many other advances we had, we need rich to bankroll the R&D that will later lead to technology being available for rest. How to prevent it from turning into dystopia is another discussion.

> _But on the other hand, I 'm sure that death serves a goal as well. It is > not a "problem", but very likely a solution to evolve the species._

It might serve a goal, but this is not _our_ goal. Evolution may "value" inclusive fitness and death is its engine, but _humans_ do not care about passing genes, they care about love, fun, intellectual growth, a good life. The process of evolution is not something we value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In case some people are on the fence about the whole idea or have questions:

The Anti-Deathist FAQ: [http://carcinisation.com/2014/07/13/an-anti-deathist- f-a-q/](http://carcinisation.com/2014/07/13/an-anti-deathist-f-a-q/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Calico has done a good job of keeping out of the press, so I'm happy to see more details. I'm somewhat surprised by the partnership with Abbvie, who is widely known as an "old school pharma company", not exactly a bastion of innovative thinking and risk taking.

Also, the focus on age-related diseases is an interesting one. Originally Calico was sold as a "fighting old age" company. That's vastly different than "fighting diseases associated with old age". At the same time, targeting age- related diseases is much easier than fighting aging itself.

<comment><USER8> > Originally Calico was sold as a "fighting old age" company. That's vastly > different than "fighting diseases associated with old age".

The difference isn't really clear to me. Could you elaborate?

<comment><USER7> I guess I think of it this way:

"fighting old age" \- attempting to stop the aging process itself (i.e. longevity)

"fighting old age diseases" \- looking to cure diseases _associated_ with old age (i.e. treating a specific condition)

In the second example you could be treating a disease, but not having any impact on the aging process itself.

<comment><USER5> We need both. We already live long enough to see that if you clocked too many years, either your heart will shut down or you will get cancer and die anyway.

The ability to stop aging process might still end up somewhat limited by cancer, so both goals seem to be tightly connected.

<comment><USER9> But is cancer as inexorable as aging? Nobody is going to live past 100 due to cellular degradation. What is the actual mortality from cancer?

I read once that if we didn't get old, death due to accidents would make the mean lifetime 800 years. I wonder what cancer does to that figure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> this is exactly the plot for an action movie. big-rich guy, funds anti aging company in order to be inmortal...

anyway. nice work google

<comment><USER5> Wait for his TED2023 talk ;).

( [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2BxH- xwc9M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2BxH-xwc9M) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Right, where can I invest?

</comment><comment><USER12> where the first wave of zombies will eventually crawl out. JK :)

</comment><comment><USER13> The largest impact in the history of humankind will be made by those companies that work to extend human lifespan. Good to see how this whole race to increase lifespan can change Silicon Valley, moving it once again toward true innovation, truly changing the world, while other companies like Craig Ventor's [http://humanlongevity.com](http://humanlongevity.com) [http://genopharmix.com](http://genopharmix.com) [http://www.sens.org](http://www.sens.org) and [http://buckinstitute.org](http://buckinstitute.org) come into to play.

<comment><USER14> "The largest impact in the history of humankind will be made by those companies that work to extend human lifespan."

True but I feel for the wrong reasons. To my mind, the single greatest challenge our species has faced in our brief history on this planet is how we minimize our impact on the finite resources available to us.

Researchers recently reexamined the predictions made in the 1970's book [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth) and found the models are holding true.

The elephant in the room is how do we curb population growth in a meaningful and humane way. What's the point of extending life if there's a diminishing return experientially?

<comment><USER15> Why not just get off the planet? The resources available above our heads are vast.

<comment><USER16> What resources? There's not much useful water out there, let alone breathable air, carbon, organic matter, living things, ecosystems. All of those crucial resources are here.

Besides, if we don't get things straight on this planet, we'll never be able to survive long enough to find another one.

<comment><USER15> _What resources?_

[http://www.planetaryresources.com/asteroids/composition/](http://www.planetaryresources.com/asteroids/composition/)

 _Besides, if we don 't get things straight on this planet, we'll never be able to survive long enough to find another one._

Survival is an argument for getting a lot of people living off planet, not an argument for not doing so. We can try and create utopias as much as we like, but that is not going to help very much when we get hit by a big rock.

Also, personally I suspect that the real advance is not going to be in settling other planets, but building habitats out of asteroids.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Will OpenCL help displace GPGPU? - <AUTHOR> http://www.yosefk.com/blog/will-opencl-help-displace-gpgpu-parallella-p2012.html

<comment><USER2> Very eloquent and insightful post by yosefk. Maybe I shouldn't admit this(as a founder of Adapteva) but I actually learned something very important from his post.:-)

Here's another sharp post by Greg Pfister that also talks about the importance of timing of accelerators.

[http://perilsofparallel.blogspot.com/2009/07/why- accelerator...](http://perilsofparallel.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-accelerators- now.html)

Here are my BIG unknowns for the next 5 years: -What road-bumps will there be down to 10nm? -Will the industry rally around OpenCL or will there be 10 different frameworks? -How successful will Intel/ARM be in building up fences to keep accelerator companies out of their back yards.</comment>


Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year? (2019) - <AUTHOR> Last year toward the end of 2018 there was an awesome thread asking this same question.  I personally found it very valuable, but have not seen one so far for 2019.  I thought I'd get it started!<p>What were the best books you read this year?  Preference to books released this year, but if an older book changed you for the better by all means please include it! <comment><USER2> Related

"Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21900498](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21900498)

"Ask HN: Favorite Nonfiction Books of 2019?" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21792158](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21792158)

"Ask HN: What book(s) had the most impact for you in 2019?" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21677320](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21677320)

"Ask HN: Books You Read in 2019?" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21799531](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21799531)

"Ask HN: What were the best science fiction books that you read in 2019?" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21925100](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21925100)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice, thanks. This list probably covers it all!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well, first things first, here's the list of what I read (well, everything I _finished_ ) in 2019.

[https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/33942804-phillip- rhode...](https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/33942804-phillip- rhodes?read_at=2019)

Out of those, which ones would I pick as "the best"? Hmm... I guess I'd single out the following for mention:

Non-fiction:

 _A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science_ \- Barbara Oakley

 _On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft_ \- Stephen King

 _CustomerCentric Selling_ \- Michael Bosworth

 _The Prime Solution: Close the Value Gap, Increase Margins, and Win the Complex Sale_ \- Jeff Thull

 _The Man Who Tamed Lightning_ \- Floyd Miller

 _Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid_ \- Douglas Hofstadter

 _Mastering the Complex Sale: How to Compete and Win When the Stakes Are High!_ \- Jeff Thull

Fiction:

 _Zero Sum Game_ \- S.L. Huang

 _The Institute_ \- Stephen King

 _The Night Window_ \- Dean Koontz

 _Blue Moon_ \- Lee Child

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the list! Several of those look incredibly interesting. Do you tend to prefer fiction or nonfiction more?

<comment><USER3> _Do you tend to prefer fiction or nonfiction more?_

That's a tough question. I hate to sound like I'm dodging the issue, but I'd say it's pretty close to 50/50\. But if you put a gun to my head and made me pick, I guess I'd say that I have a very slight preference for reading non- fiction.</comment></comment></comment>


Julia 0.3 Official Release - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/NEWS.md#julia-v030-release-notes

<comment><USER2> Release announcement: [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/julia- users/N-__nw3Wd04/961T...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/julia- users/N-__nw3Wd04/961TS3wWjf4J)

Downloads: [http://julialang.org/downloads/](http://julialang.org/downloads/)

Here are some of the biggest user-facing changes in 0.3:

      - cached system image for fast startup
      - pure-Julia REPL, replacing readline and providing more
        functionality
      - `workspace()` function to clear environment without
        restarting
      - tab substitution of Latex characters (supported in REPL,
        IJulia, and more)
      - expanded Latex operators; Unicode normalization
        (and many more Unicode-related improvements)
      - improved sparse matrix support, expanded LAPACK interfaces,
        and many other improvements or expansions to numerical
        functionality
      - shared memory support (note: no multi-threading yet, but
        significant work has been done in that direction this
        summer)
      - local goto and label
      - significantly improved hashing and floating point range
        support.
      - improved tuple performance

</comment><comment><USER3> Warning: It appears the src tarball extracts into your current dir, not an (eg) ./julia subdirectory.

<comment><USER2> Should be fixed. Thanks for the report.</comment></comment>


Things to learn in React before using Redux - <AUTHOR> https://www.robinwieruch.de/learn-react-before-using-redux/ <comment><USER3> My first project with React was a mess, mostly because of Redux. Not because it's bad, but because the lead dev was adamant about using something Flux like. First we had Flummox, than he rewrote everything in a week with Redux, that was 2 years ago, before Redux had sane async helpers.

In my current project (where I'm the lead, haha) I'm trying to got state/props all the way.

I think for most apps it's more than enough AND it's easier to get started for new devs.

React is really easy. I mean coming from Ember and ExtJS, its API is a walk in the park and you can get really far without extra state management.

One thing that is important for this approach, minimize nesting.

You don't want to pass down everything from the app, to the screen, to the list, to the item. etc.

Instead of doing:

        <List items={items} />

do it like that

        <List>
          {items.map(i => <Item item={i}/>)}
        </List>

No nesting of screens (top-level components), no (hidden) nesting of components. This may seem kinda strange, because the first example has no dependency to the Item component, but it gives the component that uses the List direct access, which simplifies props-passing immensely.

This doesn't work for all apps, but it's a good starting point.

I ended up with 2 folders, screens and components, that are both simply flat lists of component files.

<comment><USER4> Also, when you do use Redux, as in your nesting example don't pass props through components that don't have any need for them except they propagate the prop to someone else. It's absolutely fine to connect() a component deeper in the hierarchy. Passing everything down is an anti-pattern with Redux, separation of concerns still applies and the props of a component defines the API, don't clutter that API with unrelated things.

Components only receiving props that they themselves need has kept things clean in our massive codebase, and allows you to effortlessly move things about and easily re-use components wherever it makes sense.

<comment><USER5> I don't agree with the view that a component doesn't need a prop "itself" if it "only" passes it on to a child component. That child component is a part of the parent. If one decided that e.g. the child is too simple to warrant to be its own component and inlined its render() content in the parent instead, suddenly its used props would be needed by the parent "itself".

Another thing to consider is that one tightly couples components to stores when connecting. So reusability of these components is hampered.

<comment><USER6> If was my understanding that if a component has a prop which changes, even if that prop is passed down the tree, the component will still update.

This is one way I use redux, the connector watches for changes in state and then updates the component directly, rather than passing props down the tree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd rather use Redux without React than React without Redux. Sure there's some boilerplate but we use typescript so the redux boilerplate seems trivial in comparison.

Redux keeps your app _simple_. That's not the same as easy. It means that you can reason about your app as it grows and new features are added. When you run into problems like: this page is taking too long to load because we do calculations x, y and z on the server to push the data to the app. But z takes forever to compute and makes the initial page load painful. With Redux, you can move z to an async endpoint and just load x and y on page load (put the component that needs z in a loading state). Then, fire an ajax request when the component mounts to get z. When that call returns, it updates your store and the component that needs z transitions from loading to loaded.

I took me a couple of hours to do the above in a Redux app and decrease the page load from 2 seconds to 300ms. And it didn't add complexity to the app that would make it difficult to maintain. I don't even want to think how long that refactor would take if the state had been managed with React.

And ... don't even get me started on how easy -- and fast -- it is to test a Redux app. Zero side-effects means zero setup and teardown between specs.

</comment><comment><USER8> The rush to use Redux for every React project is one of the most annoying parts of the React community; using a tool just to use it, before understanding if you need it or not. This article summarizes a lot of good points.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. Until recently, my team was responsible for most of the official IBM Watson service demos, and we standardized on React for those and built up a nice library of react components[1]. None of them used Redux, though, because in general it just wasn't needed.

When we handed off responsibility of these demos to the individual service teams, we wrote up guidelines that specifically recommended React but not Redux - with the logic that if the demo is getting to a point where Redux is providing value, then it's probably too complex for a demo.

Our new project is a more involved web app that includes lots of state, shared across many different components, and we're making great use of Redux there.

[1]: [https://watson-developer-cloud.github.io/react- components/](https://watson-developer-cloud.github.io/react-components/)

<comment><USER10> One of the things I find hardest with redux is to make reusable components (across projects), as they have to be added to the state tree somewhere, and then connected. With nested components you may get implicit dependencies on where in the tree it should be. All this makes it very cumbersome.

So even though most of our apps use Redux, the reusable parts use setState as they then can be completely independent.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, that is a tradeoff - globalized state makes a lot of scenarios easier, but does make complete encapsulation and reusability harder.

Most of the third-party "Redux-connected component" libs I've seen provide a reducer that they expect to be added to the root of the state tree under a specific key name. Works, but it's not ideal. I've seen a few that let you provide a selector or key name when you initialize the library, so that the library is more flexible in how it's connected.

There's been a lot of discussion of various approaches for implementing fully encapsulated/reusable Redux-based React components in Sebastian Lorber's "Scalable Frontend with Elm or Redux" repo [0], and my links list has a section of additional articles on the topic of encapsulation with Redux [1]. My Redux addons catalog also has a large section for libraries that implement some form of per-component state or component encapsulation in Redux as well [2].

So, it's not impossible, but it does take work and there are tradeoffs either way.

[0] [https://github.com/slorber/scalable-frontend-with-elm-or- red...](https://github.com/slorber/scalable-frontend-with-elm-or-redux)

[1] [https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux- links/blob/master...](https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux- links/blob/master/redux-architecture.md#encapsulation-and-reusability)

[2] [https://github.com/markerikson/redux-ecosystem- links/blob/ma...](https://github.com/markerikson/redux-ecosystem- links/blob/master/component-state.md)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As usual, this is an excellent article by Robin. Well-written, and full of great information.

It's worth noting that both the React and Redux teams (including Dan Abramov and myself) agree that you should focus on learning React first, and _then_ learn Redux. That way there's fewer new concepts and terms to learn at once, and once you understand React, you'll have a better appreciation for what kinds of problems Redux can help solve. That's not to say you _can't_ learn them both at once, just that it's the suggested approach that will work best for most people.

</comment><comment><USER12> As a general rule do not use `this.react` inside `setState({ ... })` - <USER2> will cause you problems eventually due state updates being async.

If you need to use state to set new state, use functional callback instead - [https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/react- component.html#s...](https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/react- component.html#setstate)

</comment><comment><USER13> Worth a read. It summarizes in one place much of what I learned bit by bit from various other articles.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wish React would come with a standard way to handle Ajax (or a convention or semi-standard library would emerge). _(Edit: "comes along" in the sense that immutability-helpers, redux and create-react-app come along with react. I'm not proposing to add anything to the react module. I'm not the world's best expert on react, but before downvoting can you please assume I know a little bit of what I'm talking about?)_

Something that:

\- Can fetch JSON according to criteria from an API

\- Caches stuff locally (just in memory, or in local storage) in case of duplicate calls

\- Deals with multiple concurrent calls, and merge them (e.g. fetching 1 and then 2,3,4 before 1 finishes -> either cancel 1, or wait until it finishes, and then fetch only the last requested item.

\- And all the stuff I can't think about right now, like cancellation and timeouts

Plug your pure component into one of these, tell it about your API, and you're done. It's really error prone to write these containers yourself. And I think Redux doesn't really help much with Ajax.

<comment><USER15> This is one thing I miss about Ember. We recently moved to React and I'm really starting to miss Ember Data (even though it can be very picky).

<comment><USER16> I haven't used Ember Data much. I'd be curious how you think it could apply or could be ported to React. Maybe you'd have time to write up a short gist of what you wish you could write in React?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> IMHO Redux is a heavy, clunky and awkward practice that is only holding React back.

My advice to anyone reading this forum is give MobX a try before deciding to commit to Redux.

<comment><USER18> Don't kid yourself, MobX comes with it's own baggage. Both are great libraries, both have advantages, both have drawbacks.

<comment><USER19> What are the downsides of MobX that you've come across? The main ones I've encountered are not being sure why something isn't reacting (always my fault but not always that easy to track down), odd interop issues with observables actually being "proxy" objects (e.g. useless console.log unless you call toJS), I guess no middleware-type concept or Saga type side effect management (never really used middleware in Redux and disliked all the ceremony around side effects)... that's all I can think of right now but curious to know others experiences.

I honestly can't imagine any reason I'd go back to Redux aside from if it was used on a project I was working on though. I can develop so much faster and with fewer bugs (as typechecking MobX code thoroughly is much easier than Redux with Typescript) that there's no comparison, and like the OP, I think everyone should try it out - you'll almost definitely be pleasantly surprised!

<comment><USER20> I've been working with it recently. The lack of prescriptiveness is an issue generally. No different from not having a library, but it's worth considering.

The library itself works really well. Use strict mode and everything is super fast and reliable.

Today we've been evaluating mobx-state-tree. It has some noise (not as bad as redux). It's opinionated which helps to remove architecture decisions. So far it looks promising.

<comment><USER18> I think this is why the MobX fanboyism irks me so much. It's a great little library but it does not solve the problems I have. I want to enforce the smart/dumb paradigm, I want to be able to quickly grok app state and monitor updates, I want nice dev tools, I want the data to be separated from components to the highest degree possible, I want to persist/restore complex app state. All of these are fundamental talking points for Redux and largely unnacounted for by MobX.

If all you switched to MobX just to avoid the boilerplate you didn't need Redux in the first place.

<comment><USER20> Well, the main reason for using these libraries is to automatically drive react. You want it to be easy to change your state and have that mirrored in the interface.

Mobx helps with much of what you've asked for above. Mobx-state-tree will give you even more from that list. Personally I think the persist/restore goal (and time travelling) is overrated (though mobx-state-tree will give you those).

<comment><USER18> It does not give you more from that list. MobX is, by design, non-prescriptive about who's touching your stores, how they're being passed around, how they're being updated, or how the API of your store looks. It's all fine if you have one or two developers but is a dangerous thing for large teams.

Have you used Redux's devtools? I wouldn't give those up for anything. Not sure if MobX has anything comparable.

<comment><USER20> I have used them, yeah. Mobx-state-tree (MST) can be wired directly to the redux dectools.

The strict mode in mobx ensures that stores can only be updated via actions, so you can restrict updates from that point of view.

On the flip side - mobx makes it dead easy to minimise your core state and transform it efficiently (and declaratively) for use in the front end (or wherever). I'm told reselect helps that use case now, but you'd be hard pressed to do a better job than mobx in that regard.

Personally, I found that my code was too obscure with redux. In implementing our login flow (it has more paths than most), I found that it was hard to see the real code between the architecture.

As ever, it's important to evaluate these tools critically to see where the fall down (which is what I've been doing with MST today). Too often people evangelise their product of choice while hiding the areas in which it's weak.

And to play devils advocate, redux will have you push a lot of code into middleware where people are left to do all sorts of crazy - it's not all the rosy enlightened path :-)

One of the things that pulled me to MST was that I couldn't see a simple way of managing cross-cutting concerns with my mobx architecture. MST (and redux) make that dead simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> People should learn eventEmitter or PubSub before learn redux

<comment><USER22> Why?

<comment><USER21> Redux is too complex and too many line of code. Most of activity why need redux are async fetch and eventEmitter notification. My advice is try eventEmitter first. If u need more, than jump to redux or mobx. The main reason use redux is if u need time travel

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't understand why anyone would use React at all with the ridiculous license.

<comment><USER24> Well, there are many reasons to use React (the large ecosystem means you can find libraries and tutorials easily, for example) but yes, the license is a deal breaker for many, especially larger companies with legal teams who actually understand the ramifications.

<comment><USER25> Microsoft has no problem using React -- what are the ramifications?

<comment><USER26> Doesn't Netflix as well?

<comment><USER27> Yep, and Palantir also. I wish my company would be more open to using it, but the patent issue makes it a non-starter for us.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Heron Donated to Apache Software Foundation - <AUTHOR> https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-source/2018/heron-donated-to-apache-software-foundation.html <comment><USER2> > Today, we are proud to donate Heron to the Apache Incubator where the > community will continue to grow and thrive under the guidance of the Apache > Software Foundation

Why do I keep reading this as "Today, we are proud to donate Mittens the cat to the local animal shelter where the kitty will continue to grow and thrive under the guidance of the SPCA."

<comment><USER3> When I was doing a lot of ASF administration (Board, VP Incubator, VP Legal), I was always keenly aware that the core personnel on the projects coming to the ASF were sensationally brilliant engineers and charismatic thinkers. The idea of "guiding" such people like cats... is just way weird.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Given the perception (fair or not) that the ASF is the place that large projects go to die, I'd like to know why this donation is a good fit for the ASF and what resources are in place to help it flourish there.

<comment><USER5> If potential users are running on Mesos, streaming data from Kafka and writing results to HDFS, they're presumably not that worried about relying on Apache Foundation managed software.

Not to say that this project won't die - most projects do, but I think the "where projects go do die" stereotype is unhelpful. ASF is probably the best chance a project has to move beyond the control of a single company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My company is considering "upgrading" our Storm topologies to Heron. Given that Storm is Heron's predecessor, and Storm itself is maintained by the ASF, I wonder what this donation means for Heron.

p.s. does anybody have experience with Dhalion, Heron's autoscaling thing (is it a module? or a plugin, idk). All I could find on it was a research paper and a barren github repository; how do you use this thing?

<comment><USER7> Great! Thanks for the questions. The Dhalion repo ([https://github.com/Microsoft/Dhalion](https://github.com/Microsoft/Dhalion)) contains only the general Dhalion APIs. These are not Heron specific, that's why they are not part of Heron. In Heron, the healthmgr module essentially integrates these Dhalion APIs with Heron. Currently, Heron contains two Dhalion policies. The first one automatically restarts instances that exhibit backpressure. The second one scales up or restarts instances depending on some topology characteristics. Please join slack and we can show you how to use/modify the appropriate Heron yaml files so that you can use Dhalion. Dhalion does not require a separate installation -- it is already integrated with Heron and just needs to be configured depending on your use case. We are currently working on more aggressive autoscaling policies which should be part of the code base soon. Please let us know if you have other questions.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the reply!

For us, the ability to self-tune is one of Heron's most attractive features. Tuning components/executors in Storm was a big pain point. Have you guys ever tried using the Dhalion autoscaling combined with hardware autoscaling from a cloud provider (i.e. Azure, AWS EC2)?

<comment><USER7> No, we have not used auto-scaling with automatic hardware provisioning. We assume that the hardware is there and we just request more containers (e.g, YARN containers). Theoretically, it should be possible to do that if the autoscaling policy is extended to request for additional hardware before changing the parallelism of a stage. But this functionality is not currently there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> RIP Heron (;,;)</comment>


Candy Crush creator KING IPO valued at 7.5B USD - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/12/us-king-ipo-idUSBREA2B0KP20140312

<comment><USER2> Crazy. Just crazy. For reference, Electronic Arts marketcap = 9.27B.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This valuation is basically all from one game.</comment>


Seattle's Painful Lesson on the Road to a $15 Minimum Wage - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-26/seattle-s-painful-lesson-on-the-road-to-a-15-minimum-wage <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14637873](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14637873)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14642828](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14642828)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14645866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14645866)

</comment><comment><USER3> The State of Victoria (Australia) had a $14.50 minimum wage when I lived there, and most baristas and servers I knew wouldn't take jobs that paid less than $20. It's important to note that's the entire wage as AU doesn't really have a tipping culture. Melbourne has been voted 'most livable' city multiple times.

Seattle's situation is much more complex. Condos are going up and ST3 is funded, but the city needed that rail system a decade ago. The biggest problem in Seattle, as is the Bay Area, is growing income inequality.

When the fishing industry grew in Seattle, so did local shops, bars, hotels and all the other industry that gets paid various wages across the board to support each other. Seattle is a tech capital, and those jobs are very high demand. People in tech often get paid more than lawyers and even doctors.

I remember a lawyer telling me very few of the police he's met live anywhere near the areas they work in. People who bought houses decades ago for $150k are watching their neighbours take buyouts and leave, selling their places for $800 to over a million.

The disproportionate amount of income given to those in high demand fields hurts everyone else across the board. Seattle is building a lot more housing, unlike the bay area, but there is still a considerable amount of single occupancy housing in the city that's empty simply because the owners won't sell it or bring it up to code.

It's more than just minimum wage. There are a lot of complexities in that city where you can't just focus on a couple of numbers.

</comment><comment><USER4> The push for a national $15 minimum wage is so unhinged from reality, yet so politically popular, that it's terrifying. People living in coastal America just don't realize that they'd essentially be banning work in large swaths of the country. An hour of work simply isn't worth $15 in many places. Those places also have very low costs of living.

If a $15 minimum wage was imposed nationally, these communities would collapse and you'd simply have millions of additions to the ranks of urban poverty.

<comment><USER5> That's a very convincing argument but do you have any evidence to back up those claims?

<comment><USER4> Just my own experience traveling through America. Go to a small mountain town and look at the prices in the restaurants and supermarkets, and the local real estate. There's no way that enough money is flowing to pay everyone $15/hour, nor do you need that much to live there.

I do wish I had something more rigorous to give you. I am pretty sure I am not the first to make this argument though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This study is really, really, really bad. Here's an analysis:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/06/27/seattles- higher-minimum-wage-is-actually-working-just-fine/)

<comment><USER7> Ben Spielberg, a Teach For America alum and former member of the Executive Board of the San Jose Teachers Association, works on issues related to inequality, economic opportunity, and full employment with Jared Bernstein at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

So he's not an economist, not a statistician and is a political activist having an agenda that this study seems to undermine. I don't have enough knowledge in statistics and econometrics to know which team did better job - Berkeley or UW - but if I had to choose, I would certainly not make the choice based on a word of a political activist without relevant background.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Genuinely curious: if employers are simply cutting back hours to save paying the extra wages, what's happening with those hours that aren't staffed anymore?

One possibility is that the businesses were already overpaying for labor by staffing more employees for more hours than were needed. But that just turns a minimum-wage hike into a convenient excuse to roll back hours/staff (much as economic downturns tend to be used as a cover for companies to lay off people they no longer needed anyway).

Another possibility is that more hours are being assigned to salaried employees since it doesn't cost extra to have them work more. But that would actually be a _good_ thing -- it would increase the demand for salaried full- time employees, and being a salaried full-time employee is much better than being a minimum-wage hourly employee.

Another possibility is that businesses are just closing down more often rather than pay people to keep things operating. But that seems unlikely.

So what's actually happening?

<comment><USER9> It's a pricing system. When prices go up, you only pay it if you really need it. How much are you willing to pay for having someone washing your dishes at home?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Economists have been warning this for more than decades[1]. There are extensive studies about it. There are even former Marxists who talked about it, like Thomas Sowell[2]:

>Sowell has said that he was a Marxist "during the decade of my 20s"; one of his earliest professional publications was a sympathetic examination of Marxist thought vs. Marxist–Leninist practice. His experience working as a federal government intern during the summer of 1960 caused him to reject Marxian economics in favor of free market economic theory. During his work, Sowell discovered an association between the rise of mandated minimum wages for workers in the sugar industry of Puerto Rico and the rise of unemployment in that industry. Studying the patterns led Sowell to theorize that the government employees who administered the minimum wage law cared more about their own jobs than the plight of the poor.

Why do almost everybody think they can go against the laws of economy?

[1] 50 Years of Research on the Minimum Wage: [https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/c876c468-ffca...](https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/c876c468-ffca-47ed-9468-7193d734bde9/50-years- of-research-on-the-minimum-wage---february-15-1995.pdf)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell#Education_and_ca...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell#Education_and_career)

<comment><USER10> Minimum wage isn't really Marxist afaik, and people go against 'laws' of economy because they aren't laws in the same sense that say, thermodynamics or gravity seem to be. We have trends that arise out of messy and massively complex systems, and people feel free to believe that whatever variables were at play in some other situation aren't in theirs.

Edit: This is aside from any opinion about how good or bad the content of the article is, just pointing out why I think people are increasingly okay with ignoring economists' opinions.

<comment><USER9> >Minimum wage isn't really Marxist afaik

That's correct, but current Marxists or people who claim to be left-wing always make it a top priority issue to increment the minimum wage.

<comment><USER5> I don't really understand why capitalists think they can continue to pay people the same amount in the context of increased efficiency. Profits are higher than ever but the public doesn't see a dime of it. Surely it will have negative impacts on consumption down the road.

<comment><USER9> Higher profits aren't a bad thing. Higher profits mean higher taxes paid, higher profits also mean more money put into work (personal investments or by third parties, i.e. put in a bank and the bank makes their own investments or loans it). Higher profits means wealth is being generated. Contrary to popular belief, minimum wage does not distribute wealth, but rather excludes those who have less, therefore helps accumulating wealth.

Minimum wage jobs aren't meant to be a job for life. It's an entry level job. If you want higher paid jobs, you need to earn it. Minimum wage increase causes unemployment, you end helping a few at the expense of others who happen to need help the most.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Every prediction of doom from minimum wage hikes has failed to come to pass [1], yet the anti-minimum wage dead-enders advance ever more tendentious, hair-splitting and arcane justifications for why minimum wage increases are "bad news."

A policy that has the effect of transitioning the economy from low-skill low- wage jobs to more high-skill high-wage ones ought to be celebrated among human beings as a victory. It provides an incentive for workers to improve their skills to compete more effectively and meaningfully increase their income.

Only those who outright prefer a serf economy can describe this study as a negative for Seattle.

[1] [https://civicskunk.works/moving-the-goalposts-on-seattles- mi...](https://civicskunk.works/moving-the-goalposts-on-seattles-minimum- wage-43261b19ee63)

</comment><comment><USER12> Hmm they want me to pay to read the paper. But I have many questions, e.g. how do they know this wouldn't have happened anyway. Was there an increase in the number of worked hours being classified as non low wage, and is that why less hours worked were classified low wage, etc.

But ultimately minimum wage laws are based more on ethics than anything. I've not heard of any business going out of business because of this in Seattle. I doubt there are any. This city is ridiculously expensive to live in. I want the people serving me food, etc. to be able to afford to live here. $15 per hour doesn't go far enough, but in lieu of something more dramatic it's the least we can do.

<comment><USER13> [https://evans.uw.edu/sites/default/files/NBER%20Working%20Pa...](https://evans.uw.edu/sites/default/files/NBER%20Working%20Paper.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If I were an employer hiring minimum wage workers in Seattle, I'd be looking to dump my employees worth $10/hr and hire some worth $15.

Assuming my ability to raise prices is capped due to out of city competition, then my only choice is to do more with less, which means hiring more productive workers.

To me, that means hiring better people. People who don't need training, can multi-task, who can deal with having more work than time.

So, sorry kid looking for your first job, I just hired someone from outside the city who was making $15 an hour because they where worth it. I can't afford to train you anymore.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is another dupe of the discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14637873](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14637873)

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting, perhaps not too surprising with some lines of work.

I'd be interested to know how it has impacted broader economic activity in the region.

<comment><USER17> To me the more interesting questions are around other workers and buying power. Does this devalue wages of the $20/hour EMT that went to a technical school for 2 years? Have prices gone up in relation to this wage increase or are businesses just cutting hours (service levels) to compensate? If prices are rising because of this, does this decrease the buying power of these minimum wage workers since they are likely to shop and patron many business that also employ these minimum wage workers?

<comment><USER16> It's also challenging to consider because housing inflation in Seattle (and the west coast in general) has gone absolutely haywire for years now, often 20% a year or more in some cases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Will this put even a slight dent in the zeal of the $15 minimum wage folks? Their platform was not based on any kind of economic analysis to begin with, so I suspect that additional data in that field will not affect their desire to see this pushed through.

<comment><USER19> It won't put a dent in mine. I live in Seattle, I'm seeing the effects of economic growth here, and getting to a minimum wage that's inflation-adjusted still makes a ton of sense.

From [1]: "Our results show that wages in food services did increase—indicating the policy achieved its goal — and our estimates of the wage increases are in line with the lion's share of results in previous credible minimum wage studies. Wages increased much less among full-service restaurants, indicating that employers made use of the tip credit component of the law. Employment in food service, however, was not affected, even among the limited-service restaurants, many of them franchisees, for whom the policy was most binding. These findings extend our knowledge of minimum wage effects to policies as high as $13."

[1] [http://irle.berkeley.edu/files/2017/Seattles-Minimum-Wage- Ex...](http://irle.berkeley.edu/files/2017/Seattles-Minimum-Wage- Experiences-2015-16.pdf)</comment></comment>


PHP, Python and Google Go Fail to Detect Revoked TLS Certificates - <AUTHOR> https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/04/01/0121226/php-python-and-google-go-fail-to-detect-revoked-tls-certificates <comment><USER2> Of interest, for sure, but that should be " _default libraries_ used by X, Y, Z" fail to detect revoked certificates, right? Being that's not something a generic programming language should take an interest in.</comment>


YC S20 Remote Batch - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-s20-remote-batch/ <comment><USER2> I think people will be surprised how well this works.

There are a lot of great startups that will be born in these times. Many of them will be "remote native" \-- operated remotely, remote YC, and potentially tackling problems that have arisen due to the remote world we're living in.

After this crisis is over, some things will go back to normal, but a lot of the changes will endure to varying degrees.

I think people are used to the power of in-person connection and physical reality, and most of us are craving it. But an incredible amount can happen in digital reality, and we are only just beginning to scratch that surface.

At _minimum_ it is an interesting and necessary experiment.

<comment><USER3> I'm watching it all with some amusement. I've worked remote my whole career, first because it was the only option where I lived, and then later by choice after I returned to the developed world.

I'm trying to start a company, and I wouldn't dream of doing it any other way than remote. There's advantages and disadvantages, but I don't want to be paying SF office rent, SF salaries, SF benefits, and competing with the unicorns and tech giants in the area. I'd rather draw from a global talent pool and focus on how to minimize the drawbacks and maximize the advantages of doing so.

Plus neither my wife or I want to live in SF. We much prefer Vancouver. I'd move if it were really necessary for the business, but I'm glad that doesn't seem to be true.

<comment><USER4> What are you working on?

<comment><USER3> Kind of a zapier thing, but aimed at developers ( so different power vs ease of use tradeoff). Will be at apimate.com when I launch it.

Interestingly zapier are a remote company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If they now would be able to invest in foreign companies like GmbHs or UK Limiteds it would be perfect. I understand why they don't want to do that but I think for a lot of companies to which YC could be interesting (us included) it's simply not possible or very difficult to do a flip to a US company.

<comment><USER6> That increases complexity drastically for what's basically a third and a sixth of the reward, if even that. I don't think it makes that much sense.

<comment><USER5> Not sure I understand what you mean by "a third and a sixth of the reward", can you explain?

<comment><USER6> Population of Germany and the UK, respectively, compared to the United States (probably a little fuzzy because it was recalled from memory, though). Not only smaller pool of applicants, but also smaller markets.

<comment><USER7> The market of "Germany" is actually the entire EU, which is bigger than the US.

<comment><USER6> Only slightly bigger, much of it is dramatically more poor, and a sizeable portion of it can't understand English, much less German.

<comment><USER8> Where do you get the dramatically more poor from?

<comment><USER9> Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece have a lot of very smart and hard workers, but they are not (yet) wealthy countries. People in eastern Europe simply do not have the disposable income that Americans or western Europeans (usually) have.

<comment><USER10> Have you been lately in Romania? You would be surprised how much disposable income people have there.

The country is one of the biggest cereal producer of EU, a major car industry player and has big reserves of oil and gas.

Anecdotally, since turism/horeca services is really a minor part of the GDP, the COVID-19 will not affect it too much. Whereas in West going out is a major activity and has much influence.

<comment><USER11> The average yearly income in Romania is US$8100 per year. The average income in Mississippi (the poorest state in the US) is $42,000.

That's a fair difference in available disposable income!

(Having said that, I've worked with some Romania developers and they were great. I'd hire there, but there are better markets to sell into)

<comment><USER10> Agree, but the average income does not give any indication of the said disposable income to the respective income ( in % ). Also averages reflect quite poor the distribution of income, since some outliers can move the point quite drastically.

But, yes point taken, there is of course a difference. Corruption is a main point. Also due to the gray or black economy I suspect that the above $8100 are likely double.

<comment><USER11> Additionally lots of corruption and a large black economy do not make a country an attractive target for startups to target.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice, you can now capture that talent pool that would otherwise not want to relocate to California even for a stint. Hope this becomes a trend once normal life resumes, with YC and other investors.

</comment><comment><USER13> Applications for S20 ended on March 16th, haven't they? I wanted to apply but definitely could not travel, this change makes it interesting/possible again but I'm not sure it's not already too late to apply.

<comment><USER14> "And we're still accepting late applications if you've always wanted to do YC but couldn't move out to the bay area" \- Aaron from YC.

[https://twitter.com/aaron_epstein/status/1252267533555470338...](https://twitter.com/aaron_epstein/status/1252267533555470338?s=21)

<comment> foreign-inc How many companies from those late applications get accepted every batch?

<comment><USER15> Now that ycombinator takes over a hundred startups it does seem more promising to get in, eventually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if this changes the number of companies that can be accepted. I also worry that this will turn into Startup School 2.0.

</comment><comment><USER17> I understand circumstances are forcing this to happen, but if online batches are now a possibility, the FAQs should be updated:

"Can we do it without moving to where you are?"

Sorry, no. We tried this once, and by Demo Day that startup was way behind the rest. What we do, we have to do in person. We would not be doing a startup a favor by not making them come to YC events in person.

However, you don't have to be in silicon valley 24x7. If you have a business that requires that you be somewhere else, we will work something out so you can participate in YC events while also being attentive to your business. Usually the founders will rotate between locations, or fly back and forth.

Of course, after the 3 month program, you can go wherever you want.

<comment><USER18> It's sort of crazy to make such a sweeping decision based on one case - especially when remote collaboration tools are improving on a quarterly basis.

Of course statements like this are just rationalizations - not arguments employed to arrive at objective conclusions.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, looking back at it there's definitely a question raised by how it was just one data point, especially considering that this also means there likely wasn't a lot of institutional support on YC's end for the one remote startup as well. It wouldn't be deliberate but if you've just got that one remote startup you aren't going to be really trying to make remote programming work and making all the resources remote-friendly.

For other experiments, YC has discussed publically (fellowship, accepting people with no idea, early decision) there were what seemed externally at least to be well-run experiments with multiple accepted and some longer-term tracking to see how that worked. No remote seems to finally be getting that proper experimentation and treatment, I guess we'll see how that goes.

There are a lot of benefits to in person, I personally prefer working on things in-person to remote (in biotech, in-person really matters), but it'll be an interesting experiment this batch to see how much room there is for fully remote startup development across all the sectors they invest, both in terms of the batch itself and the companies individually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've worked remotely for the past 3.5 years. As one of two employees at a small statup, at a startup that started remote friendly and then revoked it, and now at a startup that is moving towards being remote equal (25% and rising).

Not that long compared to others here, but long enough to have seen things that work and seen things that don't work, and with sufficiently varied approaches. I think there's reasons why this will work, but I also wonder if they would have screened the startups slightly differently if they knew they were going to do the whole batch remotely. Working in an all remote environment require different communication skills than working in an office.

I also wonder how easy it'll be for founders to put in 16+ hour days while working from home. It's easy to 'stay late at the office', but I think it is harder to contain myself in my office while doing that. Maybe that's just a me thing, but I think it can be a real issue... I wonder if founders will simply hole up in the same living space somehow during quarantine; I could see that working, that's basically I've seen friends who've been in YC do anyway. It just might be harder to do in this environment.

<comment><USER21> > I also wonder how easy it'll be for founders to put in 16+ hour days while > working from home. It's easy to 'stay late at the office', but I think it is > harder to contain myself in my office while doing that. Maybe that's just a > me thing, but I think it can be a real issue...

Yeah, I think that's just a personal preference thing. I've always found offices to be much more distracting, and actually I tend to put less time in overall when there's an office involved. Mostly that's because commuting (even if it's a relatively easy commute, like a 15 minute walk) takes extra time, effort, and planning - and because there are more auditory and visual distractions to tune out in an office, which makes me fatigue more quickly.

I also felt just emotionally on edge from going to the office every day. For example, I would feel very resentful when I was phoned outside of work hours, because I felt that my limited time to enjoy myself and re-coup my energy with my family was being threatened. Now that I've been working primarily remotely now for about 3 years, I don't feel bothered when I need to step up and do extra work outside of normal hours. I'm less grouchy in general because I control the environment I work in and don't have the overhead of a commute looming over me.

I think most of the YC Founders will be able to do fine, since learning to work effectively remotely is a skill like any other. From my experience too, remote working is 10x better when every person involved is remote. The worst- case scenario is to have a split group of people (part remote, part in- office), because it leads to the in-person group having side convos that leave out the remote people, which harms the remote people's ability to bond with the in-person group and generates resentment when the remote workers inevitably get left out of a conversation that matters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looking forward to this if we are accepted, I think on the company's end, a lot of us worry about transmission of covid 19 and this just provides a safer environment.

This crisis is a test of a company's flexibility, since the lockdown started we had to do a hard pivot from onsite to remote services and we're just getting traction.

Remote work is here to stay and so is remote services. It's a new frontier/market to explore.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'd love to apply for 20-things.com. Would this be a waste of time, given the interest YC board has in Reddit?

<comment><USER24> You should apply. Whether there are companies we've already funded doing something similar is not a factor in our decisions.

<comment><USER23> Thank you, glad to hear it, that helps a lot!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is good for the world.

</comment><comment><USER26> How is VC sentiment during the pandemic? My first assumption is that they're more hesitant than usual to invest, but I've heard from peers that some VCs are now working even harder to make sure their most promising companies have the resources to survive past the crisis. Something about lessons learned from the startups that came out of the Great Recession.

<comment><USER17> Currently fundraising. From what I have been hearing, VCs are mostly doubling down on their portfolio and reducing the number of new companies they invest in. Sentiment is strong for companies enabling remote work though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Good! I have a potential job that I am quite interested in taking, so I may not end up applying after all, but should that fall through I'll be applying.

</comment><comment><USER28> We have specifically built airsend ([https://www.airsend.io/](https://www.airsend.io/)) to solve remote collaboration use cases like this (especially if the use case involves collaboration among multiple teams across organization boundaries). We will be thrilled if YC could check us out. AirSend will be a great addition to YC's online platform, video conferencing and founders forum.

</comment><comment><USER29> As a Bay Area native I wish this hadn't happen, but sometimes radical change creates radical results.

<comment><USER30> Why do you wish so?

<comment><USER31> It erodes some of the Bay Area's attraction for new talent and new companies.

<comment><USER32> As someone who doesn't yet own property here, I'm okay with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> What are the odds of this being reversed mid-batch if covid isn't as big of a deal in say July?

</comment><comment><USER34> Thanks for all the great work! Keep it up, and remember to wash your hands! :D

</comment><comment><USER35> Emails out?

<comment><USER36> Yes

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> One of the best things about YC is being there at the silicon valley. Otherwise, it would lose one of the most important benefits it offers!

</comment><comment><USER38> Save your time and do not read this rant:

If they know the application is sure to be rejected, why don't they reject it fast? I really don't understand why can't people reject things fast enough! University takes 5 months to reject the application, interviews take 2-3 weeks to reject. If they just happen to know, reject immediately. This whole process is too slow.

<comment><USER21> The thing that gets me is the whole "apply early to have a better chance" is almost certainly not true. My team's unlisted video had all of two views from mid-february, when it was submitted, and that's it. The world is a very different place today due to covid, and I regret not waiting til closer to the deadline to submit so we could factor that into the plans.

Edit: Also because we made a lot of progress between February and March, and while I was able update the application with some of the biggest stuff, I recognize that the initial impression was still the important one. If and when I apply to the next batch, I might start he application early again - but I don't think I will submit it more than a week before the deadline.</comment></comment>


Rumor: Apple to buy ARM for $8 billion? - <AUTHOR> http://www.9to5mac.com/apple-buying-arm-235057046?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+9To5Mac-MacAllDay+%289+to+5+Mac+-+Apple+Intelligence%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><AUTHOR> Question: Would ARM chips be suitable for, say, five-years-from-today iMacs? What would be the differentes between ARM and Intel?

Note: I don't know anything about hardware.

<comment><USER2> 32 vs. 64 bits is the biggest relevant one for the desktop market. 32 bits (with a special extra low power 16 bit mode) is great for the mobile market, but wouldn't be worth it for a Mac CPU change over.

I suppose Apple might do this to fund a 64 bit ARM, but that strikes me as unlikely. Especially since ARM would stand to lose a lot of business from Apple's competitors, if other companies could come up with compelling CPU/watt stories.

On the order of 10 billion (thousand million) ARM CPUs are shipping per year....</comment></comment>


A Tale of 2 Countries: The Cost of My Mother's Cardiac Care in the US and India - <AUTHOR> http://www.annfammed.org/content/12/5/470.full

<comment><USER2> The discussion from a week ago

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8323010](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8323010)

And the week before that

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8304019](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8304019)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=cost+of+mother%27s+cardiac+care#!/...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=cost+of+mother%27s+cardiac+care#!/story/forever/0/cost%20of%20mother's%20cardiac%20care)</comment>


Show HN: DataFire – Move Data between APIs - <AUTHOR> https://datafire.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all, founder here. We've just opened up the DataFire beta and are looking for feedback.

Would love to hear any thoughts or requests!</comment>


Ask HN: Organizing information on the web (startup idea) - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
I've been working on a web idea the past couple of months, and I was hoping to get some constructive feedback.
I want to try to make a site where people can create, update and share collections (databases) of information. Essentially, I want to make a 'Wikipedia of databases', where content is completely driven by individuals who want to organize information on the web. One of my goals is to centralize a lot of redundant, factual information, and to create comprehensive data sources which can be consumed by other sites through an API.
What do you think?
http://curio.org <comment><USER3> The idea is cool, actually I had one like this about 10 years ago but didn't have the guts to launch it :)

I got some criticism towards the GUI (although you took the good direction to keep it simple). I hate the endless scroll. Endless scrolls are cool for fooling around browsing pics, etc. not for browsing organized data - it just doesn't make sense in this context. Boxes desperately need padding, everything is too cluttered. Try sharpening the color scheme and use a cool sans-serif font from google webfonts, it'll make it visually more appealing.

The name is great.

What's the tech behind it? Some schemaless db I suppose? Data sources - <USER2> lists or you entered the 'fake it till you make it' batch by hand?

It needs an API, without a dead-simple API it won't bring enough additional value to f.ex. browsing wikipedia lists (the data is already there), IMO.

Keep up

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the comments.

I mostly agree with you on the UI, but I wouldn't say endless scroll doesn't make sense in this context. Even though I'm really not a big fan of it, in my mind, I'm going for data that is easily 'discoverable'. I don't see why browsing organized data can't be like fooling around, browsing through pics :) But, I see your point.

The tech is actually butt simple. The client is JQuery (mostly ajax calls) and the server is just PHP and MySQL. I use MySQL in a 'meta' way because it's essentially a database of databases. I think it would be fun to switch to some NoSQL DBMS sometime in the future.

At the moment, I'm just faking the data by hand. I have some ideas for where to pull data from. I just Googled Wikipida lists - thanks I'll definitely check it out :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pretty cool, and I think you're getting in on a quickly growing field -- Open data. IMO, the key to success for your site would be a great API and some interesting tools that use it (e.g. Visualization tools)

</comment><comment><USER5> Great idea. Hard to execute. I've been trying to find organized lists of data on some topics for the last few days, but haven't found a single reliable site.

As you're looking for user contributions, getting traction would be the hardest part. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Care to share what kinds of lists you were looking for? I might as well try to populate it with content that I know people want.</comment></comment>


Crypto Parties are becoming a thing - <AUTHOR> https://www.cryptoparty.in/parties/upcoming <comment><USER2> If you are wondering what this is all about:

 _What is CryptoParty?_

 _Interested parties with computers, devices, and the willingness to learn how to use the most basic crypto programs and the fundamental concepts of their operation! CryptoParties are free to attend, public and commercially non- aligned._

 _CryptoParty is a decentralized, global initiative to introduce basic cryptography tools - such as the Tor anonymity network, public key encryption (PGP /GPG), and OTR (Off The Record messaging) - to the general public._</comment>


AOL's Awesome Weekly Drinking Binge - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/28/aols-awesome-weekly-drinking-binge/

<comment><USER2> Nah. This is why Arrington got hired in the first place.

Notice there was little criticism of the AOL Way on Techcrunch. That sort of thing gets you fired. This just drives pageviews, lets Arrington act the bad boy, and actually make AOL look like a laidback company with typical HR rules.

</comment><comment><USER3> Come on didn't you laugh while you read that piece? Don't you think the people at AOL have a sense of humor? I hope so. What would be really cool is if TechCrunch really opened up on AOL on something substantial, not the fact that they drink.

<comment><AUTHOR> He was opening up on the fact that they routinely break their own rules.

And yes, it was a pretty funny piece. But it also joins a long list of posts that are markedly different from the TechCrunch of yesteryear, where we just read about new and interesting startups. Instead we get to read about Aol's drinking festivals and Sarah Lacy's in-flight movies.

I hate to come off as anti-change, but there was a certain excitement from reading TechCrunch circa 2006 that simply isn't there today. Perhaps it's a reflection of the Internet startup scene as a whole: more mature and more dominated by the big guys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I believe he is. There's a chance he has a clause in his contract that gives him him a payout in the event that he gets let go without cause (and firing him for being an annoying reporter probably isn't just cause). Remember, this is the same guy who moved to Seattle right before being acquired (Seattle being a state where he can avoid state taxation on his income).

In any even, it's in Ms. Huffington's hands now.

</comment><comment><USER5> The fact that Arianna Huffington is Arrington's boss is a source of endless mirth to me.

</comment><comment><USER6> The same way how he constantly publicly proclaims on TC that he doesn't know why he still pays Paul Carr to write for their site.... and then continues to pay Paul Carr to write for their site.

It's called trolling for pageviews.</comment>


Ask HN: How to get a job so I can fund my startup? - <AUTHOR> It seems like I cant find any part-time jobs that are relevant to my career, which is biz dev / customer success / sales startup roles. It seems to be theres only full-time roles, however I cant really afford to have a full-time job and work on my startup too since I wont have time for both.<p>Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> Can you consult? So, rather than have a part time job, actually go out and find a few clients?

Not sure where you are located, but in the USA this is possible.

An alternative would be to get a full time job, but make sure there is a carve out for work you do on your own that is unrelated to the job, and work nights/weekends.

Final alternative is to work full time and just save save save, then quit and work while living on savings.

Not sure of your financial situation and obligations, so hard to recommend any of these above the others.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried consulting as a LeadGen pro but as I just moved to the US I have no network here so it would take me months to get the first client.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It is hard to find part time sales/biz dev roles from larger companies. By the time they are looking to hire, they are looking for a full time person because they have a (mostly) full time need. Especially if there is commission involved, then it just continues to feed into the more, more, more...

Source: Before moving into consulting, I ran sales teams.

I would imagine that Customer Success would be easier to find on a less than full-time basis.

Consulting as Mooreds pointed out could be a good solution. Could you consult or do paid work for clients within the realm of what your start-up is going to be doing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your answer Dave. Yeah I could do consulting as a LeadGen professional, I do have experience in that and have all the tools needed, but as I just moved to the US from EU I dont have a network here. It would take me months until I get the first client.

<comment><USER3> I get that, starting over in a new place can be tough. I would approach the looking for a new job and looking for clients as the same process. Your skills might not be something that a group needs part/full time but it could be something that they purchase your skills for a week or two a month/quarter and you would be full money wise and still have time to work on your Startup.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats a very helpful advice. Thanks Dave!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Your email?</comment>


Apple: Their Tablet Computer History - <AUTHOR> http://liquidpubs.com/blog/2010/11/08/apple-their-tablet-computer-history/

<comment><USER2> I love concept designs.</comment>


Slate Why Greenland's "Dark Snow" Should Worry You - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/09/16/jason_box_s_research_into_greenland_s_dark_snow_raises_more_concerns_about.html

<comment><USER2> Well... That's not good.

Cool to look at but very very not good.</comment>


From C++ to HTML5: Rebuilding a game using open web standards - <AUTHOR> http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2011/06/29/html5-games

<comment><USER2> Concatenating all the separate audio effects into one long stream and seeking in that stream to play individual sounds is a pretty clever hack.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://raptjs.com/> was also ported from C++ to js :)

Note: it is a 2-player game.

Check out <http://madebyevan.com/> for a bunch of other projects he has worked on.

</comment><comment><USER4> Just in case anyone only skimmed the article and missed it, check out Erik Moller's blog here: <http://my.opera.com/emoller/blog/>

He lightly touches on experiences with porting his game to HTML5.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting. I wonder if they are rewriting the codebase from scratch into JS, or compiling parts of it from C++.</comment>


Wreeto – a fast, cluttered-free knowledge organisation toolset - <AUTHOR> https://wreeto.com/ <comment><USER2> Looks like an okay wiki/markdown article manager, but I'm not going to use a SaaS for something that good FOSS alternatives exist for.

If you like this style of knowledge management, have a look at Joplin.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are many pros and cons for each case. Not all people like the headache of setting a self-hosted app on a home server and many others are not capable/don't have the time to do it, maintain it or support it (at this moment, Joplin has ~390 open issues in github).

On the other hand, there's a simplicity focused note-taking service which will let you start taking notes in 20 seconds (that's how long it takes to create an account) in a clean, minimal UI and start sharing them with friends/family/colleagues instantly. No open issues as we speak and support is included! It has a free version too so it won't hurt to try it out :)</comment></comment>


Building an ecosystem & beating the mob: PayPal mafia insiders' story - <AUTHOR> http://namesake.com/conversation/brian/were-live-with-paypal-mafia-members-ericmjackson-and-jackselby-learning-about-the-mythical-paypal-culture-eric-is-now-the-ceo-of-caplinked-and-author-of-paypal-warsjack-is-a-managing-director-of-clarium-capital-httpamzntozgykn

<comment><USER2> Awesomeness, sweet conversation

</comment><comment><USER3> Great conversation!

</comment><comment><USER4> neat</comment>