Venmo Review - <AUTHOR> http://alexeymk.com/its-like-your-wallet-and-your-phone-had-a-bea <comment><USER2> I am going to signup for 2 accounts and max out the airline miles on my credit cards every month... just kidding.

I actually did this in college when the federal government allowed people to buy savings bonds with a credit card. Unless they have really good controls, I can see some enterprising college kid pumping 250k through this service and showing off an Amex black card.

<comment><USER3> Why the downvote? I am not the OP but I agree with the basic premise. Any start up dealing with money has to think about people who will abuse the system. I hope they have checks in place to avoid something like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not clear on Venmo's money transmitter license situation, especially in Pennsylvania. Anyone know how they can operate legally nationwide?

(I am a competitor but this is a real question.)

</comment><comment><USER5> One of the (few?) best startups in Philly, very nice founders and employees.

</comment><comment><USER6> I had my most recent "I live in the future" moment when I, between getting off of public transit and arriving at the food truck, received the menu from a friend, picked what I wanted, then paid the same friend for that food, all through my iPhone, and all the while knowing exactly where the other person was using GeoShare[1][2]

[1] <http://geoshare.us/> [2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2093261>

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't understand how Venmo will continue after they burn through the VC money. Won't the credit card fees eat them alive?

<comment><USER6> My understanding is that they do charge some fee to places like food trucks. The way it's structured, though, they encourage the users to keep some amount (c. $20) in their Venmo accounts, so that when you pay someone, it gets taken out of that first, then only falls back to your credit card or bank account when necessary. Depending on how frequently people cash out, they might even be able to make a small amount on interest by investing the amounts that people have on file, and just shifting the chits around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is a prettier PayPal.

The only difference is a few features and that (for now) they aren't charging fees.

<comment><USER9> No, it's not, at all.

<comment><USER10> They'll need to explain really strongly why it's not, then, because that'll be all most people will think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Venmo's privacy settings need work. You can't hide the $ amount and publish only the payment description. You can either publish it to all friends or keep the whole payment private.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sheesh, any other Aussies tired of seeing cool shit like this and not being able to use it!?

</comment><comment><USER13> Bug, they rejected my CC with exp date of this month as expired. Lost a user.

</comment><comment><USER14> How did this app for iPhone got accepted when the Bitcoin app was rejected ?</comment>


90% of Libyans have a favourable opinion of the United States - <AUTHOR> http://www.iri.org/sites/default/files/2011%20December%2019%20Survey%20of%20Eastern%20Libya%20Public%20Opinion,%20October%2012-25,%202011.pdf

<comment><USER2> 2011 December 19 Survey of Eastern Libya Public Opinion, October 12-25, 2011.pdf

\- In light of recent events, the date is relevant

<comment><USER3> You mean like how the US prevented Gaddafi from slaughtering people in Benghazi? Yes I imagine even more people there have a favorable opinion of the US now.

<comment><USER2> _You mean like..._

No, date should just be in the HN title. Opinion surveys that are 9-10 months old are not really "news", although they are not uninteresting. Just should be labeled (2011) or some such. Unchanged, the posted HN title (X% of Libyans [have] a .. opinion of...) is also poor grammar.

<comment><USER3> Ah, missed that. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Don't Become a Scientist. - <AUTHOR> http://wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/scientist.html <comment><USER4> I have to agree with this wholeheartedly. I'm just finishing up my undergrad in molecular biology. I've been working in a lab doing research for the last year and a half, and it sucks. As an earlier comment had pointed out, the post-doc I work along side only makes $40,000/year. He's in his 50's and has at least 30 published papers on everything from cancer research to stuff the lab is doing now on BK virus. For the last year, he's been trying to find a different job, preferably in the private sector and that pays more, but hasn't had any luck. The work is repetitive and boring, yet you must constantly stay focused. While it may not seem like it, it's very easy to lose track of which tube you're adding a chemical to, or which chemicals you've already added.

The bureaucracy is ridiculous. My PI doesn't do any of the research along with us. He just sits and writes/revises papers and applies to grants all day. Most of the time, he has no idea how the experiments we're doing even work.

From my research experience and from the experience of others around me, I knew research was not the field to go into. That's why I'm working on a startup now and possibly going into an MBA program. Science is a great undergraduate major, just don't expect to be able to do anything with it when you graduate.

If you want to do research, at least in biology, don't get a PhD, get an MD.

</comment><comment><USER5> A dissenting view

It's true that, as the article and many commenters have said,there are lots of bad places, and bad cultures within academia.

So what? There's also some great groups and great cultures within academia. If you want to go the academic path, the thing to do is to make sure you end up in such a place. So far as I can see the way to achieve this is:

(1) Do a lot of research before you join a group. Just because a group looks great from the outside (brand name University, famous prof) doesn't mean it'll be a good experience. Interview former members; tour the lab; ask hard questions about the culture - what do people love about their jobs; what do they think is the worst thing about the culture; what do they think about their career prospects? Follow up on these questions in detail - most people love to talk about their careers, and if they won't, it often means that they're not happy. If you get defensive responses, or a refusal to respond, that tells you what you need to know about the culture. Don't look back.

(2) Iterate until you find a group that looks excellent.

(3) Mentally, when you join a group, think of it as being on probation. After three and then six months, ask yourself "Am I having fun? Is what I'm doing making a difference? Is the culture here genuinely good?" If the answer to all these questions isn't yes, get out, and go join another group. This is hard to do - you'll get a lot of advice to the contrary - but 9 times out of 10 the results are a major improvement.

I'm leaving academia now, after PhD, postdocs, being a tenured prof, the whole nine yards. It was tough at times, but overall, it was an asbolute blast.

<comment><USER6> If the article at the top of the thread is atypical of a tenured professor, _this_ post is absolutely typical. I've heard this speech a million times. If you ever need to hear it again, ask any professor to give it to you and they'll happily oblige.

Undoubtedly, most tenured professors are having an "absolute blast". Why shouldn't they be? They are the end product of a rigorous system of selection for their particular set of personality traits. If you're not the kind of person who adores being a researcher to the exclusion of all other thoughts -- if you are not either a truly _diehard_ optimist, or the most stubborn person you'll ever know -- you won't make it to where this guy is.

The career advice here is good, solid advice, as far as it goes. But the parody of this would be fun to write, and might contain equal amounts of truth. ("(2) Iterate until you find a group that looks excellent, or until you discover that all the excellent groups have a waiting list, at which point you need to either quit grad school, apply for a personal fellowship and win it, or work for whoever has the grant money to pay you.")

No time for extensive parody today, though -- besides, the guy at _Piled Higher and Deeper_ has covered that ground better than I ever could -- so I'll leave you with this caveat: Very, very few of the people you interview with in a research group will ever tell you that your academic career is a waste of time and that you should just leave, even if it's true. They've got a very strong incentive to recruit you, so that you can apply your inexpensive intelligence and energy to their projects. They've got an incentive to be careful what they say to you, because if word gets back to their colleagues that they are discouraging prospective students it might derail their careers. They also have an even bigger incentive to keep fooling themselves.

And, you know, academic scientists really don't like pain. They're not drill sergeants. Taking starry-eyed optimists, most of whom remind you of yourself, and kicking them in the chest is not a lot of fun. It's for their own good, but it feels like euthanizing puppies. It's just so much easier to encourage them to follow the same path that you did, and to let time and nature and bureaucracy take care of teaching them the harsh realities of life.

<comment><USER5> "Very, very few of the people you interview with in a research group will ever tell you that your academic career is a waste of time and that you should just leave, even if it's true."

It's true that they'll rarely say this explicitly. Ultimately, it's the potential grad student's responsibility to dig and find out what kind of a culture a research group has. This is a difficult thing to do, requiring considerable self-confidence and tenacity. Still, in my opinion, if someone is not willing to do this, then they really should consider some path other than academia.

"(2) Iterate until you find a group that looks excellent, or until you discover that all the excellent groups have a waiting list, at which point you need to either quit grad school, apply for a personal fellowship and win it, or work for whoever has the grant money to pay you."

You seem to be implicitly assuming that the world owes you a position in a good group. It doesn't. If you can't find one, then you shouldn't work for whoever has grant money to pay you. You should go and do something else - <USER3> start a company.

<comment><USER6> _You seem to be implicitly assuming that the world owes you a position in a good group. It doesn't. If you can't find one, then you shouldn't work for whoever has grant money to pay you. You should go and do something else - <USER3> start a company._

Now we are getting somewhere! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awesome. Not only does this guy disprove the rule that all tenured profs are hopeless optimists about becoming a prof, but he's even _more_ of a pessimist than I am! I mean:

 _I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs._

Um, no. Really, no. Spoken like a guy who hasn't really known many people whose lives have been ruined by drugs.

The situation is bad -- everything this guy says is true, basically -- but I don't think it's _that_ bad. In particular, if you have Ph.D.-level skills in a technical field you can step off the academic treadmill at any point and get a job. It may not be the kind of job you get to brag about, but you probably won't starve.

There are people I know who have endured years of continuing depression because they were unable to become tenured professors. But there are also people I know who are depressed because they aren't bestselling novelists, professional musicians, lottery winners, or Bill Gates.

The secret is to be realistic. Study science as an undergrad, then switch to engineering (this is now my standard advice to young techies.) Get a Ph.D. only if you really love doing research so badly that you're willing to endure indentured servitude. Do not plan to become a professor. Make sure to spend your Ph.D. years drinking as much beer as possible with the smartest people you know, and enjoy yourself!

<comment><USER7> _"There are people I know who have endured years of continuing depression because they were unable to become tenured professors. But there are also people I know who are depressed because they aren't bestselling novelists, professional musicians, lottery winners, or Bill Gates."_

Granted, but science is totally unlike music, writing or gambling, in that that the best-case payoff is still quite meager. Wanting to become a professor is a good bit different than wanting to become a rock star or professional athlete.

Too many smart kids start into grad school thinking that a professorship is a reasonable, attainable career goal, depending entirely upon your motivation and intelligence. When they (almost inevitably) fail, it can lead to a crisis of confidence that goes much deeper than simply failing to become the next Kanye West. After all, _everyone_ knows that rock stardom depends heavily on luck...but a professorship depends only on _intelligence_. If you ask me, it's a cruel game.

<comment><USER8> > but a professorship depends only on intelligence

Myeah, but personal relationships and contacts play a big role. Along with where you live. Einstein was kept out of academia before his big year, right? How close were we from losing him altogether?

<comment><USER7> My writing wasn't totally clear. That sentence would be better if it read "a professorship ostensibly depends only on intelligence."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What he really means is not "don't become a scientist" but "don't get a job as a professor." The two are by no means identical. There were scientists long before there were research professors (that concept dates from about 1870) and there are still plenty of scientists who aren't professors.

Like being a writer, being a scientist depends on what you do, not who pays you.

<comment><USER10> How can one do relevant science without the support that comes from a research institution? Research professor (I clump lab researchers into the professor term) is certainly a new thing. So is "big money" science (a consequence of WWII.) As a result of the research prof and "big money" science, the days of ben franklin and his kite are long dead. (ben franklin was a great scientist.)

Academia is setup to provide support for scientists: it provides smart people to talk to. It provides money to pay the bills and run research labs. Where else can I receive this support?

One path is to take a 6 year detour, build a startup that pays me $30M, and then run my own research program. Honestly, that seems even harder than two postdocs.

<comment><USER11> meh, Einstein worked in a patent office. Galois failed the french public school teacher's exam. Grassman spent an eternity teaching middle school. The Wright brothers repaired bicycles. The academy spent most of its time telling these people they were wrong, and then, maybe, embraced them once they didn't have any choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Eh... I would debate quite a lot of what he said. This is a very field- oriented problem. For instance, in Psychology, the majority of graduate degrees go into counseling. Of the more research oriented people left, there is a vast array of fields available; Neuropsych, Cognitive Psych, Industrial Organizational, and so on. These are fields with public and private sector demand... If you're good, and you publish it is quite possible to land in a tenure track position is 2-3 years. The biological sciences, which my ex went into, are likewise diverse with high (unless you study ichthyology) demand. Finally, know that all academia, like startups, is a dice game. Brilliant is less than half the battle. Being right often counts for nothing. Hardworking, with force of will and personality, and in the right place at the right time (which is not always luck) play an awfully big part of every success. Even when you get in, you can easily end up the flunky of someone with similar credentials, but more success. But hey, that's life, right?

<comment><USER13> psychology is a science now?

<comment><USER14> My feeling is that there are two diverging branches in "psychology"; one that should promptly rename itself to a sub-branch of neuroscience, and the other into a mixture of philosophy, history, and sociology. Who disagrees?

I can't wait to see this rebranching happen, but alas, it's the establishment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Philip Greenspun had a great article about this as well: <http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science>

</comment><comment><USER16> I can only speak from my own experience. If you're genuinely sure you're not in it for the money, you really enjoy the area you're working in, and you're prepared to work in a way you find interesting rather than simply doing what will bump you quickly up the career ladder - then academia might well be the best job that anyone will pay you to do. A lot of people find that they don't really enjoy one aspect of this and / or can't make the necessary compromises to make it enjoyable - then it becomes just another job, not much better or worse than most others.

</comment><comment><USER17> From the government's (and the country's) perspective it makes sense to keep the imbalance between PhD's trained and PhDs hired because graduate students that don't go into academia go into industry. A lot of great companies have come out of disgruntled grad students.

I think the thing we need to figure out is how to deal with the period after a Masters and before a PhD. This is the period where you start doing real research and you learn to work on your own. This period is what makes grad school such valuable training. This is also the period in your life where you are still young and hungry to make an impact. Unfortunately, it's almost easier to stay in school and finish your degree, but once you finish it you're 30 and the hunger and energy are gone. Also, you've already put so much time into a PhD that it's too late to turn back from a career in academia.

Maybe we should redefine the Masters to include some research work.

<comment><USER18> "you're 30 and the hunger and energy is gone."

If anything you know a lot more in your domain of expertise and are in a better position to start a co. Plus you're hungrier -- grad students make very little money. A formula for startup success.

"Maybe we should redefine the Masters to include some research work."

Actually the Masters does in fact include research work. At least mine did.

<comment><USER17> In practice, it's hard to completely change course and take on even more risk once you are finished with your Ph.D. Often it's the dropouts that start companies and the PhDs that join them.

In Physics, a Masters typically means 2 years of coursework and passing some set of exams. Most of us join a research group about 1 year into grad school but it's hard to do real research until your classes are done.

<comment><USER6> _Often it's the dropouts that start companies..._

It is probably easier to start a company on the side as a grad student than to wait until you graduate. Grad student salary sucks, but the flip side is that it can be a pretty awesome day job. The guy who pointed out that 50% of the average grad student's 60-hour week is spend playing WoW is pretty much on the money. You can go months at a time doing only 20 hours of research a week, or even 10, and still not get fired.

Of course, you're not getting paid much, but you're surrounded by lots of other smart young people who aren't getting paid much either, so it's kind of fun. And you certainly aren't going to graduate if you don't do a lot of work -- but if your preferred exit plan is to found a startup and drop out, who cares about that?

It's actually rather hard to _fire_ a grad student. The adviser pays the student very little, but in return (s)he is expected to graduate the student. A student who is fired by Professor X three or four years into a Ph.D. program is well and truly screwed. They might sue. They will certainly tell every grad student they know, and they in turn might tell all the first-year students, who will avoid working for Professor X like he had the plague. So, once you've gotten established as a student in a research group, it's not so hard to spend six months or a year doing only 20 hours worth of work per week. Your adviser will roll her eyes a lot, but she's not likely to take action until you've accumulated a really solid, long-term record as a slacker.

<comment><USER7> _"It's actually rather hard to fire a grad student. The adviser pays the student very little, but in return (s)he is expected to graduate the student. A student who is fired by Professor X three or four years into a Ph.D. program is well and truly screwed. They might sue."_

...which is why the question rarely arises. The faculty have devious ways of eliminating students that don't make the grade. Why fire people, when you can just collude to make their lives so miserable that they choose to quit?

Do it properly, and the other students will just assume that the problem is a personal issue. If you're a successful researcher, it won't scare anyone away from your lab.

<comment><USER19> Can you elaborate a little on these devious ways?

<comment><USER7> The basic principle is that your advisor has control over _everything_ , and you have control over _nothing_. Need an important collaboration for your next paper? That won't happen without your advisor's support. The same goes for access to specialized equipment or supplies (the budget can become very tight when your PI doesn't like you). At most schools, your PI also controls your funding; you can expect to TA more often if s/he doesn't like you.

Your PI knows the weaknesses in your research and knowledge better than anyone, and can use this to your disadvantage. I've witnessed faculty who aggressively attack their own students during examinations (a truly disastrous scenario). More often, advisors will simply fail to defend their poor students from unfair attacks by other faculty. Departmental lectures, defenses, oral exams, etc. are remarkably subjective affairs, and one bad comment can snowball into an event that will add _years_ to your time in grad school.

Another very common tactic is for the PI to hand out the best research projects to favored students. There's nothing so demoralizing as watching a first-year grad student get an publication in Science or Nature (by being assigned to an already successful project), when you've worked for years on failing experiments. I've seen this happen too many times to count.

Like I said, there's no way to list all of the different ways that your PI can make your life painful. It's just an extremely unbalanced, unregulated power relationship, and with any creativity at all, an advisor can use that power to destroy you.

<comment><USER6> This is true. While PI's can't always fire you gracefully, they have many ways to make you _wish_ they had fired you.

So, ultimately, if your startup-company moonlighting starts to eat too much into graduate research time, you're going to have to fish or cut bait: Either keep your adviser happy, or take the necessary leave of absence.

Note that (most) graduate advisers are not evil people. I suspect that many of them will quite happily grant you six months off to pursue your startup- company dreams... _if_ the timing is right (hint: don't ask until just _after_ the _Nature_ article is submitted) and after they explain to you that your publication record and your graduation time will be set back by a year or more. Oh, and you probably won't be given the plum projects ever again, since your adviser knows that you have one eye on the door... those are the breaks of the game.

One very special caution: Your adviser may try to enlist your help in _his_ startup company. _Be very wary of this situation,_ or of any potential adviser with a history of this. You want your adviser to be unambiguously focused on helping you graduate and get a better-paying job... or as unambiguously as possible, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Don't be misled by the promise of freedom in academia. It's not like that at all.

<comment><USER21> What is wrong with it?

<comment><USER20> Unless you get a faculty position at a stellar university (highly unlikely nowadays), the teaching will be depressing. And your research will suffer as a result since you will be in no mood to do it.

Also, unless you plan to do everything yourself for research, you will need to get some funding. But whether you get that funding depends on whether your peers -- competitors actually -- like what you plan to do.

Finally, the fact that computer science tries to be a science severely limits your creativity -- at least if you want to publish in respectable conferences and journals.

<comment><USER22> Actually, the teaching is depressing even at stellar universities. I'm a postdoc at such a place. Last semester, I taught "Calculus for kids who don't care." This semester, I'm teaching "Poker and craps for kids who don't care."

I suspect the only way to avoid this is to work at an engineering school (not necessarily a top one).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "I became a scientist in order to have the freedom to work on problems which interest me."

I thought a more reasonable path to this would be to join a startup or three, get rich and then spend the rest of your life getting a PhD, working on interesting problems, etc. No? ;)

<comment><USER23> Since one out of ten fail, that wouldn't be the best strategy.

<comment><USER24> Assuming you meant "9 out of 10 fail", and that the average failure takes a year, including recovery time at a real job to replenish your finances and find a new idea...

That means you've had 6 chances just by the time your colleagues have finished grad school. 0.9^6 = 0.53, so you have a 47% chance of being a multi- millionaire by the time your academic friends are even entering the rat race. Compare that to the article's "If you're 95th-percentile lucky you might get a post-doc position, then you have a 50-50 chance of getting a tenure _track_ position." Your odds are about 10 times better with the tech startup.

Then consider that at a minimum, you should expect 2 years of postdoc and another 6 years before getting tenure. That's now 14 years of training before you can actually work on what you want. 14 startup attempts with a 90% failure rate gives you a roughly 80% chance of success. The startup path is starting to look mighty good...

<comment><AUTHOR> and plus, having started and failed at 5 startups, you learn a lot! your chances for the 6th one will definitely be higher than 10%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> >[... in contrast] a lawyer [begins working] at 25 and makes partner at 31

A very low percentage make partner, lower than the tenure percentage.

<comment><USER25> Becoming a partner: Work 80 to 100-hr weeks for 5-10 years (M-F,S-S 10-10) Sacrifice balance in your life Lose your friends If you're good enough, they'll ask you if you want to (take a loan) and _buy_ into partnership

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Science is disillusioning. I used to have a 2nd job doing programming work for bioinformatics researchers. I did this off and on for about 4 years: 2000-2004. I had two reasons for doing this - I harbored a desire to do 'science' and contribute to the grand body of human knowledge. I hoped the contacts I made would help me get into a good graduate program. The other reason was money - I worked in my spare time and made an extra 70 grand a year doing this. Note to hackers: if you want a really easy job that pays pretty well, makes you appear smart on your resume, and gives you a lot of free time to work on side projects, I highly recommend befriending the PI of a well- funded university research group that needs a programmer.

The reason I was brought in was because in addition to the research paperwork, the grants I worked on required some software artifact to be produced. The grad students and post-docs working on the project were unable to write software, so I was the hired gun. What I produced was crap, but I'm not sure that mattered. It just had to survive a demo at the end of the year and get to the grant renewal stage (in startup speak, 'next funding round.')

I'm not sure if the other researchers were actually unable to write software, or if they were just uninterested in doing so. It was strange to me, since the department I worked for was pretty much 'bioinformatics' - the point of which was to design software tools for biological research. It seemed like people should want to know how to make software, since it was...uh... kind of important to what they were doing.

The day to day environment was much like "The Office", only it was in a "lab", and it was seldom funny. The lab had a laboratory area, with test tubes and fume hoods and whatnot. The main workspace, however, was essentially a cube farm, except instead of out in an office park somewhere, it was above the university hospital's food court.

Most of the people working there were like people working at any big, lame bureaucratic institution, only they had or were obtaining PhDs. Most of their time was spent surfing the web, sending email, and attending meetings. I have never worked anywhere else where people attended so many meetings. I once worked at a giant megacorp for a year, and would lose my mind when I had to go to three meetings a week. At the research lab, they had on average three meetings per day. Journal club, data sharing, data club, journal sharing, guest lecture, team status report meeting, department status report meeting, grant status report meeting, etc. I'm familiar with the horror stories about post-docs working 100 hours a week, but if other programs are similar to the one I worked for, 40 of those hours are spent in meetings, 20 hours are spent wasting time on the internet, 10 hours are typical office chatting, 15 hours of going to classes and lectures, and then maybe 15 hours of actual work... but I'm skeptical that anyone spent 15 additional hours doing work. Normally everything was queued up until the very last moment, then people would spend a couple feverish days slapping something together before a presentation.

I shuffled around between a few different projects and was able to do most of my work offsite. I learned about some cool ideas, but didn't really feel like I was contributing to much of anything. On the last project I spent more time at the lab, simply because I was tired of working at home. Aside from a couple strange aspergy maniacs, most of the people seemed very depressed. One woman finished up her PhD and was planning on moving back to Europe to run her parent's bed and breakfast. Two others were really hoping to get into dental school.

I'm not sure what the people were being trained to do. The wet lab work was supposed to be done by PhDs, but could have easily been handled by undergraduates. Indeed, anything that required advanced knowledge actually WAS done by a young indian female undergraduate who seemed quite harried after being stuck in the lab while her post-doc and grad-student peers were off at another journal sharing. The software work simply wasn't done by anyone in the lab at all - it was all done by hired contractors like myself. It seemed that the only practical training that people received was in reading journals and applying for grants. The most 'successful' guy in the program was hired for $90,000 by a pharmaceutical firm where his job was to read and organize various journal articles...

I could go on and on about this, but the longwinded 'point' I wanted to make was that I agree with the article. I worked in a hot field at the time with a lot of grant money, and it was very bleak and depressing. And, before I get the chorus of people telling me that things are different at good universities, all of this work was done at that other university in Cambridge, the one down the street from MIT with a square named after it.

<comment><USER6> Remember that some labs _are_ more dysfunctional than others. Yours sounds pretty bad. My own experience at the same big crimson-colored university was considerably less bureaucratic -- we lost only about half a day per week to meetings, although there was still plenty of paper to be shuffled, between the grants and the articles and the manuscripts and the review manuscripts and the _insane_ procurement process. And morale was rather higher, though perhaps not an order of magnitude higher.

The "wasting time on the Internet" factor should not be underestimated. Remember, the only reason we're all here is that Tim Berners-Lee spent a lot of his time fiddling around with the Internet instead of doing his physics research.

<comment><USER7> I'll add that the bureaucracy depends heavily on the size of the group. Biological research (in particular, anything that includes the word "systems" or "-omics" in the grant title) has been succumbing to an empire-building mentality for a long time. These programs tend to be large, highly bureaucratic, and well-funded (they're also, not incidentally, the groups most likely to have the resources to pay a staff programmer).

Small groups are much more dependent on the productivity of each researcher. For example, it's not uncommon to see labs of 10 people publishing at roughly the same rate as groups of double or triple the size. Just like startups vs. big companies, the communication overhead of a small laboratory is much lower, and responsibility of each member, correspondingly higher.

<comment><USER13> the research group had both "systems" and "-omics" in its title!

<comment><USER7> What can I say? I'm psychic. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Although I agree with nearly everything he says in this essay, it's worth pointing out that he has written several other pieces that would make most normal people question his grip on sanity. At the very least, this guy is _eccentric._ Also, the numbers he cited are from 1999, and are getting a bit dated. NIH post-doc stipends are now roughly $40k/year (including in the most expensive cities, like San Francisco); grad-student stipends are around $25k per year.

Everything else is true, in my experience. If you start a PhD in the physical or biological sciences this year, you'll spend 5-10 years in grad school, barely making ends meet at $25k a year. Then, if you're incredibly lucky (think 95th-percentile lucky), you'll get a stellar paper that will set you up for a post-doc in a superstar lab, which will give you a roughly 50/50 shot at a tenure track position _somewhere_ (don't count on living in a city, or even a place where your significant other can find a job, however, because you're now living at the whims of the academic system.)

Your post-doc will take 3-4 years, and will pay you less than you could have made right out of an undergraduate CS program, in exchange for more risk and longer hours. You'll be expected to work nights and weekends, and in case you lack the drive to do it, there will be some guy from China with a J-1 visa sitting next to you. He's probably living in a boarding house right next to the university with ten other post-docs, and he's willing to work 100-hour weeks for a shot at a job in this country. That's your baseline.

If you're astronomically lucky, you'll get a faculty position -- hopefully not at Podunk U -- where you'll be paid significantly less than that undergrad CS major (who is now probably making over $100k/year, buying a home, getting married, etc.) You'll be competing for grant money in an insanely tight market (the funding rate for NIH research grants is well below 5% now), and evaluated by established faculty who will torpedo your proposals if it helps their own chances. At the end of six years of insane work, you'll get a shot at keeping your job. If you get tenure, you can settle down to a lifetime of below-market wages, while working relaxing 50-60 hour weeks.

Of course, if you choose to leave academia after grad school, the prospects are equally dismal. The rare position that requires research experience is essentially set aside for friends (you hear a lot about "networking" on the science job boards, but little practical advice on how to actually do it), or for people who have been poached from other companies by recruiters. Meanwhile, once you have a PhD, you're untouchable by most employers -- considered too theoretical and expensive for "practical" work. Ultimately, most people with advanced degrees in the sciences spend _years_ teaching courses on contract, or jumping between dead-end, low-paying jobs, hoping to start something that resembles a career.

<comment><USER6> _At the very least, this guy is_ eccentric.

He'd have to be. Nobody gets anywhere in academia by rocking the boat. It's an _intensely_ political business; even after you have tenure, you can still lose your research funding (which kills your "summer salary", lowering your take- home pay by 25% or more), your lab space, your future publications in prestigious journals (which can be anonymously torpedoed by your peers) and, most important of all, the services of the talented grad students and postdocs who actually do all your work for you.

 _Meanwhile, once you have a PhD, you're untouchable by most employers -- considered too theoretical and expensive for "practical" work._

This depends a great deal on what your Ph.D. is in and how you treat it. I've never had this problem, but I got my Ph.D. in EE, with a focus on semiconductor device fabrication. Nobody ever accused me of being "too theoretical" and there are actually quite a few industry employers that specifically look for such Ph.D.s.

A very smart friend of mine studied theoretical solid state physics, but then got a job right out of school as a process development guy at Intel. Voila, his "theoretical" reputation was instantly laundered away!

Of course, if you spend the five years after getting your Ph.D. "teaching courses on contract, or jumping between dead-end, low-paying jobs" people will begin to conclude that you're hopelessly in love with the academic lifestyle. And that's too bad. The academic lifestyle is fun in many ways -- for example, your ambitious and hard-working colleagues from China and India are often really nice, really smart people! -- but it's a terribly one-sided romance.

<comment><USER7> _"This depends a great deal on what your Ph.D. is in and how you treat it. I've never had this problem, but I got my Ph.D. in EE, with a focus on semiconductor device fabrication."_

Agree. I was trying to be careful to speak only of the physical and biological sciences, because I know from experience that job market for engineering and CS is different.

I don't think that anyone _tries_ to spend their post-doctoral years hopping between contract jobs; the problem comes when you simply _can't_ get that first job in your field, and you have to do these things to make ends meet. Before you know it, you're stuck in a cycle, and people start to believe that you're _"in love with the academic lifestyle"_. This happens to scientists more often than most people think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Are the prospects this bad in math as well?

<comment><USER26> Yes.

The only difference (but a big one in my view) is that you are an independent researcher from the very beginning.

<comment><USER27> Why independent?

<comment><USER26> I don't understand the question.

<comment><USER27> Sorry, my question is: why are math researchers more independent than others?

<comment><USER26> What I meant is that as early as in grad school you start working entirely on your own and your advisor is just that, advisor. He is not going to prove your theorems for you. As far as I know in other fields it takes a while to reach this level of independence.

<comment><USER27> Thanks a lot for your reply; I'm starting studies on maths and I was very interested on this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why is this post dated 1999 with a May 2001 reference?

<comment><USER28> Nobody respects the lone, eccentric time-travel researcher...

<comment><USER21> That's what I was thinking...this physics prof is doing better than he thinks. He's just so bogged down in bureauacracy that he has been unable to publish on it yet...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If I most value learning and research, what do I lose if I do not become a member of academia?

</comment><comment><USER30> But science is so much fun! It's kind of like going to college for free--I get to take interesting classes. And work on startups on the side.

</comment><comment><USER31> There are other professors who recommend research and are actively pitching people to join:

[http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/braman/cut- edge-2005/slides/...](http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/braman/cut- edge-2005/slides/join-research.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER32> Money isn't everything

<comment><USER33> I think that one of the things this article was getting at was that it feels like one is not captain of their own ship when they do science as a career. Ie, no matter how hard or much you work you won't get your due rewards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> What a disgustingly bourgeois article; check out this quote:

"I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs."

<comment><USER35> Interesting indeed!... The post was made in 1999 and a few things have changed since then

The author writes that the conditions in India and China are "worse", which might have been true in 1999, but certainly not today! See <http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/feb/20apac.htm> Interestingly, academic jobs are on the rise as well with burgeoning of new grad schools/research institutes. The demand-supply curve in India is skewed in other direction. Finally, (this is an information gathered from a few senior professors, haven't found any web resource yet!), the success of grant proposals in India is of the order of 60-70%, much higher than that in the U.S.

Though, it's still a fact that academia is not looked as a 'lucrative' career option yet.

(Well, as a supplement to an earlier post, there are a bunch of hilarious webpages by Philip Greenspun. See <http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/>)</comment></comment>


GitHub removes the ability to create anonymous gists - <AUTHOR> https://blog.github.com/2018-02-18-deprecation-notice-removing-anonymous-gist-creation/ <comment><USER2> Well this is a bummer. While its not mentioned this sound like a casualty of SESTA.</comment>


Navy HE Physicist briefly responds patent questions - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31798 <comment><AUTHOR> I was going to title, "Navy HE Physicist gives crackpot response to patent questions" but considered that would be too click- or flame- baity.</comment>


State of Elm 2017 Results - <AUTHOR> https://www.brianthicks.com/post/2017/07/27/state-of-elm-2017-results/ <comment><USER2> > JSON Decoders: This is one of those things that everyone has trouble with. I > sure did! So I wrote a book about them. They're not that bad once you get > used to them!

This is odd thinking. Everyone hates the current JSON Decoders. That suggests that there is something wrong with them, not that the audience should simply "get used to them".

<comment><USER3> The "our way is the right way" mentality that is common in the Elm community is really the larger issue here, and it has been a bit of a turn off for me. There is a lot about Elm to really like, but it is a rather closed off development culture without a lot of appreciation for hearing ideas and experiences from others.

If Elm could open up and allow developers to experiment with other architectures, like pretty much every other language, and not be so restrictive in forcing everyone into the exact same pattern, I think it would be very successful, because the language itself is nice. If someone wants to use Elm as it currently is, that should be one simple option available to everyone. But you should be able to easily discard that if you want to, and do other things, including making a choice on the trade-offs for JavaScript interaction. Languages that don't give developers much choice in how they are used are usually not going to be very successful.

<comment><USER4>
      The "our way is the right way" mentality
      that is common in the Elm community is
      really the larger issue here, and it has
      been a bit of a turn off for me.

This is exactly how I felt as well.

I really enjoyed Elm in the beginning but soon hit the abstraction wall as the complexity of my apps grew. I never got the impression that the Elm community was going to fix those problems any time soon. I now use PureScript which is far more pleasant to use, albeit it took a while to get up to speed with the language.

Also I'm not the only one who went to PureScript from Elm: [https://youtu.be/ngWo5e-294o?t=19m14s](https://youtu.be/ngWo5e-294o?t=19m14s)

<comment><USER5> We're over 150,000 lines of Elm code in production and are loving it. Wouldn't trade Elm for anything!

It's natural for people to have language preferences, but let's not pretend there's some spooky "abstraction wall" prohibiting a nice experience at scale. ;)

<comment><USER3> That's great that you are having a good time. But a few points:

1) The experiences you've personally had do not capture all problems that everyone has, and to assume you've seen it all is pretentious at best. You are quick to dismiss the very idea that anyone would find limitations in the language or its architecture, without even knowing the details of the myriad other projects out there; sorry, that is just naive or arrogant.

2) I've noticed that on nearly any forum, you like to brag about the size of your... codebase. The quality of a project and the problems it has solved are not revealed in quantity of lines. It doesn't matter if you have 100K or now you say 150K lines of code. I have no idea what problems you are solving, nor you us; so stop hiding behind a nice round number and claiming it gives you all manner of authority on what developers need.

> let's not pretend there's some spooky "abstraction wall"

Honestly, it's comments like this that underscore what many others here have said about the general stance in the Elm community. How about actually listening to people's experiences rather than dismissing them? You can't end your comments with little emojis and pretend it washes over the general brush- off you are presenting.

<comment><USER5> > You are quick to dismiss the very idea that anyone would find limitations in > the language or its architecture

I really don't think that's a fair reading of what I wrote. :)

> The quality of a project and the problems it has solved are not revealed in > quantity of lines.

I totally agree! I was responding to a comment where the author said they "soon hit the abstraction wall as the complexity of my apps grew."

Stating that we haven't hit any such wall in 150,000 lines of code provides a concrete sanity check on that claim. Obviously I can't post our proprietary code base, and I'd prefer to say something more objective than "we have a _very_ complex code base." (Which I'd certainly say we do!)

> How about actually listening to people's experiences rather than dismissing > them?

The statement "Elm has an abstraction wall" is not an experience report, it's a claim about a language. I'm not dismissing anyone's experience by providing a counterpoint to that claim.

I agree with you that nobody should tell others their experiences are invalid. But I feel no obligation to slump my shoulders and say "yeah I guess you must be right" if someone makes a misleading claim in a public forum.

> You can't end your comments with little emojis and pretend it washes over > the general brush-off you are presenting.

I tend to write smileys whether I agree or disagree with someone. Sorry if that bothers you. :)

<comment><USER3> Just yesterday on Slack some experienced members were pointing out the workarounds necessary to handle certain challenging abstractions, things which are still being thought about for future versions. It's perfectly valid to admit there are some limitations there which may be too much for some projects.

I don't think the above commenter's claim was any more misleading or vague than your claim. Elm is not a general purpose programming language. It exists for a single and specific use-case, a single design pattern, and this can be fantastic for those who fit their projects into that world. But it is a genuine side-effect of this that there are abstractions the language simply does not make easy or possible as a result of its goals. That's fine, but it can affect some projects -- obviously not yours. There are certain domains for which Elm makes a lot of sense, and others for which it would be the wrong choice.

And Elm as a language is still in search of its ideal abstractions, as they have significantly changed over recent versions, so it's clear that this experience is not unique to the commenter only.

Since Elm is just in its alpha stage, perhaps it is unfair to expect it to be as capable and mature as alternative languages.

<comment><USER5> > There are certain domains for which Elm makes a lot of sense, and others for > which it would be the wrong choice.

No argument here!

Elm has this characteristic in common with JavaScript, Java, Scala, C, C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, Haskell, PureScript, Go, Rust... ;)

> It's perfectly valid to admit there are some limitations there which may be > too much for some projects.

Absolutely!

I know of one team that specifically switched from Elm to ClojureScript because that made more sense for their project (whose purpose was to stitch together JS libraries on the fly), and I thought they made the right decision. ClojureScript was a better fit for their needs.

I also wouldn't use Elm in situations where a virtual DOM would be problematic, such as making a large-scale rich text editor.

I don't think anyone would disagree with the broad claim that some languages are a better fit for some projects.

> Elm as a language is still in search of its ideal abstractions

Also true of every programming language, except for the abandoned ones. :)

> I don't think the above commenter's claim was any more misleading or vague > than your claim.

I'm not sure what claim you think I'm making.

I think I've been pretty consistent about pointing out Elm has led to some great outcomes. I'm not saying things like "Everyone should drop what they're doing and switch to Elm" \- that would be absurd.

I responded to an equally absurd claim by giving a counterexample.

Just as it's valid to point out that Elm (being a programming language) has limitations, it's also valid to point out that people's preferences for various programming languages aren't the same thing as universal truths.

If someone wants to say "I tried both Elm and PureScript and preferred the latter," that's great! Everybody is happy with the language they're using. We all win!

If someone wants to say "I switched from Elm to PureScript since nontrivial Elm apps can't exist because abstractions," it's fair for me to demonstrate the absurdity of that claim by pointing out that our 150,000 line Elm app exists.

<comment><USER4>
      If someone wants to say "I switched from Elm to PureScript
      since nontrivial Elm apps can't exist because abstractions,"
      it's fair for me to demonstrate the absurdity of that claim
      by pointing out that our 150,000 line Elm app exists.

It would appear that you misunderstood what I said.

Elm not facilitating the use of sufficient level of abstractions does not necessarily mean one cannot use Elm to write the said app. It simply means that you would have to deal with it all at a lower level (with the corresponding code duplication where necessary) in the absence of the aforementioned capability to build abstractions. For more on this topic refer to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of_Computer_Programs)

Furthermore, in the process of agreeing with the parent comment, I was also stating that I had never got the impression that the Elm community was going to fix those problems any time soon. This was because the community leaders/ members were often quick to dismiss any suggestions/ complaints offered instead of patiently exploring them. Indeed your characterizing of this thread as talking about some `spooky "abstraction wall"` is a testament to that.

Speaking personally, those were the two-fold reasons (both technical and social) for me to switch to PureScript for my personal projects. I still think Elm is pleasant to work with and to that extent I am continuing to keep track of its progress.

<comment><USER5> > It would appear that you misunderstood what I said.

Could be. The point of the paragraph after this seems to be self-evident (if an abstraction is unavailable, then you use a lower-level alternative). If that was what you meant, then I agree...and I don't think I needed to have read SICP to know that. ;)

> This was because the community leaders/ members were often quick to dismiss > any suggestions/ complaints offered instead of patiently exploring them.

I would describe this particular issue as having been "patiently explored to death." Here are several links demonstrating this:

[0] [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/elm- discuss/oyrODCgYmQI/T2I_...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/elm- discuss/oyrODCgYmQI/T2I_8L-AL6EJ)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYk8CKH7OhE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYk8CKH7OhE)

[2] [https://github.com/elm-lang/elm- compiler/issues/1039](https://github.com/elm-lang/elm-compiler/issues/1039)

[3] [http://faq.elm-community.org/#does-elm-have-ad-hoc- polymorph...](http://faq.elm-community.org/#does-elm-have-ad-hoc-polymorphism- or-typeclasses)

> Elm not facilitating the use of sufficient level of abstractions [...] I had > never got the impression that the Elm community was going to fix those > problems any time soon. [...] Indeed your characterizing of this thread as > talking about some `spooky "abstraction wall"` is a testament to that.

This quote characterizes Elm as not having "sufficient level of abstractions" and that these are "problems" that are not being "fixed." My reference to the "abstraction wall" is also a direct quote from a previous comment. [4]

All of these quotes frame personal preference as objective fact.

It's like saying Java is "broken" because it does not support manual memory management, which no one seems "interested in fixing" by adding `malloc()` and `free()` to the language. Plenty of people would (rightly!) be upset if Java introduced `malloc()` and `free()`, thus breaking the invariant that everything is garbage collected.

Likewise, there are many happy Elm users, myself included, who think Elm would be _substantially worse_ if it moved toward the abstractions that PureScript embraces. The fact that Elm doesn't is a benefit from our perspective, even if it's a drawback from yours.

Neither of us have "wrong" preferences. There's no universally correct answer here. We can both go about building Web applications in our languages of choice.

This distinction may not matter to you, but to someone wondering whether Elm is worth looking into, there's a big difference between "I am inevitably going to hit a wall" (which is not true) and "not everyone agrees with Elm's design decisions" (which is of course true).

[4] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14877406](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14877406)

<comment><USER4> The level of abstraction a programming language provides is a verifiable fact. At what minimum level a programmer is comfortable working with is a personal preference. If Elm's type system is not sufficient to provide that level of abstraction it is certainly a problem to me that has not been resolved in the language. For all we know, other people may have different preferences; some may be content working with vanilla JavaScript and some even with assembly instructions. I don't think anyone denies this, and you seem to be defending something that was never challenged.

As for Elm's approach to dealing with discussions of this nature, out of the four links you had provided the last three were unilateral messages (the Github issue in particular is locked to collaborators with only a message from Evan). As for the Google Group thread it perfectly demonstrates the feeling I have had with the Elm community. Paul Chiusano (who had the same problem as me) in that thread finally got frustrated due to lack of patience and exploration among the participants; it is quite odd you would use this as a demonstration of the Elm community patiently exploring something. His exact words:

      What I find frustrating about this is that when
      conversations get ugly, the actual issues are not
      given sufficient attention and people just end up
      responding to the general unpleasantness and the
      labels being tossed around. I still feel like we
      have not really gotten to the bottom of things,
      but I don't have much hope that this thread will
      get us there and would rather just drop it for
      now like Joey suggests.

<comment><USER5>
      At what minimum level a programmer is
      comfortable working with is a personal
      preference. [...] I don't think anyone denies
      this, and you seem to be defending something
      that was never challenged.

Since it sounds like we're in agreement on this being a matter of personal preference, I'm happy to move on. :)

      Paul Chiusano (who had the same problem as me)
      in that thread finally got frustrated
      due to lack of patience and exploration among
      the participants; it is quite odd you would
      use this as a demonstration of the Elm
      community patiently exploring something.

Paul wasn't frustrated due to a "lack of patience and exploration among the participants," he was frustrated that "let's be patient and explore this further" was the outcome of the discussion--instead of the outcome he wanted, which was getting his feature requests being prioritized higher. I'll break it down.

First, here is a quote from Evan's first response in that thread: [0]

      Since very very early on, type classes have been
      requested by Haskell programmers. My opinion is
      that these features create serious accessibility
      problems in Haskell, even for people such as
      myself who came to Haskell already knowing
      Scheme, Standard ML, and OCaml. I was three
      years in to Haskell before Monad Transformers
      were clear to me.

      So I have always looked at these things not just
      as features to be implemented, but unsolved
      design problems. How do we present these ideas
      in a way that is super simple?
      How do we grow our community in a smart way?

      A question to think about for type classes is,
      what is the best way to reuse variable
      names? Type classes, implicit arguments, and
      module functors all answer this question,
      but each comes with some unfortunate tradeoffs.
      My view here is that there is no need
      to rush. When our community collectively needs
      this kind of feature, we will be in
      a much better position to evaluate the
      trade-offs between these approaches for the
      problems we are facing in practice.

Some things to note:

1) He asks specific questions to invite exploration. "What is the best way to reuse variable names? How do we present these ideas in a way that is super simple? How do we grow our community in a smart way?"

2) He explicitly calls for being patient with that exploration: "My view here is that there is no need to rush."

Following this are a bunch of posts which include a mix of discussion about these questions and a debate about prioritization.

Paul then posted: [1]

      This is turning into an interesting discussion
      and I'm very tempted to wade in,
      but honestly, I'd just like an answer to my
      earlier question about timeline for
      the non-controversial features.

He's being incredibly clear about this: he found the exploration interesting, but was more interested in knowing Evan's timeline than participating. Fair enough.

At this point we can rule out the conclusion that Paul "finally got frustrated due to lack of patience and exploration among the participants" \- because he stated, in no uncertain terms, that despite being tempted by an interesting discussion, that's not what he wants. What he wants is an answer about the prioritization of his feature request.

Evan responded, and Paul responded back: [2]

      Okay, thanks for the reply. And I appreciate
      all the hard work you are putting into Elm!
      [ ... ] Here's something to consider when
      prioritizing work [ ... ] Features like HKP +
      rank-N types / typeclasses are like an
      investment in the whole community, and they
      can have huge leverage.

So he's not interested in participating in the discussion, or in directly answering the questions Evan posed at the start of the thread, but he still wants Evan to accept his feature request. I get that, but I'm not sure how the person who is essentially saying "I do not want to participate in a patient exploration with the community, I think these features should be added as soon as possible" can be held up as supporting evidence for the notion that the Elm community is closed to patient exploration.

Later, about 50 posts deep in this thread, an Elm community member named Sean finally got frustrated with how someone else named Jonathan was advocating for his (and Paul's) point. Sean quoted Jonathan's comment that "I find it very hard to believe that you have all the requisite understandings and yet still reject these ideas" and responded by saying "And this is exactly the sort of condescending stuff that puts people off the Haskell community. As soon as someone doesn't agree with you, you question their ability. Lovely." [3] Jonathan responded "So I think we have our answer-- no, you don't even understand what you are rejecting. Brilliant."

This obviously heated exchange was what led Paul to write what you quoted, which I'll re-quote with additional context of Paul's comment: [4]

      Jonathan, I share some of your frustrations
      but I think you should be much more careful
      in how you say things. [ ... ] Sean, whether
      or not you think your characterizations of
      Jonathan are accurate, I think some of your
      comments were unhelpful and uncharitable
      toward Jonathan.

      [ ... ]

      What I find frustrating about this is that
      when conversations get ugly, the actual
      issues are not given sufficient attention
      and people just end up responding to the
      general unpleasantness and the labels
      being tossed around.

So he's frustrated that this heated exchange got in the way. The rest of what you quoted was:

      I still feel like we have not really gotten
      to the bottom of things, but I don't have
      much hope that this thread will get us there
      and would rather just drop it for now like
      Joey suggests.

As Paul made extremely clear in the quote from earlier, what he's talking about here is that he wants Evan to accept his feature request. He's not saying he felt there was insufficient exploration; in fact, he thought that exploration was "an interesting discussion and I'm very tempted to wade in" \- his objection is that the discussion's outcome - "be patient; this is an unsolved design problem and we need to gather more real-world data points before we can solve it" \- was not the outcome he wanted.

To recap:

1) Evan calls for patient exploration

2) Some patient exploration happens

3) Paul comments that the exploration has been interesting, but it's not what he wants. Really what he wants is a timeline for when the features will be prioritized.

4) Much later in the thread, two commenters get upset at one another.

5) Paul expresses frustration that their getting upset is distracting the thread from what he wants, which is to get his feature request accepted.

Hopefully this clears things up. :)

[0] [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/elm- discuss/oyrODCgYmQI/T2I_...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/elm- discuss/oyrODCgYmQI/T2I_8L-AL6EJ)

[1] [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/elm- discuss/oyrODCgYmQI/dwvw...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/elm- discuss/oyrODCgYmQI/dwvwD7yYX68J)

[2] [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/elm- discuss/oyrODCgYmQI/qf_9...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/elm- discuss/oyrODCgYmQI/qf_9ETPgsvoJ)

[3] [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/elm- discuss/oyrODCgYmQI/_i-o...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/elm- discuss/oyrODCgYmQI/_i-opQnpgCcJ)

[4] [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/elm- discuss/oyrODCgYmQI/H9NG...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/elm- discuss/oyrODCgYmQI/H9NG31Q6ONIJ)

<comment><USER3> Wow, now that's what I call a decompilation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Aside from the huge number of JavaScript programmers, the top 5 are Ruby, > Python, Haskell and Java.

> No functional language beside Haskell cracked the top 5. I'm a little > surprised by this: I had expected to see more people with functional > programming experience.

Perhaps Elm provides less "news" to people who are already using one functional platform or another, and therefore lower incentive to try it out/switch?

<comment><USER7> For haskell programmers there is also purescript which is basically a somewhat cleaned up haskell that compiles to human readable javascript.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> From looking at the repositories, I get the feeling that Elm devopment effort has been pretty low for quite a while.

Many pull requests and issues are undiscussed and uprocessed.

<comment><USER3> Elm's primary development largely operates on the whims of a single person. This can have both advantages and disadvantages, and in my opinion is a net negative.

<comment><USER9> I think the advantages of depending on a single person only come out when that person has a clear vision of where they want to bring the project.

I feels like Evan doesn't know what to do with the more advanced features that Elm, in my opinion, desperately needs, and I've been pretty unhappy with how he's taken a policy of removing stuff because nobody uses it.

<comment><USER3> The other problem is that no matter how many times different people bring up the same recommendations for Elm language features, if those opinions are not shared by Evan, they are seen as trivial and unnecessary.

Also, for such a very tiny community, they make it hard to participate in some ways. Many of the github issues are locked for comments unless you are a core contributor. And the mailing list has a lengthy waiting period on the first several new messages sent to it (I've never seen such a tightly moderated list in any language). You would think they would want to embrace anyone who chooses to spend time with their language, but they don't really give average users much of a voice.

<comment><USER10> There are many decisions about Elm (the language and the development process) that I'm personally not crazy about. However, with so many asking "why are open source maintainers burning out?" I think it's a bit obnoxious for us as a community to criticize someone's chosen style for working on their free gift to us all.

<comment><USER3> The issue is that after awhile, a language should not be an individual person's gift to the world. It's a tool, after all. People and companies use and depend on it; users should be given greater freedoms or voices. It's not a piece of art to marvel at; it's something to be tugged on by many angles to create real work by people other than the language author.

In most languages, like C++, Javascript, Clojure, Elixir -- you find a single person who created the language, and then the real guts of how the industry actually uses it are the results of a large community; the original author usually isn't the sole source of best practices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> JSON Decoders were the killer for me. Just way too verbose.

<comment><USER12> Luckily there's a whole range of tools dedicated to making your life there a bit easier:

\- json-to-elm [http://json2elm.com](http://json2elm.com)

\- swagger-elm [https://github.com/ahultgren/swagger- elm/](https://github.com/ahultgren/swagger-elm/)

\- elm-graphql [https://github.com/jahewson/elm- graphql](https://github.com/jahewson/elm-graphql), [https://github.com/jamesmacaulay/elm- graphql](https://github.com/jamesmacaulay/elm-graphql)

\- elm-export [https://hackage.haskell.org/package/elm- export](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/elm-export)

And so on :) While it would be nice to solve Json Decoders in a better way, these solutions are very helpful for the time being.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's great to see so many programming language community surveys these days. I'm running a survey for the Nim programming language and I'd love to hear your responses: [https://nim-lang.org/blog/2017/06/23/community- survey-2017.h...](https://nim-lang.org/blog/2017/06/23/community- survey-2017.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> Before reading the article, I was really excited to read about people still using Elm (the email client) in 2017. There's enough people using Elm to justify a State of Elm in 2017? Awesome! I was disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER15> I was trying to build a tmux style svg based windowing system for elm. Guess what? this involves a tree. Trees don't go well with functional programming. Ever heard of a zipper? lol.

<comment><USER16> > Trees don't go well with functional programming

What? Building trees is easy as pie in typed fp

[http://hackage.haskell.org/package/containers-0.5.10.2/docs/...](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/containers-0.5.10.2/docs/Data- Tree.html)

> Ever heard of a zipper?

[https://github.com/soupi/purescript-list- zipper/blob/master/...](https://github.com/soupi/purescript-list- zipper/blob/master/src/Data/List/Zipper.purs)</comment></comment>


Design Explorations by 37signals - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/designexplore

<comment><USER2> the todo-list with dates product grabbed my interest, but i didn't find the design all that compelling. for scrum-style development i've fallen in love with pivotal tracker (which was recommended via a project management software poll on hn--thx guys!!)

i didn't mean for this comment to sidetrack from the design explorations so much. eit.

here's my review of PT: [http://proudlyprocrasdonating.wordpress.com/2009/11/07/proje...](http://proudlyprocrasdonating.wordpress.com/2009/11/07/project- management-and-motivation/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is where 37signals shines.</comment>


Show HN: TLDRify – URL Shortener for text selections - <AUTHOR> http://tldrify.com

<comment><USER2> This seems like a useful service but what about the future? I can see myself using this more and more, but I wouldn't, because I cannot trust you simply.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very interesting service. I dislike adding a bottom (and I'm not going to) but I appreciate that I could have benefit from this tool more than once.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great service, great execution. Very clear instructions, I should've made such instructions for the More Like That Bookmarklet, shame on me.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice!

However, I can't get it to work. It gives me a link which isn't related to the text I'm choosing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you mean the link doesn't lead you to the selected text? This is probably a bug. Could you please share the link?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> uBlock seems to interfere with the bookmarklet dialog box.

Very nice idea execution of the idea. I can easily see this being built up into a sharing service.</comment>


Ask HN: Have you ever used Game Theory in a real-life problem/project? - <AUTHOR> Game theory is interesting, but I'm wondering whether it can really be used in real-life projects? <comment><USER2> The reason why you are having a problem finding practical uses of game theory is for some strange reason economists have decided to call the whole field Mechanism Design [0]. Once you know the right term to use you will find lots of examples.

0\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design)

</comment><comment><USER3> Some smart people are using game theory to mitigate cancer acquired resistance to drugs:

[https://github.com/cunninghamjj/Applying-evolutionary- princi...](https://github.com/cunninghamjj/Applying-evolutionary-principles- to-optimize-control-of-mcrpc)

</comment><comment><USER4> Comes up all the time in business decision making.

Adverse Selection

Principal/Agent

Pareto

BATNA</comment>


Google fiber is 1 Giga-bit/sec and not 1GB/sec - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=1+gigabit+to+gigabyte&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

<comment><USER2> Why is this suddenly a topic of discussion? ALL the internet speed companies measure this way, why are we just now clarifying it? This was on Reddit as well, and it's written as if Google was trying to deceive people.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1 Gigabyte per second or 1 Gigabyte per 8 seconds, I don't care. TAKE MY MONEY!

</comment><comment><USER4> Really?</comment>


Wildcard - <AUTHOR> http://www.subtraction.com/2014/11/13/wildcard-in-the-app-store-today/

<comment><USER2> Has using an rfid or similar device for business's that would sit in place of where business cards usually reside been considered? The ability to pull out your phone, open the app, and save the card in proximity?</comment>


IPad Mini Dimensions: Confirmed - <AUTHOR> http://www.repairlabs.com/blog/ipad-mini-dimensions-confirmed

<comment><USER2> This article is BS. Its does not confirm anything! Its just more speculation</comment>


Elsevier charges authors to make items "Open Access", then charges to read them. - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2012/08/05/elsevier-replies-about-hybrid-openacess-i-am-appalled-about-their-practices-breaking-licences-and-having-to-pay-to-read-open-access/

<comment><USER2> If true, this is despicable. I can barely fathom what kind of messed-up corporate culture and labyrinthine decision-making process would lead a company to charge authors for making their articles 'open access' only to turn around and put those exact same articles behind a pay-wall.

Edit: Yes, it appears to be true.

</comment><comment><USER3> Tales like this are exactly what has inspired us at Scholastica (<https://scholasticahq.com/>) to make it easy for academic journals to publish Open Access. I'm a member of the team and would encourage anyone interested in OA publishing to take gander at what we're doing. You can find an example of what an OA journal looks like on Scholastica here: <https://scholasticahq.com/the-scholastica-example-journal>

</comment><comment><USER4> Some responses to this post have stated that there was no open-access logo on the linked article:

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168900210...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168900210008910)

When I first clicked the link: (a) no open-access logo, (b) button offering me the article for $35.95.

I did not at the time know what the open-access logo was supposed to look like, so I went back to the article, found it, and clicked the link again: (a) open-access logo, (b) article in its glory.

My guess is that in response to this article someone fixed something and the article is now properly open access.

<comment><USER5> Or did you perhaps follow this link the first time: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168900207017020

This is the link that is (apparently incorrectly) used as an example of an OA article in the email that seems to have led to most of the confusion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems rather sensationalist. Where, exactly, am I supposed to find these open access articles that Elsevier is charging people to read? Besides that unsubstantiated claim, the rest of the blog post seems to be nitpicking about how Elsevier makes shitty websites that are confusing.

<comment><USER2> streptomycin: why do you say this?

Unless I misunderstood the blog post, when the author contacted Elsevier, the company's Director of Universal Access wrote back on an email that 'open access' articles can be distinguished by (quoting from the email) "an open access symbol and link in the top right of the article. For an example see here ([http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168900207...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168900207017020))."

As I write this, that article costs $35.95 -- that's pretty convincing evidence, no?

Edit: as some comments below posit, it's also possible that the Elsevier executive provided the wrong link.

<comment><USER7> I don't see any evidence the linked article is actually Open Access.

It seems possible that the response just had the wrong link, and they article they are charging for isn't open access. [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168900210...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168900210008910) is clearly Open Access, has a clear mark of that, and has full text available for free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Elsevier is a monopoly in this space. Monopolies do this kind of thing because they can, which is why they should be broken up or legislated to enforce fair behaviour.

<comment><USER5> Seems this isn't true, from the other comments - it does seem that the guy who sent the email just copied the wrong link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> [http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part- in-i...](http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its- downfall/)

<http://thecostofknowledge.com/></comment>


Heap overflow in QEMU PCNET controller, allowing guest-host escape - <AUTHOR> http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-135.html

<comment><USER2> Keep in mind that the pcnet NIC is not used by default in most QEMU, KVM, or Xen deployments.

So it's mostly a problem in scenarios where untrusted users may add pcnet NICs to their VMs. Even then, remember that additional layers of security are available. KVM is typically deployed with unprivileged QEMU processes, locked down with SELinux (more details: [https://danwalsh.livejournal.com/71489.html](https://danwalsh.livejournal.com/71489.html)).

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this going to cause another AWS patchathon?

<comment><USER4> I think, that only HVM instances with non-network optimized interfaces might be vulnerable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does this affect other products like virtualbox, vmware etc?

Didn't the VENOM qemu floppy driver bug hit a ton of products as well?

<comment><USER6> > Both the traditional "qemu-xen" or upstream qemu device models are > _potentially_ vulnerable.

VENOM was particularly nasty because, due to a bug/oversight, floppy emulation was _always_ enabled in pretty much everything that used Qemu.

This only affects one specific network driver, which to my knowledge, is nowhere used as default.</comment></comment>


Dotjs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/defunkt/dotjs

<comment><USER2> awesome library. was thinking to create a site for sharing dotjs files to web extensibility!</comment>


Digital Doppelgängers Fool Advanced Anti-Fraud Tech - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/security/digital-doppelgngers-fool-advanced-antifraud-tech <comment><USER2> Yeah you can get tool suites on various darknet hacker forums that can mimic specific fingerprints, which are used to login to banks or even (stolen) Paypal accounts. There is a site (not linking to it here) where they even give you a SOCKS5[0] proxy to spoof your geolocation so that Paypal doesn't flag your behavior as suspicious, and you can then proceed to drain the funds from the account.

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

[*] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOCKS#Use_in_cybercrime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOCKS#Use_in_cybercrime)

<comment><USER3> Also used for carding.

<comment><USER2> Yeah the SOCKS Wikipedia article even nods to cybercrime in this section: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOCKS#Use_in_cybercrime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOCKS#Use_in_cybercrime)</comment></comment></comment>


Economic Slowdown Is Expected, but It's Seen as Fleeting - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/30/business/economy/economic-slowdown-is-expected-but-its-seen-as-fleeting.html

<comment><AUTHOR> It would be interesting to have feedback from HN community about their economic expectations based on their personal contexts.</comment>


Forget the last one. Do the next one. - <AUTHOR> http://zackshapiro.com/post/32537662196/forget-the-last-one-do-the-next-one

<comment><USER2> I am not sure if it is related to "the next one" idea, but I do have continuous goal for writing: writes 500 word a day(This is a bit oversimplified, as my software actually do not calculate how many words I added, but how many words I added or deleted). Do it everyday and write whatever interests you. It could be a novel, essay, a story, an idea, a list of things, a blueprint for invention, an interesting really fact or anything really. So long as you write 500 word changes a day.

Well, I didn't keep have a specific goal at first, actually. I just know that I gotta write something. So I did, and eventually got a specific goal later. The fruit of labor thus far is one essay an a page full of half completed random essays that are constantly evolving.

These are the result:

1\. <http://kibabase.com/articles/notes-and-thoughts> (The page of random essays totaling to 7.5 K words)

2\. <http://kibabase.com/articles/self-quantification> (A 2K words essay)

Well, I didn't produce much, but that's only for about two months. It just mean that I need to keep writing constantly.

<comment><USER3> 500 words is good, 750 words is better:

<http://750words.com> (Love this site, love maintaining a streak and earning badges)

Even better would be 10,000 words a day...

[http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-i-went- from-...](http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-i-went-from- writing-2000-words-day.html) (This post inspired me to write my first novel)

I haven't reached 10,000 words a day, but I was able to sustain 4,000 words a day long enough to finish my first novel:

[http://www.syncingdreams.com/2012/06/dragon-master-post- mort...](http://www.syncingdreams.com/2012/06/dragon-master-post-mortem- part-1.html)

Now I'm supposed to be _doing the next one_. So I'll go do that now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next." - Steve Jobs

</comment><comment><USER5> In my experience this also applies to failures and other things that don't turn out so well. If you make a mistake, don't spend more time thinking about it than is necessary to figure out what went wrong and fix those mistakes. Learn from it and keep going.

</comment><comment><USER6> In general, I think this makes sense, but it can lead to some pretty unhealthy patterns in my experience. I would emphasize to those of us with insatiable ambitions not to gloss over the "pause to celebrate and appreciate" step. Celebrating our accomplishments can often get lost in the incessant drive for success. This can leave us feeling empty and dissatisfied, which is no fun at all.

<comment><USER7> I entirely agree that taking time to savour the moment is important to maintain a healthy lifestyle. I'd also go further and say that while such a results in rapid progress, it's also a good idea to stop and think about how everything went. Do a short post-mortem, regardless of whether the result was a failure or a success, identify some key areas that could use improvement, _then_ go out and do better next time.</comment></comment>


Favicon for news.ycombinator - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Heres a quick and dirty .ico created from the icon:

<http://www.paulbutler.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/yfavicon.ico>

<comment><USER3> Created? You sure you didn't hit "view image"? :-)

<comment><USER2> As I said, it is a q&d; .ico created from the image. I didn't change anything, just cropped out a few pixels to make it 16x16 and saved it as an .ico file.

<comment><USER3> I know, I was just teasing you... hence the emoction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi there. Really selfish post but I'd quite like it if news.ycombinator could provide a favicon. The only reason for this is so that my bookmarks toolbar doesn't have to have any text just icons for each site. Sorry it's a bit OCD but it'd really make my day. Cheers.

</comment><comment><USER4> I use web-based icon generators, here's two I bookmarked that are pretty useful:

<http://antifavicon.com/>

<http://www.degraeve.com/favicon/>

</comment><comment><USER5> I used ppmtowinicon to make the ourdoings.com favicon. No need to boot into Windows. Thanks to utilities like that plus WINE for IE testing, I haven't had to boot Windows since I got the XP web publishing wizard integration done.

</comment><comment><USER6> See the problem caused by /favicon.ico not returning 404 at the moment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sweet. Thanks very much. You really have made my day :)

</comment><comment><USER7> looks like pg added the favicon!

<http://ycombinator.com/favicon.ico>

<comment><USER2> Cool. It doesn't show up in FireFox for news.ycombinator.com though, even with a hard refresh.

<comment><USER8> it is a different domain ;-)

<comment><USER2> Yeah (well, a different subdomain ;-) ), but <http://news.ycombinator.com/favicon.ico> redirects to the icon at <http://ycombinator.com/favicon.ico> . It seems the browser don't follow the redirect (IE doesn't seem to either).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Ping times between major cities (where we have a server) - <AUTHOR> https://wondernetwork.com/pings/

<comment><AUTHOR> Thus far we've made 17,401,500 pings to generate that data, it's ongoing at present.

<comment><USER2> What do you store the results in? MySQL? Redis? ping.txt?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're storing it all in MySQL at present. The queries are rather slow at present so we're caching extensively on the front end.</comment></comment></comment>


A Recommendation Engine for Book Series - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fictfact.com/post/31090614090/bookseries-co-the-book-series-discovery-engine

<comment><AUTHOR> I recently started playing with Twitter bootstrap and was wondering how quickly I could put together a simple website using one of FictFact (my companies) apis. By using a combination of bootstrap + php + 2 apis (our search and recommendation apis) I was able to put together this simple series recommendation engine in a couple hours. It still has some kinks to work out, but I was happy how it worked out as an exercise.

So far the engine has found me the "Old Man's War" series by John Scalzi. (I ended up loving the first book of that series.)

</comment><comment><USER2> why not posting a link directly to the referred site (<http://www.bookseries.co/>)? That blog post didn't really add any substance/info to it...

<comment><AUTHOR> I realized that after I posted, I should have sent everyone over to the site itself. Couldn't find a place to edit the original post.</comment></comment>


A Wrench in Silicon Valley's Wealth Machine - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_52/b4114082618241.htm

<comment><USER2> We go through cycles. Right now we're in a slump so bad that things with real value and profits look bad. Before, we had been in a boom that thought value was limitless for crap.

Trying to look at Digg objectively. They don't make money with their current number of staff people and revenues. Maybe their readership will increase to a point that they will make money (assuming they don't need more staff as readership increases). Maybe they'll be able to cut staff and slow down "product growth". Of course, that risks a competitor out-doing them.

Likewise, Facebook hasn't found a way to be popular. Their userbase keeps increasing, but they're at a level where the scaling problems get real bad and require lots of staff. They're also adding users from places advertisers don't pay as much for (while they cost Facebook more in terms of things like bandwidth).

The question really is whether these companies can become profitable and whether they can become profitable to the extent required by their valuations. For example, assuming a yearly profit of $100,000,000 and an opportunity cost per year of 10% (investing in something else) and a 100 year lifetime, Facebook would be worth less than $1B. And that's assuming they're able to make $100M per year for 100 years.

Even if you say they're going to make a billion per year for 100 years from this date, they're still worth less than $10B. And why should we assume they'll be around in 10 years never mind 100. Friendster of 2002 is (6 years later) a has been.

I'm not saying that Facebook is bad, but 100 years is a lot of staying power. Heck, what technology firm can claim such a thing. Venerable IBM will hit 100 in a few years. But IBM is not the dominant company many people invested in over the years. They don't even have a PC business anymore.

Many technology firms go under because they aren't able to produce efficiently enough to stay afloat. Unlike Microsoft, Facebook can't just raise prices because their paying customers (advertisers, not users) can go somewhere else unlike Microsoft's lock-in. They can't charge users because the value they have is based on having so many users and the competition would love if Facebook gave them such an in.

Many of these things are cool, but there's a big question as to how much money they can make. With high valuations, it's not just about making money, but enough money to justify that valuation. I think investors are looking at that now rather than thinking, well, this is really popular therefore has a lot of value.

<comment><USER3> I don't fully understand how the math works out, particularly how the opportunity cost factors in. What does an opportunity cost of 10% mean and how does that factor in to the valuation equation?

<comment><USER2> So, opportunity cost is what you could get doing something else. For example, if I put $15B into an S&P500 index fund, I'd probably get returns around 10% per year. Since Facebook is a risk greater than an index fund, 10% is definitely fair.

So, if I just took that money and suck it in a stock index fund, in 100 years I'd have over $206trillion at the end. So, it's not enough for Facebook (or anyone) to make money off of money invested. It must make more money off that investment than the investment could get at a standard investment rate. If Facebook is worth $100trillion in 100 years, it doesn't justify a $15B valuation because that $15B would become over $200trillion in average stocks.

Specifically, the math is: sigma[1,100,$profit/1.1^k]

Sorry for the notation. In plain English, for year 1 through 100, add the profit for that year ($profit) divided by 1.1 raised to the year number.

In python: value = 0 proft = 100000000 for i in range(1,100): value += (profit/pow(1.1, i)) print value

To summarize: Facebook needs to be able to beat a blind investment by their valuation in order to justify that price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Digg just needs a new leadership team. Kevin and Jay spend so much time promoting themselves ("parallel entrepreneurs" hasn't worked out all that well for anyone) that they've done significant damage to the business. They need to go.

Even this article is full of half-truths. Employees are "committed for the long term" yet the bulk of them have been hired during the last six months, and 40% of the early employees have left.

<comment><USER5> I don't get how "promoting themselves" has done significant damage to the company. I mean, Kevin is the company. The company is Kevin. When Digg had a town hall meeting in Chicago, people were there to meet Kevin and have him sign their iPhones. He's gotta be out there as much as possible.

I concede having no knowledge on any of these other fronts, but I don't understand how all the good PR that comes from Rose's ubiquity in tech media can be anything but crucial to Digg's success.

<comment><USER4> I think you've answered the question. Kevin is the company. It was not always so - in fact in the early days he downplayed his role in the company, and it had massive momentum. Instead of concentrating on making a better product, a lot of energy went into the "web 2.0 poster boy" campaign as a marketing strategy. I don't think it worked.

<comment><USER5> Ok. I understand your point of view much better now. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Digg has always been overrated. People voting on news stories was never a great business and the quality of the user base has significantly deteriorated over time. The smart people have moved on and the site is dominated by spammers and trolls. No legitimate brand is interested in being associated with that level of maturity, so Digg is stuck with bottom of the barrel advertising.

I just wonder how they blew through so much cash. All the new features have sucked. I guess it all goes to biz dev guys...

On the bright side, maybe the founders will silently pass into obscurity.

</comment><comment><USER7> Digg need to take a page from Google's book and realize they need to fix their ad system.

At the moment it's showing me adverts for women's weightloss products, digg really should be able to figure out I'm male.

Worse yet it's showing me US only adverts (when I'm in Europe). Half of Digg's userbase is outside the US (quantcast data) - they're wasting 50% of their inventory. By setting up ip geolocation targeted advertising they could significantly improve their CTR.

<comment><USER5> They list links.

Google search lists links.

Digg should sell content placement at the top of their lists of links and content placement in the sidebars like Google does and Techmeme as well.

This way, instead of hiring a team of 4 people to game Digg like the Chicago Tribune did, they can just pay the money straight to Digg for front page placement and call it a day. Everyone's happier and you get fewer marketers spamming the site night and day.

</comment></comment><comment> puzzle-out I downloaded a relatively successful IT company's accounts today. Been going for 12 years, profitable for 11, innovated product (now ecommerce platform developer) and brand, creating stable employment - 68 staff, doing 12million sterling turnover and two million profit after tax. Respect.

</comment><comment><USER8> that article used the word Facebook exactly once.

</comment><comment><USER9> Someone should fix the title.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's dividend time.

<comment><USER11> on what? loses?

<comment><USER10> Exactly.

From profits that real businesses should have.</comment></comment></comment>