2014 Fields Medals announced - <AUTHOR> http://www.mathunion.org/general/prizes/2014 <comment><USER2> Quanta Magazine, published by the Simons Fonundation, has an article on each of the four Fields Medallists and the Nevanlinna Prize winner, Subhash Khot.

Artur Avila - A Brazilian Wunderkind Who Calms Chaos [http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140812-a-brazilian-...](http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140812-a-brazilian- wunderkind-who-calms-chaos/)

Manjul Bhargava - The Musical, Magical Number Theorist [http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140812-the- musical-...](http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140812-the-musical- magical-number-theorist/)

Martin Hairer - In Noisy Equations, One Who Heard Music [http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140808-in- mathemati...](http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140808-in-mathematical- noise-one-who-heard-music/)

Maryam Mirzakhani - A Tenacious Explorer of Abstract Surfaces [http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140812-a-tenacious-...](http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140812-a-tenacious- explorer-of-abstract-surfaces/)

Subhash Khot - A Grand Vision for the Impossible [http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140812-a-grand- visi...](http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140812-a-grand-vision-for- the-impossible/)

<comment><USER3> Oh, this is great: I'd only seen the one for Dr Mirzahani. Truly inspirational. I wish I'd had these role model stories as a high schooler!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was in the same Harvard class as Manjul Bhargava, one of this year's Fields Medal winners. I remember having lunch with him as a freshman and being amazed that he was already taking Math 134 (topology). I slowly realized he'd effectively taken a full undergraduate math curriculum in high school.

I had a friend who was Manjul's TA for a probability class our senior year. I still remember him exclaiming, "There's no _way_ that series telescoped!" [1] when Manjul solved one problem in a particularly clever way.

The strange thing is that it was hard to tell at first if Manjul was particularly smart. Two of our other mathematically accomplished classmates, Lenny Ng and Kiran Kedlaya (both of whom I knew much better than Manjul), were obviously brilliant, but with Manjul it took a lot longer to figure out he was a genius.

I think now the secret is out.

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

<comment><USER5> > I had a friend who was Manjul's TA for a probability class our senior year. > I still remember him exclaiming, "There's no way that series telescoped!" > [1] when Manjul solved one problem in a particularly clever way.

By any chance, can you remember that problem? I have no way to understand Manjul Bhargava's work that got him the Nobel prize, but I could probably understand how he solved that problem, which would enable me to perceive a slight bit of his genius.

<comment><USER4> Alas, I don't remember the details of the particular sum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Notably, Maryam Mirzakhani is the first woman to win a Fields medal.

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

<comment><USER7> Also notably,

1\. Mirzakhani is the first Iranian 2\. Bhargava is the first Canadian 3\. Hairer is the first Austrian 4\. Avila is the first Brazilian

<comment><USER8> Since there are still ~200 countries without a Fields Medal, this isn't mathematically remarkable in comparison to the parent point.

So, I understand instead that you're identifying this as notable for the following reason:

There are 100 times more women in the world than Canadians, yet women and Canadians have the same number of Fields Medals.

<comment><USER6> First of all, there's not enough data to be statistically significant in any of my ramblings, so it's all kind of hand-wavy and I apologize for that.

But my general feeling is that there used to be a few "powerhouse" countries and institutions that dominated, but that has been changing for many years. There's a lot more diversity these days. So I think kiyoto's point speaks to the changes there.

In 1950, it would have been pretty inconceivable that a woman from Iran would have had the access and opportunities to contribute to mathematics in a way that would have earned a Fields medal; in 2014, it's a first-time feat; hopefully, in the future, it quickly becomes mundane.

<comment><USER9> "not enough data to be statistically significant"

^suspect this is incorrect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Amazing group of people. Manjul is my wife's cousin so I have heard of a few examples of his brilliance (like the time he corrected his mom, a Math prof, during one of her lectures - he was a middle-schooler at the time).

Here's a nice piece NPR did on him: [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4111253](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4111253)

<comment><USER5> The more I read HN, the more I am impressed by the diversity of its readers. Now we have the cousin of a field medalist, nothing less!

<comment><USER11> You should see one of my all-time favorite Hacker news threads:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079)

<comment><USER12> I'm finally beginning to appreciate how my embarrassing behavior ends up trotted out regularly.

<comment><USER13> Tell me about it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The Nevanlinna Prize was also awarded. This is the award mathematicians give to theoretical computer scientists. This year the winner is Subhash Khot from NYU. His main result is the Unique Games Conjecture (UGC) and how it can be used to obtain hardness of approximation results for algorithmic problems. For example, it is used to show that MaxCut cannot be approximated better than a factor of 0.878.. unless UGC does not hold. Remarkably this exact approximation factor is achievable by the breakthrough SDP algorithm of Goemans and Williamson. It is not currently clear if UGC is true and the opinions of theoreticians are split.

</comment><comment><USER14> Martin Hairer is a OS X developer and the author of the fantastic Amadeus multi-track audio editor.

[http://www.hairersoft.com](http://www.hairersoft.com)

<comment><USER15> I'm sorry, what? A Fields medalist AND a OS X dev. I...

<comment><USER16> I suppose that when you're working on Field medal awarding problems, building software seems like a way to relax your mind.

That's a technique i tried when i was bulding my latest "complex" algorithm (graph diffing with the graph stored in a sql db): Whenever i felt stuck, i went and took an online lesson in quantum mechanics ( susskin ones, the best).

All of the sudden, all my problems seemed really easy, and i was able to move forward almost right away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> 'Manjul Bhargava completed all of his high school math and computer courses by age 14.[..] Princeton hired him at the rank of tenured full professor within only two years of finishing graduate school, which is considered a record in the Ivy League.'

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

<comment><USER18> Most of the undergraduate math majors finished high school math by age 14. Manjul was a cut above even them in mathematical talent and experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> In-depth profiles and videos about all 4 Fields medalists here: [http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140812-a-brazilian-...](http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140812-a-brazilian- wunderkind-who-calms-chaos/)

</comment><comment><USER20> A pity only very few people in the world can fully understand the beauty of the mathematical proofs these geniuses created

<comment><USER4> It is weird. Doing great mathematics is like writing great poetry in a language only a few hundred people can read. And yet, every once in a while a mathematical poem changes the world.

<comment><USER21> Yes, and it's often the case that, faced with such a "poem", the world changes without ever understanding the mechanism of the change, as with both relativity and quantum theories.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Strange to see this precisely today.

I can't help seeing this and remember once more Robin Williams (RIP) in 'Good Will Hunting', where I first knew about the Field Medal and the magic of Maths was a recurring theme in that fantastic movie.

<comment><USER23> "... Former winners include Nobel laureates, Field's medal winners, renowned astrophysicists and lowly M.I.T. Professors"

R.I.P. Robin Williams

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is it just me, or are the winners not listed anywhere on this site? It says "The Prize Committees for ICM 2014 have begun their work." And "last updated: 2014-07-30" at the bottom. Was the page reverted to an older version for some reason?

<comment><USER5> The winners were listed yesterday, then I noticed they removed the list, but now it's back.

<comment><USER25> They accidentally released the names early, then pulled them. I heard @JSEllenberg tweeted the results right away, but they were supposed to be released after the ceremony.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8170640](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8170640)

</comment><comment><USER27> Those are beautiful stories of truth exploration!

</comment><comment><USER28> >>created an abstract theory of regularity structures for stochastic partial differential equations

Fairly obvious but whatever.

JK!

<comment><USER28> Why the down vote, not funny at all? Hey I would be in support of them all getting the same money as Nobel or Abel laureates :).

<comment><USER29> Sorry WhitneyLand. In case you haven't noticed, the one thing Hacker News is most afraid of is becoming anything like Reddit.

<comment><USER30> I do not understand why should HN be afraid to give reasonable reason for down voting. Looking at picture I also thought that Maryam Mirzakhani is man. I understood my mistake only by reading down-voted comments. Someone is spoiling valuable comments and it happens too often. Sad.

<comment><USER31> > I do not understand why should HN be afraid to give reasonable reason for > down voting

It's not about being afraid, it's about not lowering the signal/noise ratio any further.

You should post a comment when, and only when, you have something substantive to say. There are many more downvotes than there are substantive things to say, which is why subthreads about downvotes invariably degenerate.

<comment><USER32> > it's about not lowering the signal/noise ratio any further.

idea: you can track an explanation _why_ something was downvoted without showing it as a comment. It can be shown only if a user clicks on some type of "why this was downvoted" link.

This would not lower the signal/noise ratio on the main thread. People can continue having a discussion that degenerates to low signal/ratio about the downvoting into this other link. If anything positive comes out of it, and enough people upvote it out of the downvoted status, then you can start commenting on it again.

This would also be aligned with the policy of posting a comment when, and only when, you have something substantive to say.

Because unless the comment was restored back to a positive score, you wouldn't be able to post a comment on the main thread (as a reply to that comment; not the whole thread). The policy would be enforced, and you dang wouldn't have to be telling people to not comment about downvoting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Some of this stuff is pretty abstruse. Can someone rephrase the winners' research programs in the form of Harry Potter fanfic?

</comment><comment><USER34> Haha, "But Khot's Unique Games Conjecture has already amply proven its value, even should it ultimately be disproven. It has cast a bright light on previously dim areas of computational complexity and provided critical insight — and, yes, Khot has also used it to prove major results, ones that stand regardless of its truth."

weak people conjecture and then get results "if my conjecture stands". This guy is a black belt, he makes a conjecture, gets a field medal for it, and then removes it from his proof ("just joking, it works wether it's true or not").

Still gets the medal for the now useless conjecture and not for the ultimate proof.

<comment><USER12> My world got a little smaller. Khot's advisor -- Sanjeev Arora -- was the guy who cemented my decision of where to go to school.

<comment><USER35> Nice humblebrag, bro</comment></comment></comment>


Einstellung Effect - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstellung_effect <comment><USER2> In this context the word simply translates to attitude as mentioned in the article. Why not using that?

<comment><USER3> In the context of the water jars experiment, "attitude" is not the explanation though; instead it refers more to the "installation" of the previous solution in the subjects' minds (i.e. the subjects who were "trained" with the 5 pre- test examples effectively had those solutions installed/set in their minds).

You see this in game development a lot- users are trained in the first 1-2 levels "Here's a puzzle - look around for clues". When they later encounter a puzzle in levels 3-n, they often apply the same methodology despite the obviousness that another approach is called for.

You see it in chess development - an app teaches users, "Given a board with these positions, the best option is x". Later during growth, the same board positions may have different solutions yet the student continually applies the original.

Attitude isn't at play here; it's simply _expectation_.</comment></comment>


Don't Be Pied Piper #1 – How to Divide Equity Among Startup Founders - <AUTHOR> https://www.legal.io/guide/555be3a277777738de6f0000/Don-t-be-Pied-Piper-1-How-to-Divide-Equity-Among-Startup-Founders

<comment><USER2> I'm really curious what most people do now-a-days. A long time ago I started a company with 3 friends. We were advised to divide the company basically by shares/points/option. We each got 1 point for each month we were with the company. So first month each of us has one point. Second month each has 2 points. If someone quits then in 6 month it would have been 6, 6, 6, 2 which means the 4 would own 30%, 30%, 30%, 10%. In a year it would be 12, 12, 12, 2. That's 31.5% each for the 3 remaining partners and the guy who left is now down to 5%

At the time that seemed like a great idea.

Then I listened to the podcast, Startup and I hear the Alex Bloomberg offer his partner 10%. "Seriously? You haven't actually done anything yet". It seemed to me he should have used the point system. At best he should start with 2 or 3 more points (or heck even more because he's the "talent") but otherwise given there was basically nothing to the company yet it seemed fair. If his partner puts in the time in a few years they'll be nearly equal.

They settled on some random numbers but it seemed short sighted. Maybe they'd need another partner. The points system seems to work. New partner starts, you decide on some starting points, possibly zero, just vest your points. If it was 5 people who've been working a year and you come on at the end of year 1 then in 4 more years it will be 60,60,60,60,60,48. That's 17% for the 5 originals and 13% for the new partner

The 2nd season had the same issue. Instead of going by time invested in the company they were just picking random numbers. It seems very arbitrary and unfair. Of course maybe the point system is just as unfair to some.

<comment><USER3> What a lot of people fail to understand is that successful startups derisk in exponential steps. It may seem unfair to a lot of people that early employees are paid 2 or 3 orders of magnitude of equity less than founders for doing perhaps even more work. What they fail to understand is that they're not being paid equity for work, they're being paid for risk.

Successful startup founders are obsessed with derisking at every step along the way and even when it seems like "they haven't done very much", the stuff they are doing is relentlessly pushing a startup through the various gates in which a certain percentage fail at every gate.

So it wouldn't surprise me if a reasonable equity split for Gimlet ended up around the 90/10 range. Considering that Alex managed to raise $1.5M almost entirely based on the back of his reputation, he's really offering ~$700K of equity to his co-founder vesting over 4 years. There's no way his other co- founder could have found an opportunity that big through any other avenue so it would have been smart for him to take the 10%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ultimately, equity math is less about math and more about psychology. Startup success is binary so the fine details of the split end up not mattering at the end of the day. What's important is that the process you use to assign equity leaves everyone feeling it was more than fair.

You could start with a team of talented people and arrive at the same equity numbers via two different processes and one will result in a billion dollar company and the other a million dollar company because the founders are motivated in the first and discouraged in the second. What's ideal is that each founder believes they got way too much equity and is glad to be a part of the team. Put in that perspective, dicking over 5% isn't something that should be encouraged.

This is why founder chemistry is so important. If you're considering co- founding a company with a person, run this hypothetical in your head: You have both just sold the company for a billion dollars and you get 70% of the sale and they get 30%. Are they happy that they're now worth 300M and even happier than you're worth 700M or are they jealous that you got the way bigger share of the pie than they did? If it's the latter, run away immediately, there's no good outcome possible there.

</comment><comment><USER4> The live chat button on the website doesnt seem to be working. I wanted to ask if the site hosts lawyers outside of the US in places like the UK for instance as I'm currently looking to start a conversation with a legal expert on some startup matters.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi!

I'm part of the team over at Legal.io. What browser are you currently using? That can help us to troubleshoot the issue with our live chat.

In the meantime - feel free to shoot an email to firstname.lastname@example.com with your question and our team will respond to you shortly!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a really important article!

I've found that a lot of my fellow founders have faced trouble when going to raise money from investors simply because they either looked uninformed or careless when dividing up equity!!

Make sure you don't fall into that trap.

</comment><comment><USER6> Dividing up equity is an ugly issue, because sometimes it's more about availability of talent, contract clauses, time (4 years is not a lot of time). Best to get it right the first time.

<comment><USER7> Are you saying you think it makes sense to have vesting schedules longer than 4 years? I've seen "evergreen" clauses where employees constantly get new options, but not vesting schedules longer than 4 years.

<comment><USER6> I've spent 2 years as a founder at my start-up and it seams like a drop in the bucket. I was just able to turn around twice and all of a sudden, I'm 50% though my vesting period. But then the other founders are 50% or more though their vesting period as well.

It may well take 8 years to get this company to IPO. 4 years seams standard, but it feels awfully sort for some reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> All feedback from startup founders welcome!</comment>


Researchers document the 'life cycle' of a volcano - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-09-document-life-volcano.html <comment><USER2> Cool research (^∇^*)</comment>


Things I Learnt from fast.ai v3 - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/10-new-things-i-learnt-from-fast-ai-v3-4d79c1f07e33 <comment><USER2> Am I one only who doesn't like the fastai approach to ML?

At times it's just a little bit too much handwaving for my taste.

<comment><USER3> As someone who learned ML the "traditional way" I both like and dislike it.

I like that I can quickly learn about advanced models since I already know about / can infer the intuition / mathematical details myself most of the time.

I dislike it because it's almost all handwaving. The way things actually work aren't really explained (other than at a high level) so either you're stuck with a wishy washy understanding or you will read the paper yourself.

But for some of us "in between", we're not satisfied with the layman's explanation, yet the paper is too formal to digest. I think there's an element of survivorship bias there, where some people just give up because they're not getting the explanations they're looking for.

Those who are smart enough to understand papers on their own can do fine, because they'll take the course as-is and just use it as a guide for what's new and fresh. Those who don't know what the heck is going on (and don't care) are happy with "plain English" explanations without looking any further.</comment></comment>


Asynchronous circuit design - <AUTHOR> http://books.google.com/books?id=DPGJEPZGXMQC&lpg=PA322&ots=6yfpWNCbxV&dq=%22illiac%22%20%22asynchronous%22&pg=PA310#v=onepage&q=%22illiac%22%20%22asynchronous%22&f=false

<comment><USER2> Can anyone point out the interesting parts here? It's been a long long while since i looked at circuit design. Is it the whole book, or a particular paragraph?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a whole book.

<comment><USER3> "What is this, one bedroom, one bathroom?"

"No, it's a whole apartment!"

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, apologies.

The whole book is interesting.

I make a lot of these little mistakes, I need to be more careful.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Did Goldman Sachs developer steal open source software? - <AUTHOR> http://news.techworld.com/applications/3200867/did-goldman-sachs-developer-steal-open-source-software/

<comment><USER2> Long story short: no-one knows what happened.

The gist: _"To the extent that the identical code was available elsewhere, he used poor judgment taking the code from a Goldman Sachs server. To the extent he took any altered code based on open-source code that Goldman Sachs had not already contributed back to the project, I see no reason why this would not run afoul of his contractual obligations to Goldman Sachs, just as would normal proprietary code."_

One might be inclined to think, however, that it's the latter case, and this is all a storm in a teacup over the percieved backwardness of even being able to steal GPL code.

<comment><USER3> GPL doesn't require you to share the source code or changes with the world.

It only requires you to share the source with those people to whom you give the binaries.

That's a common misunderstanding. You can take GPL code and base your entire proprietary system around it, including making changes to it, and as long as you only run that system (SaaS or in-house) and do not distribute the binaries, you don't have to share the source with anyone.</comment></comment>


Creating thumbnails of images in PHP using pear libraries - <AUTHOR> http://webnesbay.com/696/creating-thumbnails-in-php-using-pear-libraries/ <comment><USER2> Good tutorial...I used this method for the thumbnails on <http://www.steves- digicams.com/></comment>


I Hired a Zombie: The True Cost of a Bad Hire - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/07/09/i-hired-a-zombie/

<comment><AUTHOR> _In this economy, employers can afford to be picky and potential employees will put up with a lot_

While I agree that it's important to make sure you hire good employees, "because I can" is not a good reason to make the hiring process as painful and drawn out as possible.

</comment><comment><USER2> Instead of a mediocre infographic on how bad workers are bad I'd prefer to see why the hiring process failed so badly.

</comment><comment><USER3> $50000 sounds cheap! That doesn't factor in the opportunity cost of missing out on a "good hire".

IMHO, the "cost" of a bad hire is some multiple of their salary-- more like 200K-1M. Even worse if you add-up lost customers.

</comment><comment><USER4> It cuts both ways, of course. A zombie employer (or manager) can also be a big hit to your wallet -- not to mention your health and sanity.</comment>


Xachi Pets fuse iPhones and Stuffed Animals into one Cute and Cuddly iToy - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2010/03/08/xachi-pets-fuse-iphones-and-stuffed-animals-into-one-cute-and-cuddly-itoy/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my startup I'm doing with a few friends! We presented at the Open Angel Forum last week, so we're currently raising an angel round of funding to bring it to market.

We'd really like some advice from YC and HN people with experience pitching hardware startups to investors.</comment>


Ask HN: What are other awesome games like 2048? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection has some nice ones, but more puzzle-y than 2048: [https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/](https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Subara City is nice: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kuwaki.sub...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kuwaki.subaracity)

</comment><comment><USER4> You can't go wrong with [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.frenchguys...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.frenchguys.twenty)</comment>


Did Prosecutors Go Too Far In Swartz Case? - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2013/01/15/169421636/did-prosecutors-go-too-far-in-swartz-case

<comment><USER2>
      "I'm really not sure that anyone in this country would
      disagree that computer hacking is a problem," says
      Washington defense lawyer Jeff Ifrah, who has been
      following the case. "Should it be a crime? That's an issue
      for Congress. But Congress decided to make it a crime, and
      prosecutors have an obligation to enforce those crimes."

This is so absurdly pointless and dumb -- in the context of this case, he's talking about how law is binary.

</comment><comment><USER3> Horrible article.

Most of it seems to be written from the view point of that random unrelated lawyer they decided to interview, Jeff Ifrah who's connection is that he "has been following the case."

<comment><USER4> NPR News is very aware of the persistent bias allegations and often works hard to "balance" the presentation, sometimes to the point of creating an unreasonable false equivalency between points of view.

I didn't see any glaring factual inaccuracies, nor was it sensationalized. It seems to be a good intro to the case for a non-technical audience.

<comment><USER3> "No glaring factual inaccuracies" is a high standard indeed. :)

I think NPR erred when they repeatedly quoted a man who has about as much connection to the case as you or I do. I also think they erred in repeatedly describing what Swartz did as "hacking." They even dropped the obligatory "alleged" after the first mention.

Someone reading this article would come away thinking that Swartz "hacked into" the MIT network and "stole" millions of documents. That he was prosecuted for this crime, and that his "friends" feel that the punishment was too harsh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _"Should it be a crime? That's an issue for Congress. But Congress decided to make it a crime, and prosecutors have an obligation to enforce those crimes."_

They certainly did enforce a crime.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is an incredibly poor article. It shows little understanding of the facts of the case, and is simply a collection of quotes from other people.

I'd have thought NPR would have better quality control than this.</comment>


Consumer Reports: Tesla Must Prove Safety Before Claiming "Self-Driving" Ability - <AUTHOR> https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/press_release/consumer-reports-tesla-must-prove-safety-before-claiming-self-driving-ability/ <comment><USER2> Consumer Reports offers no definition of "safety" thresholds in terms relative to the accepted safety record of today's drivers, human beings.

How can Tesla meet their terms when they fail to define the evaluation criteria of "safety" in any measurable way? For example, if they declared that "car required unplanned control inputs" events must be no more frequent than those of human drivers, then the market as a whole would race to meet that bar.

It feels like they're unwilling to consider automated car safety relative to human car safety, and are instead demanding perfection from the automation industry. While I approve of that demand in general, it is idealistic at best, and hostile to safety at worst.

I hope CR does better at specifying their safety criteria to car manufacturers than this press release seems to indicate.</comment>


Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product - <AUTHOR> https://www.petekeen.net/marginalia-postmortem <comment><USER2> This was the biggest take-away from this article, one I've learned after wasting much time building my own SaaS "products". _Launching without an audience means nobody shows up._ It's a very true statement. One of my favorite sayings now, from Jason Cohen, is to get 30 people to fully commit to pay for your product before you even start coding it.

<comment><USER3> Just this weekend, I started coding up a tiny "saas product" that I thought about last week. Nobody knows about it, and that certainly has no launch page or audience. I got most of it done over the weekend, and really enjoyed putting it together in my favorite stack (sinatra, roots, marionette) and doing some design work, which I don't often get a chance to do.

I'll probably launch it late this week or next week. I have no audience, and don't expect massive profits either. I made it mostly because _I_ want it. Since I plan on using it extensively, I honestly don't care if I have huge profits or a gigantic audience. I spent $5 on the domain name, am hosting it along with 10 other sites on a $5/month digital ocean box. I put in some great work this weekend, and am now going to end up with something that will fit nicely into my workflow.

It will ship with a decent free plan, and a $5/month pro plan with some expanded capabilities. If one person signs up for the pro plan, that covers the cost of hosting for this site and 9 other sites (bonus!) If 2 people sign up for the pro plan, it's profitable. If zero people sign up, I paid a very small cost for something that's going to be really useful to me.

Sometimes I wonder why so many developers gravitate towards huge ideas that they think other people might want rather than starting small, with things that you want. With this little thing I'm making, there's no risk. I've already won.

<comment><USER2> What you've made is just a hobby then, not a business. (Not that there's anything wrong with programming being a hobby - it's more about managing expectations)

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure - I've coded several "micro-businesses". They make small amounts of money, and cost small amounts of money to run, and take almost no time.

One for example makes about $500 revenue with $200 expenses and 2 hours a year. It's profitable, I'm not doing it because I like spending time on it - or I'd spend more time on it.

These aren't traditional businesses, but they sure aren't hobbies. They are services I think need to exist, and that I can create, without "wasting my time".

<comment><USER5> I think the distinction Bluedevil is trying to make is you're going into this SaaS app with no intention of it being hugely profitable or successful. You're scratching an itch and if other people decide to pay you to help scratch their itch as well, then that's just a sweet bonus.

In contrast, a business would be going in with the intention of the service/app being successful (profitable or popular). Maybe hobby isn't the best way to describe it, but I agree your way of looking at things is closer to a hobby then a business.

<comment><USER4> In my book If you don't enjoy doing it not a hobby. If you care about ROI, and profit it is a business.

For me weather something is a business or a hobby has more to do with outlook than anything else. A few lucky people have insanely profitable, and scalable hobbies with 1000s of employees, and plenty of kids are struggling to keep their lawn mowing biz afloat so they can afford a new video game.

Over the years I've been told that company I founded 8 years ago, and has been my and several other peoples's day job ever since, is a hobby for many reasons, including not enough W2 employees, revenue and so on. Which, even though these things were said to prop up the speakers egos, made me think on the topic - and this is what I've come up with.

\---

edit: totally rewritten

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the right pricing model for this one is freemium. People start using it, get addicted, then you charge them for extra storage once they go over a limit, like Dropbox and Workflowy.

<comment><USER7> Agree!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for posting the "behind the scenes" story.

You say you built a landing page with mailchimp signups for your new product. Did you get many signups? And I suppose these were just signups, no money involved, right? Did a good chunck turn into paying customers?

I would love to know more.

Thank You!

<comment><AUTHOR> I had a list of about 300 people when I launched preorders and about 30% of them converted to paying customers. I was sending out weekly updates with progress toward preorders, and then after preorders started I sent out weekly updates with download links for people who paid and "buy now for X% off, won't last long" messages for people who hadn't.

The whole story is here: [https://www.petekeen.net/adventures-in-self- publishing](https://www.petekeen.net/adventures-in-self-publishing)

<comment><USER8> Wow! Nice conversion rate! Good job on not making the same mistake again!! And Good luck!

I'm reading the "Adventures" post as we speak.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting. I've been throwing around the idea of roughly the same thing for myself. I was keeping a TiddlyWiki, but that's stopped working. Developer solution ... write my own!

In general, developers are a terrible market because they think they can do whatever you did better / cheaper / faster, and they won't shut up about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would say that developer _tools_ are a terrible market for that reason. Information products (screencasts, books, etc) can be extremely successful in the same market. Examples abound, including patio11's marketing training[1], egghead.io[2] for AngularJS training, Peepcode[3], Railscasts[4], and various other ebooks [5][6][7].

Most developers that I know have two common traits that make info products an easier sell. First, they're innately curious about their field. Second, they have access to a company credit card that will happily pay for training materials.

[1]: [https://training.kalzumeus.com](https://training.kalzumeus.com)

[2]: [http://egghead.io](http://egghead.io)

[3]: [https://peepcode.com](https://peepcode.com)

[4]: [http://railscasts.com/pro](http://railscasts.com/pro)

[5]: [http://www.nathanbarry.com/authority](http://www.nathanbarry.com/authority)

[6]: [https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern- payments](https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments)

[7]: [http://www.jstorimer.com/products/working-with-ruby- threads](http://www.jstorimer.com/products/working-with-ruby-threads)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reasons why I would not pay for this (I'm a developer):

\- I already keep notes in markdown using nValt. It's fast. And it's free.

\- I sync these notes, which are just .markdown files in a directory on my machine, with Dropbox. Now I can edit these notes on my iDevices.

\- Your service costs me money to do what I do for free.

\- If I need more bells and whistles, I use Evernote. Evernote is also free for me.

\- Emailing myself notes with tags in the subject in is also free.

Why should I spent $5/mo to use a digital journaling service, and then more time to make this service work with the rest of my workflow, when I already have things in place that take care of my note taking problem?

I would need a great incentive to switch how I take notes. I'm thinking a bunch of other developers thought the same thing.

Finally, at least you shipped something. Nice retrospective. Keep at it.

Edit: It's interesting seeing this post and "Ask HN: How do you store and organize your startup ideas?"[1] on the front page at the same time :)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6585375](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6585375)

<comment><USER11> > I would need a great incentive to switch how I take notes. I'm thinking a > bunch of other developers thought the same thing.

Just like the OP, you've generalized your personal experience to other developers. It is an easy trap to fall into. I agree with the takeaway called out in another comment: validate the idea as objectively as possible and as early as possible.

<comment><USER10> Yes you're right. It's the only data point I have, so it's what I went with :)

What you're echoing is also correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I looked at the original announcement and looked specifically at the technical details list. If I didn't have the stuff on the tech details list available, and had to accomplish roughly the same non-technical task, there are a lot of ways to take notes more or less for free. I can't operate without gmail and I guess google drive so I need not worry about an app built on them.

Dropbox is not a negation of my argument, in that they handle the annoyance of keeping a storage service up.

In my cartoon mind if gmail is down, then storing notes in gmail doesn't work, but the bigger headache is gmail is down not that I can't access some minor notes. So just use gmail for free. Or github. Or a browser extension to "save email to dropbox or google drive"

The other problem is you have a very narrow window of opportunity for a programmers note taker because of habits. The concept of writing README and TODO files and inserting source comments or placeholders, perhaps with tags to search for and ASCII art for markup, has been a part of programming education and tradition for a long time. Could you sell a note taker app to noobs who don't already have a github / text editor habit? Well, maybe, but it'll be harder.

So in my cartoon mind I have an idea it gets entered into TODO or perhaps as a TODO flagged comment in the appropriate spot and its done. You need a wedge to fit your process into it. Like if PUSHes to github regularly failed or github filtered out source code comments to "save disk space" or something. But if it works great, something new is going to be a hard sell.

Now if you did something unusual once you got the data that might sell. Here's a nice web front end that uses GIT and/or github and/or dropbox and/or google drive and/or gmail as a backend.

</comment><comment><USER13> Any service that is dependent on network effects needs a plan to cultivate activity before it launches. It's crucial to offer engagement to the Real People that are early adopters on your product, and the reality is that if you go hands-off and attempt to wait for the audience to self-materialize, you'll get a lot of people who drop by, make one post, and check for interaction a couple of times, and then never come back. It's a bad deal for everyone.

Get together a group of people -- pay them if you have to -- who are committed to using your product before you do a real public launch, and then new users will immediately be engaged and it will grow from there. Launching without this spells disaster.

If you are launching SaaS that doesn't depend on other parties' involvement, you should still gauge interest, but it's OK to start small.

</comment><comment><USER14> You put it on HN and when it didn't move you gave up? What else did you try?

<comment><USER15> Writing a Post Mortem to try to resurrect it from the dead. And submitting it again to HN, hoping that second life would be better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha! No, no interest in resurrecting it at all, I just wanted to share what I learned.

<comment><USER15> By reading my comment again, it may appear a bit bitter, which was not my intention. I just wanted to point out that I hoped that you didn't give up and that post mortem was just a new marketing ploy to resurrect it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just as an aside, if you have a project that you're not sure is going to take off, there is no reason to shell out $29/month for it. Shared hosting will do the job for $5 - $10 a month. No its not super reliable, but if you have no users, who cares? And if you do get popular, my experience has been that they can handle bursts of traffic surprisingly well, until you can move to proper hosting.

</comment><comment><USER17> What was the initial reactions of people when they tried your product? Did they say they loved it and would want to use it everyday?

</comment><comment><USER18> its sort of silly, but one thing in the post that stood out for me was the $29/month for SSL and database.

It was a significant amount of money for this dev - but it could have been done even cheaper with the aws free tier and getting an ssl cert from somewhere like positivessl / commodo.

<comment><USER19> It's actually $9/month for Heroku Basic DB plan and $20/month for SSL endpoint not cert (you can use your own domain and SSL cert). You can always piggyback on yourapp.herokuapp.com for free SSL cert.

<comment><USER20> This is probably my background in sysops talking, but $29 a month for an nginx frontend, rails daemon and PostgreSQL instance sounds like highway robbery...

<comment><USER21> Seriously? $29 doesn't register as real money to me. Especially from a business perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "The next big thing will start out looking like a toy" \-- Chris Dixon

[http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will- start-o...](http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-out- looking-like-a-toy/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Rightly said, SaaS easy to build hard to sell. Products hard to build are easy to sell, as it has value and willing high value customers. But in all, a product or business without a clear customers acquisition strategy is a miracle.

</comment><comment><USER24> Great post for you because the honest introspection will lead you to more success.

Great post for us because even though these lessons have been written about before, it seems to take lots of repetition for them to sink in all the way.

</comment><comment><USER25> The Idea is nice but I wouldn't pay for it mainly because of the reasons stated by Pete Keen and another reason: When I have free tools to be doing the exact same things, why would I want to pay? If I had to launch a SaaS product, I would definitely create a buzz about it amongst my peers and give free subscription for a limited period enough to get the user used to the new idea.

</comment><comment><USER26> I apologize in advance if I sound snarky, but I (and I suspect many others here) hadn't heard of Marginalia until today. How much did you spend on ads and where did you advertise?

<comment><USER27> Don't be silly. When he said he spend a lot on advertising he didn't mean that put up a superbowl ad. He probably spend it on Google Adwords for people who where searching for related terms.

<comment><USER12> "people who where searching for related terms"

I think that would be a strange thing to search for, and I'm not sure it would be a profitable demographic.

Sometimes the problem is not just "do people search for something" but who are those people doing those searches?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Great post Pete, I'm really enjoying your Stripe + Rails book. Keep it up!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Are you still going to use your product after the SaaS version is shut down?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I switched to greener pastures[1] a long time ago.

[1]: [https://www.petekeen.net/git-backed-personal-markdown- wiki](https://www.petekeen.net/git-backed-personal-markdown-wiki)</comment></comment>


A New Approach to Amazon EC2 Networking - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/03/new-approach-amazon-ec2-networking.html

<comment><USER2> At the rate they're innovating and growing, I wouldn't be surprised to see the Amazon Web Services operation grow to be larger than the rest of Amazon's business.

<comment><USER3> Jeff Bezos spoke about this in some depth at startup school in 2008. He even highlighted a journalist's quote suggesting that Amazon was sneaking web services through the back door and it would soon be larger than Amazon itself. I don't know the numbers offhand, but I wouldn't be surprised if they've already surpassed the storefront side of their business.

<comment><USER4> I believe estimates are that AWS revenues are somewhere in the lower hundreds of millions. Very far from rivaling their tens of billions retail business.

<comment><USER5> What about the profits? Shipping, stocking and moving around physical books has got to be more expensive than marking up racks of computers and bandwidth.

<comment><USER4> They're probably following the same strategy they used in retail: undercut everyone and go for long-term market share domination.

I'd bet they're still significantly in the red every year. Eventually they'll get big enough to start skimming a few points of profit off the top. Margins will always be low because that's a huge part of their strategy.

<comment><USER6> I keep hearing this but when you compare the same machine you get on Slicehost or linode with the Amazon prices, Amazon ends up being the most expensive.

I use Amazon because of it's convenience and brand name, but I've always seen it as having a decent premium.

<comment><USER4> Amazon.com is also very often not the absolute cheapest option for products when compared purely on price. It's only if you calculate in reliability/shipping/customer support/convenience that they're the completely unbeatable on average.

Anyone can buy $100k worth of servers and $10k/mo in bandwidth and easily beat AWS pricing. That doesn't make it competitive with AWS though.

AWS is providing _world-class_ network/server infrastructure as a commodity, which is decidedly different from the kinds of infrastructure most hosting companies have.

<comment><USER6> Doesn't this contradict your previous comment? How exactly do they "undercut everyone and go for long-term market share domination"?

I actually think AWS is _profitable_ and while they might not have recuperated their initial datacenter investments, they do cover the accounting depreciation (which is all that matters).

<comment><USER7> They undercut everyone offering the same product. Rock-bottom hosting that might stay up and might have customer service available sometimes is not the same product.

<comment><USER6> Maybe I have a hard time understanding this, but the whole discussion was how Amazon undercuts their competitors and runs the business with a small loss because they are looking at the long-term game.

Saying that Amazon sells you customer service seems entirely unrelated. Yes, the might have better customer service and they might have more things (EBS, Route 53, etc) but they certainly do not undercut their competitors price- wise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Has anyone done credit card handling (input, submission to payment gateway, and storing for subscription billing and on-file orders) on EC2?

A while back I recall Amazon saying that this was possible. We're looking into the possibility of moving to the cloud, and on first look our PCI guy saw some problems. We've just started experimenting so could easily have overlooked something, but these were the stumbling blocks we saw. It looks like these new features address 2 of these 3:

• PCI requires limitations be based on outbound traffic from the cardholder environment. Amazon only allowed inbound filtering. Now they have outbound filtering, so this may be no longer problematic.

• PCI requires internal machines to be placed on internal private networks using NAT. Amazon did not support NAT. Now they do, so this block may be gone.

• PCI requires that all traffic be monitored with an IDS in the cardholder data environment. It doesn't appear possible to do a central monitoring machine with IDS in EC2.

<comment><USER9> [http://aws.amazon.com/security/pci-dss-level-1-compliance- fa...](http://aws.amazon.com/security/pci-dss-level-1-compliance-faqs/)

<comment><USER8> Yeah, we've seen that. That's what I was thinking of when I said Amazon said it was possible.

However, when it comes to actually doing that things seem a bit less clear. For instance, outbound filtering is a requirement, but Amazon just added that, so how did one satisfy that requirement before today?

<comment><USER10> would just running iptables on the instance suffice?

<comment><USER8> That could be what they had in mind. Our PCI guy tends to frown on that, though, because the purpose of restricting outbound access is so that if the machine does get compromised the bad guy can't ship off credit card information. If the outbound restriction is implemented on the machine, the bad guy might simply be able to turn them off.

It's possible that we've got an overly strict PCI guy.

Anyway, this particular issue appears dead now, as these new EC2 features add outbound filtering.

<comment><USER11> I don't think your PCI guy is overly strict. It's pretty clear that the intentions of the requirements are what you described. What might have worked, though, is to have virtual machines inside the EC2 instances in your VPC, and use this to filter traffic through a separate virtual machine.

Still, it's unnecessarily complicated and as you say, a resolved issue now. :) The new features announced fits PCI needs quite well. I haven't looked into the IDS issue you mentioned in your first post yet, but I hope it's possible to resolve somehow or get around with compensating controls.

(Disclaimer: I'm no PCI DSS expert, just an unlucky engineer trying to make a compliant system.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I work at Amazon (not on AWS). I must say, the frequency that new features are rolled out impresses even me.

Congrats on shipping, guys.

<comment><USER4> Completely agree. The AWS team is one of the very few examples of rapid iteration and improvement from a big company.

I'm as interested in the AWS team as I am in any startup that exists today. I'd love to read about the tech challenges/team make up, etc. Is there any good coverage of this?

<comment><USER13> Yes, would definitely be interesting to find out how they maintain the quality and release so often. Would be a good data point to see if they use any of the agile processes and any tweaks they have done to make it work for them.

<comment><USER9> It's a bit old, but still relevant: <http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/85/bezos_2.html>

_If Bezos's personality is decidedly noncorporate, so are some of his ideas about how to run a large organization. One of Bezos's more memorable behind- the-scenes moments came during an off-site retreat, says Risher. "People were saying that groups needed to communicate more. Jeff got up and said, 'No, communication is terrible!' " The pronouncement shocked his managers. But Bezos pursued his idea of a decentralized, disentangled company where small groups can innovate and test their visions independently of everyone else. He came up with the notion of the "two-pizza team": If you can't feed a team with two pizzas, it's too large. That limits a task force to five to seven people, depending on their appetites._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was hoping that this would finally be a way to have an ELB inside a firewall, but alas VPC doesn't support ELBs yet.

      AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon
      Elastic MapReduce, Amazon Relational Database Service
      (Amazon RDS) are not available for use in a VPC at
      this time.

<http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/#legal>

<comment><USER15> Good point. They seem to target the last leg(enterprise) of cloud shift with this. Pretty awesome to see how they are churning features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I just came to tell I love Amazon EC2, it's a treat to use.

</comment><comment><USER17> any clues if broadcast / multicast will be allowed on my private subnets? The article makes no claims one way or another...

<comment><USER18> It's not supported: <http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/faqs/#R4>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What about IPv6?

</comment><comment><USER20> Any word on performance properties of various network topologies. What topology would provide absolute maximum network performance between instances?</comment>


Steven Sinofsky to Leave Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20121112/breaking-windows-head-steven-sinofsky-to-leave-microsoft/ <comment><USER2> This is a stunning development and most of MSFT is probably in shock right now.

It's hard to overstate the scope and influence Sinofsky had at MSFT. This was a man widely expected to be the next CEO and he had impact way outside his organization (the 'Sinofsky-ization of teams').

Also, his stock was rising inside MSFT (when you stay inside the company long enough, you can sense which executives are in trouble and which ones are going up).

This is a unexpected move which is going to change Microsoft at a deep level.

<comment><USER3> He was always polarizing and that his stock was rising is equally contentious, IMO. Windows 8 was late, Surface seems to be underwhelming and his inability to be a real team player are all likely factors here, as is his rumored disagreement with Ballmer (though I had Ballmer on the losing end of that one).

You're right that this will change Microsoft at a deep level, but I think odds are good that it's a change for the better.

Personally, Sinofsky was one of the biggest reasons I left Microsoft. He was willing to ditch potentially game-changing products/features spanning multiple industries because it didn't align with his idea of software engineering, which was more suited for boxed software like Office than for rapidly deploying services. He didn't/doesn't get services - he's a boxed software guy at his core. All the Office Live stuff happened after he left Office - arguably he should have seen it coming and been ahead of the game while he was running Office.

<comment><USER4> I don't get this point. Windows 8 is probably the most connected windows ever. The store, Skydrive ads, all are driven by services behind the OS. I don't think that Sinofsky opposed or didn't get services.

<comment><USER3> And Windows 7 had none of the services that it should. It's 2012, don't you think it's a bit late already?

<comment><USER5> Probably because Microsoft was deathly afraid of being accused of "bundling".

<comment><USER6> This mirrors my experience with MS. The DOJ case had long-lived and wide- ranging effects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ouch.

I never worked in one of Sinofski's orgs, but I know quite a few people who did. I got the impression that a lot of old timers and under-performers disliked him. Most of the people that I really respected liked him. From my perspective, that's the best kind of "divisive figure" to have.

Maybe he pushed too hard...

<comment><USER8> I did work in a Sinofsky org. I was an individual contributor and didn't have a flashy title. What I saw was a man that maintained a sizable gap between reputation/rhetoric and reality. The man who supposedly cleaned up Windows did so largely by taking credit for the work of COSD, which he didn't run. For all he would amusedly repeat the phrase "don't ship the org chart", we pretty much ... shipped the org chart. During the big re-org he seemed very precise about getting a fixed number of reports on each team and having a constant tree height in all parts of the org chart, but during the (overly long) planning phase and during development he never seems to have asked the right questions of the folks doing the Modern UI or WinRT, such as "dude, what the fuck are you building?", or "does this shit make sense?" He empowered what is in the end a very dopey PM organization. He and his people would also veto stuff if it depended on non-Sinofsky divisions. He was also a staunch advocate of not doing things right the first time, and letting it become someone else's problem in a future release.

I also recall he wrote in a blog post that it should be expected that people in their early 20s work unreasonably long hours and have no social life, and that expectation was clear if you looked at the rank and file of many important teams: lots of kids right out of college doing the work that you'd expect someone more experienced to have some role in, or at least mentor; I saw a fair number of regressions and crappy features result from this approach.

Years ago some commenter on the "Mini Microsoft" blog called him "The George W. Bush of Microsoft". I tend to agree.

<comment><USER9> You are exactly wrong on what Sinofsky said about work/life balance.

From [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/techtalk/archive/2005/11/16/493549.a...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/techtalk/archive/2005/11/16/493549.aspx)

"The only thing I would say is that anyone who tells you how cool it is to pull all-nighters on commercial software or anyone who says "I live at the office" and means it, is really someone I would not want checking code into my project. To be blunt, there is no way you can do quality work if you do not give your brain a break. Since the 1940's people have been studying the quality of work people are capable of without the proper sleep, change in environment, and exercise. There are reasons why even back during Apollo moon missions they forced the astronauts to sleep and not run on adrenaline. So working at Microsoft does not push the limits like this--it is not good for you, not good for business, and not good for the customers paying you for your software. If a company is driving you to work crazy hours like this, either because you want to or they want you to, it is just uncool."

<comment><USER8> It's been some years since I read it so perhaps my memory is hazy. This is the part I found most objectionable:

> In other words, no matter how many hours you are officially supposed to work > when you are new you will put in a lot more to get those projects done. That > is ok. No, that is expected because you are going through the learning > phase. Your learning is not happening on a practice field but is happing in > the big show. So the extra hours and effort are worth it to you and the > team.

Then later:

> Microsoft will feel a lot like college in terms of the hours you put in and > the environment you work in. It will be fun. It will mean late nights. It > will mean "hanging out". All of those same things. That was my experience > and when I look around I see the same thing happening now.

Even though your excerpt makes what I would call a more correct point, I still think the above is uncool. Reading it several years ago put me off severely and coming back to it I still think he was wrong to put it that way, even if he partially redeems himself later. I read it as "it's OK and good for low- paid college grads to overwork themselves, but later you won't want to do that."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is really really sad. Everyone must be very disappointed (Especially mini-microsoft).

And the new head is a PM..heading windows engineering.

More on Julie from Mary Jo:

[1]"Larson-Green applied to Microsoft right after she got her business management degree from Western Washington University, only to be told no. But she did land a job at desktop-publishing-software maker Aldus working on the product support call lines.

Microsoft "discovered" Larson-Green after a few Softies attended a talk she gave comparing Microsoft compilers to Borland compilers and asked her to run a Visual C++ focus group for the company. In 1993, she ended up landing a job on the Visual C++ team, where focused on the integrated development environment. She moved to the Internet Explorer team (where she worked on the user experience for IE 3.0 and 4.0) and then, in 1997, to the Office team to work on FrontPage, where she got her first group program manager job. She also did a stint on the SharePoint Team Services team, back when SharePoint was known as "Office.Net.""

[1][http://www.zdnet.com/who-is-julie-larson-green-meet-the- new-...](http://www.zdnet.com/who-is-julie-larson-green-meet-the-new-head-of- windows-7000007292/)

Looks like the beginning of the end to me.

On a conspiracy note, is Ballmer kicking out all his potential competitors?

<comment><USER11> The PM role is not at all about finance or marketing. PMs at Microsoft are expected to be technically competent and depending where they're stationed, may regularly contribute code. Julie Larson-Green is noted for her expertise in UI/UX. If anything, this exemplifies a shift to focusing on the end-user.

<comment><USER12> > _"PMs at Microsoft are expected to be technically competent"_

That has most certainly not been my experience with Microsoft PMs when I lived in Seattle. There were _more_ than a few who had zero experience writing code in-industry, and many who I wouldn't trust with a product at all.

<comment><USER13> My experiences with PMs were universally good; these are people who would look at ideas in-the-baking and find ways to improve them, run interference for a number of projects, put together decision-guiding research, and generally somehow manage to bring things together.

There are bad apples in every bunch. The reason MSFT has so many PMs is not that they are under-competent; I suspect it has a lot more to do with the fact that it is a large organization that is often unable to silo teams from each other effectively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _Sinofsky, though seen as highly talented, was viewed at the top levels as not the kind of team player that the company was looking for._

Dear lord. This sounds like something from Office Space. What exactly is the kind of "team player" the company is looking for?

<comment><USER15> I don't know. I found out the hard way that being too good a "team player" will hurt you. People would just shove work to you or to your team. Or take resources from you in the guise of good for the team.

One time in a prior company, an important database/server was under my team's responsibility. Another team needed processing power and asked to borrow some capacity before they ordered their own hardware. Being a team player I agreed since it's good for the company. But over time their processing had huge impact on my tasks and caused performance problems. When I asked them to migrate out, it's always a low priority item, for whatever reason, budget, schedule, or whatever excuses. It took a year to kick them out. I got so fed up that I've contemplated to set up firewall rule to deny access from their machines.

Did people remember I being a team player and helped the other team and the company overall? No, they remembered my server was failing SLA due to poor performance since it's under my responsibility.

<comment><USER16> >>Did people remember I being a team player and helped the other team and the company overall?

Screwed if you do, and screwed if you don't.

Generally happens in companies where people don't have what it takes to own things up. Keep shifting blame on people until they take responsibility, take credit for wins. But when there is a failure conveniently announce if wasn't your responsibility at the first place. And if they don't take responsibility name them as bad team players.

The game is set to use you and throw you. You can only lose in such a game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Good riddance. I left the company because I didn't want to deal with his idea of an ideal organization. I figured he was a shoe-in for CEO and it was just time until everyone was under him. Unfortunately I think he leaves a large trail behind him- too many lower-level people saw no chance to escape his way of doing things other than to leave the company.

<comment><USER18> Could you please elaborate on why you did not agree with him on his organization plans?

I read his blog posts on their website and always thought he was technical and bearer of change.

<comment><USER13> There are a great many people in the world who are technical and generally disagreeable.

Similarly, not all change is good change.

Organizational changes in the Windows org increased fan-out and forced managers to take up additional roles, and also decreased leadership opportunities in the org. The changes were in theory supposed to be better for the leaf contributor (now you're only X steps from CEO!), but in reality, having opportunities for growth is probably much more important than having two fewer people between you and the top.

<comment><USER7> > having opportunities for growth is probably much more important than having > two fewer people between you and the top

What a silly antiquated notion. You want a promotion? Start a company. Poof: You're CEO. Just like that. The only growth going on in an organization which uses titles and head counts to signify career progress is a cancerous growth.

Sinofski's approach to organizational design pissed off underperforming people at the top and talented people at the bottom. As a (I'd like to think) talented employee, I quit. As an investor, I'd have backed a Sinofski run Microsoft. His model kept middle tier people making middle tier products. That's what Microsoft has become and it's going to be far easier and more successful to embrace than, than it would be to try to please everybody.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Surface RT selling modestly due to limited distribution and poor reviews for RT itself.

The hardware seems solid (I finally tried one tonight with both covers), but popping into the Desktop ruins the experience for people who only want Metro. (Me, I want full Win 8, so it matters a bit less to me... but breaking the Metro experience is still jarring.)

OTOH, although I've heard of Metro app numbers increasing, there's clearly a lonnnng way yet to go for it.

If all this is being pinned on Sinofsky, it's very short-sighted on Ballmer's part. With the legacy restrictions he had to deal with, I think Sinfosky did a very good job for a 1.0 product and the promise is there.

<comment><USER20> From what I understand, Surface RT has been completely sold out for a week or two now at all the Microsoft stores. Not sure what that means though...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> CNET did an excellent write up on Sinofsky just last month [http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57536905-75/steven- sinofsk...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57536905-75/steven-sinofsky- microsofts-controversial-mr-windows-8/)

</comment><comment><USER22> I worked for Microsoft for 4 years - this is a HUGE surprise to me. Most of the people I know who worked in his orgs were proud to work under his direction.

I thought he would replace Balmer eventually.

</comment><comment><USER23> [http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-next-ceo-of- microsof...](http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-next-ceo-of-microsoft- steven-sinofsky-is-the-heir-apparent-2012-2)

Sinofsky was just too popular? Ballmer's CEO position is not sacrosanct. Some internal guy being a prominent public figure is the biggest risk for him i guess.

<comment><USER23> A few guys from minimsft suggested that Ballmer picked someone else for CEO and that's why Sinfosky left.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Interesting. Sinofsky was, along with J Allard, supposed to be one of the product visionaries capable of filling the gap Gates left. When Allard left, and Microsoft put its weight behind the "unified Windows" approach instead of the Courier concept, it was thought that Sinofsky "won".

Now it appears they both lost.

<comment><USER25> No one ever considered Sinofsky a product visionary. He just picked people he trusted. J is another story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I always thought that Sinofsky was a driving force behind some of the changes that preceded Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. This comes as a great surprise to me and I hesitate to think who would be in a good position to follow him (and ultimately who would fill Ballmer's shoes in the company).

<comment><USER27> One of the comments in the linked article suggests that this could mean that the surface is selling much worse as expected. There might be some truth in this.

As Steve Jobs has said: "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering."

<comment><USER4> Or selling too well and causing the Microsoft partners to make some noise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Canonical should grab him for Ubuntu. Even if he was only there for a year, it would be a great transition for him. If things didn't work out, he could always just say the company wasn't ready for him.

However, if it worked, Ubuntu could take over Windows for the enterprise in only a few years. Now is the time to strike while the iron is hot.

Of course, they couldn't pay him all that much but the upside is tremendous.

</comment><comment><USER21> Here's Sinofsky's letter to employees on his departure [http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/windows-leadership- changes...](http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/windows-leadership-changes- part-2)

He states that it was a personal decision to leave now, disputing the rumors that he was fired. Although offcourse that doesn't mean he wasn't being pushed.

<comment><USER29> come on , that's always personal ... that's called PR ! dont you think he has a contract that forces him to keep his mouth shut ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> "Nobody wants to be dubbed the future king while the current king is still on the throne. It's the quickest way to the dungeon."

Read more: [http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-next-ceo-of- microsof...](http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-next-ceo-of-microsoft- steven-sinofsky-is-the-heir-apparent-2012-2#ixzz2C4fOqBTv)

</comment><comment><USER31> This is quite a surprise. As someone who worked on Windows for five years after undergrad and catching the tail end of Vista, people were thrilled when he was brought on board for Windows 7.

As a low level peon, I respected how he could get the org to ship on time. I think he'll be missed.

</comment><comment><USER32> I am not sure what that means at the moment but he was a strong man in the company so that he even prevented Xbox and Windows Phone divisions to develop an OS other than Windows. He was also being called as the next CEO of the company. I am not sure if that has anything to do with Win8. He was working at the company since 1989. (I was born in that year)

</comment><comment><USER33> Ballmer reminds of Stalin - remove the smart guys around you, so he does not feel threatened. Okay, that's quite an overstatement, but it feels that way to me.

</comment><comment><USER34> Along with the departure of Ray Ozzie (thank goodness!), this actually makes Cringely's suggestion -- <http://www.cringely.com/2012/10/28/steve-ballmers- dilemma/> tl;dr that Microsoft simply milk its cash cow for as long as it can and then turn into an investment fund -- seem like it may actually happen.

<comment><USER35> That would be a very good option for the ppl holding MS shares, but can do insane amount of damage to the IT industry - monetizing all those patents without fear of losing reputation among developers, students, etc. and without having to worry about new products being affected by other people patents. Team up with the super-corrupted music/movie/TV industry to make non-DRM devices and OSes illegal by bribing politicians.

<comment><USER34> I'm not clear how this would do any damage that MS won't do as part of pursuing some other course. Does anyone doubt that they're going to milk their cash cows while pursuing (say) the mobile market?

<comment><USER35> Patents have bad reputation with the tech community, which means that if now MS presses hard Linux and other products it will have trouble hiring good devs later. But if they just support and milk their existing products they don't need good devs so much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I can't help but wonder if Forstall (Apple) and Sinofsky (MS) are two men who would have been strong, maybe even visionary leaders had they been allowed to reach the position of CEO at either company. I tend to feel that Jobs only made CEO because he had also been founder and ex-CEO, and had a certain cachet from that.

<comment><USER37> Pretty difficult to be the CEO of a tech company without founding it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I hope this means that they start doing more .NET again, instead of going back to COM.

<comment><USER39> I hope so as well, the WinRT API is stripped bare. I was shocked to see how much of .NET's functionality they didn't port over to WinRT.

<comment><USER8> I'll agree that WinRT is not complete, but that's hardly COM's fault. The real story is that they thought they could replace decades of development platform evolution in a 3 year development cycle. And even in that 3 years, they didn't think things through very well, or make many attempts to learn from history. With that I would disagree that it's a good/bad, .NET/COM axis. Many programmers are productive with Win32 and COM in ways that they are not with WinRT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> "Andy Rubin is sweating right now." — @llsethj

<comment><USER41> I don't really get the joke. Care to explain? :)

<comment><USER42> Forstall and Sinofsky were both running the OS for Apple and MSFT, respectively. Andy Rubin runs Android at Google.

<comment><USER43> Sounds like Rubin is in a very good position to renegotiate his contract.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Reading between the lines here - for him to be fired, it must indicate that signs are pointing that Win 8 will be a dud release, similar to Vista. Sigh.

<comment><USER44> Vista wasn't a dud. It was mostly seen as a failure because a lot of incompatible software (mainly POORLY written software, but MS is probably partly to blame for that), and a few UX changes that forced to people to be a little more responsible (UAC).

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I think the message here from Forstall and Sinofsky is no matter how talented you are, if you're a dick it will come back and bite you.

Being smart and nice will get you further than just being smart.

</comment><comment><USER46> I predict the Start button will make a return.

<comment><USER47> I guess consumer pressure on Microsoft tech support after Win8 release is above any limits. Lack of Start button, no easy way to shutdown PC, full- screen interface with no way of knowning which app is active and without easy way to switch them - all of these ones combined make up a perfect techsupport disaster. I wonder how large is average return rate of Windows 8 devices?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> If Sinofsky turns out to be in Cupertino tomorrow, then it would complete the recent drama.

<comment><USER49> If Forstall was let go for not getting along with others then I doubt Sinofsky will be spotted in Cupertino.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Scott Guthrie for CEO!!!!

</comment><comment><USER51> I soo wish the firms would give out more than boilerplate in such cases. If only we knew the actual reason... Now we're forced to speculate.

</comment><comment><USER52> If this means less or no more Metro in Windows 9, that seems like great news to me.

<comment><USER53> I can't believe Sinofsky was behind Metro. I expect more "Metro" now, not less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> its so sad. it's clear that nobody can save Microsoft from Ballmer now that the ONE guy that can actually execute is gone.

</comment><comment><USER55> I know the reaction for Windows 8 and the Surface has been trepid but I would've thought he would have been safe given his pedigree within Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER56> Anyone think Microsoft will be announcing Scott Forstall joining the company next? Sort of like the Marissa Meyer announcement for Yahoo?

<comment><USER29> would be great !

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Wait, Apple fired their top software guy and MSFT's top software guy leaves. Why does this sound like Sinofsky is heading to Apple?

<comment><USER58> I doubt if he will go to apple. He must be bound by non-compete agreements.

<comment><USER43> That just means a six month vacation. Plenty of folks bounce around between the big cos.

<comment><USER59> The Microsoft employment contract has a one year non-compete clause. Microsoft has shown that it is willing to enforce non-competes and it is easy to do so under Washington State law.

<comment><USER60> That's why you file in California.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> it's enough to extract one final post from minimsft [http://minimsft.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/a-microsoft- without-...](http://minimsft.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/a-microsoft-without- sinofsky.html)

</comment><comment><USER62> I hate Microsoft. I hate politics. I hate Microsoft politics twice as much.

</comment><comment><USER63> I was expecting Ballmer to be fired (for his last statement on Surface sales being modest) rather than Sinofsky. Maybe the sales are actually modest and Sinofsky is somehow responsible?

</comment><comment><USER64> So I've always wondered what happens to you as a human when you're effectively fired from a high level, high visibility position. How does Sinofsky feel right now, emotionally? How does he feel professionally? Is this something someone shakes off as differences between opinionated guys in an organization? Or is this something that rocks him to his core? Does he go for another job right away? Or does he write a book and retire?

I have absolutely no perspective on this issue and often wonder what it's like.

<comment><USER65> Scott McNealy would occasionally send a note of congratulations on a promotion, typically he would say "One step up, one step closer to the door." That was of course figuratively true, and in the case of building 4 at Sun also literally true since the executive offices were right next to an employee entrance :-)

As others have noted departures at this level are always much more nuanced than simply "this was bad" or "this was good." None of the departures where I was pretty close to the departee and the situation were 'unexpected' in the sense that their course had a way point which usually pointed 'up' or 'out'.

So think about your own career, think about what you want to do, what mark you want to make on the world, what things are you passionate about. Sometimes a company changes direction, from market forces or personnel changes and the company and the individual become less aligned. Its always possible to see if you can bring the company back toward alignment, it's also possible to see the cost or probability of that happening.

In my own experience I was a VP level technical contributor at a company during the dot.com boom. I arrived as part of an acquisition which was pushed by the CTO of that company who had a vision for a richer services oriented IP connectivity solution for multi-tenant buildings. A series of missteps, some poor 'chemistry' between the executive team, and a general collapse of the DSL market, made it clear that even though I had an employment contract with these folks, the place they were going (back to their 'roots' as a wiring solution) wasn't a place I would find very interesting. I talked with the CEO, we looked at all the options, and both agreed that the 'right' answer was going to be for me to leave. That didn't particularly bother me, because the parting wasn't really a reflection on my ability or non-ability, things had changed I had a choice, I chose not to follow that change.

Contrasting that for when I left Sun (certainly not as senior level as that) where I had poured a lot of energy into the product that would become Java with visions of building really strong capability based systems and light weight task specific operating systems, only to realize that Sun 'corporate' had decided that Java was the battering ram to try and deflect the Microsoft Juggernaut of Windows/NT and a growing Enterprise presence. I was _really_ pissed off. I talked to Scott about it, Eric Schmidt (CTO at the time), and James Gosling. To their credit everyone was very supportive of my passion but in the end the company gets to decide what they are going to do with your work product, and I could not get Sun Labs to sponsor my secure version of Java and while I felt e-commerce was going to define the killer App, realistically in 1995 I was about 7 years too early to that particular party. So, just about 3 months shy of getting my 10 year pin/clock/whatever I stormed out. Emotionally I felt pretty liberated, feeling like Sun was too clueless trying to protect their enterprise accounts to see the low hanging fruit right above them.

The only place I have felt truly bad about leaving was Google, not because I was leaving, it was clear to me that Google and I had incompatible goals, but because I felt like I had failed the folks who were fighting the good fight and I left them there to suffer. The path to success there was pretty clearly laid out for those who looked for it, but the cost for me was high, too high.

<comment><USER16> Gripping read. Its really rare to read battle ground stories especially from people who have already 'been there' on the ground.

Its really great of you to stand up to what you believe and go that way. I think that's the reason why you are the VP of blekko now.

Any advice to young folks like us, who dream to make it big some day?

P.S: Read your HN profile just today, although i've been reading your comments and replying to them for a while on HN. But that's the beauty of HN isn't it?

<comment><USER65> Thanks for the compliments, I've found that advice tends to be situational and so hard to transfer generically.

I am a firm believer though in three fairly general things; follow your passion so that you don't find yourself regretting today what you didn't do yesterday, seek out contrary views to help you understand your own ideas, and choose not to take things personally. Doing that won't necessarily make you popular or successful but they will let you stay centered and happy with yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> it only means one thing :

Surface / WindowsRT / Windows8 = "big failure".

Not so long ago , he was seen as the next Microsoft boss , but firing him wont solve Microsoft problems , Ballmer is the problem.

<comment><USER66> EXACTLY.. i called this some months ago when i saw him trying to convince developers of APPs that Windows 8 in desktop PCs are just like any other tablet consumer and will buy apps. Which is not true.. Good he's out.. Now Ballmer has top leave as well. Surface should be launched all around the world in all stores to developers see any penny coming from the Store. Instead they did that freaky show in New York with just a few Surfaces while Apple threw a big launch for iPad mini selling over 4 millions in a weekend. Surface could sell that much IF microsoft made it available in all stores. GO Ballmer!

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Am I the only one who has never heard of this guy?

<comment><USER68> Not at all, I expect my parents have never heard of him either.</comment></comment>


Emscripten/HTML integration tips - <AUTHOR> http://floooh.github.io/2017/02/22/emsc-html.html <comment><USER2> I wonder when webassembly will define some general purpose interface to tie into the DOM.

I understand that's on the roadmap, but not high priority.

Edit: No help with a prediction on when, but a bit of the "how": [https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/GC.md](https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/GC.md)

<comment><USER3> I've been wondering this myself, so thanks for the link. Looks like it lives under the label: "Proposals we might consider in the future".

I've been building a [super early/experimental] rust frontend framework ([https://github.com/anowell/quasar](https://github.com/anowell/quasar)), and going through Javascript to manipulate the DOM is the cause of plenty of frustrations and limitations, so I'll be keeping an eye on this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > First, let's discard the HTML5 Fullscreen API, it sounds great at first > since it provides a fullscreen canvas without any browser window chrome. In > reality it is quite useless however, since fullscreen mode must be activated > from an input handler, and even then a warning is printed which has a > different look and feel on each browser. The kicker is though that the > Fullscreen API isn't supported on iOS Safari (last I checked).

In my own WebGL applications, I support the HTML Fullscreen API, with a shim on iOS that cheats the data that indicates the call succeeded. Since the majority of people are not-iOS (i.e. desktop-of-any-OS or Android), there's no reason for them to receive a shitty experience just because Apple can't be arsed to implement web standards.

> Emscripten's soft fullscreen ... only has one downside: when activated, it > hides all other HTML elements on the page, so it can't be used together with > an HTML UI which should hover on top of the WebGL canvas.

For this among a few reasons, I'm also trying to get rid of all of my HTML UI elements. I have a few buttons left for triggering fullscreen mode, but they will soon be gone. The initial setup is harder--it's so easy to just drop in a new HTML element--but maintaining a consistent look and feel across platforms is easier if you are using only one graphics toolkit. It also makes spinning up new projects a little easier, as again, only one UI toolkit with which to bother.

> emscripten_get_element_css_size()

The documentation on this function ([https://kripken.github.io/emscripten- site/docs/api_reference...](https://kripken.github.io/emscripten- site/docs/api_reference/html5.h.html#c.emscripten_get_element_css_size)) doesn't specify what units it returns. Does it return system-pixel values, or CSS-pixel values? I'm assuming from the name it's CSS-pixels. You have to multiply them by devicePixelRatio (a property on the Window object, looks like there is a function: [https://kripken.github.io/emscripten- site/docs/api_reference...](https://kripken.github.io/emscripten- site/docs/api_reference/emscripten.h.html#c.emscripten_get_device_pixel_ratio)) to get system-pixel values. It will vary between devices, but on many smartphones your canvas is going to be only 1/3rd the native resolution. It will also be off if the user has zoomed their UI with ctrl+mouse wheel, or if they are running a HighDPI display.

Addendum: I'm curious to know how this function works: [https://kripken.github.io/emscripten- site/docs/api_reference...](https://kripken.github.io/emscripten- site/docs/api_reference/emscripten.h.html#c.emscripten_hide_mouse). Is it using the Pointer Lock API, or is it just setting the Canvas element's cursor CSS property to "none"? Pointer Lock isn't available on iOS, Android, or Internet Explorer, but 'cursor: none;' won't let you--for example--mouse around in a 360 circle in an FPS. Given the existence of this function ([https://kripken.github.io/emscripten- site/docs/api_reference...](https://kripken.github.io/emscripten- site/docs/api_reference/html5.h.html#c.emscripten_request_pointerlock)), I would assume it means that emscripten_hide_mouse is just setting the cursor property.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the hint about the device pixel ratio, I haven't thought of that (although it's 'accidentally alright' if on HighDPI devices rendering doesn't happen at full resolution since the GPUs often don't have enough fillrate).

The function implementations are fairly easy to find in the emscripten SDK, e.g.:

emscripten_get_element_css_size(): [1]

emscripten_hide_mouse(): [2]

It's also very easy to inject your own JS 'inline' into C/C++ in case the standard functions don't quite do the right thing with EM_ASM: [3]

[1] [https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/blob/6dc4ac5f9e4d8484e...](https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/blob/6dc4ac5f9e4d8484e273e4dcc554f809738cedd6/src/library_html5.js#L1905)

[2] [https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/blob/6dc4ac5f9e4d8484e...](https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/blob/6dc4ac5f9e4d8484e273e4dcc554f809738cedd6/src/library_browser.js#L1300)

[3] [https://kripken.github.io/emscripten- site/docs/porting/conne...](https://kripken.github.io/emscripten- site/docs/porting/connecting_cpp_and_javascript/Interacting-with- code.html#calling-javascript-from-c-c)</comment></comment>


A study confirms every suspicion you ever had about high-school dating - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2274570 <comment><USER2> Mass media headlines seem more like The Onion every day.</comment>


Biz Stone On Twitter's Cozy Relationship With the State Department - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/06/biz-stone-isnt-so-sure-about-twitters-cozy-relationship-with-the-state-department/241179/ <comment><USER2> The name of the game is interaction and isolation.</comment>


Ask HN: HN community access by invite only? - <AUTHOR> What are your thoughts? <comment><USER2> I think lobsters is like that. I'm not really a fan. Controls like elevating user privileges for long time or trustworthy members is a better experience. I just bought upvote.dev and that's my plan for it.

</comment><comment><USER3> post me an invite please</comment>


Do you think "Uber for Complex Services" will work? - <AUTHOR> Complex services mean, engagements that involve several people and parameters, and takes more time to complete.  Say for example, A house construction, custom software development etc <comment><USER2> Part of Uber's success is efficient engagement. Service delivery consists mostly of the actual service, driving. Service requests consist mostly of the actual service, riding.

Another part of Uber's success is ubiquity of need and capability. Many people need to get from one place to another much of the time. Many people are capable of driving someone from one place to another without assistance.

House construction and custom software development have neither of these features. At any given time, there are no people with an _immediate_ need. There are very few people capable of providing the service without assistance. The engagement periods are months or years.</comment>


MIT Police officer shot dead - <AUTHOR>

It is now reported that MIT officer has been shot dead near Stata center.
Boston has always been a safe place, specially MIT campus with such great MIT police. Hope things are normal in Boston soon.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/campus-shooting-officer-killed-0419.html <comment><AUTHOR> CAPTURED !!! Finally the hunt is over

Thanks to the authorities. I am sure Boston will be as safe a place as it was earlier. Boston is a Home to prestigious MIT and Harvard, along with more than 60 other universities. Vibrant Boston area is full of students and workers from all over the world and I am sure very soon it will revive its charm as lively safe place

John Lennon said "give peace a chance"!</comment>


Sprint CEO: Rate Plans Will Move From Minutes To Gigabytes - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/03/24/sprint-ceo-rate-plans-will-move-from-minutes-to-gigabytes/

<comment><USER2> No one thinks in gigabytes, or kilowatts for that matter.</comment>


A9.What about this Search Engine?  - <AUTHOR> http://a9.com/

<comment><USER2> What about it? It's more cluttered than Google, takes longer to load, and only lets me search e-commerce sites.

It seems like restricting my search options while making the user experience worse is not a recipe for success.

A9 has been around for a while, and I haven't heard any convincing reasons to use it.</comment>


Show HN: Just launched the CashBase (personal finance) Android app - <AUTHOR>

CashBase (http://www.cashbasehq.com/) is personal finance software made simple. We have a web app, an iPhone app (http://www.cashbasehq.com/iphone/) and, starting today, an Android app: http://www.cashbasehq.com/android/<p>What do you think? <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://www.cashbasehq.com/android/></comment>


Apple now requires games with loot boxes to disclose odds - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2017/12/21/16805674/apple-loot-box-app-store-games-odds-probability-disclosure <comment><AUTHOR> This will be a massive change and regulation for free to play game companies in the US. Still not clear what form this will take, but it will impact thousands of games and many of the top grossing from Machine Zone, Kabam, WB, Supercell, etc.</comment>