Foursquare, Tinder, and dating - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/foursquare-direct/foursquare-is-inventing-the-future-of-dating-with-tinder-f4fde5e031ae <comment><USER2> "Tinder Places is built on Foursquare's proprietary Pilgrim technology, and delivers new potential matches through the lens of location."

This is perfect for those people for whom neither Foursquare nor Tinder is independently enough of a privacy suck.</comment>


Arne Duncan, U.S. Education Secretary on Xbox: "Not a fan. No, absolutely not." - <AUTHOR> http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/09/will_obamas_schools_chief_buy_his_kids_an_xbox_360_absolutely_not.html

<comment><USER2> Not surprised. No, absolutely not. I am locked in an epic struggle with my 11 year old to get him to take his homework seriously instead of playing video games all day. It's been a years-long familial Battle of Ypres; trench warfare, heavy losses, hazy strategic objectives.

We are relatively attentive parents. In many areas, most parents can't be this attentive; they're working multiple jobs. It's hard to imagine that the children of multiple-shift parents who have Xboxes _wouldn't_ be suffering in school.

I'm glad my son has games to play; for one thing, you'd be at a social disadvantage in 2010 not to. But it absolutely does create a drag on schoolwork.

<comment><USER3> As a game designer, when I look at this problem, I don't see kids being distracted away from something worthwhile by something pointless, but rather kids being distracted away from something _boring_ by something _fun_. The thing is, there is nothing _intrinsically_ boring about the subjects taught in school--rather, the boredom is _created_ by the linear, contextless, no- immediate-feedback method of batched homework questions.

Really, there needs to be game design thinking put into the design of homework and projects--either as a separate editorial step after the creation of the actual academic content, or, better yet, done by the teachers themselves, made capable by having taken courses in game design (psychology, applied economics, and UI design, mostly) as part of their own schooling.

<comment><USER4> Ah, how I wish it were that easy. Yes, school assignments and homework could (and should) be made more fun and engaging but the reality is that life is chock full of linear, contextless, boring, repetitive tasks with no-immediate- feedback _that must get done_. I'm not saying it _should_ be this way, or that homework should be shitty to prepare kids for reality, or that kids should be adults at 11, or that adults shouldn't have fun and eliminate every bit of useless dreck from their lives that they can. I'm not saying any of that. I _am_ saying that sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and get shit done, no matter how unpleasant. That habit seems to often be learned at an early age. The most unproductive people I know still haven't figured it out, and instead go watch TV or play video games. And then wonder why they haven't accomplished much at 40.

<comment><USER3> I am assuming you are implying that the real purpose of school, then, is to teach kids to "grit [their] teeth and get shit done, no matter how unpleasant." In other words, to teach kids self-control. Reminds me of Robin Hanson: <http://www.overcomingbias.com/tag/academia>

<comment><USER4> Actually, I _specifically_ said that's NOT what I was saying. I _do_ think that there's a lot of stuff that should be taught in school that will never be as engaging as a well-made video game. It's just the nature of reality.

<comment><USER3> There's a difference between what you _want_ to communicate, and what the words you type end up actually implying. I understand that you said "I'm not saying that [...] homework should be shitty to prepare kids for reality"—but saying that there are shitty things that should be taught, because that _is_ reality, is the same idea behind a different facade.

We live in a socially-constructed reality. There are laws of physics and biology that say how the world around us acts, but really, _we_ get to decide how _we_ act, and make the rules for human behavior. If you entitle a group to an idea, make them think it is perfectly deserved—even if their own elders can't give them that thing—then, when they grow up, they will give the generation coming after them the opportunity they never had.

Entitle children to the idea of human rights and, having grown, they will not own slaves, and free those passed down to them. Entitle children to game- designed work, and, having grown, they will believe that game design has a place in I/O psychology, and that any organizational consultant worth hiring will need to optimize for fun.

Now, you might rebut with "but what about those laws of physics and biology you mentioned? Surely they necessitate some form of un-fun?" The interesting thing about that is, evolution has made sure that all the things we have to do to survive and reproduce _are_ fun already.

* Running (and hunting, catching, killing), and exploring (and gathering, washing, preparing, and cooking) are both fun.

* Having sex is fun (think about how arduous procreation would be if evolution didn't make us think otherwise!)

* Being creative (telling stories, doodling, humming a melody to oneself) is fun.

* Competing and collaborating are both fun.

* Inventing and using tools is fun, as any programmer would tell you.

* Understanding why things work the way they do is fun (and funny! Laughing is the basic response to a sudden realization that makes you dump cache and re-parse a narrative.)

Other examples abound—the only things that _aren't_ fun are the things we force ourselves to do to live in this strange, post-agricultural lifestyle—commuting, being "objectively evaluated", producing things that disappear into an aether and for which one never receives feedback from the people on the receiving end... we're not going to change this process from the end-side. School beats people down and makes them accept this kind of life, and thus they won't bother to change it once they get there, even if it could be better. We need to entitle these new people, to make them angry that they aren't getting something because it doesn't exist yet, so that when they get the power to do something about it, they will.

<comment><USER4> Your examples of fun seem terribly biased. I notice you didn't mention agriculture, which is probably a more common source of food for most of human history than hunting (maybe not, I'm no anthropologist). Like a lot of other things on your list, I imagine that agriculture is "fun" pretty seldomly, but mostly just hard work that is often quite dull and boring. You might get some deep satisfaction out of them, but I get satisfaction out of doing many things that are hard and non-fun at first. Your list feels very cherry-picked.

Sorry, I just don't see any way that an objective observer would look at the whole of human existence and conclude that evolution has optimized everything we need to do for survival and reproduction so they're _fun_!

<comment><USER5> This. Without massive automation, agriculture is such a merciless ordeal that people actually prefer migrating to work in sweatshops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> American students on busy work, shitty teachers, the tied hands of the non- shitty teachers, teaching to tests, promoting attention to apathetic and failing students at the expense of the ones who excel and care, inability to get any kind of credit for learning about things interesting to them that aren't on the district's curriculum, and not explaining to them how anything being taught to them is supposed to impact their lives: "Not a fan. No, absolutely not."

Video games are a formidable player in the war for childrens' attention, but they're not going anywhere, so making them a scapegoat when you can't get rid of them isn't going to help anything. Even if we eradicated them from the face of the earth, something else would take their place.

The goal shouldn't be to erase the distractions that the world provides or pretend they don't exist, it should be to learn how to deal with them.

</comment><comment><USER7> I recently told my five year old, that once he can pick up any of the books we have in his room, and read it, that I will buy him a game console. I was thinking I would get him an XBox, since MS Research has a program that let's kids build their own games, and without their knowing, learn to program. Maybe I should rethink this offer and hedge some.

<comment><USER8> Well, just slip a copy of _Ulysses_ into his room. That should buy you until he goes to college.

Seriously, though, there's no way to avoid this battle. I haven't got any magic wisdom on how to win, but our culture is incredibly wealthy, the temptation to consume rather than learn is always going to be there and the temptations are only going to get worse, and the need to learn how to resist those temptations is only getting more acute. If it's not video games it will be TV or movies, if not that then books, if not that than online social media, if not that then something else. The only way to dodge the problem is to become a modern-day hermit.

<comment><USER4> _If it's not video games it will be TV or movies, if not that then books, if not that than online social media, if not that then something else._

I've argued the point before that video games, TV, movies, books, social media, etc. can all have equal value and merit, but I'm not sure I really believe it. It seems rational, but something about reading books or Hacker News just _feels_ more valuable than anything I've seen on TV. Maybe I'm watching the wrong stuff.

<comment><USER8> I would argue they _can_ have equal merit, and correspondingly, they _can_ have equal worthlessness as well. It really isn't the medium, per se.

For the record I'm a parent, but my kid is 2 and there's one in the oven, so like I said, no great font of wisdom, I've just been pondering the problem. But I do observe that one problem is that there is probably an unavoidable phase of consumption of "childish things". I played a lot of video games as a kid, but you know, I turned out alright, and looking back I can not honestly say that I would be in a very different place if I had instead been doing "worthwhile" things. In the excellent Hardy Boys story today on HN, adults go back and read their beloved books of their youth and discover they are tripe. Is there necessarily a way around that? I'd be surprised. You can't become a person of taste and discrimination without acquiring taste and discrimination and that necessarily entails a period during which you do not have taste and discrimination. Is there _anybody_ who does not essentially "fritter away" their childhood? (Yes, but not very many, and even fewer of them do it by their own choice.) Do we not often feel sorry for those who have been forced to "not fritter" away their childhood, do we not often feel sorry for the 15 year old forced to play piano four hours a day, even if it produces spectacular results? Am I the only one who looks at the top-level gymnasts and feel a bit sorry for them?

But that's just more questions, not answers. I'm not convinced anyone really has answers. Who can _prove_ that playing a lot of video games is actually a bad thing? People mostly just assume it without proof.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is pretty depressing. There have been so many studies as of late regarding all the benefits of playing video games(in moderation).</comment>


Systems Languages: An Experience Report - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@sargun/systems-languages-an-experience-report-d008b2b12628 <comment><USER2> It would be interesting to hear his take on Zig, which I would say (after only reading about it) is sitting somewhere between c and rust, leaning towards c.</comment>


Helpful article on consulting? - <AUTHOR>

I remember coming across a really helpful guide to starting a consulting business here. Except I read it while my friend was driving and didn't save the link. Could someone point me to the article? Thanks. <comment><USER2> <http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/be-consultant.html> Might be this one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perfect. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Actually, I have loved Firefox awesome-bar ... I remember reading the article, so just typing word 'consult' into the bar got me the URL! Though it may be hard to find - if you went to too many articles with 'consult' in its title.</comment>


Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/us/insurance-site-seen-needing-weeks-to-fix.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0 <comment><USER3> I suspect that as unbelievable as this sounds, it might actually be true. There must be a ton of "repeated code" to handle all of the different states and rules. I'm guessing that they started with one huge bloated "template" and then wrote automatic code generation systems that just copied _everything_ hundreds or even thousands of times.

They could very well now find themselves in a position where it is humanly impossible to untangle it all and make even the smallest changes. I'm calling it failed at this point.

Edit: Title was changed from: _Healthcare.gov "contains about 500 million lines of software code"_. This comment reflects this fact which seems unbelievable, but if true, I feel would likely mean that it was mostly created by code generators that probably copied and ossified original errors and misconceptions to the point that it is no longer possible to fix. Its a total failure, the money is gone, but they'll keep throwing even more after it, until the tiny, disjointed systems they develop in the mean time as "temporary solutions" eventually become the "real" system.

</comment><comment><USER4> > On Monday, Mr. Obama will host a Rose Garden event with people who have > successfully enrolled in the health care exchanges.

It's great that they can all fit in the Rose Garden!

<comment><USER5> I'm pretty sure they'd all fit in my basement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's a staggering amount of code. Nearly unbelievable. To put that in perspective, Windows XP was 45 million lines of code[0].

[0] [https://m.facebook.com/windows/posts/155741344475532](https://m.facebook.com/windows/posts/155741344475532)

<comment><USER7> My guess is they're counting code from existing packages used to create the site.

So for example, if they used Java, that line count is including the lines of code found in the JDK.

I see no other way of getting to such a large number.

<comment><USER8> What was the site written in?

<comment><USER9> Assembly, to protect your privacy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Pretty sure that is a direct rectal extraction number not a real number. If there were 500 million lines of code you would have a prima facie case for fraud on the part of the contractor since government contractors are required to use best industry practices and no industry practice supports 10x code expansion.

<comment><USER11> That's just not true. Contractors are only required to deliver what they proposed and the government agreed to.

<comment><USER10> Is it possible its different for DoD contractors? I ask because Lockheed in Sunnyvale took some heat (I believe a fine and a restriction on being able to bid on contracts for a period of time) for failing to use 'established industry practice' in the testing and delivery of what ever it was they were delivered. My neighbor at the time worked for them and recounted the gruesome (or in this case non-standard) details. I never really thought to question whether or not it was actually written that way, it just made sense that it would be. When I was with Intel and Intel was building milspec 8080s there were a list of standards that had to be met and all of the test equipment was calibrated based on that as well. Seemed like a pretty natural part of the government contracting business.

So you're saying that Contractors are under no obligation to meet standards? Or just that this contractor would be exempted? Or perhaps software in general would be exempted?

( Apparently NIST is involved somewhat : [http://www.informationweek.com/government/enterprise- applica...](http://www.informationweek.com/government/enterprise- applications/nist-updates-software-testing-tool/228200651) )

<comment><USER12> Contractors can certainly be under an obligation to meet standards, particularly when this is specified in the contract. However, there is no ISO standard that says "a program shall not reach five hundred million lines of code even if you include all the autogenerated XML and suchlike".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've said this before. The fact that these people (government and it's contractors) are going to have and handle our most intimate information AND that the IRS is also in the loop scares the living daylights out of me. The level of incompetence being revealed here is almost without description.

To go all the way up to opening day, have these problems and then offer that five million lines of code need to be redone is, well, I'm at a loss for words. I am trying to think about how badly one could fuck up five million lines of, say, Python. That's a lot of code. It's almost like saying that you set out to write a portal for the ACA and mistakenly wrote an navigation system for a new spacecraft.

In many ways this is great. I can't think of a better example of how bad big government can be and often is. It is hard to argue with what is unfolding before our very eyes: An attempt at centralized control that succeeded on the legislative front but is failing miserably in execution due to nothing less than incompetence at all levels. And, to boot, it is costing hundreds of millions and will probably cost billions if it doesn't implode under it's own mess.

Look at this in sharp contrast with what I happen to think would have been a far better approach: Free market decentralized healthcare. All they had to do is open interstate borders to launch all available companies into competition and slowly open other gates in order to promote free and open competition. Yes, judicious regulations would have been required here and there, but always with the goal of having an ecosystem that is as free as reasonably possible.

In this scenario at worst the government would launch a open-source projects to develop open and well-debated APIs for publishing and sharing all pertinent information. Various sites could then connect to any available insurance company through these standard API's in order to gather, present and sell insurance to anyone. Instead of having a badly executed centralized attempt to develop a portal you'd have thousands of entrepreneurs jump into the fray for an opportunity to offer the best possible services. Very soon the best-in- breed services would rise to the top and continually evolve better and better offerings.

Cheaper, faster, better. All three.

Instead we got this shit.

<comment><USER14> > It is hard to argue with what is unfolding before our very eyes

What we are seeing right now (~.5B waste) is a drop in the bucket compared to waste in the US system as compared to socialized systems. We pay ~2x as much for comparable health care (per person per mean PPP-adjusted GDP/capita) [1]. That is about 250b/yr we are spending on a (more closely) free market system that keeps promising to be more efficient than its social counterparts and keeps failing to deliver, or even deliver in the same ballpark. I realize that HN is a site about code, but it's important to keep some perspective here. $500M (itself an inflated figure) is 0.2% of $250b. If it is hard to ague against $500M of waste, it surely must be nearly impossible to argue against $250b of yearly, recurring waste, no? How do you ignore these figures?!

If you're going to argue that our system makes up the difference with better outcomes, I want to see numbers. I happen to know that they don't support this argument, but I want you to do the search so that you can't dismiss my sources by assuming they were cherry-picked.

> I happen to think ... Free market decentralized healthcare ... would have > been a far better approach

Of course, $250b/yr includes the cost of providing care as well as administration. Perhaps administration of a free market system is more efficient? Not when you compare the US (31% administrative overhead) to Canada (16.7%) or the UK (6%) [2], [3]. This isn't a surprising result, either: I recently listed 7 reasons why exchanges should be more efficient than current individual plans [4] and you can add the profit margin and advertising costs to that list to come up with 9 advantages a single-payer system would have over a free market health care system.

Markets are good at optimizing things that can be quantified, so perhaps a better comparison would be between medicare and private insurance (not overall administration, just the insurance part). Again, the government systems come out ahead: Medicare overhead is 3.6%, Canada's insurance-related overhead is 1.3%, and overhead among private US insurers is 11.7% [2].

> Cheaper, faster, better. All three.

[citation needed]

See [5] for a more complete overview of the pro-single-payer argument and a truckload of reputably-sourced studies and comparisons (as opposed to hand- wavey promises) to back it up.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_heal...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_%28PPP%29_per_capita)

[2] [http://www.pnhp.org/single_payer_resources/administrative_wa...](http://www.pnhp.org/single_payer_resources/administrative_waste_consumes_31_percent_of_health_spending.php)

[3] [http://nhsrationing.org/tag/administrative- costs/](http://nhsrationing.org/tag/administrative-costs/)

[4] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6582753](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6582753)

[5] [http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single-payer- resources](http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single-payer-resources)

<comment><USER13> >> Cheaper, faster, better. All three. > [citation needed]

Lookup the history of laser eye surgery over the last, say, ten years.

Free markets work. That's irrefutable. The problem is we've never had a free market system when it comes to medicine.

<comment><USER14> You're cherry picking: laser eye surgery has effective competition, elastic demand, no information asymmetry, and it is priced well within the annual (even monthly) earning potential of most Americans. It's a service that I would expect the free market to be able to provide efficiently and it does not surprise me that it succeeds. The free market is very good at optimizing value creation under certain circumstances and it's great that laser eye surgery matches up with those requirements.

Unfortunately, when it comes to policy we do not get to cherry-pick the conditions under which the rest of the system operates, and the other parts of the health care market run under conditions that demonstrably throw the free market for a loop (hence the system-level failures vs socialized systems I pointed out above). Cancer treatments cannot be paid for out of most people's savings. "Customers" do not always have the chance to shop around between providers (w/o insurance) and those that do use insurance experience a 99% deleveraging effect because only the 1% that have extraordinary costs are in a position to examine the value of what they bought. Do you have a proposed mechanism of breaking information asymmetries, re-leveraging disproportionately expensive consumers, and standardizing the coverage provided by free market plans? Do you have a way of pricing the 5 externalities I listed into the insurance providers' budgets? Has your proposal been implemented in a dozen other countries and proven to be comparatively cost effective for decades?

What is your answer to the figures that show that our system in aggregate is 2-10x less efficient than comparable social systems?

Anybody can cherry pick a counterexample. Anybody can speculatively extrapolate it out to a convenient conclusion. But the single-payer advocates can point to a mountain of directly relevant apples-to-apples evidence regarding the industry as a whole that does not require extrapolating across markets or cherry picking conditions / good years. To me, it appears to be a mountain of evidence vs a pebble. Do you really think the the implicit strength of extrapolation from the (very) special case of laser eye surgery carries weight against these empirical apples-to-apples comparisons?

<comment><USER15> In abstract terms, I would say single payer systems could (and should) work well. It sounds nice to me on paper.

I think an issue is that America has a system of government that lacks a long- term focus. Every 4 to 8 years, we get a new 40-100 year agenda. This leads to tinkering with these social programs and the original goals can get lost, muddled.

That, and our government is not structured very well to deliver services with a largely unaccountable bureaucracy overseen by a divided and paralyzed government. Our government in the process of failing to deliver a service right here (with the exchanges at healthcare.gov).

I could see single payer systems working well elsewhere. In the states, I think it would be implemented badly at 10x the cost. Just my opinion, but I think we should try developing a competitive market for healthcare and reduce government regulation in it and see how that goes. Then, when that flops, we can try out socialized medicine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sounds like a load of crap to me. Seriously, 500 million lines of code? I bet not even mission-critical code written to power NASA spacecraft and satellites are anywhere near that length.

I propose they give the project to the HN community, divide up the $400 million figure amongst the participants and give us a weekend and I bet we'll have more to show than that of the so-called developers the government hired.

I am not underestimating the complexity of such a site, but seriously, it's not like it hasn't been done elsewhere to a degree. if I can do Internet banking, the a site for providing healthcare can be built a lot easier. They're both of similar scale and security requirements I would imagine.

This site seems like the greatest scam ever perpetuated. I bet the contractors are laughing themselves to the bank literally as we speak. Even though it's bad publicity, money is a higher priority than credibility for some businesses out there it would seem. Is it any wonder people don't trust the government? They can't even hire competent people to build them a website. This seems to be a recurring theme for local councils and governments elsewhere as well, so it's not just the US this is happening.

People need to get mad about this. That's $400 million dollars that could have been invested elsewhere like medical research, charities, food programs, rehabilitation for the homeless... A $400 million mistake has been made, and another $400 million will probably be spent before it's even ready.

What a waste of money.

<comment><USER17> While I completely agree with you in general, a nit pick:

> I bet not even mission-critical code written to power NASA spacecraft and > satellites are anywhere near that length.

That doesn't seem like a good example. You want to keep the code in those kinds of things to a minimum, and that's probably not too hard.

<comment><USER18> It's best to keep the code in everything to the minimum!

<comment><USER19> > It's best to keep the code in everything to the minimum!

Optimizing for readability is usually most important.

Readability is usually more important than reusability, in fact, although readability very often enables reusability.

But we're talking about mission-critical embedded code, which is a special case in many respects. Still, making it as readable as possible makes bugs easier to find.

<comment><USER17> Thanks for saying this... it needs to be said far more often.

I wish there were a book about how to READ software. (If anyone knows of one, please speak up.)

One tip I picked up on my own over time is when you're looking at an unfamiliar project, don't read the code like a book, read it like a program. In other words, try to find main() and trace how things work from the bottom up, rather than trying to understand it based on how the authors have broken up the code into directories. I don't know yet whether this is truly good advice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder what languages it focuses on. I haven't heard.

I find some of it amusing - I've worked on some enterprise-level projects with business systems talking to other business systems, and I can only imagine how much eye-rolling is going on among the programmers that are actually trying to do the work. This is a project where some very visible, loud people have a vested interest in it looking bad even if it were flawless.

I actually think it would be kind of fun to be close enough to the technology to really identify the core constraints and be in a position to help alleviate them.

<comment><USER21> The sad thing is that the site being bad _should be_ really tangential to the politics. I personally would love to see outright socialized healthcare, where everyone was mandatorally enrolled in a government created program. I feel like we'd have the most leverage to bring costs down under a centralized and non-profit system. However, this system being as broken as it is - and costing as much as it has - did nothing to help that cause, even though it should be tangential to it. Very frustrating.

<comment><USER22> I guess you can't see how giving the government even more power of life and death over its subjects can be anything but political?

Certainly the U.K. NHS experience shows the running of such a system is political. I don't watch it closely, but as I understand it Tony Blair/New Labour doubled spending, but somehow functionaries and bureaucrats got the new money, not the front line people and institutions.

You think we can have anything less than a totally political discussion about euthanasia, most recently known as the Liverpool Care Pathway in the NHS?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Again the argument that Government paid for code must be released under an Open License - all of the speculation and questions here would get wiped out by a simple git push from the right contractor.

And we could more fruitfully spend our time contributing to the automated test pack.

</comment><comment><USER24> There's no way that's true.

No possible way. For a website. Did they write their own operating system from scratch? And database?

<comment><USER25> It's definitely a lot worse than that.

500 million lines of code would represent nearly every line of code that has ever gone into all shipped Microsoft software spanning 37 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I understand this website is probably more complex than your average website, but I would put money -- a lot of money -- on it being nowhere near 500 million lines.

<comment><USER27> Yeah it's got to be off by at least 3 orders of magnitude. 500K LOC might be industry standard bloat, but it should be doable in 50K if you hire good programmers.

But 500M is not credible, unless you are doing things like counting auto- generated code and open source libraries. Even then, you would have to be using 100,000 open source libraries to get near 500M LOC :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> While 500 million sounds really far fetched, this is the point at which projects explode with bloat and repeated code:

> the separately designed databases and pieces of software from 55 contractors > work together.

Factor in dealing with the multitude of state laws and companies they are interacting with, and you have a recipe for problems.

A lot of armchair quarterback technologists, but not a lot of precedent to compare computerizing a healthcare system in this way to.

</comment><comment><USER29> > According to one specialist, the Web site contains about 500 million lines > of software code.

> One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may > need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly.

Oh, so only 1%!

Tangentially, why are so few quotes in this article sourced? I see no reason why they shouldn't be. It's all throughout the article... They keep quoting "specialists."

<comment><USER12> In something this loaded with politics, I wouldn't imagine anyone involved would think it a good career move to have their names attached to bad news quoted in the press?

<comment><USER22> The only people I've seen willing to go on the record have been:

"Stan Z. Soloway, president and CEO of the trade association that represents hundreds of government service companies" who parsed the contracts and independently confirmed that there's no prime integrator (i.e. the HHS CMMS is doing/failing that job, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6569042](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6569042)).

One or more big insurance company CEOs; they're the ones who have to deal with the gubble the backend is delivering to them.

Various mostly bloviating politicians like John McCain.

Even yesterday's HHS blog posting ([http://www.hhs.gov/digitalstrategy/blog/2013/10/making- healt...](http://www.hhs.gov/digitalstrategy/blog/2013/10/making-healthcare- gov-better.html?post=yes)) is unsigned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Let's be clear: This number could not be accurate, even if it included the line counts of licensed code (SDK's, database engines, etc.). The article failed to even cite its source, beyond saying that "one specialist" said this.

The NYT is a left-leaning publication. This seems to be a transparent attempt to try to soften the blow to the Obama administration's image by saying that implementing healthcare.gov was a Herculean task that no one could have gotten right on the first try because it required a half billion lines of code. It's no coincidence that this article emerged the day before Obama himself plans a press conference on this very issue.

</comment><comment><USER31> My own conspiracy theory: XML "code" got included, even the stuff that is unambiguously data. This may or may not include HTML templates (possibly machine-generated) and the data files for each individual health care plan. This is the result either of naive use of a line-counting utility, or a miscommunication between technical and non-technical folk, or both.

</comment><comment><USER32> "One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly."

Yikes! I don't think these "experts" are going to be fixing this anytime soon.

<comment><USER21> The sad part is that it sounds like they're already being paid to do so - <USER2> were quoted as being Federal Contractors.

We really need a public peer review system for technical contracting of government projects. This is getting insane. These schmucks fleeced 500 million from our government ( _us_ ) for a barely functioning website, and now some snake oil contractors are going to come in to "fix it" and fleece us for even more.

<comment><USER22> Given the obviously appalling management "these schmucks" were subjected to, per the article " _In the last 10 months alone, government documents show, officials modified hardware and software requirements for the exchange seven times._ ", plus our hearing from multiple sources that there were getting change orders through the beginning of the week per launch, can you honestly say they fleeced us?

I can't imagine any way the contractors could have delivered a working system under the constraints we've been hearing, including most especially the unqualified Federal HHS CMMS government bureaucrats taking upon themselves the role of integrator of the 50+ parts of this system.

For that matter many people at all levels of this have been waving red flags, which the people running the show have studiously ignored. I mean, you _know_ someone told them "you've got to freeze the requirements and give the programmers some time to get the job finished", not to mention "it needs more than one week of testing"....

Some of the remedial steps we're hearing about, like monitors for system bottlenecks, sound to me like things the integrator should have made part of the system from the beginning....

<comment><USER21> You have a good point. Now that I've slept on this article, I feel a bit more balanced about it. The sticker shock wore off, and I do feel like many of your points are valid now that I'm feeling more rational about the subject.

I feel like I did underestimate the potential costs of this software. How much, I couldn't say, but thinking about it this morning I realized that they probably had to integrate with the systems of (every|many) major existing healthcare provider in the country to actually make this work as desired. I can see now where that wouldn't be cheap.

Is it 500 million expensive? I'm not sure I'm qualified to make that assessment, and now that the initial shock has worn off I'm feeling okay with that. I'd need to see more data - particularly, the balance sheets for the project - before I could say for certain whether the cost was justified. I'd be interested to see that data, but as it stands I'll settle for chilling out about it unless more information comes out along those lines.

<comment><USER22> At a very raw level, given how late in the game it was before the programmers were able to get started (obviously not their fault when CMS (sic, should be CMMS but isn't') took on the integrator role), obviously the project is going to copiously burn money. Pity the other constraints caused it burn quality (going by the old "pick two of time, money and quality").

" _but thinking about it this morning I realized that they probably had to integrate with the systems of (every|many) major existing healthcare provider in the country to actually make this work as desired. I can see now where that wouldn 't be cheap._"

Actually, that's one part that shouldn't have been expensive for the government, except in support services. As in they should have standard, sane input formats for policy details and output for enrollees that any participating insurer could adapt their systems to. IT _must_ be a core competency for a successful insurer, since everything? they do aside from marketing is IT mediated.

There's been some reported troubles with getting the policy details right, although I think what I heard was about one or more state exchanges---with guaranteed issue and community rating it's rather more simple than normal, but then again a customer's FICO score can and I gather generally/always is used in the pricing. At the other end the insurers aren't reporting trouble in getting and parsing the data, just in it being self-evidently incorrect, e.g. some customers being reported as enrolling and canceling several times. Which they're addressing, while the volume is so low, by calling them up (everyone wants to complete the circle anyway).

On the other hand, you know it took a while for everyone to hammer out those formats, especially the input one. The output should be pretty simple, just needs to have all the particulars correct. E.g it would be a bad sign if an insurer was getting people enrolled in a policy they didn't offer.

<comment><USER21> I feel that this integration effort is probably exactly where most of the expense came from. There's more to it, of course, but I can see where that one part was probably the large heap of their troubles.

I was not thinking rationally about this whole issue when it first came up and thus didn't measure my previous experience when I was thinking about the issue, but I actually have worked with healthcare systems integration before. Even with all government inefficiency/management aside (we were a private company), interfacing with healthcare providers is an extremely complicated and painful business.

For instance, there is a HIPAA standard interface protocol for things like Eligibility and Benefits and Claim Submission, and most (though still not all!) health care plans have some sort of system through which you can interface for that information - though often it's hidden behind miles of red tape and fundamentally different implementations for various custom fields, and different interpretations of the meaning of many fields. That alone is painful, and that part is supposed to be "standardized".

I can't even imagine the state of healthcare provider's policy estimation systems, particularly when it comes to interfacing with them. It's speculation on my part, but I imagine that each healthcare provider would likely have to have their estimation systems tied into. I wonder how many even had it exposed in such a way at the start of this project that you _could_ tie into it, and how many of them had a wide variety of custom inputs to take into account in their estimating. Though you are right that perhaps the new law allowed/forced them to simplify this estimation process, in which case each of these providers likely had to modify the ruleset of their ancient systems before the integrators could actually work with it. Yeah, I could see even a simplified ruleset for policy pricing and eligibility as being a major factor in slowing down this process.

I certainly wouldn't have wanted to be a software developer on this project, thinking more about how bureaucratic and inefficient both the government and healthcare providers are. I still feel like, even then, 500 million is a dubious number - and I'd like to see where that money went. (how many people were employed on the project and for what cost, what were they being charged for hardware and datacenter(s), etc...) But as a software engineer, I would certainly not have enjoyed working on such a doomed project regardless of whether the money was as well spent as possible or if it was lining the pockets of those further up the chain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Less than 10 million lines of code are required to fly an F-35 -- and that is C++.

Who is the contractor responsible for this? Perhaps the same people responsible for the Ontario EHealth scandal:

[http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ehealth- scandal-a-1b-w...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ehealth- scandal-a-1b-waste-auditor-1.808640)

<comment><USER34> > Perhaps the same people responsible for the Ontario EHealth scandal…

I don't know if you were being facetious, but you're not far off:

[http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/16/mee...](http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/16/meet- cgi-federal-the-company-behind-the-botched-launch-of-healthcare-gov/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> From March of this year:

 _Chao said that he'd once held high hopes that the exchanges would run smoothly from the beginning, but that those hopes had been dashed. "The time for debating about the size of the text on the screen, or the color, or is it a world-class user experience, that's what we used to talk about two years ago," said Chao. "Let's just make sure it's not a third-world experience."_

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/03/22/cms- on-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/03/22/cms-on- obamacares-health-insurance-exchanges-lets-just-make-sure-its-not-a-third- world-experience/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Yeah, after reading that article, I get the very strong feeling that these "federal consultants" are in for a second round of greedy-greedy-grabfest. They're throwing insane sounding numbers out there so that they can justify egregious compensation. Someone needs to call these people out on their bluff, there is no way that this terrible site is even close to the LoC numbers they're throwing out there.

I'm so sick of seeing contractors fleece our government (and by extent, _us_ ) by pulling the wool over the eyes of those who don't know any better and making sweetheart arrangements.

<comment><USER22> Geeze, how many times are you going to make this point in this discussion? See my first reply here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6586603](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6586603)

I point out there's absolutely no way the contractors could have won with the insane management they were under, unqualified CMMS government bureaucrats _doing the integration_ and constantly requiring changes, through the week before launch, some of which is detailed in this article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm having a really hard time believing that figure.

</comment><comment><USER37> Has anyone actually tried to look for health insurance using the site? It's indeed as bad as they say. It's probably the buggiest site I've ever used.

I've tried a dozen times over the span of several weeks, and get to a new impassable failure state each time. I'm literally sent to broken URL's that have variable names "?id=%applicationID%" in the URL instead of the actual value. Sometimes clicking "next" just simply refreshed the page with no new content.

</comment><comment><USER38> Use mobile version to get around the pay-wall: [http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/us/insurance-site- seen-...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/us/insurance-site-seen-needing- weeks-to-fix.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0)

</comment><comment><USER39> ha. I'll bet it's: LoC * Num_servers = 500M

At least, that sounds like a great way to charge gubbmints by LoC.

</comment><comment><USER40> The entirety of the source code available in the debian repositories as of lenny is 324 million lines of code: [source]([http://gsyc.es/~frivas/paper.pdf](http://gsyc.es/~frivas/paper.pdf)).

</comment><comment><USER7> From the page:

 _One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly._

It sounds like they've been doing a little too much coding and not enough designing.

<comment><USER21> Was that specialist in the running for being paid to fix it, and thus was overinflating the estimate so he could get paid a few hundred million to fix it up?

I like the idea of a government healthcare program, I really do. But this website... man, someone lined their pockets on this scam, big time.

<comment><USER22> Not even vaguely a scam, as I reply to you elsewhere in this discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6586603](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6586603)

Unless you want to posit that the contracts were accepted by companies that knew it could not be delivered in the time required. And even then, people are optimistic, and I strongly suspect they didn't think HHS/CMMS would be so insane about the number of changes demanded during the process, going all the way through the week before launch (!!!).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> _One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly._

In comparison:

      Windows 95 had 15 million lines of code.
      Windows 98, 18 million
      Windows XP, 35 million

[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/technology/27soft.html?pag...](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/technology/27soft.html?pagewanted=all)

Luckily they have about 8 weeks.

</comment><comment><USER42> No wonder it doesn't work. It's _very_ unlikely that healthcare.gov is more complex than an OS (such as XP noted by conover in this thread).

</comment><comment><USER43> $400M for 500M lines of code. That's roughly $800/KLoC. I wonder how that compares to any other modern software.

<comment><USER44> $800 pays for roughly one day's worth of work for a senior developer in the US. One thousand lines of working, debugged code (which is presumably what's being paid for) sounds like an awful lot of code for one person to write in a day, if the problem domain has any degree of complexity. Some parts of healthcare.gov could be quite complex, e.g., interfacing to other government systems whose APIs are not well documented.

And I agree with the people who think that 500M lines of code is unlikely. Judging by some of the statistics that were cited in other comments (e.g., "Windows XP was 45 million lines of code"), this may be more lines of code than Microsoft has written since the company was founded (many of the lines of code in XP were originally from NT, etc.).

<comment><USER43> It costs ~$300K for a senior web developer in the US currently?

<comment><USER45> The per-day rate that a company charges is not the same as the salary that person makes. So yes, it costs 300K to hire a contractor full time. Not only in the US, but on most parts of Europe too.

I feel a bit dirty for having to explain such simple things. All the armchair pundits here are declaring 'how can they screw up a simple website'. Nobody here (except if there are people reading this who actually worked on this project) knows how hard this project is, and how much integration is required. Personally, if somebody had asked me to make a quote for a project this size a year ago, and going on the information we have now, I would have said that it's impossible to build something this big and this complex within a year. Can't be done. IT systems of tax administrations of small countries that do less than this system have cost 10 years to get to a stable, workable state. How can anyone build this within a year?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I... dunno guys. Multiple disparate systems designed by separate government contractors who no doubt pumped up their work estimates tutu get even bigger contracts. Remember this is a $400 mil project. Maybe I spent too long in the government but this doesn't seem unrealistic to me.

</comment><comment><USER47> Who told them to use vanilla php to make everything , 500 million lines of code is an astounding amount of code . Next step put up a disclosure/FOI request for the source code of the healthcare.gov so that we can know what they were writing in there.

<comment><USER48> I doubt you'd get it from an FOIA request. I believe there's an exemption that covers work like this.

<comment><USER49> Right — no one there knows how to edit the database credentials out of the PHP source. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> hahaha what a crock of bull. Probably the same experts that built it were quoted as saying that. Or maybe it is true... when you cut and paste every code snippet from the web and mush it up to create this site it does add up to 500m lines of code..

Anyone have detail on language they used and/or frameworks(s)?

Someone should be held liable for this. They just wasted tax payers money on would be experts and have to spend more tax payers money to fix it. Disaster!

</comment><comment><USER51> they might be exaggerating that by including all of the respective libraries used etc, or just exaggerating in general (like the gvt tends to do)

<comment><USER52> Even if they counted PHP's lines of code, that would only throw on less than a million more lines.

I strongly suspect that somebody is full of shit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> The USPTO should see this as an opportunity to have a mail-in form which would create redundancy and also obscure these problems.

</comment><comment><USER54> Did they do a character count and submitted that as LOC to justify the high costs?..</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone know of a website that uses voice recognition input? - <AUTHOR> I want to make a webpage that when used on a mobile phone, allows the user to control input via voice.
The commands will be simple 1-10 numbers.
I'm looking for anything on the net that does something like this - something actually working that I can try out and speak to.  Does anyone know of something that does something like this? <comment><USER2> [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/p/alexa/9n12z3cctcnz?cid=A4P...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/p/alexa/9n12z3cctcnz?cid=A4PCemail&rtc=1&activetab=pivot:overviewtab)

I got an email about this from Amazon today.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm wanting to add voice recognition to a web page.

<comment><USER2> Oh I'm sorry, I totally misread what you were asking.</comment></comment></comment>


What I learned with Rdio without using Rdio - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/brain-fried/what-i-learned-with-rdio-without-using-rdio-a56b052cca74 <comment><USER2> It will be interesting to see what Rdio users will be doing, sign up for Pandora or jump ship to Spotify.

As an Rdio user myself I'm sad that Rdio will be going away. I hope Pandora will keep it alive but who knows.

I wanted to try out Spotify but when I had to enter my credit card details to create a trail account I closed my browser window, never to return. Call me pedantic..

Still searching for an Rdio substitute though...

<comment><USER3> > I wanted to try out Spotify but when I had to enter my credit card details > to create a trail account I closed my browser window, never to return

Did Rdio not do the same thing?

<comment><USER2> Maybe they did later on, but not when I created an account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if "Walt Street Journal" was intentional, or a happy accident.</comment>


Anatomy of a Bubble – Tesla and Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://endlessmetrics.substack.com/p/anatomy-of-a-bubble-tesla-and-bitcoin <comment><USER2> It's a lengthy article but I didn't learn anything other than the author likes the word "bubble".

The article claims that Tesla valuation is not based on fundamentals but it fails to present any fundamental model.

Here's one model that justifies price target of $600 (i.e. much higher than current $480 price): [https://twitter.com/garyblack00/status/1300540006864486404](https://twitter.com/garyblack00/status/1300540006864486404)

Now, you might disagree with Gary Black's numbers and think that they are too optimistic but at least there are numbers to disagree with.

This article, sadly, lacks any quantitative or qualitative analysis to disagree with. You should probably disregard people who's only argument is shouting "bubble" and comparing anything to bitcoin.

For the past 10 years Tesla has been growing revenue at 50% Compounded Annual Growth Rate.

If they keep growing at 30-50% for the next 5 to 10 years, they'll grow into a valuation that might seem excessive today. That's a very simple and yet more often than not unappreciated math behind compounded growth. Einstein understood it. Warren Buffet understands it. The author of this article doesn't.

<comment><USER3> > If they keep growing at And that's where the falacy is. Nothing keeps > growing forever. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

You don't need great analysis to see that something that has appreciated 131 times in less than a year is a bubble, unless they cured cancer or seriously undersold at their IPO. And no one undersells by that much.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure what it means to count up the number of times a stock has appreciated in a year. A stock with steady, reasonable 2% annual growth could in principle appreciate on every trading day.

<comment><USER5> I think GP means that the stock is worth 113x what it was a year ago, although that seems to be off by a factor of ~10 for Tesla.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tesla may be in a bubble, but this article doesn't provide a compelling argument. See Rob Arnott's analysis on Tesla for a more robust bubble argument that's based on the financials.

Comparing Tesla to Bitcoin is flawed. Tesla is a publicly traded stock that produces products and is subject to financial audits. Bitcoin is completely different and can't be valued like a traditional financial asset. See Robert Shiller's discussion.

Tesla will need to make a lot of profit in the future to justify a $442 billion dollar market cap. They'll need to go from breakeven to making around $66 billion a year (for a P/E ratio of 15).

Jeremy Siegel wrote a great article in 2000 about how tech companies would need to make massive profits to justify their bubble valuations. It's still a great read.

<comment><USER7> The article is not comparing the fundamental valuation of the two assets, it is talking about bubble behavior. Investors caught in a bubble behave the same way, regardless of the asset class. That's why it's a bubble--the fundamentals are ignored and the "greater fool" theory dominates market decisions.

Also, I think it may be a very long time before 15 is considered a "normal" P/E ratio again, if ever. It seems like low interest rates are here to stay.

<comment><USER6> I agree with your viewpoints on bubble behavior. Robert Shiller used "bubble behavior" analyses to predict the 1999 tech bubble and the housing bubble in Irrational Exuberance. His book talks extensively about fundamentals and human psychology. Jeremy Siegel also has performed robust bubble arguments. I'm arguing that the blogs bubble behavior argument is low quality because it doesn't discuss the fundamentals and performs an apple/oranges comparison.

The bubble conclusion might be right. A good bubble argument should demonstrate how the market price has completely detached from fundamentals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Too much attitude, not enough substance in this piece. It does little to actually fulfill the promise of the title in a way that hasn't been done hundreds of times already.

Number go up, so people buy. Number will go down. Don't enter a burning building. Don't try to catch a falling knife.

Yes, we all know that.

Assets go through periods of being overvalued all the time. There's a big difference between that and a bubble.

Nor does the author even mention the main difference between Tesla and Bitcoin. Tesla is a company and there are tested traditions of valuation that generally hold over time such as price to earnings ratio.

Bitcoin has no earnings. It's more like a currency or gold. Therefore, valuation is more challenging, but still possible given some work. Had that work been done, some actionable conclusions might be drawn.

<comment><USER9> Ok how about instead of Bitcoin, we compare it with CSCO ? It was bubble back then and the value never recover.

<comment><USER6> CSCO is a better comparison and Siegel analyzed its valuation back in March 2000: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB952997047343478041](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB952997047343478041)

Someone should use Siegel's thought framework with 2020 tech company numbers.

<comment><USER10> Can someone please post a non paywall link?

<comment><USER11> Here you go: [https://outline.com/UvsHMf](https://outline.com/UvsHMf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> People were calling a Tesla a bubble ever since it was trading at $8/share in 2013. "Who is gonna spend $50k onan electric car?" "Tesla is dependent on subsidies and burning cash!" "GM, Ford, and Nissan have competitors such as the Leaf" etc. These predictions are meaningless, according to exhaustive empirical analysis. They said the same about Facebook in 2013 when it was trading at $33/share. "Buying Instagram for $1 billion was so stupid" "Mobile ads will never work!" "There will be a competitor!" "Just a fad!" etc. They said same about Amazon when it was at $400/share in 2014. "Losing too much money on Prime orders!" "Fake reviews" "Share price too high, not enough profit!" "Stealing from the state (in regard to taxes)" etc. The list goes on and on. For every correct prediction, they get many wrong. If if valuations are high, what these people ignore is that earnings are surging, so that high PE ratio will come falling really fast. For example, Facebook had a PE ratio of 100 in 2012. If I were going to try to predict which companies are most vulnerable to being bubbles, I would look for companies that are not a dominant as Amazon or Tesla, but are small and whose products can be easily substituted for cheaper alternatives. Retail is especially vulnerable to this. But then again, Nike bucked this trend. Bitcoin , unlike Tesla, cannot generate shareholder equity, so in the long-run Bitcoin will always lag equities, as commodities have always done. Bitcoin's price is just a function of supply and demand and has no intrinsic worth. Still long tesla and amazon. Ppl need to stop trying to call the tops of these things. Ain't gonna happen. Loser's game.

</comment><comment><USER13> One thing to remember, Elon will not stop promising impossible things. Why people still believe that [Mexico will pay for the wall] is beyond me.

[http://elonmusk.today/](http://elonmusk.today/)

<comment><USER14> Maybe because Elon has already delivered "impossible things", like economical EVs and landing rocket boosters. That tends to increase one's credibility.

Not saying some things he has promised aren't somewhat a pie in the sky...

<comment><USER15> Tesla cars are far from being economical. A Mitsubishi i-Miev is economical.

<comment><USER16> $35k is the average price of a new car in the US. Bare bones Model 3 gets close to this. The metric has been met even if the frugal and poor complain. That economic cohort can buy a used Tesla in a few years if they can't afford one new, after someone else has paid the depreciation.

Not many are rushing to buy econobox EVs.

<comment><USER17> If you compare the Model 3--which is a sedan--to the median sedan sales, you'll see that the price is about $35k for the cheapest Model 3 versus about ~$20k for most sedans. Of course, these prices also generally exclude trim level upgrades, both on Tesla's side and on the more established carmakers' side.

The more expensive cars being included in "average price of a new car" are going to include pickup trucks, minivans, and SUVs. The equivalent model here is (AIUI) Tesla Model X, whose base price would be about $80k, whose competitors are ranging more around $30k-40k base.

<comment><USER16> You shouldn't be using the X for comparison, but the Y (which is closer to $45k, $55k for the Performance version that puts you close to muscle car territory).

EDIT: (HN Throttled, can't reply, replying here)

I agree there is a premium, but I do not agree it's considerable considering a) people buy a payment and b) we're in a low interest rate environment where people can stretch for a luxury car like a Tesla due to low carrying costs of the auto debt.

Why? [https://youtu.be/XCvwCcEP74Q?t=798](https://youtu.be/XCvwCcEP74Q?t=798) (13:17-14:15 is the relevant time window)

<comment><USER17> Fair enough (I am by no means an expert on the Tesla models), but the general point of Tesla cars having a considerable premium over their comparable market segments does remain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> While I agree with the bubble label, I think the reasoning described in the article is wrong. Since the bond yield inverted earlier this year, investors are looking at anywhere to put their cash for an ROI. And to further fuel the situation, the QE policy of the US treasury (I.e. printing money) has resulted in more cash sloshing around with nowhere to go other than the stock market. These factors are fueling the rise seen in the share market much more than simply "speculative investor sentiment". Like all bubbles, this one will inevitably deflate (hopefully not pop). I do think that these factors have multiplied which in turn has attracted even more investment. I believe that now is a very dangerous time to invest in the share market. A lot of this is speculation. With any luck we can navigate this situation without a crash, though I remain highly skeptical.

<comment><USER19> >this one will inevitably deflate (hopefully not pop)

If the Fed is unwavering enough to keep its new average inflation targeting scheme credible, it should not pop (though things may still cool off at some point).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Another argument for justifying the run up in price is that investors see the promise of TSLA being more than just a car company. The future of the Solar City division means that part of the company can be viewed almost as a utility co. There is a data play too. With an ever growing volume of Teslas on the road, all stocked up with the very latest in sensor technology, the company collects tons of valuable data not just for maps but also for Real time road conditions and traffic. At some point, they may find lucrative ways of monetizing that. Then we look at just the trends for their core product, the cars. The crazy thing that Tesla is doing is turning all other luxury cars into Cadillacs (ie products for old people). They are doing the same thing to Mercedes and BMW that the Apple Watch did to Rolex. If you want to signal that you are part of the new rich, you buy a car that shows off power + environmental friendliness. With the flight out of major cities in the US, Tesla is going to be a pretty popular choice for new car buyers that just landed in the suburbs.

<comment><USER21> Tesla is similar to Netflix/Amazon when everyone knew the future -- TV/shopping would eventually go online and now everyone knows cars will eventually be EVs

The legacy OEMs must allocate their capital to maintain current products/dividends/pensions and have a seat at the EV table in the future. Not as easy as it sounds, especially considering technology creates winner-takes- all situations and cap-ex to participate in battery production at scale appears to be in the 10s of billions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Not sure this article was more than a journal entry for the guy who wrote it, but I will chime in.

Given any anecdote about the economy going down and stock market going up, it is worth noting what is going on with the money supply. There is a huge amount of liquidity being pushed into the USD supply by the fed and treasury. It needs to go somewhere. The (government's) hope is that it will go into hiring/spending and the real economy. Even if that is what happens to the majority of the new money supply (debatable) a large amount will go into financial assets for people who want to preserve their wealth. The expected result (IMO) would be stocks to go up in USD purely because of demand for them. This can alse been seen as inflation or maybe financial asset inflation. The fundamentals of the economy are not good, but the new money has to go somewhere. After paying for living expenses etc, there aren't many places to put it besides the stock market.

A final thought is that if consumer price inflation remains low and financial assets catch all the inflation, the "rich" or invested benefit the most. However, its arguable that financial asset inflation without CPI is a better result for most people vs high CPI and a stock market crash. I would be interested to know if this a framework used by the Fed or just me as a random guy on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER23> Remember, Tesla is more than a car company. They are an energy company and are actively growing their battery manufacturing capability.

Why is that important to remember? With initiatives in the US like the Green New Deal and other various green energy pushes; _there will be a huge demand for grid-connected batteries._ Edit: They (Tesla) has a massively profitable grid-connected battery in Australia that's paired with wind generation.

IMO, Tesla's high price is a _gamble_ that American politics will create a large demand for batteries. But, I wouldn't call it a bubble.

</comment><comment><USER24> Quoting the recent [1] on Tesla's performance on Monday:

> _Today alone, Tesla's market cap soared by $64 billion in eight hours, > including after hours. That's $8 billion in "value created" per hour._

> _In the second quarter, Tesla's total revenues were $6 billion, down by 5.8% > from Q2 last year. Today, its value rose by $8 billion per hour. Over the > past four quarters, Tesla's total revenues were $26 billion. Today, its > value rose by $64 billion._

And the same source on the stock split:

> _The stock split did the job, based on the logic that a five-dollar bill > broken into five ones makes each of those ones suddenly worth $1.16 — or > $1.87 if you start counting since the announcement of the split on August > 11._

And I think this really puts things into perspective:

> _Tesla's shares are now valued at about 20 times annual revenues. [...] In > terms of market cap, this makes Tesla the seventh most valuable US company – > not counting Alibaba._

A car company that sold just 400K cars in its best year is the _seventh most valuable US company_. Unbelievable.

<comment><USER14> > A car company that sold just 400K cars in its best year is the seventh most > valuable US company. Unbelievable.

Similar statements are a staple of what people say about growth companies. Investors seem to think the prospects are way better. Your mileage may vary.

<comment><USER24> And what exactly would those prospects be to justify this valuation?

VW, the third-largest car manufacturer in the world, sold 11 _million_ cars last year (27x Tesla), for ~$280bn revenue (11x Tesla) and ~$19bn profit.

VW made 1 out of 8 of the ~77 million cars sold in 2019.

Tesla's valuation is currently 6x that of VW's. So how exactly are investors picturing Tesla's growth here? To justify this insane evaluation, they'd need to utterly dominate the market by sales, and with an incredible profit margin.

This isn't driven by investors. This is pure speculation.

<comment><USER14> Ask the people who bought the stock. In the end, this is still their bet and many of them believe Tesla stock is _undervalued_ , and they put their money where their mouth is.

They do have more than just the cars. Tesla says they expect their energy to business to eventually surpass the EV one. They have also an insurance company.

I don't have any Tesla stock.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The last part made the most sense about "the ship has sailed" in terms of "buy low sell high" but there's so many sectors to dominate that Tesla is still going for and has a distinct approach/advantage for domination. Where's "high"? idk

</comment><comment><USER26> The fossil fuel economy has enjoyed a psychological bubble: we can trash the atmosphere with whatever we want. Tesla was the ONLY automaker to look at the SCIENCE DENYING bubble and say: maybe we actually need to emit less GHG or our planet is doomed.

Everyone thought they were crazy, that it was a waste of money to emit less garbage into the air, and NO ONE stepped in to compete on EVs. Meanwhile, Tesla were simply following the science, which said we NEED EV's. As the science has progressed, many governments in Europe and some US states have massively pushed toward EV, and early adopters who are also looking at science and the performance of EVs say: I'm rich, Tesla works for me now.

Does Tesla have too high of a valuation? Maybe, but their EV's are years ahead of the competition, so maybe not. Maybe the fault here is with other automakers for completely ignoring EV's for the first decade of Tesla's domination.

</comment><comment><USER27> Interesting choice on one of those charts to truncate the "post-crash Bitcoin" price at end 2018. The price recovered to $10k by mid-2019 and has been relatively stable there since.

</comment><comment><USER28> I saw him mention how the stock market "fully recovered" but I didn't see the word "trillion" "inflation" or "stimulus" anywhere in the article.

</comment><comment><USER29> _For $7,625 invested at the opening offer price, you'd have a million dollars today._

This statement from the article is incorrect and doesn't account for the stock split. Had you invested that much at the opening price you'd actually have closer to $5mil today.

<comment><USER30> [https://youshouldhaveboughtstocks.com/](https://youshouldhaveboughtstocks.com/)

Actually the amount in the article is correct

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> What the author and most people fails to realize is that you can make alot of money in the market with bubbles.

<comment><USER32> Quoting the author: "Riding a bubble is dangerous. It can also be lucrative."

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> One of these things is not like the other.

One is backed by multiple factories producing vehicles, with even more factories coming online in the next year, an entire industry facing "innovator's dilemma" with a petrol & diesels new sales ban coming into force 2030-2035 for most countries.

The other, a virtual commodity not backed by any physical items, issuers or a real economy.

How are they comparable?

<comment><USER34> They're comparable because the value is based on faith/hope in the future, not fundamentals.

The existence of factories is irrelevant if those factories are not spectacularly profitable.

And right now they're barely - not spectacularly - profitable. And the innovator's dilemma applies equally to the rest of the industry, which is already making EVs of its own.

Like everyone else I have no idea if Tesla is a reasonable bet. But it's clear the price today has become completely and irrationally detached from fundamentals to the point where the value _might as well_ be from trading virtual items.

<comment><USER35> Yeah a tulip bulb has some basic real value. You put it into the ground and it grows into a beautiful plant. But is it worth as much as a house in downtown Amsterdam? Certainly not. Tesla is a valuable company, but the current price is totally unjustified.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think there's a crucial difference between TSLA, bitcoin and other "pure" bubbles. I would include The Dotcom in the pure bubble category... definitions are soft therefore debatable. This is IMO.

 _" Stocks _(in a bubble) _can become inflated through mania-fueled narratives - not fundamentals. "_

I disagree on nuance. Narrative often drops off during a pure bubble. Rising prices fuel mania and further rising stock prices. This is a key element of bubbles: feedback. We have a debate about TSLA in 2019. You say it's overpriced. I buy TSLA. I make money. We argue again. It's hard for you to win the argument now.

Bubble narrative tends to get vague as time goes on. Bitcoin's narrative was that it would be a real currency. People would get bitcoin salaries and buy groceries with it. That isn't the narrative anymore.

The dotcom narrative, towards the end, became a vague " _this is just how the economy works now_." The mania was there. The stock prices were there. The narrative itself fell off. Uber is another good example. What's the narrative now?

Tesla has some differences. A "narrative" _is_ actually driving stock prices. Tesla investors are betting on certain things being achieved. They may or may not be achieved, and that will determine whether or not it was a good investment.

Narrative 1 is (at current prices), break-even or less for investors: Tesla will keep its position in the EV market, but the EV market will grow massively.

Narrative 2 is: Self driving is coming soon. Tesla is in position and others are not.

The first half of the narrative is suspect. "Soon" can be a long time. The second half is (IMO), pretty solid. It takes time to make new models of cars. This is the other extreme to software. If all factories switched in one day, it still takes a decade to replace the full fleet. Meanwhile, factories long lead times. Etc.

If the software works and they get a regulatory green light, Tesla immediately controls an existing fleet and all their new cars are immediately self driving. It's a very big lead in a very, very saucy new market.

Now... You can think that's likely or unlikely. But, A Tesla share is really a bet on this narrative/prediction becoming reality. A bitcoin is no longer a bet on any prediction besides future prices.

 _" Sometimes, performance becomes completely untethered to any analyzable fundamentals."_

This is true, but I think it mistakes what these "fundamentals" mean. It's like using BMI to determine if someone is fat. True, on average. Average is good enough for a stock analyst or an insurance actuary concerned with portfolios and populations. For any individual though, the "mirror test" is more accurate than BMI. The fundamentals of any day 1 startup always say "don't buy."

A more fundamental fundamental is (value)=([p]narrative 1)X([$}narrative 1) + ([p]narrative2)X([$}narrative2)

Insert your own probabilities(p) and values and you have your guess at Tesla's "real" value.

Whatever you think of current prices, you have to be extremely bearish to come up with a value that reflect TSLA's current "fundamentals".</comment>


Ask HN: What systems or processes do you use to be a manager/leader? - <AUTHOR> I work at a growing company, and have recently begun promoting individual contributors to managers underneath me. I'm looking for tips on how to be a more effective leader myself, and enable those underneath me to also be.<p>What are the systems, tools, or processes that you've either created or discovered to be an effective leader/manager? <comment><USER2> Systems, tools or processes? I talk to people. Figure out what motivates them, what makes them tick. What they like, what they don't like, what they value. How they work. Their strengths and their flaws. Then adjust based on that.

Few people really know how to do leadership or management anyway (including myself), but by doing the above I think I'm doing better than most, without having read a book or attended a MBA.

</comment><comment><USER3> What I use as a basis for leadership skills is my Army training. I am not joking.</comment>


Citigroup scores a tax break - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/15/AR2009121504534.html?hpid=topnews

<comment><AUTHOR> I still think I need to consider starting a bank....</comment>


Ask HN: Best source of passive income while working on startup? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone have experience of working a job to free up your "sweat" to be allocated to your startup?  Realistically something that takes 2-3 hour a day but generates 50-60% of typical working stiff salary (40-60k). <comment><USER2> Airbnb. Keep a room in your house open, if you live in a desirable neighborhood, and have people rotating through. If you charge high enough you could at least make up your rent and on good months make more. Keep a look out for big events like Outside Lands where there are hundreds of people coming through the city and up your prices.

The easiest way to make extra money is to use the assets you already have, like your house. Even if you don't have a spare room, keep a look out for those weekends and sleep on a friends couch or something. Look into your car and GetAround etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, although it's not easily replicable. I spent a couple of years working remotely as a web grunt. Some weeks were insanely busy, but in general it only took a few hours a day of my time. I was able to do a lot of work on my startup between assignments. The key is to find the right kind of company. You want to be positioned as the technical asset who solves problems, not the person who creates the product being sold. If you're the latter (like a web developer in a marketing agency), then there probably won't be much downtime.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've considered launching a kickstarter for one of my side projects to help pay for my living while I work on my real startup. It seems like it would be extremely time consuming though.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you figure this out let me know... :-)

50-60% of a 40-60K salary is where I am at full time 40+ hours a week.</comment>


The First Rule of Programming: It's Always Your Fault - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001079.html

<comment><USER2> Another similar rule I like to follow is that if a user of your site cant figure out how to do something, it is your fault not theirs

</comment><comment><USER3> That's funny, because I have always had this notion internally (don't blame the tools, look in your code first), but in a recent project it actually _was_ the tool that was broken more often than not. Consider the issue where:

      String s = (String)(vect.remove(vect.size() - 1));

... throws a NullPointerException, where the code:

      Object o = vect.remove(vect.size() - 1);
      String s = (String)o;

... works fine.

Can you spot the bug? No, because there is no good reason for it to fail. There is no good explanation for a bug like that. And, when it's in expensive proprietary enterprise software you can count on support _NOT_ giving half a rat's ass about the problem.

<comment><USER4> Compiler problems suck, because you start wondering if the rest of your code will start failing in weird and wonderful ways once it reaches the customer. I've had a fair share of compiler/system library issues in game development; the console SDKs I've used were unbelievably flaky, all the way from compiler, build system, debugger to system libraries and hardware itself. Not fun. For many people it becomes difficult to maintain the "it's always your code's fault" mantra in that situation.

<comment><USER5> I'll always remember that long night back in 1992 trying to figure out why one of my freshman CS assignments suddenly stopped working when I had finished the features and was just cleaning up the code. It turned out there was a bug in the Sequent Dynix Pascal compiler that caused my program to fail when I deleted a comment. It took me quite a while to figure that out and put the comment back in. :-)

In retrospect it was a valuable lesson. Always use source code control, and check in small changes frequently. That way you can easily roll back in small increments to figure out which change broke something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Agreed. A project I worked on in grad school involved developing a thick client (Swing) for a large corporation. Well, we pushed the envelop with Swing, and it was several times where a bug was actually in Swing, and we had to find a workaround in our code while we waited for Sun to fix it.

But on the flip side, everytime we saw something weird happen, our knee jerk reaction was, "Its a bug in Swing". And our project leader would look at us and say, "Java works". His philosophy there was that if your basic assumption is that the tools you are using are broken, you can never get anything done! Start by assuming you made the mistake, and work away from that point.

<comment><USER7> I did a Swing project soon after Java 1.3 came out and kept finding odd bugs where the behavior of the code directly contradicted the behavior in the JavaDocs. My experience was basically that if you didn't do things exactly as they did in The Java Tutorial, chances are it wouldn't work. Or it'd mostly work, but with weird edge cases when you did something unexpected.

I asked my QA manager about this, and he said that the word on the street was that Java 1.3 was not QA'd. They just made sure that the tutorial worked and pushed it out the door.

I've had similar experiences with Java AJAX frameworks. The basic stuff from Sun (JavaEE, JSF) seems fairly robust, as long as you use it in the intended way. But many of the add-ons like Facelets, A4J, RichFaces, etc. are made by small 2-3 person startups, and they don't QA or document their code at all. Moreover, their code frequently makes functionality in the _base_ JSF layers break (eg. you have to use ui:repeat instead of c:forEach with Facelets, and then you have to use a4j:repeat instead of ui:repeat if you add A4J). Maybe that's changed since they were bought by JBoss, but it's something to keep in mind whenever you use bleeding-edge libraries by small teams.

So I'd amend that: start by assuming you're wrong, but if you can't find anything in your code, look at your dependencies in order of least-used -> most-used. Chances are, software like Python or Apache or Java has been fairly well-exercised, and most of the bugs have been worked out. But there's no reason to believe that JPartTimeOneDeveloperLibrary is any better than code you write yourself, and if you use untested projects like that, you should budget time to look through their source code and debug their problems and send in patches.

Unfortunately, sometimes managers get it into their head that a 3rd-party library is more reliable than it actually is, often because the vendor has the chutzpah to charge a hundred grand for it, and they mandate you use it. This should be considered a bug in your manager, but unfortunately there's no fix for that...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Whenever I run into a frustrating "bug in the compiler" type problem I find it's useful to take a walk or revisit the problem again the following day.

Many times my mistake becomes obvious right away.

<comment><USER9> On rare occasions I still find myself falling into the "I'll get it soon" bug- seeking trap. That evil state can keep you spinning your wheels for hours.

I've a rule to help recognize it: If I start spouting frustrated profanity, I have to step away from the screen for at least an hour. It's amazing how obviously simple the solution is on my return.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am pretty sure that every trainee and junior programmer I have ever mentored has come to me with a "bug in the compiler". I always try and find the gentlest way possible to tell them that it's unlikely that there is a bug and if there was then in all probability their more experienced colleagues would know about it.

Usually however it is a good start point for revisiting the topic of program structure and the tricky question of "state". A quick re-write of the offending routine usually removes the "bug".

</comment><comment><USER11> I live and die by this. I've spent a number of years muttering to myself "It's not the compiler. It's not the compiler." (Though, strictly speaking, these days "It's not the interpreter.")

And then I remember that day that a coworker tracked down a microcode cache- sharing bug on dual processor servers that he notified Intel about.

</comment><comment><USER12> Always? I just returned from fixing a problem. A system call for UDP connection wasn't working. It worked yesterday. I could, however, ping and ssh over the network interface.

I tried an earlier branch. Same problem. After that, I replaced the NIC, rebooted, and everything worked.

Sometimes it really is the hardware/library/compiler/... There was probably a lot more investigation I could have done before going to that level (as the author suggests) but in this case it was most efficient to try replacing the card early and identify/eliminate it as the problem.

</comment><comment><USER13> Remarks from 2 mentors I have never forgotten:

1\. Everything worked fine. You came along and did something. Now it doesn't work. I wonder if it has something to do with what you did.

2\. I seriously doubt that the operating system, which has worked perfectly well for 20 years, suddenly and unexpectedly messed up on the exact same day you arrived.

<comment><USER14> A remark from 1 mentor I have never forgotten:

1\. If you can't think in base-8 you CAN'T be a programmer!

so I set out to write a program that would think in base-8 for me...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think someone's watched A Bug's Life recently.

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


Show HN: Bootstrapped Hosting company - <AUTHOR>

This is some short information of how I bootstrapped my hosting company, pretty much an MVP of a hosting company.
1. Provide MINIMAL/NO support. No technical support is provided, all VPS plans and Web Hosting plans are unmanaged and provide only support on issues with services provided by us (billing, control panel) but nothing inside the VPS unless it is a fault on our end (network misconfiguration).
2. Automated setup. All VPSs are deployed instantly, (à la DigitalOcean) so no humans have to manually deploy them.
END PRODUCT: https://definedcodehosting.com
All payment is automatic via Stripe or Bitpay so the only human maintenance is checking the host node. Which is also automated, thanks Nagios! <comment><USER2> Can you talk a little bit about your metrics or future plans? Looks interesting, would love to know more about how you're competing in this pretty competitive space.

<comment><AUTHOR> We started off with a few servers in the Netherlands and just hosted the Mini NAT only range which took off really well. We've now bought a server in France to start a dedicated IPv4 range. We plan to expand this range into more countries and more places as it grows. Obviously then we will need a few more techs to manage the servers and it would become less bootstrapped.

<comment><USER3> It's interesting to see people using NAT to solve the problem of restricted IPs. It is probably too late for a newcomer to claim an allocation of IPs from RIPE,etc.

Are you considering IPv6 support? Several people are out there offering IPv6-only hosting, (as well as the traditional folk who offer both), which is nice to see.

As a final question how are you planning to detect and deal with spammers, or copyright infringers? Both are drawn to cheap plans..

<comment><AUTHOR> NAT is an interesting solution and we offer 20 ports which helps people still host websites, apps and services on our servers without needing a dedicated IPv4 address (reverse proxy).

We have IPv6 support, you just need to submit a ticket after ordering and we add 20 native IPv6 addresses!

We have a rate limited SMTP port and if people go over this we will give 1 warning, ask for the reason and if it's valid then we will either just let it continue or lift the limit. Repeated offences will have services terminated immediately. Same goes for copyright offences. The resources are fairly small (HDD/SSD, BW) so it is not too hard to detect.

You may be interested (since you appear to offer DNS Hosting) that many of these Mini plans are used as DNS slaves because of their cheap price. An interesting use I've found.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://definedcodehosting.com](https://definedcodehosting.com)</comment>


Announcing Clearbit Connect - <AUTHOR> http://blog.clearbit.com/clearbit-connect/ <comment><USER2> I'm one of the 7000 Connect beta users and would like to say that I'm very happy with it.

Other commenters are comparing this to Rapportive. LinkedIn has discontinued Rapportive and this is an excellent substitute.

So far the hit rate for finding emails has been about 80 - 85% in my experience.

As an aside: I think Clearbit's building a really excellent suite of APIs, and Connect is only the icing on the cake.

<comment><USER3> Has Rapportive been discontinued? It still works for me.

Or do you mean Linkedin no longer work on it?

<comment><USER2> Weird. It has never worked for me, and that seems to be the general consensus on the review of the extension. I'm on Chrome/Mac OSX.

What os/browser are you using?

<comment><USER3> Chrome/OSX 10.11

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone else think it's scary that they are asking everyone on the community plan to share all of their business contacts? ([https://www.dropbox.com/s/uuq96vivlbbrrak/Screenshot%202016-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/uuq96vivlbbrrak/Screenshot%202016-04-07%2014.45.22.png?dl=0))

Definitely stopped me from signing up to give it a try.

<comment><USER5> So sign up for a paid plan? The plugin works well, and at least by being upfront about utilizing your data, you know that there is a sustainable business model behind it, so it will not have to be discontinued or put out to pasture like Rapportive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been using the beta in my gmail for a while and the attention to detail is so amazing.

</comment><comment><USER7> I built a similar tool back in 2010 - for gmail, yahoo mail and hotmail.

It was a browser plugin for Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

I learned a lot about Gmail's DOM (it's highly obfuscated) and how terrible the plugin-writer's experience is for Internet Explorer.

After six months of promotion on peoplesmart.com as an add-on to allow our users to get more information about the people in their email conversations, we had about twenty users total.

The project was scrapped, and I moved on to my next thing.

Perhaps it was just timing. Best of luck!

<comment><USER8> They do provide a very natural way to do it for paid gmail accounts: [https://developers.google.com/gmail/contextual_gadgets](https://developers.google.com/gmail/contextual_gadgets)

Not sure why there's no model to do this for standard gmail accounts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am one of beta users, Clearbit is really nice, it really helps me understand and research companies. Not all of them are covered but when they are, it is super useful.

Also, because they have Alex MacCaw on team, for whom I have great respect as a developer, really makes me enjoy and like this product.

Only thing that I encountered as a problem is that privacy plugins tend to disable it and mess with it running. I whitelisted it a little but it somewhat helped, not completely.

Anyhow, really great product.

</comment><comment><USER10> A product people liked got shut down, so someone else rebuilt it. As a society, we're needlessly duplicating so much effort because we've decided treat software as a private good even though it's non-rivalrous and non- excludable. If we can come up with better ways to fund software, we can end this widespread waste and make progress faster.

<comment><USER11> in the open source community, the same problem occurs the moment that the steward rejects the pull request. So the altruist forks the project and releases it again with a new name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's an api, and the pricing isn't cheap, but I feel like this is going to bring a whole new wave of spam after the initially scraped list gets resold over and over.

You might have an additional revenue stream selling an "opt my email out of this thing" plan.

</comment><comment><USER12> Announcing Rapportive ... again.

</comment><comment><USER13> This will never be as useful as Rapportive without having LinkedIn as a data source. And since LinkedIn owns Rapportive and is probably not keen to share that data with a competitor, I don't see that happening any time soon.

<comment><USER14> I have ran connect side by side with rapportive during the beta and have not noticed any data gaps. There are other sources of data beyond linkedin.</comment></comment>


Scrum, Sprint & User Stories (Takeaways from GA's Product Management Course) - <AUTHOR> http://www.kathyc.co/scrum-waterfall-user-stories/

<comment><USER2> This sounds interesting...but the link is failing...

redirects to: [http://www.kathyc.co/scrum-waterfall-user-stories/wp- admin/i...](http://www.kathyc.co/scrum-waterfall-user-stories/wp- admin/install.php) Chrome: Error 310 (net::ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS): There were too many redirects.

</comment><comment><USER3> oh no! It's up now - sorry about that

try this if you're still interested, thanks: <http://www.kathyc.co/sprint></comment>