Amazon's New Customer - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2017/amazons-new-customer/ <comment><USER3> I had to exit at this quote:

 _Apple's goal was not to build a phone but to build an even more personal computer; their strategy was not to add on functionality to a phone but to reduce the phone to an app; and their tactics were not to duplicate the carriers but to leverage their connection with customers to gain concessions from them._

I disagree here, this is hindsight and speculative, and the provided link is from 2013. The initial iPhone did not come with a market (the 'iTunes App Store') and AFAIK we don't know for sure if it had been planned from the beginning to pan out the way it did.

I am not trying to play down the success of the iPhone and how it has changed the world. Yes, it was incredibly successful, yes it all panned out nicely. I am just questioning if it was all planned to come out exactly this way from the beginning, or maybe there were some decisions made after initial success and someone came up with even better ideas.

<comment><USER4> I distinctly remember the way Steve Jobs presented it: "It's a phone, it's an iPod, and it's an Internet communications device."

That just comes off to me as though even he didn't realize how ubiquitous phones would become, and how integral to our lives they would become, even replacing computers for so many tasks. It's my phone, my iPod, my work outside of office hours, schedules and times my workouts, my alarm clock, my camera, my GPS and mapbook, my library, my notebook, my flashlight, my scanner, my TV, the way I look at cat pictures and the way I look up where to find an AED in an emergency.

<comment><USER5> Read back the quote again to yourself.

Phone + iPod + Internet communications device...you are pretty much describing a general purpose computer, no?

And if you go back to the keynote, that was kind of the joke. He started out describing these as if they were separate products being introduced. The punch line was it was just one device. In other words, subtly mocking the idea you needed a separate device for each kind of functionality you wanted.

Lastly, Apple was a computer company from top to bottom. How else would they envision a solution to the problem of crappy phones, but to turn them into computers with really good software? That's just who Apple was.

So the idea of the Apple strategy being replacing the mobile phone with a mobile computer is only obvious in hind sight just isn't true, it was obvious as soon as the iPhone was introduced.

<comment><USER6> A general purpose computer, or a very locked down thin client. Like the world of AOL users.

I would have suggested the latter, otherwise the system would have been a lot more open.

General purpose computers give purchasers administrator/root access by default. If you don't have that, you have a thin client run by someone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This deal is Venmo for groceries. A tech company is filling an obvious hole in an established industry - where in many other countries, the incumbents have been flexible enough to do it themselves.

Amazon has reached the conclusion British supermarkets reached over a decade ago: The sensible way to run a perishable goods supply chain is through an existing network of grocery stores.

While WebVan was crashing and burning, Tesco (biggest supermarket) was building out a home delivery service using their shops as "free" fulfilment centres. Tesco Direct launched so early, their original client wasn't even a website - it was a desktop Windows application!

This is another odd market where somehow the US incumbents seem unable to implement an obvious feature that is common in other countries. Eventually a middleman (Instacart for food, Venmo for money transfer) do it for them - <USER2> take a cut on the way. I wonder why this happens?

<comment><USER8> > This is another odd market where somehow the US incumbents seem unable to > implement an obvious feature that is common in other countries.

What other examples are there?

We have had online grocery delivery in Canada called Grocery Gateway [1] for a decade or longer. It's run by our biggest grocery company as well. The business seems to be doing fine but it's still very much niche and most people don't know a lot about it.

I assumed the US had a few local companies doing the same there. The difference is that these are not anywhere near the scale of what Amazon could do with groceries at a national country wide scale.

Overall I don't think Tesco vs Amazon is a really accurate comparison. It sounds more like all of those people who said "Nokia had smartphones way before Apple! This isn't new." Or comparing a taxi company having a mobile app to book a ride vs Uber. Or Couchsurfing vs Airbnb. Etc, etc. There are tons of examples.

There is still a huge amount of potential to replace grocery stores with ecommerce and so far only minor attempts have been made.

[1] [https://www.grocerygateway.com/store/](https://www.grocerygateway.com/store/)

<comment><USER9> IMHO the three biggest challenges have been cost, accuracy, and quality.

We have a lot of options for this in NYC: PeaPod by Stop N' Shop, Instacart, Fresh Direct, and Whole Foods has its own delivery service.

I've tried them all. I REALLY want to stop going to the grocery store. But with all of them, I've found:

* The price is too high to justify it. Walking down the corner to the grocery store is not that big a deal.

* You don't always get everything you ask for. They run out of stock of things, or forget things. So you often end up missing that one crucial ingredient.

* Sometimes they don't give you the quality you're looking for. Maybe the bananas or avocados are either unripe or too ripe. A couple services ask you the preferred ripeness, but then they don't end up having that so they give you a different ripeness.

* Back on the pricing: I personally tend to buy only 2-3 days of food at a time, because I want it to be fresh. If I want baked cod on Friday night, I generally want to buy it Thursday or Friday. But since I'm paying a premium for my delivery, it makes more sense to batch it into bigger orders, which doesn't work for me.

<comment><USER5> You live in NYC, and you still want delivery?

I mean, when I lived in Manhattan, the nearest grocery store wasn't much further than my refrigerator. Walking into the store and grabbing the thing you want would have been a lot faster than ordering online and waiting for someone to deliver.

<comment><USER10> Depends how much you value your time. If you want to shop at whole foods or trader joes then you're going to stand in line. Standing in line is one of my least favorite things to do. I would rather pay a delivery fee and have someone else do my shopping and bring it to me while I spend the timing doing something else that I enjoy.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I was thinking more the little super markets and bodegas on every corner, than whole foods or trader joe's.

<comment><USER11> Come on that's nowhere near grocery-store quality if they even have fresh foods of any kind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> tl;dr: Amazon will "transform the Whole Foods supply chain into a service architecture based on primitives," using the stores as customers that guarantee a necessary level of scale.

I think this is basically true. Amazon will refactor Whole Foods' supply chain into something that serves both Amazon Fresh and the retail stores. This will allow Fresh to scale massively and dominate the category.

I would just emphasize that Amazon probably has more interest in Whole Foods then merely a guaranteed "customer". Whole Foods is bringing a lot of local supply chain relationships to the table.

But I agree 100% it's about the supply chain and not transforming retail stores into delivery hubs or anything silly like that. It won't hurt that the stores will freely promote Amazon Fresh and serve as great venues for sampling new products. But Amazon's goal here is to take over the category by massively scaling Fresh.

<comment><USER13>
      refactor

Geeze, I hope it compiles okay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This whole article seems predicated on a couple of misconceptions. To whit: 1) getting bought out is losing 2) buying is winning.

The fact that Amazon has more money than Whole Foods is nothing to do with its performance in the groceries market. The fact that Amazon has bought Whole Foods suggests, in fact, that they think there's value to be had there that isn't reflected in their current market capitalisation.

And none of this actually means that the Whole Foods acquisition will work. It sounds like a good idea, and I wouldn't risk money betting against Jeff Bezos but Amazon aren't a dominant player in the groceries market yet. They've just bought one of the few successful insurgents.

In short, this is just a move in the game. Calling the match is pretty premature.

<comment><USER15> I don't see what in the article gave you the impression that Whole Foods lost. Or that Amazon won.

<comment><USER5> He drew an analogy between the Whole Foods CEO about Amazon and the groceries market and the Palm CEO about Apple and the phone market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I generally like Stratechery articles - but I found this one stretching to make everything fit into a nice, neat box - particularly the comparison of AWS to the Grocery business. I found the graphics representing rather incomprehensible (perhaps I'm simply not bright enough to get them) and it feels like someone looking for a grand unifying theory of Amazon, as opposed to something simple: the grocery business is huge ($900b/year), Amazon wants to be a part of that channel.

It's basically doing the opposite of Walmart. If there is a grand unifying theory of Amazon, I think it is also pretty simple: start with a specific niche in a category, dominate that and then grow. But that is hardly a unique approach in business. Amazon does, however, execute it extremely well.

<comment><USER17> _I found this one stretching to make everything fit into a nice, neat box._

Yes. It's entirely possible that Amazon found Whole Foods for sale at such a low price that the stores don't matter much. It's the house brands which Amazon can distribute through their existing supply chain. Most of Whole Foods' house brands have reasonable shelf lives, so they can easily be slotted into the Amazon system.

Using Amazon's package distribution system to fill the stores would be inefficient. Stores get product by the pallet, not the box. Supermarket distribution is semitrailers of pallets going direct from big refrigerated warehouses to big stores. Amazon isn't set up for that.

It's not clear what Amazon will do with the stores. Probably put in Amazon lockers and cut the prices on the house brands at first.

<comment><USER18> That's exactly how it works. They've already cost-cutted and streamlined it all about as much as it will get. Yet, it all reduces down to people pulling pallets from manufacturers off trucks, putting them somewhere, other people making custom pallets for stores from those pallets, shipping them, and then breaking those down at store for sale to customers. The only time I saw real innovation in that was Costco and its predecessor's brilliant decision to eliminate the store to just let people shop off the pallets and such in the warehouse.

I think Amazon did try some stuff like having storage containers robotically come toward workers. They might have some tricks up their sleeves. The fundamental model is pretty basic and optimized, though, with competition driving margins down making it harder to optimize over time.

<comment><USER17> _I think Amazon did try some stuff like having storage containers robotically come toward workers._

They bought that technology from Kiva, then bought the company, and all their current-generation distribution centers use it. (Amazon has distribution center generations; they don't upgrade existing buildings while in operation, but build new ones with newer technology. Some pre-Kiva centers are still running.)

Automatic picking is still an R&D problem. Amazon has put some effort into that; they have an annual competition where people can compete to win a few thousand dollars solving a billion dollar problem.

Automatic mixed-case picking and palletizing can be automated. It isn't quite fast enough, quite general enough, and quite cheap enough to take over.[1] Except inside frozen food warehouses.[2] Humans are not very productive at -23C, but special-purpose automation machinery is. Amazon has the scale to push that gear into being cost-effective.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO7fvrdTCgs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO7fvrdTCgs) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuvrP1QKsdk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuvrP1QKsdk)

<comment><USER18> They're really neat tech videos. The first confirms how slow and expensive I'd expect it to be. The second looks really complicated compared to humans picking off pallets with PITS guiding other pallets or rollers. First vid I found on YouTube:

[https://youtu.be/VOg4NE6M-_I?t=46s](https://youtu.be/VOg4NE6M-_I?t=46s)

So, they have pallets all over the place. The order pickers are driving something automated to grab the stuff. They get a good amount at once. They can stack it on new pallets or ship it as shown. Pretty straight-forward. I could see some addition speeding up dealing with the vertical pallets. Those self-driving forklifts from show Silicon Valley could be nice. Yet, the automated versions are so expensive that some (all?) DC's in both Walmart and Kroger got rid of the pallet-wrapping machines per conversations with employees. It wasn't cost effective to maintain vs just having low-paid people do it they said.

So, it will be interesting to see what happens with all this. I like the idea of doing frozen first as people might be moving slower. I do also recall those having boxes that are more similar to each other compared to other loads. I'd start with pallet or roller optimization software that tells people to get the stuff in the order that stacks or ships easiest. That might exist already. I only have second-hand info from the DC's so don't know. Maybe have robots that move things automatically dropping pallets or adding them as in the video with the humans order picking off them. Maybe some lights or something on the dolly to show where to drop the next box for ideal stacking. There's possibilities..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think this article hits the nail on the head. When I use a grocery app, I'm usually shopping at Whole Foods. By modifying the structure so that delivery is a feature (Much like Prime), instead of a separate good, they'll be able to take most of the current players in the space to the cleaners.

</comment><comment><USER20> > The cost to build AWS was justified because the first and best customer is > Amazon's e-commerce business

I've seen statements that AWS wasn't actually used for Amazon own needs (in the beginning) and was developed by a different team at least a couple of times, here on HN and elsewhere. Were these rumors false?

<comment><USER21> History is always a little murkier than stated – it probably started out as something and then found its 'product/market fit' serving Amazon.

Steve Yegge's famous essay covers it quite well, I think: [https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX](https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX)

> So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of > course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet > whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus > or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and > eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like > unsolicited peer bonuses.

His Big Mandate went something along these lines:

      1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

      2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

      3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed:  no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever.  The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

      4) It doesn't matter what technology they use.  HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter.  Bezos doesn't care.

      5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable.  That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world.  No exceptions.

      6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.

      7) Thank you; have a nice day!

<comment><USER22> You missed the best part, where he says something along the lines of 'haha, just kidding about #7. Jeff Bezos definitely does not care about your day'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm not from the US so i have never been to whole foods, but isn't the point of whole foods is that you get a totally different selection than other retailers ? and if so, how could it be a customer for regular grocery products ?

<comment><USER24> Many of the brands that are dominant in Whole Foods are also available, to some degree or another, in other grocery stores.

But Whole Foods has a more targeted sourcing strategy for fresh veggies, fruit and meats. They carry more of those organic brands than the usual grocery store.

It's not entirely a "whole 'nother thing" but it is a pretty deep curation of food, food types, brands, and some of the more eclectic, local and smaller food brands.

You get used to Whole Foods but when I visit a Safeway or Raley's, I'm pretty shocked what a more traditional, mainstream grocery store looks like.

That said, and on an unrelated point... though I buy more from Whole Foods than any other grocery chain, the degree to which all the stores have started to be more like each other and less local-driven has been a little disappointing. The Whole Foods in Flagstaff is much the same as the Whole Foods in Roseville.

<comment><USER25> The local-produce movement has some surprisingly harsh downsides, and I'd guess that Whole Foods reassessed its strategy after battling them for years.

The first big problem is that the macroeconomics of local tend to suck. The opportunity cost associated with keeping supply constrained in a small market grows in proportion with our ability to reduce transportation costs and integrate national and international markets. Meanwhile, a fragmented patchwork of smaller farms and companies serving local markets tends toward waste: farms invest in the high-end produce they think will maximize yield per acre in the local market. Unit costs per item are higher, and nobody has incentives to produce the essential, but low-margin items that the market still needs.

The second big problem is that consumers don't actually know what local means. Not really, at any rate. Enjoying blueberries in Southern California in the summer? Those aren't local. Oh, but we still want them? And we want them year round? So...I guess we're back at some combination of local + (inter)national, in which case we're still supporting factory farms, giant monocultures, and seed conglomerates -- we've just conveniently pushed these things out of our minds. But they still exist, and we haven't really solved the problems we've set out to fix. The point is, consumers want their goddamn blueberries. And their bananas, which, don't even get me started how much _actual blood has been spilled_ over the international banana trade. (Seriously. Look up Chiquita on Wikipedia. You'll be tempted to use the phrase 'conflict bananas' after reading up. Don't use that phrase. But, like, still. Wow.)

There is probably some sort of ideal market, combining the economic efficiencies of concentration with the variety and quality of specialization. I think we'd all love to get there. But this is the kind of problem Jeff Bezos seems precisely better equipped to solve than John Mackey did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I was surprised Stratechery didn't talk more about the warehousing side of the grocery industry, which is a huge business unto itself.

Given the huge scale of Amazon's fulfillment centers, those are the businesses I would think should be the most afraid of this news.

</comment><comment><USER27> My biggest take away is that Amazon will use these stores to take on the restaurant supply business. I'm willing to bet the CEO of Gordon Food Service, which covers eastern US, is clueless on how his company's fortunes are imperiled.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm wondering if Amazon will attempt to buy something like Costco or Bestbuy. Then they'd have both ends of the market and also have the ability to connect the big box to the relatively smaller box.

</comment><comment><USER28> interesting quote regarding amazon's updated mission statement to be earth's most consumer-centric company where folks can discover things to buy. I wonder what buying a house/home on Amazon would be like.

</comment><comment><USER29> IMO, any blog or news article that was written AFTER Amazon has been in the news are simply trying to ride the press wave.

I especially find it tickling when most of the authors have no prior work experience or affiliation with any business of Amazon.</comment>


John Carmack's dev notes on Doom Classic for iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.idsoftware.com/doom-classic/doomdevelopment.htm

<comment><USER2> John is awesome. After hearing Doom Classic was out on the iPhone I immediately bought it and tried throwing myself into hell to see what would happen. Immediate reaction: Doom is really hard to play on a touch screen.

I really hope they make Doom 2 for either Xbox Arcade or the iPhone.

<comment><USER3> Everything is hard to play on a touch screen. Touch screens are horrible for gaming.

<comment><USER4> I also bought Doom Classic and found I got much better at it after just 20 minutes of playing. Still no comparison to mouse/keyboard for FPS games, but neither are console controllers...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "I doubt one customer in ten will actually play a network game of Doom Classic, but it was interesting working on it."

That may be true. On the other hand, I, for one, am going to become a customer _because_ of the network game option.</comment>


Blinking Commits - <AUTHOR> http://blog.annharter.com/2015/08/12/blinking-commits.html <comment><USER2>
        git commit -F <(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thiderman/doge/master/doge/static/doge.txt) # [0]

Oh god do I feel bad about this. What have I done?

[0] [https://github.com/thiderman/doge](https://github.com/thiderman/doge)

<comment><USER3>
        git commit --allow-empty -F <(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thiderman/doge/master/doge/static/doge.txt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Funny timing, with the recent "Terminal escape sequence XSS" post on oss- security in mind: [http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss- security/2015/08/11/8](http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss- security/2015/08/11/8)

<comment><USER5> > So the basic TL;DR: please don't use really ancient terminal programs that > are vulnerable to this stuff. Disappointing that he would make this > statement and then not bother to recommend specific ones to avoid and/or > use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Regrettably (?), you can't use this to implement marquee.

But you can make your text black with a black background. Or re-order lines, which I suspect to be "fun" for git logs.

<comment><USER7> I think the most devious would be to simply move the cursor up one line. This would result in the 'git log' line being overwritten, and hiding the commit from casual scrutiny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> iTerm2 supports images in the terminal. May as well take this as far as it will go.

[https://iterm2.com/images.html](https://iterm2.com/images.html)

Edit: even animated gifs

<comment><USER9> Ranger utilizes this well on (not just on iterm) [http://ranger.nongnu.org/](http://ranger.nongnu.org/) \- a VIM-style terminal-based file explorer via w3m.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately only with iTerm2 it seems able to play animated gif.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I actually quite like the idea of control codes in commit messages for internal teams where you can implement rules.

It could be useful for highlighting risky commits in red or other visual markers.

Would play merry hell with almost every other way of viewing commits though :D

<comment><USER12> >I actually quite like the idea of control codes in commit messages for internal teams where you can implement rules.

>It could be useful for highlighting risky commits in red or other visual markers.

Yeah... that is really not a good idea. You are not supposed to take this blog post seriously.

Why not just agree on some terminology like CRITICAL/MINOR/SECURITY, which a visual interface can then highlight?

        SECURITY: Fix XSS in spline reticulation

If it detects "SECURITY" it adds a red background, etc. Anyone viewing the raw text version of the commit messages will still get the message without having to see a bunch of gibberish.

<comment><USER11> > You are not supposed to take this blog post seriously.

And you were not supposed to take my comment seriously... I thought I made that obvious with the last sentence but oh well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Has nothing to do with git, or committing, it just applies VT100 control codes that work anywhere in a compatible terminal.

<comment><USER14> So to be clear, the article isn't suggesting that e.g. github will interpret the ANSI escape sequences, but they will be when you `git log` from a command line, right?

<comment><USER15> Correct, this is an ANSI escape code[1] interpreted by terminals, not XSS.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone know if an issue has been opened (or any relevant discussion on the dev list) on stripping escape sequences? It _does_ seem like it could be harmful.

</comment><comment><USER16> To insert a literal character (like the Escape entered in this post) in Emacs, use C-q.

</comment><comment><USER17> Of course, you can also use other escape codes to make your commits colored (e.g. [92m for green), underlined ([4m), etc.

<comment><USER18> Or change the terminal title. ^[]0;title^G

<comment><USER19> Or for screen and tmux:

        ^[ktitle^[\

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So, 1990's Geocities commits are now a thing again? ^[[5m#UNDER CONSTRUCTION^[[0m

</comment><comment><USER21> The writing style is clever and funny. You should keep writing!

</comment><comment><USER22> I think this post just changed my position on censorship :p

</comment><comment><USER23> Will it still work if I omit the closing bracket? Or put it in a different commit message, further down the page?

</comment><comment><USER24> This is a really entertaining writing style: technical enlightenment through demonstration via humorous examples. For the lazy (and additional humorous demonstration), I wish he'd provided an example gif showing it in action (i.e., Github, terminal, Sourcetree, etc...).

<comment><USER25> The author uses female pronouns.

<comment><USER24> There are no gendered pronouns in her blog post.[1]

At first, I was surprised to find I falsely assumed she was male in spite of evidence to the contrary, and was going to thank you for making me more aware of my own oversight. Upon review, however, I made the correct assumption that it was non-gendered. I'll forego the inciting comment, and corresponding cultural political flamewar over my use of a singular default male pronoun. If you down-voted me, please understand that doing so is alienating and a disservice to conversations. We should not punish commenters for failing to conform to our own personal cultural norms. This is consistent with the spirit of your comment; engineers need not conform to external expectations of a masculine identity.

[1] _Her_ handles at the bottom are neither pronouns, nor in the blog post, and were inconsequential to me given my present lack of motive for reaching out to the author.

<comment><USER25> I didn't downvote you. (Downvotes are heavily rate-limited, at a guess, from very unscientific observation, I think I only get ten a day, so I save them for the really annoying comments.)

I'm not sure why you think he/his pronouns are nongendered. The nongendered pronouns in English are they/them.

<comment><USER24> You're continuing to controversialize and divert from the original conversation. That said...

> I think I only get ten [downvotes] a day, so I save them for the really > annoying comments.

10 downvotes a day? Please reconsider your behavior. You are almost certainly unnecessarily alienating commenters, and in this case, misguidedly so.

> I'm not sure why you think he/his pronouns are nongendered.

When I said "it was non-gendered," I was referring to _the blog post,_ which meant your original comment, "The author uses female pronouns," is factually incorrect.

> The nongendered pronouns in English are they/them.

I'm aware, and intimated as much: "I'll forego [discussing] my use of a singular default male pronoun". Yes, they/them is non-gendered, but it is also plural, making it grammatically historically incorrect. However, despite the informality of my comment, given the extreme propensity of the "generic he" to be controversialized, especially in technology and the internet, and the movement away from it during my lifetime, I'll placate to avoid the negative insinuations.

Educating yourself on the context of the matter would go a long way to ameliorate your sanctimonious attitude, and hopefully disincline you to feel the need to controversialize, divert and detract from conversations in the future.

<comment><USER26> On the matter of education, singular they is historically supported: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Older_usage_by_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Older_usage_by_respected_authors)

<comment><USER24> Yes. I'm aware. I was trying to be as terse as possible on the diverting topic. It's disputed whether past singular they was considered grammatically correct at the time, despite the source. Of course, then you have to define what it means to be "considered grammatically correct" and who decides that and now you're entering a whole subjective can of worms that turns into circular logic, leading back to the realization that language is largely cultural and expressive, not technical, unfortunately. All of these are reasons why there's not much room for a logical argument here, and only an appeal to emotion, bandwagoning, and some historical bad actors making the "generic he" untenable.

Still, the OC was factually incorrect and this entire topic is diverting and as you've now contributed to with your sanctimonious desire to prove me wrong, controversialized and alienating here on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> In the world of ANSI escape codes and terminal emulators things are never that easy.

Works for OS X apparently.

</comment><comment><USER28> Haha, what a coincidence. Just the other day we discussed string special cases[0][1], to which I contributed ansi escapes. Unicode "fonts" 𝓵𝓲𝓴𝓮 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖘 seem to work in commit messages as well.

I think this is quite harmful, especially the character movement ansi escapes could be used for nefarious purposes.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10035008](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10035008)

[1] [https://github.com/minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty- strings/blo...](https://github.com/minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty- strings/blob/master/blns.txt)

<comment><USER29> _I think this is quite harmful, especially the character movement ansi escapes could be used for nefarious purposes._

Like what?

<comment><USER30> \- Push malicious commit

\- Rewrite the commit hash in git log with character movement

Actually I don't know if it's a practical attack in any way, could cause some confusion.

<comment><USER31> If you can commit, why not just enter something like "Small fix in formatting" instead of drawing of LOT of attention to malicious comit?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This works for me in OS X's built-in Terminal app, but not iTerm. Both report xterm-256color as $TERM, so I'm not sure what about iTerm is configured differently to prevent it from working there.

<comment><USER33> iTerm2 has an option in your Profile: Text tab > Text Rendering: "Blinking Text Allowed"

Off by default; enable and blink like its 1989.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wonder if GitHub do/will support this and parse it to HTML

<comment><USER35> If they did they'd have to wrap it a <blink> tag. Anything else would just be sacrilege

<comment><USER36> Unfortunately most browsers don't have <blink> support anymore

<comment><USER19> Well, then it fits; many terminal emulators don't support \e[5m as blink anymore. Xterm, URxvt, and Konsole do, but the Linux terminal doesn't (gives it a grey background, not blinking), VTE-based terminals (gnome-terminal, lxterminal, ...) don't (ignored), Emacs term-mode doesn't (treats it as bold).

<comment><USER37> The "gray background" is really a "bright black" background. The old IBM CGA and successors had a flag for whether to interpret the top bit of the background color as intensity or blink[0]. It looks like Linux used to have it set to blink a few years back[1].

[0] [http://webpages.charter.net/danrollins/techhelp/0087.HTM](http://webpages.charter.net/danrollins/techhelp/0087.HTM)

[1] [http://sourceforge.net/p/linux- fbdev/mailman/message/7849329...](http://sourceforge.net/p/linux- fbdev/mailman/message/7849329/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Doesn't work in my gnome-terminal. Looks like the commands get escaped by git somehow. Did anybody test it?

<comment><USER39> Doesn't work on Xfce either. On a virtual terminal thingy (ctrl-alt-f1) it shows a grey background with white text. I suspect blink is only implemented on the Mac's terminal, not in Linux-land.

<comment><USER40> > _I suspect blink is only implemented on the Mac 's terminal, not in Linux- > land._

...Lord, when did I get so old? :/

EDIT: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100)

<comment><USER38> I suspect it's really not a terminal issue but something about git. Or does a Terminal that doesn't interpret a command print it in clear text? I just get the string back, the same way I entered it.

<comment><USER40> What?

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

It's definitely a terminal thing. The "bug" in git is that it doesn't strip out the control characters or reject the commit if the commit message contains non-text data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Who remembers when most of the blogs syndicating discussions about RSS all started blinking at once, when somebody posted an item whose title was "What happens when you put a <blink> tag into the title?"

</comment><comment><USER42> Every time I use a control character, my mind strays back to CHR$141.

Although I do wonder what havoc you could wreak on hosted git services with cunning sequences of control characters. Smacks of injection.

<comment><USER43> If anyone else is curious about CHR$141, it's how you can show doubly-tall letters on an Acorn BBC Micro's teletext display...

[http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcwin/manual/bbcwinh.html](http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcwin/manual/bbcwinh.html)

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> First emojis, now blinking text, this has to stop.

</comment><comment><USER45> Can you turn it off? I'd imagine a big project (e.g. Linux Kernel) could start to look like a Christmas tree...

</comment><comment><USER46> ok now i need a spam filter for git log - everything is flashing like "look at my nice changes here!" :)

<comment><USER20> THIS COMMIT IS REALLY IMPORTANT!!11

<comment><USER30> YOU ARE THE 1000000th VISITOR OF THIS GIT LOG!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> You were more concerned with whether or not you could you never stopped to think whether or not you should

<comment><USER48> Nah, they just want to watch the world burn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> After the emoji, the blinking... Will git commits become like the 2000s web? :p

<comment><USER50> Wait 'till someone figures out he/she can store a webpage inside commit message.

<comment><USER51> and wait 'till someone figures out they can store ads inside commit messages.

<comment><USER52> actually, this could be done by github for some extra buck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> We just need a marquee now.

<comment><USER41> I say leapfrog directly to WebGL commit messages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> All this talk about ASCII control codes and no one mentions 0x07 aka ␇?

</comment><comment><USER55> Surely, there is a way to do this in Sublime?

<comment><USER56> If you can insert the ESC character, u001B, it's easy. (Though note that it appears as the two characters ^[ in the blog post, so your code should start ESC[5m with only one bracket.)

Unfortunately Sublime wasn't happy with me trying to type it through the Mac Unicode Hex input, but I _was_ able to copy-paste it in, and I was also able to enter it directly in other programs, like GitHub desktop.</comment></comment>


Gardner Dozois has died - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/MichaelSwanwick/status/1000849132230184961 <comment><USER2> He is the author of one solo novel, Strangers (1978). Which is very strange fact, because it was LeGuin-style book about interplanetary aliens in love, but better.</comment>


Protect Bitcoin from Politics - <AUTHOR> http://jacobexmachina.blogspot.com/2013/03/how-to-protect-bitcoin.html

<comment><USER2> "Candidate accepts donations using payment system associated with online drug and child porn peddlers"

</comment><comment><USER3> My guess as to what the sticking point would be that prevents politicians from accepting Bitcoin donations - they're not known to not take anything worth money - is somehow doing so without allowing foreign donations to their campaigns, which I believe is illegal.

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently there is little identity authentication on campaign websites. They ask for your name and address before you pay with something like paypal, but there is no means of verification.

<comment><USER4> Actually, they have to report these donations to the Federal Elections Commission (fec.gov) on a quarterly basis, even if there have been no donations for that quarter. Further there is a pretty sizable body of law around the funding received for the obvious reason that it's a tempting target for corruption.

When I was considering my run for Congress, one piece of advice I got for "free" from a guy who I had talked to about running campaigns, was to be sure I had a good idea about who everyone was that was giving me money. That had to be reported and if it turned out a law was violated it was on the candidate, not the donor in terms of consequences.

According to this guy, there were candidates who got "derailed" by opponents who arranged a big donation to be made, hoping that it would be accepted and not tracked down. Then leaking the existence of that donation to the FEC who would put the hapless candidate under investigation (and out of the race) until the investigation was resolved. This adviser suggested that politicians were despised for the same reason that used car salespeople get despised, and that was because too many of them had no morals preventing them from making progress at your expense.

Anyway, I think it is useful for the Bitcoin community to educate various politicians about what Bitcoin is, but I expect the best they can hope to do is keep them from acting directly against its interests. Getting actual support would be quite hard for a currency whose primary driver seems to be crime syndicates.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, they report the information you give them on the form on their website. The form of payment shouldn't matter. You can authentic identity on a bitcoin transaction as on any other transaction if you choose to. Generate a unique address for each transaction and the bookkeeping is easy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Irrationality is the real invisible hand - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/post.aspx?bid=355&bpid=23416

<comment><USER2> There was nothing irrational about the crash. For a long time, a lot of people where getting rich and having a good time spending. They were simply "rationally" exploiting the system as well as they could.

Somehow I still remember an article that the whole housing misery started with laws that required more credit to be given to poor people, resulting in schemes to make that bad credit viable (we all know how that went). Why is that not being mentioned anymore? It would indicate that instead of too few laws, too many laws started the problem.

<comment><USER3> That line of conservation disappeared b/c it was essentially attention-bait for people predisposed to believe it; upon any real inquiry (eg: reading the actual text of the CRA, understanding what it did and didn't do, and the total size of CRA-associated lending programs, not just reading an editorial or two) it falls apart as anything like a causal explanation; much like speculators in the financial markets opinion columnists -- speculators in both senses of the word -- rush to jump on a meme once it's climbing and rush to jump off once it's on the way down, often leaving a confused bagholders in their wake, wondering where all that _strum und drang_ got to (like you, in this case)...didn't you get the memo?

If you want to point at past interventions that're more-directly responsible for triggering today's problems you might start by mapping out the intersection between:

(i) pension funds, the size of their assets under management, the legal restrictions on what they can invest in, and the performance window they need to hit

(ii) how fed interest rate policies can impact bond yields across the broader bond market

(iii) how securitization works, including some comparison (before securitization/after securitization) of attributes like yield and 'ratings', and in particular paying attention to drawing connections here with point (i)

That's a lot more work and it's still almost certainly not "the whole story", but there's a definite story there that (in fact) adds a lot of color to the picture, even if it's a lot less pithy than the CRA.

<comment><USER2> I see, thanks! I don't understand everything you are saying, but I still. I think rather than looking at individual laws and financial constructs, it would be more interesting to study why people accepted investments without transparency. I think more transparency might be the correct answer, rather than regulations as to what kinds of investments should be allowed for whom.

I remember reading about another stock market bubble (I think India Tea Company), where at one point someone sold shares for a "venture whose activity shall only be revealed later", who then disappeared overseas with the investors money. But really, if people are willing to invest in that kind of thing (0 transparency, extreme risk), can laws really help, and would they be the right answer?

<comment><USER3> I was actually being a bit of a smartass, but I've decided to repent. I don't have time to tell you the full story, but here's a fuller outline.

I assume you know what a bond is; if you don't, you'll need to look it up.

(1) The fed basically sets the interest rates in the bond market. The real mechanisms are complicated and have a lot of "moving parts", but the basic picture is:

\- the fed basically sets the interest rate on new "treasury securities" (treasury bills, notes, etc.).

\- "treasury securities" are considered 0-risk (b/c the borrower can just print the money to pay them, basically)

\- when other parties want to raise money by selling debt (eg: offering bonds) they have to offer _more interest_ than the going rate on "treasury securities" (b/c other parties will have higher than 0 risk of nonpayment, and consequently the higher interest is what attracts investors to buy the bonds)

\- basically the relationship is like: the riskier the bond, the higher the interest rate (over and above the federal rate) it will offer

(2) throughout the mid-late 90s and into the early 2000s the fed held interest rate at abnormally low levels (at least by historical standards).

The net effect of holding interest rates that low for that long was that the range of interest rates you could get on bonds was lower than historical norms (by a few % points at least).

(3) There are enormous pools of highly-regulated money-for-investment held in vehicles like pension funds (domestically and also abroad). CF this chart (from 2006):

[http://books.google.com/books?id=x4d-lCjRY8AC&pg=PA4&...](http://books.google.com/books?id=x4d-lCjRY8AC&pg=PA4&lpg=PA4&dq=total+size+of+us+pension+funds+under+management&source=bl&ots=ICFM2oF8Bq&sig=0tsf_otH_GlCO- xm5VM0iVXgk30&hl=en&ei=M_HsSZ-3CJLIM5OB3dcF&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8)

...to get some idea how much money is in USA-based pension funds alone (there's more overseas where pensions are higher).

The details very _a lot_ between categories of funds, but generally highly- regulated funds who are more about risk-minimizing (like pension funds) than return-maximizing will try to invest heavily in bonds or bond-like instruments; again this is complicated but roughly speaking the reasoning is:

\- bonds or bond-like instruments usually have a defined series of payments whose value is easy to calculate; the only real risk is that the borrower stop paying

\- there's huge pressure not to default on bonds; a dropping stock price is bad for shareholders, but defaulting on bonds risks your being able to continue to operate (b/c you have no way of raising short-term funds)

...which makes bonds historically lower-risk, lower-reward compared to (eg) stocks. Pensions and pension-like funds have another reason for preferring bonds:

\- pensions need to have cash on hand on a regular basis (to pay out claims)

\- bonds always pay out on a regular basis (until they don't); to turn stocks into cash you have to sell them (or hope the dividends don't change on you)

Thus historically you'd have a huge diversified pile of bonds (mix of higher- return / higher risk and the opposite) as the major component of such a fund's portfolio (with various other investments tossed in).

The consequence of a long period of historically low interest rates meant that bonds no longer offered the same kind of returns; even a few % matters here, b/c if eg you are using an internal interest rate of 4% then going from a portfolio average of 7% to a portfolio average of 5% means you're actually going from 3% net of inflation to 1% net of inflation, etc.

Now, if these were just hedge funds or other speculative vehicles that'd be one thing; but, pensions legally are contractually obligated to make their payments, so failure-to-perform isn't just "too bad, so sad" but potentially legal nightmares; additionally, USA pensions are partially backed by an equivalent of the FDIC

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

...which currently is self-funding but in a real disaster would probably graduate to explicit federal backing.

So summary: due to fed policy vis-a-vis interest rates over an extended period of time (well over a decade now) it's been harder and harder for pensions to meet their performance targets with their traditional strategies; due to their nature this isn't just bad news, it's possibly "against the law" in some sense.

(4) Enter Securitization

What securitization basically did was:

\- take a 1000 mortages originating at about the same time (july 2004) but geographically distributed and with a range of credit scores / home values / interest rates

\- set up an entity that receives all monthly mortgage payments

\- as the money comes in, the entity first dumps it into "bucket 1"; when "bucket 1" is full you send that out to its owner(s), then you dump what's left into "bucket 2", send that out when it's full, etc, until the money runs out. It's possible that, eg, once a handful of people default or prepay their mortage that buckets 5 on down stop getting any money.

\- you call the "buckets" tranches, and you do some "financial engineering" to decide how many buckets to put in and how big to make the buckets; depending on how you choose you typically wind up with some top-level tranches that have low risk but higher effective interest rates (compared to normal bonds with the same interest rates)

\- the reason this works is that even though the bottom buckets are going to go to zero (almost inevitably) you're concentrating most of the risk in the bottom tranches and thereby the higher tranches have lower-risk

\- zoila! you've created a bond-like instrument that has higher returns but the same apparent risk (ratings agencies had a huge role here, again too little time to detail in full)

So, there was basically a huge demand for "yield" (interest rates on bond-like products) but a huge shortage (due to fed interest rate policy); the whole securitization scheme came about partly to meet that demand.

The consequences of securitization are varied: it increases willingness to loan to high-risk borrowers (b/c you sell off the mortgage as part of the security, and having some high-interest rate, high-risk "pepper" in the security is essential to being able to offer high interest rates.

But for a lot of market actors the products looked really appealing as a way of "not going out of business".

There's a lot more you could do to draw out that story with enough motivation; it's far from the whole story -- or the only story -- but it's one of the underlying currents leading up to the current predicament.

It's nice to have a single thread to tug on that explains everything but that's hard to find; the financial world is a huge web of interconnected actors with interconnected motives.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Report: For The First Time In Decades, US Is Bleeding High-Skilled Immigrants - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/07/report-for-first-time-in-decades-us-is-bleeding-high-skilled-immigrants/ <comment><USER2> See previous HN discussion with links to related documents on the same issue:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4607747></comment>


Fake Porn Makers Are Worried About Accidentally Making Child Porn – Motherboard - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evmkxa/ai-fake-porn-deepfakes-child-pornography-emma-watson-elle-fanning <comment><USER2> Pretty scary to be honest.

Can you imagine being framed for that? How the f __* do you even defend that?

Makes you think if what Facebook was on to something then. ([https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x478b/facebook-r...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x478b/facebook- revenge-porn-nudes))

Hey,I trust them more than I do the government when it comes to cybersecurity.([https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/us/office-of-personnel- ma...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/us/office-of-personnel-management- hackers-got-data-of-millions.html))</comment>


Robot School, a teach-to-code app, great introduction to programming to all ages - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/robot-school.-learn-to-code/id943154220?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D2

<comment><USER2> move a Robot and learn how to code in Swift

</comment><comment><USER3> iOS, Android, MacOS.</comment>


Pivot or Fail? - <AUTHOR> https://avc.com/2018/11/pivot-or-fail/ <comment><USER2> I feel like this misses an obvious source of the appeal of the pivot for the founders, namely that _actual_ money in your hands today beats _potential_ money in your hands tomorrow.

If you shut down and start over around the new idea, maybe you'll be able to raise money around that idea, but then again, maybe you won't. Nothing's guaranteed; and if you find you _can't_ raise the money again, you end up with nothing at all.

Meanwhile, in the existing business, there's a big pot of money _already raised_ just sitting there for you to use. Using it could mean problems down the road, of course. But _not_ using it means problems _right now_ , so it's not hard to see the appeal of just grabbing it and figuring you'll cross those bridges if and when you ever actually come to them.

<comment><USER3> > If you shut down and start over around the new idea, maybe you'll be able to > raise money around that idea, but then again, maybe you won't.

Is someone who chooses failure over pivoting likely to get some kind of negative association in the investor community at large? A perception that they don't do enough to protect investment or something like that? No judgement on whether that is right or wrong, just curious.

<comment><USER4> No, it's just that they have to prove the new thing. This way they go with the existing pot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I thought the point of a pivot is that you take _something_ of value in the old company - whether it be the codebase, team, data, customer list, internal tool, employee's random side project, or just some key algorithm or insight that has some utility - and apply it to a new market or new product. Hard to do this legally without keeping the old corporate structure.

If you're actually changing all of product|market|team all at once, I wouldn't call that a pivot, I'd call that a failure. Like Fred, I don't see the appeal of keeping the existing corporate structure and cap table in that case. But I'm surprised that that's now what "pivot" means - he obviously sees more startups I do, but it sounds like the term has been diluted pretty heavily.

<comment><USER6> You could be doing that, scavenging value out of the existing (doomed) company, or you could be kidding yourself, continuing on with the baggage of that company because it seems easier than starting over from scratch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If I could go back in time, I would have chosen to fail rather than pivot. At the time (of the pivot) what made the choice to fail difficult was that we had _some_ success aka revenue, and so could just carry on. What I see now is that I could have still shut that thing down, paid back investors with the trickle of remaining revenue, and in parallel started a new thing.

Hindsight is always 20/20, but I think the article is broadly right. If you need to pivot, it's probably better to fail gracefully instead.

</comment><comment><USER8> > But the bigger issue is the dilution you take into your next startup. I have > never understood why entrepreneurs would want to use a company and a cap > table that they no longer own 100% of to do a new startup. They are just > carrying baggage that they don't have to and probably should not carry.

This happens WAY more than people realize.

</comment><comment><USER9> Agree with Fred.

I left one of my past companies because of something similar. It wasn't even a "hard pivot", we were an EdTech company catering to higher ed, and then switched to a complete different product, now selling to parents of kids under the age of 8.

Two months later I realised I just wasn't excited enough about building apps for kids (this is a great market and has a lot of potential, it just wasn't my thing)

The company is still doing sort of okay, but I couldn't picture myself spending 6-8 months there. It felt like taking a formula 1 car and putting it in Dubai traffic. I even felt slightly guilty of not caring enough about "making the buttons bigger so kids can tap them and feel playful".

I'm currently working on something entirely different in the productivity space as a one man team with no funding but the process already feels more rewarding. So while I'm still working on something entirely different, starting from scratch and failing (personally atleast) was an important step along the way.

I'm solving a problem that I really care about and often tell myself that I would build/use this product for myself anyways. I do have some promising feedback from potential users but what's more important to me is the sense of fulfilment which leads to motivation which then leads to discipline, and this would just not be possible if I was working on something I'm not excited about or felt I didn't sign up for.

</comment><comment><USER10> TrafOData pivot to become Microsoft was a pretty hard pivot.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traf-O- Data](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traf-O-Data)

</comment><comment><USER11> Is there not a risk of tremendous legal battles with investors when you start a new, legally separate business that it could be argued you should have pivoted into?

<comment><USER12> I wonder how much time needs to elapse between failure and a new startup?

<comment><USER6> No time at all. If you're misuse IPR (or violating contractual obligations) from your previous company, no amount of time will cure that. If you aren't, you don't even need to wait a millisecond.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Spoken like someone who hasn't built an entire company from scratch multiple times. It takes a lot to build and share the vision, get buy-in from believers, build up an audience, distribution, marketing channels, the "right" team, right product, the list goes on -- and all of this is both physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausting.

It's REALLY hard to just reboot into something else you pour yourself into.

</comment><comment><USER14> This advice is targetted at those who have taken funding. It doesn't apply to bootstrappers of course, who can do anything they think is right.

<comment><USER15> I think it depends on what your drive is. It might be a desire to just run a business. Or it might be some concept that inspires you. It could be a desire to work with a specific group of people. Or just to make money. Or to serve a particular community.

I don't think there's one "correct" answer for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What he says about dilution is right. But there are other considerations:

\- The founders are not sure they can raise money for the new idea and they might use the money left in the failed company.

\- The failed company may have users that are useful to the new idea.

\- The failed company may own the IPR necessary for the new idea.

\- There is often transaction cost connected with starting all over and almost always time.

</comment><comment><USER17> I did this with Staffjoy two years ago [1]. I'm thankful that we shut down promptly when things were failing - instead of dragging them out. I knew that we had picked great investors (e.g., Caffeinated Capital) when I brought bad acquisition offers to them, and they told me just to shut down and move onto my next project.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13647382](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13647382)

</comment><comment><USER18> "And I am not sure hard pivots are good for anyone"

Except, it was good for Slack and its investors and all of its users. Slack is oddly acknowledged in the first paragraph and then quickly forgotten about. There's a good "Masters of Scale" podcast about the Slack pivot and the Flickr pivot (which was also a hard pivot).

<comment><USER19> Discord came out of a game studio as well (Hammer & Chisel)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Paypal was a pivot. Paypal's original product was a security token.

</comment><comment><USER21> I like Fred a lot, and I know it's not his fault, but the sycophantic comments on his posts make me sick.</comment>


Late Labs: A 'Crowdcoding' Site Where Developers Trade Code For Equity - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/26/late-labs/

<comment><USER2> Not sure about their distinction between Hackers and Hustlers.</comment>


Susie, a food delivery service that uses SMS for everything. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sendsonar.com/2015/03/30/dont-want-to-think-about-food-susie-has-you-covered-just-text-her/

<comment><AUTHOR> As a side-note: services like these come with an anticipation -- I think people that sign up for CSAs will relate to it.</comment>


Startups for the 99% - <AUTHOR> http://www.trevormckendrick.com/startups-for-the-99/ <comment><USER2> I believe that a business being referred to as a "startup" should be something akin to an insult unless you're very, _very_ early stage. It usually means you're running a business that's basically failing - no customers, no revenue, no profit. The sooner you stop being a startup and start being a business the better.

Obviously there are a few caveats to that as certain things that take more time and money than others (hardware, biotech, etc), but for most SaaS businesses (eg most startups) it's true enough.

<comment><USER3> Call a brand new business a startup. Hell, just drop the term and call it a new business. Call a failure a failure. I don't see why we have to load these terms so much or why people insist on pushing their own preconceptions.

People like to bicker about whether it's a startup if it accepts funding, where the funding comes from and how ownership is established, what kind of background the founders have and how long their "runway" is, whether it's set up for an exit or for long term operation... it's ridiculous.

I think the implication is that we've overloaded this term and a few others when we're talking about many different things in many different contexts but can't be bothered to clarify what we're talking about, so hey, what I see as a startup is pretty specific, but I'm not actually going to tell you what I mean (despite knowing I'm bringing serious bias to the term), so I'm just gonna throw that term around and disparage anyone with a different interpretation.

If you define "startup" as very early stage, fine. Why would you use it as an insult for something that's not? Why wouldn't you just say "no, you're just NOT a startup" and ask what the business model is and why they aren't profitable?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would be great if the author has specified what kind of advice isn't applicable to non-VC-backed companies. IMHO a part of it is still relevant even if you don't shoot for the stars. After all every business (even the "lifestyle" one) needs some good practices to (at least) stay on the market and avoid the fate of an expensive hobby. Yesterday I had a similar discussion on the workshop with a group of SMB owners/managers (mostly experienced people running the business for many yrs - up to 30, but there were also a few startups). All of them were in real need for an actual change to either grow or keep up with the evolving market. We were working on their business models and I was using well known examples of companies as illustrations. One of the guys suddenly asked "Why are we talking about such big companies? We are not them." The answer was pretty simple - if you want to learn and get inspired there's only one direction to look - up.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if part of the reason why most everyone uses the word 'startup' is because the alternatives 'small business', 'lifestyle business', or 'SaaS business' are just not sexy or cool to say.

It would be good for the overall entrepreneurial community if both were given their due attention (and the credit they deserve) but the tech media loves to drum up the hype for the former and it's hard not to be influenced by it.

I'm fairly unaffected by the hype and would like to start my own company but even I cringe at the thought of calling it a small business even if it has no chance of raising VC (and doesn't need to).

<comment><USER6> how about: business? you can add an adjective when it is large enough

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> They're two different things, but often have significant overlap. Both need to get new customers, hire employees, create infrastructure, and so on.

I'll suggest "bootup" for "bootstrapped startup".

<comment><USER8> I like "bootup".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not to mention that the term "startup" in general usage doesn't even have to mean a technology company. In general terms it could mean a small , new business with low revenue.

On HN you will often see companies with multi million $ valuations referred to as startups.

</comment><comment><USER10> > "...how many investors can you name who don't have an active blog?"

Six months ago? Zero. Today? Four, off hand. This blog post has some sound advice about evaluating whether your startup should seek outside funding, but it is based on the false premise that the only VC money worth taking comes from the top-tier VC firms like USV, Sequoia, etc.

There is a whole world of capital investors outside of the ones you read about in the news. Think of it as venture capital for the 99%. That doesn't mean all startups should take outside money; it only means that you shouldn't believe that just because USV wouldn't invest in your company that no one would.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is very, very true. The waters are a bit muddy though, because a lot of those smaller 'would never take VC' startups actually transition into the VC kind of startup. This is even true for many of the big players in the tech landscape today. When they started out and before they gained their incredible traction, a lot of VCs would have laughed them out of the building.

There should still be some way to differentiate the name though. Maybe something as simple as 'VC-Startup' and 'LS-Startup' (lifestyle)?

</comment><comment><USER12> The author's key assertion is that there should be separate terms for the different types of startups: those that fit with the venture capital model, and those that don't.

While separate terms may make the differences clearer, the same differentiation can be obtained with 2 widely used qualifiers: fundable, scalable

A fundable startup / scalable startup is a business that, if successful, has a high probability of being huge (>= $1B in market cap).

However, its questionable if the media, bloggers, etc. would start to use each term accurately.

</comment><comment><USER13> I was thinking the same thing as the OP the other day - most of the sites I visit every day are tailored toward the 1% that gets VC and goes for the gold.

I recently registered startupsinhardmode.com and plan to blog there about the day-to-day challenges that "the 99%" go through (the DNS should propagate shortly if anyone is interested in checking it out).

</comment><comment><USER14> The second category he defined has a pretty good name: small and medium business.

He even mentions it in passing (as "SMBs").

<comment><USER15> No, they are not. SMBs have stable business model. Startups are searching for a business model. This is startups 101. Startup can become a smb in the future. SMB may decide to pivot and create a startup that is developing a complementary product.

<comment><USER14> Is it the model or the income which matters?

If it's the model, then "startup" means "any business which isn't profitable with its current model".

If it's the income, then "startup" means "any business which isn't profitable with its current model".

At least, that's how it appears to me.

<comment><USER16> A valid point. But we don't think of restaurants as startups, even though they typically take 1-2 years to become profitable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here's a chestnut from over a decade ago that spells it out in black and white:

Are you Amazon or are you Ben and Jerry's?

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> Some words should be universal... like shark. But I don't think start-up falls into that category.

</comment><comment><USER19> Startup vs. small business.

</comment><comment><USER20> This link is relevant to the "What defines a startup?" conversation: [http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais- macle...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais- macleod-17-building-the-future-and-financing-lifestyle-businesses/)</comment>


What's inside net/http: Late binding in the Go standard library - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/whats-inside-net-http-socket-late-binding-in-the-go-standard-library/ <comment><USER2> So if there are idle connections in the pool, and a client asks for a connection, the library still tries to open a new connection?

And when it gets the pooled connection a few cycles later, it marks the new connection that is still being opened to be 'given away', which presumably means added to the pool?

Am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER3> Reading the standard library is a huge help in learning to write Go well. It's a high-quality compendium of best practices.</comment>