OKRs Aren't Going to Fix Your Communication Issues - <AUTHOR> http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2019/03/29/okrs-arent-going-to-fix-your-communication/ <comment><USER2> Incase others like me don't know - OKR is Objectives and Key Results. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR)

I honestly have never seen that acronym but apparently popular from Intel management practices?

<comment><USER3> I hate it when people use TLAs without defining them.

<comment><USER4> I added "what_the_fuck_are_okrs_craig" to the end of the URL in the hopes he gets the message when he looks in his 404 logs...

<comment><USER5> Are there people who do this?

<comment><USER4> Admittedly I'm grumpy today. I sometimes do this "404 trolling" to yell at people.

<comment><USER6> the knowledge of this has made me happy. :)

Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've only experienced OKRs at one company, and I felt a sort of a weird disconnect between OKRs and actual work/performance. On the one hand, OKRs were presumably critically important, but on the other, they weren't directly tied to individual performance. I still have trouble wrapping my head around that.

And I found those ratings (0, .4, .7, 1.0 for hitting a stretch goal) just a sort of weird self delusion, like setting your watch 15 minutes early to ensure you'll be on time. You can fool yourself a little, but eventually it stops working, and so, for example, .7 become the de facto "real" target.

Secondarily, I found that as a team lead, to the extent that OKRs were stressed, any non-OKR related work became highly disincentivized. Refactor? Write more integration tests? Hell no, not if it doesn't directly impact OKRs. We had stories in the backlog that really _should_ have been done because they would have helped other teams and yielded a positive return, but anything non- OKR was just dropped on the floor.

Third, they didn't really provide any value to the team that I could discern. We didn't have to look at our objectives every day to know what to do. We had typical releases/epics, etc... to do, and on a day to day basis, the OKRs just receded into the background. In theory, I assume that the OKRs are there to guide which releases/epics/stories, etc... you do, but in our case, we had a pretty clearly defined product already prior to introduction of OKRs. So the OKRs were all just sorta "OK, finish this thing we're already working on."

That said, the company was new to them and in the process of learning. Perhaps we did them wrong, or perhaps I missed the point.

<comment><USER8> Why didn't you make OKRs out of refactoring, integration tests, etc.?

<comment><USER9> IMO, it is difficult to write an OKR for this sort of work that is focused on measurable impact.

"Write an integration test for xyz" is not really what OKRs are designed for. You can do that (and lots of people do), but it tends to be frowned on. The reason for this is that it's not clear how it rolls up into the larger company OKRs. Where does "wrote integration test for xyz" fit into the company's "increase monthly active users by x%" KR?

I think the general trickiness is that OKRs are inherently backward-looking. A lot of technical improvements have to do with risk mitigation. The risk of nasty bugs (testing), the risk of future functionality being slow to develop because of poor architecture (refactoring), etc. But it isn't clear (to me) how to write OKRs for mitigating future risks.

<comment><USER10> | "Write an integration test for xyz" is not really what OKRs are designed for.

This gets it backwards. This is a task. Why are you performing this task? Especially without being tied to specific development? If you can't justify doing it with your/teams/companies stated OKRs, you actually shouldn't be doing it. Even if you feel you should because 'its the right thing'. Even looking at it this way gets it backward.

You should be looking at your OKRs and figuring out what you should do to get there. But, you might have to break it down a little further.

Indeed, a KR of 'increase monthly active users by x%' is not directly actionable by an engineer. But an engineering department can come up with its own OKRs that fit in that direction.

For instance, to achieve that goal it might be necessary to develop new features. However, if 70% of the engineering time is spent in bug-fixing then they're not going to be able to do that. (Do you know where your team spends its time? That might be worthwhile to figure out).

So, an objective of 'Increase development time for features' (or some such) might be considered. If you find you're dealing with a lot of bugs, one of the key results might be to reduce bugreports by 50%. To do that you might argue that you should add some integration tests so that you can change code and catch issues before they get to production so that in the future you'll be spending less time on bugfixing / rework, so that you can work on new features that will entice new users to full fill the company objective.

<comment><USER11> How do you measure the impact of rare but very expensive flaws without inventing phony metrics to pretend to fit the tasks you think need doing?

"Don't have a catastrophic data breach"

There isn't a middle ground where there is a linear correlation between a serious compound failure and fixing bugs or writing tests.

You could come up with a methodology for a "security score" and track that. However it is both a transparent workaround for having specific bugs / tasks in OKRs and it is likely that your invented metric will be bogus and will lead you to do irrational things.

<comment><USER10> IMO, you don't. Operational security isn't (or shouldnt be :)) a specific _ business goal_ for a company. With that I mean it's not a specific objective to achieve: it should be a _base principle_ that should be part of your engineering (and operating) principles that you apply to do anything.

Put differently: you have a way of working that includes applying measures for security. For instance, you might do threat modeling at an early stage of your project/iteration. Those sessions may result in concrete work to perform. You might also perform a security test at the end of an iteration that confirms things have been covered. That adds to your workload and affects your ability to achieve goals in a certain way. You apply this way of working to move toward a goal.

So, over time, you will find out that applying these principles have a certain outcome. It may be positive: "we're not seeing security issues and development pace is OK" and it might be negative ("security tests are coming back bad", "we're hacked" or "development pace is snail-like"). When it's negative, that means you have to do things that will slow down achieving your goals.

That kind of negative feedback should lead to a poor(er) performance score on the KR when reviewing them. It's this kind of feedback that should factor back into your decisions moving forward to achieve the goal. In this example, if you have negative findings, you might choose to educate engineers on security matters, streamline your engineering principles, increase the team size and/or even replace people.

<comment><USER12> If you put off security work until "we're hacked!", it's too damn late. You can't bolt on security after the fact. Similar for testing, refactoring, etc. Your approach here is a recipe for putting off important work until it's too expensive or flat out too late.

<comment><USER10> I agree. I shouldn't have added 'were hacked'. It distracts from what I'm trying to say. Your conclusion that I'm saying is a recipe for putting off work is exactly opposite of what I'm trying to say.

My point was that you should have a certain set of sane engineering principles (security being one area they should cover). They should be sufficient to todays standards. These principles are not/should not be business goals: they are tools in achieving goals in a responsible and reproducible way.

I am also saying that if you get feedback that these principles are keeping you from you should include them your evaluation in determining next steps to move forward without dictating a specific manner of how you should deal with them; that's up to the specific situation at hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> When I took over at my new lab, 40 FTEs, I implemented OKRs, just between my direct reports and I. It quickly became apparent who gets shit done and who doesn't. It also became apparent how overloaded some folks were. How little some understand their jobs. It helped me see what I needed to focus on and what I needed the lab to focus on.

I am also in a massive, MASSIVE, organization with literally acres of people dedicated to formal communication processes. I submit that OKRs were handy because they forced formal communication that revealed problems outside the official formal methods. It's a hack. And in the realm of formal comms, it's a particularly low-friction, low-cost-of-adoption hack.

10/10 will use again.

<comment><USER14> As suspected it's useful only to the higher-ups and specifically to manage drones who need military discipline, same as scrum.

If it has an acronym it's useless to functioning contributors. The original purpose has disappeared with the name.

<comment><USER15> Everybody's acting like OKRs are this enormous heavyweight process. Why? You just write down what you're planning on doing this quarter in a prioritized list. The purpose is to broadcast your view of your priorities, so interested parties can ask that they be adjusted. At the end of the quarter you look back and review what you actually accomplished. It's really not that big of a deal.

The process gets heavier at the level where OKRs are getting aggregated across multiple teams, or teams of teams, but that's a cost paid by managers, not by "drones," so I don't see why line employees should be concerned with it.

FWIW I spend about four to six hours a year thinking about OKRs, and that's assuming I'm paying attention for the entire OKR team meeting (fat chance).

<comment><USER16> > _four to six hours a year thinking about OKRs_

As a non-IC, I'd spend that much time per week on OKRs: writing the OKRs for a team involved planning out the next quarter's topics, which required aligning the team (with individual meetings & group ones) for the 2-3 weeks at the end of the quarter. Then drafting them, aligning with the department/VP's topics for the quarter, finishing them, getting feedback from other team leads, dry- run presentation for the dev manager meeting, then live run-through for the department all-hands, mid-point scoring updates, end-of-quarter scoring, back to the beginning

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> ,,OKRs present a heavy-weight answer to the problem. OKRs tend to require hours and maybe even days to determine what are the right goals and metrics. ''

If a team leader doesn't have a few days to decide on the strategy for the team for the next quarter, I have no idea what more important thing she is doing.

John Doerr wrote the great book about OKRs to explain how important they were in setting the strategy for Intel when it went out of the memory business and focused just on processors: achieving that in 1 quarter is only possible with very clear communication.

If it's not rare enough (quaterly or yearly) or not short enough (few items), it doesn't work, it's just a wish list. I have seen them working and not working (when the whole team knew that doing all the strech goals were impossible).

<comment><USER18> > If a team leader doesn't have a few days to decide on the strategy for the > team for the next quarter, I have no idea what more important thing she is > doing

Typically, focusing the team on the strategy for the next 24 hours.

<comment><USER19> That sounds like leading by micromanaging...

<comment> mr-ron Depends if the leader is in the weeds contributing or not.

My experience with quarterly goals at an early startup was that it made an artifact for what was most important at that given moment. Only later we're we able to prioritize a quarter ahead

<comment><USER17> For a startup an example objective would be an MVP launch and a key result would be an MVP being tried out by 10 people in a coffee shop, or getting 100 views from various blog posts. Something like this would set an expectation for the whole team (sales, marketing, engineering...) for the quarter. It shouldn't be complex, but it has to be something well thought out and serious.

I would get crazy if I would get a new strategy every 24 hours. The details of the execution can change, but the objective and the key results shouldn't change that often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Despite the name and intention, in my experience, OKRs is a prime candidate for cargo culting culture into an org and using process as a proxy for actual focus on outcomes.

<comment><USER21> I agree. That's the only type of use of OKRs I've ever seen or heard of, across several jobs and big, small, young and old companies.

People who get shit done do so _in spite of_ OKRs or other formalisms like Agile. OKRs do not help orient work towards what matters, maintain accountability, alert management to schedule slippage, or unify team efforts. OKRs are cargo cult metrics for middle management to bend the ear of higher management to argue and gladhand for bonuses & promotions.

<comment><USER22> When you say Agile is a formalism, you mean Agile with a big-A? Like the very formal approaches to Scrum or SAFe?

Because outside of those, agile is actually the anti-formalism. It's a whole slew of tools, techniques, methods, and philosophies to choose from for your team and organization. Offices that formalize it are the same ones that'd formalize Waterfall or Vee model or Rational Unified Process or any other approach. And they'll suffer the same consequences regardless of which one they use.

Offices that understand it as a toolkit can actually get value from it (AKA, those who read and internalized the initial manifesto and mostly avoided the consultancies that came out after).

<comment><USER21> In theory I'd agree, but in practice agile is _always_ just a source of metrics so that middle managers can create Dutch Books out of project outcomes.

I read a good way of putting it once, "when everyone misuses a tool, beyond a certain point, it's the tool's fault." I think this fits the realities of agile well.

Separately a lot of people will look at this or that pathological issue in agile and say that's not "real" agile, ignoring that this is just a No True Scotsman fallacy by which you'd vacuously define agile as "all good things" or something.

The main pathology I've seen in agile (across half a dozen companies, large & small, with or without formal agile training, etc.) is that it is paradoxically highly inflexible. If certain research tasks need to be a 4-week deep dive that cannot be chopped up into separate tickets on a sprint cadence and cannot be time-boxed, there's no way to handle it (this happens all the time on research teams).

If one team needs to work on a 3-week cycle all summer instead of the company- wide 2-week cycle, it can't be done. If there is no way to estimate some points for a certain task, you still are forced to go through the motions and fabricate misleading numbers anyway.

Even the core agile manifesto has to be ignored sometimes. Sometimes sticking to the plan actually is more important than responding to change, and you have to turn down business or tell customers no even if it costs you.

Agile can be used well. It's just exceedingly rare that it is, to such a degree that we need to admit something's wrong with agile itself given how easy it is to subvert agile into a bad system.

At this point a lot of people reply by saying, well what alternative is there? I don't like this because it presumes there has to exist some named alternative that doesn't suffer agile's limitations, but no such official method has to exist and that doesn't mean agile should be used.

Instead, just use some mixture of common sense and planning based on the specific personnel working on the project, their preferences and styles, and randomly stealing things from agile or waterfall or whatever else on an as- needed bases. Don't give it a name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Good people make any process look good.

No matter how amazing the process is, without good people, you'll fail.

I like OKRs, but I benefit from being with smart people.

</comment><comment><USER24> One way to think about this stuff is to ask : "Do lawyers and accountants and doctors and playwrights and mathematicians have these kind of schemes?". Answer: probably not. They're handy for some jobs but not others. FWIW this kind of oddness has been going on since I entered the workforce in 1986. BS5750, ISO9001, TQM, KPI, and on. Part of the landscape and not really worth getting too excited about.

<comment><USER20> Good point. Thinking about this more, I'm wondering if OKRs are just s byproduct of abstraction. Management needs to feel like they have a way to have "traction" on things they don't actually have any real understanding of - eg the code. Similar to how devs think java is what the processor actually does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> We just got done with trying OKRs for a quarter at my company. It was overall a really positive experience. We had a small team of people working to push out a new product. At the beginning of the quarter, we defined what success looked like for that new product and came up with the key indicators for it. As a developer, it was really fulfilling to take time to really think through what it would take to build out a truly quality product. I spent a lot more time thinking through the things I normally wouldn't put much effort into. We built tools to help our support team understand the new product. We put together documentation. We took time to think about how to train the company on the new product. We wrote automated tests to make sure that we could sell the new product as a stable solution. Everything was focused on our overall objective to deliver a quality product. Our team had people from development, marketing, sales, product, and quality assurance. It was great to see a cross- department team unified to get something amazing done. Just adding a data point that there are ways to make it work well.

</comment><comment><USER26> One way in which I've seen OKRs used effectively is as a defense against the type of middle or upper manager who is constantly coming up with new ideas or tasks. But what if we did $shiny_thing!? Sorry, that's not in our OKRs this quarter, let's have a meeting to plan for next quarter.

<comment><USER27> It acts as a defense in both directions, too, since the manager's boss will want the manager to stick to objectives that fit with the manager's boss' OKRs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> OKR and other management frameworks work well in environments that would perform well even without them (self-organizing, enthusiastic, competent, non- threating and driven employees). Having just the structure in place wouldn't guarantee much. Google's success using OKRs was a side effect of their past employee composition and the fact it got least in the way of them to do great things.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is good. Ive found communicating OKRs steadily on a cadence (weekly) as well as show the team the progress towards a goal at an all hands to be effective. Its rare for someone to miss _all_ the all hands meetings.

Commms, progress, priorities, from a company down to tactical execution level are easy but require discipline.

</comment><comment><USER30> People moan on and on about OKRs, but I am a developer and I honestly like them.

Personally: I do not resent that management wants to know what I am up to. And it is helpful for me to be working on projects in such a way that I understand their greater context.

</comment><comment><USER31> They also won't fix leadership's lack of vision, ability to focus, and courage.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's strange because the company I work for just started implementing OKRs last week. It actually happens creepily often when I do something and then some related article pops up on HN a some weeks later. I do read HN everyday though but still.

I guess it shows that we severely lack creativity and are all being manipulated.

Personally I don't think OKRs add any value because they force us to focus on measurable results at the expense of unmeasurable results which might actually be more important.

<comment><USER33> >It actually happens creepily often when I do something and then some related article pops up on HN a some weeks later.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader–Meinhof_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader–Meinhof_effect)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> What is an OKR? Whatever it is, clearly didn't help the author to communicate clearly. ;)

</comment><comment><USER35> Here's a step to fix your communication issue. Don't assume people know what OKR is, and explain it briefly at the start of your article about OKRs.

</comment><comment><USER36> I have never been involved in an okr system that wasn't an utterly pointless waste of time that no one but hr and back office people took seriously.

<comment><USER37> What was a common theme among all the systems that you think contributed to their pointlessness?

<comment><USER38> We do quarterly OKRs. Quarterly deadlines are completely arbitrary and my actual deadlines aren't tied to the quarters.

So I (and everyone around me) don't take them seriously. We take the actual deadlines seriously. The only thing OKRs seem to do is provide direction to the higher ups about what my team is up to.

<comment><USER39> Yes so you have no actual incentive to focus on OKRs. You're doing the work required to keep the company running but the quarter's OKR goals only gets attention if you think it will help your actual job. Is that what you mean?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Using email efficiently requires training and discipline, being able to:

\-- at a quick glance, quickly "triage" big lists of unread messages, not be put off by several hundreds messages and grab the phone

\-- reply shortly and to the point (being native to the culture and language helps but is not a given anymore)

\-- master art of attracting attention of very busy people of various kinds, to get them open at least the email and read some

\-- not to turn email into slack in disguise, check if the question already has answer available somewhere else, and not become nervous if the other side doesn't reply in a second

\-- master email client sufficiently to configure pre-sorting messages, and trust it's action

I'd say environment where email works as a reliable channel for top-importance communication (such as goals and prios), probably already doesn't need OKRs.

</comment><comment><USER41> Jacob Kaplan-Moss had some practical advice in response to this post which I found interesting:

[https://jacobian.org/2019/apr/1/talk-about- performance/](https://jacobian.org/2019/apr/1/talk-about-performance/)

</comment><comment><USER42> The point he makes is that OKRs (alone) aren't going to save you. The same way any technology or trend (Scrum, Docker, latest JS library...) isn't going to fix your problems. You must change your process/culture along with it.

We took on OKRs a while back, and have created a process around it - [https://info.container-solutions.com/hermes-container- soluti...](https://info.container-solutions.com/hermes-container-solutions- strategic-execution-toolkit) (Apologies for the gated content)

</comment><comment><USER43> OKRs were always waved around as some magic secret sauce that's going to revolutionize the free puppy distribution market. In practice they ended up just being another reason why directors would bother us about the "error burn rate" of services that only have errors when the upstream services they rely on are having issues; with no way to programmatically remove that from the "error burn rate". I hope this helped management discover how much the systems of that job all rely on eachother.

</comment><comment><USER44> I feel like the article misses a powerful aspect of OKRs–the ability for people to be creative, but in a cohesive manner that results in focus.

I noticed that my team hardly did any of the work we planned for last quarter, but we were still able to achieve many of our key results through (different) work.

In an organization where you don't have the power to influence your own work, OKRs provide more context than what will be used, so people may feel like it's a waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER45> Goals are great, sure. And yes these are just goals with lots of wrapping.

But I am tired of having the latest management book wisdom foisted upon me by product and management. Why do engineers always need to be dragged into this stuff? Why can't they be content to have their endless meetings and share their "decks" alone? As Christopher Hitchens was fond of saying about religion: "just leave me out of it."

/rant

</comment><comment><USER46> "OKRs tend to require hours and maybe even days to determine what are the right goals and metrics."

The author implies that this is wasted time. It is not.

Figuring out why you do what you do and how you measure the success of that in a way that leads you to the right result IS hard but extremely valuable work. It forces you to deeply understand the problem you're solving and the challenges you face.

</comment><comment><USER47> In my experience OKRs are the latest fashion of BigCo MBA bullshit -- same thing with a new name and with equally bullshit results.

</comment><comment><USER48> I like having a static quarterly document, in a super easy to access place. It must be one page max and lay out the "theme" of the quarter and supporting initiatives.

Every team weekly summary email has a link to this document in the footer. Tracker — or whatever you use — has epics et al aligned with this document.

</comment><comment><USER49> OKRs can be really great but only if they are used properly and are fully integrated into the process from top to bottom.

Just relabelling old KPIs as OKRs is pointless (just, why would you do this?)

Just having OKRs at a division or company level is pointless (no buy-in or engagement from regular employees)

</comment><comment><USER50> What is OKR?

<comment><USER39> Example of a more traditional KPI (Key Performance Indicator): System downtime must be below 0.01% every quarter.

Example of an OKR (Objectives and Key Results): By the end of the quarter, implement a new fast-response process to reduce issue resolution time by 25%

<comment><USER27> That isn't an effective OKR. Try this:

Objective: system downtime must be below .01% every quarter.

KR: implement new fast-response process (binary measurement.)

KR: reduce mean issue resolution time from 60 to 45 minutes (linear measurement of progress with .75 set to 15 minutes and 1.0 set to 20 minutes of reduction)

In this case, your objective is likely a key result of our boss, so it makes sense that it's the same measurement. You're being measured on something that matters. One of your key results is purely based on effort. The other might have a bit in it that's out of your control, but also lets you benefit from other ways you and your team find to achieve the resolution time reduction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> OKRs can be great, or they can result in releasing software that isn't ready yet (see Google's Buzz for context).

My suggestion: let your team members craft goals, and help shape those goals into deliverables that help them and the company.

</comment><comment><USER52> I worked at a startup for a bit that started OKRs and I found experience super enjoyable; to the point where working in a more relaxed environment(for lack of a better description) is kinda hard these days.

The two things people and teams struggled the most with though, IMHO, is:

A.) Coming up with a good OKR that met longer term, higher level company priorities that intersected your work.

B.) Coming up with a good ORK in terms of measurable key results.

It can be tough and time consuming to get the measurements in place necessary to gauge the results, or even make a case for the OKR in the first place(incidentally this is the dirty secret of SRE IMHO). We would pro- actively get data collection in place on occasion for reasons that included helping to launch and score future OKRs.

<comment><USER53> True. I've worked at several companies where OKRs were implemented and I find it valuable. Everyone does them differently. People still have trouble understanding and implementing them.

To address some of the pain points with OKRs I started building my own saas about a year ago [https://simpleokr.com](https://simpleokr.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> John Doerr's book references Intel and Google heavily to gain credibility for the OKR methodology. Can someone from either of those organizations chime in with their experience?

</comment><comment><USER55> OKRs aren't supposed to fix communication. They are supposed to guide your team to make day to day decisions that support the agreed goal.

</comment><comment><USER56> One issue I see... People dont actually read their email

[https://blog.prepp.io/news-stories/youre-not-imagining-it- yo...](https://blog.prepp.io/news-stories/youre-not-imagining-it-your- employees-are-not-reading-your-emails)

</comment><comment><USER57> True that!

</comment><comment><USER57> true that!</comment>


Here Comes Another Bubble v1.1 - The Richter Scales  - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I

<comment><USER2> I don't think there's a bubble at all. The original tech bubble happened because companies IPO'd really early, and Joe Average Investor took equity out of his home or took cash advances on his credit cards and invested it in high tech stocks. This inflated the value of those stocks, causing more Joe Average Investors to pour money into high tech stocks. Lather, Rinse, Repeat until mid-2000 when that cycle collapsed.

There are precious few IPO's right now. And, the people investing in startups right now are accredited investors i.e angels and VC's. There isn't money rushing in from Joe Average Investor in the US, because by law they can't invest in a non-publicly traded company.

Angels and VC's plan on a bunch of companies in their portfolio failing. They typically expect to lose money on %40-70 of their investments, break even on %30 of their investments and hopefully make a 2X to GoogleX return on their money on the %10-30 of the companies that "succeed".

There are around 250,000 millionaires in the San Francisco Bay Area and 600,000 millionaires in NYC.[1] That's a huge pool of people that can afford to write a check for $25-50k without really hurting if they lose that money. A lot of those people are also increasingly willing to write a check to a couple of entrepreneurs with a promising product and a bit of traction. Why? Because they would rather do that with some of their wealth rather than pay a professional money manager %3 of their investment a year to manage their money for them.

ref [1]: <http://www.us.capgemini.com/news/current_news.asp?ID=840>

</comment><comment><USER3> Please people, when you submit something 2+ years old, indicate it in the title. (2007 in this case)

</comment><comment><USER4> My view on this is that the first internet wave came too early. In the late 90s, society was not ready for the changes the internet were bringing (disintermediation, killing of distribution channels, ...). The tech was oversold by eager business people to an audience that was not asking for it & oftentimes did not understand it. Now at least people 'get' the internet. Sometimes I feel we're only _now_ fulfilling the promises we made ten years ago.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For some time I have a feeling that we have 1996/1997 again - this video is from 2007...

</comment><comment><USER5> No, wallstreet died before this could end up in a real bubble.

But there is always next time.</comment>


DigitalOcean announces IPv6 Support in Singapore - <AUTHOR> https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/announcing-ipv6-support-in-singapore/

<comment><USER3> I wonder what the risks are for running on "The new version was completely rewritten from the ground up...", but it does seem to have been tested for a few months.

As a developer that does ops stuff as a means to the ends of development - <USER2> afraid to admit I don't really understand what I need to do to transition to ipv6. Is it just pointing my domain names at an ipv6 address and updating iptables? Do I have to be concerned with it at an application level?

<comment><USER4> Generally as a developer you just want to bind to "::" when listening as the equivalent of "0.0.0.0" ie all addresses, or "::1" for localhost (and create an ipv6 socket, but most higher level stacks will do that given an ipv6 adddress). In most stacks that is the only userspace change. The usual setup is that this will also map ipv4 connections over to ipv6. That is not always true, eg OpenBSD will never bind to both kinds of address, you have to listen on two sockets, and you can force that behaviour on other systems. This should work so long as the host you are on does not have ipv6 completely disabled in the kernel, even if there is in fact no ipv6 routing.

Most things "just work", though there are minor fixes and things to know, eg the standard notation for ipv6 literals in http is [http://](http://)[::1]/ as the : might be a port specifier. I think the only thing I used recently that had no idea about ipv6 was Twisted, oh and some Java applications.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: programmer asked to sign 2 year non compete being 3 years full time. - <AUTHOR>

a friend works full time as a software engineer for a healthcare company and specialize in very niche software. Now 3 years later all of sudden bunch of people are being let go just weeks after signing a new agreement. The new agreement holds that for 2 years from the moment of being let go or quitting, you cannot work for a company in the same field. My friend being programmer with unique healthcare knowledge would never sign an agreement like that in the first place but now 3 years on the w2 job the company is "forcing" him to do so.
what would you do? is it reasonable/normal to negotiate for some additional perks given this new very uncomfortable position??
thanks. <comment><USER2> You didn't talk about where you are, and location matters a lot. Also, I hate to sound like reddit, but your friend might want to talk to an employment lawyer if they have issues with this kind of clause. Many of my friends work in finance, which is even worse than healthcare about non-competes. In practice, without discussing any possible concrete payments that may or may not have been awarded to anyone I know, because they would be bound by confidentiality agreements that they would never violate:

\- Companies usually only enforce it on "key people" but they do it liberally, as many of these companies have non-compete payout riders on their key person insurance.

\- They may not enforce the whole term --- it is their choice.

\- They will probably offer full salary during the non-compete period (at least in Chicago, where less than full salary won't even make it past mediation). If you lawyer up, you can probably negotiate at least COBRA/benefits payments as well and possibly part of your previous yearly bonus.

\- If you take another job during the non-compete period, you may need to prorate the salary against what you're being paid to not work.

\- If your friend plans to "fight" they should be ready for a protracted battle with many months of limbo, unpaid status during which the company will attempt to have injunctions issued against a new company to keep your friend from working. Also, many of these contracts have mandatory non-binding arbitration followed by mediation, though several lawyers I talked to said they usually just file for court anyway immediately if they're fighting, since that is where it will end up.

Anyway, after talking to a lawyer, if she feels like it's worth the downside risk of having to spend two years volunteering at a local animal shelter and working on her Project Euler achievements, sign away. If not, or if the lawyers in their area have different advice about what the compensation will be for the non-compete, then walk.

</comment><comment><USER3> Resign without signing the agreement.

About the only way I would sign such an agreement would be if the company put two years' salary in escrow for payment to me during the two year period.

<comment><USER4> Isn't it better to have them fire you than to quit outright? I think a future employer would prefer to see "fired because I refused to sign a two year non- compete" than to see "quit because I didn't like how management was acting." The latter is more ambiguous to interpret.

Personally, I would treat it as a salary negotiation and ask for "garden- leave." See [http://www.employmentlawgroup.net/Articles/ROswald/Defending...](http://www.employmentlawgroup.net/Articles/ROswald/DefendingNonCompete.asp) : "Before signing a non-compete agreement, an employee should request that the employer include a "garden-leave" provision in the non-compete. A garden- leave clause requires the employer to continue paying the former employee her salary and benefits in exchange for the employee's agreement not to compete with the employer. This arrangement benefits both the employer and the employee because it gives employers necessary protection against unfair competition yet ensures that employees are financially secure during the non- compete period. While Virginia courts have not yet addressed the enforceability of a garden-leave provision, other courts have held that a former employee is entitled to garden-leave pay where she is unable to find new employment because of a non-compete."

The Wikipedia entry on non-competes may be helpful: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would just go somewhere else and start working. If someone actually had the balls to try and cause problems for me (for zero gain on their part) I would probably liberally advertise that fact and drag them through the mud.

In your friend's case, since he will have to quit under duress, he should be entitled to unemployment benefits while he finds some sane employers. No, it is not reasonable/normal to negotiate with insane idiots.

</comment><comment><USER6> As a founder of a company being acquired, I was ok signing an agreement that had a 1 year non-compete.

As an employee of a regular job - hell no (unless they agree to pay me a substantial portion of my salary for that 2 years)

Depending on the location, this may actually be un-enforceable, but he'll need a lawyer to verify this and fight it if necessary.

<comment><AUTHOR> this is New York City. how about negotiating terms down to one year or 6 months? is that something you think is worth mentioning to mgmnt?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've had two people quit over just this issue. I signed mine figuring never in a million years would they actually track me down and sue me if I was ever let go.

They are getting their ducks in a row for some specific reason. Are they being Acquired?

</comment><comment><USER8> If your friend is in the position to do so he should get an offer from a competing employer and then bargain ruthlessly with the expectation of leaving.

</comment><comment><USER9> What is the company afraid of? Is there some competitor poaching talent? The idea of locking you out just before firing you is very peculiar.

</comment><comment><USER10> He should consult a lawyer and do so, if possible, before signing the agreement.

</comment><comment><USER11> How about that the deal is void if the company lets him go.

<comment><AUTHOR> its pretty straightforward written: for any reason on any side.

<comment><USER3> He should contact an employment/labor attorney. Under no circumstances should he sign the agreement without consulting an attorney.

30-60-90 days of non-compete is one thing. Two years is insane, almost criminal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > all of sudden bunch of people are being let go just weeks after signing a > new agreement.

If I'm reading this correctly, is this not itself a huge indication of the company's attitude and so a warning sign?

I agree with the others: Talk to a (competent, specializing in local employment law) attorney. Start job hunting now. Don't sign it unless you have a good reason (e.g. guaranteed compensation at then-current pay level, plus normal raises as determined in some fashion, for the full non-compete term -- and paid COBRA or equivalent benefits that perhaps extend beyond the non- compete term (because you still need coverage until you actually land the next job); health care insurance can be as important as anything else -- also not forgetting the value of pension plan participation and/or 401k match, and the like).

No, you may not get all of that. But those are all factors to consider in making a personal decision.

From your superficial description and my own personal experience, it reads as if this organization may be turning into crap. I'd suggest seriously exploring moving on.

P.S. Also know the geographic limitations, if any are specified, of the non- compete agreement. In some jurisdictions and/or employment domains, absence of geographic limits effectively makes the non-compete illegal or unenforceable or a judge may modify the agreement to impose such a limitation -- probably the maximum geographic limitation allowed under local law. IANAL nor particularly versed in this; it's my impression gleaned from others' comments here and there on this matter.</comment>


DIY CRISPR Genome Engineering Kits on Indiegogo - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/diy-crispr-genome-engineering-kits-from-the-odin/x/4544718#/ <comment><AUTHOR> Should people have access to something like this? Is genetic engineering and geneware going to be the next big thing? Seems like it. I imagine that one day we will all have automated genetic programmers in our homes.</comment>


Ask HN: How to enter a new market with an SaaS without VC? - <AUTHOR>

We are running a SaaS solution (5-figure MRR / 250 active customers) in Germany / Austria looking to enter new markets. Especially US would be very interesting as the topic, the SaaS is made for, is popular in Germany for 1-2 years already and is currently popping up in the US and other countries in the last months.
The product itself is basically a SEO tool: a TF-IDF analysis tool for analyzing existing and creating better content for websites. In addition to that, you are provided with a ranking tracker for your keywords + an onpage tool which helps you to identify technical / structural / textual & content issue on your website.
1) Is there a realistic chance to find a motivated local marketing-partner who pushes the product into the market for 2-3 years and then earns a lifetime %-share of the local revenue in his country / area?
2) Which way would you suggest to enter the US or other new markets with a small SaaS, which does NOT want to go the way through VC funding / investors?
3) Are you possibly interested? ;) <comment><USER2> Would you be better served staying closer to home for your first attempt?

Rather than reach for the US why not try france or spain (or the UK)

\-- common currency (except for the uk)

\-- Fewer time zone issues (out of band support and troubleshooting)

\-- Not having to deal with US taxes (as in sales tax vs vat)

\-- Gives you a chance to work out I18N l16n in a smaller pool/area

\-- is your client base one that would help you out if you put up an affiliate model? "sign up french clients and your next month is free"

If your looking for "marketing partners", are you looking at folks who would fit in a "basket of products" related to what you do? If you sell razors who sells shaving cream, can you team up with someone who is local to do the CS and sales for you hear, and you do the same thing for them there?

<comment><AUTHOR> a "closer-to home" market would be easier for sure, and we are also thinking about it. but the issue is more or less similar - you need a local with an existing network or somebody with real passion to push the product to partners / clients with different marketing campaigns (content marketing, blogger relations, exhibitions, direct mailings, forums, blogs,...)

affiliate model is an options as well. the easiest push would be through webhosting companies or marketing agencies, who offer the product as upselling product to their existing clients and get some rev-share, i guess.

regarding the razors & shaving cream partnership. the idea is generally a good one (in theory). we already have some local partners (mostly online marketing agencies), but they usually don´t have the time/capacity/motivation to push a product from somebody else for a 40% share of a (small) monthly fee, as they don´t see the value in passive long-term recurring revenue.

<comment><USER2> Not quite what I was suggesting so let me clarify.

Im in the process of building out a product to help small businesses deal with inbound leads and CRM, moving them to conversion more quickly. Our products would not be "competitive" however my customers could easily become your customers. If I reviewed your product, and LIKED it, would I be willing to promote you to my customers, assuming I could offer them a discount and get a rev share?

Im suggesting you find a SAAS business to partner with, they see the value in long term recurring revenue, and introducing a stream of said revenue, without adding a lot of overhead. Assuming you do reciprocal marketing, at the end of any given month only one of you is going to be writing a check and thats to balance the books between the leads your generating for each other.

The only example that I can think of for these sorts of relationships was/is paypal and eBay (it is early and I need more coffee). Both shared a ton of customers, and had complimentary products did the whole merger/split thing because it looked great on paper, but didn't work in principal. If your eBay, can you find your paypal, and build a partnership rather than seek a merger?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for your clarification. the paypal & ebay example made me think. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Maybe interesting for us, why don't you want to use VC funding / investors? Is it the equity part?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, equity part and freedom in product development, but there are options like a separate US company with shared equity. Looking forward to your email (ctc details in my profile).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> 1b) Where should you start looking for such a marketing-partner?</comment>


Benchmarking Redis on AWS ElastiCache - <AUTHOR> http://blog.meldium.com/home/2013/9/13/benchmarking-redis-on-aws-elasticache

<comment><USER2> It is important to realize that these numbers are very, very low. Amazon's architecture has always been particularly terrible at running Redis, and the fact that they gave it a brand name has not changed that.

antirez's "How fast is Redis?" page ([http://redis.io/topics/benchmarks](http://redis.io/topics/benchmarks)) draws some attention to the fact that Redis gets much slower when virtualized. He mentions that a state-of-the-art VMware hypervisor will cut Redis's performance by a factor of two.

EC2's performance is considerably worse than a state-of-the-art hypervisor.

For comparison, I just ran the same benchmark the article describes on the desktop PC I'm currently using to post this. It cost me $800, last year, and that includes the video card. It gets an average of 881,670 OPS, which is over ten times faster than an m2-2xlarge machine in this benchmark.

</comment><comment><USER3> I recently switched some of our eccomerce caching from a 3 Node ElastiCache Memcache cluster to a m1.large Redis ElastiCache instance for caching and a m1.small for session storage in Redis. So far the performance with Magento I've seen a 30-40% increase.

<comment><USER4> 30-40% increase in what? Latency? Throughput?

I'd be curious to see how using ElastiCache Redis as a session store compares to DynamoDB (on latency, throughput, and price).

<comment><USER3> App server response time (New Relic measurement). I haven't looked into DynamoDB.

<comment><USER4> Just to be 100% clear, increase = worse in this context, correct?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing that would be interesting to see is how Redis on ElastiCache stands up against other cloud-based Redis offerings that are available in AWS, like redis-cloud.com. Is anyone here using one of these services?

<comment><USER6> probably around the same, although the winning features for those would rather be the auto-scaling and sharding features, instant failover etc ([http://redis-cloud.com/redis/redis-comparison](http://redis- cloud.com/redis/redis-comparison)).

<comment><USER7> I'm always a little dubious about any service whose comparison page is "we do everything! others do nothing!" like that. Anyone got any direct experience with them?

<comment><USER2> Yep! My company evaluated their service, briefly. We asked how they perform on redis-benchmark. They provided no numbers and said "We have a way to stop users who generate benchmark traffic on our service."

We tried running the actual Redis-using process of our application on their free tier. The server went down.

Would not recommend.

<comment><USER8> Dear rspeer - we regret learning of your negative experience with our service. We do find it somewhat puzzling that you never reached out to us for assistance after your instance had crashed - we have thousands of active users and each incident is dealt with utmost professionalism regardless the plan type. If you wish, we invite you try our service again and contact us at email@example.com with any question or issue.

<comment><USER2> Sorry for the lack of follow-up, but there's a reason we were just evaluating. Nothing was forcing us to use redis-cloud in particular.

In fact, nothing was forcing us to use any sort of Redis in the cloud, which is good, because my conclusion is that _nobody_ has a satisfactory solution for it. It's not just your service. It's not just Amazon either. Nobody has figured out Redis in the cloud.

Redis is designed to be a high-performance, in-memory data store. All "Redis in the cloud" offerings turn it into a low-performance data store that feels more like a database, and that defeats the point.

If you figure it out, let me know... but I'll want to be able to run redis- benchmark.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> tl;dr Don't use the t1-micro or m1-small instances for anything serving interactive traffic, m1-large and m2-xlarge are much better than c1-xlarge

<comment><USER6> and the winners are m1-medium, m1-large, and m2-xlarge</comment></comment>


Ask HN: When to get customers' billing info? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on the billing system of a new startup, and I'm trying to think through the plusses and minuses of when to get the credit card info from the customers.
I know that some shops (37signals) get the credit card up front, but say "we'll give you 30 days to cancel, and we won't charge you until the end of that time." This method actually bothers me, as it seems to spin "counting on you not remembering to cancel" as "doing you a favor, so you don't have to get out your credit card to actually sign up down the road." But maybe I'm being overly sensitive on that?
Have you tried multiple approaches? Has anyone done A/B testing on signup flows? I'd love anything you have ... anecdotes, data, whatever.
If it matters, the startup I'm working on at the moment has a freemium model, with a free (but feature-limited) version, and a paid (or multiple tiers of paid) version. The market is freelancers, self-employed people, and, to some extent, small businesses. <comment><USER2> I'm the designer for tenderapp.com, and we decided to try putting in credit card information when we need it (after the 30-day trial) instead of up front, like we previously did for Lighthouse. Well, decided may be the wrong word... let's call it a happy accident that it happened that way.

Now that we've had this flow live for a few months, I can't think of a reason a small startup would possibly ask for credit card information up front.

Pros:

\- We have one of the lowest barriers to entry to our app. Literally 10 seconds and you have a fully functional install.

\- We have lowered the amount of people complaining about us accidentally charging them (i.e. they forget about the 30-day trial and ask for a refund at day 31) to zero.

\- We've opened up a lot more channels for follow up. We can contact people weeks/months after their trial expires and see if they'd like an extension or to try again. (In other words, we've removed the negative parts of trying the product -- cancelling)

Cons:

\- It's lowered our conversion rate (remember what rate means) and made it extremely unpredictable.

\- We don't get to steal as much money from people who forget to cancel their subscriptions.

At the end of the day, I believe in our product and I want as many people to try it as possible. A credit card form isn't going to stop someone from purchasing a product (unless it's _really_ bad), but it sure does stop a lot of people from trying out a product. So I work as hard as I can to remove any roadblocks to people getting their feet wet. From the responses I've had, our customers love it too.

<comment><USER3> Does your lower conversion rate take into account people who cancel after one month, or ask for a refund because they tripped over the thirty days?

<comment><USER2> Yes, it does. We don't generate reports often enough to take into account day- long variations, so it ends up being people that stick around a month or two (at minimum)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm curious how it would work if you gave a free month, then billed at the end of every month.

Let's say they sign up on January 1. On February 1st, they receive an email or notice mentioning that their free trial is over, and they'll be billed at the end of the month. If they're not completely satisfied, they can close their account and have February's bill completely refunded. At the end of February, they get prompted for payment information.

Some people will use your service free for two months and then close their account, effectively getting a two month trial period. It's unlikely these people were going to purchase your service anyhow.

The people who were going to pay will pay like normal.

The folks who are on the fence about paying might decide to signup because they've now had a month of knowing that they're 'paying' for this service. Once you're already expecting the bill it doesn't seem like a big deal to pay it.

If you implemented a payment scheme like that, you might make it a policy to never charge people for the month they cancel either. I know it loses a month worth of income, but it feels like you'd be giving departing customers a more positive experience.

</comment><comment><USER5> Today I finally gave up Trac for Lighthouse (I need to let customers file bugs). Lighthouse _won't_ take my credit card information up front; I had to get a free account and then upgrade it. I actually found it annoying.

On the other hand I'm sure patio11 will tell you that nothing bounces prospects faster than a credit card signup.

<comment><USER3> It bounces me. I don't want to have to hand in payment information to even take a look at a product before I can use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> For a simple premium model with a 30-day free trial, you've got two reasons not to ask for the CC info until you're going to cut off someone's access to the premium product (you want to maximize the number of prospects, especially as a new entrant). I'd just make sure that you just "locked" someone's premium features/data if their credit card lapsed (if you're doing subscriptions) or if they decline to re-up (if you're allowing month-by-month PAYGO payments) - i.e. don't delete it accidentally when you downgrade an account.

And even if you decide to follow 37signals w/r/t the premium version (ask at the time someone upgrades/purchases, but only but actually charge the card at the end of the first period), there's no reason to ask for a CC for the free version; you're making your sales funnel unnecessarily narrow. You can nudge/bother them to upgrade _only when they're already customers_.

[I guarantee that no one has a more convoluted billing system than does Dawdle, so I've spent a lot of time dealing with this living hell. While we don't require up-front payment, we use credit cards for authentication as a fraud prevention measure for both creating (free) listings and for our "name your own price" StandingOffers. (I mean, if you're going to name your own price, and we want to charge you automatically when your StandingOffer matches a listing, we kinda sorta need your info up front.) Of course, the authentication charges are 1) expensive and 2) piss off customers, but what are you gonna do?]

</comment><comment><USER7> I agree with your comments on asking for credit card info upfront. As a user, if I were to try out a 30-day trial offer, I'd prefer to provide my credit card info after the trial ...and only if I decided to purchase the product.

I recently purchased HttpScoop which uses this model (great product for the Mac and they let me try the product for 15 days before asking for my credit- card info) \--- As a developer, this is the model that I'd use for any of my products that have a trial offer.

</comment><comment><USER8> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=827379>

Thought you might find the above post useful. Anyway, thanks for this question. I think 37Signals is certainly the gold standard but I don't think I'm going to follow it for my yet-to-be-released project.

They have about 5 or 6 tiers for each app and to be honest I really hate that for the following reasons:

1\. because it just seems overly complicated for the user and

2\. it seems like a pain in the arse to manage on the backend

It seems to work for them though and people are used to this method of tiered monthly payment plans.

I kind of prefer the Google apps model myself but then again Google is ginormous and doesn't need to price google apps to make profit so I'm suspicious of that. Google apps has 2 versions, free and pro. The pro is $50/user/year and they have no tiers. Nice and simple.

</comment><comment><USER9> Just a quick thought: If the product can be given as a gift, maybe you should leave a "give as gift" option. When you ask for credit card later, you eliminate the chance for your best customer. If a parent, spouse or friend gives a subscription as a gift, I feel like they are putting it on set it and forget it mode (especially if what you are asking for is a small amount every month).

For sure this only applies to certain products, maybe educational or entertainment ones.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think it depends how you're placing your lower-tier version. If it's permanently free, I don't think you need credit card information. If it's a 30-day trial of your paid version, you might want to grab the card just to make sure that no one's signing up, waiting a month, canceling, and creating a new account. I'd recommend not doing the "we'll charge you unless you tell us not to" version. Just make it really easy for them to buy it when the month is over.

</comment><comment><USER11> Oh god please take my credit card info up front....then remind the hell out of me that the account will auto renew at 7, 3 and 1 day left.

I've dealt with a couple services that won't take the account info up front, and I canceled because paying was such a hassle on the day that they actually wanted to be paid.

</comment><comment><USER12> They can do this because they have achieved enough user mass and are now a relatively known site.

They did not have this when they launched.

I suggest you let your users try everything and then downgrade when their time is up. They don't know what they are missing unless you show them.

</comment><comment><USER13> Give them the option of filling in the CC info and provide a "Do it later" button?

It would be interesting to see how the conversation rate differed between the group that filled in the information immediately and those that opted for later.

</comment><comment><USER11> Additionally, you can make taking it up front optional as well...</comment>


Tax Gap Due To Under-Reported Income To IRS Can End World Poverty Ten Times Over - <AUTHOR> http://statspotting.com/tax-gap-due-to-under-reported-income-to-irs-can-end-world-poverty-ten-times-over/

<comment><USER2> > ... Can End World Poverty Ten Times Over

Yes, for thirty seconds. When are people going to realize that using money to end poverty is a fantasy? The conventional way to try to end poverty is to give people money -- but when people get money, they have more children. There isn't enough money in the world to begin to approach people's enthusiasm for creating poor, starving children.

But there really is a way to end poverty, and it has nothing to do with money. It consists of:

1\. Education.

2\. The right to reproductive self-determination.

That's right -- the two things Third World dictators dislike the most.

<comment><USER3> > but when people get money, they have more children.

I'm curious what you're basing this assertion on. In general a lower income level (household/region) or lower economic development (region) are correlated with higher fertility levels, that is pretty well established. Of course the relationship is complicated, and it's not quite that simple. It's true that just giving people money would not necessarily lead to a lower birth rate, but it could if done strategically and in the right circumstances.

> nd it has nothing to do with money

Education costs money, and money can help kick start economic development.

I agree that just throwing money at poverty doesn't make it go away, but money is certainly an important factor.

<comment><USER2> >> but when people get money, they have more children.

> I'm curious what you're basing this assertion on.

History. In particular, the sad history of anti-poverty programs like AFDC (just one example among many):

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

AFDC was abolished for the reason that it made the problem worse. A quote: "... it was criticized for offering incentives for women to have children, and for providing disincentives for women to join the workforce."

> It's true that just giving people money would not necessarily lead to a > lower birth rate, but it could if done strategically and in the right > circumstances.

Money alone can only make the problem worse. To do any good at all, it must be accompanied by something else. Reproductive self-determination would be a good start.

> Education costs money ...

There's a difference between schooling and education. Your remark applies to schooling. Education is free.

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." -- Mark Twain

<comment><USER3> > he sad history of anti-poverty programs like AFDC

Right, but that's a more specific point than what you made and the distinction is important. You said "when people get money they have more children"..this is demonstrably false when talking in general.

The reality is, when you give people money in certain ways it becomes an incentive to have more children. On this we are in complete agreement. This does not hold as on overall trend though. It's perfectly possible to spend money on subsidies or programs which have the opposite effect.

> There's a difference between schooling and education.

There is, but in this context it's just splitting hairs.

> Your remark applies to schooling.

Not so.

> Education is free.

That's true, but meaningless in practical terms. The level of education is not going to spontaneously raise itself. It's true that some people could start providing education of their own accord, in fact many already do. However to have a real effect you need to organize and disseminate information, etc...all much easier with money.

<comment><USER2> > ... this is demonstrably false when talking in general.

No, it is demonstrably true when talking in general. To deny this is to deny the scientific theory of evolution. More resources leads to more reproduction. Organisms that don't follow this rule, die out.

>> Education is free.

> That's true, but meaningless in practical terms.

What? Are we talking about education, or are we talking about purchasing a sheepskin?

> However to have a real effect you need to organize and disseminate > information, etc...all much easier with money.

So education can't happen unless the ruling class releases the information essential to education? You have a very interesting picture of reality. How did people educate themselves before there was a ruling class, before there was someone who needed to "organize and disseminate information"? On that topic, how did the ruling class get there in the first place -- or was it "turtles all the way down" (a famous Bertrand Russell line)?

Education doesn't mean waiting to be told _what_ to think, it means learning _how_ to think.

<comment><USER3> > To deny this is to deny the scientific theory of evolution.

No, it's to understand the statistics. The richer and more economically developed a country is in general; the lower the birthrate. Likewise that's the trend for households/regions/etc. In general the better off a person is, the less likely they are to have children or to have many children.

Your analysis is too simplistic. The issue here is where the incentive lies: with having more children or less. Programs that give money to the poor do neither of those things __inherently __. It depends on __how __the money is given; that is what causes the incentive to go one way or the other.

As we covered, it becomes more complicated because there are ways to give incentive to have more children. To put it simply, if you pay a woman for each child she has...she is more likely to have more children. If you give her the chance to earn more money, she is LESS likely to have more children.

> So education can't happen unless the ruling class releases the information > essential to education?

That's a rather nice strawman you've constructed.

> How did people educate themselves before

Much more slowly and with greater difficulty than they do now; that's the point.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Are We Really So Modern? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/05/the-dream-of-enlightenment-by-anthony-gottlieb <comment><USER2> Yes indeed, we really are so modern, if we are going by how many more things have become wobbly. We have one-upped the enlightenment geezers: we no longer have a fixed notion of time (relativity).</comment>


Ask HN: Any Tips for Downloading Petabytes from Cloud to Local - <AUTHOR> One of my colleagues request to download a petabytes from multiple cloud locations to in-house server room. (what?)
At first, we consider to use the AWS Snowball. but requester's team are using multiple cloud providers and regions. Because of growing data every day, we can't afford to call the AWS Snowball/Snowmobile every months/quarters.
Next idea is using AWS Direct Connect (and other providers') and syncing to local object storage. (maybe ceph?)
Is there any suggestion/idea/solution for solving this wisely? <comment><USER2> Buy a used station wagon.</comment>


National Entrepreneurship Week: This video sums it up (and motivates you) - <AUTHOR> http://www.siliconprairienews.com/2010/02/national-entrepreneurship-week-this-video-sums-it-up

<comment><USER2> As an entrepreneur, I found this to be very motivating. It highlights the essence of why some of us do what we do.

They guys at Grasshopper seem to be dedicated to motivate anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit to go for it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Grasshopper grew out of Babson college, which is the top entrepreneur MBA program.

So Babson has been promoting this video, so it is cool to see it being a part of the NEW.

</comment><comment><USER4> Creative marketing by grasshopper

</comment><comment><USER5> It's little more than a commercial. It says entrepreneurs are motivated to create jobs, but many are actually motivated to eliminate jobs and waste people's time -- like this commercial did. One minute I will never get back and because of it, I will _never_ use the service it advertises.

If you are going to waste our time with a "viral" ad, please at least make it interesting and if you can't succeed at that, shoot for accuracy, or at a minimum, empathy with your target market.

Sometimes humor works too, however, and unfortunately, this ad was absolutely void of any humor whatsoever.

Flagged as spam...

</comment><comment><USER6> Hmm... Neat video, but I'm in the "I suspect sock puppets" camp.</comment>


Software defined storage vs. hardware defined storage - <AUTHOR> https://blog.min.io/comparing-software-defined-storage-with-appliances/ <comment><USER2> I mean, I understand where they are coming from — minio is an s3 object store that integrates remarkably well into the whole containerized ecosystem, but there's definitely something to be said for "old" tech.

Just to give an example, having been bitten more than just a few times in the past, I personally am hesitant to use minio and the likes because the landscape changes so fast. I don't really understand minio's business model, but do know they're heavily VC funded and are likely not making a profit right now. This begs the question whether it is a safe bet.

On the other hand, we could buy some storage appliance from a reputable brand and have an s3 compatible API there. I know that when I'm buying Dell or whatever the company isn't going away any time soon, and if something's wrong, I can get a Dell engineer to our datacenter in a few hours of time.

Lastly, I don't really _want_ to containerize my storage. I always consider storage and other state something I want to keep out of kubernetes, and treat it as an external service to kubernetes. There are quite a few things that can go wrong when running these services inside kubernetes, and in my experience things just stay a lot simpler if you just stick to VMs for this type of stuff. YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER3> So I read this list and at the end I was like well this is a bit bias to SW, then I looked at the source. There are trade offs on both sides. There are some advantages to the HW side, mostly consistent performance depending on the workload and the clients view of the storage. It's still and interesting space that is ripe for innovation despise all the current players. It's likely where I will go with my next startup.</comment>


No Babies? -- Causes for the aging population of Europe - b-man http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/magazine/29Birth-t.html?_r=1&fta=y&pagewanted=all

<comment><AUTHOR> One of my (rather cynical) friends predicts that liberal, secular, Western culture is going to die out in the long run. He thinks certain religious traditions that encourage children and families (traditional Catholicism, Islam, Mormonism) will survive, but not us. I argued it was a race--could our culture infect theirs before theirs outpopulated ours? It'll be interesting to see (in the ominous, "may you live in interesting times" sense of the word).

<comment><USER2> This assumes that a person cannot be born in a religious culture and convert to a more secular culture or vice versa.

[edit] Could the people down-voting please explain why this is not a valid point?

<comment><AUTHOR> _I argued it was a race--could our culture infect theirs before theirs outpopulated ours?_

That sentence kind of implies what you said. I didn't downvote you (I can't because of how HN works) but I'd assume that's the reason why.

<comment><USER2> I see... I didn't interpret "could our culture infect theirs" as converting people over. I don't see it as something infective. There will naturally be a good deal of attrition. Makes sense, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sometimes worry that this is a depressing answer to Fermi's paradox (Fermi's paradox asks why no intelligent life has been found, if the odds of it are so high):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox>

Maybe when a species/civilization gets to a certain point of sophistication and intelligence, the motive to keep expanding (or even reproducing, apparently) stops, and they don't go on to colonize anywhere else.

Really, the only reason the Americas are so populated right now is because of crazy overpopulation in Europe at the time. If a new continent was discovered today (or if Mars was suddenly terraformed), how long would it take for it to be populated? Would it ever be?

<comment><USER4> It's not sophistication and intelligence. It's the cost of living.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's that simple. Plenty of people living in poverty manage to have quite large families.

I think instead it's the desire to have children only if you can have them and still live a the level of comfort you desire. It used to be, that people had kids simply because it was the default, and everyone did. But now that society has advanced to the point that people are able to make different decisions, it seems like often the choice is, simply to not have them.

That's all I mean by sophistication--the ability to look at how you are living, and make those choices for yourself.

<comment><USER5> Exactly this. European governments have put various financial incentives in place for having kids, yet they're scratching their heads why they're not working.

At least in Austria, it pretty much doesn't matter how much your household earns, up to a certain level (it's somewhere around €2300/month net if I remember correctly), as long as you have at least 2 kids. The child benefits plus family tax breaks compensate for low income. The benefits are diminished (not just proportionally) at higher income levels, which basically means there's an incentive for poor people to have kids. Having a kid probably won't reduce your standard of living if it comes with a 50% raise or whatever. One parent dropping from full-time to part time will also have little to zero financial impact at that level.

At higher income levels, none of that is true. The jobs tend to be more demanding, working part time is hardly an option, and daytime childcare is expensive. The €100/month/child or so the government give you won't even get close to covering that.

I don't know if the incentives are working among those with lower income - they have more kids, but for all I know they would have more anyway, but the current setup is useless for encouraging reproduction across the board.

<comment><USER6> I don't know about Austria, but in the Netherlands there's a similar monetary compensation you get for each child; however, AFAIK it's not meant to "encourage" people to have more children. Rather, it's meant to make up for the increased cost of living once your family expands.

(There's a Dutch politician quoted in the article as saying that Dutch women should have more babies... it seemed awfully odd to me. Upon closer investigation, he was talking about cranking up the birth rate from 1.7 to 2.1.)

<comment><USER7> _it's not meant to "encourage" people to have more children. Rather, it's meant to make up for the increased cost of living once your family expands._

Removing discouragement is the same overall as adding encouragement.

<comment><USER8> "Removing discouragement is the same overall as adding encouragement."

It may have the same effect, but it something entirely different. For example, would you argue that legalizing the sale of tobacco or alcohol is the same as encouraging people to smoke or drink?

<comment><USER7> It's not clear to me that legalization of those drugs would have the same effect as doing something else with the intent to encourage use of them. However, in the case of money, it's a little clearer: the only difference between giving someone extra money when they have another child and replacing money they spend on an extra child is what you say about it.

Now, it's true that what you say about it can have a real effect on choices and outcomes, but we don't really know enough to reliably predict what that effect is in the general case, so for practical purposes, I think we're better off assuming that the effects are negligible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the problem is integrating family life with the rest of your life. Right now both concepts are completely orthogonal, so when you start a family suddenly you have a much bigger management problem.

(I Am Not An Anthropologist, but) My understanding of traditional hunter gatherer societies is that women would keep on working even with a small baby. The baby could be strapped to the womans back, or simply kept close by, so that the woman could keep working but still have quick access to the baby to nurse it when needed.

When the child got older, they would have the entire tribe looking out for them, so there wasn't a need for constant micromanagement. We have daycares, but that only lasts half the day. After work the parents are expected to dedicate the rest of their night to supervising. That's a big (and unnatural) time commitment, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER10> Women of Europe! We need to remedy this situation. I'll do my bit if you do yours. Email address is in my profile, please attach pictures.

(I kid, I kid. I've already done my share: the little one is expected next month).

<comment><USER11> Your share is 2.1 kids, not just one.

<comment><USER10> Fair point. I'll get right on it!

<comment><USER12> diversify your DNA portfolio.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Compare with this article from a few months back: [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/europe/10iht- sweden....](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/europe/10iht- sweden.html?pagewanted=all) . While this article isn't exclusively about just birth rate, it notes that Sweden has one of the higher birthrates in Europe. Looking at wikipedia, the birth rate for Sweden is still (what I suppose is) low, only 1.67, compared with the US at 2.09.

edit: just in case you aren't inclined to read through, the article is about granting fathers paternity leave.

<comment><USER14> Darn, and I thought it was going to be about Children of Men.

<comment><USER13> I think what all of these articles point to is that it's expensive or time consuming to raise kids, so people simply don't have them. It seems like the key to raising fertility rates is just to provide a good environment for parents to have them in, like giving leave to new parents and giving tax incentives or stipends to those who do. Then again, its probably more complex than this.

<comment><USER15> An interesting argument I've heard wrt to "high" western birthrate countries is that it has more to do with the societal roles of women. In both the United States and Sweden, women are generally told they can have both a career and become mothers, and while this view is not universally held in either country, it's a widespread belief. By contrast, in western nations with lower birthrates, the social views tilt towards women being told they can have a career OR become a mother, and that trying to be both is detrimental.

What tends to happen in nations when motherhood becomes an either-or proposition is, women opt to either forgo childbearing or chose to only have 1 child and then continue on with their career track. Whereas in countries with a broader view of motherhood, women who want both aren't guilted by society to stop at 1 or, and likewise fewer women face the choice of forgoing or limiting motherhood to pursue their career ambitions.

<comment><USER16> Generally there is a bounce. For a generation after women get the chance of a career, education etc the birth rate plumnets - this is the position Italy is in.

Then 20-30 years later those same women have reached positions in politics, industry, education etc where they can influence policy on childcare, maternity leave etc. Then the number of children goes back up - this is the state Scandanavia is in.

Germany is a little odd, remember that less than 20years ago it absorbed a 3rd world country which rather screws up it's stats.

<comment><USER17> Calling the DDR a 3rd world country is a little exaggerated in my opinion.

<comment><USER16> HN now with free hyperbole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Inconvenient facts this article _doesn't_ mention include the baby booms in France and the UK since 1998. Given that post-natal and social policies have a huge impact on birth rates and are set at a national, not EU, level, this report needs to be taken with a bucket (not a pinch) of salt.

</comment><comment><USER19> This article is a bit of a slog (but well worth reading) -- I summarized the most interesting part to me (birthrates and why) here: [http://quippd.com/show/4304/Where_have_all_Europes_babies_go...](http://quippd.com/show/4304/Where_have_all_Europes_babies_gone)

</comment><comment><USER20> Is this a problem? Overpopulation seems worse to me.

<comment><USER21> Yes, a big one, as the article explains: if you have a massive number of old people living on pensions / versions of social security, but not a lot of younger people working to produce goods and services, those old people are not going to be able to survive at the standards of living they'd like and b) over-taxed young people are going to be incentived to not work or leave.

These are not good things, especially because they have recursive aspects, as discussed.

<comment><USER22> That's a problem that will solve itself in a maximum of about 70 years.

<comment><USER3> No, it won't. If you maintain the same sub-replacement fertility rate, you'll end up with a stable inverted population pyramid, albeit a constantly shrinking one. Every generation will have too few workers to support too many retirees.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wolfram Alpha Pro democratizes data analysis - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/6/2776303/wolfram-alpha-pro-democratizes-data-analysis-an-in-depth-look-at-the <comment><USER2> Isn't there an inherent contradiction between 'democratises' and "$4.99 a month"?

<comment><USER3> No? It just means that anyone can do it. You don't have to be part of an "aristocracy" (government or academic) to have access to these tools.

<comment><USER4> If you had to pay $4.99 to vote I suspect people might complain about how "democratic" that was. It's at worst a bit of an over-reaching use of the word, and not some horrible evil conspiracy to exclude poor children from doing maths on the interwebs.

<comment><USER5> You do pay a lot more than $5 to vote in the form of taxes. If you stop paying your taxes, will you still have your right to vote after your sorry ass lands in jail for defrauding the IRS?

There you go, so much for free democracy.

<comment><USER4> > If you stop paying your taxes, will you still have your right to vote after > your sorry ass lands in jail for defrauding the IRS?

In Europe, yes, you can still vote. Even if you are a convicted of murdering the people who came to take you away for not paying your taxes.

Further reading: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11674014>

<comment><USER6> For some crimes, the sentences can include temporary removal of some rights, including the right to vote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love Wolfram|Alpha but I don't use it all the time. In fact sometimes I go months without using it. I'd love to see some other sort of payment schedule... Like free suscription and a modest charge per query & data transfer.

</comment><comment><USER8> You can apply to be a tester for this and get free access here: <http://preview.wolframalpha.com/pro>

</comment><comment><USER9> Yah I wouldnt use the term "democractize" to describe a service that's $5 a month. Democracy, the best system money can buy!

<comment><USER10> The term is here being used to indicate that it is increasing access to something that has previously been limited to far fewer people. It does not need to make it available to everyone to still be vastly more accessible than before.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much did the founders of Lynda get during the LinkedIn acquistion? - <AUTHOR> https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/lynda-com<p>I'm not sure if the Crunchbase data is complete, but they were founded in 1995, took on $289 million only recently, and then were acquired for $1.5 billion. With typical dilution, how much do you think the founders made? <comment><USER2> They took in the latest $186b in Jan 2015 at a ~ $1b valuation, or about 18.6% of the equity.

Assuming the series A was for a similar proportion and that they had some seedfunding and such in '95 it is probably safe to say that the owners got somewhere between 30-50% ownership.

With that back of the napkin maths, $500-750m give or take.

Considering the the time between series B and acquisition was less than half a year, I say that is a pretty decent ROI.</comment>


A First aid app on every smartphone - <AUTHOR> https://www.change.org/p/google-preinstall-a-first-aid-app-on-every-android-or-ios-device <comment><AUTHOR> This is a simple way to get better first aid to billions. There are more than 2 billion smartphone users worldwide, most of them will witness some kind of emergency situation sooner or later. Having a trusted app that is preinstalled on their smartphones and ready to use in seconds, could make a big difference and literally save lives. Most of these smartphones are Android or iOS smartphones, so we call on Google and Apple to develop and maintain a global set of first aid apps. These apps should be preinstalled like the calculator or your email app and your phone should notify you that they are installed. Please support this petitio and share it, it would be a simple way to save thousands of lives. You can act now and download a first aid app from the App Store or Google Play Store, you could need it tomorrow. Thank you.</comment>


Post Corona: The Four - <AUTHOR> https://www.profgalloway.com/bats-and-amazon <comment><AUTHOR> > Facebook used to sit with the cool kids at lunch, but word got out that he > killed a dog, filmed it, and made a meme of it.

Priceless.</comment>