Banks are slow to increase rates on savings accounts, but quick to reduce them - <AUTHOR> http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2020/06/banks-are-slow-to-increase-rates-on.html <comment><USER2> The problem is that most people don't want to change banks.

If changing your bank to get a better savings rate took 15 minutes and had no other consequences, banks would be updating their rates by the second to beat one another. But it doesn't. If your mortgage, credit cards, car loan, etc, are all with the same bank then switching your bank account only just to get 0.1% higher interest is a huge hassle for little benefit. Especially if you don't have much money sitting in a savings account- even with $5000 in your account, a 0.1% difference is $5/year.

So what banks are actually competing over is the people who happen to be shopping around for a new bank- something most people do only a handful of times in their life. Meanwhile, leaving rates low improves the banks bottom line. Short term vs long term tradeoffs.

In short: banks have little reason to raise savings account interest rates regardless of what their central bank gives them.

<comment><USER3> > So what banks are actually competing over is the people who happen to be > shopping around for a new bank- something most people do only a handful of > times in their life.

It's worse than that. I shopped around for a new bank based on my needs -- I picked Capital One specifically because of their advertised "no foreign transaction fees". [In fact, there's a fee around 1%, it's just not called a "foreign transaction fee". But 1% is low enough for me.] Interest on savings accounts didn't register at all.

And really, interest on savings accounts _shouldn 't_ register for anyone looking for a bank account, because savings accounts are a terrible, terrible way to invest your money. If you have money in a savings account _for the purpose of earning interest_ , you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER4> > savings accounts are a terrible, terrible way to invest your money. If you > have money in a savings account for the purpose of earning interest, you're > doing it wrong.

Note that this wasn't always the case, though. Until not too long ago, keeping your money in a savings account, not making too many "risky" investments, and benefiting from compound interest in the long term while saving for retirement was considered basic financial literacy.

However, by now interest rates have been near zero and well below inflation for the entire adult lives of anyone under ~35, so the common wisdom has shifted to investing your money in the market being basic financial literacy.

<comment><USER3> > However, by now interest rates have been near zero and well below inflation > for the entire adult lives of anyone under ~35

When were interest rates on bank accounts not below inflation? Bank interest failing to even keep up with inflation is not a recent phenomenon; as far as I'm aware, our low rates now are better, inflation-adjusted, than the old high rates were.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems like pretty typical market behavior to me. Are we really surprised that banks are taking the opportunity to increase their profits by choosing not to pass down all savings to customers?

The same exact thing happens with gas stations. The price of gas never falls quite as fast or far for the consumer as it does for the retailer, but gas stations will instantly respond to price increases. I'm sure there are dozens of other examples of this.

<comment><USER6> I heard this story / explanation before:

You own a gas station and you want to fill up your tanks so you call the distributor and pay $1 / gallon. You then sell that for $1.10 / gallon making a 10% profit.

Now prices of crude doubles and you have 1000 gallons left to sell. It's going to cost you $2 / gal to refill so you immediately raise your price to prevent a loss and cover the next fill.

I don't know how accurate that is to the real situation gas stations face but I'd never thought of it in terms of selling higher to afford the next bulk delivery.

<comment><USER7> But when the price drops back down you don't immediately drop your price because why would you charge $1.10 for something you paid $2 for?

But your competitor will lower their prices when they get a refill, so you may end up having to lower your prices before you get your own refill.

<comment><USER6> Yep, correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Online only banks offer great rates on savings accounts. The Fed has an influence but these rates are market driven. If you want high rates, look for them and put your money there. Many financial products are only available to the wealthy but in this case anyone can do this.

<comment><USER9> Savings account rates are terrible compared with alternative investments though, even cash-storage investments.

<comment><USER8> I'm not aware of anything with that risk / liquidity profile which pays better? In fact theoretically there shouldn't be anything.

<comment><USER10> \- High yield savings accounts

\- CDs

\- Money market accounts

All pay much higher than a typical megabank savings account and are equally as safe.

<comment><USER8> Sorry i meant better than high yield savings.

<comment><USER10> Bond ETFs are right now around 2% yield with slightly higher risk than a savings account

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is why the stock market is still going up. There is no where else to put your money. We need better 1-3% returns for savings and 401ks outside of equities. Where are people supposed to put their money these days?

<comment><USER12> You're not supposed to keep your money anyway. That's literally the whole point. Rates are so low because they're trying to get you to spend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Same with fuel prices. War in the middle East? Gas prices jump up overnight. Slump or excess? Consumer prices drop ridiculously slow. Middle men will always use any excuse to extract more from both sides.

<comment><USER14> I guess that's true in most cases, a lot of people seem to be saying it, but a few months ago we had gas cheaper than $1 per gallon quite suddenly.

<comment><USER15> This makes sense when you think about the inelastic demand for gas and the physical problem of storing it. The availability of storage makes gas prices change slowly most of the time. But, if there's a chance of the tanks running dry, prices go sharply up. And if there's a chance of the tanks running out of space, prices go sharply down.

<comment><USER16> In those cases they shouldn't go up immediately only during refilling an order.

<comment><USER15> Not the individual gas stations; I mean the storage capacity of the whole system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Another (small) dimension to this: my brother-in-law works for an organization that acts as a thinktank for many/most(all?) credit unions in the US. When we moved to Santa Fe last year, I noted that the credit union I wanted to join (yay! credit unions!) offered an insanely low interest rate for their savings account. So I asked my BiL whether I should feel guilty about using an online "high rate" savings account instead.

He told me that if a CU is offering a very low rate, it essentially means that they don't have much significant lending going on. He said that if things changed, and they start to see real growth in the demand for capital loans, their savings interest rate will pick up. He said I should not worry about it.

Now, this doesn't really address the Fed rate vs. the savings interest rate gap (surely the CU could at least pay something near the Fed rate), but it did expand my understanding of the situation for credit unions, at least.

<comment><USER12> Customers that jump around for an extra basis point in interest on their $400 account are the worst customers for a bank. There is a sweet point that banks and credit unions try to hit where they aren't competing for those customers but that they're getting enough deposits to operate and grow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Both my mom and my aunt died a couple of years ago. I had all the paperwork that I needed but it was 2-3 hours for each account that needed to be closed and a new account opened for the estate. I was able to close one of my mom's and that was relatively easy, like 15 minutes.

It did seem incredibly expensive to provide a person to interact with. One of the banks involved was Chase and they did have a video interface where you could interact with a banker somewhere else.

I guess it works out, since the banks had thousands of dollars sitting in the bank paying no interest. And the amounts surged to hundreds of thousands as their houses were sold and before the money was distributed to the heirs.

But dealing with the general public for accounts in the hundreds of dollars has to be a money loser. Except for the overdraft and other fees, of course.

</comment><comment><USER19> Same goes for gas prices. I heard an earnings call recently for a public company that runs a ton of gas stations. They indicated that their margins on gasoline have gone far far up and offsetted and losses of sales of drink/snacks etc in their stores, because they are quick to raise gas prices when oil prices go up, but very slow to do so when prices go down.

The amount of fascinating economic lessons we've gotten over the past 6 months is amazing. All kinds of cool things I've learned:

Pool companies are backed up 1 year right now with people nesting at home

Whirlpool blew their analysts earnings estimates out of the water on strong appliance sales due to "nesting at home"

Weber grills are on huge back order.

and on and on.

<comment><USER13> > losses of sales of drink/snacks etc in their stores

As a former gas station owner, let me correct you here. Drinks and snacks, no matter how low the volume have crazy margins, sometimes 100% or more and make up a large fraction of gas station profits. It isn't rare to run the fuel at a loss to sell more ice cream and drinks.

<comment> jon-wood How can a product have > 100% margin? Were you getting paid by the supplier to stock their products?

<comment><USER20> Uhm, you buy an item for $1, sell it for $3, the margin is 200%, no?

<comment><USER21> As typically defined: The _margin_ is 67%. The _markup_ is 200%.

Margin is "profit as percent of revenue". Markup is "profit as percent of COGS".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The problem is that the banks can borrow so cheaply that they actually don't want to pay their clients the interest rates on their accounts. As it expensive for the bank, and increases the bank's liabilities/risks (money in the books) hence they will lower the rates. Which then hopefully will lower the amounts on the books by people either moving it out of the bank or spend it.

That's what I understood from the bankers when I was working at a bank :) They a had a simple formula representing but can't find my notes now.

I am 'enjoying' interest rates on my bank accounts around the world between -0.5%-1.5%. I really should sort out the negative rent.

</comment><comment><USER23> But nobody is expecting to be earning a significant return from a retail bank account, are they?

I think if you're disappointed by your checking-account interest rate you probably first need to think about why you're storing your money there.

<comment><USER24> There are a lot more people than you think that simply don't invest their money, instead they keep it in savings accounts. My aunt is one of those people. She got a large inheritance and basically kept it in a savings account for 20 years. My mom got the same inheritance and bought investment properties with it and now its worth 10x. I think it comes down to the fact that a lot of people are risk averse or feel that investments are too complicated for them.

<comment><USER25> 10x? I'm not familiar with real estate. How does one earn 10x in that time frame. Even with a price to rent ratio of 1 to 15 and assuming housing prices double over that period, you still aren't at 10x, and that doesn't include maintenance, taxes, closing fees, etc.

<comment><USER26> Leverage. Let's say the inheritance was 50k. You make that a 10% down payment on a 500k house. Assume rent covers your interest on the loan, taxes, etc. 10 years later the house appreciates 100% to 1M. You sell the house.

You just made 500k from 50k.

<comment><USER27> Did you mean "etc" to include maintenance, principle payments, and transaction costs?

It doesn't sound like you're describing the magic of leverage, but the magic of having an arbitrary amount of cashflow.

Makes me think of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kiyosaki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kiyosaki) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The worse thing is that the opposite applies for floating credit (loan) rate. They're very quick to increase the rates but very very slow to reduce them. So it's like double profit for them.

</comment><comment><USER29> The banks cost of money isn't closely tied to the Fed rate. It is more tied to long term investments such as government bonds or t-bills. These have been pretty low and very low recently.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think a lot of the issue is that the model of banking has changed. Once upon a time, the business model was that the customer deposits savings, then the bank loans out that money, and the interest they collect is the profit.

But with unlimited free money from the fed, why bother? The fact is that they don't actually want your money any more. It's just a hassle to keep track of. They get a lot more money by charging overdraft fees than by loaning your money out anyway. So why should they be eager to compete for savings deposits?

</comment><comment><USER31> From my limited experience, they're good at offering an enticing savings rate but a year or two later will whack it down close to nil. They're playing the same game as utilities and insurance, after a year or two your benefits shrink or your costs go up.

Examples, had a 2% interest rate "ISA"-like account and it went down to 0.01%. Home insurance doubles in 10 years through lack of changing it.

Switching all our services yearly is a time suck and they know it.

</comment><comment><USER32> Reminds me of gas stations, quick to jack up the prices, slow to reduce them.

If you hold inventory, it's hard to resist unless market pressure forces different pricing.

</comment><comment><USER33> Biggest assymetry I noticed yet is that mortgage rates are often fixed no matter what happens to current money lending rate.

I am no financial expert, but I think unpredictable rates hugely favor consumer.

When rates are high and money is in high supply, inflation reduces the actual principal, as nominal amount Stas the same. When rates are low, you can refinance mortgage at current, low rates and reduce interest part of your mortgage.

<comment><USER34> The US government subsidizes the home mortgage market in the US. I don't known of any other country offers people 30 year fixed rate mortgages.

Fixed mortgage rates help consumers because they can always refinance down to a lower rate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> My credit union is really good about tracking rates against the greater market. But I only qualified for membership because I taught community college in Orange County, California for two semesters as an adjunct. I live in Chicago now and I have no intention of giving up my account with that credit union.

</comment><comment><USER36> I am happy to be contradicted by better specialists than me of US banks. But aren't the vast majority of loans in the US fixed rate with no or little prepayment penalties? If that's the case the interest rate risk of these banks is not trivial and certainly not a simple pass-through of overnight rates.

<comment><USER37> The article isn't about loan interest rates but the interest rate banks offer on deposits.

<comment><USER36> Where do you think the bank gets the money for paying interest on deposits from?

<comment><USER38> They have sofas in their lobby, and they look under the cushions.

I just checked. US Bank's basic savings account offer 0.01% APY and costs $4/month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> As an aside, if someone is fairly risk averse (i.e. doesn't want to lose more then 10-15% in a crisis like what just happened) and wants to park ~200k, is the best option a high-yield savings account? A CD? I would have normally thought treasuries but obviously interest rates are low.

<comment><USER40> Depends on if you mean 10-15% real purchasing power or nominal. Most people think of cash as safe as possible but heavy inflation could wipe out 50% real purchasing power in a few years. Nominal? Sure, high yield savings account is safest, 1% currently, and won't lose any nominal. You could even do a bond or muni bond fund, BND or VTEB, to gain extra after-tax yield ~2% without losing more than 10-15%. But you really want to not lose more than 10-15% real, in which you'd need to think of the money as a portfolio including inflation hedges like TIPS (inflation protected bonds), Stocks, and Gold, albeit in small 5-10% allocations because of their greater risk.

<comment><USER41> I like BND. Only dropped 8.7% from peak to bottom in march (back up now), it pays out a decent dividend, and it is a vanguard etf and vanguard is awesome in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> patio11 tweeted about banks and their opaque conduct re. interest on savings accounts in the past couple of months:

[https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1269919425802559488](https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1269919425802559488)

</comment><comment><USER43> Banks will pay as little as they can get away with and charge as much as they can get away with.

Only competition stops that being nothing and loads.

There is no "passing on". There is only what the market forces on a bank to survive.

</comment><comment><USER44> If you can borrow from your central bank for nothing, why would pay depositors anything? They're not just competing with free, they're unreliable and expensive to manage.

</comment><comment><USER45> Internet is only a small part of the equation here. Banks are constantly giving back to customers in other ways, such as free checks, ATM fee refunds, and sign-up bonuses.

</comment><comment><USER46> Wish algorithms decide [https://banksdaily.com/central- banks/](https://banksdaily.com/central-banks/)

</comment><comment><USER47> Why is it surprising? It applies to housing loans as well. Sometimes unless you threaten the banks that you will switch the bank they won't reduce it interest rate.

</comment><comment><USER48> This is the same with gasoline prices too. CA gas prices are still well over $3/gallon despite low crude prices.

<comment><USER34> That's just how much refining fuel costs. There is no monopoly of fuel suppliers holding the gas price up, and gas stations make very little money selling gas itself.

<comment><USER49> Refining isnt actually all that expensive. At least in California, taxes are a higher percentage of total price (18.4c federal + 35c state, per gallon).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> There's another asymmetry where people like to buy stocks at a low price and sell them at a high price.

</comment><comment><USER51> Ally bank (an online bank) has very competitive savings rates and great online banking/support.

</comment><comment><USER52> Just like gas/petrol stations when it comes to oil price changes...

</comment><comment><USER53> Banks exist to make money. I don't understand how this is surprising to anyone. Downvote me all you want, but it's mind-boggling that a private message board for startups is also full of surprised Pikachu faces any time a company tries to turn a profit.

</comment><comment><USER54> Why would you ever have a savings account? They're pointless as they always earn little interest. Much better to invest in an ETF that tracks something like the S&P500 with an average year on year growth of 10%, or if that is too risky invest in a government bond.

<comment><USER55> > _or if that is too risky invest in a government bond._

You can get 1% in a savings account in the US. TBill rates are all less than 0.25%. The latter has tax benefits, but not enough.

One good way to "get a higher return" (for some at least) is to pay down debt. If your mortgage is at 3%, whatever you pay off is "earning" 2ish% after tax. If your margin loan is at 1.5%, anything you pay off earns 1.5% (because the interest isn't deductible.)

<comment><USER54> One of the things I do is use interest free credit cards to pay for my usual expenses such as food and fuel. That frees up cash. I then use that cash to invest in ETFs. When the interest free period on the credit card expires I either sell the ETFs to pay it off or use an interest free balance transfer card to carry the debt. In that case, as long as the transfer fee is below your rate of return + inflation you profit.

<comment><USER54> You then pocket the net return on investment from the ETFs. The risk mitigation is that the interest free period is usually over 2 years, enough time for a stock market recovery should a downturn happen and you fail to time to market and sell on a high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> The ease with which money can be moved in and out of money market funds mean that it's probably unlikely that anyone has a long term balance of over $2000 or so in a savings account. At those levels the difference in interest rates is dwarfed by fees etc.

</comment><comment><USER57> Same with gas prices

</comment><comment><USER58> It's almost like banking is a business.

</comment><comment><USER59> Just like gas station prices.

</comment><comment><USER60> Title sounds like the Fed.

</comment><comment><USER61> Same with gas prices.

</comment><comment><USER62> Am curious how Compound, dX/dY, Nexo services are able to advertise such high interest rates on digital assets. Some as high as 10% APR accrued on a daily basis.

<comment><USER49> For one, because the underlying asset they are paying interest in can lose value, or even go to zero. Compound, for example, has lost 50% of its value in just a month.

The crypto space is also, to say the least, extremely risky, and full of every variety of untrustworthy, unscrupulous character.</comment></comment>


Mother Tongues - <AUTHOR> http://slavenorth.com/columns/sanskrit.htm <comment><USER2> I'm fascinated by these words that describe pieces of our lived experience in a way that makes us say, "I knew there was a word for this!" They seem similar to the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, but in a semantic sense.

A few from English that I like:

curglaff - the shock felt in bathing when one first plunges into the cold water

groak - to silently watch someone while they are eating, hoping to be invited to join them

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure of the spelling, and I'm sure I'd butcher it, but Thai has a word for "the overwhelming urge to pinch a baby because it's so damn cute". My wife uses it on a regular basis when we're out and about and she sees babies.

<comment><USER4> The Philippines (Tagalog) has a word with basically the same meaning--gigil. It's pretty interesting to learn another language has a word for the same feeling because there isn't really a fit in English.

<comment><USER5> Thailand isn't so far away from the Philippines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm a little puzzled at his complaint that he can't transliterate Devanagari; although I've only learned some of the basics as I attempt to learn Hindi, it's not particularly challenging--it's just an alphabet (alphasyllabary if you want to be pedantic)

<comment><USER7> Devnagri script, which is used for a bunch of Indian languages including Hindi, is probably the simplest to transliterate. Each letter has a pretty well defined pronunciation with very rare exceptions. Vowels are completely regular and always have the same sound in all words with no exceptions (that I can think of). It should be pretty easy to write some simple logic in a few hundred lines of code to do this automatically... with the main difficulty being the target language rather than the source language.

<comment><USER6> One of my friends once told me, "We don't have spelling bees in India... it wouldn't make sense, when you hear the word there's really only one way to spell it."

I on the other hand can't hear the difference between Hindi "b", "v", "g", and "k" half the time :)

<comment><USER7> Well the Hindi alphabet has 52 letters with 28 "pure" consonants (which multiply with some modifiers). See here: [http://www.omniglot.com/writing/hindi.htm](http://www.omniglot.com/writing/hindi.htm) Some other Indian languages have additional consonants that are not familiar to predominantly Hindi speakers. The key thing is that the written alphabet seems to have been designed to accurately represent _all_ of those sounds. It's hard (actually impossible) to map all these to Roman alphabet.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Visualizing sensor data and statistics with augmented reality - <AUTHOR> http://www.pachube.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, here's a link to a demo video:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxr8oaRUq6k></comment>


Ask HN: Top three questions for a startup before accepting a job offer? - <AUTHOR> I'm curious, what questions do you think are the most important before you accept a job offer from a startup? I'm curious, how do you know when to join or not to join a startup? <comment><USER2> I can't boil it down to 3 because there are many things you need to understand, some details can be gleaned via observation too.

So some of the top questions you should ask IMO are below:

\- Runway left

\- When was the last raise, what was the amount and time to raise it? What is the makeup of the investors (Angel vs. VC etc)?

\- What is the next milestone on the fundraising side?

\- What is the biggest competitive advantage/product feature the company has?

\- What are the biggest issues facing product/development?

\- How do you see my role helping the company?

\- How can I best help the company if I come aboard?

\- What is the biggest opportunity you feel the company has?

\- What is the biggest risk the company faces?

\- Who do I report to? -- this trips some startups up, but can highlight potential issues.

\- How many employees are there today? How many do you plan to hire in the next 3, 6, 12 months? How many employees have left since founding?

\- Equity and the vesting schedule details. Share class information as well. Current dilution, outstanding shares issued and reserved is nice to know too as well.

For what it is worth and this applies to any size company not just startups, you should also ask about what agreements they want you to sign and get them as early into the process as possible without being unreasonable. e.g. outside work policy, NDA, non-compete, non-solicitation, compensation, equity etc. Some of these they may not give you until you agree at least conditionally verbally, but there should be no reason you can't see them once you do. Companies that hide these until your first day make me nervous, at the same time that doesn't mean they are bad, just maybe been given bad advice or have a lack of understanding themselves.

<comment><USER3> Those breakdown into 3 good classes of questions:

\- Understanding the company's place in the market & how they make money

\- Understanding their expectations for you -- have they thought them through?

and finally

\- How well they respond to questions that they won't answer. They won't show you the cap table, but how the conversation goes is a good indicator of how well you and the future manager will be able to communicate.

<comment><USER4> Seriously...

They offer you any sort of stock as compensation, and are privately held and won't show you the cap table it is a polite thanks but no thanks and exit.

Any company that isn't comfortable sharing that information isn't going anywhere fast -- or they are about to go public (but you would know that already as well).

<comment><USER5> >it is a polite thanks but no thanks and exit

No need to be that drastic - just treat the compensation package as if the equity grant is worth $0. With the liquidity and uncertainty involved, you probably want to do that anyway, since you care a lot about "how far away am I from not having enough money" and an equity grant that pays off with a power distribution a decade out helps you very little on that front.

<comment><USER4> Regardless of what the cap table says you should treat that grant as a $0.

I have heard "we dont have one". A sign to run.

I have heard "we dont share that sort of info with staff". Major failure to understand the information I would be entitled to owning even a SINGLE share.

No speaks volumes about management, about its confidence, about it's openness. These are thing that one who is going to work for a company should be HYPER concerned with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Assuming you are 1) excited by the people you'd be working with and 2) excited by the problem and tech stack you'd be working on, I'd want to assess:

\- Does the product have traction? Are there paying customers or people who are very excited about what you are building?

\- How much runway do they have? Perhaps related, if they aren't yet profitable, does the company act like they are (salaries, fancy perks, etc.)?

\- Are you getting a reasonable amount of equity comp and is it structured such that you'll likely be able to benefit from future upside? Startups can change rapidly and stock options are notoriously tricky: you don't want to have to leave stock behind or stay too long at a company that you grow to dislike. This is complicated but [http://stockoptioncounsel.com/blog/joining- an-early-stage-st...](http://stockoptioncounsel.com/blog/joining-an-early- stage-startup-negotiateyour-equity-wisely-with-stock-option-counsel- tips/2014/2/12) and [http://stockoptioncounsel.com/blog/early-expiration-of- start...](http://stockoptioncounsel.com/blog/early-expiration-of-startup- stock-options-part-3-examples-of-good-startup-equity-design-by-company- stage/2017/8/11) are good resources if you really want to dig in.

</comment><comment><USER7> Many factors have to align for a startup to succeed, but the most important of all is that there is actually market demand for the product. You can have the best team in the world and fail because you aren't making something that someone wants to buy. Conversely, you can make a lot of mistakes and still succeed if you have a product in high demand.

So aside from all the questions you would ask about working conditions, tech stack and financial runway, think long and hard about if you truly believe that there is a market for the product that the startup is making. And likewise, would it be possible to ever make a profit delivering that product?

So many startup ideas are honestly pretty bad - they are chasing tiny markets, they are chasing non-existent markets, or they are chasing low-margin businesses and would have to take over the entire world to be profitable, etc. If you don't completely buy the idea of the company as an eventually profitable enterprise, don't join.

Finally, make sure you get something in return for the risk you are taking - either in immediate pay or real equality. It's so, so common for people to work at a startup for 3-4 years, have the startup "succeed" in the sense that it gets bought up by someone, but in the end all the employees get nominal rewards (say less than 100k) or nothing. That is not worth years of giving up a good salary at a bigger company with better benefits.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see that's also a smart way to look at it. How do you figure out that there is a market for the product if you don't know much about the specific industry? Let's say I like sports, but I don't know much about that industry, how would I know that there is a market for it?

<comment><USER8> You don't have to be a market domain expert, and even if you were, markets shift. Sometimes there actually was demand at the pre-seed stage, and by the time series A rolled around, incumbents have entered with competing products, or tastes have changed, or a million other things.

You have to put yourself in your (potential) customer's shoes. And more than that, you need to try and judge the founders' ability to do that, to see whether they can develop product _relevancy_ as the company (and market) matures.

In other words, emotional intelligence is a valuable asset for early-stage companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I didn't ask this when I joined my current company, but have since learned my lesson. For future offers I will be sure to ask about the outside work project policy and pass if I feel it is overly restrictive.

<comment><USER10> I also recommend you consult a lawyer on this. I did on a recent one that seemed overly restrictive, but it turns out they did it poorly so I was told I could do what I wanted and they could try to fight it but they would lose, and that would only be it they found out and cared. Since my side company I've had for years isn't related, I took the job and risk. Also keep in mind non- compete are often extremely difficult to enforce as we'll, another thing people sometimes get hung up on.

<comment><USER11> >> Also keep in mind non-compete are often extremely difficult to enforce as we'll, another thing people sometimes get hung up on.

haha right... a colleague of mine just was sued for attempting to join a company considered a competitor...we all had to sign NDAs that prohibit working for a number of companies in our field after we live current employer..

If company wants and there is an NDA/non-compete in place they can bury you in legal costs even if they dont win.

Be careful with highly restrictive NDA/non-competes.

<comment><USER12> How can they bury you in legal costs? If their contract is unenforceable you don't really need a lawyer to tell that to the judge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I want to figure out if their team is strong in areas I won't be involved in. If they have crappy code at least I can fix it. But if their sales strategy sucks, I'm be stuck with the consequences without having much opportunity to improve matters.

There's not one specific question I'd ask to figure that out. Depending on how the conversation goes it might be asking about the background of the founders, or their plans for the coming months, or how they assess their threats.

<comment><USER14> I cannot stress this enough. Every single starup I worked with that has failed, has failed due to poor performance of the sales team, and/or leadership choosing the wrong path at critical points. Unless the product is highly technical, engineering mostly just needs to execute at a high level to do their part. They usually can't save or sink a company all on their own.

If your role is in engineering you may be at the mercy of failures which you have no control over. I've found those to be the most frustrating and stressful periods in my career.

Watching another department make bad choices or have poor skills/work ethic without being allowed to go in and correct it myself was very painful. Especially being in a small organization.

<comment><USER15> To be fair, this is true of all departments and all people. Sales can't be successful if engineering and product don't build a good product with product market fit.

The idea of going somewhere where the biggest blockers to success are under your control makes a lot of sense if you have confidence in your ability to execute.

<comment><USER16> The product matters little in some cases. Marketing can succeed with vaporware. Sales can succeed without an actual working product as long as they focus on the decision maker and have vender lockin. HR, c.level execs don't need a working product just a concept.

Product development rarely provides features that can be self fueling for marketing/sales. Brands rarely need killer product features they need a targeted story.

It is much easier to have a successful company without a product than it is to have a successful company that trys to use product features as a marketing department.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Some good questions, you won't get answers to all:

What's your runway? Are you profitable? What is your yearly revenue?

What's the biggest problem you're facing right now? What could kill you in the short-term? What's your plan for this year?

How does your Product team work with your Software Engineering team? Do you have x-functional teams? Do you do semi-regular retrospectives?

What's the background of your leadership team? Eg. has your Head of Product worked as a PM at a FAANG? What's the best thing and the worst thing about working with the CEO/CTO?

<comment><AUTHOR> What's Eng team and HoP?

<comment><USER18> First one is going to have to be engineering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd say get into the nitty-gritty of their tech if you can. For example:

\- What version of the languages and frameworks are they using? If they're not current versions, why not and when do they plan to update?

\- If they do automated testing find out if it's the whole code base or just on an isolated part.

\- If they have QA, are they writing automated tests or just performing manual QA?

\- How long does it take to get code deployed?

\- What do they think their biggest technical issue is and how do they plan to address it? In your experience, do those things line up?

\- Are you personally impressed by the knowledge level of the engineers interviewing you? That's not one you can ask directly, but you can get an idea by seeing how they answer.

Understanding what their processes look like in practice and in detail, as well as why and how they make decisions, can tell you an enormous amount about the effectiveness of the organization.

<comment><USER20> I agree with most of these, except the last point here:

> What version of the languages and frameworks are they using? If they're not > current versions, why not and when do they plan to update?

Certainly knowing what frameworks are used is useful, but in some fields it's ignorant to assume that an organisation doesn't know what they're doing because they use older versions of software. And asking "when are you going to update", might be the wrong question.

That said, it's a good conversation prompt from both sides. It lets the interviewee gauge if the reason is valid e.g. you build mission critical software and LTS is sensible. It also lets the interviewer gauge how strong the candidate is. Can they have a pointed discussion about software reliability or are they just looking for a cool outfit that runs the latest whizzbang libraries?

<comment><USER19> Yeah, that's a great clarification. The way I've phrased it implies that they're somehow incompetent for not immediately jumping to the newest version, which is not my intent.

I more so meant it as a way to figure out what their plans are for software lifecycle. All common languages (as far as I'm aware) deprecate old versions at some point, after which there are security implications for not updating. Asking what the long term plan is for changing versions and keeping up to date (however big of a priority that is) can provide some insights into how aware they are of technical chores that may be important but aren't feature related. I'm personally more interested in how a company thinks about their answer than what the actual answer is.

For example, I once spoke with a company that used PHP 5.5 with substantial tech debt. Their long term plan was to rewrite the whole platform as Go microservices. They didn't seem to realize that this would be a multi-year effort if it ever happened and that PHP 5.5 was already past its end of life date. The solution didn't fit the circumstances. That told me quite a bit about their engineering organization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm surprised this one hasn't been posted yet, because it can be a huge signal:

\- Is there a plan for a liquidity event? or

\- Does the company have a liquidity event target?

And some follow-ups, if so:

\- What date is it planned for?

\- What are the conditions the company is planning around?

It's important to know what a startup's goals are. Some exist purely for a liquidity event down the road, while others want to "change the world," etc. Taking a job with a startup that was targeting liquidity in a year or two means you have to balance your offer very carefully and understand your compensation package.

</comment><comment><USER22> "Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup" | 329 comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18533592](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18533592)

</comment><comment><USER23> Assuming the startup has a product, your questions should center on impact and growth.

1\. Impact: What problem are they solving for users? How are users using the product?

2\. Growth: How quickly are they growing users, both free and paying? How are they acquiring users?

If the startup has a convincing answer for 1, they're working on something concrete. If they don't have convincing answer, probe deeper to find out if they have tangible plans for what they're going to create.

If they answer question 1 well, ask them 2. If they're growing users quickly (for instance, double digit % week over week), the startup is totally worth considering. If they're not growing quickly, ask them how they plan to grow. It's useful to know how they're acquiring users -- if they're spending money to get users, you should ask if it's scalable. If they're getting users without spending much money, great.

Growth can fix most problems in a startup -- it attracts users, investors and talent. If they aren't seeing growth, they should at least have a tangible impact with the users they have and plans for growth.

<comment><USER24> Double digit week over week week is only possible for very early stage startups. 10% week over week for a year is 142x yearly, which just isn't sustainable for more than a year or two at the absolute maximum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Another good one: What share class are my options, and are they the same share class as the founders?

As an employee you won't have a ton of insight into things like dilution or liquidation prefs as the company raises more money. Knowing you have the same share class as founders is a good way to ensure there is someone on the board is looking out for your share class.

<comment><USER26> I can answer this (are they the same share class as the founders?) for him: "NO"

<comment><USER25> Most founders I know have common shares. I wouldn't assume this answer.

<comment><USER26> Agree. I'd say this question shouldn't be the one to weigh the decision.

Safer assumption: regardless of number of shares/options given or class of these - assume the value of these are $0 (unless these are RSU grants of publicly traded company).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Do you have any pending litigation?

 _Every_ single company I have ever joined would have answered "yes" to this, and in hindsight, I really should have known about that answer prior to joining. Alone, it's probably not a deal-breaker, but I feel like I ought to have known sooner about these things.

<comment><USER28> What does "pending" mean?

You can check yourself if there are any active or historical cases.

<comment><USER27> > _What does "pending" mean?_

I'm just going to steal the definition from Google then: "awaiting decision or settlement." Ongoing. Not finished.

> _You can check yourself if there are any active or historical cases._

Not only do I have no idea how to do that, or even how to find out how to do that, my understanding is that court cases are _not_ readily available to the public, and that in many instances obtaining the information would require going to the specific court and in-person requesting the records. And since corporations, in particular, can be sued pretty much anywhere, this isn't a feasible suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Hi! You can check out Angel list's recent blog post exactly on this. [https://angel.co/blog/30-questions-to-ask-before-joining- a-s...](https://angel.co/blog/30-questions-to-ask-before-joining-a-startup)

</comment><comment><USER30> To be a bit contrarian here, I'm not sure that any question you ask after an offer (over and above what you knew/have learned before) will actually improve the quality of your decision that much. as an exageration, how do you answer "ask hn: top three questions before accepting a marriage proposal?" (though I'd be very curious to read that thread)

</comment><comment><USER31> These are totally based on my own experience and may not make sense for everyone but:

\- In the main projects I'd be working on, how many new files are necessary to consume data from an outside source (say JMS) and log the result.

\- What is the frequency of your releases

\- How long does it take for a minor feature request to make it from initial conception to delivery to the user

These aren't actually specific to a startup largely because I haven't been burnt by a failed startup. YMMV

</comment><comment><USER32> You can find more than just 3 great questions to ask your interviewers on Culture Queries: [https://www.keyvalues.com/culture- queries](https://www.keyvalues.com/culture-queries)

</comment><comment><USER33> \- What's the current burn rate and projected runway? \- How have you validating or going to validate product market fit? \- What sets your product and its key value proposition different from others in the market?

</comment><comment><USER34> \- What's the OT policy like? Encouraged/discouraged? Cash/comp?

\- How much of my IP/side projects will belong to you?

\- Could you walk me through an average day for a $position? (better to talk to an actual $position if possible)

<comment><USER35> It's really important to talk directly to someone who would be considered your peer to understand the team and the day to day. Bonus points if you can speak to them privately to get candid answers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> \- what is your runway?

\- what is my equity (potential)?

\- is there already a technical platform/process to do my work, or does this need to be build first?

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean by technical platform/process?

<comment><USER37> I would infer this to mean a foundation of informed technology choices, working code, and systems that run the code to an acceptable SLA, probably with well-thought-out logging and monitoring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Do I get a private office?

I guess if a company ever passes #1 I'll have to think up a #2 and #3!

</comment><comment><USER39> 1) Is there a business transaction within their business model that produces revenue?

2) What is their long-term intent? (Exit, operate, merge, acquire, etc.)

3) Has the leadership team done this before? (I don't want to be someone else's learning experience.)

</comment><comment><USER40> \- are your CxO positions filled by friends/family?

\- do you have past history of firing people just before their vesting cliff?

\- how did you meet your investors (scan for any hints of dirty money, e.g. backing from Russia etc.)?

<comment><USER41> These are great questions that are often challenging to find the answers to. Just asking them can set things on a weird tone. I think that in a lot of ways, it's ideal if you can contract for a few weeks and ask around to figure out the answers to these questions before you sign on full time. Otherwise, you don't know what you're getting into. Consequences can be dire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> The questions you should ask (and expect to have answered) vary depending on where you slot into the org chart.

Pivots, both historical and pending are relevant no matter who you report to.

Competition in the marketplace is also relevant.

</comment><comment><USER43> The big one for me: how strongly do you equate "programming" with "engineering", and to what extent do you value other approaches (in the spirit of [1])?

To what extent are ways of working circumscribed by tooling choices?

"What are you selling?" (and is it something I can believe in) is pretty important too.

[1] [https://www.tedinski.com/2018/03/20/wizarding-vs- engineering...](https://www.tedinski.com/2018/03/20/wizarding-vs- engineering.html)

<comment><USER44> Parts of that article are a bit dubious. Good practices don't have much to do with a language being statically typed or dynamically typed. You can write awful, convoluted code with a wizardry approach in Java and C++, but clean, easily maintainable and testable code with an engineering approach in Elixir and Clojure, which indeed would be much harder in Python. The programming paradigm (and a lot of other factors) is probably much more important than static vs. dynamic.

<comment><USER45> You have to assume going in that unknown startup code will be a shitshow.

Given the choice between a unityped shitshow and a shitshow where I can at least lean on the compiler, I know which one I'll pick every time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> 1\. Why is this position open?

2\. How are remote workers integrated?

3\. Are there past employees on good terms, who you would hire again? Are separations of all reasons generally clean?

My corn hole hurts. I used to ask all the option related questions and whatnot (6 SF sw eng jobs), but the engineering lane is so far down the totem in 2019 that I don't see much purpose. They want my skills for 6-18 months? Great, let's not over-complicate it. My resume is too toasted to make it past the second floor as a result of poor picks resulting in no references newer than 2013.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'd always ask a startup what their runway is. If it's less than a year I wouldn't go for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> How would you know if their stated runway is realistic? What I mean, I feel that startup is gonna try to get you no matter what (in some cases), so how do you know if they are telling truth or not?

<comment><USER48> They should be able to answer in a fair amount of detail what their runway looks like (i.e. cash in the bank, burn rate, projected hiring figures, etc.)

Of course, you can never know for sure if someone is telling the truth or not, but they way they defend their answer says a lot in my opinion. People who tend to lie usually don't like getting into the numbers, and people who are honest about runway tend to pay pretty close attention to them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This is pretty close to a question on the yearly Stackoverlow survey, which you might want to look up.

Personally, I only consider offices I can reach by bike, and try to avoid bro- culture companies.

</comment><comment><USER50> I think the category "startup" is too generic for us to provide you a valuable answer. What is the size of the company? How long have they been running? What stage (seeds, A, B, etc), who are the founders? What is the domain?

Give us more details and we'll provide you very targeted questions to ask. Since you're talking about an offer, I'm assuming this for a specific startup...

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing specific atm. I do agree that startup could mean a lot of things. But I've learned already quite a lot from the questions that were provided, for which I'm very thankful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> A friend of mine suggested

"What is your staff turnover like?"

Along with the note that the answer is less important than observing their reaction to being asked.

</comment><comment><USER52> \- Can you describe your key/northstar metric, what goes into it, and how it's doing? \- What is your runway/burn rate? \- If equity is part of the comp, may I see a cap table first?

My experience has been that if these things are secret, they are looking for disposable pawns. Sometimes you just need the gig, but go in eyes open.

</comment><comment><USER53> If you're entering into senior roles, ask "What metrics are you using to measure success?". It's an open ended question but it'll give you tons of insights into how management thinks about business.

</comment><comment><USER54> Ask if there's a structure in place to measure, or evaluate your growth to award raises. Otherwise, your next raise is going to be depending on that next sale for however long you can tolerate it.

</comment><comment><USER55> Your question needs a little more focus. Specifically, what stage of startup? Let's assume Series B or earlier.

All the normal stuff like the top voted comment describes.

Missing from that list is the most important question! At A or B stage, what is revenue growth rate? At seed this is a different animal.

Second most important, and also missing (!), brief bios on the management team.

I'd also ask, combined experience of the engineering team, and often missed on a forum like this, combined experience of the _sales team_.

</comment><comment><USER56> \- How long am I guaranteed to get paid? If they guarantee and can't pay you it's on them. I wouldn't worry about the startup's existence - its not your problem, provided you are working for decent people.

\- If there is a stock offer learn vesting terms and ballpark how much you would make if company was worth 10M-100M. Assume that's an extra bonus and company would probably not make it there.

\- Determine what your role is and whether you will like it.

<comment><USER57> Define "guaranteed".

Because unless they actually pay you that money in advance, its most likely not guaranteed in the event the company goes belly up.

<comment><USER56> Then I say it is a too risky deal to take.

I expect a founder to normally guarantee 6 months, or 12 months or 24 months of payment before hiring someone depending on the situation at time of hire. This is the only way I would hire anybody.

Frankly I find it misplaced for a hired employee to have to worry about intricate details about company's runway and other risks etc. Its not your problem. If you are expected to own that as your problem then you might as well offer to be a founder and get proper stock.

<comment><USER57> I agree with your points entirely, but my point is, what does the word "guarantee" actually mean?

If you enter into a legally binding document with the company that says you'll be paid no matter what, that still means nothing if there's no money.

<comment><USER56> guarantee is whether the person who makes it is trustworthy or not, and knows his/her finances. I'd focus on that instead of try to judge how the company is doing to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> 1) how many months of cash do you have 2) how many people have left the company? 3) how many paying customers do you have?

</comment><comment><USER59> Ask them about the last raise round, and then ask why they raised. The correct reason for companies to raise money is if they tell themselves, "if only we had $Xmillion, we would be able to do Y". They shouldn't be raising money just to raise. This will give you some insight into the near term company goals.

<comment><USER60> This isn't necessarily true. Raising capital because the market is good and their are favorable valuations and terms is a perfectly legit reason to raise.

The most successful raises usually occur when you don't need the money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Ask them 3 times how much money they have.

</comment><comment><USER62> It really depends on why you want to join a startup/where you are in your career. If you are young, you probably want to focus on gaining experience and build your network. If you are older, you may value financial aspects more.

</comment><comment><USER63> \- What is the limit of (1 + 1/n)^n when n goes to 1/10 ?

\- Could you multiply this number with your salary offer ?

If they say yes to previous question, then there is a bonus question.

\- Next year, could you find the limit of the same function when n tends to 1/20 ?

<comment><USER64> This makes no sense. (1 + 1/n)^n is computable at both points, why would you ask for a limit?

<comment><USER63> true. I guess I'm not hired.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Do you use version control/what version control do you use?

It's like fizz buzz for companies

</comment><comment><USER66> "If I end up not being successful at this role in 6 months, why will that have happened? What will have gone wrong and what can we do now to prevent that?"

</comment><comment><USER67> \- "Have you ever turned down a paying customer for ethical reasons?" \- "What's your approach to building teams?"

</comment><comment><USER68> 1) Salary 2) WFH days 3) Who am I working with?

</comment><comment><USER69> I normally do my research on the company's financial health then ask:

\- how flexible are you guys (wfh, etc)

\- ask about holiday allowance

\- confirm how perks work

<comment><AUTHOR> How do you do that research?

<comment><USER70> I always look them up on CrunchBase or similar sites first. (EDGAR is also good.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I am EU based, so EDGAR is not an option for me, but thanks for the information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Is there a clawback provision in the stock option agreement?</comment>


Censoring chatroulette - <AUTHOR>

Will censoring chatroulete "fix" it? Is undesirable content the major reason preventing them from really taking off? <comment><USER2> It's hard to say. It's undesirable content may have played a role in its rise to fame. Definitely bad publicity, but still publicity. And while most would not admit it, it may have attracted female viewers to the site.

There was a post in IAMA months ago on Reddit where a chatroulette exhibitionist mentioned that a quarter of the women would watch him for up to 10 minutes, often encouraging him.

Sometimes success derives from the freedom that lets undesirable things happen. In the process of stopping those undesirable things, the freedom that brought success may be extinguished.

Success in the complicated social network of the internet is complicated, and it is too difficult at least for me to make a solid guess on what will happen.</comment>


WolframTones: Generate a Composition - <AUTHOR> http://tones.wolfram.com/generate/advanced.html?instrumentation

<comment><USER2> Unlike real music, it's actually more interesting to see how _bad_ you can get it.

<http://tones.wolfram.com/xid/8274-538-3479-807-5191>

<comment><USER3> Give me that and an Amiga with video toaster, and I'll make you a mid-90s sci fi show...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> to music, what W|A is to google.

</comment><comment><USER3> (c) 2005?

Sounds like Rephlex records is out of business...</comment>


EPA Looks to Move Forward with Blending More Ethanol in Summer Gasoline - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedrive.com/news/26947/epa-looks-to-move-forward-with-blending-more-ethanol-in-your-summer-gasoline <comment><USER2> Who is behind the lobbying on Ethanol? The decrease in gas mileage is not worth it, and I'm fairly certain the product is hardly profitable without heavy government subsidies.

<comment><USER3> The corn lobby is very powerful. Nobody else thinks ethanol is a good idea, especially from corn (one of the worst crops you could use). The carbon inputs to make the ethanol are around the same as if you just burned petroleum in the first place. Once you burn the ethanol as well, it's much worse than just gasoline. It also encourages expansion of farm land into virgin land and increases food prices. Not to mention it is horrible for engines, especially in older vehicles.

Hilariously, gas sold for non-highway use (like farms) is not required to contain ethanol, and usually doesn't. They'll push it on all of us, but won't use it themselves.

<comment><USER4> Also, a lot of small engines (with carbs) demand non-ethanol gasoline; apparently ethanol gums up the carbs I think.

Of course, it'd be better if we just stopped using those small engines altogether... one leaf blower being used for one day puts out as much pollution as a Ford Raptor pickup in 100,000 miles.

<comment><USER5> Ethanol does not "gum up" (note I am not defending anything here). Just open up your bathroom cabinet. I bet you got a bottle of isopropyl alcohol in there. Its probably years old too. How "gummed up" is it?

The gumming up of ethanol mixed fuels is due to the poor quality of gasoline base that is used.

<comment><USER6> The gumminess comes from degrading rubber hoses and seals, neither of which are found in a plastic bottle.

<comment><USER7> Well, it also comes from dissolving years of gasoline deposits, if you've been using non-ethanol gas before. Ethanol is a very effective cleaner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I feel like the game is being played backwards.

Instead of subsidizing a single solution to some kind of externality we should be taxing the cost of the externality itself and allowing all potential solutions to bid on the mitigation...

</comment><comment><USER9> Wonderful. /s

My car's owner's manual specifically says not to use fuel with greater than 10% ethanol. I don't want to play Russian Roulette with my fuel system.

<comment><USER10> I'm not an expert, but my understanding is most modern (non-carburetor) cars can run 100% ethanol without issue. The problems arise, not from the combustion process, but from the increased acidity causing increased wear on non-metal components like seals and gaskets.

Most consumer gasoline already has ethanol mixed in, I doubt a modest increase will be an issue.

\-----

Also, most consumer stations have 10% (unleaded), 85% (e85), or 100% (racing). I'm not aware of any stations that consistently offer anything between 10% and 85%.

I suspect your car's warning it warning against e85 and racing fuel.

<comment><USER11> Most computers don't know how to adjust the air-fuel ratio for higher levels of ethanol. It isn't impossible to do that but it is additional effort to put in those mappings.

There are a lot of stations in Iowa that offer E15. Few other states even have one. Even in Iowa a lot of stations have said they won't sell it because of the legal issues.

<comment><USER7> There are also cold-starting issues when running very high ethanol fractions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How heavily are taxpayers subsidizing corn used for ethanol?

What would a gallon of E15 cost without the corn subsidy?

<comment><USER13> Well, since it takes more than a gallon of fuel to produce a gallon of ethanol, we can assume it's completely subsidized.

<comment><USER14> This statement is logically unsound. The addition of ethanol is as an additive to reduce emissions, just as other petroleum-based additives are used. There's no constraint that such additives be net energy positive.

<comment><USER13> This is the first I've heard of ethanol being useful for reducing emissions. First off, the net effect is obviously more emissions since the fuel burned to create the ethanol is mostly diesel in farm equipment. Second the local reduction of emissions seems to be benzene, but is replaced with acetaldehyde, which sounds like a wash, or barely an improvement.

The emissions argument seems like a complete loser for ethanol.

<comment><USER14> > _This is the first I 've heard of ethanol being useful for reducing > emissions._

Why would the EPA be involved, if not for emissions reasons?

The argument about net-zero or negative energy life-cycle return isn't what is meant by "emissions". In automobiles the exhaust pipe is considered a point source, not the combined sum of the production process including a tractor being run a thousand miles away from downtown LA or Houston.

<comment><USER13> I addressed this with my local emissions comment about benzene. Maybe you missed it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > The use of biofuel products, such as ethanol, is heavily subsidized in the > United States.

OK, so we subsidize ethanol production... because? It's not because turning what could be food into fuel is good for "the environment" really. It's definitely not good for actually feeding people. (Diversion of what could be food-productive land to ethanol is responsible for increase in subsistence food costs for poor people worldwide).

But anyway, we subsidize it. Mostly to help farmers. Fine, you gotta help farmers somehow.

> The government hopes that by permitting the higher blend of ethanol, drivers > will be paying less at the pump.

OK, since we're subsidizing it, making it cheaper than gasoline, now we gotta allow more of it, so consumers will "pay less at the pump". Not because, you know, it's inherently cheaper or anything, but just because we subsidize it.

But at least people will get to pay less for gas. Uh, what's that you say?

> But for consumers, more ethanol means lower overall fuel economy since > ethanol only possesses two-thirds the energy content of a gallon of > gasoline. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that a 10 > percent ethanol blend into gasoline will decrease a car's overall fuel > economy by three percent; this means that increasing ethanol to a 15 percent > blend will bring the average fuel economy down 4.5 percent when compared to > just straight gasoline.

Okay, so maybe they're not paying _as much_ less at the pump as they thought. Presumably the per-gallon cost is at least 4.5% less than gasoline, so at least they're still paying _something_ less at the pump... I hope. If it's less than 4.5% less than straight gasoline, of course they're paying more, they just don't realize it. (And let's not talk about older cars whose engines can't handle it and which will be harmed, unless you knew that and... bought the premium gas instead? Still saving money at the pump?)

But at least it's PROBABLY not releasing MORE air pollution than gasoline, if you believe the ethanol industry's researchers over other researchers. Great!

The whole thing MAKES NO SENSE. The whole ethanol thing is garbage policy.

That was originally promoted as somehow "good for the environment." (It is not). This is why "oh, maybe it won't help that much, but every little bit helps" is never a good reason to do things "good for the environment." Some things are just BS. (And don't get me wrong, i think we DESPERATELY need to do a LOT more "good for the environment" (and climate change), which is why this kind of BS is SO BAD).

At least this article is better than most and gives you enough facts to connect the dots if you're paying attention.

<comment><USER7> The problem is not with the ethanol. It's with the corn.

<comment><USER15> At least you can EAT corn instead of burning it as a poor more-polluting more- expensive substitute for gasoline!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are any Startup School videos up? - <AUTHOR>

Please post links if you have them, thanks! <comment><USER2> Yes. Click on presenter's name: <http://startupschool.org/2012/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Did you find them?</comment>


My first DDoS attack for a $200 ransom - <AUTHOR> http://ghirardotti.fr/symfony2/2016/04/04/DDoS-attack-for-ransom/ <comment><USER2> Roughly, a somewhat lackluster response to a somewhat lackluster DDoS attempt.

They tried blocking specific ip addresses, which didn't work, because the attack was somewhat distributed. They then just turned on some caching, which allowed the site to function, albeit with an unknown excess bandwidth charge pending.

And, the DDoS itself can't of been terribly impressive, as all it took to mitigate was a bit of caching. He mentions 10 requests / sec as the scale of the attack.

<comment><USER3> I was shocked that 12 requests/second could take down _any_ site.

I use async logic (previously OpenResty, more recently NodeJS and Go) and largely pregenerated sites, so 2500 requests/second is a minimum baseline -- on a much lower end instance than an m4.xlarge.

There's a reason I don't use PHP (or any primarily synchronous language like Ruby) any more.

<comment><USER4> The language used is meaningless absent the context of the whole application, especially the database. I can do 2500 requests a second with ruby or php on a micro instance on AWS. But that's meaningless after I plug into a mysql database that's going to bottleneck at 2 requests a second after i try to render abad wordpress theme out of MySql.

<comment><USER3> That 2500 is after taking into account relevant database queries. With async servers (which, as far as I know, PHP _can 't_ be, at least with the way it typically integrates into Apache) you can accept all the requests, forward off the database requests each depends on, and still send back the pages to everyone who requested one.

Of course I've avoided WordPress and similar frameworks for years for a reason as well; I've seen front-end frameworks that require dozens if not hundreds of database queries to render a page, which is such bad design that it makes my brain hurt.

<comment><USER2> node.js does have it's advantages, but it's possible to be very fast with php.

For example, the advantage of the "warm app" with node is often approximated by using a shared memory kv store in php.

And, while an async io approach scales in a simpler way, you can typically find an optimum tuning for fastcgi that scales very well.

Looking at this benchmark: [https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r12&hw=...](https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r12&hw=peak&test=query)

There are php-fpm implementations running at the same clip as node, and an hhvm implementation trouncing it.

Yes, benchmarks are sometimes bullshit, but the idea that node's approach is somehow light years ahead just doesn't pan out in the real world.

<comment><USER3> >benchmarks are sometimes bullshit, but the idea that node's approach is somehow light years ahead just doesn't pan out in the real world.

It's in the real world where you have database connections that can't always scale to 186k/second with low latency on all responses, which is what's required to get the performance out of HHVM in the linked benchmark. In a typical architecture you may not have the database local to the PHP server, meaning latency will be much higher. And it's upstream latency that kills a synchronous connection.

And it's in the real world where a number of third party queries may be involved with a request, and those queries may take 100ms to resolve, during which time your thread is blocked in PHP whereas Node can be busy handling other requests or even other aspects of the same request (a Promise.all of a half dozen simultaneous database queries, for instance).

Async approaches _are_ light years ahead in the real world. I keep seeing references to HHVM when people try to defend PHP, so I did a Google search to find out if it supports async, and the answer is "a little bit." [1] Basically it looks like, _within a single request_ , it can execute several queries in parallel, like my Promise.all example above. So it looks like Hack, at least, has that feature. But as far as I can tell it doesn't mix multiple connections in a single thread. And you have to be careful to use only async-aware operations or you lose the benefits; Node is designed around async behavior, so everything you're likely to use supports it by default.

Those benchmarks are in fact unrealistic. And the Node implementation in that benchmark uses a single connection to MySQL, so the 20 queries are actually executed in series instead of in parallel. [0] If they used a connection pool instead, they could all execute in parallel. Look at the numbers:

Queries 1 5 10 15 20 nodejs 85,490 22,917 12,083 8,250 6,254 hhvm 12,369 12,428 10,056 10,394 9,322

The NodeJS results shouldn't drop that fast off of the single query unless they're all using the same MySQL connection; even using just 4 connections from a pool should speed it up by a lot. Also, the HHVM source uses stored procedures while the Node version recompiles the query every time. Finally, Node can be faster when driven from Nginx, while it's using the internal Node server instead.

Here's an article I just stumbled across that talks about the limits of HHVM to accelerate PHP: [2] It touches on some of the same points. Async is the important way to speed up real world apps, and it's not the default "PHP Way."

Aside from that, probably 90% of the people using PHP are using it "normal" PHP on a hosted server in Apache and not HHVM at all. So you're basically arguing hypotheticals: "IF they use HHVM, and IF they write the code exactly right, and IF their upstream servers have really low latency all the time, then PHP isn't much slower than Node."

Node is usually faster in the real world given common coding patterns. And Node gives you Socket.IO, which pretty much kills the relevance of PHP no matter how you slice it. Even long polling would slaughter a PHP server; you'd be able to support at most one concurrent user per thread. Async servers are a good at supporting long running connections.

[0] [https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...](https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/master/frameworks/JavaScript/nodejs/handlers/mysql- raw.js)

[1] [https://docs.hhvm.com/hack/async/introduction](https://docs.hhvm.com/hack/async/introduction)

[2] [http://www.infoworld.com/article/2948132/app- servers/hhvm-38...](http://www.infoworld.com/article/2948132/app- servers/hhvm-38-can-speed-up-php-but-only-so-much.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The webpage[0] seems to be having issues. The best I could do was the Google cache[1] or the Markdown source[2].

[0]: [http://lologhi.github.io/symfony2/2016/04/04/DDoS-attack- for...](http://lologhi.github.io/symfony2/2016/04/04/DDoS-attack-for-ransom/)

[1]: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:J7lca_...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:J7lca_k5dWcJ:ghirardotti.fr/symfony2/2016/04/04/DDoS- attack-for-ransom/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

[2]: [https://github.com/lologhi/lologhi.github.com/blob/master/_p...](https://github.com/lologhi/lologhi.github.com/blob/master/_posts/2016-05-04-DDoS- attack-for-ransom.md)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is an amazingly weak DDoS, put your site behind CloudFlare or similar free service and go take a nap. They'll tank this without raising an eyebrow.

<comment><USER7> probably because I've been playing an mmo, but i like the use of the word 'tank' here

<comment><USER8> The etymology here is actually really interesting. The term "tank" was an Americanism for a swimming pool once upon a time, and the etymology of that is pretty well-known: it was imported from a Portuguese word meaning "pond" which ultimately came from India [1]. The same source quotes a 1960s usage of the term for "failure" in the sport of Tennis.

The term actually seems to come from a 1920s boxing euphemism [2]: when a boxer is not actually knocked out but voluntarily lays down on the ground, it was called "a dive" for obvious reasons; euphemistically some people called this "going into the tank," since you'd dive into a pool.

How did this start referring to the vehicle? Again, back to [1], there was once a memo "recommending the proposed "caterpillar machine-gun destroyer" machines be entrusted to an organization "which, for secrecy, shall be called the 'Tank Supply Committee,' ..." and the rest is history.

[1] [http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=tank](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=tank)

[2] [http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2008/10/explainer_goes_in_the_tank.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > 40 cores [m4.10xlarge], but still unable to process 10 requests/sec

my goodness.

<comment><USER10> That's php for you. Although I use php myself quite often, it can be a resource hog if you're lazy about optimization. A customer I was working with was using wordpress, and their homepage took about 5 seconds to load due to a hideously inefficient wordpress module that was doing the exact same sql query thousands of times! With a little bit of optimization I managed to get it down to about 1 or 2 seconds.

For my own sites, I mostly use static html or server-parsed html.

<comment><USER11> The overhead of an SQL query has nothing to do with the language you're using.

<comment><USER10> Of course I'm aware of that. I was just giving an example of a specific case I came across. The point I was making is that there is a lot of inefficient php code out there.

<comment><USER12> Recently a colleague and I took a PHP+MySQL page that was taking 1-2 minutes to load and were able to drop it down to 30 seconds after our first round of revisions. After a second round of revisions, we got it under 15 seconds, then after another round we got it to the 1-5 second range. Most of the optimizations were in the PHP not in the SQL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ummmm.... A cache layer for any web application is a must have, perhaps he could have avoided the attack all along if it were present on the system since day one?...

At least for this kind of attack, a more serious DDoS won't be tamed by "just adding cache"

<comment><USER14> Well, when your DDOS is '10 requests a second', your site is probably not the most sophisticated.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, true! But please share your personal DDoS experience is mine is not large enough :p

<comment><USER14> I also hope I didn't sound too insulting. I know keeping any site up against DDOS is hard!

<comment><AUTHOR> No it's ok! Thank you ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For next time you don't want to have to copy and paste. No need for SED.

cat <file> | cut -d ' ' -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

<comment><USER16> no need for cat

<comment><USER15> You're correct, force of habit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Apparently, it didn't work. :)

Site not installed The site ghirardotti.fr is not yet installed

[Edit: it's up now.]

<comment><USER17> Though, it is interesting how an article with a dead link made it on the frontpage with 3 points.

<comment><AUTHOR> And there are 73 persons on it right now if I believe Google Analytics

<comment><USER18> [ Edit: I'm almost certain it's an ipv6 vs ipv4 issue. the ipv4 addresses resolve to github pages land, the ipv6 address resolves to somewhere inside OVH - the issue being that if the viewer's network infrastructure prefers ipv6, they will get a holding page from OVH stating that that "Site not installed / The site ghirardotti.fr is not yet installed" ]

Dig:

      dig ghirardotti.fr
      ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, rcode: NOERROR, id: 19860
      ;; flags: qr rd ra ; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
      ;; QUESTION SECTION:
      ;; ghirardotti.fr.	IN	A

      ;; ANSWER SECTION:
      ghirardotti.fr.	3112	IN	A	188.8.131.52
      ghirardotti.fr.	3112	IN	A	126.96.36.199

      ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:

      ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:

Both ip's belong to Github, probably used as a failover/load balancing/round robin pair of some kind.

reverse dns

dig -x 126.96.36.199

      ; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> -x 22.214.171.124
      ;; global options: +cmd
      ;; Got answer:
      ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 46826
      ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

      ;; QUESTION SECTION:
      ;22.214.171.124.in-addr.arpa.	IN	PTR

      ;; ANSWER SECTION:
      188.8.131.52.in-addr.arpa. 3593 IN	PTR	pages.github.com.

dig ipv6:

      dig AAAA ghirardotti.fr

      ; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> AAAA ghirardotti.fr
      ;; global options: +cmd
      ;; Got answer:
      ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 0
      ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

      ;; QUESTION SECTION:
      ;ghirardotti.fr.			IN	AAAA

      ;; ANSWER SECTION:
      ghirardotti.fr.		1613	IN	AAAA	2001:41d0:1:1b00:213:186:33:19

      ;; Query time: 91 msec

Reverse dns on that:

      dig -x 2001:41d0:1:1b00:213:186:33:19

      ; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> -x 2001:41d0:1:1b00:213:186:33:19
      ;; global options: +cmd
      ;; Got answer:
      ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 25262
      ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

      ;; QUESTION SECTION:
      ;22.214.171.124.184.108.40.206.22.214.171.124.126.96.36.199.0.0.b.220.127.116.11.0.0.d.22.214.171.124.0.2.ip6.arpa.
      IN PTR

      ;; ANSWER SECTION:
      188.8.131.52.22.214.171.124.220.127.116.11.126.96.36.199.0.0.b.188.8.131.52.0.0.d.220.127.116.11.0.2.ip6.arpa.
      85728 IN PTR cluster010.ovh.net.

<comment><USER10> If they're using OVH they already have free DDoS protection. I use OVH myself and I've had a few mitigated DDoS attacks that I barely noticed.

Perhaps 10 requests/sec is below OVH's detection threshold. My last one was 8.4Gbps @ 1 million packets per sec. 10 requests/sec would be difficult to even notice :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, OVH is just for our domain name. Also is talking about my blog, not [https://www.villa-bali.com](https://www.villa-bali.com) website, which is on AWS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well, typical SLA for server side is 500 ms, then you have a chance to load a whole page under 3 seconds, which is recommended by google usability findings.

villa-bali is not even close to this, my bet that you (or your ORM) are making too many requests to database. Try to record ALL requests to database during page rendering and I bet you have about hundred. Check out following test results:

8 test agents: [http://loadme.socialtalents.com/Result/ViewById/57341f645b5f...](http://loadme.socialtalents.com/Result/ViewById/57341f645b5f160adca6c1bc) \- 5% of users have to wait more than 2 seconds 16 test agents: [http://loadme.socialtalents.com/Result/ViewById/57341f1a5b5f...](http://loadme.socialtalents.com/Result/ViewById/57341f1a5b5f160adca6c19b) 5% of users need to wait for more than 4 seconds.

Definitely, any bot can nuke your website easily.

</comment><comment><USER20> How come the original post has 55 upvotes, but the karma of of original poster is only 18 (6:33 PM GMT)?

<comment><USER21> Users receive one karma for one comment upvote, but one submission upvote yields less than one karma for the user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder what would happen if GET / only returned a redirect to somewhere (either an HTTP code or an HTML with window.location='http:/yoursite.com/new_page'

</comment><comment><USER23> > 40 cores, but still unable to process 10 requests/sec

Stopped reading after that.</comment>


Interactive Twitter Visualization: Election 2012 (made with d3.js) - <AUTHOR> http://hotspots.io/election

<comment><USER2> This looks great. One thing that's a little annoying is how the vertical axis automatically scales to the range of the data. It makes it hard to compare peaks that don't occur within the same view range.

<comment><USER3> The aspect ratio is also problematic with taller windows; best practice is to bank to 45º:

<http://vis.berkeley.edu/papers/banking/>

It's hard to pick the right aspect ratio without knowing the data beforehand, but you could make some reasonable assumptions about how spiky the peaks are. Given those assumptions, you could choose a fixed-height (say, 400px), and then adjust the visible time range if you still want variable-width. This would allow the chart to increase in size without compromising the aspect ratio.

Alternatively, you could use a responsive layout and just choose between two or three fixed sizes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestions - it's certainly an issue we're thinking about and looking to improve.

Also, d3.js is a pleasure to work with. Really appreciate all the work you've put into it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very slick UX and very informative as well! I would love to be able to create custom topics, such as 'D3.JS' and generate timelines with top tweets.

Quick question: how did you obtain the real-time metric "# of tweets per hour"? Are you sampling to determine an estimate using the Search API, or do you have access to a proverbial "firehose"?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're actually using the Twitter Streaming API, which has pretty high limits even with access levels lower than the full firehose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really cool, any plans to add other data sources? FB might be harder, but I think G+ has a public search API. I see it's just a demo for now, but a dashboard view would be great as that "go-to source" for top breaking news.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you can, please do the same for Wikipedia / SOPA.. it'll be interesting to see the difference in volume between tech media reporting and general outcry..

</comment><comment><USER7> This would be great as a map and if people tweeted a certain hashtag, color the map according to their vote. You could really see what direction the twitter audience is leaning. this is a neat implementation though.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks real nice, but the information is pretty useless.

* When events unfold, twitter users predictably react.

* Some events are bigger than others.

<comment><USER9> Yes, but how much bigger? whose getting the attention? that is what's interesting about this visualization.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to handle a record during an interview? - <AUTHOR> I have a record, I was convicted of a handful of felonies roughly five years ago and ended up going to prison. I have since then gotten an awesome job and am doing well. On a whim I put a few application in to some dream jobs (I reverse commute at the moment and would like to get closer to the city) and a few companies are actually very interested. I even have an interview coming up in a few days for full-stack React development. Do I disclose up front? Any input from people who do the hiring would be greatly appreciated. I would hate for it to be a perfect fit and no one says anything, only for it to be a huge issue down the road. I am confident that I can get a job on the merit of my code and I do not want to shoot myself in the foot. Thanks for any input! <comment><USER2> An interview is more about how you present yourself than about your actual skills, so make sure that you create a good impression first before telling them. In my interviews I usually ask about a record towards the end of the interview so that I'm not biased, but if it comes up earlier, be truthful about it.

</comment><comment><USER3> My feeling is to take an "own it, and be up front about it" mindset. Tell them what happened, admit that you goofed up, explain how/why you believe you learned your lesson or whatever, and make it clear that you won't be doing that again (whatever it was). Without knowing anything more about your situation, that's the best advice I can think of.

<comment><AUTHOR> I got involved in drug sales and ended up threatening a fellow dealer with a weapon. I was going to a good school at the time and ended up going back to school while away. Thanks a bunch for the advice!</comment></comment>


Flash's Gaming Legacy  and My Efforts to Save It - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@bluemaximax011/adobe-flashs-gaming-legacy-thousands-upon-thousands-of-titles-and-my-efforts-to-save-it-58c14811558a <comment><AUTHOR> There is a crowd of people rushing to archive Flash games before they are gone forever.

You can join them here: [https://discord.gg/S9uJ794](https://discord.gg/S9uJ794)</comment>


Samsung drops US countersuit to focus on Apple patent defense - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/07/01/samsung-drops-us-countersuit-to-focus-on-apple-patent-defense/ <comment><AUTHOR> The word on the streets (of Seoul), Samsung dropped the lawsuit as soon as the auction for Nortel Network's wireless patents ended. Soon after Samsung realized it was on (more) shaky grounds. Apple took part in the winning consortium.

And, where Samsung pleads its case of copying=competing, they have no shame. I hope this will justify 'innocent copying' from their competitors locally and abroad, namely emerging Chinese brands. Knowing how Samsung behaves/operates, they would seek the death penalty for those who challenge them with true innovation. As in, behind the scene guerilla tactics by 1) using closely- affiliated media powerhouses to spread official misinformation 2) or, influencing articles by buying advertising from trade news magazines, 3) cut the head off all revenue streams of the challenger by threatening its customers/backers. Samsung tried all of the above in late 2009, when Apple launched the iPhone 3G/3GS in Korea. 1) & 2) Spread misinformation using mainstream TV and newspaper media 3) Threatened the then-sole-iPhone carrier, KT by awarding its rival (SKT) with exclusivity to Galaxy-line products. Should note, SKT began offering the iPhone in March '11 which proved moot to Samsung playing favorites.</comment>


C Runtime Overhead - <AUTHOR> http://ryanhileman.info/posts/lib43 <comment><USER2> Static linking to Musl libc is pretty minimal, not sure you really need assembly

strace -tt /tmp/test

15:38:33.245549 execve("/tmp/test", ["/tmp/test"], [/* 16 vars */]) = 0

15:38:33.246436 arch_prctl(ARCH_SET_FS, 0x601070) = 0

15:38:33.246617 set_tid_address(0x6010a0) = 17227

15:38:33.246875 exit_group(0) = ?

15:38:33.247060 +++ exited with 0 +++

<comment><AUTHOR> My solution in the final trace was a minimal (300 sloc) libc with a total of two lines of assembly (to bootstrap syscalls) and didn't do any syscalls beside read, write, and exit. I've also toyed with the idea of testing exit via error (SIGSEGV, SIGILL, etc) because cleanup might be faster on a forced exit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Now imagine the speed if you could get rid of the syscall overhead. You would have to write a lot more code (and it probably wouldn't run on Linux due to trying to access protected memory locations or IO ports), but it would be significantly faster.

Aah, the promise of the Exokernel[1].

[1] [http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~wiseman/2os/microkernels/exokernel.pd...](http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~wiseman/2os/microkernels/exokernel.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Well, when I started programming, C and Pascal execution speed were looked down like managed runtimes are still nowadays.

Serious application development for consumer computers was done in straight Assembly. Anything higher than that was "scripting". :)

<comment><USER5> Back when digital, electronic computers were new, assembly was called "automatic programming".

<comment><USER6> Good old Autocode. Finally you didn't need to enter all instructions by number, it was considered a great leap forward at the time...

 _The first autocode and its compiler were developed by Alick Glennie in 1952 for the Mark 1 computer at the University of Manchester and is considered by some to be the first compiled programming language. His main goal was to make the programming of Mark 1 machine, known for its partcularly abstruse machine code, comprehensible. Although the resulting language was much clearer than the machine code, it was still very machine dependent._

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's interesting to note that Go doesn't depend on libc. However, I rather doubt the Go runtime bootstraps any faster than libc, so it probably wouldn't help here. One consequence is that Linux and libc are tightly coupled and some of the "syscall" behavior you depend on is actually implemented as a wrapper in libc. This has caused some behavioral differences between Go and C that have surprised the language developers.

<comment><USER8> can you give an example?

<comment><USER2> Linux has very non Posixy ideas about threads, which are basically processes with shared memory. libc is supposed to present a Posix compatible interface. See [1] for some examples. Go simply exposes raw syscalls.

[1] [http://ewontfix.com/17/](http://ewontfix.com/17/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Micro-benchmarks lead to optimizing at the wrong level. In the real world, if process startup time is a bottleneck in your application then you are creating too many processes too quickly.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're absolutely right about the majority of the time in the real world. A ctf level is a contrived case, but that doesn't make this any less interesting for me. This was mostly a challenge of "how fast can I run my existing program?" and I think I nailed it pretty well with lib43 [0] (which is a working _extremely minimal_ libc and crt0 replacement in about 300 lines of code).

My favorite part is my x86_64 linux syscall interface, in which I define a short assembly stub (syscall.c) and simply list syscall names (syscall.list) to wire them up. The calling convention between user-space functions and the kernel was close enough I was able to reduce the inline asm to two instructions (`mov rax, _syscall num_ ; syscall;`).

[0] [https://github.com/lunixbochs/lib43](https://github.com/lunixbochs/lib43)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "...huck the whole thing and rewrite it in assembly."

What are the functions in libc that you truly need and use?

How many of those routines are you incapable or unwilling to rewrite yourself?

I have asked myself these questions on many occasions.

The cruft laden operating system I use (which I imagine by many people's standards is "bare bones") is hopelessly dependent on "libc". But I find that the userland programs I truly need can be written using only a minimal subset of the many functions that are compiled into it.

Could I write any of these in assembly and create my own "libasm" to do the syscalls? This is a project I have contemplated many times.

To motivate myself to keep writing more assembly in the age of scripting language du jour madness, I write a small program in assembly language and then write the same program in C and then step through each compiled program (e.g., with ald). Seeing some of the overhead is an effective motivator.

<comment><USER11> You for the most part don't need to rewrite anything. You can take the source code for most libc functions and compile them independently.

<comment><USER2> Musl libc has every function in a separate file, so if you statically link you just get what you use, modulo a number of functions that use each other. So building it yourself is not going to be much better.

<comment><USER12> Just a remark: If you find it confusing to scatter your code over too many small files with only one function each, look up "-ffunction-sections" on the gcc manual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is cool. I've been working on something similar[0]. It only takes a few more lines to add some of the other useful libc/posix/sysv things. My eventual goal is to rewrite asmutils'[1] httpd [2] in C and get a binary about 2-3x in size (2-3K).

[0] [https://github.com/lpsantil/rt0](https://github.com/lpsantil/rt0)

[1] [http://asm.sourceforge.net/asmutils.html](http://asm.sourceforge.net/asmutils.html)

[2] [https://github.com/leto/asmutils/blob/master/src/httpd.asm](https://github.com/leto/asmutils/blob/master/src/httpd.asm)

</comment><comment><USER14> Something funny about the numbers here. The assembly stub took 8ms, but the whole program only takes 1ms?

<comment><USER15> That was a typo -- the assembly stub took about 0.8 ms as shown in the trace.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, fixed.</comment></comment></comment>


Announcing Y Combinator Startup News (2007) - <AUTHOR> https://news.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html)

<comment><USER3> > Each user's voting power will then be scaled based on whether they vote for > good stories or bad ones.

I guess they gave up on that? Would be interesting to hear how it panned out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > You can tell a lot about the users of a site like this from the the links > they post and their comments in discussions. There are a number of Reddit > users that I know only by their usernames, but I know must be smart from the > things they've written. We're counting on the same phenomenon to help us > decide who to fund.

It sounds like "karma" may have a deeper meaning than on Reddit. Do good things--they may literally pay off one day.

<comment><USER5> > Do good things

I think popular ones would be more accurate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The community sure has come along way. I appreciate that the design is still pretty much the same. Even still running on Arc lang!</comment>


Ask HN: Building a simple utility site to build pre-launch traffic? - <AUTHOR>

I have two different applications that I've been developing part-time.  One application is for managing Apache authentication across multiple sites on the same server and the other is a replacement for both the browser popup authentication window and backend user authentication on Apache.
To build some pre-launch traffic and gauge interest in the market I've built a simple website aimed at the same type of user:
http://www.htpasswdmaker.com/
I've left it as a stand-alone site for now with the plan to add links to the applications I have in development once they mature to a release point.  I'm also thinking about using it as a test bed for SEO testing and potentially adwords testing.
With that in mind, what does everyone think of building independent traffic drivers like this?  Do simple applications like this work better for "evergreen content" than for example a howto site about Apache authentication?
BTW, I've had a similar sort of site up for a few years for generating personal passwords, http://passwordchart.com/ (same design), it gets around 8,000 uniques a month with peaks and troughs around reviews in blogs. <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable links:

<http://www.htpasswdmaker.com/>

<http://passwordchart.com/>

</comment><comment><USER2> A bookmarklet for Password Chart would be cool.</comment>