Ask YC: Are you self-funding/bootstrapping? - <AUTHOR>

Just wondering how many people here have been self-funding/bootstrapping their projects and how has that been working for you?
Personally, we've been self-funding Openomy (http://www.openomy.com) since it began in mid-2005. Overall, I wouldn't change a thing. We now have 50K+ users, a scalable infrastructure, and full control over what happens with the site.
That said, I think we hurt ourselves by not looking to take _any_ capital: we spent a lot of time rearchitecting our infrastructure to scale, and we still work on the project only on the side. If we could have hired a couple engineers and worked full-time, I think we could be much further along in completing our vision. We may have even been able to do more marketing (more == any)! ;)
Still, to note just how cheap it is to do a project like this these days, we spend <$1000/month on our servers (colocation/bandwidth + S3), and $0/month on anything else.
I'd love to hear from others and to see how bootstrapping/self-funding has treated you, what you enjoy the most, what the hardest part is, etc. <comment><USER2> We started about a year ago and launched about 3 months ago. The biggest two problems are:

Time. Neither of us can afford to quit our _"jobs at a big company"_. We're not 20 and have mortgages, school payments, etc. Working part-time is probably 10 times less effective. Ohh... I cannot stress it enough! Part-time can be as bad as 50 times less effective; sometimes weeks can pass with no work being done, depends on how busy we get at our day jobs.

Marketing&Advertising. We cannot afford a solid PR campaign and expensive ads. We got some independent evaluations with ad quotes as high as $500K/year. Google brings a steady (albeit very small) stream of daily new users, but unless we come up with something, it will take forever to reach good numbers. Common advise like "blogging" BS and "sign all your emails with your URL" do not apply and really make no sense - you can't get into 6-figure user numbers this way.

<http://pikluk.com>

<comment><USER3> I just browsed through Pikluk and am impressed with the idea and execution. Have you guys tried getting media attention? You could email newspaper journalists, parent-type magazine editors to take a look at and review your site. That's free publicity and journalists are always looking for new things to write about!

<comment><USER4> Ditto - I'm surprised you haven't talked to every elementary school, church group, public library, etc. "Save the children" is the story that writes itself. Pikluk is great and if more people knew about it, they'd eat it up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Both Magnatune (<http://magnatune.com>) and BookMooch (<http://bookmooch.com>) are bootstrapped by me.

The hardest things for me are:

1) sometimes you come up with an idea that would make money at a certain scale (in my case, lots of shoutcast radio stations of Magnatune's music) but you can't do it because you don't have the money

2) I have to put a lot more time into making the software I write efficient and scalable, because I can't afford to buy lots of machines when the site grows. So, for instance, I tend to avoid doing a lot of SQL queries, which might be handy, because scaling that requires lots of SQL server machines.

3) In the old days (10 years ago, when I self-funded Lyris, which eventually became a success) a big problem I had was getting licenses to technology (C++ libraries, database servers) but these days open source replaces all that.

4) doing without employees. That's both a benefit in the near-term, as I have to learn how to do everything lean and well, but a disadvantage if there are rote tasks to do now as we scale. With BookMooch, I've managed to get volunteers to do those rote tasks, but with Magnatune, I got 3 not-very-well- paid part timers.

\- John Buckman

<comment><USER6> Well whaddya know! I attended Magnatune's workshop presentation at WikiMania; nice to see the founder here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My friend Reid and I are bootstrapping Fangamer. The short version is a professional video game fansite. Since we both run Starmen.Net (<http://starmen.net>) we figured that we can just do the same, except bigger and for all games. (btw, Starmen.Net is the reason why Earthbound is a 'cult hit') Reid is taking care of all the financials himself.

We have three very great reasons why we believe we can self-fund ourselves: 1) Reid invested in a little known company called Apple quite awhile go. We have enough money to live on our own and work 100% on Fangamer only. 2) We already have built a community, Starmen.Net. Since we're adding on, we don't have to go through the hassle of starting to get people to an unknown site. Due to the crazy media stuff that Starmen.Net does (<http://starmen.net/ebanthology/>), we have a lot of media contacts in the gaming industry. 3) Since Starmen.Net is donation funded, we already have servers and everything paid for. We run our own private server, so we have a great resource to start out on.

I suppose I could add a shameless blog mention ;) <http://fangamer.com/>

</comment><comment><USER8> Low living costs + high relative wages for a western-educated human being in South East Asia = my short-term boot-strapping strategy. See below-the-fold for details of that.

First, the past:

* I bootstrapped my first venture, called Ethical Style, when I was 20 and going to university (5 years ago). The idea was to support independent artists abroad by marketing (for profit) their products in N. America. I sold on- and off-line and made a little money, nothing big. I stopped working on it after a year, when I got accepted into a program that let me travel the world to promote Canadian businesses and meet "important" people (stayed there until I saw enough government fraud to make me sick).

\-- Spending my own money on my first business, which I really believed in, felt natural, and I liked the idea of growing 'with' my business, one challenge at a time. __The only reason I'd have rather had other people's money for that business, is because it was my first business venture, and I wish I'd sought more advice from people who knew what they were doing. Raising money would have entailed this sort of learning and possible mentorship.

\-- An important aside: being in school was a big distraction and took away from the necessity of commitment to what I was doing. Had I really depended on this company as a full-time endeavor, I think I'd have kept at it longer and learned more.

\-- The money I spent on this company was earned in a damned-hard-assed way: tree planting in the mountains of British Columbia. Camping out on the side of a mountain planting 2000-odd trees a day in the thick of bugs and blood and tendonitis and rain and snow was by far the most challenging thing I'd ever done, and I failed more at it than I'd failed at anything else in my life before I finally learned how to be successful 2/3 of the way in to the season. So there was a lot of sweat in that money I spent.

* In my last venture, we had 4 equal partners with a 'consensus' decision-making structure. _Maybe_ this would have worked if it wasn't complicated by dramatically differential personal knowledge of each other's working styles, morals, and skills -- in our case we had to go through the difficult process of removing one founder part-way through, and then I burnt out from stress after living alone inside the product development office I started in China for half a year.

\-- In general I don't think my personality was strong enough yet to deal with so many issues related to working with older people related by family, especially when most of our communication was on the phone or email (we'd never actually worked closely together, ever, before two of us -- then, later, one of us -- came to China to do the bulk of our product development work.)

\-- This company is still going without me, and all relationships remained intact after I left, thank goodness

\-- Taking money as a young, eager person, I wasn't forceful enough in putting my own point of view and thinking independently. I too easily believed what the older investor said, too easily gave them the benefit of the doubt. I like to think I'm a lot more skeptical now. So the psychological effects of taking money need to be included in the discussion. I like the idea of bootstrapping because of the independence that it fosters in my own psychological development -- but I think some investor situations would also help, rather than hinder this.

* I don't perceive capital as being all that scarce. If I have a good idea that convinces _me_ , then I am relatively confident that I will be able to find funding to match the merit of my endeavor.

\-- Finding _good people_ to provide that funding along with healthy relationship and support, however, is extremely valuable in my books and not guaranteed or simple or straightforward (enter: luck, kindness, etc.). \-- I think this attitude helps me, because I don't feel like I'm not taking capital because I'm not "good enough", eg/ it doesn't hit me in the ego and scare me out of having confidence.

\</comment><comment>--- the present / future </comment><comment>---- (story-telling time!)

While I am currently waiting rather passively for the twin progenitors of startups (idea + energy) to consummate their relationship in my life again (I'm still in the pre-conception stage of my third venture) I'm replying to this anyway because of (1) self-perceived inevitability of my starting a new venture in the next 6-12 months, and (2) my decided preference to bootstrap, after a rough experience with a push-forward-faster-than-you-can-comprehend- your-own-world, aggressive-angel model of my last startup.

A few months ago, my own burnout (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=69097>) landed me in the heart of the Middle Kingdom with almost no money, energy, or much of anything else (thank god I still had my laptop!).

After doing absolutely nothing for a good-enough while (and sleeping for curiously long hours) I found an apartment in northern Beijing to share with friendly Auzzi, American, and Icelander flat mates, and just chilled out.

Soon enough, I was able to read again (not being able to read anything productively was quite scary, let me tell you), be interested in things again (in the midst of my burnout, I remember muttering to friends that there was "not a single website on the entire internet capable of capturing my interest in any way" -- now, I have dozens of entire books waiting to be read, and hundreds of websites that I am voraciously drawn to), and generally found myself re-building my sense of self and confidence.

A couple of months ago I found a part-time job preparing rich Chinese students to write their SATs. Low costs and high relative wage made it easy to save up some $$$...

So, in a couple of weeks I'm headed to South East Asia to put my feet on the sands of a beach for the first time in 3 years, and then see what it's like to be poor in the tropics again. I've always loved traveling (especially the people one meets) and am quite interested in ideas relating to the "distribution of the future" to those who haven't got access to it yet. Though, I will more than likely be keen to make my next venture for-profit, even if it does have some empowerment of villages within its business model.

So, given the ready availability of well-paid teaching -- which can even be quite enjoyable if it's not just straight English teaching -- or online consulting/design, which can be done on any beach with a net connection, I think I will stay out in the land of cheap eating and warm sunshine until I've begun to implement my next idea, whatever that may be.

Then, depending on the nature of my idea, availability and necessity of a co- founder or initial employees, and cash-in-my-pocket, I'll either stay out here and attempt a life of work-whilst-continuing-to-enjoy-paradise, or head back to a more startup-friendly city in North America. Frankly, what I miss most of all while being out here is regular face-to-face contact with brilliant/interesting/kind people who speak my native tongue. Finding some sense of connectedness to like-minded people will be at or near the top of my list as I consider my next living base.

I'm Canadian, so my options may be limited to Montreal or Vancouver, which I consider the only livable destinations given who I am. I wouldn't mind visiting "the valley," but that would be contingent on making the right connections along the way.

</comment><comment><USER9> Well, we are self-funded, two years afloat, located in the middle of nowhere (West Siberia/Russia) and we have customers in US/Canada and Europe :-). We develop mobile voip+chat software (see, <http://www.talkonaut.com/>). Most of our revenue comes from licensing our software to other/bigger companies.

<comment><USER10> love the name

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Self-funded. We're not averse to taking outside capital, but I want to make sure we don't take money until the right time in our company's lifecycle. Given how many times our assumptions have been proven wrong, I don't think we've reached that point - I like having the freedom to change directions and try a different tack without having to justify it to investors & staff. I've been an early employee in a couple funded companies that were at roughly the same point in development that we are, and was always struck by how stupid management was. This way we can be stupid and correct for it without getting caught in the blame/frustration cycle that overtakes a lot of VC-funded companies. Investors probably also appreciate us not spending their money making mistakes; I doubt we could get funding at this point if we tried.

I've been working full-time for 4 months (+ 9 months with a day job), my cofounder still has his day job but is quitting in a month or two. I'm still in my 20s and saved up a whole lot of money from my last job, so we could go for quite a while like this.

Everyone's completely right about the reduced effectiveness of moonlighting; in my experience, a 10x drop in productivity is not unusual. Also, I've found that there are some projects that you just can't do while employed elsewhere, because you can't load the whole project into your head on just nights and weekends. The two sites we released while I was still employed were basically dead in the cradle, because they don't solve anything that hundreds of other sites haven't already solved. Quitting has given me the time & attention to pursue much more ambitious coding projects.

Also, those cost figures seem high. We spend $80/month or hosting and make about $60 back on advertising, so it basically pays for itself.

<comment><USER2> You don't spend to advertise yourself? How do you get users?

<comment><USER11> Word-of-mouth and search engines, apparently. We posted one game on Digg back in the summer, had a flurry of hits and then about 6 (yeah, I'm not leaving off a digit) uniques a day for the next 3 months. But traffic has grown steadily since late October, and we haven't been doing anything. No Google ads, no promotional postings, not even telling anyone other than linking it in our social-network profiles and answering family friends who ask "What are you up to these days?" We're at about 1000 uniques (73,000 hits) for the month of February so far.

I'm kinda amazed that we even _have_ users, given the quality of the product that we've got up there and the lack of updates in the past 6 months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'll be self-funding after school's done this summer. My day job is as a nurse, so I'll be able to work 3 - 12 hour shifts a week and be able to code for 4 days. If I work my PTO right, I work for 5 days in one week and take a week off.

It'll also be rather easy for me to cut back one or two days a pay period without taking a bit hit. My other founder, my wife, isn't working a 9-5 right now, so she'll be able to devote quite a bit of time to it as well.

</comment><comment><USER13> I believe the best part is you can't be fired and when people tell you that you can't do it, you do it anyway.

<comment><USER14> there's an element of truth to this (freedom to use good tools, for example).

i've followed both models, but one of the best things you get from outside investors is forced accountability; it's a good kick in the ass to regularly take hard looks at your plan and have to meet deadlines and ship stuff.

if you're bootstrapping or part time, it's easy to kind of fart along and spend years on an idea that would have either succeeded or failed quickly if you had been forced to execute to a plan.

<comment><USER15> well said. some people work better under pressure

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _"... Openomy is completely free for now. In the future there will be an additional premium membership, in exchange for some nice extras. ..."_

Is there any reason why you are not charging something? Sure you need free accounts to let people try the service. What about a Pro-Version like flickr. [0]

A question I'd like to ask is:

      Q What nice extras do you offer?

For me nice extras would be:

\- ability to create a profile

\- ability to see images embedded in a page

\- tools specifically to post to twitter (simple twit poster) , archive the post, process meta data (who replied, when)

\- tool(s) specifically to post images to flickr (simple flickr uploader), archive image, text, tags & who replied.

\- rss feed back of flickr + twitter archive that I can customise (select twit + flickr images mixed, only twitter, only flickr, only flickr, only flickr images by tag etc)

\- allow my friends to subscribe to my feed

This is an abstraction above your current service. But is readily consumable. The real problem is being able to find what people want, then charge for it. Flickr built this kind of back-end then built the photo site on top of it. Is this what you need? A purpose built public site on top of you data service?

 _"... Over the past couple of years, as we predicted, the world is moving to an almost entirely web-based software model. We post our photos to Flickr, write our documents on Zoho, etc. Unfortunately, it's much too difficult for us to use our photos posted on Flickr within our documents on Zoho. ..."_

My view is you are doing a great job of creating the basic building blocks to achieve this. What I'd want to see is a pay for use service that allows you to demonstrate these aims. [2]

Your service utilises commodity bandwidth and storage. If you look at how flickr utilised these same commodities by harnessing the explosive use of cameras I'm sure you can see a way to make money from it. How flickr balanced the back-end development (infrastructure) with the front-end (consumer facing) is a case study in itself. This means more development, but that's what it's about right?

[0] The free version of flickr allows limited usage. It does not stop you upload images, but the cost for use is worth it if you intend to use it over a longer period.

[1] Caterina Fake, ITConversations, "The History of Flickr", <http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1755.html>

[2] One area I don't see is how you can share your data with friends, like friendfeed [1] does so well.

</comment><comment><USER4> Um, because you can do stuff like this ([http://blog.openomy.com/2008/01/case- study-using-haskell-and...](http://blog.openomy.com/2008/01/case-study-using- haskell-and-happs-for.html)) without being told to get real :) Sound familiar?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hahaha, it's true-- that's one of the great things. Thanks to Openomy, we've given ourselves the chance to try out soo many things (Ruby (on Rails), Haskell (+ HAppS), C# (mono), Java, Scala, etc). And those are just the programming languages. :)

<comment><USER17> yeah but is that productive? is it worth it searching for a "great fit" language (I ask as I don't know, I just know my grass is greener tendency to get the better of me all the time).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We're bootstrapping 100%. My full-time engineering co-op (required for graduation) pays the bills. I also do marketing and web consulting part-time. And sometimes, my band makes decent money as well.

Our startup itself, though, is funded by winning competitions. We've won business plan competitions and we just recently added 1st place at a statewide marketing competition (it's funny when engineering majors beat business and marketing majors at business and marketing). Now we'll be going to Atlanta in April for nationals.

Whenever people ask us if we're considering funding, we typically reply that we prefer the type of funding we don't have to pay back, though I couldn't see us turning down a serious offer.

Sometimes I think it'd be cool to be able to work on our startup full-time, but I already work on it for probably 6-10 hours a day, so I'm not sure how much we'd really gain.

</comment><comment><USER19> first off - this is one of the best threads i've seen here in a long time and I'm deeply inspired to hear others stories of bootstrapping success and failures.

We have bootstrapped rephoria from day one and are now nearing the one year mark but alas have yet to ship our product. I lost my day job mid last last year and thought it was going to be a massive blessing as i had been working nights for two months proir and was feeling the constant strain...wrong. We were not ready from a team capability standpoint and with no funding was constantly stressed by money issues.

During that time we experienced so many setbacks and disappointments but have kept pushing as we are continually inspired by the potential of the vision. Basically it was not until I took a day job some 4 months later that things got rolling again.

As of today we are closer than ever to launching and what we are launching is far better than what I would have launched last year, so in reality (hindsight) at that point we were not ready for investment.

As first time entrepreneurs I believe that we will need to get past launch - get real users - and validation of the model - at which point I will make a strong push to secure an angel round.

Bootstrapping is a fundamental entrepreneurial quality - it forces you to believe in yourself, your team, and your idea in the face of all odds. If you can make it through you will be a superior entrepreneur. Bootstrapping is part of the true Hacker spirit. That said the ability to achieve scale and growth is greatly enhanced by having the funds in place to focus and execute on the plan in a timely fashion.

My twitter a few hours earlier read: Wishing i could hit the biz refresh button and have the time i had 3 months ago with the team i have now.

</comment><comment><USER20> I quit my job last month and took a 60% job (3 days a week). That way I don't have to use up any savings and have quite a lot of time for my project anyway. It seemed a good compromise between moonlighting and having no day job at all.

<comment><USER21> From your other comments, I surmise that you're in Germany. Has anyone done/is doing something like this in US (for technical/engineering jobs, not McD's)?

<comment><USER20> Currently I am in Germany, but my new Job will be in Zurich.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> We have bootstrapped Club E Network, a broadband TV & Social Network for entrepreneurs, from the ground up. We started with nothing, took on great partners (including a technology partner to create the BETA version of the social network), and have brought it in a few months since launch to the range of tens of thousands of unique visitors a month to get us off the ground. Now that we are at that level, we will be taking some investment to further develop the next generation of the site (much more advanced) as well as continue developing our original television series.

I think not having money gives entrepreneurs a real advantage in some ways, because you are forced to REALLY think hard and discover innovative ways to market and improve your site, without cash. It's been a very interesting experience, and I definitely believe something that is beneficial for entrepreneurs to go through, as opposed to taking money right from the start.

Corey Kossack President Club E Network <http://www.ClubENetwork.com>

</comment><comment><USER23> Francis Fischbach interviewed Dave Stubenvoll of Wowza Media [http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/01/25/founder-story- dave-s...](http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/01/25/founder-story-dave- stubenvoll-of-wowza-media-systems/)

Dave offered a number of useful "lessons learned" for bootstrappers. Wowza is bootstrapping a Flash Streaming Server and making headway in the niche of their choosing against Adobe. My three key take-aways were

1\. If you are a lone entrepreneur, team up.

2\. Figure out how to get it rolling without quitting your day job.

3\. Don't "Build to Flip." Dave notes: "if I was dependent upon the sale of this company to some single entity, I probably wouldn't survive. I would be doing things to sell as opposed to doing things to make sure that the business is around next year and the year after, and the year after."

There's a lot more there: he has been involved as a founder or the early stages of five startups (two that were intrapreneurial or internal startups at Intuit and Adobe).

</comment><comment><USER24> We are bootstrapping and I find it really helps. You get a higher thought-to- work ratio, which means you can more often work out whether an idea is good or bad before pouring away development time into it.

The downside is the frustration of not being able to work on your true passion all the time. But I would say this is a common problem for salaried employees.

However, once we start cranking out code, I think going full time will make us much more productive than continuing to bootstrap.

<comment><USER25> I quite agree - we're bootstrapping too. I'm contracting during the day at the moment to pay for mortgage, food etc.. But when I'm stuck on something coding late at night, I've got the whole next day to chew over the best way forward then attack it again in the evening. I work in my own time, but I think about problems on the client's time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> We have been self-funded and I'm still surprised how long we managed to get along, as we really started with basically no money at all. Unfortunately our product (a game) didn't sell, so it didn't work out for us. But I don't think that more money would have made a difference, we failed for other reasons and additional funding might actually have made it even worse.

Not being able to afford an tax accountant was one of the troubles bothering me the most, because doing that myself did cost more time & energy than I had expected. And looking back I think I should have been a little less of a cheapskate for everything needed for business, like hardware and software (like refusing to buy a new HD for myself - that was just stupid). Everything helping you to work faster is probably worth spending money on it, even if you don't have any. I also should have cut personal expenses even harder right from the start, but I only learned how much more I could reduce this after a while.

The good part is that we are not more broke now than our bank-limit did allow us to be ;-)

</comment><comment><USER27> We are currently self funded. We have two founders who saved for about a year. Then we also had a small site we worked on the side for a long time, which we sold. So that has been our funding. We are approaching 1 year self funded right now.

We also reduced a lot of our expenses we don't eat out we don't go to bars we buy food at costco we watch netflix (no cable no movie theaters) we got vonage and reduced our cell phone bills we have a really cheap place we rent we started doing cheaper activities with friends, board games, making them dinner, video games

So we have made our small amounts of funding really last.

Still haven't really made it yet, but we still have money in the bank to keep on going.

</comment><comment><USER28> 100% bootstrapped working on NewsCred (<http://www.newscred.com>). We've been hacking away for 6 months now and getting ready to launch the product in a few weeks. Its fun turning an extra inch into a yard, and the lack of money or Aeron chairs keep us hungry, lean and focused. Of course, its tough on the personal situation (family, going out etc) sometimes, but that will make it all the more worthwhile when we have users who appreciate the product. What I enjoy the most? Knowing that every dollar means so much, so that every decision that we take needs to be smart, creative, efficient and generally drive us towards a better product.

</comment><comment><USER29> Enjoy: full control w/o investor interference

Hardest parts: Balancing job, family (3 kids), and startup. Only having 10hrs/wk to work on it. Figuring out marketing on my own.

I think taking investment could be good depending on the investors.

I'm going after a very tough market -- people who are too busy for the effort traditional photo-sharing sites require. There's this narrow band of people who have 5 minutes but not 30 to share the last few months' photos. If it were a more attractive market I would have serious competition from full-time startups.

<http://ourdoings.com/>

</comment><comment><USER30> Self funded & enjoying it. Doing pure research on a field that fascinates me. plus no VC funds anything in this field today.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter>

<comment><USER9> Marcus, do you do an AI research just for fun, or do you have a decent idea how to monetize your startup or research results ? I'm surprised to hear that there are still AI entrepreneurs. :-)

<comment><USER30> Hopefully I'm doing it for money, but I'd do it even if I knew I'll never see a dime out it.

I have plans on monetizing it, right now doing a test run with a medical CAD software provider (Computer Assisted Diagnosis) to improve their results, it's one of the fields where AI actually has clear direct economic value.

Also thinking about building a web startup around the algorithms, AI as a web service, might apply to YC.

And yes there aren't many AI entrepreneurs, funding is a problem so unless you can afford to bootstrap for a long time (I sold a previous startup and can afford to not make a dime for a few years) you might be in a jam. Most companies in the field are university spin-offs, with the research done while the team is still in the academia.

<comment><USER9> I wish you luck Marcus in your AI startup and don't afraid of competition from university spin-offs.I had been involved in many seemed to be cool research projects while I was working for a uni, all of them are still a pile of papers, even those who tried to move on faild due to bureaucracy. Two years ago me and my colleague, we quit that dirty job and set up our own tiny mobile software dev company. The progress goes very fast now :-).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Hey, if it's too easy everybody will be doing it. Nobody will be an employee again...

</comment><comment><USER32> We're self-funded and have both been working roughly 50% time on the project for slightly more than a year. The hit in income for the past year was painful, but we are about to launch and we're very excited about the product.

<comment><USER4> Is that 50% on architecture and 50% on your startup?

<comment><USER33> Yes, that's what Fred works. I have a different situation, where I had a fulltime software job, but when I was ready to leave, they offered to keep me at 20 hrs/wk, supporting me enough to put the rest into the startup. That opportunity to work part-time is a great opportunity, and a big benefit of being a founder of that first company and staying there for many years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> We're bootstrapped (servee.com), I'm in my first few months, and it's hard making the transition from freelance work to startup work, because the freelance is currently paying the startup bills, and my bills.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm self funded but so early into the project that there's nothing to report. It is nice to know that I can take my time (day job supporting me and all), but maybe that's an inhibiting factor...

</comment><comment><USER35> We're bootstraping <http://www.OtherWeather.com> with some help from a silent private investor (very small money).

Would take investment if it was presented, but working on marketing/pr now (yes part time grrr).

We could do the ol' VC dog and pony show but we're wary of wasting our time when we could be building value of the site (instead of making PowerPoints and buying suits).

</comment><comment><USER36> Bootstrapping has worked well for my company, but I see some missed opportunities where taking outside investment would have paid off earlier on. I think this is especially true when being first to offer a new service or product makes all the difference and you use your outside investment to bring your product to market first.

</comment><comment><USER37> bootstrapping, in part because i have mad faith that participatory ownership can extend even to customers

<http://www.fastcompany.com/node/27333/print>

</comment><comment><USER38> "and $0/month on anything else"

Just how long are you willing to keep this up without taking salaries? Is it a business or a hobby?

<comment><AUTHOR> Remember that we're working on this on the side. We have salaries, just not from this. That number definitely rises if/when that situation changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Yes we can</comment>


Barbie Wants to Get to Know Your Child - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/magazine/barbie-wants-to-get-to-know-your-child.html <comment><USER3> My girls -- especially my middle one -- spend lots of time talking to their toys, having elaborate imaginary conversations in which they make up both sides of the exchange. As far as I know, children in all cultures have done this with dolls since time immemorial, which indicates to me that the behavior somehow developmentally important. Do we really want to short-circuit that with a gadget?

I think the effort to use technology -- screens, talking toys -- to relieve children of boredom, and by "boredom" I mean "stretches of time in which they're forced to come up with creative ways to entertain themselves and each other", is one of the most regrettable features of modern life.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't idealize the past too much. I had stuffed animals that I played with too as a kid, and readily gave them up for video games and consider myself better off for it. I'd put Minecraft up against "playing outside" in terms of social development any day. Wish I'd had it when I was 6.

Interacting with technology as a child means you're exposed to someone else's vision and imagination. It does not destroy your own. In this regard, books should be seen as just as bad, but they're not. I don't think people are quite rational when they discuss this subject.

<comment><USER5> I think you both have a valid point, and both things are valuable - time with your imagination and time with other's imaginations. We try to moderate our kids' use of iPad and video games, and got them into a routine where they spend roughly equal time playing with their toys and arts and crafts and playing outside.

They seem to self regulate, and we're pretty happy with how things are going. We're not screens-paranoids, but we have noticed technology use tends to become excessive when unregulated. When your kid wants to watch hours of toy videos on YouTube instead of playing with real toys, a correction is in order.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm worried and/or saddened by how gendered it all is. I'm guessing it's not the NY Times' fault but probably how the designers of this product think that's shining through. It seems that for all our AI and fancy electronic toys we're still in the '50s as a civilisation. It keeps talking about girls this girls that, while i wonder, can't we just talk about children? Is it really beneficial to foist these binary and dare i say reductionist gender roles on impressionable kids? I guess many people have a vested interest in doing that, but it'd be great if it could be toned down a bit, at least.

<comment><USER5> My wife and I enjoy buying gendered toys for our children, and our children prefer them. It could be an innate preference or one conditioned by us, but we don't care and don't lose any sleep over it. Our children are happy.

We don't discourage them from playing with each other's toys, and they do, but they exhibit a clear gender bias.

There's still a lot of parents like us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Best part of this submission imo is this creepy image: [http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/09/20/magazine/20barbie3...](http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/09/20/magazine/20barbie3/20barbie3-master1050-v2.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm actually really impressed with the brand reimagining that's already going on with Barbie speaking in an authentic millennial voice on instagram.

[https://instagram.com/socalitybarbie/](https://instagram.com/socalitybarbie/)

<comment><USER9> I wouldn't say it's millennial, rather Generation Z or even beyond.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Advertisement in toys for children must be banned. Seaman's "All hail Sega, buy another Dreamcast" was a joke, but now treat is real.

<comment><USER10> ...threat

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> You might also enjoy the recent novel Speak, by Louisa Hall. It's a thoughtful treatment of the idea of speaking dolls/conversational agents and the connections we form with them.

[http://www.amazon.com/Speak-Novel-Louisa-Hall- ebook/dp/B00N0...](http://www.amazon.com/Speak-Novel-Louisa-Hall- ebook/dp/B00N0WUPKU)

</comment><comment> Digit-Al "Hi. My name is Talking Tina... and I'm going to kill you."

<comment><USER12> "Don't ask me, I'm just a girl. [giggles]"

<comment><USER13> Simpsons - <USER2>

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej0iUcgNCpg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej0iUcgNCpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "You're right. I should apologize,'' Barbie said. ''I'm not mad anymore. I just want to be friends again."

So this barbie "friend" is incapable of walking away, of ending the friendship, and will basically say or do anything to keep the child happy and talking. That's not friendship. That's a perverse version of siri.

<comment><USER5> I'm sure with the current state of technological advancement, we'll see toys that can alienate small children very soon.

<comment><USER13> Lol, perfect marketing. Instead of the kid saying "I don't like this doll anymore" she can now say "I need a new doll, this one doesn't like ME anymore."

<comment><USER5> One thing I've noticed, having 3 small children, is how today's toys compete with each other for attention. If it has batteries, it exhibits the same needy behavior: About a minute after you put it down, it will cry out something like "Play with me!" or "Let's sing another song!".

It's really irritating when you put a baby down to sleep, sneak out of the room, and a couple of the toys cry out their last desperate attempt to be played with. I'd like to [meet] the genius that dreamed up this idea.

<comment><USER13> It was nature. Puppies do the same thing. All baby mammals seek renewed attention when attention ends. It's an ancient survival instinct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _" The game show also had an award for cleaning up gross stuff, including bugs, and a Mattel lawyer fretted that it sounded as though Barbie was encouraging kids to cruelly squash insects. Chidoni agreed. ''PETA will come after you,'' she said."_

This paragraph filled me with despair.

</comment><comment><USER15> Please do not editorialize the titles of submissions to HN. (Submitted title was "Barbie Is Trying to Pass the Turing Test".)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment>


Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.valuemotive.com/are-daily-scrum-meetings-worth-it-6c6fb915bec4 <comment><USER3> Daily stand-ups have two formats, one is Round Robin that has origins in Scrum, other is Walk the Board that is more Kanban. I highly recommend you switching from "did yesterday/do today" to "walking the board" as it is less about checking what each employee delivered in a day but rather what the team can do to move tickets through the board. It is also more inclusive allowing quiet/introverted/non-native English speaking members of the team to participate in the meeting rather than rehearse their updates in their heads ignoring others.

<comment><USER4> It should be noted that the "round robin" format has an important aspect which is to enable each team member to air his/her personal grievances regarding anything related to the project.

<comment><USER5> I would rather have this kind of discussions in the retrospective. It is a dedicated time for the team to discuss pain points, and to take actions to heal them.

<comment><USER6> I think the sooner the team is aware about issues the better.

<comment><USER7> I'm going to assume the GP meant blockers rather than grievances. Grievances are more like injustices and shouldn't really be aired at standups in a healthy team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This kind of daily meetings make me feel like I'm standing trial for my crimes. Especially if I've had a bad/down/unproductive day, which happens.

Maybe it's better when you take away the power relations. And reduce the frequency during non-critical periods.

<comment><USER9> Making classic standups useful and comfortable definitely requires psychological safety. You need to feel like you can occasionally say "worked on X, didn't make any progress", and a manager or a rival isn't going to pounce on you for it.

If you don't have pervasive psychological safety, there's a lot of stuff from XP that isn't going to work.

<comment><USER10> Exactly what I was about to say. There are many things that are dismissed in team culture because of the fear of feeling exposed or blamed but that is an issue of culture and/or insecurity, not a disadvantage of using agile methods.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For me, they are. More so in my current role with a fully remote company. All calls are video calls, with RingCentral, Slack or Google Meet. We get to see each other face to face, get some social time and chit-chat a few minutes before diving into the standup.

Other teams do async standup via Slack, via Standup Alice. It seems to work for them.

I also really like the addition of an "open forum" in my team. Is there anything you've heard from other teams that will probably have an impact on this sprint's tickets or ones in the queue for the next one? Its also a good time for the PMs to relate any relevant conversations had with other PMs that we should know about.

The real key to this is there's no power play involved, and to have a good sense of scope about what's appropriate to bring up and what isn't. We're also a hybrid core/product team, so regular checkins are beneficial overall.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think they are worth it for remote teams. Most of the work comms can be easily done in slack, but there's definitely a benefit of making people talk to each other and express emotions at least once a day.

Normal offices accomplish that with water cooler talk and informal chatter, but you miss on that with remote teams. There might be a better way to solve the "loosing of esprit de corps" thing but dailies are the easiest thing I've seen do that.

<comment><USER13> Why not weekly? Or twice a week? Advantage of remote is that you can prioritize incoming information and everybody is onboard with asynchronous communication by default.

<comment><USER12> It's not about information sharing, dailies are crappy for that anyways. You should always have async information centre so people can get up to speed.

The idea is to be able to share the squishy emotional human bit of working with a team of people.

Without it I've seen people just slowly drift apart. You'd see a comment from a coworker on your PR and be like "argh who is this guys think he is! He's totally wrong" but if you can talk with him about it in video it becomes a lot less confrontational. You can apologise and be apologised to.

A jira board is just a means to have some shared concern to talk about. And done properly can leave you with a feeling of being part of something bigger, rather than a lonely coder talking to a computer.

<comment><USER14> > You'd see a comment from a coworker on your PR and be like "argh who is this > guys think he is! He's totally wrong" but if you can talk with him about it > in video it becomes a lot less confrontational. You can apologise and be > apologised to.

Unless that doesn't happen. Perhaps he digs in his heels that he's "right" when he's demonstrably wrong? Or 'he' is the team lead, and it doesn't matter whether he's right or wrong, we all now move in that direction "because". Having to have video/f2f in situations like that adds more stress.

Dealing with this situation now, and it's bad.

<comment><USER12> Well one thing that "How to win friends and Influence People", "Never split the difference" and "Non Violent Communication" in general has thought me is that it's very hard to "convince someone you're right". Dealing with people successfully to win them to your cause is a very hard skill to master, one that I'm struggling with myself.

A better strategy I think is to try to get emotionally in sync with the other person first. Win them as a friend so to speak. And visual queues in that case become paramount. Co-location is even better, but we're talking about remote now don't we.

People sadly don't usually listen to the facts, especially if there's an argument, and double that if the argument is public (more than two people involved). It requires enormous emotional courage to admit someone's right before a lot of people, so we hardly every do it. That's what most of the advice from those books is to get to know people first, gain their trust and talk to their emotions rather than the facts.

Dailies are not meant to fix that I think, more like keep the team working in the long run if it had a good start, and help leaders find out about problems quickly and address them elsewhere.

Going off topic a bit though but in your example - a team lead that's going off to a demonstrably wrong direction - well they have more things on their mind than that particular thing probably, "does my team listen to me" might be one of them or "other business consideration that we're not privy to" is another.

One way to approach this is to support them publicly but have a one-on-one with them and express your concerns, without personal judgement and the like. After which you can ask them to help you with a particular task, preferably one that you know will hit the problem where you've thought the direction would be bad. And never say "I told you so!" Help them through the arising situation and bam! You will have them on your side plus the project would be moving in a good direction.

Also a lot of times it might turn out that this direction was actually preferable. You'll get to say "yeah you were totally right" and win them to your side as well, and learn a new thing in the process!

<comment><USER14> > It requires enormous emotional courage to admit someone's right before a lot > of people, so we hardly every do it.

I've got a couple of current situations where... the other person is _not wrong_ (charitably "right"), but the timing and prioritization is poor. Or, they may be 'right' but for wrong or bad reasoning. (yes, doing "foo" in the code is good because is helps with code readability, but no, it doesn't bestow another layer of security to the project, and no, it's not a 'performance boost').

These are even harder situations to deal with, because, again, technically, the idea being presented isn't "wrong" or "bad" in an absolute sense, just... strategically, it a step in a demonstrably bad direction wrt to project progression and hitting deadlines.

> or "other business consideration that we're not privy to" is another.

I've been on teams of up to 50 people - divided in to multiple smaller teams - company in the hundreds of employees. Yes, there may be reasonings that I'm not privy to - completely understandable (expected). I've been on teams of 3-4, talking to an end client multiple times per week about goals/deadlines/etc. There should not be any reason for info siloing with respect to anything at that level (save, perhaps, financial considerations like salaries, contract amounts, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Q. Are daily scrum meetings worth it?

Programmers: no.

Project managers: Why can't we do this twice a day?

</comment><comment><USER16> > Usually the better the project is going, the less you need the daily.

That quote sums it up pretty nicely. To bad of a naming for this type of meeting. Hard to negotiate to do a "daily" less then daily.

<comment><USER17> Agreed - whether it should be done daily or not is a decision based on a wide number of inputs.

When it's work best anecdotally, is when we hold regular retrospectives ON our agile ways of working. EG: Is the standup working for us? What should we stop/start/continue in our standups?

When this 'retro of agile' (rather than just project/product retros) take place regularly you quickly come across a format and cadence that works for the team.

Tools are just tools, they should work for us, not the other way around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm sorry, stand ups are literally a psychological trick played by middle managers to put pressure on devs. They undoubtably lead to higher turnover from devs fleeing chickenshit and I've never seen one actually lead to better code.

<comment><USER19> In a past life as a Product Manager, one of my top devs rarely attended standups. One day, she rolled into the office mid standup, went over to the coffee machine, and prepared a cup. Never looked in our direction, and proceeded to begin her work.

Later during our 1-1, I asked her what the issue was, and she bluntly told me that she thought standups were useless.

I never brought it up again, as she was an amazing developer, and her documentation was absolutely pristine. After that, I myself stopped seeing the value in universal standups. If a person is good, they make it known in other ways.

<comment><USER10> That isn't the point at all. The standup isn't to make her a better developer, it is to make the team work more effectively. What happens when someone is taking a long time to do something that she knows a shortcut for but they won't know because "she doesn't need to come".

It's a sad culture when a developer thinks they don't need the team or when, for some reason, they don't have to come to standups.

<comment><USER20> I think she said standups are useless, not that the team is useless. I completely agree. I've never found any use for them in years of being forced to do standups. They are 100% for managers. If someone has an issue I can help out with, they message me directly or post in a channel and we work on it. That's what happens. Very simple. They don't have to wait until the next day and they don't have to bother everyone else with their likely-irrelevant issue.

Also, how can standups be designed to make the team work more effectively? They essentially steal some of the best development time in the day by insisting on being the first thing done in the morning, when most people are fresh and ready to go. There's no way in hell this was designed to be anything but a manager's control tool designed to slow down the team in bureaucracy and bullshit. And it does a great job at that.

<comment><USER21> > Also, how can standups be designed to make the team work more effectively?

Tips:

* NO MANAGERS. The standup is for the scrum team to organise and help itself. It is not there give a status update for the manager. The manager isn't in the team, and people have trouble talking freely when the manager is around.

* Do an issue based standup. Discuss the status of each issue on the board from the right to left. The primary question is "What can we do to keep these issues moving along through the process?".

* At the end you can ask "Does anyone have anything else important to add?". Maybe people have to leave early today etc etc.

That's it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > This will interrupt programming flow.

This for me is the biggest drawback. When you are in the zone and interrupted it takes long to get back in the flow again.

Another point is I don't solve problems in a linear fashion. When I am stuck I sometimes jump to another part of the application that I know I will have to tackle later on. That's just me. This is hard to explain in Agile with a PM/scrum master present.

Edit: PM/scrum master because we have mixed environment.

<comment><USER9> > This will interrupt programming flow.

This is why you do the standup first thing, before people have started working. There is no flow to interrupt.

> Another point is I don't solve problems in a linear fashion. When I am stuck > I sometimes jump to another part of the application that I know I will have > to tackle later on. That's just me.

If you're doing XP, or any kanban-flavoured variety of agile, you pick up one story/feature/etc and work on it until it's done. You might jump around in the codebase to build that feature, but you work on one feature. That's easy and natural to describe in a standup.

If you're not doing that, then indeed, it's going to be hard to talk about what you've done.

But to be honest, what you're doing is almost certainly not very effective, so maybe stop doing that?

<comment><USER23> > This is why you do the standup first thing, before people have started > working. There is no flow to interrupt.

That requires all the people to come to work at the same time.

<comment><USER22> This point is dealt with in the article. People have different traveling arrangements. In my case sometimes I have to drop off my child at school and head in after the morning rush hour. So daily stand up is not first thing in the morning.

<comment><USER24> I worked on a project where we had the daily scrum (by conference call) at 4pm, precisely because people all started work at different times. All that that achieved was to mean that I was unproductive from about 2pm because I was thinking "if I get into something now I'll get interrupted before I properly finish it"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The one true benefit that i remember from my time working in scrum was when we moved the scrum meeting from morning to 12 o`clock. And the benefit? After the meeting, everyone was already standing, so we went straight to lunch as a group without any further delay. Saved a lot of time and effort to organize everyone.

</comment><comment><USER26> Personally, I like the slack message standup over the meeting, but that's mainly because I'm a terrible listener, at least with text I can go back and see what a certain person has decided to mention. I also feel like it's easier to mention someone that I might need help from during the day

<comment><USER10> The problem I have with the Slack model is that it becomes opt-in. Lots of Devs simply won't read the channels because they won't care what other people were doing even if that knowledge helps people to skill-share, coach, encourage or take part of the work off of someone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't like or dislike daily meetings much personally, but I think they are needed - mainly for scrum master and PO. Daily can't be replaced realistically with bug tracker dashboard because 80% of daily time is not bug status discussion but let's say mostly human problems. Also I believe there is zero correlation between success of the project as a whole and a need for daily, none at all. People suggest async text in chat but eventually harder and more detailed issues will raise a need to actually talk and while it will save 20 minutes time of each participant who now don't have to listen to other people's issues it will also isolate people from potentially useful information and prevent them to suggest their ideas or ask for clarification , basically limiting in-team collaboration.

<comment><USER28> _I think they are needed - mainly for scrum master and PO...[but] there is zero correlation between success of the project as a whole and a need for daily_

So, basically, what you're really saying is they're not needed and you don't need scrum masters or POs.

<comment><USER27> No, I mean that when project is successful a need for daily (or other detailed sync) doesn't diminish. You are still making decisions, plan complex features and communicate with the same humans, only company account has more zeroes, that's all difference.

PS: in our case SMs and POs are actually doing useful work and we aren't holding any worthless meetings which are solely to entertain people not doing anything. If that was what you implied.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Another variation would be to do the daily on Slack which can even be > asynchronous.

That is exactly what I do. Every morning answer 3 things in Slack. It is also good way to say "Good morning, now I start to work on X, yesterday I did Z and I need some help on Y.

<comment><USER12> The thing with dailies is not that you share your updates, its more that you're forced to listen to everyone else's.

Granted you can always snooze a bit and pretend, but that kind of bad faith is usually indicative of other deeper problems with the team.

Also this can become a drag if you're "held accountable" rather than "helped in need" but smart leaders would recognize that and attempt to fix the problem in the team, and a daily like that can be a tool for them to diagnose problems like this.

<comment><USER30> > you're forced to listen to everyone else's.

This seems to be an overlooked aspect here in the comments too. Yes, nobody likes to be forced to do something but in this case it's worth it. We have enough distractions as it is so taking 15 minutes to focus on what's important to our colleagues can bring forth valuable connections of ideas and people.

<comment><USER31> Face to face communication, and thus listening to others, is the whole point of the daily scrum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> As so many things with scrum, a lot depends on the attitude of the scum master. If the scrum master is an ambitions person and focusing on results, stand-up meetings can be become a drag. If however, the scrum master has a focus on the team and it members, it can become a source of cooperation and encouragement. Many companies that want to implement scrum, do not want to pay the cost of hiring people who are good at being scrum masters (and are not necessary software engineers), but decide to assign the role to some existing people in the company, which, often results in people who see it is a stepping stone to a management position to opt for the role of scrum master.

<comment><USER30> I agree with the importance of Scrum Master in the meeting but from a different perspective. Without a dedicated Scrum Master the meetings often feel either flat or take an off-topic life of their own. I believe that sort of communication is also important but should then be done outside of the Daily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I see the value in daily communication and the general topics (yesterday, today, blockers) of the dailies, but at the same time the daily standups show how the in general much of the modern work and communication has moved to asynchronous methods but the text book example still requires the events to happen in a synchronous way (eg. standup at 9 am) which obviously causes issues.

Then you move forward to move say the dailies in Slack, at which point they just get posted whenever people see fit, which sort of works unless the problems themselves need to be solved synchronously, as it is with many cases and they easily just end up being status reports instead of actual planning.

</comment><comment><USER34> I think they're absolutely worth it. The interruption of flow is minor, because they're predictable. You can plan around them. If you're working on something really complex and urgent, I don't mind if you skip it occasionally (but don't make that a habit).

I think it's good to start the day together, with some idea of what everybody is working on. It helps to detect some issues that otherwise might be ignored or detected too late. Generally, communication is good, and short communication is better.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, nothing worse than finding out that someone has implemented something that you've already done somewhere else because you didn't know it was being worked on.

Short is definitely good as is the chance to chip in a bit of unsolicited advice from one dev to another ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I haven't found a way to make daily standups work in my team which is fully remote and spread out on 3 continents and 4 time zones (so there is no "start of day"). Instead I have a weekly sync with everyone and 1:1 with each person on a weekly basis.

Kanban board gets reviewed weekly for assignment and direction (and I keep an eye on it thoughout the week). Blockers get addressed asynchronously in dedicated discussion spaces as soon as they arise. If a solution isn't found in chat then it becomes a topic on the sync meeting. But generally, there's no "spinning wheels" as everyone is mature and doesn't need a short leash.

Which leads me to trust. Everyone in our team has a decent amount of experience. They all know when they are stuck and they all know where to ask for help. I've always felt that trust is empowering and that's what I wish for everyone on my team.

But in this context, 1:1 are very important and I try my best to make them safe spaces for people to bring up issues which would be more uncomfortable to bring up in a group setting, especially for introvert personalities.

Ideally, pick what works best for YOUR team. Experiment and try new things. What works today may not be the right thing in a year. These are tools, not dogmas. The worst process is the one everyone follows but nobody knows why nor how/if it helps.

</comment><comment><USER36> Yes, they do but it depends on the context. In my previous company (web agency) they were solving several issues at the same time:

\- Project Manager (Proxy Product Owner) is communicating with the client on a daily basis and is getting some important updates about the progress of the Sprint;

\- if there are some unexpected developments (for example, some User Stories appeared to be more complex) the Team and the PO can make a decision about it together, discuss various options, etc;

\- the distributed team has a chance to see each other (we were encouraging video calls via Google Meet).

However, there are some certain rules which should be followed in order to make Daily Scrums effective:

\- video (or at least audio) conferences for distributed teams – it can actually be slower to have this meeting via Slack;

\- they must be timeboxed (15 minutes max);

\- stay pragmatic about what you are discussing and ask the feedback of your team about it.

</comment><comment><USER37> In my experience, daily scrums are without value. A well-functioning team already knows what everyone else is working on, what problems they're having, and etc.

If a team isn't well-functioning, then daily scrums could have some value -- but I think a better approach would be to fix the team.

</comment><comment><USER23> When I was put in charge of a new team for a new project at my previous company, we did the most agile thing there is. We got together and asked ourselves (all of us having previously been on teams that had daily standups): "So, what do you all think, is the daily standup worth it? No? Alright, let's try without it."

It worked great. We ended up doing a quick meetings 1-2 times a week to sync- up and get the idea of where we are. Any blockers would be brought up informally (through Slack or in-person). We all knew each other well, so trust was high to begin with. Also, it was a relatively small team of 5 people.

I guess the point is that "having daily standups" is not agile. Regularly asking yourselves if they are or would be useful (whatever the answer may be) is.

</comment><comment><USER38> Every article:

Title: Is [x] better than [y]?

Article: Depends on context

<comment><USER39> Well, isn't this how the world works? If yes, then x. If not, then y. I'm happy to live in a non-binary world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> For a small remote company like ours, it would be exhausting to do daily scrum meetings. Instead, we have an hour-long weekly scrum meeting on Monday and it's more effective.

<comment><USER41> Can you give a little more context about why it would become exhausting for remote workers? I'd seen terrible stand ups and good ones, but the location of those taking part has rarely been a deciding factor.

<comment><USER40> It is a waste of time. Whatever you need to discuss regarding the tasks can be discussed once a week and then once the tasks have been assigned and discussed, trust the team to work at their own pace and time and deliver it by next Monday instead of micromanaging the team every day.

<comment><USER41> But why is that especially exhausting for remote workers? Why not local ones too?

You also foucs on assigned tasks rather than a team working together to get stuff done. Sounds like Software engineers, not product engineers. If you are pre assigning tasks and working separately then yes a daily scrum has no value.

But that isn't the point of a daily scrum, or scrum/agile at all. The focus needs to be on getting value to a customer together as fast as possible - <USER2> individuals doing a task each to build to a pre-defined whole. Iteration not increments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> NO.

<comment><USER43> Because?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> i loved the dailies. it was the best way to earn money without doing any work. i always tried to prolong the meetings as much as possible. ah, i miss those days.

</comment><comment><USER45> No</comment>


A Million Digits of Pi in 9 Lines of JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://ajennings.net/blog/a-million-digits-of-pi-in-9-lines-of-javascript.html <comment><USER2> > this simple one still converges at about 0.6 decimal digits per term.

Quick proof of this: as the number of terms _n_ in the sum goes to infinity, the ratio of each term to the previous one is approximately 1/4 - the first factor contributes _m /(m+1)_, the second _q /(q+2)_ for some _m_ and _q_ that go to infinity along with _n_ , the third contributes 1/4.

If we counted base 4, then the value of each digit would be on average 1/4 of the previous one, certainly for a normal number like pi. But we count base 10, so we get _log_10 4_ decimal digits every time we get one base-four digit. Which is very close to 0.6.

<comment><USER3> I wonder if base 4 math is how people recite this out loud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> His demo page, in my Chrome, if I enter 10000, it takes about 2 seconds to finish with 10k digits.

But if I enter 100k, it takes 30 seconds to get to reporting 10k digits worth of progress.

Hmm. Have to think about that one. Just cause it's asking JS to do comparisons of much larger numbers?

<comment><USER5> I'd bet a good portion of the difference is between rendering the additional digits as it goes.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't note timing numbers, but rendering digits in hex was basically instantaneous, even when doing a million (decimal) digits.

Rendering the digits in decimal was significant delay (like 40 seconds for a million digits). That's why it just shows the hex until the very end, and it shows how long the decimal conversion takes.

<comment><USER5> You sure you don't mean converting digits to hex instead of rendering? The constant rendering of the hex digits as the work progresses results in a ~3x slowdown for 100k digits in my testing (see my other comment in this tree).

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe you're right. I know displaying in hex was way faster than displaying in decimal and seemed fast enough, so I stopped there. I didn't test rendering speed specifically.

Doing a million digits in the console (with no status updates) took about an hour and doing it in that page took just over two hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, I wonder why Firefox is so much slower? Quantum seems pretty zippy overall, but maybe that's largely due to fast rendering speeds?

Does anyone on the Spidermonkey team have some insight?

<comment><USER7> Looks like they are using big integers, which I'd guess isn't something that comes up a lot, so probably hasn't been optimized for too much.

<comment><USER8> It is pretty new, and as you mention not many websites use them yet, so I'm sure there are more important optimizations the Firefox team is focusing on for now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Alternatively, you can generate Pi digits one by one in a streaming way: [https://observablehq.com/@mourner/calculating-pi- digits](https://observablehq.com/@mourner/calculating-pi-digits)

</comment><comment><USER10> JS Error `No identifiers allowed directly after numeric literal` when running [http://ajennings.net/pi.html](http://ajennings.net/pi.html) on Mac OS Mojave 10.14.6, Safari 12.1.2 (14607.3.9)

<comment><USER11> Safari does not support BigInt yet it seems.

<comment><USER12> Safari seems to be consistently behind these days, not sure why.

<comment><USER13> Apple seems to be the only browser developer that makes user-centric changes first, not developer-centric.

I'm OK with that.

<comment><USER14> It seems user-centric to you know... make the browser work for what users what to use it for. Like generating digits of pi.

<comment><USER15> Yes I'm sure there's a lot of consumers that want to calculate large amounts of digits of Pi in their browser..

<comment><USER14> I didn't say that. You're moving goalposts anyway. Calculating pi isn't the only use for big ints. The more practical application is maybe crypto or something.

But _some_ users want to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A fun related thread on math stackexchange which has several examples of series which converge quickly to pi: [https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/14113/series- that-c...](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/14113/series-that- converge-to-pi-quickly)

edit: There also some nice formulae for quick convergence in this article: [https://julialang.org/blog/2017/03/piday](https://julialang.org/blog/2017/03/piday)

</comment><comment><USER17> Can someone explain the logic behind the evolution of the fractions at each stage? I see that (1/4) becomes (1/4^2) and (1/4^3), but it's not obvious to me how (1/3)->(1/5)->(1/7) flows (odds? primes?), or (1/2) -> (13/24) -> (135/246).

EDIT: I understand now, the numerator on the first term is ascending odds and the denominator is ascending evens. Thanks for everyone's help!

<comment><USER18> Remove the leading 3 and the trailing term of 1/4 increasing in power.

You are left with this (in the 4th line):

1 3 5 1

\- - - -

2 4 6 7

The pattern I see is that, starting from the top left and reading numerator, denominator, numerator, denominator and so on gives: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 if you ignore the last numerator.

I may have it wrong, but that looks like the pattern.

<comment><USER19> 4th step is 1357/2468

<comment><USER18> Is that simplified? I'm just going off of this image: [http://ajennings.net/blog/images/formula.png](http://ajennings.net/blog/images/formula.png)

<comment><USER19> me too, the pattern to me is odds on the numerator and evens in the denominator, and the second fraction goes 1/3, 1/5, 1/7, 1/9...

i think we're saying the same thing i misunderstood your comment. 1357/2468 is the first fraction of the NEXT line that isnt in the image

<comment><USER18> Aha, yes, I edited my post now to say 4th _line_ not 4th _step_. Leave it to HN to get an off-by-one error :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > this simple one still converges at about 0.6 decimal digits per term.

The Chudnovsky brothers' algorithm computes 14.18... digits per term. Its implementation in Scheme is only about a couple dozen lines of code. It computes a million pi digits in about 17.5 seconds on raspberry pi 4 in Gambit Scheme (57 seconds on the original raspberry pi, IIRC).

</comment><comment> 52-6F-62 For those of us behind work proxies that dumbly think this site is "domain parking" or worse:

[http://archive.is/hUo6Q](http://archive.is/hUo6Q)

<comment><AUTHOR> Personal domain. I haven't used it for much over the years.

The hosting is static pages on S3.

I wonder if there's anything I could do to avoid the domain getting flagged.

Maybe it's because the root page on the domain is just a quote.

<comment> 52-6F-62 Not sure. Where the company I work for operates they have some very weird proxy setup (not my company's rule but the host). Largely it seems only effective at blocking legitimate content for nonsense reasons. My own site gets blocked on occasion, though I've lazily let the cert expire. That reminds me....

Anyway I wouldn't worry too much. It's likely just stodgy corporate environments that put those kinds of controls in place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> On any standard unix system with bc installed - it's preinstalled on most of them, you can calculate pi to $n digits using bc:

bc -l <<< "scale=$n; 4*a(1)"

<comment><USER21> The algorithm seems to be at least quadratic in the length. On a 2014 i7 Mac mini, (n, time(sec)) = (1000, 0.29), (2000, 1.65), (4000, 9.70), (8000, 58.42).

<comment><USER22> I think this section on Wikipedia is relevant: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximations_of_%CF%80#Grego...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximations_of_%CF%80#Gregory%E2%80%93Leibniz_series)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was going to make a joke about just writing Math.PI.toFixed(10 * * 6), but it turns out that Number.toFixed() only supports up to 100 places AND Math.PI stops at the 50th place. Still amusing to me. Also, BigInt numbers can't be combined with non BigInt without conversion. I haven't had cause to use them yet, so I didn't know that.

Learned three new things making a dumb HN joke... not bad!

</comment><comment><USER24> I thought it would be the "spigot" algorithm, which is based on Bellard's formula (yes, _that_ Bellard) and yields similarly small programs:

[http://numbers.computation.free.fr/Constants/TinyPrograms/ti...](http://numbers.computation.free.fr/Constants/TinyPrograms/tinycodes.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> This also takes a lot of RAM. Keep an eye on it during longer executions or the swapping could make your box pretty unusable.

<comment><AUTHOR> It should take 415kB to store a million digit number, and the algorithm only needs to keep two of them. So, 1MB total to calculate a million digits of pi. I wonder if there are a lot of temporary allocations that build up until they get garbage collected.

<comment><USER25> Not sure what it is exactly, but forcing a garbage collection (using the "minimize memory usage" button in about:memory) doesn't make any difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I still can't work out how the formula shown translates to the code given. Any hints?

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm interested to see how the computation time would progress with the recent V8 memory enhancements.

</comment><comment><USER28>
      let y=3n*(10n**1000020n);
      const f=(i,x,p)=>{(x>0)?f(i+2n,x*i/((i+1n)*4n),p+x/(i+2n)):p/(10n**20n)}
      console.log(f(1n,y/8n,y));

Not sure if I can golf it anymore

<comment><USER29> That version already doesn't work… once you fix the arrow function, there's also the issue that most engines today don't support proper tail calls, so nothing recursive will be portable. (But if it did, you could save a lot of characters by dropping unnecessary parentheses, expanding (i+1n)×4n to 4n×i+4n, replacing the const with a comma, removing semicolons…)

<comment><USER30> this is my perl golf version of the same series. You can probably can do something similar with js:

map$l+=(-1) __$_ /(1-$_ _2)_ 4,1..<>;die$l

<comment><USER31> Doesn't work for me [0]. Perhaps HN messed it up somehow?

[0]: [https://tio.run/##K0gtyjH9/z83sUAlR9tWQ9dQUyVeX8NQVyXeSNNEx1...](https://tio.run/##K0gtyjH9/z83sUAlR9tWQ9dQUyVeX8NQVyXeSNNEx1BPz8bOOiUzVSXn/38A)

<comment><USER30> I guess so... [https://tio.run/##K0gtyjH9/z83sUAlR9tWQ9dQU0tLJV5fw1BXJV7LSF...](https://tio.run/##K0gtyjH9/z83sUAlR9tWQ9dQU0tLJV5fw1BXJV7LSFPLRMdQT8/GzjolM1UlR@H/f0MDIAAA)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It will be much faster if you don't update the HEX values all the time (they are not that interesting anyway).

<comment><AUTHOR> Displaying hex is quite fast (compared to trying to display decimal), though you're right that it might add up to a noticeable amount of time in the end. I did the full million digit calculation on that sample page on the same computer and it took a little over two hours (so 2.1x slowdown) but at that point I was also adding a 5ms delay every 100 terms.

It is fun to scroll down and watch the "cutoff", where digits above that are not changing and digits below that are. That's just as fun in hex as it is in decimal. But yes, maybe I should add an option to turn that off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> What is the actual equation? They just list the first couple of terms.

<comment><USER34> Continuing the pattern it's

      $\pi = 3 + \sum_{k=1}^\infty 3 \frac{(2k-1)!!}{(2k)!!} \frac{1}{2k+1} \frac{1}{4^k}$ [1].

n!! is double factorial, the product of odd or even numbers up to n (depending on whether n is odd or even) [2].

Edit: added a simpler series from [https://math.stackexchange.com/a/14116](https://math.stackexchange.com/a/14116):

      $\pi = \sum_{k=0}^{\infty} \frac{(2k)!!}{(2k+1)!!} \left(\frac{1}{2}\right)^{k-1}$

[1] [https://imgur.com/a/YtA8kUx](https://imgur.com/a/YtA8kUx)

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Is there a BigDecimal, Money, or similar coming to JS?

<comment> mark-r You could probably emulate them. For example, Money would just be BigInt/100.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> infinite series ..an amazing discovery

</comment><comment><USER37> wget "[https://www.piday.org/million/"](https://www.piday.org/million/")

Got you beat, js.

<comment><USER38> Until you go to examine it and realize it's infinite scrolling via JS and spend all your time trying to hack around that. (Or you just grab the URL out of the request and fetch it a few times directly)</comment></comment>


SOPA Right, Internets Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://getoffmyinternets.net/2011/12/23/sopa-right-internets-wrong/ Controversial but has a point. Legislation constantly evolves. At what point of the process is a boycott appropriate?<p>If GoDaddy wants to invest in a YC startup working on DNS and Domain Registration (which really sucks), we won't allow it? <comment><AUTHOR> Controversial but has a point. Legislation constantly evolves. At what point of the process is a boycott appropriate?

If GoDaddy wants to invest in a YC startup working on DNS and Domain Registration (which really sucks), we wouldn't allow it?</comment>


Show HN: a human-friendly, people-centric social discovery platform - <AUTHOR> http://picostormlabs.com/alpha

<comment><AUTHOR> A little background: this is the culmination of a year's hard work on our startup, picostorm code labs. I'm proud to present it to HN for your viewing pleasure. The photos you see are that of a fully functional technology demo - not mockups.

The core of the project is a personal content relevancy engine, an ergonomic intergace and a unique personas system.</comment>


Ask HN: "Disrupted" or Just Dyspeptic? - <AUTHOR> I just finished reading this and would like to discuss it, probably to my detriment.  Put my comments in the 1st comment because they wouldn't fit here. <comment><AUTHOR> Probably even more important, as "any publicity is good publicity", I'm loathe to give "Disrupted" more attention than it deserves.

Book summary: Dan Lyons' job as Newsweek technology editor gets eliminated. Deciding to cash in on the current startup boom, he finds a somewhat obscure pseudo-corn and signs up. After wacky adventures, it ends in tears and legal action.

After skimming the various excerpts of "Disrupted", I read the whole thing last night. To paraphrase Elvis Costello, I started being amused and now I'm disgusted.

But not for the ostensible reasons that the book strongly tries to influence the reader to believe.

My personal background is having worked in tech for a long time, serving in a range of companies: big, middling and startup since the late 80s. I've personally seen things more horrible (and funny) than anything in this book. All of the issues Lyons' calls out, have been in play as long as I've been in this business.

That's not to say I endorse them - rampant age discrimination, cult-like manipulation of employees, screwing most employees on liquidity outcomes, etc. But it's nothing new. Lyons claims to have been writing technology, starting with trade rags, for the past 20 years and it shouldn't be anything new to him either.

What runs strong and straight through "Disrupted" is that Lyons' joined a company without sufficient due diligence. Whatever the merits of HubSpot, it was/is a machine for marketing and sales. Lyons was under the impression that by giving arrant speeches and writing pieces for a consciously elite audience - explicitly not the HubSpot prospect base, the world would come to his door.

That's just not how the real world works. Nothing he did contributed directly or seemingly indirectly to the HubSpot bottom line. The founders were trying to puff that thing up for an IPO. Ultimately, a little image work at a high salary wasn't satisfactory, regardless of their ethical failings.

One can easily imagine an alternative universe where Lyons' bosses approved his separate "glossy" magazine-oid website, and he spent two years emitting ephemeral think pieces. This book would never have been written. Lyons' might have moved on after IPO with a little money and connections to join the Scoble Set at the next cool startup.

It's obvious that Lyons views elite media people as being on another level from the rest of us. In a sense it's an analog of tech pedigree nonsense, where if you're not ex/current NYT or Time, you obviously lack the necessary insight to really understand things.

Spite and jealousy do not constitute a platform from which to pontificate on the tech industry. Compare "Disrupted" with the recent "The Everything Store" about Amazon. The latter certainly has lots of dark insight, but no sense that it was written because the author wasn't allowed another cookie.</comment>


Review: HP improves its $200 laptop a lot, but it's still a $200 laptop - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/review-hp-improves-its-200-laptop-a-lot-but-its-still-a-200-laptop/ <comment><USER2> (Very little) discucssion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11003450](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11003450)

And why does this show up separately? Same URL, submitted only a few hours later.</comment>


How Sugar and Fat Trick the Brain into Wanting More Food - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-sugar-and-fat-trick-the-brain-into-wanting-more-food/ <comment> norea-armozel Most of this article reads like the summary of "You on a Diet" from Oz and Roizen. I'm glad much of the science hasn't changed. It's not that calories don't count, but that satiety as a signal of sufficient food gets messed by overeating and obesity as a whole.

I'm glad they didn't try to foist the "hormonal" theory of metabolism on us again because calories in vs calories out is still a solid model for weight loss. It's just not enough if you eat the wrong things to fix your satiety signals.</comment>


How hackers hack you using simple social engineering [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc7scxvKQOo&feature=youtu.be <comment><USER2> She did great on that social engineering attack. The crying baby on YouTube was a nice touch. The overall segment illustrates many aspects of psychological manipulation that can be used to successfully con a support person. A believable scenario, something people might sympathize with, a sense of urgency, further but brief engagement with questions/answers, and gratitude for their participation.

This stuff was always tricky to train people to defend against. I need to update my links to good presentations on this subject for attack and especially defensive training for employees. So, what do you people have to go in that collection?

Note: OP video led to autoplay of No Tech Hacking by Johnny Long. I recall someone recommending me read the book by same name. So, nice accidental reminder.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4kfsxF8Tio](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4kfsxF8Tio)

Note 2: Bejtlich's comment on NTH on Amazon reminded me that we should probably always list Mitnick's Art of Deception and Abignale's Art of the Steal in these threads for useful examples they had. They each extracted much mileage out of social engineering.

<comment><USER3> Ugh, so this is why banks ask you to type your cart number and call support password before they connect you to a real person. And then he asks you your some private informations, then fills them on the program, only after this he can give you a support.

<comment><USER2> Usually. It's also why some institutions will lock you out entirely without a visit for a photo ID check. Pre-designated people in some high-security settings with optional tokens or biometrics.

Now, some measures you run into will exist because a non-security expert formulated them to cover their ass after reading something online or in a bookstore. Or by security people who also have to comply with a policy or regulation of varying degrees of sanity. So, it's not always a real attack or risk inspiring specific measures but often is for verification during support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is part of a longer video: Real Future: What Happens When You Dare Expert Hackers To Hack You (Episode 8)

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

<comment><USER5> In that video Dan Tentler talks about how he hacked the journalist by prompting fake system messages to input his password.

I've always wondered when using Ubuntu, how paranoid should one be regarding the prompts to auto install updates? Anyways, if you've been owned to that extent already, your adversary could always use a key logger, instead, so I guess it's maybe not worth worrying about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another aspect of social engineering that is seldom discussed: Women will have a higher success rate at any sort of information-extraction, in fact, I would say that it is a "social engineer" method in itself. The crying baby sound- effect? Simply icing on the cake.

If a male with a naturally brooding voice contacted a service provider to extract a password, his chances of success are lower because he is less trustworthy by nature, which increases the odds of the operator on the other end raising suspicion.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've seen a lot better ones than this at HOPE. I honestly don't think I would have bought her story -- and I have history of working the phones for stuff. It comes across as too contrived. She would have fooled me better by just sounding bored.

</comment><comment><USER8> Other guy in the video was Chris Hadnagy who literally wrote the book on social engineering.

Cool dude, too. Great class if you ever get the chance to take it at Black Hat.

</comment><comment><USER9> So this is what I need to do to get quick tech support help over the phone. Social engineering as a tool for legitimate purposes.

</comment><comment><USER10> While I am not an artist, I always had a distaste for the phrase "scam artist". It didn't seem appropriate to elevate someone who commits fraud to the level of "artist".

But my hope was the phrase would shift out of the professions entirely. And certainly not into my own profession.

<comment><USER11> "Engineered" and "artistic" seem apt descriptions of parts of the scam: the skillful, creative, and well though out parts. Just like "criminal" and "scammer" address the other side of the same activities.

<comment><USER10> Engineering is applied math and science. Hard science mind you.

<comment><USER11> That's one sense of the word. There are others. I was thinking of "the action of working artfully to bring something about".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Apple's 'iPad' is the harbinger of the ebook revolution" is just speculation - <AUTHOR> http://thoughts.aidannulman.com/3-reasons-why-this-whole-apples-ipad-is-the-h <comment><USER2> Not exactly a great article. The author seems to imply that there wasn't an mp3 player market before the ipod - a factually false statement. I still even have my 125mb AAA battery-powered player lurking somewhere in my closet. And as many college students can tell you, there is QUITE a collection of pirated textbooks and latest releases floating around the various IRC channels...</comment>


Zootool – Open-source self-hosted alternative Open Zoo - <AUTHOR> http://bastianallgeier.com/openzoo/

<comment><USER2> If you haven't tried it yet, I would recommend to try bokemarks.com</comment>


Medium now offers audio versions of its stories for members - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2017/05/18/medium-now-offers-audio-versions-of-its-stories-for-members/ <comment><USER2> This looks cool. As a writer I've actually discovered how much fun it is to record story telling, like as if I was at a bar or a backyard BBQ. There's some fun performative aspects to it!</comment>