Browse man pages in style with your personal manservant - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jimeh/manservant

<comment><USER2> Looks pretty -- but the great thing about man is that it runs right there within the terminal. Switching to a GUI browser is a big mode shift and comes with all sorts of distraction. Using a terminal browser like links is probably pretty clunky.

<comment><USER3> Running in the terminal is the biggest advantage - moreover the terminal man- pages allow forward and backward search with vi-shortcuts, which makes searching them really easy and fast.

<comment><USER2> The biggest improvement the web interface offers seems to be the outline on the right. For long man pages ( _man bash_ , I'm looking at you), that could be very useful. Anyway to do that in regular man?

<comment><USER4>
        info bash

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I believe html manpages are built in to most Linux distros' default apache install (or at least easy to set up).

<http://localhost/cgi-bin/man/man2html>

At least on Ubuntu, after apt-get install apache2, the URL above works.

<comment><USER6> 404 for me on Debian Wheezy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Back in the day, there was xman: <http://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/man/man1/xman.1.html>

</comment><comment><USER8> What I'd like is something like this that would also try and gather up stuff from info and /usr/share/doc/PROGRAM/ or whereever it is on the current system and possibly even online docs and try to present them in a reasonably consistent fashion, or at least have it all accessible in one place. But that's a little more ambitious. Also it'd have a terminal program that was a shortcut to remote open a tab in your browser and focus it. The latter would be nice for this.

</comment><comment><USER9> tengo hambre</comment>


SETI@home shuts down after 21 years - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/seti-home-search-for-alien-life-project-shuts-down-after-21-years/ <comment><USER2> Back then, I was quite young. Around 2002.

We were like 5 boys getting into overclocking. For our SETI team, the "Bücki crunching connection", from my small hometown in Germany.

I just tried to find an old screenshot from back in the day, and wow I found one, from 2002:

[https://imgur.com/a/L5Q5PMR](https://imgur.com/a/L5Q5PMR)

So funny, it is all there: ICQ, mIRC; an icon to launch Quake III. And some SETI crunching stats. In Internet Explorer.

Seemingly we were actually crunching under one account for the team OC-CARD.de ([http://www.setiatwork.com/team/teamstats.cgi?teamid=30308](http://www.setiatwork.com/team/teamstats.cgi?teamid=30308))

You might have done the same, but I am still sharing this because this has influenced me a lot:

I bought an AMD Duron, some arctic silver heat paste. I took a lead pencil to connect some dots on the CPU to unlock the multiplier freely, got a freaking heat sink, and overclocked the hell out of the Duron. I needed to hide this from my parents, but of course the plan was to crunch 24/7.

I found another screenshot, the file is called "firstname.lastname@example.com". Looks like I knew what I was doing:

[https://imgur.com/a/eG9nmdO](https://imgur.com/a/eG9nmdO)

Edit: looks like our team (OC-CARD.de) was actually among the top 200 of all SETI teams. Wow, yeah there were some serious people in the team, like "Butcho", ranking in the top 1000 of individuals. No idea who that guy was and where he got the compute resources from. That's the romantic part of that Internet era.

Edit2: turned this into a very quick blog post to properly archive my own memory here: [https://gehrcke.de/2020/03/setihome- hibernation/](https://gehrcke.de/2020/03/setihome-hibernation/)

<comment><USER3> Oh man those screenshots really are a throwback:

\- [x] Quake <3

\- [x] Classic windows UI; custom scheme

\- [x] Double height task bar

\- [x] ICQ & mIRC for all your communications needs; I'll give you a pass for Outlook when there were clearly "better" alternatives like Pegasus ;o)

\- [x] Broken icon in taskbar launcher area

I'm loving it, thanks for sharing!

<comment><USER4> Was about to write the same :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I ran it on the weekend once on the queue at Disney animation, maybe a hundred CPUs on SGI Origins. Went from zero to top ten-ish percentile in a half hour or so. Good times until I got a stern talking to by some systems guy.

<comment><USER6> Yeah. You wouldn't believe the number of idiots that went around covertly attempting to run this (and similar) on the production Unix servers of their employer.

Saying that as the lead Solaris SysAdmin for a large telco project a few decades ago, with one manager in particular who repeatedly kept on firing it up on the main (high end SunFire) billing cluster servers. Even when expressly told not to. That guy was a f*cking moron. :(

<comment><USER7> Prolly he really wanted to find out that we're not alone in the universe.

Sucks to know we're alone and no one has reached out.

<comment><USER8> SETI was probably only ever going to catch an intentional transmission it's far from proof we're alone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In case anyone reads the headline and thinks that the SETI research center itself is shutting down, or that the project failed in some way:

> "It's a lot of work for us to manage the distributed processing of data. We > need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already > have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper," their news > announcement stated.

Maybe it's PR speak, but it does make sense to me that there'd be a point of diminishing returns where enough data has been processed.

<comment><USER10> They've already completed construction of the ansible, the design of which was decoded several years ago.

<comment><USER11> Thank you for making me laugh at loud while making breakfast

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I remember being a younger pup and building fleets of machines (including overclocking, etc) for the sole purpose of running S@H, and all of the amazing software the spun up around it... SetiSpy, SetiDriver, SetiQ. I often wonder how machines of today would compare in work production to my old Duron 800, but alas.

<comment><USER13> > Duron

Now there's a name I haven't heard in a while. Duron, the poorerer man's Celeron.

<comment><USER14> Celeron 300A, the relative poorer man's Pentium

<comment><USER15> Weren't they also supported by the Abit BP6 motherboard, letting you use two of them as poorer man's Xeons?

<comment><USER16> Indeed they were. I had that exact setup. Overclocked the hell out of them. Unlike the 550 MHz someone else suggested, I'm 97.6% sure I only had them clocked at 450 MHz.

<comment><USER17> Yup, dual 450 celery was my gaaaangster setup at my silly startup :)

<comment><USER18> Dual celery story: Me being around 14, not allowed to build my own PC, but I got to spec it, I ordered dual CPU's. The company put in a dual slot 1 motherboard, and then two celerons in slot1 adapters.. that didn't support SMP. After complaining for a while, they traded the two celerons and adapters for a single P3 (I think I was being had). It took a year or two before I was able to afford the second P3. I still hold a grudge towards that particular computer shop, or I would, hadn't they gone out of biz. I did run a lot of SETI@home on that P3, it earned me my first two certificates :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not to sound like a broken record (I and others have said this or similar on these kinds of threads) but... I, personally, have become convinced that looking for signals this way is actually pointless.

The argument is basically this:

1\. Within 1000 years (and maybe a lot less) we will have the engineering capability to build space habitats, powered by solar power. This last part is important because this thought experiment isn't gated on commercial viability of nuclear fusion power, which I'm not yet convinced is possible.

2\. These space habitats are far more efficient at creating living area than planets. I forget the exact numbers but something like 1% of the mass of Mercury is enough to create enough living area for something like 10^16 to 10^18 people.

3\. Space habitats are more convenient and cheaper to move between than leaving or even entering a gravity well like Earth's.

4\. Roughly one billionth of the Sun's energy hits the Earth.

5\. Once you have the ability to create one of these things, each becomes progressively easier.

This, of course, is the classic Dyson Swarm. Originally this was called a Dyson Sphere but this has led some to think it's a solid shell around a star. That was never the intent. Even if it was, no known or currently theorized material could support this.

Dyson Swarms are not subtle. Even a partial Dyson Swarm should be detectable as a large IR source compared to how much visible light is produced. This is because the only way for something in space to cool down is to radiate that heat away and physics determines the wavelength of that based on the temperature of the object.

Standard objection: what if you can recycle that heat? Well, you can't do that perfectly (as this would violate Thermodynamics) and even if you reduce IR emissions by 90%, you've simply reduced the IR emissions by one order of magnitude. For comparison, the Sun produces roughly 4x10^26 Watts of power.

So if you accept the above premises the gap between stabbing each other with swords and having this technology, at least for us, is 1000-2000 years, a cosmic blink of an eye to produce signals without the above IR signature. Those are long odds.

Personally I subscribe to the view that technological life is, at least within a billion light years of us, is likely quite rare.

The above is a very superficial summary of a topic that Isaac Arthur's channel goes into great depth about. I guarantee you any objection you have has at least one video that goes into that in great depth.

<comment><USER20> That's a fascinating comment, thank you.

I personally suspect the engineering challenges might pale next to the challenges of political organization.

Quite simply, the continued human expertise and organization necessary to manage and sustain such a system is far, far beyond anything we have today.

We can't even manage to globally reduce CO2, and the recent government responses to coronavirus have led a lot to be desired, to say the least.

Just because you put people up in space habitats doesn't mean they become any less power-hungry, any more cooperative, or any more peaceful.

You say we'll have the engineering in 1,000 years, and I could buy that. But read Aristotle's _Politics_ from 2,400 years ago, which is concerned mainly with political stability and revolution, and he might as well be describing people today.

I'd like to see us manage "spaceship earth" a helluva lot better before I have even the remotest faith we could manage space habitats _politically_. Heck, we couldn't even manage Biosphere 2, remember?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2)

<comment><USER19> > Quite simply, the continued human expertise and organization necessary to > manage and sustain such a system is far, far beyond anything we have today.

I get your concern but the differences are significant.

1\. Habitats are mobile. If you don't like the neighbours you can up and move, something not possible with geography on Earth;

2\. Land area is essentially infinite, not so on Earth.

> We can't even manage to globally reduce CO2

On the contrary, excessive CO2 is, at least in some context, a remarkably simple problem. We can extract CO2 from the atmosphere and make fuel. It just doesn't make any sense to do it because we need to burn fossil fuels to power the process.

So all we really need is a power source that's cheaper than fossil fuels. There are two obvious contenders for this:

1\. Solar power. Estimates I've seen are that an orbital collector can be about 7 times as efficient as current Earth-based solar collectors.

2\. Fusion power. Personally I'm not yet convinced if hydrogen fusion is viable. There are of course other proposals. We shall see.

You'll note that I don't include fission. It's an unpopular opinion on HN but until we have a good story for fuel and waste processing then this is a nonstarter.

<comment><USER21> > but until we have a good story for fuel and waste processing then this is a > nonstarter.

Waste processing in space? Just give it a slight push in the direction of the sun (or whatever the right direction is taking in consideration gravity) and forget about it.

<comment><USER22> > a slight push in the direction of the sun

That's not how orbital dynamics work; a slight push in any direction won't change the orbit enough for that thing to not be a problem anymore.

To make something fall into the sun, one needs quite a bit of delta-vee, which means energy. However, if the thing isn't in any hurry (and I imagine waste isn't), one can simply attach a solar sail with a tiny computer for steering it, and let it brake for the next few thousand years.

(Kerbal Space Program should be part of school curricula)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Seems a bit misleading, they're not distributing more work units, not closing the research center. Nonetheless, this is sad news to me. My entire career path in the tech world was because I got a campus job working for SETI@home.

<comment><USER24> agreed - I think the title should be updated to call out the "app" shuts down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Anectdata: I set up an old computer with this in 2009, but a few months later I heard about this thing called cryptocurrency mining...

EDIT: The article notes that they are reaching a point of diminishing returns with the distributed nature of the SETI@HOME tasks, but I can't help wondering if things like crypto had an impact on participation with this and other @HOME-style academic projects[0].

[0]: [https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php](https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php)

<comment><USER26> I'm not an expert in either this or cryptocurrency, but it always seemed like these two would be a good marriage of technologies rather than having crypto mining rigs waste resources on unproductive proof of work algorithms. Does anyone know why that wasn't feasible or didn't catch on?

<comment><USER27> Proof of work relies on computations that are hard to do but easy to check that someone has done. The entire network has to check someone's proposed result. There are very few computations that have sufficient asymmetry to the degree needed to make bitcoin work, and the types of things that SETI@home needs don't fit that bill.

<comment><USER28> Isn't Folding@Home trying to run an asymmetrical computation, though? The broad strokes as I understand them are that you have a sequence of amines, you arrange them into a three-dimensional protein (the hard part) by whatever method, and then you evaluate the energy bound within your structure (the easier part?). Lower energy is better.

The obvious problem is that there's no judgment of "correct" or "incorrect". Analogizing to a bitcoin proof-of-work, it would be as if a hash beginning with more zeroes always outranked a hash beginning with fewer zeroes, but there was no way to know whether your hash started with "enough" zeroes or not.

<comment><USER29> Protein folding might work as a proof-of-work algorithm. One big problem is of course that it's useful work that could conceivably be monetized.

Proof-of-work works because a theoretical attacker would have to invest huge resources into an attack. For bitcoin it's trivial to say "for attack scenario X an attack has to spend at least Y", and as long as the expected reward is lower than Y the network is safe (that's for example one factor you use to determine how many confirmations you wait before accepting a payment). If the attacker could conceivably gain money outside the cryptocurrency for performing the proof-of-work, that makes the whole calculation less predictable, and likely exposes you to more situations where an attack is actually profitable.

<comment><USER30> Isn't "maybe I can monetize this protein" less of a sure bet than "I can rewrite these transactions" ?

<comment><USER31> An attack on proof-of-work wouldn't let you rewrite arbitrary transactions. At most an attacker could exclude certain recent transactions—most likely their own—reverting payments which were previously deemed "complete" and replacing them with conflicting transactions. All transactions still need to be signed with the proper keys, however, so the attacker can't just lay claim to others' coins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Just the other day I saw a post about the current status [0] of the Voyager probes, the farthest man-made objects that we have sent out so far. [1]

It made me wonder about the possibility of an alien species discovering them. Probably infinitesimal, barring divine intervention. I mean, what are the chances of _us_ stumbling upon similar probes sent out by another species who had no idea we were here? Do we even have the tech to detect something so _small_ entering our solar system, even if it were to pass close to Earth?

[0] [https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/](https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/)

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

</comment><comment><USER33> I have wondered about folding@home as well, another distributed project begun in another age that seems not, from the outside, to have lived up to its early hype. In the meantime, it seems that Alphafold has surpassed conventional efforts at understanding protein folding, including folding@home's. [https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold- casp...](https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-casp13-what- just-happened/)

<comment><USER34> The two approaches aren't directly comparable. Alphafold predicts the optimum structure for a sequence, while folding@home explores protein dynamics (how a protein's structure changes over time).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I can remember my high school science teacher sometime between 2001-2002 telling us about this project and you'd see this running on his computer any time he wasn't using it.

I always wondered what came out of it and how cool it felt to feel like you could, as an individual, help support something massive by doing something so small.

<comment><USER36> >>I always wondered what came out of it and how cool it felt to feel like you could, as an individual, help support something massive by doing something so small.

You can still participate in Folding@Home, which in my opinion is a far more worthy pursuit - actual medical science came out of it and more is still being produced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I had the brilliant experience of visiting the Allen Telescope Array and meeting Jill and her husband before the announcement of their $100MM donation a few years ago. I have to say that it is an incredibly lean operation ran by the smartest people I've ever met. The @HOME project was more about being able to help handle throughput they would've otherwise just had to dump. I think it makes sense to sit back and spend time reevaluating what's been collected such that the filters can be evolved into something more efficient. I don't think they've spent time seriously trying to apply AI, yet. I'd be eager to hear their opinions on the subject.

</comment><comment><USER38> There was a promise at the time (still active, I'm sure) that if your computer discovered a signal from ET, you would be listed as co-discoverer of alien life. I still remember watching the screensaver crunch through work units with the tiny but real hope that the data on my computer had that signal.

Even at the time, the prize seemed a little unearned, since all you had to do was click through an installer. But it was still an incentive. Probably the greatest lottery prize that's ever been offered.

<comment><USER39> I don't think the discovery was required to be ET. I think that if the blip your system discovered was anything significant (pulsar or something), you'd get the credit. It was after all your machine and electricity that you paid for to do the discovery. It was the precursor to crypto proof of work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I worked in a debt collection center where all the call center people used Linux workstations running wy60 terminals and a custom check viewer I wrote in Java (had to reverse engineer our vendors that I did get working in Wine, but it crashed a lot).

Installations and updates were automated. After getting the company logo and xplanet in the background, I got permission to put SETI@Home and FOLDING@Home on the machines (I think I did half and half). After all the machines were barely doing anything other than terminals and rendering TIFFs. Our company name was listed as the team.

Looks like the stats are off line for SETI@Home teams .. wonder how much that cluster kept contributing after I left.

</comment><comment><USER41> Ah, good memories of being temporarily banned in the EE labs at UT Austin for running set@home on a bunch of the unix boxes. Must have been around 2000.

<comment><USER42> I got chewed out at my workplace around 1999 or so. We had a couple hundred SUN workstations on the network and anyone could run commands remotely on any workstation. So I set up a cron job to spawn SETI@home jobs on every workstation every night at 9pm, shutting them down at 6am the next morning.

I was way up there in the rankings for a while, until the sysadmins started investigating the strange traffic patterns...

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I had just left Berkeley when this was released. I remember installing it on every computer I had access to, which was a lot, because I was in IT at a startup so I could put it on every desktop we had. And every server we had (but of course at nice 19, until management found out).

For a while we were in the top 10, until much bigger companies got in on it.

Kinda sad to see it shut down, but to be fair, I haven't run it in years.

</comment><comment><USER44> End of an era for sure. But then there is this I guess: Something in Deep Space Is Sending Signals to Earth in Steady 16-Day Cycles: [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxexwz/something-in- deep-...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxexwz/something-in-deep-space- is-sending-signals-to-earth-in-steady-16-day-cycles)

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm a little sad about this. My dad works in computer storage and had access to lots of computers doing nothing. He's now at "just about 11 quintillion flops, 99.12% ranking vs all other users"

</comment><comment><USER46> _" For those who wish to donate their CPU resources, SETI@home suggests users select another BOINC project that also supports distributed computing."_

[https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php](https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php)

I loved the concept of SETI@home and ran it on a bunch of computers at my university when I was a student.

<comment><USER47> I just bought a powerful mac mini, but due to other projects arising, it sits idle. I am curious if anyone has suggestions.

I looked through a dozen or so BOINC projects, but they all seem dead. The amicable pairs project had some 2020 results and activity in its forum, but I couldn't draw a line to any practical goal.

That said, maybe the sorts of projects that have practical outcomes don't need to rely on the computing power of strangers.

<comment><USER48> Rosetta@Home seems pretty alive : [https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=13533](https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=13533)

<comment><USER49> "Distributed computing project, Rosetta@Home, is using the BOINC infrastructure to model covid-19 proteins that may be drug targets. " \- [https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/f5as77/distributed...](https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/f5as77/distributed_computing_project_rosettahome_is/)

I have run BOINC on my own computers for about 20 years. I really like it because it always properly steps out of the way whenever the computer is being used for something else (including config to do that when simply other processes need more resource), and because it's cross-platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> "The owner of this website (www.bleepingcomputer.com) has banned the autonomous system number (ASN) your IP address is in (20473) from accessing this website." \- thanks, owner...

</comment><comment><USER51> Ah the excitement of seeing those lines trace across my old Mac's screen in the 1990s. Would _I_ be the one to find the pulse?

... no

</comment><comment><USER52> Did SETI@home accomplish anything useful with its 21 years of computing? Outside of the general "it's always good to do science, even with negative results" which I agree with.

I ran a large cluster of university machines surreptitiously for this project many years ago.

<comment><USER53> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHGb02%2B14a](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHGb02%2B14a)

<comment><USER54> So, is this all they did in 21 years? Funny people don't criticize it for wasting electricity when people complain about how Bitcoin wastes so much which seems like a far more practical utility than SETI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I figured it was basically killed by improved power management. When it started, a lot of computers didn't sleep because they might not wake up.

</comment><comment><USER56> Memories of SETI activity on my family's first desktop computer screensaver and my dad's work laptop.

I don't have much to add other than that this is one of my first memories of computers being useful for the world outside my own.

</comment><comment><USER57> Oh, sad to hear. I remember having SETI@home running on a couple of systems when in idle. Heck, my PS3 had some SETI@home background-task running when not in active use. Good times.

</comment><comment><USER58> Does anyone remember about 18 years ago when some well meaning, but ignorant people got charged with electricity theft crimes for installing distributed.net on their work's PCs?

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2002-01-23/plea- agre...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2002-01-23/plea-agreement-in- distributed-computing-case)

</comment><comment><USER59> We had a well-intended kid at a military facility in the early 2000s who loaded this on every computer he could log into. He genuinely thought he was doing a good thing for the world. Maybe he did. But the military network admins were none to pleased and he got somewhat more than a stern talking-to. Felt genuinely bad for him.

</comment><comment><USER60> Does that mean folding@home is next? I think the screensaver dying out eventually killed it. Also cloud computing.

<comment><USER61> Honestly, I never cared much about SETI@home, always felt like an empty waste of resources. But folding@home or even just training LeelaChess by community really feels like a noble cause I am willing to spend some electricity for.

<comment><USER62> Well, SETI@home would have predated folding@home, so people stuck with what they knew.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> This reminded me of Dreamlab, which is an interesting adaptation of the same idea to mobile phones. [https://www.vodafone.com.au/foundation/dreamlab](https://www.vodafone.com.au/foundation/dreamlab)

</comment><comment><USER64> A lot of nostalgia in this thread but don't be too sad to see it go. It was only ever a waste of energy for everyone involved. If you want to put your extra processor cycles to a good cause, there are much more worthy projects like Folding@home

</comment><comment><USER65> I wonder how much $/co2 of power was spent during the lifetime of the project.

<comment><USER66> This is why I never did it. I remember thinking it was really cool back when I was in high school, but could never justify the electricity use.

<comment><USER67> I ran BOINC in winter; as it's not wasting if you're already using heaters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Man alive. I first ran some SETI@home stuff on my gaming rig in 2001. After a year or two I figured it was wasted energy. Surely they had more efficient rigs helping out than my lowly Unreal 2004 machine, right?

</comment><comment><USER69> If they were smart, they'd just quietly switch to bitcoin mining units.

<comment><USER70> Ahh but we did switch to mining bitcoin. We're just not allowed to tell you about it.

<comment><USER71> Or mining BLE beacons with Nodle.io

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Back in 2000, I was working for a small dotcom startup and I remember we came into work one day to discover that our production servers were all running at a crawl & unable to serve traffic. Turned out that one of the devs had installed seti@home on _all_ our servers (this was before devops was a thing) and it was hogging 90%+ of the cpu. I think he'd installed seti on every machine in the office that he could get access to, even other people's workstations. He was utterly obsessed with the thing.

</comment><comment><USER73> Back when HTC still made cool things, they had an Android app that would let you contribute your phone's idle cycles towards various projects, of which _I think_ SETI was an option.[0] I remember running it my HTC One M7 for awhile.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.htc.ptg&hl...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.htc.ptg&hl=en_US)

</comment><comment><USER74> So, what about the hypothesis that aliens 'released' the concept of crypto currencies on Earth, resulting in that idling computers and whole data centers would start mining bitcoins instead of investigating signals from extra- terrestrial life forms? It'd be a nice plot, trying to hide themselves a bit longer from our search...

</comment><comment><USER75> I wonder what fraction of the work was done in the final year. BOINC capacity has expanded 600% in the last 5 years, and it's still not even all that large (fewer than a million hosts, average resources per host similar to a desktop computer). The raw idle capacity of the world's computers is far larger.

</comment><comment><USER76> My high school physics teacher offered one point of extra credit per n work units. I had a fairly beefy computer, for a high school kid, and since he never put a ceiling on the number of points offered, I ended up accumulating up enough extra credit to bump my grade up a whole letter.

</comment><comment><USER77> I remember everybody at my work (Software Engineering) setting this up in 2002. The idea was kind of obvious, but at the same time so far ahead of its time.

It would be great if a similar project was set up to provide everyday, real world services like, say, internet search, or a distributed S3 clone.

</comment><comment><USER78> Considering how much carbon footprint it creates, I'm not sure the trade off was worth it. I'm happy they're shutting it down for now. Maybe once everyone is on renewables/cleaner energy sources it'd be a project worth restarting for using idle capacity.

</comment><comment><USER79> No Aliens found unfortunately :(

<comment><USER80> None of the type that they're allowed to tell you about :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> I take a lot of screenshots for work requests, and I tend to save them... hoping that 20 years on, they are as interesting as these screenshots.

</comment><comment><USER82> Isn't it a bit early given that we've just entered the era of machine learning which could be a big help for the project?

</comment><comment><USER83> I wonder what the aggregate carbon footprint and electricity bill was over the project's life. It has to be a lot, right?

</comment><comment><USER84> Got to see the Seti Burst computer rack at Arecibo in December along with a lot of other stuff. Glad to have that memory.

</comment><comment><USER85> If you're looking for alternatives besides the BOINC stuff, there is distributed.net.

</comment><comment><USER86> Loved seti as a teenager and in my college years, always felt cool when it was running.

</comment><comment><USER87> Wow, end of an era. I remember asking my mom to install it on her computer.

</comment><comment><USER88> I ran it on my android and had contributed from almost past 3 years.

</comment><comment><USER89> Ah man... it's just old enough to get a legal drink in the USA.

</comment><comment><USER90> I am sure there will be no conspiracy theories from this news

<comment><USER91> > I am sure there will be no conspiracy theories from this news

Well, yeah, because the government and military industrial complex censored all of it. But don't worry, Q Anon will figure it out for us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> Soooo, probably a lot of energy wasted for nothing?

</comment><comment><USER93> Is it the best way to use such a famous brand name? Not just sad but also feel abandon for those in.

Anyway may be they have found the alien and not telling us directly. Otherwise why stop? Just strange.

</comment><comment><USER94> Wow, I've been using it for 21 years?!

</comment><comment><USER95> I remember running it back in the day. Sad.

</comment><comment><USER96> And how many aliens did they discover?

</comment><comment><USER97> ALIENS ON THE BLOCKCHAIN

</comment><comment><USER98> 2020 is one messy year

</comment><comment><USER99> or they have already found em aliens

 _twiddles thumbs_

</comment><comment><USER100> I guess they found what they were looking for.

</comment><comment><USER101> did they find anything?

</comment><comment><USER102> Bummer. I have my laptop set to not sleep while plugged into power so it can do work while I'm not using it.

I guess I'll switch over to another space or environmental project.

</comment><comment><USER103> I always told people to do mersenne prime search instead of s@h.

[https://www.mersenne.org/](https://www.mersenne.org/)

<comment><USER104> Why is this better than SETI? What's the purpose of finding mersenne primes

<comment><USER103> > Why is this better than SETI? What's the purpose of finding mersenne primes

I hope you're kidding ...

We will probably never find or communicate with ET, so the effort is a waste of time and resources. Space is just too big.

But interesting numbers are already known to be valuable in group theory, encryption, and other areas. Golomb numbers are used today, for example:

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

And my standard disclaimer for technological illiterates: "It's not all about you."

<comment><USER47> I think you are getting downvoted for your tone. I wondered the same thing as the parent post. I genuinely don't about mersenne primes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER105> why is it?

</comment><comment><USER106> F

</comment><comment><USER107> I find it quite funny that people still think that we'll "find" ETs by looking for them.

ETs gave us their DNA. They are our ancestors. Which is why "contact" has been a reality since "our beginning" on Earth.

Physical contact will (officially) happen when humanity is ready for it, measured by the maturity of our shared consciousness.

Marina Jacobi is among those who currently are in direct and constant telepathic contact with various groups of ETs. She often channels them (there are many others who do this too). Check out her Quantum Manifestation Series to learn about what's going on: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKaW-6KuhVvEIX- oRG7cBZQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKaW-6KuhVvEIX-oRG7cBZQ)

<comment><USER108> ...

This is HN -- you post unscientific crap and it will be called out -- that lady seems like a crackpot.

She does not channel or contact ET life.

<comment><USER107> It's unfortunate that you are so close minded. You will be surprised in a couple of years, at most.</comment></comment></comment>


Is Elon Musk trying to do too much too fast? - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-spacex-tesla-musk-20160902-snap-story.html <comment><USER2> "This raises serious questions about the reliability of the SpaceX launch vehicle," said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, which receives money from Boeing Co., a SpaceX competitor. "They are taking this technology to the limits."

Key quote on which the rest of the article appears to be constructed.

SpaceX is pushing the technology to the limits on purpose. This is not because they are doing "too much" but because they are doing everything they can to completely change the way rocketry is done.

When a Formula 1 car catches fire in the pits, do we call a halt to pressurised fuelling, or find ways to improve the safety of fuelling?

When a NASCAR crashes and burns, do we call a halt to car racing, or do we find ways to improve the safety and reliability of racing cars?

The simple answer to the "too much too fast" question is "no". Too much, too fast would be where SpaceX is unable to maintain their progress and makes mistakes they can not learn from.

Right now the focus of SpaceX is getting to the point where they can launch, land, relaunch. They will find more ways that quickly fuelling a rocket with supercooled fuel doesn't work.

Their competitors might simply say, "supercooled propellants are too hard," and stick to existing performance figures and trusted designs. SpaceX is choosing to do the hard thing because doing the hard thing is how you advance the state of the art.

"We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too." — President John F Kennedy, Rice University address.

Did NASA try doing too much, too fast? They went from the "four inch flight" of Mercury-Redstone 1 in 1960 to the disaster of Apollo 1 (crew killed in a cabin fire due to high oxygen atmosphere) in February 1967 to success with Apollo 11 in July 1969, with many lessons being learned in the meantime.

<comment><USER3> I disagree strongly. SpaceX has always felt, especially to those in the industry, to have a blatant disregard for even basic elements of safety in their design and operation.

They _did_ supercool their propellants, and pushing that envelope was indeed worthwhile to see what they could gain from it. Unfortunately they _also_ decided to stage the payload to shave a day off of integration time.

SpaceX is a very interesting company, and I wish them the best because there are a lot of smart people working there on difficult problems. But I personally can't stand seeing them take unnecessary risks and treating it as a necessary cost of business. It terrifies me that they want to strap three of these Falcon 9 cores together, or that they want to put people on top of this thing.

<comment><USER4> _I disagree strongly. SpaceX has always felt, especially to those in the industry, to have a blatant disregard for even basic elements of safety in their design and operation._

Do you realize that this company does more testing and more rigorous tests than other launch service provider?

<comment><USER3> Source? I've heard that they have more sensors and telemetry on individual tests, but I hadn't heard that they're more rigorous than other providers.

<comment><USER2> One recent example is SpaceX doing the pad abort test, and a planned in-flight abort test for their Dragon 2 capsule, while Boeing is doing their testing on paper.

<comment><USER3> I don't think that's completely accurate. While Boeing is not going to do an in-flight abort test, they will be doing a pad abort test in October 2017. A technical demonstration of the abort system was one of the requirements of the requirements of the Commercial Crew Transport program.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A Space-X booster failure isn't a disaster. Fortunately, Space-X fuels remotely. The USSR had booster explosions during fueling in 1960 and in 1980, each with tens of casualties. If Space-X can find out what's wrong and fix it, it's not a huge setback. If the craft had been manned, the pad abort system would have saved the crew; the payload module was unharmed for the first few seconds, enough time for the capsule to launch. The Falcon launch failure rate is about 4%, which is on a par with everybody else.[1]. But that's not counting this as a launch failure.

Tesla's "autopilot" was too much, too fast. It's not very good and was promoted as being more capable than it is. Tesla really needs to enforce hands-on-wheel strictly.

The Tesla Model 3 at $35K with big production volume is a big risk. It will probably come out late, at $50K+, and in lower initial volume. But it should make it out the plant door at some point. That's the biggest risk item in all this. Remember that when Musk announced the proposed Model 3 production schedule, the two top people in production quit. They clearly knew the goal wasn't realistic.

Tesla buying Solar City looks more like a bailout. The big Solar City risk is that they're building their own solar panels. They could be undercut by competition from China, as Applied Materials was. Solar City has the advantage that their plant sells to themselves, so they can resist competition to some extent. Solar City's big vulnerability is that they're heavily dependent on Government subsidies. Those are gradually going away as solar becomes able to stand on its own.

The big risks are financial, not technical. Hence the pressure at Tesla to cut costs, and probably use creative accounting, to get a profitable quarter.

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/ei3h1B7.png](http://i.imgur.com/ei3h1B7.png)

<comment><USER6> Maybe they should include a pad abort module on cargo missioms, so they can find out its performance next time a Falcon explodes during fueling.

<comment><USER5> Huge weight penalty. They'd never get to geosync orbit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If rocket failures were a Poisson process with a low rate, you'd expect to see some clustering by random chance. And if they're being watched by the media, you should expect to see people making much of it, whether or not there's a systemic problem.

As with most news, I recommend waiting a decade and buying a history book.

<comment><USER8> Your assertion that there would be "some clustering by random chance" is correct, however rocket failures are most definitely not described well by a Poisson distribution. The simplest reasonable model would be to assume each launch campaign has a fixed probability of failure, and that the probability of any given failure event is independent of the others. In other words, a binomial distribution. And this is a commonly applied model, I've seen a number of people doing such calculations in the last few days.

However, these assumptions do not accurately reflect reality. When a failure occurs launches are stopped, the problem is identified, and the problem is fixed. A failure event should cause reliability to increase for subsequent launches; failures are _not_ conditionally independent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yes, of course he is. Most people are not talented enough to run one company, let alone have the time. The primary thing that concerns me is I understand his rush.

As Tesla is rushing towards the Model 3, they remain largely without competition from other electric cars. From Musk's point of view, it's completely logical to press your lead. Very soon it will be extremely hard for gasoline-powered vehicles to compete - the relentless engineering of electronics has made its way to automobiles. Has any other vendor seriously evaluated a charging solution aside from Supercharger?

I wish I lived in a world where Elon had better pick one damn company to run, because the market to build electric cars was so overwhelmingly competitive. Or where the utilities were so ahead in renewal energy creation and storage that Tesla would be silly to also have to go through the insane trouble of building a battery factory. Or acquire a solar company, lol.

Musk's achievements impress me especially in comparison to his peers. Who's bothering to challenge the dealership lobby? Who's ready to start pushing software updates over the air to their entire fleet? Hopefully Apple, Google, Amazon, Uber, etc get into the game and also contribute to pushing things forward. Because honestly the old guard hasn't made me as excited. I hope Elon inspires millions to be as disruptive.

<comment><USER10> In the words of Peter Thiel "Elon Musk the man who knows no risk"

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FvxrxpW2ckQ&feature=youtu.be&t...](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FvxrxpW2ckQ&feature=youtu.be&t=2484)

<comment><USER11> A friend at Stanford had a lecture taught by one of Musk's old friends who's now a partner at Greylock. The friend said they all used to fly to Vegas 10-15 years ago and that Elon used to just double down after doubling down at blackjack – that it was very indicative of his perception of risk.

Apparently he and Peter Thiel also used to debate about who was going to get to Mars first. In the lecturer's words: "Yeah, looks like Elon is probably gonna win that one now."

<comment><USER10> that's a great story it just reaffirms the "Know no Risks" personality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Frankly I don't care...

I wake up some mornings and occasionally when I have those crappy "entrepreneury/startyupy" days when everything is going to shit and I wonder if it's worth all the effort - I think about what Elon Musk is doing and then STFU and get out of bed and get on with it.

Having read the recent biography about the guy, the only thing I worry about is that he is physically on a aircraft too much while flying between SpaceX and Tesla (along with other places). He's too important to the future of the human race to lose because of some crappy accident. Ditto his work schedule - for the love of god, please someone make sure he doesn't die of a heart attack/stress or something else!

<comment><USER13> I find myself doing the same from time to time! It really does help me push through.

I've tried the same line of reasoning with my girlfriend as well; not much success.

YMMV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So I work in cleantech, and here's my favorite climate change joke:

They say humans won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late.

To me, Musk is acting like your typical super-smart engineer under a fire drill. Perhaps Musk thinks that we aren't adapting fast enough to the changes in our environment, so he's basically putting every drop of effort he has into trying to engineer solutions.

Engineers are a weird bunch. They love fixing problems more than they love money. Also, they recognize the tools available and use them to their advantage. Remember social engineering is still engineering. Perhaps Musk sees capitalism and markets as a tool and is using it to his advantage (having rich people on your side adds to your toolkit).

What would you do if we had to switch 87% of our energy sources from fossil fuel[1] to something else in the next 30 years[2]? No really, what would you actually try to engineer to pull it off? Now you're in Musk's mindset. Luckily, that's double-digit trillion dollar opportunity if you can actually pull it off[3], so you can use the markets as a tool (and everyone wins[4]). Musk knows the next Googe will be an energy company[5].

Also, he wants to die on Mars. Everyone's got to have a hobby.

[1]: [https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=11951](https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=11951)

[2]: [http://ar5-syr.ipcc.ch/ipcc/sites/default/files/AR5_SYR_Figu...](http://ar5-syr.ipcc.ch/ipcc/sites/default/files/AR5_SYR_Figure_2.3.png)

[3]: [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate- consensus-97...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate- consensus-97-per-cent/2015/aug/31/citi-report-slowing-global-warming-would- save-tens-of-trillions-of-dollars)

[4]: [http://0.tqn.com/d/politicalhumor/1/S/5/6/3/What-If-Its-A- Ho...](http://0.tqn.com/d/politicalhumor/1/S/5/6/3/What-If-Its-A-Hoax.jpg)

[5]: [http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next- internet/](http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next-internet/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I loved this part.

Greg Autry, a space industry expert who teaches at USC's Marshall School of Business, said that Musk's aggressive cuts to the cost of launching rockets "even scares the Chinese."

<comment><USER15> I doubt that the Chinese are actually that "scared". They have clearly been taking the very long view with their exploration program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Everyone can have their own opinion regarding how many rockets and African internet satellites and Tesla drivers and astronauts are worth risking to push technology as far as fast as Musk can. What's harder to argue, I think, is that Musk has pushed right up near the line where one or two more lost SpaceX rockets or dead Tesla drivers could send many of his plans into a tailspin.

There's almost a feel like Steve Jobs in 1985, sword of damocles hanging overhead. History may prove Musk "right" as it did Jobs, but he nonetheless similarly risks losing quite a lot, as do we all in a sense.

<comment><USER17> The rocket is the rocket. These things happen. However, a static fire test is pretty rare these days, and usually doesn't take place with the payload loaded, but SpaceX wanted to shave a day off the schedule[0]. Bonus points, for insurance not paying for the loss.[1] So they do run their rocket launches in an odd way.

What's more troubling is the Tesla autopilot product release. That is indefensible. Let's be honest here people, if it's outside the lab, it's a release. Sure you can call it a "beta", you can throw up a "Hey don't use this, it's beta," click through warning, but it's still a release. If you didn't think that people were going to hear "autopilot" and think autopilot, then you're too naive to be in the consumer industry.

No, it's not a level 4 autonomous vehicle, and yet that's how people are going to treat it, because that's what you demo. That's what _you 're calling it_. That's what "autopilot" means. Level 3 is the worst level, because it lulls the driver into complacency, and then into a completely preventable accident.

[0] [http://spacenews.com/falcon-9-pad-explosion-highlights- uniqu...](http://spacenews.com/falcon-9-pad-explosion-highlights-unique- aspect-of-spacex-launch-campaigns/)

[1] [http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2016/09/01/spacex_bl...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2016/09/01/spacex_blew_up_facebook_s_first_internet_satellite.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Don't even bother reading it: whenever there is a question on the headline of an article from a serious major news outlet, the answer is NO. Seriously it's like that EVERY time. 100%. Literally. Early ages of click-bait when it wasn't even clicking but buying read-bait. Sensationalism and controversy always sell but they have to keep some kind of integrity to be taken seriously, right? Anyway: Challenger, Columbia, Apollo 1. Those were actual disasters. That was actually taking it too far. And the industry learned from those failures and put in place the necessary failsafes to avoid them. Doesn't mean there aren't more to come. Blowing up stuff to get into space is still blowing up stuff. Nevermind driving thousands of cars in actual traffic millions of miles. But what SpaceX is doing, testing on production non manned vehicles, doesn't even compare to what both USA and Russia were doing during the space race. The only problem is it upsets shareholders, and I'm pretty sure the amount of people trying to short this stock is reaching critical mass, so they better be more careful because the real shitstorm of defamation and FUD is yet to come...

</comment><comment><USER19> a rocket explodes and suddenly everyone turns on the golden boy.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, because a rocket exploding is not important when you run a rocket company...

I mean, couldn't they focus on all those rockets that did not explode?

<comment><USER21> Are you being sarcastic? Because one of the failure modes of a rocket is to explode. It is unfortunate, but not unexpected. It's basically unavoidable for any rocket manufacturer, and certainly not a cause to condemn SpaceX.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Isn't it obvious? Look at him, look at what kind of people he is looking to hire. He is not looking at people that are mature, balanced and harmonious. He is looking for people to burn with passion and work enormous efforts. Well when you conduct your life like this you can't have too many outcomes but most likely one of those worthy of drama awards :) For who is wise enough these simple priciples are everywhre around us to observe and learn.

</comment><comment><USER23> I hope he doesn't up like the real Tesla who ended up broke. Tesla was trying to do some really advanced things like wireless energy transmission.

<comment><USER24> Most of the popularized Tesla stuff is fantasy and pseudo science.

<comment><USER23> He invented a lot of stuff. He way ahead of his time. You have to put yourself in the context of the 1900's.

<comment><USER25> Mostly because few people where messing with electricity at the time. He showed up right after steam engines took off and you could cheaply generate a lot of power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think Elon Musk is extremely smart and talented but I also think he's been extremely lucky so far (but his luck seems to be running out lately).

Since Paypal, he's been on a winning streak and this has just boosted his confidence to stratospheric heights - As a result, he probably bit off more than he could chew.</comment>


Mathematical paper rejected because an author is Iranian - <AUTHOR> https://gowers.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/taylor-and-francis-doing-trumps-dirty-work-for-him/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've explicitly and deliberately changed the title specifically because the original is provocative, and less informative.

<comment><USER2> I find it horrific and psychotic that Iranian citizens must bear the random and illogical attacks of the USA against their basic lives. We aren't talking about banking or visas anymore, but merely publishing a paper.

As for what can be done about this? If actual political change can't be achieved in the US, then the world must change all of its systems to avoid hegemonic rage.

Sadly, though this is technically possible [1], it seems that one does not gain reputation by using non-traditional publishing venues.

[1] just self-host a txt file somewhere or etc</comment></comment>


What do you call the lead developer's offsider? - <AUTHOR>

I just realised that my resume needs to be updated, because the project I've been working on has hit a major milestone.  An amateur computer programmer done good, I'm a subcontractor for one of the big guys.  Basically I'm the principal contractor's (who is lead developer, primary project manager and domain expert) offsider.  How should I describe that in less than 5 words in my resume? <comment><USER2> Why do you have to say it in less than 5 words? I'm in the same boat. I clearly say i'm an independent contractor(and a lead engineer). And i clearly say what i do/did.

Eg. [http://www.linkedin.com/in/sidmitra](http://www.linkedin.com/in/sidmitra)</comment>


Google+ "inspired" by diaspora? - <AUTHOR> http://raventools.com/blog/google-copies-diaspora/

<comment><USER3> I've never been too bothered, as a user, when one product "borrows" a great feature from another, especially if they manage to deliver a better experience.

I've had high hopes for Diaspora. Gave them cash when they were on Kickstarter. Tried hosting my own Diaspora server. Waited for the devs and the community to do _something_ with the $200,000 they raised.

Certainly a lot of hackers have done much more with much less.

In the year since Diaspora was announced, though, not much has happened.

Ask anyone in the general public if they've used Diaspora, and you're more likely to get a confused "what's Diaspora?"

At the end of the day, there's really only one measuring stick for a social service: users. We use social sites to communicate with our friends and followers. Facebook is deeply flawed, but people have stayed there because people were staying there.

G+ looks like the first real opportunity for people to leave Facebook without losing the connections they've become addicted to. If G+ is going to be the new default for sharing online, I really just want three things.

1\. Let me control my data and my privacy.

2\. Play nice with other sites, protocols, and standards.

3\. Provide a great user experience, including "borrowing" from other places when it makes sense.

<comment><USER4> Why is facebook "deeply flawed"?

@1. you can do that on Facebook, too ... they even have "circles" there, too

@2. facebook is the champion of playing nice with other sites, just look around you ... everything is facebook nowadays

@3. facebook borrowed a lot and you can filter everything everywhere.

So maybe their UI isn't as clean as Google+ and they lack a great video chat, but other than that, why should anyone switch to yet another social network which does the same ... once was enough for many people, now that everyone and their dog is on the leading network there is no incentive to switch away.

Google+ is coming to late to a party that started years ago and will suffer the same fate as other Google products: only geeks will use them, no matter how good they are (Wave :/) ...

<comment><USER5> I agree also. I also think we all need to appreciate the fact that 99% of the world uses Facebook BECAUSE it is a agnostic platform. I have a Gmail account - most of friends "lay persons" in the tech world - use Yahoo or Hotmail, and sure, some use Gmail. They check Facebook on their mobiles and website daily - they don't particularly care about [or even know really] the "wars of technology companies"

Facebook works. All their friends exist on it - it does everything they could possibly want it to do "connect to their friends". In my mind - it's "Google and Bing" all over. Bing works and is arguably just as good as Google these days yet everyone continues to use Google.

Google+ - great for technology people who want to "control their data". Most of my friends don't even understand what "exporting data for portability" even means. They use Facebook, see their friends posts, upload photos, check-in to places and they love that.

It's going to take a LOT MORE "innovation" to move them across to another platform because "it's new, pretty and contains some nifty features that Facebook already contains or will contain in the next 3 months of 'lock-down' in response to Google+". I'm not on Google+ [outrageous request for invite via my profile :D] - but I just can't see my friends moving to it - <USER2> when they don't even login to Google anyway when they are searching.

Facebook will "win" in my mind - because they are agnostic to email and that's where your "connections" lie and the reason you use Google "mostly" [outrageous generalization again] is because you host your email on Gmail.

<comment><USER6> Google+ will succeed because it's simpler. Everybody wants to control their data and have online relationships that mirror real ones in terms of context. You think mom's don't worry about who can see the pictures of their kids? Or non-technical professionals don't worry about whether or not it's safe to add your coworker to your friends list?

Facebook makes that process tedious. Google+ bakes it in to the foundations and at every step in an obvious way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I assumed the concept had come from Google's own research, which I first saw a year ago in this slide deck: [http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life- social-networ...](http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social- network-v2?from=embed)

According to Wikipedia, Diaspora was initially funded in April 2010 and a developer preview was released in September 2010. The Google slide deck was published in July 2010, so presumably this is an idea they had been kicking around for a while before then.

It seems that the notion of friend (circles|aspects) is just one of those obvious ideas that everybody had, but nobody executed properly until now.

<comment><USER8> This is exactly what I was thinking, since I saw that presentation last year. It could be that the Diaspora guys were inspired by the Google research, and not the other way around. It just took Google longer to push it out to a product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's unfair to say that Google copied Diaspora. When you're making a social product there are only so many ways you can style a text entry box and only so many words for "bundles of people". The feature set across _most_ social products has at least some overlap.

Blatant copying looks more like the Plurk v. Microsoft situation from December 2009: <http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/14/microsoft-plurk-ripoff/>.

Pixel for pixel copying = lame, feature overlap = necessary.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think giving users the ability to build a social identity in G+ now, and then export to wherever, could wind up being a big help to Diaspora in the long run.

How complete is the export is exactly?

<comment><USER11> <https://www.google.com/takeout>

Currently it supports Contacts and Circles, and Stream. I haven't got a G+ login, so I can't say what form the data takes, but the other data I have looked at was IIRC in CSV format.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's interesting to me here is the impact the right naming for a feature can have.

I think "circles" as in "circles of friends" would be intuitive to most users. Probably because the concept corresponds to how people already organise their social groups anyway.

An "aspect" on the other hand focuses not on the who, but on how you present your self. I think this would be much more obscure for most users to get used to even though the end effect is basically the same.

</comment><comment><USER13> the future of diaspora is just NOW in doubt? not pretty much every single day since it was announced?

I have immense respect for the founders of the diaspora project. they were at the right place and at the right time to get some kickass funding and publicity, but thats basically it. don't get me wrong. the idea is great, and I'd love to see a proper competitor to facebook from the community.

and I'm sure I'll get downvoted for this.

<comment><USER14> No, you'll get downvoted for pre-emptively complaining about getting downvoted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Google was kicking around the idea of circles long before Diaspora. If anything it was the other way around.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't think they have copied Diaspora's model.

If you try to solve group communication problems, you by definition need to create some model of groups, be it Circles, Diaspora aspects, Facebook groups, IRC channels, email recipient lists, whatever.

Because both Diaspora and Google+ are clearly inspired by semi-public _sharing_ model of Facebook, it's quite natural that their group model will resemble each other, even be almost identical. If, on the otherhand, a service is focused around group conversation instead of sharing, it's group model might be one where groups are shared among participants, instead of being private aliases.

However, what's much more interesting to me is how a service tries to bootstrap "the group management".

In the beginning you don't have Circles and you don't have strong incentive to group people to Circles when you don't know are you going to use the service and how are you going to use it. Google clearly tried to make it more enjoyable by providing fun visual UI. But it still feels a chore, because benefits are unclear.

I would have emphasized it differently: start from a sharing experience instead of group management. Use email-like recipient list as the basic model and introduce the fun way to make group aliases after you have shared a few items. It's more utilitarian model, which doesn't have as strong virality factor as Google's approach. In Google+ you get something akin to invite when somebody adds you to his Circle.

</comment><comment><USER17> The iPod wasn't the first mp3 player.

Facebook wasn't the first social networking site.

Google wasn't the first search engine.

Windows/Mac/Unix weren't the first operating systems.

Taking ideas from competitors and improving upon them is a fundamental part of business. No one actually thinks that coming up with a product concept is the same as delivering a product that users actually want.

</comment><comment><USER18> The interesting thing about disapora was that it was meant to be federated, like wave, and email. Plus is not federated at all.

Therefore they are only similar in that they have targeted people's areas of displeasure regarding facebook, and this is hardly remarkable. They were both built specifically to compete with facebook, so this whole discussion is almost tautological.

<comment><USER8> Right, Circles only solves the sharing problem. Diaspora has a much larger ambition. Federation allows for communication between instances that are owned and operated by different people, but it also preserves your privacy better. Google wants all your data. However, you can install Diaspora on a home computer so absolutely no one gets your data except what you share.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The Appleseed Project also has had the idea of Aspects/Circles for a while now. They call them...<dramatic pause>...'Circles.'

</comment><comment><USER20> It's natural Google+ to have someting similar to Diaspora, or Facebook, or any other social community service.

And at the end of the day, It doesn't matter who was the first. What matters is who will be the first that will do it right.

</comment><comment><USER21> Diaspora was going down the toilet anyways.. why not recycle some of their ideas?

</comment><comment><USER22> _The future of Diaspora is now in doubt_

When was it not in doubt? They got money and momentum during some Facebook privacy blunder that was so ephemeral I can't even remember what it was about.

</comment><comment><USER23> Geez - Huddle was "inspired" by Padpaw, but I'm not bitter, much.

Lot's of ideas get tried out, some times they stick. Other times they take 2 or 3 starts/failures before they stick

</comment><comment><USER24> No disrespect to Diaspora, but they hadn't really come up with anything new, especially nothing that a company like Google would have to look towards them for inspiration. Livejournal had friends lists for a decade, plenty of other projects were looking to federate social networking (Appleseed, OneSocialWeb, FOAF, etc). I think this is giving way too much credit to Diaspora, whose real innovation it seems was in the marketing/crowdsourced funding space.

</comment><comment><USER25> Google has been working on Circles for over a year -- and it's based on research they conducted before that.

[http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social- networ...](http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2)

</comment><comment> clark-kent For those bashing the diaspora guys, remember it takes years to create a successful Open source project. Most popular OSS projects are at least 3-5 years old. Cut the guys some slack. HN readers should understand this more than any other site.

</comment><comment><USER26> are there any products that don't take features from other products?

</comment><comment><USER27> No. Google+ has shipped.

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't think that one can say that Diaspora owned the idea that we have different social circles/aspects.

But still sad that Diaspora might close their doors. They can take pride in the fact that their vision is being adopted.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm wondering is Diaspora can sue Google for this "inspiration".

Anyway, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2714109> for google+ invitations.

</comment><comment><USER30> I remember viewing this presentation months ago, in which an ex-googler presents the idea behind social circles: [http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social- networ...](http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2)

</comment><comment><USER31> Just yesterday I learned about <http://project.friendika.com/> which looks like a nice distributed network too and maybe without the Diaspora troubles.</comment>


How we use Cake to build .NET Core apps and version assemblies – Stackify - <AUTHOR> https://stackify.com/how-we-use-cake-to-build-net-core-apps/ <comment><USER2> Seems over complicated, here is the same thing with make and older csc tasks (taken from my blog here: [http://flukus.github.io/2016/11/30/2016_11_30_Rediscovering-...](http://flukus.github.io/2016/11/30/2016_11_30_Rediscovering- Make/)):

        Version ?= 188.8.131.52
        $(version): $(init)
          sed s'/$${Version}/$(Version)/g' src/Version.template.cs > build/Version.cs

Not to mention it's doing a lot of other things I would call anti-patterns, like running differently if it's on the CI server ("if(bambooRelease)") and checking in build artifacts.</comment>


CitizenTekk is hiring a professional Web Developer  - <AUTHOR> http://citizentekk.com/careers/

<comment><AUTHOR> CitizenTekk has an immediate need for an experienced Web Developer. Must be an expert in HTML5 and CSS. Must be experienced in rapid web development and passionate for a great user interface. We have a top notch team and are looking for someone to join immediately. Expected pay of $5000/month + equity (after proving your value to the team). Prefer a candidate in Bay Area although we will consider a virtual position for a dedicated and performing individual.</comment>


Huge Quasar Cluster is Largest Cosmic Structure - <AUTHOR> http://news.discovery.com/space/galaxies/scientists-find-universes-largest-structure-130111.htm

<comment><USER2> The article is pretty light on details. What exactly defines this as a single "structure"? How do we determine where one cluster ends and another begins?

<comment><USER3> [http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/01/07/mnr...](http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/01/07/mnras.sts497.full)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When we see things like this it gets the sci-fi nerd going in me and makes me wonder if we could possibly be seeing the formation of a Tipler Cylinder (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipler_cylinder>) or similar structure. Or if it's a time-bubble so that a civilization can survive to discover other sentient life.

</comment><comment><USER5> If its so large, why is it a cluster? I didn't know the universe was that large...sounds like these objects are actually scattered fairly thinly.

Also, gotta love astronomers and their affinity to naming things:

"For simplicity we shall also refer to U1.27 as the Huge-LQG and U1.28 as the CCLQG"</comment>


Celebrating Aggregation - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/04/celebrating-aggregation.html <comment><USER2> Like other abused buzzwords, the term "Attention Economy" got a little played out. But I think the economics of attention is exactly why aggregation services do provide value. When there's an abundance of information, attention become a scarce resource.

Like Fred (author of post above), I have heard people accuse aggregation sites of being parasites. Sure there are bad ones, but there are extremely clever ones, too. It takes work make a rule that presents a story cluster, or karma, and just because they aren't creating _content,_ doesn't mean they are creative, or creating value. They are creating filters, they are creating a picture of popularity (Hypem), they are creating a picture of relationships (techmeme).

If there's anything I'm hungry for, it's not more content sites, it's even more and better aggregator sites. Obviously we are, too. Every few weeks there's a new post that asks a variation of "What other sites like Hacker News do you visit?"

</comment><comment><USER3> Totally agree. Would add just one thing though - properly established and enforced guidelines on what exactly constitutes 'aggregation'.

So people don't go crazy with ripping off entire articles, images, ideas etc.</comment>


Light Phone 2 - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/light-phone-2-smartphone-design#/ <comment><USER2> It's a phone that sends texts, places calls, and has an alarm.

Why would you pay $250 for this, rather than buy a $30 feature phone?

<comment><USER3> To express a certain aesthetic, like the reason people buy expensive couches or clothes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ignoring the ridiculous price tag this phone is as close to what I'm looking for yet. I also want to go lighter but a major thing for me is battery life. Light Phone 2 is aiming at 5 days stand by, why are we still dealing with battery life in terms of days, not weeks or months?

So, that means my Nokia 120 is still an awesome phone with 3-4 weeks of battery life, calls, texts, radio, alarm and a 32GB (via micro SD) music player. And that at a tenth of the price of Light Phone 2.

</comment><comment> j-walker "Due to the telecommunications landscape right now, it may not be possible to seamlessly maintain your primary number for all instances, for example it is not possible to forward messages with most carriers we have explored."

This pretty much kills it IMO. When someone is trying to reach you they have to message two numbers?

</comment><comment><USER5> They removed all but basic functionality of a standard smartphone but want to charge $400 (retail price). No thanks.

Seems like all new technology now you add some buzz words to it and you can suddenly double or triple the price.

</comment><comment><USER6> I like the design.

Someone should make a matte, black phone shell that goes over the screen, bundled with an app with an UI like this phone has.</comment>


Android 8.0's "streaming OS updates" will work even if your phone is full - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08/android-8-0s-streaming-os-updates-will-work-even-if-your-phone-is-full/ <comment><USER2> So they can update even if your phone is full... because it's not actually full, because they already pre-reserved a whole other partition large enough for the entire OS, and all Android 8 does now is patch that other partition directly with the downloaded data instead of staging the patch on the user partition first.

tl;dr: your phone isn't actually full, Google just reserved a bunch of space ahead of time.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the common models for academy-industry cooperation? - <AUTHOR> I'm planning a academy relations program for Palo Alto Networks. I'm interested in learning what others are doing.
Examples of high tech/cyber security are more relevant but any example is welcomed.
Our current direction is to share data sets with the academy. In specific areas of interest we would like to enter into joint projects with academic partners. <comment><AUTHOR> This paper discusses setting up AI centers but also argues that cooperation is beneficial. [https://hbr.org/2019/01/how-to-set-up-an-ai-center-of- excell...](https://hbr.org/2019/01/how-to-set-up-an-ai-center-of-excellence)</comment>


Deep Learning with Spark and TensorFlow - <AUTHOR> https://databricks.com/blog/2016/01/25/deep-learning-with-spark-and-tensorflow.html <comment><USER2> So the cool thing here is that you can use Spark and TF to find the best model like Microsoft Research did with Resnets.

[http://www.wired.com/2016/01/microsoft-neural-net-shows- deep...](http://www.wired.com/2016/01/microsoft-neural-net-shows-deep- learning-can-get-way-deeper/)

They're showing you how to train different architectures simultaneously, and then compare their results in order to select the best one. That's great as far as it goes.

The drawback is that with this schema, you can't actually train a given network faster, which is what you want to do with Spark. What is the role of a distributed run-time in training artificial neural networks? It's easy. NNs are computationally intensive, so you want to share the work over many machines.

Spark can help you orchestrate that through data parallelism, parameter averaging and iterative reduce, which we do with Deeplearning4j.

[http://deeplearning4j.org/spark](http://deeplearning4j.org/spark) [https://github.com/deeplearning4j/dl4j-spark- cdh5-examples](https://github.com/deeplearning4j/dl4j-spark-cdh5-examples)

Data parallelism is an approach Google uses to train neural networks on tons of data quickly. The idea is that you shard your data to a lot of equivalent models, have each of the models train on a separate machine, and then average their parameters. That works, it's fast, and it's how Spark can help you do deep learning better.

</comment><comment><USER3> Impressive, but it seems an inversion of paradigms. Small data to compute ratios is usually associated with high performance computing (HPC). Why use Spark when the data is small and is broadcast to each worker? You have to pay the serialization-deserialization penalties of moving the data from Python to JVM and back again. In fact the JVM isn't really needed here at all since all the computation is done in the pure-Python workers in an embarrassingly- parallel way. Seems to me that you would just move onto an HPC and use TensorFlow within a IPython.parallel paradigm and be done much sooner.

<comment><USER4> The "broadcast" is pretty cheap because often you already have the data in some distributed file system, or if on a single node the network bandwidth is pretty high. The problem with a lot of the deep learning workloads is that it is very compute intensive and as a result takes a long time to run. For example, it is not uncommon to take a week to train some models.

<comment><USER5> Deep learning workloads are typically compute-intensive, but they also tend to be extremely I/O intensive, and convergence may depend on a synchronous step where all the nodes must finish making their contribution to the model before any of them can continue. (This may not be quite true though -- see Google's DistBelief paper--but most frameworks work this way). Often times, adding more machines to a cluster may make training proportionally slower.

<comment><USER4> Did you actually read the article? It was using Spark to parallelize hyperparameter tuning, which is embarrassingly parallel.

<comment><USER6> Why not just use GNU Parallel (or something similar) instead of Spark?

<comment><USER7> I think one reason would fault tolerance. Is there a fault tolerance layer in GNU parallel? last time I checked their homepage ( a few minutes ago), there was no reference to fault tolerance.

Another reason is, perhaps, scheduling.

<comment><USER8> what fault tolerance does spark give you in this scheme? It cannot look into TF progress and checkpoint all state. Using Spark with TF, seems like an overkill -- you need to manage and install two framework what should ideally be a 200 line python wrapper or small mesos framework at most.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a question about neural networks.

Say, you are training a NN to recognize handwritten characters 0 and 1, and you have 1000 training images for each character (so 2000 images in total). All images are bitmaps with 0 for black and 1 for white.

Now, by accident, all the "0" training-images have an even number of black pixels, and all the "1" training-images have an odd number of black pixels.

How do you know that the NN really learns to recognize 0's and 1's, as opposed to recognizing whether the number of pixels in an image is even or odd?

<comment><USER10> There's actually a case in the early history of perceptrons that brings up this exact issue:

"There is a humorous story from the early days of machine learning about a network that was supposed to be trained to recognize tanks hidden in forest regions. The network was trained on a large set of photographs – some with tanks and some without tanks. After learning was complete the system appeared to work well when "shown" additional photographs from the original set. As a final test, a new group of photos were taken to see if the network could recognize tanks in a slightly different setting. The results were extremely disappointing. No one was sure why the network failed on this new group of photos. Eventually, someone noticed that in the original set of photos the network had been trained on, all of the photos with tanks had been taken on a cloudy day, while all of the photos without tanks were taken on a sunny day. The network had not learned to detect the difference between scenes with tanks and without tanks, it had instead learned to distinguish photos taken on cloudy days from photos taken on sunny days!"[0]

The pragmatic answer is that this is why you have two hold-out sets: cross validation/dev set and the test set. Typically you keep 70% of the data for training, 15% of the data for CV and 15% for Test. Ideally you should shuffle the data enough that there isn't any bias in the natural order of the data.

You train the model on the train data, and estimate how well the model actually performs on the CV set which the model did not see in training. You continue to use the CV set while you tweak parameters, try out new models etc. At this point you may have "cheated" a bit because you only kept things that worked well on your CV data. Finally when you say "this is done!" you try out your model on the Test data set.

Of course it's still possible that you would have the even/odd issue, and the answer to this whole set of issues is "healthy skepticism", and checking for these types of errors.

Take for example this Sentence Completion Challenge from Microsoft Research [1]

They claim some astounding results on correctly predicting GRE type questions using a very simple model (LSA for those who care). These results seemed impossible! But it turns out they cheated by training the model _only_ on possible answers (which is akin to studying for the actually GRE by only review the possible answers that will be on the exam).

We tend to obsess over p-values and test validation scores as a substitute for reasoning. But all research papers should be read as an argument a friend is making to you, "I've done this incredible thing... ", and no single number should replace reasoned inquisition into possible errors.

[0] [http://watson.latech.edu/WatsonRebootTest/ch14s2p4.html](http://watson.latech.edu/WatsonRebootTest/ch14s2p4.html)

[1] [http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/?id=157031](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/?id=157031)

<comment><USER11> the tank anecdote is also famously apocryphal. here's a good analysis of the origin of that story: [http://www.jefftk.com/p/detecting- tanks](http://www.jefftk.com/p/detecting-tanks)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 0.1% accuracy increments correspond to 10 images in the testing set; they should be reporting standard error bars with those numbers.

</comment><comment><USER13> That article reminded me of this: [http://i.imgur.com/XQJ3ACO.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/XQJ3ACO.jpg)

<comment><USER14> [http://i.imgur.com/boZRjbB.png](http://i.imgur.com/boZRjbB.png)

<comment><USER15> There's actually a little bit more info out there for would-be "Watson builders".

[https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/InsideSys...](https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/InsideSystemStorage/entry/ibm_watson_how_to_build_your_own_watson_jr_in_your_basement7)

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/21/ibm_watson_qa_system...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/21/ibm_watson_qa_system/)

[http://learning.acm.org/webinar/lally.cfm](http://learning.acm.org/webinar/lally.cfm)

[http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/ALP/2011/03/natural-language- processi...](http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/ALP/2011/03/natural-language-processing- with-prolog-in-the-ibm-watson-system/)

Of course, there's still a big gap between "Download some stuff" and "Build Watson", but at least there's a trickle of details on what happens in the "a miracle happens here" step. :-)

<comment><USER14> Yup - and very grateful for those.

To me, recently, the linked graphic represents pretty well what I'm faced with on a daily basis. People seem to think that because a hammer exists, it's easy to build a house.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The 5 Deep Learning Frameworks You Should Know - <AUTHOR> https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/the-5-deep-learning-frameworks-every-serious-machine-learner-should-be-familiar-with-93f4d469d24c <comment><USER2> Why should I know them. Your title presumed much!</comment>


Re: Anonymous- Why isn't the KKK a terrorist group? - <AUTHOR> http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/politics/216789-kkk-anonymous-terrorists-hate-group <comment><USER2> TLDR;

they are. back in the day they were charged with terrorism, principally. Among sabotage and other crimes. One of the rare examples of terrorism being used outside of either a wartime threat or leftist organization/labor union.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe they were back in the day but according to the Anti-Defamation League they are not today. Nor is any homegrown extremist group.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This focuses on the legal designation of terrorism. But outside of that designation, it isn't true that homegrown American groups are not considered terrorists. "Eco-terrorism" is not an unknown phrase in the US, for example. The Weathermen. But I don't think I have ever heard the KKK described as a terrorist organization in any context.

(For a fun exercise, try thinking of extremist groups and who they attack, then match that up with whether or not the group is considered terrorist.)</comment>


Internet Entrepreneurs Are Like Professional Athletes, They Peak Around 25 - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/30/internet-entrepreneurs-are-like-professional-athletes-they-peak-around-25/

<comment><USER2> Oh man, where to begin...

#1 This is one of those self validating ideas from VCs. VCs, especially those in 2011, actually prey on the young and inexperienced, those who don't have enough experience to know bad deals when they see them. Older entrepreneurs presumably have more experience and would be a tougher nut to crack. Older entrepreneurs are also likely to put much more capital in the startup themselves, therefore, needing less from Angels and VCs.

#2 The idea that someone intellectually or creatively peaks, especially at such a young age, is also rather absurd. Again, experience is a HUGE component of both of those and someone with more experience, has seen the past couple of bubbles knows what is coming and what to expect, how to read the tea-leaves and can navigate better.

I remember in 2009 when the GFC was starting and the market was crashing for 2 weeks a boss of mine said something that will stick with me for as long as I live (BTW...he was a Kleiner Perkins CEO at the startup I was at and my direct boss...mid-50s. He was also a VC in a previous life as well as running the largest enterprise software shop in Europe). He said "I've made and lost millions of dollars several times in my career. There is always opportunity even if they sledding gets harder. The successful people are the ones that are calm when the waters get rough, not when they are still." He was an amazing person and an amazing CEO. I've personally noticed it is much easier to be calm when I can honestly say "I've seen this before".

#3 Something that was not mentioned in the article is the notion that professional athletes often say that they physically start to deteriorate around age 30 but mentally peak around 32-40. They know the game better, they've see the schemes, the defenses/offenses, they can recognize the patterns better. Put the brain of a 40 year old John Elway into the body of a 25 year old John Elway and that guy wins 10 straight superbowls.

I've started 5 companies, had 4 failures and one sorta success. I'm working on my next one now. I WISH I could go back and do so many things differently in those first two based on what I know now. However, I can't, but I do have the opportunity to go further in this next venture. And, I have the added benefit of several hundred thousand dollars in personal capital to invest as well as a loving spouse to support the family needs. Yes, I'm getting older, but that doesn't make me a worse programmer unless I let it. Would I be willing to sell myself to a VC right now? Not unless I'm getting a KP type VC (connections) or something else in return (not just money).

For anyone interested, read Felix Dennis' book called 'How to Get Rich' on not letting go of even a single % if you can help it. Incidently this is why YC will have younger founders; the younger crowd simply cannot self fund as well as the older entrepreneurs. And younger founders need the advice more....though admittedly, all of us could use more connections ;)

EDIT: I thought about this for a bit more and I guess I would sum it up thusly: "25 is when internet entrepreneurs peak for VCs to make money off of them...after that is declining returns". I HIGHLY doubt that the internet entrepreneur peaks at 25, just the VCs ability to make % returns off of them.

<comment><USER3> I want to upvote you twice, esp. for your EDIT

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Although this article says "last year Y Combinator said the average age of their founders is under 25," in the interview it links to, I say the average age is 26:

        MA: What's the average age of investment?

        RC: I don't know. It's 25 and under.

        PG: Ours is 26 — yours have to be older.

I'm not sure what the median is now. We haven't tried to calculate it for a while.

<comment><USER5> You make it sound like the median age is trivia at best, contrary to Arrington's suggestion that it is part of your "data driven" strategy.

<comment><USER4> We don't have a data-driven strategy. I _wish_ we did, but at the moment it's anecdotal evidence driven.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Because young entrepreneurs are more creative and imaginative, and are willing put 100% of their lives into their startups, he said. "It's not a guess, this is a data driven observation," says the VC._

The article is unclear as to whether this applies to startups seeking venture capital or all startups, in general.

It also states that it's not a matter of opinion, but data-driven fact. If I'm not reaching out to a VC or engaging with a VC in any way whatsoever, what data is he going to have on me? Isn't he only going to have access to data about startups that are reaching out for capital?

I'm in my thirties and I know that very few startups actually need millions of dollars. I still haven't figured out the justification for such ridiculously huge investments and expenses in most internet startups. Anyway, I digress. Being in my thirties, what I need are ambitious partners who can fill in the tech or business gaps I personally have as well as inspire, invigorate, stir ideas and share in the glory and the gloom.

What I don't need are millions of dollars to get started. Or even hundreds of thousands. Whatever I need, I can almost assuredly take care of on my own (and with partners, _our_ own). I suppose that one reason I don't need this is that I'm not just a year or two out of college and $200k in debt from my education. I'll never reach out to a VC and he'll never know of me, unless he comes sniffing around.

By the way, it would seem that investing in someone younger is a lot wiser, because you'll get a lot more potential years of return if you're investing in "people" and not "product". Why invest with a stubborn middle aged guy who won't put up with your shit? Come on, honey! Sign on the dotted line and we'll make you a rock and roll star!

Anyway, this all seems like a lot of navel-gazing. I could sit around arguing if someone is too old to do something all day, but I'd rather go prove it.

</comment><comment><USER7> The YC data point probably has a sample bias. I'd expect that young people apply in disproportionately large numbers.

<comment><USER8> They have to. How many people over 30 are willing to quit their family and community for 3 months to go live, eat and breath YC? I would love to be in a YC environment. The people you'd meet and the experience would be unbelievable. But I'm 37, have two young kids and a wife, and that "start-up" needs my attention, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I might be missing something, but this seems so obvious it's almost tautological.

He's limiting his discussion to startups in the "consumer internet" arena and speaking from the perspective of a VC.

So you need hype, quick movement and you don't expect the company to be around in a few years (unless it's acquired by another company, probably not run by 25 year olds).

Young people are going to be more in touch with what's fashionable or about to be fashionable in order to get hype. They're inexperienced so they'll work crazy hours for no money for the promise of a lottery ticket.

This market is not really dependent on quality engineering, since the code won't be around very long to be maintained and downtime or data loss is accepted by most users (who probably aren't paying for the service anyway).

And I'm not trying to bad mouth the sector either, it's a great proving ground for new ideas and we've gotten fantastic stuff out of it.

So the point is that in a business sector where it's in the investors best interest for the founders to be young, most of the founders are young?

In the financial industry this would be phrased differently: "The consumer internet market is highly tolerant of all the faults of young, inexperienced and easily exploited workers while also being easily influenced by the least expensive marketing on the planet"

I don't think that way of framing the exact same point would make it on techcrunch though.

</comment><comment><USER5> The reason that YC funds more younger people is because the amount offered is not really enough for anyone to live on (especially in the bay area). Things are different now with Yuri offering 150k, but that is a recent change.

If you are a kid right out of school, or have your parents basement to fall back on if you go broke, you haven't lost much.

</comment><comment><USER10> From wikipedia:

"J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Orange, California)"

Is techcrunch not an internet company?

Furthermore, the story here is some anonymous VC has volunteered that this is a "data-driven observation" and well, we have a sports analogy to go with it.

There's plenty of studies not done by people who profit from promulgating the hype around young entrepreneurs.

Show us the data, 41 year old dude.

<comment><USER11> I'd argue TechCrunch is a blog, rather than a consumer startup (after all, it started with Michael Arrington alone -- and grew from there).

<comment><USER10> That seems like a dubious distinction, given gawker and other blog networks. I find it hard to find a clear difference between consumer internet products and blog networks.

Facebook is the obvious exception, but even youtube almost feels like it started out as a blog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One shining counter example: Consumer backup company Carbonite. Watch Mixergy's interview with the founder. He's not anywhere close to 25 and is a serial entreprenuer. <http://mixergy.com/david-friend-carbonite-interview/>

</comment><comment><USER13> But Arrington founded TechCrunch at age 35 — or doesn't he count?

<comment><USER14> Ohhh... you want to know about the age bias for the actually successful startups, and not just the age bias of having enough life flexibility to go off on some 80%-baked adventure...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Man, I really hope that isn't true. Or if it is, that it doesn't affect angels and VC's that funding new companies based on someone's age. I'm 31 but feel like I'm 20.

</comment><comment><USER16> link bait</comment>


The 2nd edition of The Joy of Clojure is underway - <AUTHOR> http://joyofclojure.com/2nd

<comment><USER2> Any idea on the expected release date? Is it planed in 2013 or 2014?</comment>