Ask HN: How can I be productive interning remotely? - <AUTHOR> I'm a senior undergraduate Computer Science student, and I recently began a paid internship position working remotely with a startup during school. It's been a bit of a rough start, and I'm having trouble getting clear tasks with well-defined requirements. The company has only begun working with interns in the past few months, and had very little in the way of established workflows. I effectively report directly to the CEO, who is an alumnus of my school and doesn't seem to have experience managing software projects. They only started using task tracking and workplace communication tools in the past few weeks, and so far I've primarily communicated via email and calls. I'm beginning to feel quite useless, as I have no real idea of what's expected of me or what the acceptance criteria are for the feature I've been tasked with implementing. Said feature had a rather unrealistic deadline to build from scratch, even for a professional working full-time, let alone a college intern working remotely for maybe a dozen hours a week. There are a number of other things regarding the company that strike me as red flags, and at this point I'm not sure it was a good idea to accept the position. I'm interested in the work being done though, and I think it could be a beneficial arrangement for all involved if the managerial/logistical issues can be sorted out.<p>So how can I make the most of this experience and provide as much value to the company as possible? <comment><USER3> > I'm having trouble getting clear tasks with well-defined requirements. (...) > I effectively report directly to the CEO.

FWIW it's a common symptom of too busy a manager. Most managers are too busy, btw.

What's happening is that the CEO is probably thinking something "I need to take some time to itemize this task so he can work faster" but doing so is lower priority than that day's urgent fire.

> How can I make the most of this experience and provide as much value to the > company as possible?

The best way to provide value to the company in your situation also happens to be the one where you'll make the very most of the experience: manage yourself to the point of being nearly or entirely autonomous. Examples:

The task itself is vague or unclear? Expand a bit on what you feel the task is, what it's for, etc. in writing, and submit that for review.

Next steps are vague or unclear? Expand on the DoD (Definition of Done), itemize the way forward, and submit those for review.

Does the usefulness of this/that new feature sound fishy? Ask about it. Not satisfied with the answer? Ask if they don't mind you getting in a Hangout with a few end-users to validate the idea's merit? Assuming they accept, then do so and report on your findings.

Every little step where they don't need to think for you is a step where you'll learn more and where you'll make yourself more useful. Have the company's end-goals in mind at all stages, take initiative, put things in writing (this is crucial for remote work), and you'll do fine.

<comment><USER4> Couldn't agree more,

This has been my strategy for years working for busy managers.

You have to make the life easy for them. Try to avoid sending open ended questions to them, instead send something that they can either sign-off fully or partially.

If you can't detail out all the requirements on your own, try to reduce the scope of the task until you can and try to give enough context for the manager to say Yes/No.

Also, if anything is vague and you manage to setup a video call to clarify it then make sure to create a slide with your topics on and walk them through 1 by 1. My experience is that visionary minds like startup CEOs have a tendency to go completely off-track otherwise.

<comment><USER5> Most CEOs can make a zillion choices a day. The best strategy is to give them options to choose from: "We could do A, or B or C. What route do you want me to take?" (where A,B,C are well defined)

It's even better if it doesn't matter what they pick (because all of the options are excellent choices) ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are a couple problems I see here:

1) The biggest one that jumps out is having an intern working remotely. First, I am surprised your school would even allow this to happen. To be honest, this almost sounds like a favor from an alumni CEO to the school and he/she could really care less about having an intern. Internships are supposed to be learning experiences. You should be immersed in an environment to give you experience. In another post, you said something about the company is in Silicon Valley and you are in the midwest and that you can't spend any time with them. To be blunt, that is a lame excuse. You should ask them to fly you out, or even cover your own travel expenses if they won't, to even spend a day with the team. Meet them, work with them in person.

2) Most startups themselves don't always have a clear path and they still may be working on defining the tasks that need to be done. Are you the only one working remotely? If not, you should see if you can be involved in their meetings. See what they are working on, how their tasks are defined, and what their deliverables are. Find ways to work with them or emulate their delivery process. If you are the only one working remotely, the company probably could care less about you as an intern. I don't mean that rudely, just that they look at it as they will give you a project, if you get some done great, if not oh well nothing lost.

<comment><USER7> I agree with #1 and was thinking basically the same thing. Most of what I did during my internship, and what I help foster in the inters today at the same company, is the idea of socializing with other coworkers and other areas of the company. An internship is a taste of moving away from college in to the corporate life, and help determine if that's something interesting to the intern (and it's sometimes not, admittedly). A remote internship sounds effectively like a class with no lecture sessions, which will make it feel effectively like college. It sounds like a neat opportunity, but also like they're definitely missing something by not being onsite. The OP should definitely try to spend a week onsite - I work remotely now, but didn't always, and the weeks onsite are invaluable to the interpersonal relationships that make working remotely possible.

<comment><USER6> Absolutely. As much as working remotely can be rewarding, like you said, there is a need for some level of interpersonal relationships. A remote internship to me, would be like doing an online class without a syllabus or professor. Here's your book, figure out what you need to learn and how to learn it. If the company isn't willing to have the intern on-site, even for a day, that to me says more about the company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _I 'm having trouble getting clear tasks with well-defined requirements._

Having worked remotely for a number of years, and having run a startup, I think this is the root cause of your issue. You're not going to get well defined requirements because the definition of "well defined" varies from person to person, and because startups generally don't plan features in great detail (tbh, as a rule established businesses don't either).

If you want to make a bigger impact, start being more proactive in asking what features need to do in order to be accepted. If you don't know something, _think_ about it, then write a clear document that sets out what you think you need to do and points to specific things that you need clarification about. That's what I'd expect any developer to do, regardless of whether they're an intern or an experienced lead developer. The key thing no one in a business is simply there to execute instructions. You have to think for yourself.

tl;dr If you don't know what you're supposed to be building there's no way you can build a thing that works, so think through the problem and ask good questions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I've been trying to be as proactive as I can but I could probably do more. A big issue is that the feature in question sounds simple but is really quite complex (e.g. tell whether a picture is of a bird) and I'm not sure I'm conveying this effectively to the CEO. It's really a confluence of problems: lack of communication due to high friction, lack of organization, lack of documentation, and lack of mock-ups or user stories. What I'll try to do is create and assign myself tasks on our task tracker so we all at least have some idea if what I should be doing, and I can use this as a starting point to ask for clarification.

<comment><USER9> Don't expect others to produce user stories or mock-ups, especially if this isn't already part of the culture.

If you want to have user stories and mock-ups, start spending your time making those yourself and push them back to whoever is giving you the requirements for comment.

If they question the need for you to be spending time doing that, it's an opportunity to ask for more specific direction on what you should be spending your time doing. Chances are it's a classic case of not knowing what they want, but knowing what they don't want, so by having their requirements reflected back to them they'll come back with "Ah, but what I meant was..." and you'll get more clear requirements.

If it's still murky after that and you really can't get more concrete requirements than "We need this magic box made" then consider that some places genuinely just aren't good places to work, and consider this a learning opportunity and point for future comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm afraid it's not going to work.

Turning vaguely defined task into something tangible is usually the most difficult, and most important part of the task, but it requires some experience.

In the beginning you need to learn the internal know-how, and this requires regular prompt answers. Otherwise, you will stay blocked and frustrated most of the time.

Remote work is fine when you already know the domain, but that's not really what intern programs are for.

That said, you can try to write design docs where you put your questions. Note that it's not really about writing a specification, but about writing down what you know and what you don't. You can speculate about answers to your questions, and this way make your manager understand what you're missing.

<comment><USER11> > Remote work is fine when you already know the domain, but that's not really > what intern programs are for.

I'd argue that it depends on the rest of the team. The OP didn't mention whether he was the only remote or not, but if so then I agree; it's a lost cause, and there's no way this is going to work. But if he's joining a team of other remotes they can make it work if others are willing to try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Let me a bit blunt. An intern that is still in school working a dozen hours a week, is not going to produce anything of real value, realistically. Any reasonable company (start up or not) knows this and is willing to take a hit on their productivity to help you out (and also evaluate whether or not you might be worth hiring in the future).

So the question of how to be successful _should_ be whether or not you can do something positive, showcase your skills and learn about industry at the same time. If you even get a hint that it's about you producing value to the team, I would consider moving on (given what else you have said). There is no point in being set up for failure.

Most of the time with interns, I have to scramble to try to find some vague connection with what we are doing. The intern will feel bad if they realise that they are doing a make work project. In reality, though, it's all about the intern. Especially with talented interns, we just want to make the experience really positive and don't care at all what they do.

<comment><USER13> I would disagree with that assertion. My internship proved to be extremely valuable to the company. An intern was actually a pretty important part of our culture. It allows higher risk R&D or to get things done which bypass the normal, sometimes slower process. And even if an intern fails, they'll have gained a lot of experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think there might also be an issue with what software development is made out to be - well defined tasks with outcomes and deadlines, supported by a manager and easily achievable in a the desired timeframe - and the realities of working in startup and early stage companies.

Self direction is the key here. All you really need is the outcome desired and the 'why?' \- these should enable you to start and hopefully feel you are making an impact. Take it as an unbelievable opportunity, you're basically being given a project to go wild with, manage yourself and make your own decisions. Things might fail, it might take longer than they thought - but as many others have mentioned communication is the key!!! Write out YOUR plan, tell them what you're gonna do, give them an idea of time of the first few parts - and be realistic and transparent. This is pretty much all they can ask of you. Have fun and learn :)

<comment><USER15> This is the beauty of working in a start up. You get to self manage your work. Some people love that other hate it. If you are someone that loves it then it is amazing.

<comment><USER14> exactly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> First, I would suggest being more open. Take some of the concerns you've raised here — feeling useless, not knowing what's expected of you — and go to the CEO with them. Don't be critical or overemphatic. Just tell them the situation you're in and how you're feeling. If they're worth their salt they'll listen and be understanding and try to make things better. If not, at least you'll know who you're dealing with.

Communicate more frequently. If you're not sure what to do, ask someone. If they don't know, ask someone else. You certainly don't want to bother people every 5 minutes, but if you're stuck for hours each day that's not good for anyone.

If possible, get them to tell you the most basic subset of functionality you can build at first. Build that. Take it to them and see what they think. That will probably give them a far better idea of what they want.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've had similar issues doing remote work for people who aren't really good at managing projects. The solution depends on how much you care about the product itself - you can either take charge, send constant emails, follow up on missed promises and generally push people to actually do something, or you can just ride this thing out. The management probably won't improve in time, and the product will most likely crash and burn. I've "saved" a few projects by doing most of the work myself, but often there are factors beyond your control that will drag the project down anyway. Another thing to think about - even if you build it, your CEO isn't guaranteed to make good use of the product and all your honest effort might be wasted by bad leadership anyway.

</comment><comment><USER18> Congrats, you are getting a first hand perspective of a startup; there are no syllabi just a vague sense of which direction to walk. What you describe as "lack of guidance" can also be described as "hands off delegation". The presence or absence of task tracking, feature specs, etc mean nothing right now. Your success depends on your ability to take ownership of the feature, anticipate requirements, deliver the code, and ask for feedback. You've been thrown into the deep end of the pool while your peers who took normal internships are in the kiddie pool with floaties. Have fun and make time to come up for air every so often!

</comment><comment><USER19> Most startups fail. Many startups are train wreaks. In many cases, talented individuals can only watch in horror as events unfold.

As a junior, remote employee you're not in a position to significantly effect the outcome of the business.

Many companies also don't know how to communicate with remote employees well. Not replying to emails.

So... try your best to engage with company and observe how the company works. Learn the warning signs, learn what issues they face. These should all be hugely useful lessons.

But don't expect the company not to be a train wreak or to be massively successful. Those things are quite rare.

</comment><comment><USER20> After years of remote working, albeit as a technical writer rather than a developer, I've learned a couple of techniques for dealing with vague and ill- defined tasks.

i) Write down exactly what you think the task might entail and email the CEO / manager. If you're off the mark, you'll get corrected. If you're on the right track, you'll get the go-ahead. Either way, you'll have a clear path forward.

ii) YMMV vary with this because of the different job roles, but I'll often just figure out a good solution to the problem, implement it, and see what happens. In my experience, tasks are ill-defined and vague because the manager has only an ill-defined and vague idea of what they need. In solving the problem, you do the thinking and clarification so the manager doesn't have to.

</comment><comment><USER21> Have you spent any time at all with this new team in person? If not, I suspect it would be valuable to meet with the team face to face. Sure, you can do calls and such, but it's a lot easier for them to think of you as an outsider if you haven't actually occupied the office space.

You might also consider getting a mentor within the company. This is how we do it at $employer; you report to a manager, but your tasks and assistance come from a single mentor whose purpose during your tenure is to guide you towards completing your assigned project.

Have you been given a large but attainable project, or are they expecting you to just fix bugs and the like?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have not, and practically speaking I can't; they're in Silicon Valley and I'm in the Midwest.

The mentor system was extremely valuable for me in my prior internships, but as I transition into industry I feel that the impetus is on me to learn how to work without a mentor, which I think is what I'm struggling with.

It's a large, attainable project but on an unrealistic timescale.

<comment><USER22> "practically speaking I can't; they're in Silicon Valley and I'm in the Midwest."

Planes exist. This is a trivially-solvable problem. Yes, they cost money - <USER2> the time savings from improved communication will amortize that cost very rapidly.

If what they're paying you _won 't_ cover a plane ticket in a week or less but they're expecting you to ship features solo, GTFO. There's a clear line between "internship that pays below market because learning" and "bullshit job that pays below market because interns don't know any better".

On a final note, the whole "I need to learn how to work without a mentor" thing is really odd. That style of learning, IMO, actually becomes _more_ important post-graduation...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> To me, through no fault of your own, this is sounds like a low quality internship. Not because there's little productive work being accomplished, but because there is little professional interaction between the student and experienced professionals and about zero chance for constructive personal interactions.

Hopefully, you're at least getting paid.

Anyway, the big lessons here are that most people ignore remote workers because managing them is significantly more work than when co-located and perhaps more importantly, the most important aspect of developing a career is meeting people and getting to know them.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER24> 1\. arrange a 1:1 skype call with anyone and everyone on the team who might be either interested in what you are creating or to whom you might be able to contribute something useful. 2. try to find someone who clearly understands the needs of the organization and who has some painpoint you can help with. this is unlikely to be the ceo, because their painpoints are very high level and abstract. it will be some technical guy who has a bunch of tasks to do, some of which theyd be happy to offload. do those tasks for them, earn karma, youre in.

</comment><comment><USER25> Make sure you know what they want from you. Not clear requirements could mean there are problems inside the company or they don't want to deal with you too much. In either case not clear requirements could be beneficial or very non- beneficial for them since if you aren't sure what you are building you might build anything that works from your point of view. Make sure you sort this out before you build it.

</comment><comment><USER26> Although a very different situation company wise I did a similar remote internship once. My coping strategy was to find small bugs that you understand and fix it if given no direction - it's great way to learn, assist and keep out of trouble.

</comment><comment><USER27> Honestly having a startup take on an intern sounds nuts to me... I don't really have any sound basis for advice since my only experience with interns was having them join my team at BigCo this summer, so other comments here are probably better suggestions. Still here are a few thoughts that come to mind you might want to chew on.

Imagine yourself as a part time employee rather than an intern. Imagine if you don't figure out how to impress, you'll be fired. (As an intern you're basically fire-proof.) This means that you need to become more autonomous and take the initiative. If something is unclear, creatively interpret it into something that is clear, and work on that. Make some progress, or write up the more concrete version, and get feedback. While waiting for feedback make more progress. If you are blocked, ping other people on the team to see if you can help them out with anything, or if nothing else find bugs, fix bugs, and/or write test code. There is always stuff to do.

You mentioned an example task "tell whether a picture is of a bird", if that's all I had to go on then I'd search for a few online image classification service providers and write a shell script or whatever to send the picture to them and report back. Done. When showing the implementation or the write-up in review, if there's something that the CEO doesn't like about the solution (he wanted you to do it by hand, or wanted you to use a particular machine learning or computer vision toolkit, or integrated with a web api, or wanted you to go out and take a bunch of reference pictures to train a neural net on...) then his complaints will make what he originally wanted more clear. Repeat.

For the remote aspect in particular, schedule a daily (or at the very least every other day) one-on-one meeting over Hangouts or Skype with the CEO. Time box it to 15 minutes though 30 might not be bad either. If the CEO can't make these, ask him to find someone who can and who will effectively become your new supervisor. You want these meetings to first be about any concerns you want to raise (like feeling directionless, or that some deadline is too hard for the vagueness of the task) and second about your general activities of the previous and coming day so people are in the loop with what you're up to. Also encourage the whole team to get on irc/hipchat/slack/matrix in an all-team channel. Assuming the company consists of more than just you and the CEO, it's crucial you have contact with some portion of the rest of the team, and be able to ping them in real time to ask "can we jump on a hangout meeting real quick to discuss x / share my screen and look at y?"

</comment><comment><USER28> i don't think your institution should allow this. reason is an internship should be about learning. if you are on the floor you will learn by osmosis. if you work remotely you won't. as for you, skype or slack a lot. maybe you will still get something out of it. try your best to implement the feature anyways even if it is a tight schedule. you will likely be evaluated on that.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is a core issue on remote working. Not many people talks about this because still remote working is something quite new.

</comment><comment><USER30> Look for an internship which is not remote.

</comment><comment><USER31> An external intern?

Something seems awry.</comment>


Thriller Queens: Agatha Christie vs. Patricia Highsmith - <AUTHOR> https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2018-12-16/culture/thriller-queens-agatha-christie-v-patricia-highsmith-k952xdmkf <comment><USER2> Couldn't read the article. Paywalled.

Did Agatha Christie write thrillers though? They are more like 'murder mysteries' than thrillers like books written by say Fredrick Forsyth.

<comment><USER3> the non-paywalled first paragraph at least addresses that:

"Hercule Poirot and Tom Ripley. At first sight, the retired Belgian detective and the gentleman psychopath have little in common: Poirot solves crimes, Ripley commits them. Their creators, too, stand at opposite ends of the crime- writing spectrum — Agatha Christie, still the world's bestselling author, is regarded as the writer of comfort-read whodunnits, while in Patricia Highsmith's universe morality is turned on its head and the reader actively rejoices with Ripley as he gets away with murder."</comment></comment>


A Simple Explanation of Regularization in Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> https://www.nintyzeros.com/2020/03/regularization-machine-learning.html <comment><USER2> This post is good.I got to know lot about the regualarization but stuck to understand when it is used and how it is helpful.The author has explained well and thanks</comment>


Save NYC sublets and vacation rentals from anti-competitive bill - <AUTHOR> http://www.saveNYsublets.com

<comment><USER2> I'd be more in favor of activism on this point if AirBnB made any effort to limit their rentals to owner-occupied apartments. Someone renting out a spare bedroom in their apartment, or a spare couch, is one thing, but someone renting out a dozen apartments that they have never lived in, as basically an unlicensed hotel, is quite different.

A good first step would be imposing a limit of one rental property per person on the site, and making at least basic efforts to enforce it.

To be fair, this is basically an NYC problem. I haven't seen nearly the same level of shadiness on AirBnB in other cities, where people renting out spare rooms and couches seems to be the norm. But in NYC, a lot of the AirBnB listings are unlicensed hotels and unlicensed hostels, not people renting out spare rooms. I wouldn't be surprised if a good number were affiliated with organized-crime groups, either, since those are the main operators of unlicensed hotels.

<comment><USER3> > But in NYC, a lot of the AirBnB listings are unlicensed hotels and > unlicensed hostels, not people renting out spare rooms.

Why do you care?

> I wouldn't be surprised if a good number were affiliated with organized- > crime groups, either, since those are the main operators of unlicensed > hotels.

When renting a room is outlawed, only outlaws will rent rooms.

<comment><USER2> On the first part: because unlicensed hotels are generally unsanitary and unsafe to stay at, are often run by shady operators who may rip you off or rob you, and are a nuisance to neighbors. Also, it's essentially misrepresentation, because AirBnB portrays itself as a place where you rent out someone's room from a real person, but then you're actually renting out a room in a fleabag hotel. If I was looking for low-end hotels I wouldn't be on AirBnB!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Services like AirBnB seem interesting, but I'm curious if they pay all the same taxes that hotels do. If hotels are paying to subsidize things like stadiums, but AirBnB can get away with avoiding that, I can see how the hotels would see that as unfair and lobby accordingly.

<comment><USER5> If that were the real problem, the solution would be better enforcement of tax law rather than making the competition flat out illegal.

<comment><USER6> Or better yet, repeal the taxes that force hotel owners to subsidize stadiums, etc., which create the barrier to entry that leads to unlicensed hotels existing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think AirBnB et al need to make it clear that they are attempting to BE the regulatory system. The major argument behind bills like this is that regulation is a nightmare, and it's not an unreasonable one. Unless of course you understand how AirBnB works, and the kind of regulation it provides.

</comment><comment><USER8> So their examples are someone illegally subletting their apartment (find me a Brooklyn waiter whose lease allows subletting) and someone who benefits from the taxed, regulated high hotel prices to by renting their spare room short- term. It's not terribly convincing, noble as the cause might be.

<comment><USER9> The right to sublease is guaranteed by New York's landlord-tenant law.

"A tenant renting a residence pursuant to an existing lease in a dwelling having four or more residential units shall have the right to sublease his premises subject to the written consent of the landlord in advance of the subletting. Such consent shall not be unreasonably withheld."

N.Y.S. Real Property Law, Section 226-b(2)(a).

So that Brooklyn waiter shouldn't be too hard to find.

<comment><USER10> Landlords in NYC are legally entitled to credit-check subtenants, among many other details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A worthwhile cause perhaps, but flagged nonetheless.

<comment><AUTHOR> A whole class of Internet startups, including AirBnb (YC-funded) are affected by this anti-competitive legislation pushed forward by big-money NYC hotel interests.

<comment><USER12> And people who don't want bloody temporary neighbors who have no incentive not to be dicks. Or who are visiting cities and, more often than not, want to party. Who often don't understand what it's like to live in NYC where apartments are right next to each other and just how much sound carries or how much sound they're making; drunk people are not quiet people. Or SF where I live in a nicer building but can still touch my neighbor's house when I stretch my arms out.

If they want to help people do whatever they want with their houses in the country or in suburbs, Airbnb should knock themselves out. But in the city, where they help introduce really obnoxious neighbors, they should go away.

ps -- when I lived in Yorkville, my gf and I paid $3700 for our apartment. If you think I have exactly no tolerance for loud neighbors, well, you're right. That's not even on the high end of middle class housing in that area.

<comment><USER13> I'm going to play devil's advocate here: Would you rather have a hostel open up next door?

<comment><USER12> There will never be a hostel. That's why it's important to go to zoning board meetings / your local planning council. Just skim the meeting notes once a month and if there are new businesses opening near you, read what they are!

In general, there is a place for people to stay and party -- and that's in business districts. Or in hotels that are subject to increased sound insulation requirements and further regulatory requirements requiring noise, with penalties for not enforcing compliance from the guests up to and including loss of licence.

<comment><USER14> I find it funny that Americans that such store in zoning laws.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoin 2015: Ecosystem Grows Despite Price Decline - <AUTHOR> http://www.coindesk.com/state-bitcoin-2015-ecosystem-grows-despite-price-decline/

<comment><USER2> Investors put money in blcokchain technology, not bitcoin.</comment>


NASA Invents a Folding Solar Panel Inspired by Origami - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/09/nasa-invents-folding-solar-panel-inspired-origami/?mbid=social_twitter <comment><USER2> This is a variation on a well-known technique: [http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~sdg/dstruct/wrapping.html](http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~sdg/dstruct/wrapping.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Folding fan -like circular solar panels by ATK were scheduled for NASA's Orion spacecraft, but at least for starters it's instead going to look just like ESA's ATV with four rectangular "fingers", since the service module is ATV- derived.

[http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/mpcv/](http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/mpcv/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Wouldn't it be better to have a motor to spin it open and closed rather than having multiple motors to pull it open?

</comment><comment><USER5> The Miura fold is a simpler way to accomplish this, requiring only a single diagonal force to unfold it.

It's pretty handy for (disposable) maps, too!

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

</comment><comment><USER6> I love combining art and science like this. Here is an article that has a video about the project - [http://news.byu.edu/archive13-nov- origami.aspx](http://news.byu.edu/archive13-nov-origami.aspx)</comment>


Identity and Bank Data of 130M Indians Leaked Online: Report[PDF] #AadhaarFail - <AUTHOR> http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/information-security-practices-of-aadhaar-or-lack-thereof-a-documentation-of-public-availability-of-aadhaar-numbers-with-sensitive-personal-financial-information/at_download/file <comment><AUTHOR> It is 1/10th of India's Population/ #aadhaarEpicFail

</comment><comment><USER2> Interesting topic, but please add [pdf] to the title.

<comment><AUTHOR> Done

<comment><USER2> Thank you, I read through it since then, and it was a well-researched and shocking report about the mismanagement of private data. I'm surprised it didn't get more attention from the privacy-conscious crowd here. Perhaps readers are less likely to directly download a PDF.

The paper might have better exposure/interest if you could find an HTML page/article describing the paper. I would recommend reposting it, I believe it's within forum guidelines, when a relevant article is not noticed, you can repost it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> That's huge.</comment>


Nintendo Takes Down Nintendo Power Collection from Internet Archive - <AUTHOR> http://www.polygon.com/2016/8/8/12405278/nintendo-power-issues-disappear-from-free-online-archive <comment><USER2> Not even remotely surprising. I was hoping to grab a copy before it happened by I didn't get around to it. Oh well.</comment>


Time and Computers [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://seriot.ch/resources/talks_papers/20151022_time_and_computers_softshake.pdf <comment><USER2> Great compilation! I like it.

However I feel that the data and the intelligent life forms on the the internet clouds are getting closer to being "timeless". The computers, data and internet is the creation by humans to move farther away from the non- living, unintelligent things which only exist in present time. Because intelligence is nothing but the extent to which one can exist beyond the present time (in the past and future). The life forms have built such ability through their senses, memory for comparing things across time and controlling the future by triggering forces due to energy dissipation. The unintelligent things remained as passive medium for energy dissipation towards more entropy.

The data clouds take such abilities (senses, memory, controlling force) to next level in both directions of time. In doing that, the "present" looses its significance and makes time-travel possible.

More at [https://medium.com/@vr6/the-species-roaming-the-data- world-4...](https://medium.com/@vr6/the-species-roaming-the-data- world-4c5f1ed10b01)</comment>


FTC Sues Intel for Abuse of Monopoly Power - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748704541004574599791659334798-lMyQjAxMDA5MDEwNjExNDYyWj.html

<comment><AUTHOR> _"The commission also alleges that Intel secretly redesigned key software, known as a compiler, that deliberately stunted the performance of competitors' CPU chips."_

The EU _finally_ drops its antitrust suit against Microsoft, but the FTC seems to want to waste more time and money.

<comment><USER2> The difference is that Microsoft has not actually engaged recently in anticompetitive practices. Some of the concessions they were forced to make in the EU go beyond mere antitrust into the realm of taxing their success under the guise of antitrust protection.

The Intel case is different. Intel _has_ done anticompetitive things. For the sake of we consumers, it's important that they be brought to justice so that they and other companies are less tempted in the future to do what they have done.</comment></comment>


DNA highlights the lasting impacts of a historical African Kingdom - <AUTHOR> https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2019/jan/dna-highlights-lasting-impacts-historical-african-kingdom <comment><AUTHOR> This is the paper in question:

[https://www.pnas.org/content/116/2/593](https://www.pnas.org/content/116/2/593)</comment>


Show HN: I made an elegant SwiftUI timeline - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ThasianX/ElegantTimeline-SwiftUI <comment><USER2> FYI you can use ffmpeg to encode gif as h264/h265 mp4 videos of varying quality or convert to webm which can be played from an img tag, all of which will be orders of magnitude smaller.

Simplest form: ffmpeg -i foo.gif -c:v libx264 -crf 22 foo.mp4

You can vary crf to change the size to quality trade-off.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've replaced most of the gifs with embedded videos. Page loading size is around ~100 mb now

<comment><USER3> That's still _very_ unreasonably large and is going to cause real problems for some users, though not as many (and is still going to be uselessly slow to load for many—much of the world, including where large numbers of developers, even SwiftUI developers, are, doesn't have multi-megabit-per-second speeds). Look, even 20MB is too large. Please, I beg you, just don't put any GIFs on that page: just make it clear that it's a video, e.g. by overlaying a circled play icon on the image and making it a link to the relevant video on YouTube.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very nice!

I know you want to show off the buttery smoothness of your animations, but do you really need to dump >200MBs of gifs on that single page?

Holy laptop fan smoke!

<comment><USER5> Do NOT open this page on mobile. It just consumed all my data plan

<comment><USER6> It consumed my cable internet plan.

<comment><USER7> It consumed me

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Your loading page size is 449.8 MB [1]

Please put that in your title.

[1]: [https://tools.pingdom.com/#5cd8c1fc83000000](https://tools.pingdom.com/#5cd8c1fc83000000)

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't change it but if a mod can, I'd be more than willing to accept that change

<comment><USER3> No, don't put it in the _title_ , just _fix the page_. A page being even 100MB would be wildly unacceptable, let alone 450MB.

The _really_ quick fix is just to replace the images with links to the images. Anything fancier (like replacing them with static images and links to actual _videos_ rather than GIFs) can come later.

Please. I'm not trying to be mean in any way, but words are failing me at just _how bad_ this is. You just _don't do_ this sort of thing. Entirely genuinely, you have probably directly cost at least a dozen people a few dollars with these GIFs, and measurably (sometimes seriously) inconvenienced dozens more for up to a month due to limits reached or approached.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep fixing that right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is based on Moleskine's Timepage app ([https://us.moleskine.com/timepage/p0486](https://us.moleskine.com/timepage/p0486)) if you want to use this on your phone.

(It's mentioned in the README, but thought it was worth calling out.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. check timepage out. it's amazing

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> this looks amazing! (beware on mobile for giant gif size)

SwifUI is a breath of fresh air compared to xcode builder, that giant unmergeable xml and the constraint madness where really clumsy to work with.

<comment><USER11> Are you using it for actual apps in production ?

I'm always very careful whenever apple release new technologies for devs. They promote it heavily but actually nobody uses it inside, and it's up to the community to go through all the bugs.

<comment><USER12> I'm just curious: what are you referring to?

<comment><USER11> Core data and swift itself. I've heard from ex apple workers that some team even use their own uikit-like components (table views, scroll views, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I applaud the attention to detail: many of these things are obvious but finding the time and actually implementing it!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This repo is a nice learning resource, it points out learning objectives for different areas of code with links.

</comment><comment><USER15> Dear Apple, hire this hacker

<comment><USER16> Nah, I wouldn't want them to trust a "developer" who dumps half a gigabyte of GIFs on a webpage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looks great!</comment>


NASA takes cloud computing to Mars - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/nasa-takes-cloud-computing-mars

<comment><USER2> At first I was all "they can't do that, there isn't enough bandwidth and the latency is terrible"! But, oh well, it's just a boring article on how NASA rented cloud servers to do number crunching for the Mars rover. I really hate sensationalistic misleading headlines.</comment>


Attending Conferences as an Introvert - <AUTHOR> https://sourcediving.com/attending-conferences-as-an-introvert-7f85fa422b03 <comment><USER2> I've never been to a conference.

I was interested in an upcoming conference related to some technology I have been working with, so I decided to calculate what it would cost to attend. The fee to attend the conference was not outrageous, but I would have to fly to the location and find lodging for 3 nights.

I decided I could probably do it for about $1,000 if everything went well.

Then I realized that I would probably be able to just watch the videos on youtube afterward. Since I wouldn't know any of the people in attendance and my knowledge of this technology would barely let me converse with experts, it seems like a simple choice.

So if you're hosting a conference, how do you convince people to spend a significant portion of their yearly salary and miss several days of work instead of staying at home?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm at a conference right now. The serendipitous side conversations, the ability to get face to face with vendors and experts (even if it is just you listening to others ask questions) and the ability to sit and focus on learning (as opposed to being distracted by other work) are the primary reasons to attend in meatspace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I just went to a conference in Seattle last week (Deconstruct conf) and literally did not have one conversation the entire time I was at the conference. Between the talks I read a book. Recommended!

<comment><USER4> I don't think this is uncommon. I have attended 1 or 2 conferences every year for the past 15 years or so, and there are always lots of people who want to keep to themselves, spending time between talks reading or working on their laptops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's a wild idea: Why don't we all agree that the "introvert/extrovert" dichotomy is a false one, and that while we all have tendencies, it's also good to step outside our comfort zone a bit.

For those with introverted tendencies, that might mean working on being a bit more outgoing and trying to engage in social settings.

For those with extroverted tendencies, that might mean listening more and talking less, and spending more time alone and becoming comfortable with oneself.

Or, I suppose we could all just label and pigeonhole ourselves so we don't find ourselves uncomfortable and can avoid growing and changing. I guess that's okay, too...

<comment><USER6> > Why don't we all agree that the "introvert/extrovert" dichotomy is a false > one

Because there's scientific evidence strongly suggesting otherwise. That said, the author is using the wrong term. He's talking about social anxiety, not introversion. Introverts at conferences tend to take more of a hit and run approach, like a sprinter, whereas extroverts can socialize for hours, like those damned cross country runners. :)

<comment><USER5> _Because there 's scientific evidence strongly suggesting otherwise._

About this you are mistaken:

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

 _Despite these differences, a meta-analysis of 15 experience sampling studies has suggested that there is a great deal of overlap in the way that extraverts and introverts behave.[33] In these studies, participants used mobile devices to report how extraverted (e.g., bold, talkative, assertive, outgoing) they were acting at multiple times during their daily lives. Fleeson and Gallagher (2009) found that extraverts regularly behave in an introverted way, and introverts regularly behave in an extraverted way. Indeed, there was more within-person variability than between-person variability in extraverted behaviours. The key feature that distinguishes extraverts and introverts was that extraverts tend to act moderately extraverted about 5-10% more often than introverts. From this perspective, extraverts and introverts are not "fundamentally different". Rather, an "extravert" is just someone who acts more extraverted more often, suggesting that extraversion is more about what one "does" than what one "has"._

That article goes on to say:

 _Humans are complex and unique, and because introversion-extraversion varies along a continuum, individuals may have a mixture of both orientations. A person who acts introverted in one situation may act extraverted in another, and people can learn to act in "counterdispositional" ways in certain situations. For example, Brian Little's Free Trait Theory [35][36] suggests that people can take on "Free Traits", behaving in ways that may not be their "first nature", but can strategically advance projects that are important to them. Together, this presents an optimistic view of what extraversion is. Rather than being fixed and stable, individuals vary in their extraverted behaviours across different moments, and can choose to act extraverted to advance important personal projects or even increase their happiness, as mentioned above._

In short: The dichotomy is a false one. To imply anything else is just pop psychological BS, albeit fashionable BS right now.

 _He 's talking about social anxiety, not introversion._

That's a _whole_ other problem, and is considered an anxiety disorder. If it's resulting in career limiting behaviour, it's probably worth therapy, such as CBT, to try and resolve:

[http://socialphobia.org/social-anxiety-disorder- definition-s...](http://socialphobia.org/social-anxiety-disorder-definition- symptoms-treatment-therapy-medications-insight-prognosis)

<comment><USER6> I mean actual scientific evidence, not self-reporting studies which are not in any way scientific or psychological studies, which are almost universally bogus.

Take a look at this article. It goes into specifics about neurochemical pathways and the D4DR gene: [https://musingsonmormonism.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/easily-t...](https://musingsonmormonism.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/easily- the-most-fascintaing-and-illuminating-comparison-of-introversion-and- extroversion-ive-ever-seen/)

> If it's resulting in career limiting behaviour, it's probably worth therapy

Once again, we disagree. I've only seen anxiety disorders get worse through so called "therapy". There are ways to deal with it on your own, which is pretty much your only option anyway, unless you want to take benzos, which will irrevocably screw up your brain chemistry.

<comment><USER5> Hmm, funny, because a little googling on that gene turned up this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine_receptor_D4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine_receptor_D4)

 _Despite early findings of an association between the DRD4 48bp VNTR and novelty seeking (a normal characteristic of exploratory and excitable people),[24][25] a 2008 meta-analysis compared 36 published studies of novelty seeking and the polymorphism and found no effect._

and goes on to say:

 _Novelty-seeking behavior is probably mediated by several genes, and the variance attributable to DRD4 by itself is not particularly large._

All that does is prove my point. If novelty-seeking, which let's all assume is a proxy for extraversion for the moment, is mediated by multiple genes, then of course there will be a spectrum of variation depending on the combination a particular person possesses.

Care to try cherrypicking again? :)

<comment><USER6> You picked the first thing you could find in wikipedia and claim that refutes an article you haven't bothered to read? Who's cherry picking again? Introversion/Extroversion has _nothing_ to do with novelty seeking. Read the article I linked.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but the argumentation in that blog post is that novelty seeking is a proxy for dopamine sensitivity, and dopamine sensitivity may be linked to extraverted/introverted tendencies, hence why that gene study is relevant.

But, as I noted, since multiple genes likely regulate for dopamine sensitivity (not to mention things like sleep, diet, etc), there are many factors which regulate those tendencies, and it's false to claim there's a dichotomy and that people are fixed to one tendency or the other.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down - Old, yet relevant - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/06/29/couchsurfing-deletes-itself-shuts-down/

<comment><USER3> More info from the source. <http://www.couchsurfing.com/crash_page.html>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ran into this old story on TC, just reinforced the point that disaster recovery is not just about careful planning but also about experience. Make sure you periodically, test your backup disaster recovery plan too.

</comment><comment><USER4> Today, at over half a million members with CS2.0, they're more stable, and doing things like using AWS for static picture serving needs. And there are many more people working on keeping it up and running these days :)

</comment><comment><USER5> "...We have retained the professional 'Gold Support Service' of MySQL..."

It is interesting that if MySQL had built-in measures to prevent this kind of disaster, MySQL would have never got any money from them.

That is the problem I see with commercial FOSS: if your product installs easily, runs perfectly, and is easy to use, there is no way to make money.

<comment><USER6> MySQL does have built-in measures to prevent this kind of disaster! They should have enabled binary logging and use that to make low impact backups. They also could have used replication (also built in) to avoid all these problems and have a hot backup.

The only reason they retained the 'Gold Support Service' is because their own database administrators obviously had no idea what they were doing or how to use the software correctly.

There are always companies that will make use of commercial support for FOSS but MySQL will probably never make any money from me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder about the DBAs they hired. It would be interesting to hear about some hiring lessons based on this.

At some point you have to be able to trust people, and unless you are already an expert in that area how do you really know?

</comment><comment><USER8> Besides the tragic (or incompetent?) tech failures, what do folks here think about the founder initially just calling it quits on the community?

Having followed this particular crash-recovery saga unfold and being involved with web 2.0 otherwise, it would be interesting to hear a few thoughts over this: what's the responsibility of the platform provider towards their possibly very engaged community - or is there any?

<comment><USER7> I think it's a difficult dilemma, but ultimately the founders don't owe the community unless people were paying for a service. Firstly, without the founder there would be no community, secondly, their work created and made the community possible. They have to be responsible to themselves, and that might mean taking a break.

If the community wants to remain a community then normally someone else will step up, that's the power of community, it's bigger than just a web site. In the case of couch surfing v2 seems to be going strong.

<comment><USER9> I would hope the founder of a company with a successful community would at least try to pass on the name and membership to community members or other entrepreneurs who would try to continue the community. I'm sure there are plenty of entrepreneurs and businesses who would have been happy to get nothing but the domain name and member list to try to start a new couchsurfing (though it appears that the service came back just fine on its own).

<comment><USER10> CouchSurfing International Inc was registered as a non-profit and is now a charity.

Knowing a bit about it (having been a volunteer for the org) I think the crash was extremely badly handled. For better or worse, many people were relying on the service to find places to stay, connect with people in foreign cities, and so on. Leaving those people high and dry is bad karma. Likewise, users should be encouraged to make "backups" in the form of phone nos, email addresses, etc if the reliability of the site can't be guaranteed.

I think the problem is a classic one in technology. The geeks at the helm are over confident. Their self belief clouds their judgement with regards to backups, failure planning, and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> thank god couchsurfing is back and better than before---i would be dead in europe and south america without it

</comment><comment><USER12> how do you backup and recover your stuff ?

I can't find any prepackaged thing on the web. I'd like to address 2 needs : disaster recovery and point in time recovery.

For now I only dump the database from time to time, but it's far from a real solution, if I loose my whole server it would take quite some time to get its configuration back on track.

<comment><USER13> If it's a *nix system, why not setup a cron job to do it for you? I have a Python script in /etc/cron.daily that performs a mysql-dump, tars it, and uploads it to S3.

For total completeness and peace-of-mind, you could have the script add anything else you need backed up, like your projects or public_html directories, configuration files, etc.

<comment><USER10> Running mysqldump on a database the size of CouchSurfing's is a real problem. It's a resource hog. To properly back up a consistent data image you need to use locking, which prevents writes to your database while the backup is running. That causes downtime on every backup, not ideal.

Likewise, when backing up 100s of GiBs of data, a simple tar gz is not suitable. More sophisticated strategies need to be used when the data becomes that big.

I've found <http://HighScalability.com> to be a great source of information on building scalable applications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Awesome historical lesson. You will know you have built something of value when it becomes much, much bigger than you.

</comment><comment><USER15> This was not the only mismanagement of Couchsurfing. It is a great idea - <USER2> the organisation is a bit authoritarian. Read more at: <http://www.opencouchsurfing.org/>

</comment><comment><USER16> This sucks. When I first heard about CouchSurfing i wrote it down on my list of "Ideas that will change the world". Maybe someone can make a new version and integrate it with Facebook?

<comment><USER17> The story is from 2006. CouchSurfing is alive and well. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is really a sad news, feel sorry for the founder of Couchsurfing . Hope they recover. Best of Luck.

</comment><comment><USER19> Wow, freaky tingles up and down my spine from that last paragraph.</comment>


We need domain ownership proof based authentication - <AUTHOR> https://tautvilas.dpage.io/we-need-domain-ownership-proof-based-authentication <comment><USER2> DNS.live does this for its free web and DNS hosting [1]. All you need to do is sign any post/api call with the private key associated with the address in control of your handshake tld.

An example is on github [2][3].

[1] [https://dns.live/hosting.html](https://dns.live/hosting.html)

[2] Server: [https://github.com/dnslive/dnslive- webserv](https://github.com/dnslive/dnslive-webserv)

[3] Client: [https://github.com/dnslive/dnslive- webhost](https://github.com/dnslive/dnslive-webhost)

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a cool concept. I wish more web platforms would offer similar options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There is IndieAuth, which adapts OAuth 2 to work with URLs as identities (and being OAuth, can even do authorization): [https://aaronparecki.com/2018/07/07/7/oauth-for-the-open- web](https://aaronparecki.com/2018/07/07/7/oauth-for-the-open-web)

[https://indieauth.net/](https://indieauth.net/)

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem with OAuth - it is too complicated. Both for developers and for users.

<comment><USER3> OAuth 1 I'd agree with that statement (it's use of crypto gave it more pitfalls), but basic OAuth 2 is really not that bad. It's a few fairly straight-forward HTTP requests.</comment></comment></comment>


Deschooling Society - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society <comment><USER2> This is pertinent (Illich is the author of Deschooling Society):

Software Against Humanity? An Illichian perspective on the industrial era of software by Stephen Kell

[https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/srk21/research/talks/...](https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/srk21/research/talks/kell19software- slides.pdf)</comment>


Professional real estate appraisers to Zillow: cease and desist - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070416/071718.shtml

<comment><AUTHOR> It's troubling that it is unlawful to publicize the results of running a regression algorithm on data that is public.

</comment><comment><USER2> April 2007.</comment>


Ryzen 3 Has Rizen – Performant quadcores on a budget - <AUTHOR> http://semiaccurate.com/2017/07/27/amds-ryzen-3-1300x-review/ <comment><USER2> Huh, a $100 quadcore ain't half bad, perhaps I should buy one. Looks like it'd be faster than this first gen Core i5 I'm using. Could probably keep the upgrade sub-$250 for RAM/CPU/Motherboard...

<comment><USER3> What kind of i5 do you have? If its a i5-2500k your only going to gain ~15% to ~20% in performance, I would buy a 1600X or just hold off on upgrading at all.

<comment><USER2> Huh, might end up going for a higher end chip, but I could definitely use that bump in performance! Already got an SSD, optimized kernel and a few other tweaks to get the most out of this chip, but it only goes so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I will possibly upgrade to a Ryzen3 or 5 to my next main home system. The only reason I can see sticking with Intel for now is for Hackintosh.

<comment><USER5> Yea, Idk. Back kn the early APU days I remember hearing that Apple wanted to use AMD's high end mobile APUs, but it fell through due to lack of supply.

<comment><AUTHOR> Referring to [https://www.macrumors.com/2011/11/17/apple-had-late-stage- pr...](https://www.macrumors.com/2011/11/17/apple-had-late-stage-prototypes- of-an-amd-fusion-based-macbook-air/) perchance?</comment></comment></comment>


Sun's NeWS was a mistake, as are all toolkit-in-server windowing systems (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/NeWSWasAMistake <comment><USER2> Reminds me of the classic "Wheel of Reincarnation" paper: "On the Design of Display Processors" [http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer- sutherland...](http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer-sutherland- design-of-display-processors.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Learning about Venture Capital - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
I'm interested in pursuing a venture capital company to try to get some funding for my business idea, but I have a few questions about VC. If you have a link or some reading material that answers my questions, I'd love to read it too.
1. Can you ask a VC company for how much money you need, or do they offer you money based on a valuation?
2. How much control do they have over your business? Do they dictate salaries, compensation, bonuses, who you can hire, what tech you can use, etc? For example, say a company gets like $33 million in VC. What's to stop the CEO from making his salary $5 million a year and then just leaving after a year, regardless of the status of company. I realize most entrepreneurs wouldn't do that out of principle, but can the VC's dictate who is paid what?
3. Or, to counteract that, do they feed you money a month at a time or do they just cut you one big check?
4. What happens if you just totally fail but it was clear it was a legitimate effort? Are there any legal ramifications, or do the VC's cut their losses and each go their separate ways?
5. I already have an incorporated business, so I have that side covered, but the business is literally worth $0 because I haven't sold anything or have anything to sell. Say I wanted to raise $500,000 to build out the idea I have, what % of the company would the VC ask for?
Any other tips others have for raising capital would be extremely appreciated! Thank you! <comment><USER2> I would recommend you check out a few sites like:

<http://www.venturehacks.com> <http://answers.onstartups.com> <http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com>

To answer your questions directly:

1) You generally tell them how much money you are trying to raise (based on your financial projections). The valuation determines what percentage ownership you end up giving up in exchange for the funding. The total amount you end up with is negotiable.

2) The VC takes a percentage ownership of your company, and generally ends up with a seat on your board, Officer salaries are generally determined by the board. As the founder, you usually specify your salary requirements during the fund raising process....an overly large salary is a red flag and could turn investors off. The total amount of control the investors end up with depends on your specific situation.

3) Usually it is done as one big check. However, it may be split up into 'tranches', which are delivered upon meeting certain milestones.

4) Most startups do end up failing, the investors know the risks associated and factor that in their decisions about what companies to fund. If it fails, it fails. The fact that your company is a separate legal entity protects you from personal liability.

5) Generally investors end up taking a 20%-40% ownership stake in your company per round. If you raise multiple rounds, each new investor takes a new slice of the pie.

I would definitely recommend checking out the sites I linked above to get a much more thorough overview of the fundraising process. I would also recommend looking into angel investment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. I'll definitely be checking out those sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Read Mark Suster's blog, cover to cover: <http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/>

Start here: <http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/pitching-a-vc/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, thanks! I have his blog on my RSS list, so I'll check out that article and read from there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Any other tips others have for raising capital would be extremely > appreciated! Thank you!

You really need at least one of the following three things to successfully raise capital:

1\. Traction. 2\. A successful track record. 3\. A personal recommendation from someone the investor respects.

It might be possible to get a small amount of seed funding with just a good idea and a prototype/demo (e.g. Ycombinator).

Also, I cannot recommend venturehacks.com strongly enough.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't have any direct experience, but my understanding is that:

VCs will give an amount that seems appropriate to getting to "the next stage", however that is defined. Their take is determined by the pre-money valuation and the amount given. A web startup might be able to sell 20% of the company for $1 million, implying a $4m pre-money valuation. Biotech startups typically give up 90-95% in order to get $20-40m invested.

VCs will want to know where their money is spent, and generally want the CEO to pay himself $125-175k. Paying the CEO a million, if not vetoed, would quickly ruin the relationship with the VCs, which you do not want to break.

Also, and this cannot be stressed enough: _watch out_ for downright evil terms such as participating preferred and multiple liquidation preferences. VCs usually ask for a 1x liquidation preference, meaning that they take out their investment at par before anyone else gets paid. (This only makes sense, because otherwise you could sell on a down round, liquidating but screwing the VC). However, evil VCs will ask for a multiple. So, on $4m invested, the liquidation preference might be $8 million, meaning that if you sell at $7.5 million, you get nothing. Another evil term is participating preferred, which means that they get an equity-based share _after_ taking the liquidation preference. So if you take $2 million for 40% of your company at 2x with participating preferred, then sell at $8 million, the VC gets $4 million plus 40% of the remainder ($5.6 million) instead of the $3.2 they deserve-- and you, the founders, just got ripped off. These kinds of terms exist because, although there are a lot of great VCs, there are also a lot of silver-spoon entitled shits who actually believe they deserve that sort of thing for the gift of their existence.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I appreciate the insight and showing me what to look out for. I have a good lawyer, so I hope he would have my back with terms like those.</comment></comment>


It's EasySetting Up React and Webpack - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/its-easy-setting-up-react-and-webpack-eb9ecaef5094 <comment><USER2> converting an aurelia project from jspm/esnext to use webpack/typescript with a bunch of plugins/deps like ui-virtualization, d3, bootstrap-datepicker etc. is however not that easy.</comment>


ELuna is a simple library to bind C/C++ and Lua - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/eluna/

<comment><USER2> The sample class (class CPPClass) is unsafe because it doesn't properly implement a copy constructor and operator= (ie make both private).</comment>


Why Facebook Instant Articles Are the Future of the Web - <AUTHOR> http://jasonlbaptiste.com/commentary/why-facebook-instant-articles-are-the-future-of-the-web/

<comment><USER2> I couldn't make it through the article with all the spam popping up for his book or newsletter or whatever else it was I was dismissing.</comment>


Tell HN:  An idea for product "duels" where loser gives company to winner. - <AUTHOR>

The idea is for one startup to challenge another to a "duel".  This would be some sort of officially supervised competition over a short period of time.
For example, it might be who will gain the most active users in a week say.
The loser of the duel must give away their company to the winner.
I think this could be quite a spectator sport -- attracting a lot more interest than typical marketing.
Moreover, it might really benefit sites with user created content, since there would be fewer competitors and hence more traction in each site. <comment><USER2> Let's be clear about one thing: all businesses, even startups, are supposed to generate _profits_. That competition already exists.

So, on it's face, this is a terrible idea. But not hopeless. Maybe it can be turned into a serviceable one if we turn the premise on it's head. Let's instead consider the question: What business activity _would_ benefit from an intense competition conducted over a short duration?

Of the top of my head, what comes to mind is something like a product/service launch marketing campaign. Or perhaps something that has a defined expiration date, like event promotion.

Hmm... the way it could work is that the company whose business it is to adjudicate would solicit Customers requiring the marketing/promotion services. A Customer would be able to specify the rules, duration, judgement criteria and awards. Then the Adjudicator would open the solicitation to the public, and manage the resulting competition on behalf of the Customer.

Marketing/PR/promo companies would come to the Adjudicator's site to view the various Customers solicitations. They can then choose to respond to a solicitation as a Competitor.

That's kind of interesting, at least to me. Similar to another startup I worked on a few years back. So, what would the entrepreneurs setting up the Adjudicator need to do? Setting up a site to enable Customers to enter the actual competition criteria is trivial. There would be two big challenges.

One relates to verifying results. How would one accurately measure the key criteria of the competitions as specified by the Customer (eyeball views/tickets sold/etc), and corresponds them to the correct Competitor? Tricky, but solvable. I have some notions about that. You can probably think of a few ways.

The second has to do with creating lightweight, but binding, legal frameworks to protect the Customers', Competitors', and Adjudicator's interests. Non- trivial, but also solvable.

So, not necessarily a great idea, but definitely better than the original premise.

Thoughts? Ways to improve this idea? Or create a competition out of some other outsource-able business activity that customers would pay for?

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't this already happening? I suppose there's a business opportunity in making a spectacle of startups, but is it something you'd want your new company to endure. There's a lot of investment by founders and early employees in a startup. One slight design advantage could extinguish a business who may later become an incredible corporate machine.

Admittedly I'd be curious about startups that would engage in such an activity. By why not go all out. Have founders wear padded sumo suits and battle on a massive trampoline. The last one standing after a 5 minute duel takes all.

</comment><comment><USER4> Or, you could compete like this: both companies sell products, and make money. Whoever makes the most money 'wins', but those that make more than they spend still get ranked in the credits.

I don't really see the need for any other sort of 'business competition'.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the case with user created content, all companies in some domain could fail because they have split the community for that domain too much.

<comment><USER4> Presumably they won't all fail at exactly the same time, so whoever hangs on long enough wins in that case.</comment></comment></comment>


Passive TCP/IP Geo-Location - <AUTHOR> http://geoloc.foremski.pl/ <comment><USER2> I see the bug. If the ping times are high enough (~250ms) it will happily create circles which exceed the area of earth, and the google maps API will happily draw negative circles which exclude the user's likely location.

Really there should be a max function that shades the entire earth (or ignores it since that result really can't tell you anything).

<comment><USER3> If ping times are over 250ms the user's likely location is China (but could also be online via satellite, or in space). Of course, if the user is in China, Google Maps won't display.

<comment> maz- Eh? RTT between London and Sydney for example is around 300ms and testing that page, I see a 316ms RTT from Singapore (in London).

Theoretical minimum RTT's based on the speed of light for systems on the opposite side of the world is nice and all but doesn't take into account the realities of packet processing on the internet.

<comment><USER3> Yes but speaking statistically, since virtually nobody lives in Australia or London versus China, the user's likely location is China.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I did this a few years ago, a simple tool that pinged places all over the world and calculated where you should be.

This only ever gets as close as your ISP, or perhaps a local routing center if your ISP has multiple (mine has only one in Amsterdam, I live on the other side of the country). This means it's less accurate than your typical GeoIP database.

Edit: I'm no longer sure this is the same. The title mentions "passive", and from another comment I understand that the author meant that you can find someone's location if you are the man in the middle, observing traffic to various places around the world. This is definitely something I had not considered yet!

<comment><USER5> It isn't passive. See lines 64-73 of the code [1]. This seems very similar to what you describe, but rather than you pinging a bunch of places around the world, it has a bunch of places around the world essentially pinging _you_.

If you check the HTML source, it's src'ing scripts from machines around the world (I assume whatever host is being used, the author has spun up a VPN in each of their data centers). Here's an example of one [2]. Each of these sends you a constant value over and over again, and the server side measures the latency, before finally reporting the average round-trip time to you.

[1]: [http://geoloc.foremski.pl/tcpinfo.go](http://geoloc.foremski.pl/tcpinfo.go)

[2]: [http://220.127.116.11/DE_Frankfurt.js](http://184.108.40.206/DE_Frankfurt.js)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > This website demonstrates IP address geo-location by passively measuring > TCP/IP round-trip times of web requests made to a few servers spread around > the world.

I don't get how that could be called passive. This is making your browser issue requests or am I missing something?

<comment><USER7> I believe the author's point was you could determine the location by monitoring other applications and their network calls.

That being said, I highly doubt there are many requests being made to Bangalore, India and this appears to require requests to a wide array of locations all over the world.

<comment><USER4> Aside from the disproportional amount of traffic going to America (I'm from Europe), there was still a significant portion of traffic that went all over the world when I last checked for my private traffic.

Additionally I once made a map of destinations from our school's "security lab" network. This is 30 minutes of traffic: [https://snag.gy/aJqrg2.jpg](https://snag.gy/aJqrg2.jpg)

The map is a modified version of the one generated by Wireshark (circles are proportional to the amount of data going from/to that IP address). It seems to use Maxmind's GeoIP database.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The ping times seem sensible, but I can't work out any correlation between them and the map. Just seems like a random collection of circles...

<comment><USER9> I assume each circle has a radius proportional to the rtt, thus the area in which the circles overlap is roughly where you should be. The limited amount of servers + wide range of rtt gives a massive margin of errors, but this is probably easily improvable through some extra servers and some kind of knn-ish analysis.

<comment><USER10> Well in my case somehow javascript places Singapore circles center to middle of Indian ocean close to Antarctica. San Francisco and Bangalore are in South America.

<comment><USER11> That's not an inclusive circle, it means anything within the circle is _not_ reachable within the RTT reach of ie. Bangalore or Singapore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Delay component of the round trip time contains sum of: 1\. delays in buffer queue 2\. serialization delays 3\. processing delays 4\. propagation delays While propagation delay usually makes up the largest portion, it is not always the case. Furthermore, the routing efficiency varies widely, depending on IX peering and INET upstream arrangements of your ISP. It also helps to know the topology of the underlying physical networks, or at least major POPs.

This is like measuring intensity of the Sun with the naked eye.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think there's a bug in the circle placement. They don't appear to be correct for me. I'm assuming they're supposed to be centred on the locations listed.

<comment><USER14> I though that too at first, but they are correct. It looks like this because these are circles on a globe. The outline of a very big circle around a location is the same as the outline of a small circle around the point on the opposite side of the globe.

Look at the color-tint to find out what is inside and what is outside a circle.

<comment><USER13> Ah yes, I see. My ping times to Singapore are so bad that it looks like a circle over Columbia/Ecuador, ie the other side of the globe, but what looks like a circle is actually what's outside the circle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> While GeoIP databases might be more accurate this method _may_ in some situations provide location information of users behind proxies. lame self- reference, discussion on the topic: [https://deadhacker.com/2011/03/13/predicting-location-of- one...](https://deadhacker.com/2011/03/13/predicting-location-of-one-hop- proxy-users/)

<comment><USER16> Sort of. You measure the latency from the user to the proxy + the proxy to the site, so what you end up with is the approximate location of the proxy and a radius around it where the user could be. But the radius is liable to be 3000 miles, and you can't even assume the user isn't really closer to the proxy than that because the user could be using more than one proxy or anything else that adds fixed network latency (including on purpose to prevent this).

Which is the same problem with using it to determine if the user is "too far" from the server. You can get extra latency (and thus false positives) whenever there is bufferbloat or a lame corporate network that routes traffic from New York to New York via a network appliance in California or similar.

<comment><USER17> Assuming that the user only uses one proxy, you can use GeoIP to get his proxy location, and then if you account for the proxy-webserver distance, you can get a pretty accurate geolocation.

<comment><USER16> > Assuming that the user only uses one proxy, you can use GeoIP to get his > proxy location, and then if you account for the proxy-webserver distance, > you can get a pretty accurate geolocation.

A congested network link can easily add more than 100ms of latency due to buffering. At the speed of light that's thousands of miles.

You can't even say that if the latency between the proxy and the browser is only 10ms then the user is physically close to the proxy, because you don't know if the user is running the browser on a VPS with something like X forwarding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is wildly inaccurate. I'm in the U.S. (not even a southern state) and it thinks I'm somewhere well off the coast of Peru. Perhaps my results are atypical, or there's a rendering problem? Perhaps this could be improved with more servers and a better algorithm for resolving the times?

<comment><USER19> Actually, what it's trying to tell you is that you're _not_ in Peru. If you're 220 ms away from Singapore, you must not be in Columbia, since a speed-of- light transmission would take longer than that to make a round trip.

For me, the most specific fix is provided by New York and San Francisco. Together, they can tell that I'm somewhere in the US, Canada, or Mexico. (But, of course, you could have figured that out from GeoIP.)

<comment><USER18> Ah yes, that makes more sense. Thanks for the help. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Don't forget that this is a proof-of-concept and is not meant to be an reliable solution for you to replace GeoIP with, but rather a concept to play with thoughts.

The first thing that comes to mind would be combining this with peer-to-peer pinging - which if the swarm is big enough could potentially provide a fairly decent geolocation mechanism.

</comment><comment><USER21> Really cool tool.

If he added a few more servers and set a max ping rt it would become a lot more accurate.

And it doesn't really replace geoip, but implemented correctly can be used very affectively for latency based routing (similar to what AWS has).

</comment><comment><USER22> Honestly this does not seem to be a very smart thing to do at all. Your ping times is probably just going to reveal on which coast of US you are on (unless you're speedtest.com or something like that).

If you want city-level accuracy, at least in US, just use geo IP lookup: [https://geoiptool.com/](https://geoiptool.com/) This finds my city perfectly, unlike the link above (which says I'm somewhere on US West coast).

<comment><USER23> How does Geo IP Tool make these predictions? Like, where is the data it's associating my IP with coming from or how are they obtaining it?

<comment><USER24> they start with WHOIS data and add what they can from there to improve accuracy. Quite a few residential ISPs register blocks of IP addresses (subnets) to a city, town, neighborhood, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Little Snitch[1] does a very good job of preventing this sort of attack. Even if they give names to the servers that make me think they're something I want to allow, the time I spend clicking the "Allow" button is well outside the margin of error of the latency measurements. I'm in NYC and the tool places me in Frankfort, Germany.

+1 for Little Snitch.

[1] [https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html](https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html)

<comment><USER26> Yes, I use and love Little Snitch too, but don't you have a rule that says Browser = Allow all?

<comment><USER25> Nope.

It only took me a few days to work out whitelists/blacklists for the sites I use often, i.e. most citicards.com subdomains get an "allow" but cardoffer.citicards.com gets a "deny". On other sites I come across it's usually trivial to whitelist the domains that provide their functionality, and most adservers and tracking servers I've already blocked.

Given browsers are the main place I get tracked, putting an allow all for my browser seems to defeat the purpose.

That said, it was pretty annoying the first few days.

<comment><USER26> I see. I use uBlock Origin for the browser, and Little Snitch for application level connections. Similar strategy though, starting with deny all, and gradually building a whitelist to get sites functional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have a question about geolocation when using Google Compute. All of the geolocation services identify my server as US based, when in fact it is located in asia (ping and traceroute reveals).

Was wondering perhaps HN big heads can explain it to me:) I suspect it is somehow related to how Google operates its SDN and that IP is assigned to massive AS block.

Nevertheless, I think there is a decent performance risk when CDNs serve from US based cache rather than local.

<comment><USER28> GeoIP databases work based on the _owner_ of the IP address. The owner can cooperate with a geoip database and provide more granular locations for the blocks they use. Others, like Google apparently, don't and as such, you'll show up as the registered address for the allocated block.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Nice idea. Digitalocean's Singapore routing seems a bit terrible. From Perth I get 50ms to a hop in Singapore (aarnet), but the endpoint is >100ms!

</comment><comment><USER30> Seems a bit off for me in Virginia, USA.

[http://imgur.com/TblQSSu](http://imgur.com/TblQSSu)

<comment><USER31> Looks about right, the circle around Columbia is not shaded inside - that is, the center of the circle is on the other side of globe. So Virginia lies in the most heavily shaded region.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Smart, but I don't know how granular you could get unless you had known servers at every possible datacenter.

<comment><USER11> Just use a CDN with decent edge coverage. I'm sure those results can be improved drastically.

<comment><USER10> You did notice that the backend code is Go code snippet that needs to run at the end points?

<comment><USER11> So? I'm sure some CDN out there allow you to run your own code, hence it could be more granular (as OP was interested in).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've created slightly improved version here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11993451](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11993451)

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm not impressed so far. The demonstrator on the linked page found out that I live... somewhere in Europe.

You could get a more precise location by simply reverse-DNSsing my IP address.

</comment><comment><USER35> Works for me! Correctly identified my location as Germany.

</comment><comment><USER36> my result: [https://snag.gy/4X5ZyN.jpg](https://snag.gy/4X5ZyN.jpg)

<comment><USER37> I think that means you're in Europe.

<comment><USER36> I am. How do you see this?

<comment><USER28> The circle around the Indian Ocean, and the 2 near/over South America are inverted. _Inside_ the circle is where you aren't. As such Europe is the place where all circles overlap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Tried with Tor. Not even close.

</comment><comment><USER39> Am I looking at the area in which the majority of circles intersect, a la Venn?

<comment><USER10> Intersect? In my case they intersect in a weird way: [http://i.imgur.com/eFqyCEq.png](http://i.imgur.com/eFqyCEq.png) Those circle centres don't even look right.

<comment><USER40> It's obvious. You are either in the Pacific Ocean or the Atlantic Ocean!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> So it approximated me being in Frankfurt. Not bad, just about 100 miles away.

</comment><comment><USER42> Not very accurate - got my location incorrect by over 10000 km.

</comment><comment><USER43> I apparently live in the middle of the Caribbean. Ha. I wish.

</comment><comment><USER44> earlier it had me in California/Oregon.

now it shows me in Ecuador?

i am actually on west coast canada

</comment><comment><USER45> it even doesn't show a continent properly where I am .

</comment><comment><USER46> Only works if JavaScript is allowed by default.

<comment><USER47> The demo, yes. The attack, no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> this puts me in one of about 6 locations in the world each with an accuracy of several thousand kilometers. probably because i suffer from quite unpleasant packet loss. but not convinced it works.

<comment><USER49> Some of the circles are inverse circles. I thought it was inaccurate at first too, until I realized the India result was telling me "you're NOT in Peru".

<comment><USER48> Just done it from the office. I'm definitely "not" in the ocean. [http://i64.tinypic.com/28ujms7.png](http://i64.tinypic.com/28ujms7.png)

<comment><USER49> Lol! Looks like this is saying:

Green: Not in the Indian Ocean.

Blue: Not in the Pacific near Ecuador.

Yellow: Not in the Southern hemisphere.

Red: Somewhere in Europe, Greenland, North Africa, or Svalbard.

In your case, the red circle is the only one that really matters. Yellow took a tiny slice out of it near Iraq.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Proceedings of Recent Workshop on Plan 9 - <AUTHOR> http://iwp9.org/proceedings.pdf

<comment><USER2> Fetching this PDF is a bit problematic right now, so have a mirror:

<http://www.mediafire.com/view/?qyx13hkdvt0e594>

</comment><comment><USER3> cached version of the front page in case the server is still busy:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gf2cpz0...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gf2cpz0DFYAJ:7e.iwp9.org/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=firefox- nightly)

pdf fails to load entirely as for now.</comment>


Jason, time to get out of the tub - <AUTHOR> http://www.texasstartupblog.com/2009/09/18/jason-time-to-get-out-of-the-tub/

<comment><USER2> The post on 37signals the linked post refers to is discussed on HN directly at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=829502> with over 190 comments currently.</comment>


Texas Hold'em Hand Strength, Visualized - <AUTHOR> http://chrisbeaumont.org/holdem_odds/#8H+QS <comment><USER2> Looks like you used heads up hand strengths, and then full-table hand frequencies, and computed weighted hand strenghts based on that--which is a mistake, of course.

<comment><USER3> I'd love to do this with play-raise-fold frequencies by number of people at table. Are there relatively untainted public poker hand datasets? WSOP tournament data maybe?

<comment><USER2> You can buy huge databases from other players, yes. They're full data sets, not "tainted," and have far more hands than have ever been played in the WSOP.

It's considered bad form in the poker world, and generally against site TOS, if you're a player using the data to have a read on a player before you've ever played him.

If you're just doing research, nobody cares at all. They might even give you the datasets, if they actually believe you. Or perhaps if you let them anonymize them?

<comment><USER4> Unless I've misunderstood you, it's really not considered bad form at all. It's considered pretty standard amongst professional poker players that most everyone (at least the professionals) are all using some form of HUD (heads-up display) that will overlay stats next to each opponent's name, detailing all sorts of useful information about the player's tendencies. It's almost mandatory to use a HUD if you like to multi-table more than 4 tables at once.

<comment><USER5> Collecting and mining hands you play\see is fine but its the buying and selling of other people's datasets that is bad form / banned. In the small circles of nose-bleed games, it is resembles collusion when a team shares data to undermine a single target across a set of games.

<comment><USER4> It's still pretty standard to mine hands that you didn't personally participate in. Lots of players mine nonstop. You're right that you're probably crossing the line when you buy/share other people's datasets, as you'll get information that your opponent can't possibly get without also sharing/buying datasets. That being said, of the nose-bleed players I personally knew it was still the norm to share data with your friends. I think at that level you just have to assume that all of your previously played hands are visible to all your opponents and adjust accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't mean to be OT, but does anybody play online anymore? I paid my (cheap) rent in college playing on FullTilt and PokerStars, but the (unreasonable) gov't crackdown seems to have put an end to online play. Or is there a secret I'm not in on?

<comment><USER7> Seals With Clubs. Deposit bitcoin. Play with bitcoin. Withdraw bitcoin. Probably not legal in the U.S. but it's a great site (and they don't check your IP origin afaik, though you could probably get in with TOR or a proxy anyway).

<comment><USER8> Seals With Clubs shut down three days ago: [http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/news-views- gossip/seals...](http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/news-views-gossip/seals- clubs-shutting-down-1512542/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Repost of my reddit rant about UX issues in this visualization:

This is interesting, but the layout is pretty confusing for somebody who studies poker.

Every other hand chart has AA in the top left, like these from Poker Stove: [http://i.imgur.com/cvgvh.png](http://i.imgur.com/cvgvh.png)

Also, yours have duplicate information. As2d and 2dAs are both displayed, when in fact they are equal in poker. Most charts split up suited and offsuit hands, like the ones above or this one from Equilab which lists out every combo separately like you do: [http://i.imgur.com/BqS1iht.png](http://i.imgur.com/BqS1iht.png)

Your input format is also confusing. On your site, users have to type '6C 6D' but everywhere else on the internet, that would be written '6c6d'

<comment><USER10> OP here. Your points about the convention for lowercase and aces on the upper- left are fair. However, the duplicated information in these grids was intentional. I was less interested in building a standard suited/off suited odds table (those are readily available) or a strategy tool, and more interested in a visually clear way to explore the "probability landscape". I find these grids with duplicate information easier to grasp on first viewing. I also like seeing how subtle suit-based patterns in panel 1 cancel out when you average all slices into panel 2. You can't show that unless you retain all suit information

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This doesn't consider the post-flop strategy though. Since heads-up limit holdem has been solved, it would be interesting to look at the EV of the hand with the optimal play. I would think hands like 22 should have been weaker than show down value suggested..

<comment><USER12> _weakly_ solved. What was shown is essentially a optimal solution _for playing against itself_. Not an abitrary villain of unknown tendencies.

Besides, limit is dead.

<comment><USER2> This is mostly untrue, to my understanding.

It was not solved to maximally exploit a bad villain, but it was solved to be unexploitable, and therefore unbeatable.

It would make mountains of chips vs 99%+ of players, probably at 80%+ of the possible rate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It reminds me the "Temperature Maps" by Sho Sengoku in backgammon [1]. For a given move, it syntheses the equities (somehow probability of winning) for each possible dice roll of the opponent on next turn. It allows among other thing to see how dependent of luck you be after a move (by looking at the contrast between squares).

[1] [http://www.bkgm.com/articles/Sengoku/TemperatureMap/index.ht...](http://www.bkgm.com/articles/Sengoku/TemperatureMap/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> Fascinating. I've seen a few remarkable showdowns between AQ and KK, I never would have guessed the odds were quite so tilted in KK's favour.

<comment><USER15> AQ vs KK is no different than A10 or AJ vs KK. Even middling Aces like A7 or A8 aren't much worse off because of the lost straight possibilities due to two K's being taken.

I haven't looked at the numbers but I would bet that A2-A5 are better off against KK than AQ.

<comment><USER16> The numbers have arrived -- thanks to www.sliceeq.com -- and your hunch is right. After 100,000 Monte Carlo simulations, Slice declares that winning odds are as follows

KK (70.9%) vs AQsuited or AQoffsuit (29.1%)

KK (69.2%) vs A5suited or A5offsuit (30.8%)

The reason why the seemingly inferior hand of A5 does better is that it has about a 4.6% chance of making a straight. (Usually A2345, but conceivably something else) The AQ hand has only about a 2.7% chance of making a straight, because the deck is depleted of Kings, making the desired AKQJT straight hard to catch.

In general, Slice is a wonderful -- and free -- tool for testing various hand outcomes, particularly against likely ranges that an opponent might have.

NOTE: The simulation percentages above will vary slightly each time Slice goes hunting for 100,000 random hands. But the disparity between AQ and A5 generally is somewhere between 1.5 and 2 percentage points.

<comment><USER17> Additionally, if AQ has made a straight with a K, KK now has a redraw to a full house. If the flop was KJT, KK still has a 34% chance to win the hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I enjoyed this analysis, I went through something similar when designing a bridge hand 'strength' estimator as part of an automated bidding program. I'm going to have to go back and see if I can borrow some of these ideas :-)

</comment><comment><USER19> I thougt that a 2 and a 7 were the worst, but here a 2 and 3 has -35.4% win%-lose% while 2 and 7 has a slightly better -30.8% win%-lose% (second diagram). Any idea what the difference is?

<comment><USER20> Not a poker expert by far, but this could be because 2/3 can only participate in three straight draws (A2345,23456,34567) whereas 2/7 can be in seven straight hands. (A2345, 23456, 34567, 45678, 56789, 6789T, 789TJ)

<comment><USER2> Suffice it to say that no, that's not the reason.

The reason is entirely high-card strength vs all the hands including cards less than 7, like 65, 64, etc.

EDIT: And the value of pairing the 7 vs pairing the 3, again where high card strength matters--6X pairing the 6 won't matter as often.

Given there's only two hands, they are somewhat likely to showdown unimproved, not making a pair or better. If you analyzed ten handed tables, 2-7 fares the worst.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: ScreenToVideo – Powerful screen recorder and video editor - <AUTHOR> https://screentovideo.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! I hope you're doing well.

We built ScreenToVideo as an intuitive tool for everybody wanting to create a video presentation in just a few steps (Record, Edit, Share), without dealing with multiple complex applications.

New features are added regularly and components are redesigned to provide the most utility with the least complexity.

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Please take a look and share your thoughts with us. What do you like about it? What would you like S2V to solve for you?</comment>


The PS4 That Might Have Been - <AUTHOR> http://a1.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-ps4-that-might-have-been.html

<comment><USER2> Definitely a creative hypothesis!

In that whole analysis though, there's no mention of fun. In today's world of indie games, we're being constantly reminded fun != more power. It's orthogonal.</comment>