A Guide to the Regional Ramen of Japan - <AUTHOR> http://luckypeach.com/a-guide-to-the-regional-ramen-of-japan/ <comment><USER2> While this is a pretty epic listing (well done!), it's still not even close to complete. My personal pet peeve omission is Okinawa soba, which despite the name is very much in the ramen family:

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

And if the god of ramen is Hakata-style tonkotsu, its temple is Ichiran:

[http://blog.gaijinpot.com/ichiran-ramen-without- word/](http://blog.gaijinpot.com/ichiran-ramen-without-word/)

And while it's a tourist trap, Yokohama's Ramen Museum is still a good way to sample many of these:

[http://www.raumen.co.jp/english/](http://www.raumen.co.jp/english/)

<comment><USER3> There's also the momofuku instant ramen museum in Ikeda, (Osaka) where you can design and create your own instant cup ramen. Loads of tourists and local families with kids, but worth visiting if you have 2 hours to kill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like ramen, but I am careful about frequency of eating ramen. It is known among Japanese that extreme ramen freaks have short life. We Japanese maybe tend to be salt addicted. So careful people eat soup moderately.

<comment><USER5> It is about the salt only, or is there something else? I'm curious because ramen sounds like something that should be healthy.

<comment><USER6> 2014 study [1], press release [2], and interpretive article [3]:

Instant noodle intake and dietary patterns are associated with distinct cardiometabolic risk factors in Korea

[1] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24966409](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24966409)

[2] [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140812121642.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140812121642.htm)

[3] [http://www.care2.com/causes/did-you-know-instant-ramen- noodl...](http://www.care2.com/causes/did-you-know-instant-ramen-noodles-were- this-bad-for-you.html)

<comment><USER7> Instant ramen is potentially rather different from freshly prepared ramen though, eg in terms of salt content, additives etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There used to be a chain in LA called "Chin-ma-ya" that served a variety called "tantanmen" that I haven't found elsewhere. Both the torrance and little tokyo location closed and now I only have vague memories of their terrible looping music to satiate me. You can get tankotsu anywhere but only they had the delicious tantanmen with the golden fried shrimp and the curry- side-dish-thingy. I barely appreciated them when they were here and now I crave what I cannot have.

<comment><USER9> > You can get tankotsu anywhere

First it's tonkotsu(豚骨). not trying to be snarky. Just passing on info. But second, at least in my experience, all tonkotsu in LA sucks except Tsujita. And even Tsujita sucks unless you get their tsukemen or as they call them "dipping noodles".

Or course everything in food is subjective. I like extremely rich flavorful noodles. Some people like light flavors.

As for tantanmen, apparently real tantanmen (if you can call any food real) is the Chinese kind where there's a thick oily spice sauce at the bottom of the bowl and you have to stir it up. In other words there's no soup.

In Japan there's another style of tantanmen which is has a soup broth. As usual there's a wide variety from light to heavy. The light stuff is not for me but the heavy stuff is AMAZING!!!!

[http://i.imgur.com/NzBzAdN.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/NzBzAdN.jpg)

This is from a chain called 万豚記 (wan-zhu-ji) (memory of ten thousand pigs). It's owned by a corporation that has a zillion restaurants in Japan.

[http://kiwa-group.co.jp/brand_search.php](http://kiwa- group.co.jp/brand_search.php)

many of them carry this style of heavy tantanmen which I love

<comment><USER10> > As for tantanmen, apparently real tantanmen (if you can call any food real) > is the Chinese kind where there's a thick oily spice sauce at the bottom of > the bowl and you have to stir it up. In other words there's no soup.

Oh, yes. The Chinese word is _dandanmian_ , though, and most English-language menus will write it as "dan dan noodles" (and I've seen it written as "dong dong noodles", too).

Where I live (Dallas suburbs), there's one really amazing authentic Sichuan place -- Royal Sichuan -- which serves actual, authentic _dandanmian_ , and it's some of the best food I've ever had in my life. I can't get enough of it.

<comment><USER9> I haven't had dandanmian in Dallas but I have had it throughout the SF Bay Area and Los Angeles (Monterey Park, Alhambra, the places where many claim the best Chinese food in the USA is). While I like it I don't crave it the way I crave the Japanese style so if you get a chance please come to Japan and try it here. I think you'll like it. Just make sure you pick a good one. There's also plenty of bad ones here too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I remember being in Fukuoka and visiting the so called "ramen stadium" at the top of some shopping complex. More varieties than you could poke a stick at, and all purchasable via ticket machine only. I ended up getting some random thing that had pork, and what appeared to be quail eggs in a black broth. I can see why they like their ramen.

<comment><USER12> There's a similar one in Kyoto at the JR Rail station that is very nice with 8 styles of ramen, all in different little sit down restaurants with ticket machines: [http://www.insidekyoto.com/kyoto-ramen- koji](http://www.insidekyoto.com/kyoto-ramen-koji)

<comment><USER13> I remember going to both and getting lost in the sea of choices. A bit like the food courts in Singapore/HK.

Fukuoka also has food stalls with plenty of good ramen if someone is heading there

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What about instant ramen? While it's not entirely a fair comparison to freshly made ones, the Japs have certainly pioneered and mastered the skill of churning out instant ramen that has "fresh" pork/seafood in it. Personally, I prefer the dry soba to the soupy ones.

<comment><USER14> > the Japs

In the United States, "Jap" is an ethnic slur. You might want to use another word.

<comment><USER15> But it's okay to call the English "Brits".

<comment><USER16> It's a legacy from WWII. See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jap)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I really want to try ramen, but i don't like meat. Is there any Vegetarian friendly ramen?

<comment><USER18> It's pretty rare, and most so in the more traditional places. Even if there's no meat in the ramen, the broth is generally pork (occasionally chicken) based.

<comment><USER19> Funny story time: in my late and unlamented career as a translator, I was attached to a pair of US artists visiting Gifu's international arts and crafts fair. Both were vegans and expressed a desire to have vegan ramen.

I explained this to the ramen shop proprietor. He came out with a bowl of ramen with chashu (pork) on top of it. When I pointed out that pork does in fact count as a meat product, he plucked it off with chopsticks. I then said "Excuse me, I don't mean to be a bother about this, but I can't help but notice that you poured the broth from a pan marked Pig. Is there, I don't know, pork in the broth?" "Oh you read Japanese!" "Yep, literacy is a handy quality in a translator." "Do your guests read Japanese?" "No." "Then as far as they know it's hearty vegetable broth now isn't it!"

<comment><USER20> Haha, the real question is, did they notice the difference? Or did they just say, "Damn, that was the best vegetable broth I've ever had!"

<comment><USER19> We ate elsewhere, after a round of apologies to all concerned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is a great write-up. I had the fortune of visiting a national Ramen festival in Japan (and the privilege of being on national Japanese television as the novel white-person!) and I really enjoyed sampling the various regional varieties all in one place. There's an astounding degree of variation that I wouldn't have predicted, a priori.

</comment><comment><USER22> I didn't see it mentioned, but if you're not subscribed to the Lucky Peach, it's a really great publication. I happened upon Issue 1 (the Ramen issue) in a grocery store a few years ago and I've subscribed ever since.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm a bit saddened that we don't seem to have too many of these kinds of "multiple ingredient, endless variation" style foods here in the US. Most regional fare (pizza, BBQ) is comparatively simple. Or is it just me?

<comment><USER24> The US has lots of sandwich variants. Sometimes we use dipping sauces or soup sides, sometimes the ingredients are unusual, there are various styles of bread, toasted vs. untoasted, etc. This is a food genre that is shared with Europe and the Commonwealth, of course, but original variants abound here.

<comment><USER23> True, I was just thinking about that! But on the other hand, it's hard to compare a sandwich — something that usually takes no more than an hour of cooking, total — with ramen, whose broth can take several days to make, and whose flavorants alone have rich traditions and endless varieties.

EDIT: But I suppose it becomes a lot more true if you factor in the bread, and include things like bagels.

<comment><USER25> I think you're looking at the other side of the fence with too rosy of glasses. Is not bread for those sandwiches labor intensive? The fillings too -- all sorts of roasts and vegetables and pickles and meats that can each take a while to make. Why is it that 'broth' is allowed to add to the time of Ramen when these things arent allowed to add to the time of a sandwich?

Not to mention BBQ is something that _does_ take a lot of time -- 2, 4, 8, 24 hours of BBQing, even multiple days if you sous vide it.

<comment><USER23> Yes, you're right. I thought of Katz's right after I posted that!

As for BBQ, I am not saying that it's an unworthy food in any way. It's just that ramen seems to have a lot more variations on account of all the different combinations of ingredients. (Broth, base, fillings, noodles.) Same with pasta in Italy. That's what I mean by "simple". (Though, yes, I suppose there are a whole lot of sauces and rubs, too.)

<comment><USER26> Broth, base, fillings, noodles for ramen.

Sauce, rub, wood and smoke, cuts of meat for bbq.

<comment><USER27> I think people who aren't heavy BBQ fans don't fully appreciate the number of decisions that goes into a well-made BBQ. The sauces and rubs alone show a huge amount of variation that can make or break the entire thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Missing my favorite! "Tori pai tan" from Kagari in Tokyo. Literally "white chicken soup." [http://i.imgur.com/e4vS59N.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/e4vS59N.jpg)

<comment><USER29> I can't tell from the picture on my phone -- is that a clear chicken soup or a fatty chicken soup?

Daikichi in Yushima, Tokyo also has a very good (clear) chicken soup -- it's not uncommon to see people lining up before it even opens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is there any type of Ramen that doesn't use Pork?? I wouldn't want to miss out on Ramen just because i dont eat Pork.

<comment><USER9> There's many kinds of ramen. Pork is one of the most common. There's chicken ramen. There's salt ramen. There's soy sauce ramen. There's miso ramen. And there's every combination. Soy+Miso+Chicken, Chicken+Pork, Pork+Sardine+Miso, Salt+Shrimp+Pork, Tomato, Cheese :P

You will find it hard to know for sure if there's no pork though because even if it's labeled salt-ramen if you look at the details it might say made with pork as well.

<comment><USER31> You forgot the seafood based combinations! They have pure seafood bases too, though. My Japanese friend brought me to a shop in Tokyo that apparently specialised in a 100% seafood base/stock. It was light compared to the meat- based stock but equally good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> [http://youtu.be/RosUc9UVuos](http://youtu.be/RosUc9UVuos)

</comment><comment><USER32> I love Ippudo's spiciest on the menu, here in Tokyo. Supposed to be Hakata- style. Like to top it with gyoza.

</comment><comment><USER33> Historical and geographical context of Japanese _ramen_ from a Chinese cultural perspective: _ra_ part is derived from 拉 (Mandarin _la_ ) which means pulled and refers to the process of making the noodles, the _men_ part is derived from 麺 (Mandarin _mian_ ) which is the traditional Chinese character for noodles (面 is the simplified form). In modern China, this 麺/面 normally describes long-form wheat noodles however other types of wheat noodles (such as knife-cut noodles), egg noodles, various bean noodles and rice noodles are also popular and some of them are described with the same character. However, many are produced using alternate methods such as squashing through a press or manually slicing a large, pancake-like, thin, often doubled-over piece of noodle material in to noodle-like strands, or by cutting chunks off a block of dough. China has a lot of noodle traditions, probably (logically for its size and population) far more than Japan. Personally I'm a fan of 米干 or _mi gan_ which is a Tai-style broad flat fresh rice noodle normally prepared in the southwest and 刀削面 ( _dao xue mian_ ) or knife-cut noodles which hail from north-western China. Modern mainland China's instant noodle tradition, probably partly re-inspired by Japan's (possibly via Hong Kong) is known as 方便面 ( _fangbian mian_ ) or 'convenience noodles'. A Taiwanese academic take on this whole thing would be interesting.

Note that the Wikipedia page for Ramen[1] is laughable in claiming the origin of ramen is unclear. It's clearly Chinese. Interestingly however, it claims the Japanese only began to use the term _ramen_ after the 1950s, ie. after they invaded China, Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam (all but Korea being huge noodle consumers). Previously the Japanese used other terms which directly attributed the tradition to China. While there is apparently no clear evidence, one could reliably assume that Buddhist monks and other travelers around the Nara period[2] would have brought knowledge of Chinese and Central Asian foodstuffs back to Japan from post Silk Road China.

As a postscript to be fair (borrowing happens in many directions!), so-called Chinese _baozi_ (包子) or steamed buns are actually Turkic in origin, as attributed by surviving Yuan Dynasty cookbooks (see also Jewish, Polish, Russian, Tibetan traditions). The same sources include an early recipe for _baklavah_ which has since died out in China... probably in the anti-foreign repression following the Mongol Yuan Dynasty at the dawn of the Ming, which incidentally was when Zhenghe sailed his great Chinese fleet to Southeast Asia and Africa. Also, some people claim Italy's noodle tradition is a post-Marco Polo thing (who, some credible evidence attests, was actually from the now Croatian island of Dubrovnik, under the sway of the piratical Venetian empire but not 'Italian' per-se).

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramen#History](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramen#History)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanto_Rikush%C5%AB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanto_Rikush%C5%AB)

<comment><USER2> Wikipedia (and you) conflate two different things here: the origin of _ramen_ the food as we know it today, which is quite arguably Japan (although admittedly it's a fuzzy line to draw); and the origin of _ramen_ the name, which I agree is almost certainly from Chinese 拉麺. However, Japanese ramen doesn't taste at all like Chinese 拉麺, they've become entirely different dishes.

Also, you're spinning the name change as Japan somehow attempting to claim credit, while it's actually more the other way around: the term 支那 _shina_ became pejorative, so they stopped using it. This also predates Japan exporting instant noodles to the world (c. 1971), much less the term "ramen" being adopted into English to mean them (1990s?).

<comment><USER33> You're right there is an etymology question (the term _ramen_ is clearly Chinese in etymological origin, the other names clearly refer to China) and the historical origin of noodles in Japan generally. I think given the etymological evidence of all terms ( _ramen_ and pre- _ramen_ ) combined with geographic proximity it would be exceptionally hard to argue that's not China as well.

As far as putting words in to my mouth or motivations in to other people's brains when discussing history, please don't do that, it doesn't lead to constructive conversation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Funny how this is related to hacking. I guess a lot of devs love this stuff.

<comment><USER35> Yeah, everybody likes food. And oriental food are better IMO than our fast food (more vegetables and less fat)

<comment><USER10> Ramen is, like, pure carbs, though.</comment></comment></comment>


Iterative Optimization on Hot Paths in Go Apps - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/samsara-engineering/iterative-optimization-on-hot-paths-c89827749c20 <comment><USER2> I don't really get this article. It isn't necessary to optimize for minimal allocations if it doesn't affect response time. They mention the new technique was making too many allocations; why do they care how many allocations are being made, if response time is the same?

<comment><USER3> In one work: throughput. More CPU time spent doing useful work rather than GC scanning. Makes you need less scaling out to handle increasing load.

<comment><USER4> How can you increase throughout without reducing response time?

<comment><USER5> Throughput is going to be affected by anything that can bottleneck your application. Even if response time is the same, if you reduce the time spent cleaning up between responses and requests then you can handle a higher number of requests with the same number of workers. If you reduce the amount of memory being allocated you'd also be able to run more workers on the same hardware, also increasing throughput. And as you're implying, reducing time spent making responses would also allow you to increase throughput too.

<comment><USER4> I still don't understand that maths - if you both get n requests per second and the time per request has not changed then the throughout is the same isn't it?

Time between request translates directly into response time as someone is waiting during that time aren't they? If nobody is waiting and it's not added to anyone's wait time then who cares?

The answer really is power consumption during GC even if nobody is waiting, but you didn't mention that.

<comment><USER5> Throughput involves both time to process a request and how many requests you can process per unit time.

If you only take 10ms to process a request and give the data back to the user, but then take 200ms afterwards cleaning up after yourself (garbage collection, background tasks etc). then you can only serve up less than 5 requests per second per worker. If you allocate per request 200mb and then free it afterwards and only have 1GB of memory on the server, you can only have a max of 5 workers, so in this case you can only have ~25 requests per second throughput. Fixing either of those cases means you can have a higher throughput in the end without having to scale it out across more servers, since you can prevent the future requests from waiting by either being able to have more workers, or have workers do less work between requests. This isn't even necessarily GC work, it could be sending off jobs to send emails or other jobs that were related to the request regardless of what they were. All of this still ties up the worker that could be handling the request.

Also, the number of requests you get has nothing to do with the number of requests you can actually process. You could be able to process 100k requests per second, but only get 200/second, or vice versa.

<comment><USER4> Sorry I still don't understand that - if you have a delay caused by GC before you can respond the next request then this adds time to the request which is waiting during that delay which increases response time.

<comment><USER3> It depends on what you call response time: if you see it server side, you might count it only from when a request is accepted, from the client side, since the request is sent.

Because you can scale out, it makes sense to measure response time from the server perspective (from when the request is accepted.) Silly example...

Say you have two CPU: you can respond to (CPU bound) requests at a time. When the parallel GC kicks in, it fully occupies one CPU. Response time does not change, but you are handling half of the previous requests per second.

You could scale out, and have two machines handle two requests in parallel when both are running GC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> More optimization based on making escape analysis happy to reduce allocations. This is yet another data point in favor of a generational garbage collector with bump allocation in the nursery.

<comment><USER3> That's less than a fourth of what the article says.

Copying data is sometimes faster than allocating it (and the TCMalloc-inspired Go allocator is quite quick.) Many small, allocations are inefficient in any language... There are other interesting points.

And anyway, a bump allocator with nursery will spend longer time vetting the nursery and copying long-lived objects. In Go this would not pay back, as the nursery is mostly staying on the stack without special tricks to please the escape analysis.

If you argued that Rust lifetimes system makes it easier to reason like the escape analysis would, I would agree, but you preferred to drop a tweet-size rant...

<comment><USER6> tcmalloc cannot compare to allocation performance in HotSpot, where allocation is about 5 or 6 instructions. This is the same size as a function prologue and epilogue.

You're denying that the generational hypothesis holds for Go heap objects. I see no reason why this would be the case. In fact, Go's situation is very close to that of .NET, where the generational hypothesis certainly holds and therefore .NET has a generational garbage collector. This very article is evidence in favor of the generational hypothesis, since much of the optimizations boil down to reducing short-lived heap allocations.

<comment><USER7> And again same thing about HotSpot that you repeat third time in last week-two weeks?

Java has new GC which is non-generational and is focused on low latency like Go GC is. It's called ZGC.

[http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/333](http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/333)

<comment><USER6> ZGC has a very different design. Go's GC is non-moving and has no read barrier. ZGC has a read barrier and bump allocation everywhere (using compaction to ensure that memory regions are contiguous). As a result it does not suffer the throughput issues of Go's GC.

<comment><USER7> It's not moving/compacting because it doesn't need to - it doesn't have fragmentation issues. Bump allocation is efficient and fast in single threaded programs but almost all Go applications are multi threaded and it would require locks there. Go is using thread local caches for allocation, that's why there is no point in using bump allocation.

This was mentioned many times by the Go team.

Generational hypothesis says that most objects die young. Golang have value types (which Java do not have atm, but Valhalla is coming) and allocate on the stack based on escape analysis (which gets better with time). This means that adding generational GC would not benefit Go as much as you think. Go GC main focus is very low latency, not throughput and handling huge heaps with a lot of generations is not so easy with HotSpot. In many cases you need to tune GC in Java because of that. There are trade offs like with everything.

I am running high performance service written in Golang and I was working on high performance services in Java.

This are the pauses from Go service on XX GB heaps from today:

[https://imgur.com/tSXtP4a](https://imgur.com/tSXtP4a)

This is without tuning GC or writing exceptionally unidiomatic Go code. This is impossible to achieve in Java with Hot Spot without tuning GC/writing your whole code specially to satisfy GC.

<comment><USER6> > It's not moving/compacting because it doesn't need to - it doesn't have > fragmentation issues.

It's not about fragmentation. It's about allocation throughput.

> Bump allocation is efficient and fast in single threaded programs but almost > all Go applications are multi threaded and it would require locks there. Go > is using thread local caches for allocation, that's why there is no point in > using bump allocation.

No production bump allocator takes locks!

> This was mentioned many times by the Go team.

Yes, and my view is that they're coming to incorrect conclusions.

> Golang have value types (which Java do not have atm, but Valhalla is coming) > and allocate on the stack based on escape analysis (which gets better with > time).

1\. .NET has value types, and in that runtime the generational hypothesis certainly holds and therefore .NET has a generational garbage collector.

2\. Java HotSpot has escape analysis too (and the generational hypothesis still holds). It's primarily for SROA and related optimizations, though, not for allocation performance. That's because, unlike Go, HotSpot allocation is already fast.

> This means that adding generational GC would not benefit Go as much as you > think.

I have yet to see any evidence that bump allocation in the nursery would not help Go.

> Go GC main focus is very low latency, not throughput and handling huge heaps > with a lot of generations is not so easy with HotSpot.

And for most applications, balancing throughput and latency is more desirable than trading tons of throughput for low latency.

> In many cases you need to tune GC in Java because of that.

The default GC in Java HotSpot has one main knob, just as Go does. Actually, the knob is better in Java, because "max pause time" is easier to understand than SetGCPercent.

<comment><USER7> > The default GC in Java HotSpot has one main knob

Do you write that from theory or experience? Because from my experience this was never enough. There are actually whole books written about tuning GC in Java.

> I have yet to see any evidence that bump allocation in the nursery would not > help Go.

I can revert what you wrote here and it would be true too.

> Yes, and my view is that they're coming to incorrect conclusions.

I will ask again as someone did before. Did you reach to the Go team about your views and explained that you think they are coming to incorrect conclusions? You can do it easily by writing here[1].

I've seen you are committing a lot of time to write those things about Go in multiple submissions. The best way would be to spend this time talking with Go team and showing your view with proper argumentation. This would be better spent time than writing same thing over and over again on HN in my opinion. If you are right (which I doubt, but I can be wrong too, we are only humans after all) it would benefit whole Go community.

1\. [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/golang- dev](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/golang-dev)

<comment><USER6> I've talked to the devs on Twitter, yes.

I'm more trying to correct misconceptions around GC than anything else.

<comment><USER7> > I've talked to the devs on Twitter, yes.

Can you point me to that discussion? I can't seem to find any discussion in which you participate on Twitter about Go GC with Rick Hudson or Austin Clements, Ian Lance Taylor etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Don't Over-Optimize Fundraising - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/dont-over-optimize-fundraising/ <comment><USER2> It seems to me that some of these points essentially suggest, 'hey, don't worry about the details of your funding, they aren't that important to whether you succeed. Just don't totally screw up on funding, focus on what you do with it'.

And, hey, that might be true.

But it also seems to me that there is a conflict of interest here in several of the main points.

> Founders who quibble over selling 18% or 20% of their company in a round > have lost sight of what actually matters.

If each VC is getting that extra 2% of the company for free each round, that adds up.

So maybe we should take these points with a grain of salt. They don't seem obviously wrong to me (but I'm not an expert), but there _does_ seem to be a conflict of interest in what they say and where it comes from.

<comment><USER3> This is a tangent to the original article, but a reply specifically to your comment on being "greedy" (by which I mean founders being sensitive to giving up equity).

Whenever an investor says "are you really going to quibble over 1%?" my instinctive reaction is "are you?" It goes both ways. Yes, 90% of a watermelon is better than 100% of a grape. And obviously the investor's perspective for an ROI and risk tolerance are different from the startup founder and it has to be worth it for them. But it's so insanely selfish to paint the founder as greedy when the investor is literally in the process of being a hypocrite.

I actually understand the investor's perspective and realize they have a _completely_ different context with their own goals, risks, assessments, etcetera and it's completely valid for them to have their own terms! I just _despise_ when they frame the argument in such a tone-deaf manner. Yes, 1% fucking matters, otherwise you wouldn't be asking for it.

<comment><USER4> Usually the answer to that is to get a competing term sheet. That way, the answer to "Are you really going to quibble over 1%?" is "No, I'm not, I'm going to go with the firm that gives me that 1% without quibbling."

This also underscores the importance of doing fundraising in parallel and lining up as many offers as you can in a short period of time. If you're negotiating 1:1 you've already lost; you can't actually get market price unless you can make a market.

<comment><USER5> This might work to maximize price but it won't necessarily land you with the best partners. The smartest, best money knows it and they make you pay for their investment. Moreover, approaching fundraising as a transactional auction in a quick sprint carries with it a bunch of "relationship debt." You're signing on to someone (your investor) you can't fire for the duration of your company's existence. Rushing into that might end up costing your company far more than the marginal gain from a bidding war. Just my two cents.

<comment><USER6> This goes against point #2 that the investor for the most part doesn't matter.

<comment><USER5> Point #2 is so patently absurd its hard to take seriously. One, YC are themselves investors, and as far as I know they don't position themselves as causally inert in relation to a company's success / one of many indistinguishable and arbitrary alternatives.

Two, I don't think you will find many entrepreneurs who'd claim indifference around their investor choice. At the very least, this claim asks us to believe there aren't terrible investors who cause damage, which runs contrary to both common sense and history.

[edited]

<comment><USER5> Well, mea culpa. The piece does address the issue of bad investors. My main beef is with the line, "in the end, while some investors are better than others, none of them translate directly to success," which I don't think is a credible claim, or at least warrants more evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article seems to be in some conflict to how YC operates, which is designed around the demo day auction frenzy, where you might see valuation caps rise overnight on a rolling basis (I've seen some almost comical leaps in valuation in this regard), not to mention starting at prices in the $10-15M range. The ones that clear at those prices, on average, don't have the traction to justify it, which means the capital they get is often either second tier or first-tier call options. The net result is the best companies in the batch do just fine and because their prices, on average, were higher, YC and the company benefit from reduced dilution. The rest of the batch is then left with an inflated effective post-money that makes it harder for new capital to finance, especially if it follows an average growth curve.

New money doesn't particularly care you raised post demo-day at $15M if they think you're worth for example, at best, $12M now. It's a difficult conversation to have with founders and it can result in completely unnecessary pain around morale and optics. The worst loss is perversely invisible, as smart money might de-prioritize pursuing these companies knowing they have to work around the earlier mis-price. This is an opportunity cost that might not be apparent to most.

This is all complicated by the fact that demo day is in fact, not the first shot investors get at the companies in a batch. You might find that some of the most exciting companies in a given batch have been almost fully subscribed by the time demo day rolls around, as top tier firms don't wait till the actual demo day. Obviously, YC can't nor should they proscribe meeting with investors ahead of demo day, but this simply means access isn't as equally distributed as the notion of demo day might suggest. It looks to some degree like a second pass for folks without the network or access of a top-tier firm.

All this works great for YC, which, like every other fund in this world, makes money off power law returns, but it comes at a cost.

[edited]

</comment><comment><USER7> Don't over-optimize for the investor. If your startup lands in trouble, no investor is going to dig you out of it.

What should you over-optimize for? Flexibility. Over-optimize for the ability for your business to become a cashflow positive lifestyle business that is not a 100M+ exit. That's actually what many many startups become.

YC won't tell you that because they over-optimize for world-changing binary results.

<comment><USER8> Agreed with a caveat (from a VC perspective, mind you).

99% (schematically) of new businesses should indeed optimize for flexibility.

But, if you judge yourself to have a real shot at the >> $100M exit, then optimize for that path and foreclose the flexibility.

There's a real truth to the idea that you will be putting your all into any business, so if you have one that really can create an entire career's worth of wealth at once for you and your whole team, you should optimize for that.

If on the other hand your business doesn't have a realistic shot at that, stay the hell away from VC. Waste of time and cash is king anyhow.

<comment><USER9> _" There's a real truth to the idea that you will be putting your all into any business, so if you have one that really can create an entire career's worth of wealth at once for you and your whole team, you should optimize for that."_

That's the "truth" convenient for VCs. Even if a startup has a realistic shot at >> $100M exit, it doesn't automatically mean that the founders should go that route. It depends on their risk tolerance and particular circumstances. If a startup could exit at $200M with a _much lower risk_ than them exiting at $600M, some/many founders might prefer the former route. And that still would be "an entire career's worth of wealth at once" for them and the whole team (if the team is small enough), or pretty close to that, or simply just a very very good outcome.

<comment><USER8> I don't disagree with what you're saying schematically. I agree that there's a lot of propaganda that serves the money machine, and that it's not suitable for most founders.

I think the specific numbers you're providing are tricky, because generally, getting to $200 M exit within, say, a decade, involves institutional funding (VC, PE, "growth", whatever).

(As a relatively small non-Valley funder, I would generally also prefer to be an investor in a company that exits at $200 M with a _much lower risk_ than a $600 M exit, given that getting to $600 M might mean another $50-100 M in late-stage, first-money-out, preference overhang capital.)

I think the real question usually has orders of magnitude difference here. Internally-fundable businesses tend to opt for business models like services, consulting, etc., since they can scale without a lot of invested equity. Hence a lot of times you wind up growing a business semi-organically and end up getting a 1-2x revenue multiple for a modest growth, modest gross-margin, consulting type business. Or, if you do get a good SaaS operation going and grow it organcially, you might find yourself faced with the late-arriving roll-up play heavily funded by private equity, who will buy you at a 3-5x in an attempt to consolidate the market and float it at a 6-10x.

And yes, if you as a founder have a 90% shot at $10 M in 10 years, vs. a 9% shot at $100 M or a 0.9% shot at $1 B, most rational founders should and do take the safe road. Stipulated :)

But in my experience and observation, getting over the hurdle of product- market fit and a repeatable go to market strategy is what tends to kill startups. If you get that PMF and GTM working, it often makes sense to fund hypergrowth. If you don't, the company is walking dead anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Don't take gambling advice from the casino.

<comment><USER11> YC's stake gets smaller if the founder gets more diluted, so YC's interests are aligned with the founders'.

<comment><USER3> While I completely agree YC is providing valuable advice, I do not find your argument convincing. It reminds me of realtors supposedly being aligned with home owners because they make more for a higher sale price, which is true but it's completely ignoring effort. The homeowner has a much higher incentive to put more effort into selling the home for the right price, whereas the realtor has much more incentive to sell it faster.

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

This is not a perfect analogy for investors and founders, but it is an example where supposedly incentives are aligned but in reality they might not be. What's best for the investor is not necessarily what's best for the founder.

But again, in this case I do agree that YC is providing useful advice.

<comment><USER11> I hear what you're saying, and that makes sense, but in this case YC has no incentive to "churn and burn" through companies. In fact, given that they _really_ make their money from multi-billion dollar exits, even a marginal amount of dilution in those companies harms them greatly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For seed funding maybe it does not matter... but usually the options at that stage are funding or no funding. For every other funding it does matter.

</comment><comment><USER8> TL;DR: optimize only for monotonically increasing, vanilla terms for 24 months runway at a time.

As a VC and an entrepreneur, various times over the last 19 years, I will say this to entrepreneurs in good faith:

1\. Your core competency is company building, not fundraising. (There are exceptions, but you're not one of them.) Just get enough money to company- build for the next 18-24 months on plan.

2\. The primary (only?) thing to optimize for in valuation is "monotonically increasing over time." All of the pain (for founders, early investors, et al.) is when you have flat-to-down rounds. That's when you REALLY get diluted, and I don't mean like "geez 30% sucks" I mean like "let's build in a new 20% option pool because then founders are now down to 5% each" kind of dilution.

3\. The other thing to optimize for is keep your overhang (liquidation preferences) manageable. The bigger the prefs, and the bigger the post, the worse your options are for an earlier founder-friendly exit.

4\. Finally, as a sandpaper-the-edges kind of thing, remember that terms tend to get more investor-friendly over time, even for good (but not phenomenal) performers. So all in all, choose smaller rounds and lower valuations _provided you get vanilla terms_ (meaning no multiple prefs or strange dividends etc.) because subsequent investors will insist on same-or-better sweeteners, which can bite everyone down the stack.

5\. Really finally -- remember that for all of the seeming insider sharkiness of VCs, they all have to see each other in polite company again. Meaning, they're the devil you know. The real rapacious problem terms come from non-VC participants who don't mind slashing and burning -- be most cautious of those.</comment>


A Global Guide to What It Means to Be Part of the 1% - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-04/a-global-guide-to-what-it-means-to-be-part-of-the-1 <comment><USER2> Compared to the 0.1% or, heaven forbid, the 0.01%, the 1% is downright poor. Why the focus on the 1%?

Also, no focus on wealth inequality in this article, which is arguably much more significant than income inequality.

<comment> B-Con "Occupy Wallstreet", which was largely composed of naive college students, pushed the phrase "1%". It's catchy.

It's more like the 0.01% that most people _actually_ mean when they talk about 1%, including Occupy Wallstreet. The actual people at the 1% line are kind of boring.

<comment><USER2> Except you end up getting equally naive journalists pushing equally naive articles analyzing the 1%, and equally naive academics doing the same, and the ultimate effect is that there's very little data and very little analysis on, for example, the 0.01%. And people like Bernie Sanders, for example, seem loathe to talk about them too. I imagine that people don't like to talk about them because of how powerful they are. And so all this talk about the 1% is actually a very useful smokescreen for the <0.01%.

<comment> B-Con > I imagine that people don't like to talk about them because of how powerful > they are. And so all this talk about the 1% is actually a very useful > smokescreen for the <0.01%.

No joke. Who's the actual 1%? In my personal experience of friends and family: My doctor, a VP of a big company you've never heard of, another doctor, a higher-up at a corporate law firm, a business consultant, a very senior engineer.

They don't run the world from the shadows. They don't hoard the world's wealth. They pay cash for almost everything, some drive nice cars, and they don't need to worry that their kid won't qualify for financial aid if they get into an ivy league college. Half the ones I know started life either middle class or in poverty.

Yeah, let's focus all our attention on them. I'm sure they have all the answers to fixing the world's inequality.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Utter Disregard for Git Commit History - <AUTHOR> http://zachholman.com/posts/git-commit-history/

<comment><USER2> Sounds like the author wants something like Mercurial's [https://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ChangesetEvolution](https://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ChangesetEvolution). It will allow you to rebase and do all kinds of heinous things to your history, but still maintain the original commits that things came from.

</comment><comment><USER3> Commits are forever. What happens to your history of pull requests if github shuts down or turns evil?

<comment><USER4> Are there any GitHub clones that record PRs, issues, wikis, etc as commits on separate branches?

GitHub has proven that discussions around code are every bit as important as the code itself, so why not give it first class treatment by storing it in the same medium?</comment></comment>


How Square taught me to be an entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://www.delian.io/post/42683539095

<comment><AUTHOR> Aww... I don't understand why this got flagged.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some great shows/movies about computing and computing history? - <AUTHOR> The Imitation Game and the General Magic documentary come to mind. <comment><USER2> I found Halt and Catch Fire to be entertaining. It's not really historical or technical, but shows the politics of a fictional company (based loosely on Compaq) related to technology. Keri Bishe is also very attractive with auburn hair.

There have been a couple movies about Steve Jobs. I think netflix has some stuff about Microsoft and Bill Gates. I think there's also a BBC produced film about algorithms on Netflix, although it's very basic.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've found many good (mostly black-n-white) historical snippets by searching on YT for persons related to computer history (for example Von Neumann, Hopper, Feynman, ...). A lot is related to wartime efforts, as there seemed to be a real need there..

But there's certainly no shortage of books [0] about the subject, and I'd recommend to start there to get a list of names and key events first.

If you're looking for entertainment (although there's multiple good documentaries listed there too): [1]

HCF is something I'm planning to check out soon!

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22907211](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22907211)

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

<comment><USER3> And here's a new one that seems very interesting, just out: Bit Player [0] (about Claude Shannon and his work)

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7WmMSAxq8s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7WmMSAxq8s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is a german film "23" about two hackers in the 80s. It is said to give a good impression of the hacker culture of that time, but also has cold war and conspiracy theory themes. It is based on real events, though it took some license apparently.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_\(film\))</comment>


Ask HN: At which tech companies do employees act (and are treated like) adults? - <AUTHOR>

I am being serious here (this is a throwaway account for obvious reasons).
I enjoy working in the tech industry. I like working with people, and get a kick out of creating and shipping products. But I am getting somewhat frustrated with the childish Valley work culture.
Unlimited snacks and tricycles at work are not selling points for me. I can feed and entertain myself just fine. I would simply like to work with people that get stuff done (efficiently) ... and then carry on with the rest of their lives. Less small talk, more productivity.
Are there tech companies in or near SF where this happens? It would be great to get a list going. <comment><USER2> I've always found this frustrating myself. I was never a fan of immaturity, but I have absolutely no patience for it at my age (it's one reason I hated my last company). The cultish character of some startups and tech companies also creeps me out. In general, I guess an infantile workforce is easier to manipulate than a group of mature adults. Or maybe there's something in the free snacks...

My personal experience has been that companies that need tech (vs. tech companies), as well as the older players, tend to have employees with a greater level of average or at least apparent average maturity. The Peter Pan syndrome you have in mind seems to be fairly unique to new tech, but not new businesses in general. Maybe instead of working for a tech company, you should consider working for a company that has a tech team instead.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty much anywhere that is an establish business.

An obvious example is Microsoft. But really take any software or technology company that is more than a few years old and you don't find people acting this way. It is just brand new startups or those who wish to pretend like they were brand new startups that do.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am glad to hear that I am not the only one who doesn't think "happy hour with your coworkers every week" and "we all vacation together" is a perk.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think you're a little confused, to be honest.

Having a lot of snacks lying around isn't the same thing as missing adulthood, and not having a lot of snacks lying around is not an indicator of adulthood. They're not correlated.

What you _actually_ want to look for is information on how you'll actually _work_. What responsibility you have. Whether or not you're trusted to make your own decisions. That sort of thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Look, I get that. I don't credit roosters for sunrises either. Let's not go down that road.

It's just not a selling point for me, and not appealing when used as such ("Come work here, we have great snacks.") Usually accompanied by claims of "unlimited vacation" and "a fully decked out Macbook Pro." I understand that these things can also exist in an environment where people are treated like adults (e.g. given responsibility, trusted to do their work, given privacy and space).

I would, of course, rather know more about the actual work environment. This information is just hard to obtain unless you personally know someone at the company - someone who is willing to talk candidly about it. Occasionally, a company makes puts such values front and center (e.g. 37 Signals). I was hoping to get more examples.

<comment><USER5> I work at one of the valley's biggest companies. I am happy to talk candidly to you about them. See my email address in profile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If we are asking about culture from an innocent standpoint of maturity and mapping, it ties directly to social issues we still hear categorically ignored as minority issues and money issues.

If we want a stable culture we need to address the hierarchy of needs errors, without numb economics and unchecked corporal pleasure, with enough pattern recognition to pay serious attention to habits of terms of 'model, view, and culture.'

</comment><comment><USER7> As has been said by many here already, more established companies and companies that need tech will generally have a more mature work force. I suffered from the same problem and took (in my opinion) a safe alternative, working in a bank development division managing the online properties and apps. Its an established environment with professionals that are treated as such.

</comment><comment><USER8> Startups which separate life and work are hard to find. Especially very early stage startups. This is why you should always get a bunch of stocks when you join startups. Once the startup is doing well, they go the standard route of hiring HR and business-y guys. That transition gets rid of most of the tricycles (mostly because more space is needed to house the extra people...)

</comment><comment><USER9> Come and interview at Amazon.com. We have offices in CA too. The culture is somewhat mixed, and there are places that keep things sane while respecting most people's, um, peculiarities.

<comment><USER10> One of my senior friends will be working at Amazon full time after he graduates this spring. He's one of our best & brightest. Amazon seems like a great fit for him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Try companies that make high-end enterprise apps. Guidewire would be a good choice near you.

</comment><comment><USER12> I work remotely. I get to create exactly the kind of work environment I want.

</comment><comment><USER13> I would say companies that deals with industrial stuff.

</comment><comment><USER14> any company funded without vc money fits your needs</comment>


A couple of simple design tips to Google.com - <AUTHOR> http://lighthouseinteger.blogspot.com/2010_10_01_archive.html#7380227766559792511

<comment><USER2> The arrow at the first result indicates the keyboard shortcut functionality. Now you can navigate results without mouse: use up/down keys to select a result, then press enter. I love that feature!

</comment><comment><USER3> I really don't like the blue arrows... All this does is keep the page from going "below the fold" (a $$ decision?). I use the keyboard to browse, and I expect the down arrow to move the page lower to reveal results 5-10.

* If you are logged in, you can turn these arrows off by disabling Google Instant.

* You can also toggle this functionality by pressing tab

</comment><comment><USER4> I have to agree that the icons are pretty crap.</comment>


Have women evolved to protect themselves from sexual assault? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2281138/pagenum/all/#p2

<comment><USER2> Excerpt:

 _...there is no question that rape seriously impairs a woman's reproductive interests. To say that rape pregnancies are costly to a woman's genetic success would be an enormous understatement. Not only do such conceptions completely undermine the female's mate selection—and so the quality of her offsprings' genes—but rapists are unlikely to stick around and help raise children, putting such children at a significant disadvantage. In short, it's a catastrophic mess from the vantage point of the mother's genes._

List from the article (article elaborates on each point):

 _1\. When threatened by sexual assault, ovulating women display a measurable increase in physical strength.

2\. Ovulating women overestimate strange males' probability of being rapists.

3\. Ovulating women play it safe by avoiding situations that place them at increased risk of being raped.

4\. Women become more racist when they're ovulating._</comment>


Mapping the Mass Exodus from Florida by Land, Sea, and Sky - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/09/mapping-the-mass-exodus-from-florida-by-land-sea-and-sky/539271/ <comment><USER2> Google, Apple, Facebook and the telcos would have a good idea as to who has actually evacuated and where to. It would be very interesting to see that data, on a map, anonymised to a heat map. It is not clear where people are supposed to evacuate to, the reality would be most interesting, maybe it would just reflect a general heatmap of where people lived.

I am sure the NSA could pull up this information too but I don't imagine that town planning times and disaster emergency planners have access to accurate information. How do you find out who lives somewhere and where they are now? The Googles of this world know this information.

<comment><USER3> In general, a person's home can be identified by tracking the movement of their mobile phone. At night it is at rest when the person sleeps. Alternatively, turning the phone off and a few hours later back on in the same location. If you use maps you can correlate it with businesses and homes.

Governments could ask telcos for this data (a log of when and where which phones connected to a cell). Or just the general workload of cell towers compared to previous weeks gives you a rough estimation of where phones are and are not. You could also ask for broadband activity and compare it to previous activity. If people evacuated, their bandwidth usage should have flatlined.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a bit frightening to see that concentration of communities which may be unable to evacuate right in the TB area, where the storm is coming.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, try being here. The view is interesting.

<comment><USER4> I wish you the best, and I hope you and yours make it through totally unscathed.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there any job more creative than programming? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Painting, design work (web design, print design, product design, architecture), poetry, fiction writing, composing music, theater acting... Do you want me to continue?

Yes, programming is a creative job. But to claim it to be "the most creative" is rather short-sighted.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just wanted to think about other creative jobs, didn't say programming was, actually, the most creative.

The other guy mentioned cooking. I wouldn't think about this hypothesis alone. You asked if I would like you to continue. I actually would like to ask you about consulting. Like being a Mckinsey's consultant. Would you consider it as very creative job?

<comment><USER2> > I [...] didn't say programming was, actually, the most creative.

Then you need to rephrase your question. In normal conversational English, "Is there any job more creative than programming?" implies that you consider programming to be the most creative job.

I think we should need to step back and define "creative" before we move on with this discussion. For me, being creative means doing things that have never been done in this way before. Writing a poem no-one has ever written, painting a picture no-one has ever painted, singing a song that has never been sung. The opposite of creativity is doing things "by the book". If I am just following a set of instructions, or applying a bunch of rules, that is not being creative.

Two examples: if I am cooking a meal from a cookery book, that is not very creative. But if I made the recipe up myself, it is. If I implement quick sort, that is not very creative - thousands of people have done it before me, there are plenty of instructions out there. On the other hand, if I come up with my own, original algorithm, that is being creative.

Being creative means exploring the universe of possibilities. The further away you get from the comfy planet of "it's-been-done-before", the more creative you are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> After 2 decades of programming, I rarely feel creative while programming. While designing an app or UI/UX sure, but rarely while coding.

For me, 90% of coding feels like being a human constraint solver. Take the intersection of tech being used and defined business rules, and figure out the path to implement a feature. It's rare I have to get overly creative to solve a given problem in an out-of-the-box manner.

Maybe I just need to work on more interesting things.

</comment><comment><USER4> The question inside the question is "Job for who?"

My sister dances and teaches and makes music and art. She's smart enough to program, but I doubt it would suit her temperament. Her muse is her muse, not my muse.

Architects can design buildings that last many years...much longer than most code. Does that make architecture more creative? Architects tend to design fewer buildings than programmers write programs. Does that make architecture less creative?

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a subjective question. Depends on the individual performing the action. To him anything may or may not be more "creative" than programming.

<comment><USER2> Why do you say creativity is subjective? If that is the case, anything could be creative - even working on a production line in a factory.

<comment><USER6> Why do you question it's subjectivity? Do you have any metrics you would use to measure it objectively?

I would argue that any task can be done with creativity, even working on a production line in a factory.

<comment><USER2> Creativity, as I've said above, has to do with doing things apart from the norm, doing them differently to how they are usually done or how they have been done before.

Using that definition allows a relatively objective comparison of the creativity involved in various tasks. Of course, just how much creativity is involved depends on how the person concerned actually executes a task. (It is perfectly possible to write an incredibly uncreative poem, for example.) In that sense there is some subjectivity involved, but the subjectivity depends primarily on how the subject executes his task, not how he perceives it.

Going back to the production line: production lines were invented specifically to get _rid_ of creativity. Ford wanted to ensure that every single car coming out of his factory was identical. The production line was his way of forcing equality, sameness - thus, the production line is the very antithesis of creativity. Of course, you might find a worker here or there who will work creatively on a production line. But I dare say he won't keep his job for long...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You would need a meta-creative job, one job where you have to create your own job. Perhaps enterpreneur would be it.

<comment><USER8> perhaps you can get a bit more creative if you discard the constraint of "job" and pick some other objectives not commonly valued / pursued by society

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Writing fiction, writing poetry, translating fiction, translating poetry, debating things on the internet.

<comment><AUTHOR> The cool point in your answer is that you gave 5 activities and they all involve "writing" in a certain extent. Coding is also writing, so the conclusion we might draw here is that writing, in its various forms, is a very creative task. About "debating things on the internet", though, I would disagree. Debating things on the internet definitely demands more resilience, but I really don't think you need to be very creative. Actually, besides being resilient, you need to be good at rhetoric.

<comment><USER9> I guess it's probably closer to creative writing than debate on the internet, but I'd say this is pretty creative: [http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html](http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wouldn't consider programming creative at all, it's the opposite for me. Each problem has a unique solution and do only one thing. None of what you code can be interpreted in differents ways depending of the person looking at it or using it.

</comment><comment><USER11> There are some in theoretical physics.

</comment><comment><USER12> UX/UI designing

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Why it would be more creative to work on UI/UX than building tough algorithms on the back-end? Just due to the aesthetic characteristic in the UI/UX tasks?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cooking?

<comment><AUTHOR> Cooking can be a creative task, but I do not think normal people do creative things on the kitchen, they just follow recipes... In my life, for instance, I cook the same things all the time. On the other hand, most of the time when I am programming I do creative stuff to solve problems. It is quite normal to think outside of the box while programming, but not while cooking. Most people must have a similar feeling.

<comment><USER13> True but in the professional cooking world, I think it's probably comparable to programming. In some cases, it may be more creative.

At home, you can experience more creativity by looking up lots of recipes for the same dish, start understanding what the core ingredients/flavors are and venturing out from there. Eventually you get a handle on ingredients and cooking methods like they're the syntax of a programming language.</comment></comment></comment>


The depressed programmer - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@santiagobasulto/the-depressed-programmer-49076d8b33f0 <comment><USER2> Welcome to the world of software development. In theory, you have to write "great code" for the coder who follows your footsteps in some company, practically it is your own code you have to revisit years later.

Embrace the experience and learn from it.

Revisiting my own code from 10 years ago makes me proud, revisiting my own code from 20 years ago makes me appreciate how much I learned.

Having produced a shitload of bad code is no reason for being depressed as long as you can rightfully claim that your more recent code is better because of what you learned from your early, bad experiences.

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure the author of the medium article was conveying an entirely different point. Namely, that they noticed they wrote poor code, some time ago, when they were depressed, not that they got depressed, now, when they saw poor code they'd written some time ago.

There's more of interest in this very brief article: the broader role of the state of mind of a coder as they write code; that coding might be more art than science; and where's the research in to these things?

These are familiar issues to me and I'm sure some folk in the game but the author is right that much of the industry seems to ignore them with presumed* profound consequences for the quality of code that gets written.

* What little science I'm aware of on these topics is generally weak. This may be because the industry is mostly ignoring them so there's no money in studying them but it's also clear that the things to measure (state of mind and quality of code) are really hard to measure in a way that leads to useful science.

<comment><USER3> A timely post on encouraging the opposite psychological space from depressed, namely "optimizing for fun":

[https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2015/12/20/perl-6-christma...](https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2015/12/20/perl-6-christmas- have-an-appropriate-amount-of-fun/)</comment></comment></comment>


Clipmarks Acquired by Forbes - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2007/08/07/clipmarks-acquired-by-forbes/ <comment><USER2> It's not done yet - check out Eric Goldstein's comments... [http://www.clipmarks.com/clipmark/464EF3EF- BEEB-4C41-A464-7F...](http://www.clipmarks.com/clipmark/464EF3EF- BEEB-4C41-A464-7F78C350F0DB/)</comment>


This Ugly Ad Saved My Business - <AUTHOR> http://www.gkogan.co/blog/ugly-ad-saved-business/# <comment><USER2> I think the most brilliant part was the sidebar ad that essentially 'lost' all the space for one arrow. This void completely draws your attention.

The text on the sidebar was also quite clever in referencing itself.

To me, it mostly shows that clever and clear copy wins over nice graphics.

<comment><USER3> It's not just the void: it's the fact the arrow points directly to the link in the top banner ad.

It's also almost perfect for the audience: it's aimed at cartoonists where intentionally crude stylings are usually intentional. (I doubt it would be similarly effective if promoting SaaS or luxury travel, where it would look jarringly out of place)

It also has a much higher proportion of screen real estate than the average banner campaign and apparently little of visual interest to compete with it, both of which are critical to its success.

<comment><USER2> yes, but the arrow is much more noticeable with this void. That's what I meant to say.

I did want to mention that the visual style matches perfectly with the target audience - cartoonists. That's a very good point.

I agree it's the perfect mix between content and style. For me it still boils down primarily to great, simple copy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ugly ads are sort of known to do well. This is why those "one weird trick" ads do so well. Also the weird sketches of people done in ms paint and junk. It's about getting attention and clicks. And it works.

<comment><USER5> Ugly ads, long copy, many things still work.

If anyone is interested in learning more about marketing methods, get:

"Tested Advertising Methods" by Caples (be sure to get 4th edition or earlier because later editions have LESS ads!)

<comment><USER6> Tested Advertising Methods is great.

It's also worth checking out the book Ca$hvertising. Its marketing is exactly as cringe-inducing as it sounds, but it has a lot of solid advice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Lessons Learned is the most valuable here. The ugliness doesn't matter, stand out and address your potential clients on their level.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yup. Ugly works extremely well.

I've personally made significant money from a very similar ad. Never underestimate the power of MS Paint (or equivalent)!</comment>


Hundreds of homeless people fined and imprisoned in England and Wales - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/may/20/homeless-people-fined-imprisoned-pspo-england-wales <comment><AUTHOR> Did that have anything to do with a wedding or do they have private prisons? or something else?</comment>


EMC co-founder kills himself - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/30/richard_egan_obituary/print.html

<comment><USER2> EMC is one of those quietly explosively successful companies that nobody knows anything about, but brings in billions in revenues. I was holding Data General stock when they were acquired by EMC, and sold it soon after (just before a precipitous drop due to the tech crash), but I've often considered buying again.

Not entirely relevant, I guess, but I think I'd like to know more about the EMC story, now that I think of it. In its early days it was a stunningly sure- footed tiny player, in a field of giants, and they came out the other side of the battle a giant themselves. I aspire to that sort of story for my own ventures.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=797695></comment>


Show HN: Y-Productive – an app to keep your work and distractions under control - <AUTHOR> https://www.y-productive.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HackerNews!

I made this app to fight all the technological pressure that huge distractional services (like Facebook or YouTube) put on us to distract us from our work.

The app aims to develop useful productivity habits and is designed for a personal use. Time tracking, productivity tracking and task/project management combined with a good-looking UI.

Here's a short video that describes the app and the idea best: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dV- XdXFrDg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dV-XdXFrDg)</comment>


Ask HN: What are you reading during the lockdown? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> "Recursion", Blake Crouch: That's what New York City cop Barry Sutton is learning as he investigates the devastating phenomenon the media has dubbed False Memory Syndrome-a mysterious affliction that drives its victims mad with memories of a life they never lived.

"Daisy Jones & The Six", Taylor Jenkins Reid: Everyone knows Daisy Jones & The Six: The band's album Aurora came to define the rock 'n' roll era of the late seventies, and an entire generation of girls wanted to grow up to be Daisy. But no one knows the reason behind the group's split on the night of their final concert at Chicago Stadium on July 12, 1979 . . . until now.

"The Silent Patient", Alex Michaelides: Alicia Berenson's life is seemingly perfect. A famous painter married to an in-demand fashion photographer, she lives in a grand house with big windows overlooking a park in one of London's most desirable areas. One evening her husband Gabriel returns home late from a fashion shoot, and Alicia shoots him five times in the face, and then never speaks another word. Alicia's refusal to talk, or give any kind of explanation, turns a domestic tragedy into something far grander, a mystery that captures the public imagination and casts Alicia into notoriety.

</comment><comment><USER3> Solitude: A Return to the Self, Anthony Storr

[https://bookshop.org/books/solitude-a-return-to-the-self- rei...](https://bookshop.org/books/solitude-a-return-to-the-self- reissue/9780743280747)

Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff

[https://bookshop.org/books/metaphors-we-live-by- revised/9780...](https://bookshop.org/books/metaphors-we-live-by- revised/9780226468013)

Confessions And Other Religious Writings, Tolstoy

[https://bookshop.org/books/a-confession/9780486438511](https://bookshop.org/books/a-confession/9780486438511)

The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, Henry Beston

[https://bookshop.org/books/the-outermost-house-a-year-of- lif...](https://bookshop.org/books/the-outermost-house-a-year-of-life-on-the- great-beach-of-cape-cod/9780805073683)

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, Alfred Lansing

[https://bookshop.org/books/endurance-shackleton-s- incredible...](https://bookshop.org/books/endurance-shackleton-s-incredible- voyage-anniversary/9780465062881)

</comment><comment><USER4> The Quantum Thief: imagine a world (mainly in the local solar system) where all the coolest tech exists. Nanites, uploading your brain to a computer, the ability to control quantum effects, meyacortexes, advanced cryptography, etc. It's hard to read since it's kinda based on hard physics, but very fun. I'm on the second book in the series.

Ninefox Gambit: the physical world (some far off place with a lot of worlds in space) can be controlled by events that occur and the common use of a specific calendar system and using specific formations like a 'spell'. It's basically a heavily math oriented magic system that runs all of the tech in the universe, and different calendar systems have different effects. It's hard to explain here, but a really fun 'sci-fi fantasy' novel.</comment>


Show HN: SumEval – Multi-language evaluation framework for text summarization - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/chakki-works/sumeval <comment><USER2> Thanks for this. I couldn't believe I had to use that Perl script when I wanted to play with some summarization ideas previously.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I also feel so (why Perl script now)! I hope this tool makes the evaluation of text summarization easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Multi language</comment>


Ray-Strips: A Compact Mesh Representation for Interactive Ray Tracing (2007) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/RS/paper_rt07.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> The important bits can be found at the end of the paper;

> 6.2 Analysis and Limitations

> The results above show that Ray-Strips are an efficient representation for > our tested complex benchmarks. In practice, the memory improvements gained > from using Ray-Strips are highly dependent on finding sufficiently long > triangle strips to build the hierarchy on. Obviously, this makes our > approach unsuitable for models without any mesh connectivity (e.g. without > any shared vertices). In that case, the Ray-Strip representation shown in > Section 4 becomes an indexed triangle list with a standard BVH (just with > the addition on the 2-byte header storing the triangle count) and > performance gains are lost. However, the memory overhead added is only very > small.Therefore, it is unlikely that there will be a significant performance > loss compared to using an indexed triangle list to start with.

> Our current implementation uses the stripification library Stripe[0], which > was designed for rasterization and unlike many newer approaches works on > general meshes without limitations on the input. Since the computed strips > can be sub-optimal for ray tracing,it should be quite possible to further > improve the performance of our approaches by designing a stripification > algorithm that chooses strips based on ray tracing criteria.

> As presented in Section 3 and 4, our system uses a BVH with axis-aligned > bounding boxes as the high-level hierarchy, but is important to note that in > principle any acceleration structure can be used for the Ray-Strips. We find > that a BVH usually provides a reasonable compromise between rendering speed, > flexibility and ease of use. It is also easily updateable so that dynamic > scenes can be handled efficiently. If maximum performance for a static scene > is desired, a kd-tree may be a better choice and might reduce the memory > footprint slightly. Note that Ray-Strips can be updated in the same manner > as BVHs, but have the limitation that mesh connectivity cannot change in the > animation, e.g. objects cannot "break".

[0] I can't find this anywhere on the internet. Here is the DOI for the IEEE paper cited (which does not mention this library), DOI: 10.1109/VISUAL.1996.568125

<comment><USER2> heres a random search result that is code that cites that paper for its own strip generation

[https://github.com/zeux/meshoptimizer/blob/master/src/stripi...](https://github.com/zeux/meshoptimizer/blob/master/src/stripifier.cpp)

source: went to [https://sci-hub.tw/10.1109/VISUAL.1996.568125](https://sci- hub.tw/10.1109/VISUAL.1996.568125)

then searched one of the author names + github

paper title and authors are Optimizing Triangle Strips for Fast Rendering Francine Evans Steven Skiena Amitabh Varshney

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A sort of ELI5 on this for those that may not be familiar with any of this:

Ray tracing algorithms require checking to see if a ray will intersect with objects in a scene. This takes a LOT of time, and if you want this to be _interactive_ ray tracing (e.g. in a game, where you need a frame drawn in a very short time), you have to find ways to reduce the number of objects you're comparing the ray against.

A lot of the time this includes culling algorithms, which essentially give you very quick ways to say that a number of objects have literally no way of being intersected by a ray, so you can ignore them. There's also things like bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs), which says things like, if a ray doesn't intersect with a given massive invisible cube that contains objects, then it can't possibly intersect things contained in that cube.

This is a bit different of a solution. If I'm understanding it right, this involves simplifying the representation of the objects themselves, so that something that was once a lot of triangles to be checked individually, can now be checked as one object. This means that a) you don't have to check for as many intersections, and b) it uses a lot less memory.

<comment><USER4> There's also the huge issue of computing the material shading once you've intersected the triangles. Rasterization has the convenient property that all pixels in the draw are coherent with the same material. That isn't true with raytracing, especially diffuse materials where the rays scatter everywhere. So your texture lookups are much more random compared to rasterization. This is why Disney's Hyperion added "ray sorting", to bring back some memory coherency to the problem. The current approaches to real-time raytracing, like NVIDIA's RTX, do not have ray sorting.

The benchmarks on scenes I have seen have shown that triangle intersection is only 5-10% of the time spent, with shading and texture bandwidth being the rest. So I'm skeptical that accelerated geometry tests will solve the raytracing problem.

<comment><USER5> Not quite the full picture...

Yes, rays bouncing off diffuse/glossy surfaces (incoherent rays) do mean texture accesses are much more random, but at the same time it means you can approximate them very easily, by loading much lower mipmap levels, or even switching to a "constant" overall colour after a certain number of bounces.

Whilst Hyperion does utilise ray sorting due to this, it was also due to Disney's insistence on using PTex for their texture mapping (instead of using UVs), which itself requires highly coherent texturing points to be performant.

Other CG/VFX companies are using pathtracing without ray sorting with Arnold, and many others are using Renderman RIS which does a limited amount of Ray batch sorting, but that pretty much tails off after 2/3 bounces, and you're left with ray/shading batches of 1, so Renderman's implementation of ray / shading point sorting is much more limited.

Whilst it is true that in some cases, ray / primitive / BVH intersection proportion of overall render time is as low as 5-10%, it's more normally in the 15-40% range, but this obviously depends on scene complexity and shading complexity. And this is for high-end VFX with highly complex materials: For interactive rendering where you could bake down a lot of materials to single maps (or even primvar mesh vertex attributes like Manuka does), the shading overhead would be a lot less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A little bit off topic but I recently saw something regarding a Ray-tracing engine built inside of the game Factorio.

Check it out here - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lVAFcDX4eM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lVAFcDX4eM)

<comment><USER7> The Factorio guys are just down the road from us at Corona Renderer (a top ray tracing engine) in Prague, I guess we should hang out and talk ray tracing sometime :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This was 2007. Is this used in production these days? If not, what else is used instead?

<comment><USER9> Most systems that I am aware of use a plain BVH. Memory requirements for the acceleration structure are not that much of a concern in most cases. Memory hogs typically are (in descending order) volumetric data (smoke/fire/...), textures and only then geometry. And because a BVH leaf node typically contains a few triangles, the BVH itself is always smaller than the geometry data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> More raytracing resources:

[https://github.com/melling/ComputerGraphics/blob/master/ray_...](https://github.com/melling/ComputerGraphics/blob/master/ray_tracing.md)

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if any of this is implemented in OpenVDB[0]?

[0] [https://www.openvdb.org/](https://www.openvdb.org/)

<comment><USER9> No, OpenVDB solves the completely unrelated problem of keeping huge volume data sets in memory for efficient monte carlo sampling. This ray strip paper deals with tiangulated surface meshes, which are completely unrelated data structures in an unrelated domain (2d surfaces embedded in a 2d domain versus a discretely, regularly sampled 3d function).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> (2007)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed.</comment></comment>


Chinese Room Thought Experiment - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Chinese_room_thought_experiment <comment><USER2> If you take an english person (on their consent and treating them with all respect) and insert electrodes into their brain, one group after hearing-to- neural, another before neural-to-speech, you will not understand how it all works too. You hear the question and hear the response, but have no idea how it was produced. Is that different? I think it is not.

Now imagine that not words, but ideas appear in your consciousness. And you don't have to verbalize them, only think abstractly. Do you really understand what it is about? Or is your brain "understanding" by picking associations and [de]verbalize them before/after processing as you were thaught? (language is not a built-in)

Why do people think that they understand themselves or _something_ clearly, when there is a large mostly unknown area of psychology/psychiatry and thinking in general.

A lighter version of criticism may sound like this: is a cpu required to understand a program it is executing? If yes, why do programs work? If no, what's the paradox then. Strong english AI emulates strong chinese AI algorithm and it all works without the former understanding the latter due to intellectual/knowledge limits. Maybe some strong enough english AI could understand chinese by simply figuring out everything from code, data, snapshots and spare time alone.</comment>


Photographers Capture Mysterious, Beautiful Patterns in Sand - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/07/sand-patterns-gallery/ <comment><USER2> See also Sand Artist Joe Castillo

[http://thegrablegroup.com/entertainment/sandstory-ted- active...](http://thegrablegroup.com/entertainment/sandstory-ted- active-2011-by-sand-artist-joe-castillo/)</comment>


Microdata: HTML5's Best-Kept Secret - <AUTHOR> http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/09/microdata-html5s-best-kept-secret/ <comment><USER2> Polluting markup is not the solution. It looks really ugly and makes maintenance a nightmare. Separate markup from data (and style, scripts, etc) for a cleaner app.

I've always been a proponent of placing all data in a script using json which you can consume easily without screen scraping.

<http://mylittlehacks.appspot.com/dataislands>

<comment><USER3> I don't see microdata as markup pollution. It is semantic information that is closely tied to the data it is representing. Rather than just telling the browser you have a paragraph, you can tell it the paragraph contains an address.

And it seems to me that in real world web apps all the markup with microdata could be programmtically added. Create a new object with a microdata schema and get an ORM type object with an HTML write method. This way you never manually type microdata markup anyways.

<comment><USER4> Turning

Hendershot's Coffee Bar

1560 Oglethorpe Ave, Athens, GA

Into

Hendershot's Coffee Bar

            1560 Oglethorpe Ave,
            Athens,
            GA.

...is not markup pollution? It's three times as big as before, and the value of this is still questionable.

<comment><USER5> But it's smaller than the proposed data island.

Which also won't work for people with javascript disabled. Plus, does Google go through your javascript and figure out what eventually makes it onto the page?

<comment><USER2> Well, templates is another issue, mixed with data island may make it more verbose.

The idea of the data island is to have the data separated from the content and let consumers use the data whenever they need it. I am now studying the possibility to use a link tag and have the data island external, like rss/atom to save bandwidth when 90% of consumers won't care about the data. And for those who care, they just load the external link and there you have it, all the data without scraping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> why bother? because google, for example, will use some of the annotations:

[http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=99170)

<comment><USER7> Like I've mentioned before, Google and browser support are hardly the limit of how annotations would be useful. Having a scalable standard for metadata would create a platform for all types of services. To me, what's exciting isn't what it will immediately get you, but what will be possible with that platform of data when it's a well-accepted standard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Recent discussion here about microdata: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1673623>

</comment><comment><USER9> I have always liked (and often written about) an alternative: for HTML: <http://example.com/test.html>, for semantic data: <http://example.com/test.n3> (N3 RDF format).

If a web app creates dynamic data at URL: <http://example.com/stockfeeds?symbol=APPL> then perhaps use something like: <http://example.com/stockfeeds.n3?symbol=APPL> to get RDF. Also, have standard (or commonly used) meta data to point to an equivalent RDF URI in generated HTML.

</comment><comment><USER10> Never confuse microdata or microformats for API substitutes.</comment>


Show HN: HN Notify.xyz – Subscribe to Your HN Replies - <AUTHOR> https://hnnotify.xyz/ <comment><USER2> At this point it feels like notifications for reply activity should be a default feature of HN.

Not having notifications causes abrupt ends of discussions because the author didn't realize a reply was posted.

Reply notifications furthers the goal of HN as a discussion forum.

<comment><USER3> Nah, I think that it's important that people don't get to invested into their comments. That's how flamewars keep going.

I care mostly about the general conversation here than that one comment I made yesterday afternoon

<comment><USER4> I'm the other way. I don't trust the users here to be real or not vote manip. Top comments are most dangerous.

The heart of discussion can be found in the details, not the surface.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just add your email (or a fake one, I don't care, just not one that bounces please), and a username you want to follow the replies for (yours, mine, pg, dang, it doesn't matter, and I don't care!).

This is a complete rewrite of the previous service I built for this. I had started this rewrite over a year ago, but due to family troubles I had to put it on hold.

I wrote the original HNNotify.xyz to once an hour crawl the API for your replies and email you if it found any. This was a terrible approach and led to a lot of issues. But that is how it has been running for well, ever.

This rewrite uses a database I feed with my API crawler. It's a lot more stable, and the query to find replies takes milliseconds instead of minutes.

</comment><comment><USER5> A service like this already exists: [https://hnreplies.com/](https://hnreplies.com/) and I've been using it for quite some time now - no issues faced till now.

The only difference is that hnnotify.xyz notifies you on comments to your _submissions_ too.

<comment><USER6> I've been using HN Replies for years and have nothing to say against it. Clean, only minimal functionality, delivery is prompt—kudos to maintainer.

<comment><USER7> That's dangrossman[1] and indeed, it's perfect.

1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dangrossman](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dangrossman)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Beware, since your main div has the "newsletter-subscribe" class, it gets gidden by uBlock Origin and the website is unusable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well that's no good. I will have to fix that when I get home this afternoon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been using the old version since you first posted it on Show HN over a year (two years?) ago.

Thanks! I especially like the new email formatting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks buddy. Also thanks for being my beta tester!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> In "Building Communities with Software" (2004), Spolsky writes:

"Q. Could you make a feature where I check a box that says "email me if somebody replies to my post?"

A. This one feature, so easy to implement and thus so tempting to programmers, is the best way to kill dead any young forum. Implement this feature and you may never get to critical mass. Philip Greenspun's LUSENET has this feature and you can watch it sapping the life out of young discussion groups."

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/03/03/building- communiti...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/03/03/building-communities- with-software/)

<comment><USER9> His rationale as to _why_ :

"If you offer the "notify me" checkbox, these people will post their question, check the box, and never come back. They'll just read the replies in their mailbox. The end. If you eliminate the checkbox, people are left with no choice but to check back every once in a while. And while they're checking back, they might read another post which looks interesting. And they might have something to contribute to that post."

<comment><USER11> Have a browser push notification that truncates the message...so they still get a notification but have to visit to see the full reply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Since it's Show HN it will be nice if there is any technical details provided. So how is it implemented, does it use APIs from HN?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's an ASP.net core website. I have a 3 droplets powering it $5 for web, $5 for utilities, and a $25 droplet for the HN Api crawler.

My API crawler is an C# console app that just increments the last crawled item until it gets a 404 then sleeps for 60 seconds. I currently have just over 3GB of data from the API.

<comment><USER13> Are you crawling firebase or algolia?

<comment><AUTHOR> Firebase

<comment><USER13> Than you could crawl up to the maxitem instead of relying on 404

[https://hacker- news.firebaseio.com/v0/maxitem.json?print=pre...](https://hacker- news.firebaseio.com/v0/maxitem.json?print=pretty)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > We will only email you notifications about your HN profile and new features.

AFAIK I should need to have a checkbox for that (IANAL). Is there a working "Unsubscribe" button in the emails? I'm very interested on this, but more interested in keeping my inbox clean-ish

Edit: tone

<comment><AUTHOR> Every email has an unsubscribe, but you are literally signing up for notifications. If you don't check it, you'd get no notification.

<comment><USER14> Oh yeah, notifications about new comments are fine (the whole point). I'm curious about new features emails. Once every 6-12 months would be totally fine, weekly updates not really :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I can tell you. In 2 years of running the previous version of this, i emailed the hundreds of users a total of 0 times.

I will email the old users for the first time later today once I migrate their accounts to the new platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> nice! i had this idea in mind for a while but didn't see how to monetize it :) glad someone did it.

> We collect every new submission and comment from Hacker News, and once every > 5 minutes or so (assuming I don't break something).

nit - you should decide if your tone is "we" or "I".

edit: another idea would be to add notifications for upvote/downvote you get. it's harder to implement so maybe just when your score changes...

edit2: why downvote?

<comment><AUTHOR> We is my company. I is me, the developer. I realize it might be confusing, I'll have my editor look at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is what I was thinking to build today. Awesome to see it has been built by @jermaustin.nice concept!

</comment><comment><USER17> It should be an RSS feed.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an idea. And cheaper than sending emails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Testing, testing

<comment><USER2> Test.

<comment><USER9> Test! Looks like notification emails have a ~10 minute delay and are done in batches.

<comment><USER2> Hnreplies is faster.... within a minute or two ...

<comment><USER9> I would prefer it be even slower. I was going to suggest making it configurable per user. I don't want my email blowing up or for it to turn into FB or Discord notifications (i.e., constant).

<comment><USER11> Would be nice if HNReplies did a daily digest or something.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the average amount of time for a startup to break even? - <AUTHOR> 1. After how much time does a start-up usually break even or become profitable?
2. If they aren't break even for too long, does that mean that their product just isn't adequate for the market?
3. After how much time being unprofitable do investors just decide that this company is not worth any more investments?
I would really appreciate to know these answers (or assumptions, experiences), since it would give me a better understanding of the probabilities of success for some start-ups I've been following.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> 1\. Longer than the founders originally thought, but in the ones that do break even or become profitable, not so long that they go under. Seriously though, it varies so wildly depending on factors that its' difficult to say, but if the fundamentals of the business are good then you're going to be alright.

2\. Not necessarily. Sometimes they just haven't found their right way of monetisation. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube are all examples of large scale long term loss-leaders.

3\. It varies from investor to investor, but generally if the company fundamentals aren't there, if the cost of recovery is greater than the cost of writing it off and if it looks like there's no way out, that would be the main alarm bells that I can think of.</comment>


Would you try our app for parking? - <AUTHOR> http://www.fleckparking.com <comment><USER2> If you are aiming for the short-term customer, I doubt there will be too much demand for it.

Reasons:

1\. There's too much logistics overhead. 2\. People are probably in a hurry and probably won't plan ahead. Imagine you are in a rush. Can you find the spot? 3\. For places where parking is in high demand, there are probably already many parking garages available. They are more expensive, but they are much simpler.

How about renting out long-term parking spots instead? Say a week or month at a time? This would target the following:

1\. People who live nearby who hate hunting for parking spots all the time. 2\. People who don't like parking their car out in the street, and would like a covered spot somewhere. 3\. Lower logistics and coordination. Stable income for parking spot owners. Win win on both sides.

</comment><comment><USER3> You need to make it much more clear that you are not renting out _public_ parking spaces (like spaces on the street, for example).</comment>


Another iPhone Alarm Bug: Non-Recurring Alarms Broken, Beginning 1/1/2011 - <AUTHOR> http://www.9to5mac.com/45310/new-years-2011-breaks-non-recurring-iphone-alarm-clocks

<comment><USER2> Another alarm clock bug in a very short time. When such a (seemingly?) simple feature turns out to be buggy, it does start to make you wonder about the quality of the rest of the OS.

Apple must feel the same way. I know they take pride in sweating the details and having stuff "just work", so that makes me wonder if some heads are gonna roll over this...</comment>


Charter of the Forest - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_the_Forest <comment><USER2> If you liked this, you might enjoy a discussion of old Irish law about the Lords and commoners of the wood as well. [http://www.forestryfocus.ie/wp- content/uploads/2013/02/Trees...](http://www.forestryfocus.ie/wp- content/uploads/2013/02/Trees-in-Early-Ireland.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> ""Forest" to the Normans meant an enclosed area where the monarch (or sometimes another aristocrat) had exclusive rights to animals of the chase and the greenery ("vert") on which they fed. It did not consist only of trees, but included large areas of heathland, grassland and wetlands, productive of food, grazing and other resources."

I adore this definition. Forest is so important for modern living as well, although we do not use it necessarily directly for grazing or resources, but as a weekend safe haven from the hectic city life.

Sure, I am "grazing" my local forest with my MTB on the weekends, but in a much more eco-friendly way. It fills up my batteries for the coming working week. :)

<comment><USER4> Yes, as in the New Forest [0] in southern England (where 'new' refers to its creation in 1079). Even today it has some complex and ancient usage rights.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel like there's some context missing here on why the king signed this into law? Benefits for commoners are obvious, but the benefits for the king less so

<comment><USER6> The king at the time was nine years old, and facing a rival claim to the throne from a French prince. His unpopular late father had been forced into signing the Magna Carta a couple of years earlier. His regent's decision to be generous (and to actually uphold Magna Carta and not punish all the nobles who had fought against either king) was probably a smart one. It's not like royalty particularly suffered from the common man foraging in their forests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The calligraphy in that document blows my mind.</comment>