SEO is no longer a viable marketing strategy for startups - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.org/2011/03/05/seo-is-no-longer-a-viable-marketing-strategy-for-startups/ <comment><USER2> I strongly disagree with this, and should probably blow up that disagreement into a blog post:

1) SEO is harder today than it was in, say, 2000, just like the App Store is more competitive than it was at launch. That is a long way from non-viable, though. There are recent, high profile, successful startups like Mint or OKCupid where SEO was a core traffic acquisition strategy. (OK, you will not be as good at SEO as OKCupid, but you can be as good at SEO as Mint is. They're in an uber-competitive market and found a spin on it such that the skeeziness in the space worked in their favor, because most people in consumer finance are trying to sell you a credit card and Mint was trying to save you money by, ahem, selling you a credit card.)

2) Links >>>> everything else, with regards to ranking for head keywords. Happily, _startups are in a great position to get links_. BCC has a couple of hundred in five years -- a YC startup can pick up a couple of hundred by _launching_. AirBNB practically has a hundred from PR coverage in the NYT. A single well-executed link bait or viral sensation seeded with your hundreds of linkerati friends can really, really move the needle.

3) You can still dominate large portions the tail of the keyword distribution through superior execution on your content strategy. Is this the tactic for all seasons? No, if you're just doing brand arbitrage against the same 400 New York hotels that _every other person with a phonebook_ has access to, this will not lead to dethroning established competitors. If, on the other hand, you're finding unconquered frontier and settling it, you win by default. Can I give _yet another_ plug for services which do not target twenty-something white and Asian males and, instead, which target the need of underserved demographics? If your primary competition is Demand Media _you should ROFLstomp them_ for most of the keywords you actively target. (And learn from their model for scaling content creation up.)

<comment><USER3> Could you elaborate on why you say OkCupid was very good at SEO? Is it mainly because of their blogposts, or were they doing other things right as well?

<comment><USER2> Google [online dating]. That's why I say they're very good at SEO.

As to why they have that ranking? Well, they do linkbait so well that almost isn't fair to call it linkbait any more. They also do other things. One particular tactic which used to be quite popular in dating is viral quizzes.

<http://www.okcupid.com/the-death-test>

They have toned down the aggressiveness of that tactic in recent years, probably after a different site got torched for it. (Plus you don't have to be quite so aggressive after you've already won -- then you can use self- reinforcing authority and translate your commanding market position into, e.g., a competitive moat like their blog posts.)

They also execute very, very well. For example, it's easy to say "Viral apps win" and it is hard to be Zynga. Similarly, it is easy to say "Get more links and you'll win" and it's hard to top OKCupid's execution on that -- most individual tactics I've seen them try have execution in the top 1%. They're #1 with a bullet at linkbait. Those quizzes are better than 99% of quizzes. Their use of the product to support the SEO is better than 99% of startups. (Humming a few bars: OKCupid has rabid fans amongst folks whose dating behavior results in banhammers at other dating sites, and they _leverage that to the hilt_.)

<comment><USER4> I'm in England and for "online dating" I see:

Sponsored #1: Match.com Sponsored #2: top10bestdatingsites.co.uk Sponsored #3: matchaffinity.com Ranked #1: plentyoffish.com Ranked #2: dating.guardian.co.uk Ranked #3: eharmony.co.uk Ranked #4: mysinglefriend.com Ranked #5: loopylove.com Ranked #6: flirtbox.com

I can't locate okcupid in the first 5 pages (at that point they were all no name sites) this seems strange to me, is ok cupid #1 for you?

<comment><USER5> #2 in Toronto

Guess they rank differently based on geographic location...?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't necessarily disagree for many startups, but his example is poor. The TripAdvisor site is a better result for the reason Google featured it in the SERP--user reviews. Oyster's page is a review by one person versus TripAdvisor's 171 reviews. TripAdvisor's page is also much older, dating back to at least October 2003 when the first review was posted. Oyster was started in June 2009, which is pretty recent in the scheme of things. I'd say they are doing pretty well to rank where they do considering.

FWIW the top results are also all Four Season's actual site, which is what it should be.

SEO is tough in the web app market, but if you're a content based website, SEO was and still is a very viable strategy. Look at Stack Overflow for an example.

<comment><USER7> Might not be the best example - but I think my overall point stands.

<comment><USER8> re: links, have you heard of Mint.com? Check out their infographics as and example of aggressive, but high quality and legit link building. The one they did about 'how big is a trillion?' got hundreds of links. Here's another peice of brilliant link bait: <http://feefighters.com/paypal-calculator>.

If you think only black hat link builders can move the needle, you aren't meeting the right people.

Also, why can't startups just raise money to buy an existing site with inbound links? A domain is just a pointer, and handled properly, there is little downside.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Perhaps a better conclusion would be that: startups should no longer consider SEO a viable __short-term__ marketing strategy.

Sure, the industry has spawned aggressive black-hat SEOs that make "profitable" keywords very competitive. But I feel that a startup that's carving out a niche that's not as cutthroat as "hotels", and more focused than content farms, can still make search engines a significant part of their traffic.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've done a lot of SEO and my experience is that you can get great amounts of traffic if you think creatively and approach things the right way. If you want to gain traffic by ranking well for "music downloads," good luck! If you, however, research the music niche and find 5 keywords with low competition and 20,000 monthly searches, you could easily build good traffic.

One example - I have a health site, and realized that I could write an article on medications when they were officially named - as until then, the name was a closely kept trade secret. This type of trick could lead to gaining traffic over established players like WebMD who were less nimble.

Ultimately, you need SEO, you need great content, you need everything if you want to succeed. But SEO still works very well and still offers plenty of room for people to outmaneuver and perform the big names.

</comment><comment><USER11> I agree that SEO shouldn't be _the_ viable marketing strategy for your start- up. If that's your path to gaining traction in any market that can make you a real amount of money through organic, it's largely already been harvested and/or millions of dollars have been thrown at establishing ranking positions - such as on keywords like "cheap flights" or "car insurance".

However, in subsidiary markets where the volume isn't as large, it's a valid marketing channel for ancillary revenue streams. Much like retargeting or PPC or having a Facebook fan page, in these markets, SEO won't be your _thing_. It will simply be _a_ thing, because the volume is significantly lower and often times, in the "startup" environment, what you're offering isn't necessarily something that people know how to search for.

If your aim is for the long term, throw out the bait and continue building for some long-term keyword like "cheap flights" - but in the seed-investment environment where traction must occur quicker and something positive must be seen _somewhere_ \- trying to achieve such a keyword would be a suicide mission, and as such, would _almost_ make this post an accurate take.

</comment><comment><USER12> I was hoping that he would also lay out the strategies that he DOES consider viable. It's hard to compare SEO and the allegedly superior alternatives without even knowing them.

Because, if there were no superior alternatives to SEO (just for argument's sake, I don't believe that), then SEO would still be a viable marketing strategy, despite its flaws.

<comment><USER13> I would say some alternatives might be: CPC/CPM advertising, getting articles written about your site, lead generation, social sharing, social promotions (think Dropbox), affiliate programs, or just making a product that is so awesome people tell their friends/coworkers about it

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's just silly. Plenty of new sites get significant amounts of traffic from search engines, and figuring how how to do better remains a viable marketing strategy for everybody. OK, it's a lot harder to dominate primary search terms than it used to be, lots of people with deep pockets, and a lot of favoritism by Google to the incumbents. But there are plenty of opportunities for creativity.

<comment><USER7> I have been observing startups for the last decade and SEO has definitely gotten way harder recently for startups. Believe it or not.

<comment><USER8> In my experience, the problem is the investors. Most investors in startups can't stomach the unpredictability, in timing OR payoff of investments in SEO.

In my case, it took 5 years of bootstrapping to hit 1M uniques per month from organic and 7 years to exit for 8 figures. If I'd had investors to contend with, my head would have likely been on a platter well before that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> SEO should not be "the strategy", it should be one of many customer acquisition tools in the startup toolkit.

I also believe that the notion that you can't have a great user interface and optimize for SEO at the same time is wrong. Well optimized websites have a lot of additional content below the fold on their home pages. Most users don't see it, but the search engines do.

Re: Jonknee - SEO is tough in general to do it effectively and build backlinks you need to be createive.

RE: artisdb: He does provide a link in the comments section for what you're looking for. I'd also take a look at McClure's Slideshare for other ideas - [http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for- pir...](http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long- version) (acquisition part of diagram is on slide 3).

Re: Sawyer - that's a very interesting point. I'm surprised modern search engines haven't found a way around ajax and other modern techniques. i would assume they're close since they rolled out ajax tools for adsense recently.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'd say link bait title, but the whole article follows it.

The sites described don't use SEO as a marketing strategy. They used SEO as a business model. Marketing is about getting people aware of your business. What's discussed in the article is getting customers to accidentally use you.

</comment><comment><USER17> Not a great example, but it's still disturbing to me how aggressive and universal SEO has become in the last few years. It's starting to feel like a 'virus writers versus Windows 98' situation, but with Google as the monoculture under assault.

</comment><comment><USER18> I also strongly disagree with this.

Github is the perfect example of this strategy working today. It's a bit different than examples of yore, but certainly still quite lucrative.

I wrote a post about this sometime ago: [http://marcgayle.com/githubs- brilliant-organic-traffic-acqui...](http://marcgayle.com/githubs-brilliant- organic-traffic-acquisition)

I can bet that if Github released their traffic data like Stack Overflow did, a large portion of their traffic would show that it comes from the long tail of many keywords associated with open-source repos from Google.

</comment><comment><USER19> The article may have a point about startups that are "informational sites," but not everyone is doing that type of startup.

My startup is in enterprise software and services and I had more than $200k in additional revenue last year due to SEO (of course it took me two years to get any decent SEO traction, but it was still worth it). I should note that I didn't go after primary search terms, but got this mostly through long tail keywords that were directed at my niche.

</comment><comment><USER20> Interestingly, Chris Dixon's own Hunch has a pretty good potential for SEO with their long tail of multiple answers questions (teach-hunch-about-you), but they do not exploit it. These are user-generated questions and answers, currently hidden from Google in Javascript. Text in the form of questions typically ranks well because this is what users often type in the search engines, and very little text on the web is phrased as questions.

</comment><comment><USER21> Article is surprisingly lacking in logical rigor:

Observe X (Trip Advisor above Oyster)

Observe Y (Trip Advisor has a cluttered ad-strewn page)

Conclude that X is a result of Y.

One counter-example to refute article: _Wikipedia_

</comment><comment><USER22> Here's the bottom line. Don't rely on Google, Facebook, Reddit or HN for that matter. They all have their own interests, changing rules mores etc. The "best" content, app or product doesn't necessarily win in any channel. The best marketing wins and having an awesome product is just one factor in great marketing.

</comment><comment><USER23> 1\. Who gains "initial traction" from SEO, anyways? A fresh website to Google is not indexed for an arbitrary amount of time up to many months. Word of mouth and media coverage are what give startups their momentum. Search engine ranking is more of a longterm byproduct in practice.

2\. Increasing search engine ranking isn't hard. You can overpower seemingly entrenched websites with a mild link-generation campaign.

3\. SEO is all about inbound links and not much else. Aside from blogspam, I haven't seen a website that seemed to compromise usability for on-page "search engine optimization", the latter being so severely deprecated that it's only peddled by people who have the word "SEO" self-proclaimed in their job title.

</comment><comment><USER24> Interesting article; a search engines' strength is in linking keywords to text based content, but they do a very poor job directing customers to modern web applications. Easy example: search for the term "social network", and try to locate Facebook. I gave up after five pages.

The point is that if your site is an application, rather than a repository of written content, SEO is going to mean writing keyword laced content, and then building inbound links. Obviously this is a sub-optimal way to market if you're a startup; it's far better to grow as Facebook did, by word of mouth and strong network effects.

</comment><comment><USER25> I agree, and suspect this is a major factor driving higher valuations. Companies which can grow organically in this environment are undervalued at 20x revenues. Not only is there much lower risk for investors, but Google gives these companies a significant competitive advantage:

\- potential competitors can't compete on price since they'll be more reliant on AdSense

\- potential competitors will need more money to survive to the point they see any SEO traffic.

</comment><comment><USER26> If you gain traction, you should gain SEO. If you aren't an SEO expert, it may be tough to gain a foothold in tough keywords. However, if you are an SEO expert, I'd assume SEO would be quite a good strategy for you.

</comment><comment><USER27> So link trading is "black-hat SEO" now?

Yes, link trading might not be directly relevant for the user, but i consider it much less bad than link farming and spamming, so I'd rather call it "gray- hat" or so.

</comment><comment><USER28> well, then startups must change the way SEO is done at a startup, they must do something that big companies can't or won't do .... i.e: link to their competition [http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/07/07/startups-linking-to- your...](http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/07/07/startups-linking-to-your- competition-will-help-you-no-really/)

</comment><comment><USER29> Although Chris's supporting info is accurate enough, he draws a conclusion than I find to be not appropriate for many startups.

However, let me set the tone by defining at a high level what I find to be the core of SEO today (from my limited experience):

* Being indexable - Make it easy for Google to read and store your website. Building your site using web standards is easiest way to do this.

* Be relevant to what people are searching for - If someone is searching for "some phrase" and your site doesn't have those words, Google has no way to connect you to the phrase. The more content you have around the topic, the more likely your site will be considered relevant to what people are searching for.

* Build authority of your website - Quality & quantity of links are one of the primary ways Google figures out how to rank the content the are going to suggest to their visitors. Other factors play a role, such as site age, but a lot of high quality links trumps everything else.

Now that we have a foundation to start the conversation, let's dig in.

1) Startups today will have a "tougher" time with garnering traffic from SEO but that's true of almost anything at any point in time. People always complain about the good old days but what they are really saying is that the game is different now. If people from 1999 timetraveled, they'd be jealous of our overall low cost for startup and even how many people are online. Yes, times are different. Deal with it.

SEO is harder today because there are entrenched players who see the value of SEO and are willing to make the investments. With that said, a solid 70-80% of the players who are leading the SEO rankings were likely not there a couple years ago (just from anecdotal observation over time.) This means that a year from now, you could be at the top of a really competitive term that will drive your sales, if you invest the time, energy and resources it takes.

2) The fact that search rankings is more competitive now is actually a good thing. Getting ranking won't be a walk in the park but it'll be just as tough for someone else once you're leading the pack. It's a worth while competitive advantage that will be valuable when you are ready to sell and it'll help you make SALES which will bring in REVENUE. Profitable revenue will give you the fuel to live another day and eventually figure out how to really be successful. Profits trump everything, IMO!

3) Long tail search is growing and will likely become bigger than the high volume terms as people become more able to request more specific terms. This presents a lot of opportunity to the creative marketer who can guesstimate the search phrases their prospects will use and it presents low competitive overall.

4) SEO takes resources to do but it actually is best done when in combination with other things. This means the margin resources needed is fairly low. For example, if you're going to make something remarkable and attempt to get lots of PR, keeping SEO in mind will help you get a lot more out of your effort and the cost difference will likely be a tiny percentage of your overall time and money investment.

5) And lastly, SEO is good for the soul. One of the best SEO advice I got was "Why does your business/site deserve to be #1 on Google? Why should they refer people to you?" If you think about SEO from that perspective, you'll do right by your visitors and you'll improve your entire business.

For all the above reasons, I can see where Chris is coming from but I strongly disagree.

</comment><comment><USER30> Why is the assumption that Oyster is more useful than TripAdvisor just because it has less ads and is "cleaner"?

</comment><comment><USER8> Anyone know how Zenedy.com (YC W10) is doing with their "unviable" SEO content farming strategy?

</comment><comment><USER31> I found the argument and the conclusion to the premise to be somewhat vague and underwhelming. If Dixon thinks X, then it shall be.

That being said, studies do prove that content drives traffic and linkage and that the more linkage you have, the higher your search rankings. Whether you like that or not.

</comment><comment><USER32> SEO = digital snake oil</comment>


Git Magic - Preface - <AUTHOR> http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/gitmagic/ <comment><USER2> Yet another Git tutorial. I've found that it's impossible to master Git by treating it like a black box- one _must_ understand how it works to truly understand it.

<comment><USER3> This is exactly why I wrote my tutorial:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=531517>

It's pretty sad that this one not only assumes that knowledge of the internals is unnecessary, it in fact praises such ignorance ("newbies can ignore its inner workings and view Git as a gizmo that can amaze friends and infuriate enemies with its wondrous abilities"). This is particularly true considering that the relevant parts of the Git internals are actually quite simple.

<comment><USER4> Your life is too short to learn and understand the internals of everything. The less I have to know about the internals, the more leverage a library or framework provides me.

Secondly, what is 'quite simple' to you may be incomprehensible to someone else. However, I still have to collaborate with these people on a project. If git is ruled out, because only the top 1% of people in software engineering can gain a sufficient understanding of the internals to use it, then it is utterly worthless to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm showing this to my version control-challenged co-workers first thing in the morning!

</comment><comment><USER5> this has been my most useful git tutorial, or more importantly, reference. it's great to come back to for how to deal with a situation that doesn't come up often enough, but when it does you need a concise answer on how to handle it.</comment>


3 days and InviteShare already up for sale? - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/10358

<comment><AUTHOR> This seems like a candid business effort in itself - develop a small web business/app over the course of a month and sell it early for a quick, cheap exit.

It's not really a bad idea if trying to raise some money for a very strong idea, if you don't mistakenly sell it like everything else that is.

</comment><comment><USER2> Hmm, did the auction start before the TC article, or after?.

Seems like an incredible steal right now at $7500 with such a positive TechCrunch writeup and all the associated buzz that is sure to follow. I wonder where the bidding will end...$100K?</comment>


GraphBLAS – Graph algorithms in the language of linear algebra - <AUTHOR> http://graphblas.org/ <comment><USER2> I have created a tutorial slideshow on the theory of GraphBLAS with lots of examples and step-by-step illustrations: [http://mit.bme.hu/~szarnyas/grb/graphblas- introduction.pdf](http://mit.bme.hu/~szarnyas/grb/graphblas-introduction.pdf)

A shorter version of this tutorial was recorded at FOSDEM earlier this year: [https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/graphblas/](https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/graphblas/)

More papers/tutorials/libraries are listed at [https://github.com/GraphBLAS/GraphBLAS- Pointers](https://github.com/GraphBLAS/GraphBLAS-Pointers).

<comment><USER3> Thanks and great

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This interview with Tim Davis has a bit of background information.

[https://www.acm.org/articles/people-of-acm/2019/tim- davis](https://www.acm.org/articles/people-of-acm/2019/tim-davis)

> I picked Gaussian elimination. "That will be quick," I thought. Not! I got > started on matrices in 1985 and I'm not done with Gaussian elimination yet.

> GraphBLAS is a community effort, including industry, academics, and > government labs, that is working to design a library that can implement > graph algorithms based on sparse linear algebra over semirings. There are > lots of great graph libraries out there that don't exploit the linear > algebraic abstraction, but most of what they do can be viewed as matrix > operations on adjacency matrices. GraphBLAS makes the connection to linear > algebra explicit.

> GraphBLAS gives the graph algorithm developer the power and abstraction of > linear algebra, with all its advantages (associative and distributive laws, > AB=(B'A')', and so on). One level of breadth-first search, for example, is a > single sparse matrix-times-sparse vector multiply, with no loss of > asymptotic efficiency. Google's entire PageRank computation can be done with > a handful of iterations around a single call to GraphBLAS, using what I call > the "PageRank semiring."

<comment><USER5> >> _Google 's entire PageRank computation can be done with a handful of iterations around a single call to GraphBLAS, using what I call the "PageRank semiring."_

The author has an example of PageRank in C:

[https://github.com/DrTimothyAldenDavis/GraphBLAS/blob/stable...](https://github.com/DrTimothyAldenDavis/GraphBLAS/blob/stable/Demo/Source/dpagerank.c)

I assume his "single call" statement refers to the MATLAB version:

[https://github.com/DrTimothyAldenDavis/GraphBLAS/blob/stable...](https://github.com/DrTimothyAldenDavis/GraphBLAS/blob/stable/Demo/MATLAB/dpagerank.m)

        for i = 1:20
            r = ((c*r) * C) + a * sum (r) ;
        end

The MATLAB interface uses overloaded operators and methods on a GraphBLAS matrix object.

<comment><USER6> I was referring to the PageRank_semiring in [https://github.com/DrTimothyAldenDavis/GraphBLAS/blob/5e569f...](https://github.com/DrTimothyAldenDavis/GraphBLAS/blob/5e569f2fcb0597b4ad3c60fca1a4ff8e938fd111/Demo/Source/dpagerank2.c#L348) . I wasn't counting the test for the termination condition -- in the statement in my interview, I assumed the # of iterations could just be given. I would guess that's the case for the Google PageRank computation, since the graph doesn't change so much each month when they compute it, they probably know how many iterations they need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> RedisGraph uses GraphBLAS:

[https://github.com/RedisGraph/RedisGraph/](https://github.com/RedisGraph/RedisGraph/)

Their paper claims that computing with adjacency (sparse) matrices is more performant than alternatives:

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.01294.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.01294.pdf)

They compile queries written in Cypher (Neo4j's language) to operations in linear algebra. An example query is:

        MATCH (n:actor{name:"Nicolas Cage"})-[:act]->(m:movie)<-[:act]-(a:actor) RETURN a.name, m.title

<comment><USER7> Note that the Cypher support is incomplete, and missing features like multiple labels.

[https://oss.redislabs.com/redisgraph/cypher_support/](https://oss.redislabs.com/redisgraph/cypher_support/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there a treatment of graph algorithms in linear algebra from the basics anywhere?

<comment><USER9> pygraphblas author here, here is a good notebook introduction to the very basics of GraphBLAS with Python. The concepts carry naturally to the C API as well:

[https://github.com/michelp/pygraphblas/blob/master/pygraphbl...](https://github.com/michelp/pygraphblas/blob/master/pygraphblas/demo/Introduction- to-GraphBLAS-with-Python.ipynb)

I also made a quick introduction video for a paper submission you can see here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUbXW_f03W0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUbXW_f03W0)

<comment><USER10> I'm a graph theorist, and I spend a lot of time on various optimization problems (matchings, packings, coverings, Steiner trees, etc) doing VLSI. AFAICT, it seems like GraphBLAS is geared for information processing about data stored in a graph representation, and doesn't approach the problems I need. Am I wrong?

Right now, the graphs I'm interested in are reasonably small (tens of thousands of edges), and my oldschool approaches are good enough, but if my employer's products continue their grow trajectory, we'll need to leverage GPUs and TPUs if at all possible. Should I be learning about GraphBLAS?

<comment><USER11> GraphBLAS is meant to solve graph problems (i.e., generally the sort of ones you are interested in, but more emphasis on parallel ones). Perhaps graph analytics may be closer to what it does right now rather than graph theory. At the very basic level, it exploits the matrix graph duality and casts graph problems as matrix problems. For eg., BFS and SSSP are sparse matrix vector multiplications over a suitably defined semiring. The benefit of this is that you can use high performance matrix libraries. The downside is that not everything can be done this way. At least not easily. You may find the book by Kepner and Gilbert useful. Also look at cugraph and gunrock for GPU based graph frameworks.

<comment><USER10> Time to hit the books, I guess. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Shameless self promotion, I started a rust wrapper as my first project for GraphBLAS

[https://github.com/fabianmurariu/rustgraphblas](https://github.com/fabianmurariu/rustgraphblas)

and a JNI wrapper

[https://github.com/fabianmurariu/graphblas-java- native](https://github.com/fabianmurariu/graphblas-java-native)

They are not 100% complete, the JNI one is not published yet and only works on linux

</comment><comment><USER13> There is also a Python wrapper:

[https://github.com/michelp/pygraphblas](https://github.com/michelp/pygraphblas)

</comment><comment><USER14> Sounds like a good idea with an added benefit that there are BLAS interfaces for many programming languages.

</comment><comment><USER15> Can you guys give some real world examples of what graphs algorithms people are actually using in applications?

<comment><USER16> A lot of bioinformatics (my field) uses graph algorithms. DNA sequencing machines don't give you entire genomes, they give you pieces. Re-assembling the genome from those pieces is a prime graph algorithm target.

For example, Canu, one of the more popular current assemblers for PacBio and MinION data, uses a best overlap graph [https://genome.cshlp.org/content/27/5/722.long](https://genome.cshlp.org/content/27/5/722.long)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For those like me who prefer watching talks, Tim Davis presented for Redis a year or two ago.

[https://youtu.be/xnez6tloNSQ](https://youtu.be/xnez6tloNSQ)

</comment><comment><USER18> Is there a short example somewhere of what it looks like in practice?

<comment><USER19> There's an example here showing you don't need to write a shortest path algorithm in terms of nodes and edges: [https://github.com/gunrock/graphblast#usage](https://github.com/gunrock/graphblast#usage)

<comment><USER11> graphblas is nice in theory, but actual high performance code tends to be quite messy and not always easily encapsulated by graphblas. For example, if you want to store predecessors in SSSP, the semiring becomes quite involved, and not easily transferable to GPUs etc. And there are other other optimizations (direction optimizing BFS, delta stepping SSSP etc.) that are not really a part of the algorithmic specification which also break the encapsulation.

<comment><USER6> Give us time; we're still in the beginning stages of writing algorithms that use it. If you dig through LAGraph, you'll find lots of messy prototypes, as we experiment on various methods. Those are drafts, not polished results. Our most recent methods are polished, extremely simple, yet very fast:

[https://github.com/GraphBLAS/LAGraph/blob/master/Source/Algo...](https://github.com/GraphBLAS/LAGraph/blob/master/Source/Algorithm/LAGraph_bc_batch4.c)

[https://github.com/GraphBLAS/LAGraph/blob/master/Source/Algo...](https://github.com/GraphBLAS/LAGraph/blob/master/Source/Algorithm/LAGraph_dnn.c)

[https://github.com/GraphBLAS/LAGraph/blob/master/Source/Algo...](https://github.com/GraphBLAS/LAGraph/blob/master/Source/Algorithm/LAGraph_tricount.c) (that one has 6 algorithms inside)

[https://github.com/GraphBLAS/LAGraph/blob/master/Source/Algo...](https://github.com/GraphBLAS/LAGraph/blob/master/Source/Algorithm/LAGraph_pagerank3f.c)

We're working on the GPU version, and all the built-in semirings very work nicely on the GPU. For user-defined semirings, we will need the user operators defined as strings containing C code. Then they can all be done on the GPU too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is their a similar connection from algebra to hyper-graph (semantic graphs)?

<comment><USER9> Hypergraphs can be represented with Incidence Matrices

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

the same algebra applies and GraphBLAS works well with them!

<comment><USER20> Thanks, I get it, instead of using only 0 and 1, use the index to indicate which property, and the index is also a node in the graph.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The reference is written in C apparently...</comment>


I built reddit + 4chan + yelp. Thoughts? - <AUTHOR> http://gossiply.com

<comment><USER2> If you can make the site focus on celebs instead of normal people you might be onto something — what if you took in all of the feeds of celeb gossip sites?

What's nice about that is that is also much more advertiser friendly...

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting idea. I'm not sure how I'd go about recruiting celebs to try the dang thing out.

Honestly, I built this thing primarily for fun -- not sure if it really makes a whole lot of sense from a business perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Searched "97214" (zip code in Portland, OR).

Got a bunch of results from New York City?

<comment><AUTHOR> It was broken as of... a minute ago. And/or the app has become sentient and is expressing its opinion of Portland.

<comment><USER3> Well, Portlandia has been known to corrupt code bases.

Looks neat, I'll try to play around with it again later.</comment></comment></comment>


Steve Blank: 'VCs Won't Admit They're in a Ponzi Scheme' - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/zoe-henry/steve-blank-tech-bubble-burst-ponzi-scheme.html <comment><USER2> More tiresome than the current state of the valley is how people react to it. I'm here since it started. I was reading on Venture Hacks and Hacker News before Y Combinator was really a thing. People where actually talking about what a Y combinator is, the Lisp one. The moment it started to hype everybody above the age of 20 should know how it would go since it is like every other hype. It starts optimistically, everybody happy that somehting is actually happening. Then the euphory spreads. Then people start to do ridiculous things. Then everybody knows that it's ridiculous but nobody knows how to get out. Then it starts to die, slowly or in a burst. That's how life is. No surprises here. But despite that most people seem to act like they have the biggest conclusion of their life: The valley is a bubble. Wow.

In business as in IT the basic rules stay the same. If it is healthy to go public with five consecutive successful quarters, then aim for that with your business. If you are editing text better spend time learning vim or emacs than the newest flashy text editor. No need to hype the explosion or burst of any hype.

Thus, I'd rather see us discussing about how to make a business work. And I'm really disappointed that Steve Blank, who always was about core marketing values, participates in such a attention seeking article.

<comment><USER3> The voice of reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What are ways this can be bet on since these are non-public companies?

So far I've identified:

1\. Commercial real estate. Could take a short position on any public companies (ex. CBRE) though they're likely too diversified to drive them down to zero.

2\. Hiring. Could bet against LinkedIn? Most local recruiters / agencies are privately owned and the public ones are diversified.

3\. Ancillary services. Seems like start-ups serving start-ups so there's no publicly available position to take.

4\. Tax Revenue. Assuming a contraction, can you bet on local municipalities being short on budget / revenue with a smaller tax base?

Might be a fools errand to short these if the excess capacity can be picked up by all the behemoths (Google, Facebook, Apple).

I wouldn't dare take a short position on SF residential real-estate although outlying areas might see a larger contraction.

<comment><USER5> A short position on SF real estate is probably good from several angles: possibly overheated tech market, geographic diversification of the tech industry, and strong movements to build more residential capacity.

Geographic diversification of the industry seems to be a thing. A few years ago the major SF/SV VCs were pretty much restricted to investing in Bay Area companies only. Today I see a lot of non-Bay Area things in their portfolio. YC is a stubborn holdout here but in general I see the industry diversifying. The real estate costs are a factor-- in our own case moving to the Bay would about double our burn rate. That doubled burn rate would be going _only_ to real estate (by way of higher salaries to afford it and higher office space costs).

Investors should just start cutting checks to real estate rentiers directly and bypass the middleman.

<comment><USER6> Shorting SF real estate seems like a really, really bad idea to me. There have been a lot of articles recently about the research that SF real estate has been going up 6.6% a year for 60+ years now. Of course, there have been some downturns along the way, but the only way to profit from these downturns with a short position is basically perfect timing. I'm sure someone will do it, get lucky, make a killing, and be the subject of lots of "look how smart this person was" articles, but we probably won't see any articles about the tons of people who tried to do the same thing, were unlucky with their timing, and lost their shirts.

<comment><USER5> Can you actually have a city where nobody $150k/year salary can actually afford to live there?

Of course your argument does boil down to the old "markets can defy reality longer than you can short them." Shorting is high risk.

<comment><USER7> Because people buying homes tend to not live alone. And 150k is pretty middle of the road for established tech workers in SF, so in reality you're looking at two people making 200k each.

400k/yr can buy you a home in the Bay Area easily.

<comment><USER8> I think I'd probably say it's possible rather than easily done. But why force young couples to ante up such a huge buy-in just for the opportunity to work at all the local companies? Even the YC partners are starting to point out, correctly I think, that expensive housing is becoming a significant headwind to Silicon Valley's future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is this taking into account the terms of these ridiculous valuations? According to [http://www.fenwick.com/publications/pages/the-terms- behind-t...](http://www.fenwick.com/publications/pages/the-terms-behind-the- unicorn-valuations.aspx) these come with "significant downside protection" and other terms that make these deals more akin to debt than equity funding.

If you stop thinking about the valuation being the price of the company, and instead being the price of a financial product which includes shares AND these protection mechanisms (e.g. liquidity preferences) do these valuations still seem irrational?

<comment><USER10> There's little downside protection from bankruptcy or from a fire sale to strategic investors who are waiting for bankruptcy. A friend recently left a startup that had raised over $100M where the whole executive team was celebrating an $800 revenue deal. He didn't even wait to vest. Lots of mid to late stage startups are in big trouble, and it will take time to flush it out and see who's all hype, who's unit economics are upside down, and who are the real companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think it was worse in the late 90s early 00s. There is this documentary called 'e-dreams' that came out in 2001. It documents a delivery startup that didn't charge anything to deliver products to customers.

They had virtually no business model (and lost money on every order) and got millions in startup capital. The whole company imploded within a year, but some of the interviews with the executives of the company are pretty telling: they never intended on making a profit. The intent was to either get bought out by a larger company or get an IPO and bank the proceeds.

E-dreams is a really good documentary for anyone interested in seeing a small sliver out of the early days of the first .com boom/bust.

I watch it once-a-year to remind me of the craziness.

<comment><USER12> This really doesn't show that the situation in the late 90s was more ridiculous than today.

First, this is a very carefully selected story, not a representative sample, so it's anyone's guess how bad a measure it is of the absurdity of the overall situation in the late 90s. If we are selective we can find similarly crazy stories from last year, so that it is only a matter of selling the story that the craziest stuff is representative.

Second, the problem is not merely that people take silly risks, the problem is when too much is staked on those silly risks. If everyone thought the market was wacky and outrageous, they wouldn't stake very much. The really serious situation, where too much is staked, is one where everyone is saying things like "can't lose" leading to a system which is structured for catastrophe.

Third, to say it was worse back then implies that we know how bad it is now, which really drives us to the heart of the issue - what evidence we have today. It doesn't really matter about how crazy we think it was in the late 90s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Steve Blank has been saying this since 2011 when the economist hosted a debate between Blank and Ben Horowitz. All respect to Steve Blank though for his other work.

The Economist seems to have broken the link to the content on their site, but below is a video the Economist posted on Youtube and the articles posted on the personal blogs of Blank and Horowitz. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfX9VLsUWwc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfX9VLsUWwc) [http://www.bhorowitz.com/debating_the_tech_bubble_with_steve...](http://www.bhorowitz.com/debating_the_tech_bubble_with_steve_blank_part_i) [https://steveblank.com/2011/06/15/the-next-bubble-dont- get-f...](https://steveblank.com/2011/06/15/the-next-bubble-dont-get-fooled- again/) [http://a16z.com/2011/06/17/debating-the-tech-bubble-with- ste...](http://a16z.com/2011/06/17/debating-the-tech-bubble-with-steve-blank- part-ii/) [https://steveblank.com/2011/06/17/are-you-you-the-fool-at- th...](https://steveblank.com/2011/06/17/are-you-you-the-fool-at-the-table/) [https://steveblank.com/2011/06/22/the-internet-might-kill- us...](https://steveblank.com/2011/06/22/the-internet-might-kill-us-all/)

<comment><USER14> Given that Steve Blank is usually correct about startups, not incorrect, wouldn't a better analogy be "even a working clock is wrong twice a day"? (Which of course is a nonsensical analogy.)

It seems like a bubble could take more than 5 years to pop. Blank makes an analogy to the housing bubble, in which housing prices grew somewhat steadily from about 1970 to a peak in 2007. Economists started claiming a bubble in the early 2000s, and housing prices after the bubble popped only went back down to about where they were in the early 2000s. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_housing_bubble#I...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_housing_bubble#Identification)

<comment><USER15> The thing about the housing bubble is that while housing prices didn't decline to a normal level, the way that decline was prevented was through the massive injection of money into the system as whole (qualitative easing) and government loans to the largest banks.

This permanently broke the house-buying process as a whole to various degrees in that most people can no longer afford to buy a home to live in.

But also, it's plausible that the flood of money coming into VC is a part of this general flood of money - a flood that supports the US economy but not a "healthy" condition but with jobs around growing these inflated capital assets taking up a large number of well paid jobs, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think it's possible to draw a line between angel/VC with sane valuations and the "unicorn" phenomenon.

The former does not seem to be in a bubble per se, though we have seen a cool down. A "hot" market is not a "bubble" and a cool down is not a "crash." Bubbles are violent and insane and that's not what we've seen in seed/series A.

The latter may well be a bubble.

What I'm hearing about right now is that it's getting a lot harder to raise money in later stages if you don't have great revenue numbers and real revenue growth. Earlier stages have cooled a bit but not catastrophically.

<comment><USER16> _A "hot" market is not a "bubble" and a cool down is not a "crash."_

Then instead of a bubble, how about a "Foam?" It occurred to me about a year ago that an "ecosystem" where you had a lot of startup companies serving the needs of other startup companies would be the perfect place for one to pump-up the size and perceived potential of the "ecosystem" in a way which attracts yet more money and increases the perception of further value creation in a positive feedback loop. However, since no one company, no single investment instrument is involved, there is no single perpetrator to blame.

It's exploiting the same social proof dynamics, but in a highly distributed fashion. It's technically and legally not a Ponzi scheme, even though it's powered by the same mechanisms.

So this should probably be the next frontier in the startup world -- preventing or at least mitigating this form of corruption. Or is it just to be adopted as the "startup business cycle" \-- justified by the minority of companies that come out of such foam-swells that actually create value?

<comment><USER17> > Then instead of a bubble, how about a "Foam?"

"Froth" is the standard terminology for this concept.

<comment><USER16> That works. It also works with "hot" markets. The market gets so hot, it starts boiling then foams over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Yeah, probably the worst thing about the valley culture is that organic growth has lost it's charm. There was value in bootstrapping, making revenue, then profits and then seeking funding as a way of increasing profits by growing.

My understanding is that silicon valley VC culture started out because people were building hardware and this required some investment to get started. Software is totally different and with AWS and the like, building software is so cheap. But no, now it's basically: take money, give out stuff for free and take more money showing the free customers and get even more free questions and take even more money and so on. In the end, nobody knows the true value of the company - the founders, the VCs or the customers. True money is made by either ads, selling customer data or lock-in by making migrations to another service very expensive.

What irks me is that this scheme overly favours VCs and to some part the founders. The thing is the stream of founders who are willing to do this is never ending (same thing about privacy. the number of people willing to give up their privacy _consciously_ is never ending). Even YC thinks of the whole thing as a game (if you followed the snapchat thing). I am cynical but this is really about rich people having fun and everyone else (customers, employees) is getting suckered. None of these companies are being built to last.

<comment><USER19> >> Yeah, probably the worst thing about the valley culture is that organic growth has lost it's charm.

With the cost of living there, particularly the real estate component, you could also argue it's lost alot of its feasibility. Getting started there isn't cheap if any part of your plan requires hiring people or finding space to accomodate them early.

<comment><USER20> I'm currently faced with this. We have a bootstrapped company with offices in SF and Southern California. Office space in SoCal is easy and cheap, but trying to find just 3 desks for our new SF office has been a nightmare. Places like WeWork are asking $2500 for a tiny office with 4 desks.

(Obvious plug: If you happen to have a few desks or a small office spare, please email me.)

<comment><USER21> wework is shit, btw

I work in one of their offices and it's horrid.

One of two elevators in a 15 floor building was left broken for 6 weeks at the end of last year. The second elevator still breaks for a couple days every month. I hope you enjoy a 15 minute wait to get in or out of the building. Alex is the smarmy liar who runs it, and all he can say is, "So sorry! Not my problem!" while declining to have WeWork give a damn about the building's terrible maintenance.

These morons can't get the lock on the floor to work reliably; you badge in, the reader turns green, and the door lock doesn't unlock. This has been going on for probably 5 months. We now just leave the door to the whole floor unlocked all day, which is awesome, since there's street trash all over and eventually we're going to have stuff stolen.

They can't make the A/C work; I hope you like wearing blankets at work in the winter and working in 75+ degree weather in the summer.

These idiots built a bathroom with _no exhaust fan_. Since our floor is full of men, imagine how it smells by the end of the day. I'm surprised there's still paint on the walls.

The only thing WeWork is competent at is cashing your rent checks.

Oh, and the offices themselves are ludicrously loud. They are giant square boxes with no sound insulation, so enjoy a total lack of productivity the second your officemates, or people in offices near you, start talking.

ps -- those phone booths they talk about? Busy most of the day.

Avoid them at all costs.

<comment><USER22> Agree that WeWork is overpriced junk. 2 bathrooms on each floor for like 200 people. Should be so easy to beat these bozos as all they are really selling is image.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Nowadays, most of the liquidity is happening for large companies paying for startups and hedge funds buying into the latest round. So when this crash happens, it's mostly going to affect the later-stage investors," Blank says. That's different from what happened when the bubble burst previously, inasmuch as "It [the '99 crash] destroyed a lot of public value, not just private capital. Your grandmother got hurt as well."

Newspapers were complaining about the public being unable to invest in unicorns, with all the benefits going to wealthy private investors. Then people on HN started echoing these sentiments (the part where stuff from newspapers gets planted into the heads of normal people and becomes their opinion is really scary, I guess it must be happening to me, too. Really scary to watch this happen though, reading some weird idea in a newspaper and then reading/hearing it repeated by people the next month.)

Will newspapers remember to thank wealthy private investors for taking the hit when the bubble pops? (BTW, what AFAIK doesn't exist but could is a VC fund with publicly traded shares. Of course the average VC produces below-average returns.)

</comment><comment><USER24> The reality is that some VCs invest in smart but risky bets and some just throw money around like it's free. Uber and Tesla are risky bets, but also have solid thinking behind their business and target specific market demands. There are risks in execution and a whole host of other problems, but the idea behind it is fairly solid.

What is not a smart investment is funding some company that is planning on making "the next social media analytics platform". There are what, 200+ companies all doing that?

The issue is mostly one of perception: What happens when investors realize this and want their money back? The house of cards comes crashing down, and might take out some smaller, legitimately innovative places in the process. Money flows out of the industry, it is no longer seen as viable. Investors see VCs as some kind of get rich scheme, it's only a matter of time before reality intercedes. When that happens, it may even take out the biggest players. VCs are a great idea but often poorly executed, basically due to greed.

</comment><comment><USER25> Startups are just illiquid investments, like real estate or even like chunks of public-company equity so large that the market can't absorb their sale. Every single investor who ever existed has talked their own book; i.e. they promote the assets in which they have a stake. This is not a Ponzi scheme, it's a market. And unlike Ponzi schemes, in venture, there is an underlying asset, which is the company that's growing. Growth and profit are two different things. Profit and valuation are two different things. Valuation, or market cap, are based on the expectation of future revenue. With tech companies, these expectations can be very high, and rightly so. Even if they are grounded in human psychology, and subject to projections, distortions and the like.

</comment><comment><USER26> He's correct. The economy will only support "fluff" for so long. At some point, no one will be willing to acquire these companies for their price, and the public won't support an IPO at their price also. Revenue and cash flow are vital to long-term success. Increasing your sticker price just by saying your company is worth more doesn't hold up in the real world. Find a problem, solve the problem way better than anyone else is, and create a monopoly with real profits. It's not easy, but that's where the real wealth is created.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is an interesting thing to trend, especially since it has been just over a year since @sama put out his famous bet ([http://blog.samaltman.com/bubble- talk](http://blog.samaltman.com/bubble-talk)).

I think the author may be conflating (as most do) VC investments at the left side of the power-law curve, and those on the right side. Meaning that the investments on the left (that produce at least 100x returns) are likely valued correctly, whereas investments on the right (at the tail end of the power law curve -- or even those in the center) are supposedly overvalued.

Even so, the Inc author's insinuations about Uber and Airbnb are not exactly the smartest things I've ever seen written. Since I fully expect that within 10 years Uber will be running a massive network of electric, self-driving cars and busses (and perhaps even long-haul networks?) in every major and even minor city in the world. The global transportation infrastructure is absolutely worth MUCH more than $50bn.

</comment><comment><USER28> Devonshire Research Group had a very interesting analysis of Tesla. Related to OP, I found their high level matrix of identifying probable ponzi schemes interesting.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11769775](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11769775)

</comment><comment><USER29> When was this article written? I'm a huge fan of Steve Blank, but the attached doesn't seem current.

 _For entrepreneurs, Blank warns, the future is clear: "Startups are going to find it much, much harder to raise money, and the liquidity pipeline will bounce back to the good old days -- when you actually had to make money to have some liquidity event [go public]."_

I don't see many companies going public nowadays, so it isn't like there's a mad dash of premature IPOs. If anything it's harder than ever to go IPO. Due to Sarbanes-Oxley companies are getting much larger before the exit. Due to activist investors, companies want to have the future 5 or 6 quarters in the bag (in addition to the past 5 or 6) before going public.

<comment><USER25> It looks like it was published two days ago, if you google the headline. It's totally stupid that Inc. doesn't give the article a time stamp...

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Of course, it's a ponzi scheme. How else can you explain such behaviors as the same VC investing in the same company's Series A at $10, Series B at $100, Series C at $1000, etc?

<comment><USER31> No doubt its unsustainable or exaggerated growth, but is it still a Ponzi scheme if it lasts a decade and most participants exit with more money than they started?

<comment><USER32> Ponzi schemes do not have a set time line and any successful Ponzi scheme will have most participants exit with a profit until the Ponzi scheme collapses and then the remaining participants will be holding nothing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> As an outsider, what is the best way to measure or identify the bubble?

Is a "VC firm filing for bankruptcy" the only indicator?

Can someone more knowledgeable share some thoughts on this?

<comment><USER34> A drop in ping pong table sales is a leading indicator[0].

0: [http://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-tech-bubble-popping- ping-...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-tech-bubble-popping-ping-pong- offers-an-answer-1462286089)

<comment><USER35> That only indicates startups being more prudent and reducing their burn rate.

<comment><USER36> Right. Which they only do when..?

<comment><USER35> ...they realise they aren't getting value for money, which can happen at _any_ time, not just during a bubble.

<comment><USER36> Ping-pong tables.

In enough numbers to make the graph deflect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It's odd for Blank to continually be tooting this horn when his ideas on "The Lean Startup" are part of the problem. You can't walk into a business not knowing how the business is going to work. That's not something TBD. Sure, some "startups" manage to make it through, but if we're talking about ponzi schemes here...

</comment><comment><USER38> even companies with little intrinsic value (i.e no ability to generate future cash flows for shareholders) can trade at high valuations for a long time (see the tulip mania)

</comment><comment><USER39> I think "Ponzi Scheme" is both too harsh, and too generous.

<comment><USER40> Triangle opportunity?

<comment><USER41> Conjoined triangles of opportunity.

<comment><USER42> They teach that in business schools now</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Prophet of Doom an Boom - <AUTHOR> http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article4022091.ece?print=yes&randnum=1212475411171

<comment><USER2> Read the "Black Swan" recently, just as good as advertised. The article was a bit ... caffeinated. Didn't really explain anything, just jumped around a number of topics. This is probably better: <http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb04/taleb_index.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> posted some days/a week a go.</comment>


Coinbase added Bitcoin Cash - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/coinbase/status/943270201058922496?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet <comment><USER2> This will increase the price of Bitcoin Cash further.

I feel like Bitcoin Cash is very unpopular in online forums (HN, reddit) but its value increases still... any explanation?

<comment><USER3> Why is it unpopular?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Look at the price!

<comment><USER5> dropped back to normal level, some people made some money....

<comment><USER6> Anyone that knew when coinbase we're adding could have done very well.

<comment><USER6> Oh look...

[http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42425857](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42425857)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Change company culture or quit my job? - <AUTHOR>

I recently join a startup which claims to be a tech startup. The spirit was high during the first week but when I got exposed to the code base, it almost made me cry. There's just no quality in it. The dev team just doesn't have the proper skills and they don't keep good practices like using a version control system, unit tests, code reviews, documentation, so on and on. There's so much code duplications and gotchas that every time I submit code, it takes days to figure out why my code isn't working (didn't set a flag in the config file, didn't update this in the database, so and so...). The bug fixes are hard coded as if statements and no formula makes sense in this code base. Now just after a couple of weeks, my morale has dropped badly. I have two options - to quit or to challenge the culture (and potentially make enemies). If I quit, jobs are hard to find in country X where I am. The other option is to challenge the dev team over the code base but they just doesn't understand anything I say (caching, refactoring, unit tests, etc...) and management is still pushing for new features and asking me why I'm not as productive as the other team members - who spend most of the time fixing and introducing bugs. What should I do? <comment><USER2> Personally, I'd leave. I've never been good at trying to introduce those sorts of systemic cultural changes. My own experience is that those have either to come from above, or be endorsed and supported by management. Without that support (or directive) efforts will fail, and you'll possibly upset people along the way (although you may upset them anyway).

As it is, if you choose to stay, you may ask for a definition of 'productive' that they're using against you. Is it lines of code? Time to get 'feature x' 'live'? Something else?

Once you have a definition, quantify the issues you're seeing - the number of bugs that are introduced by 'fast' developers is probably a prime candidate. Ask that bugs be documented - either over a short time period or just outstanding bugs everyone knows of.

Get everyone to understand that speed != quality, and that getting stuff done 'fast' is most likely a false economy. If you can get everyone or almost everyone to agree on some of those basics, you can then propose some new processes and measure the effect.

None of this will be quick, and it might not be adopted at all. But... I'd suggest documenting this dispassionately, no naming of names or pointing of fingers to specific people.

If _you_ are having problems getting up to speed, anyone else probably would as well, so even if they decide to fire you, they won't get anyone else to be as productive. That's probably not actually true - it would depend on how they measure productivity. If it's just a matter of people throwing code out in to production without worrying whether it works or not, then yeah, someone else _might_ be more productive than you. But it is a false economy over the long haul. Also, any new person coming in has a huge learning curve, because there's institutional knowledge gone by not having documentation, unit tests, etc.

If they really truly do not see that, it's probably better for your own sanity to find something else. But given the job situation, do what you can to make your case without stepping on anyone's toes.

</comment><comment><USER3> You've only been there two weeks and your manager is asking why you're not as productive as the others? Holy crap.

Don't just quit, but start looking _hard_ for something else. This place is hopeless; neither the developers nor management have a clue.

</comment><comment><USER4> Quit. It doesn't sound like you're in a position (new hire, basic programmer) where you have the ability or influence to change the company culture... and with a culture like that, it sounds like the company will be hitting rocky waters at some point -- if you're not happy with their practices now, you certainly don't want to be working your ass off for them when they're in trouble.

</comment><comment><USER5> Quitting is easy. The other way is to plough through the problem. Make management aware of the situation, ask them to create an emergency 'project manager' position, and take the lead.

Then you'll have improved the culture, saved your job, and achieved a promotion. Any of your peers who can't handle it - well, that's too bad. Often, although they may not realize it, people WANT to be told what to do. (That may even include your managers...)

If that fails - THEN quit ;-)

<comment><USER6> Sorry, that's just asking to be fired.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some choices.

a) Be quiet, and try to be as productive as you can.

b) Look for a job, then quit.

c) Look for a job, and while you're looking, make a first approach to the most receptive management or near management member you can think of. Maybe lunch or beers. Give him a non-emotional, short executive summary of the problem and its consequences. If you get a positive response _and_ you think he understood (pick your manager carefully for this), consider how to cautiously proceed.

All three choices are equally valid. c) is obviously complicated and risky, so you have to consider (among many other variables) whether you care enough about this company and your relationship with it to try; whether the entrenched are "know it alls" or are they willing to learn and be better; whether management are managers or slave drivers; whether you can afford a period of unemployment. In other words, is it worth the risk.

There are likely other companies that match your goals better than this one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this. I'll definitely start with b) and c) I really want to help the company but a) is more complicated since it bothers me to know that I just potentially introduced another set of bugs by not addressing the underlying issues.

<comment><USER6> I would recommend combining a) and b).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Changing company culture is incredibly hard in the best of places. In your case, it sounds impossible. Don't even try, it'll eat your soul.

Instead, do the best job your can, while accepting that you can't turn this company around. Be humble: don't tell others they're wrong all the time (even if they are). Be helpful.

At the same time, look hard for another job.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is there a "lead" programmer there? If you don't want to quit then one option would be to convince the founder(s) that you are best placed to ensure the quality and maintainability of the codebase. This is probably worth a pay raise, but do be prepared to bring specific examples of what is going wrong and how your ideas will make the company more profitable.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, there is no lead programmer and the founder isn't technical. I'm the only person here who actually understands software engineering. I have to write long essays and letters to explain why things aren't the way they should be and I often have to lecture the other developers on what I mean by O(nlogn) vs O(n^2), ftp vs version control, spread sheet vs bug tracking system, project manager vs supervisor, sys admin vs phpmyadmin user.

<comment><USER8> It sounds like quitting may be the best option. But it's always worth seeing if there's a little more money available if you take on extra responsibilities to train up the rest of the team - assuming that this is a trade-off you're happy with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's wrong with coding bug fixes as "if" statements?

<comment><USER10> Original:

      def double(x):
          return x+3

BUG REPORT: double(4) returns 7 instead of 8.

Fixed:

      def double(x):
          if x == 4:
              return 8
          else:
              return x+3

<comment><USER11> I think that's indeed what OP meant, but there's also:

        def abs(x):
            return x

... where adding the 'if' seems appropriate :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _I have two options - to quit or to challenge the culture (and potentially make enemies)._

The English bible says "The meek shall inherit the earth." My understanding is that in French it says "The nonchalant shall inherit the earth." You influence culture every minute of every day by your behavior. Doing so consciously will likely make other people uncomfortable. It can make enemies. But "challenging" it is not the only path.

Peace.</comment>


Kevin Kelly on Soft Singularity and Inevitable Tech Advances - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/kevin-kelly-soft-singularity-advances-we-cant-stop-465914 <comment><USER2> "I think there's many, many other second- and third-order disruptions that will come from having self-driving cars. For instance, what are we going to do in the car if we're not driving it? There's this whole time slot that suddenly opens up."

Unless it's a cure for car sickness, I'll be spending that time looking out the window.

<comment><USER3> I find it hard to believe that VR/AR won't have solved that by then, so yes, you should have both a cure for motion sickness and a means to be entertained in the same package.

<comment><USER4> That's actually a cool application of VR/AR that I haven't heard of before -- having your GUIs on a 'virtual steadicam', which should (in theory) have a similar effect to looking out the window, while allowing people to get work done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> | went on to found WELL, an early, hugely influential online community.

Is Kevin Kelly just rewriting history now? I was a kid at the time and have only second-hand knowledge through aging hippies I used to know, but pretty sure he was brand's employee, and had heard that brand was the driving force. As someone who's been written out of the story of my own startup by a sad narcissist, this stuff really irks me.

</comment><comment><USER6> I loved the observation about a visitor from 1970 to 2016 : wow what a cool thing in your pocket; the internet is amazing; TV's are huge; cars are slightly better; people survive cancer better; you're all much richer. I don't subscribe to the "there's no breakthrough technology vibe" but the difference between 50 years and 100 years of technology seems quite striking (in 1916 there were a handful of military aircraft and telephony was relatively rare). Perhaps the trope about needing three generations of management to fully exploit technology and innovation (rejectionists, adopters but confused, full on believers) is true? 20-25 years per generation?

</comment><comment><USER7> > I see an opportunity where people will start charging to watch an ad, > charging to read someone's email, charging to see this thing.

In some way we're already doing that. Companies that don't get our attention spend time money to reach to us with no return. But those money don't get to us.

To be paid to receive means that part of those money should go to the recipient, which requires to link the recipient to a bank account or equivalent, so to a verified identity.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't share the optimism.

> They're [dystopias] traumatic and dramatic, but they don't last very long > because they blow themselves out, and they blow themselves up.

People actually just get used to them. North korea exists since over half a century already. Even our western societies have dystopian qualities that we now just accept.</comment>


Reddit and the Quest to Detoxify the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the-quest-to-detoxify-the-internet <comment><USER2> I ain't no troll but been trolled. I just feel sad if someone is that intelligent then why waste your intelligence here. They can definitely put it to better use.

It's more like bullying in the school/college yard.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dupe that made it to the first page: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16569778](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16569778)</comment>


Ask HN: How to get started in Java Development? - <AUTHOR>

I was wondering if anyone could give me good advice on getting started with Java. There's so many frameworks, platforms and versions, I'm unsure how to even begin. As far as programming goes, I've been developing with linux/binutils for years as well as the typical LAMP stack (PHP, Python). But I really want a language that lets me develop for the desktop & web. Where are (good) web resources for Java? I'd really like to start off learning the most "standard" and forward looking tools - think Symfony2 for PHP, or BOOST for c++). With Java its just overwhelming from though...<p>Thanks in advance, <comment><USER2> With regards to Java itself, definitely check out Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java ([http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Java-Edition-Bruce- Eckel/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Java-Edition-Bruce- Eckel/dp/0131872486/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339056301&sr=8-1)). The 4th edition is the most current. However, previous ones are available for free here: <http://www.mindviewinc.com/Books/downloads.html>.

Another good introductory text is Head First Java ([http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-Java-2nd- Edition/dp/0596009...](http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-Java-2nd- Edition/dp/0596009208/ref=pd_sim_b_1)).

In terms of frameworks, I would recommend checking out Play! (<http://www.playframework.org/>) for web applications. Spring is a bit more enterprise-y, it is also a good option (<http://www.springsource.com/>).

</comment><comment><USER3> You don't need a "framework" or a "platform", nor does the version matter at this stage. Download the JDK, use the javac command line compiler and your editor of choice, write some programs with the default APIs (e.g. Swing for GUIs, JSPs for websites, etc). When you start to write bigger programs, think about what you are finding difficult, _then_ look for a "framework" that solves it.

</comment><comment><USER4> 1\. Download Eclipse for Java developers (<http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/>)

2\. Try Oracle's Java tutorials which are surprisingly good (<http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/>)

</comment><comment><USER5> I got started with Processing, and slowly expanded from there into Java.

It was quite fun (I built a few games) and I learned a lot about the language before I had to start learning the libraries, which was nice.

</comment><comment><USER6> first you need to learn the Object Oriented Paradigm .and how you can write Classes and objects in java. then try to learn how you can develop desktop application you have two main frameworks for the GUI (JavaFX and Swing) I recommend JavaFX because oracle doesn't support anymore Swing. Then comes the best part, the Java Entreprise Edition (JEE ) ,its here where the fun begins ,JEE is for web application s, first you need to learn JSP and Servlet, and then take a look at the web frameworks that exists like (Play, Spring, Struts ,JSF ...)

</comment><comment><USER7> you can also check out online beginner lectures for java.</comment>


Market Data Firm Spots the Tracks of Bizarre Robot Traders - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/08/market-data-firm-spots-the-tracks-of-bizarre-robot-traders/60829/

<comment><USER2> This is interesting but should hardly be surprising if anyone knows how algorithmic trading works. The smart algorithms would also randomize the way they slice the orders exactly to throw off someone trying to look for a pattern</comment>


Introducing WebBook: Browser Based eReading with Binks - <AUTHOR> http://beneaththeink.com/blog/introducing-webbok-browser-based-ereading/

<comment><USER2> In the Kamalaya section, it doesn't seem to scroll down. Using the latest Firefox. Am I missing some sort of control that's too light to see on my bad- contrast screen?

<comment><AUTHOR> There should be paddles on the left and right sides of the screen to change the page. It's set up to work like a book, so pages turn instead of scrolling up and down.</comment></comment>