We're killing it, bro - <AUTHOR> http://mystartuphas30daystolive.tumblr.com/post/53928277234/were-killing-it-bro

<comment><USER3> Some advice. It's not going to be easy to hear, and you won't believe me until after you've gone through the rest of the process.

You're taking all of this way too seriously.

It's just a company. Sure, it was one that you poured everything you had into, and I'm sure you associate a great deal of your self-identity with it, but it's still just a company.

Some context: I sold my first startup, which I co-founded with my wife, to a company about 3 years ago. We worked there for two years, and then they fired me. I had poured so much of myself into trying to make the product survive post-acquisition that when they showed me the door, I just sort of walked around in a daze, not realizing what I was supposed to do next. Then, gradually, I started to realize that there was a life for me after the startup, and one in which I could do better things than I could ever have working for the company that fired me.

Over time I came to realize that the product wasn't really that important. It was just something I was working on for awhile. If I wanted, I could go build a new version of the same product, or I could work on one of a hundred ideas that I have brewing. Once you realize that pretty much everything is ephemeral, you worry less about each individual step in your life and are able to focus more on the big picture. When it gets dark around you, it can seem like the world is much smaller than it actually is.

I think there's something appealing about having an "arc" of some sort to your life story. In reality, life isn't a play in three acts, and you get lots of chances to define and redefine yourself.

Just be honest, clear, and concise with the people around you. Take your share of the responsibility. Take some time to understand what happened, how you feel about it, and what you learned. Use that information to become better in the future.

<comment><USER4> I feel it's really unfair for you to compare a sale of a company to crashing and burning in one.

An acquihire and even -fire would seem to be a pretty desirable outcome to our writer.

<comment><USER3> You're missing my point. I'm saying that while some things seem like they're the end of the world, they're usually not. It's important to remember that when faced with those circumstances, because it keeps you grounded in reality and looking toward the future.

<comment><USER4> I'm not missing the point - I think your point is inconsiderate.

<comment><USER5> I think he's saying that a failed startup is like the end of your first serious high school relationship. It was your whole world for a while and when it comes crashing down it feels like nothing will ever be right again. But life goes on and if you're lucky you eventually look back and realized that you learned a lot and grew as a person and you've moved forward to other things that are now important to you.

<comment><USER6> It doesn't really help to comfort a broken hearted teenager by saying, "don't worry, you'll find love again! Just look at me and my beautiful wife!"

<comment><USER3> Except that, in your analogy, my wife is now married to someone else.

<comment><USER6> The point of the analogy is merely this: You are telling someone going through a potentially awful experience that you were in an entirely different situation where the outcome for you was far far better.

So if you really want to stick with the analogy, it's like an amicably- divorced-and-remarried man telling a widower to just cheer up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Call me skeptical, but this whole blog smells of a giant PR campaign.

Miraculously, in 30 days, the author will reveal that he has _saved_ the dying company, thanks to the Internet.

I wouldn't be surprised if there is a giant "subscribe to my newsletter" button very soon.

<comment><USER8> No.

<comment><USER9> We'll take your word for it, because that has worked out in the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You're a good writer, your posts on this topic have been compelling, and I believe you are quite sincere in your desire to do right by what remains of your startup and your team.

That's why I feel compelled to ask: have you consulted your team before embarking on this blogging adventure? There's more than a hint of the macabre in the posts (hashtags such as "delusion" being a good example). Do your team members share your assessment? Do they know you're blogging about this stuff? You are inadvertently speaking for them when you speak about these things. I would just urge you to make sure this is not a vanity exercise. Your team members might be very disheartened to learn that their founder is blogging, in dark and occasionally bitter tone, about their impending doom.

In my history of reading these sorts of post mortems, I've noticed that the best of them attempt to draw lessons from failure. At the very least, mine your experience for wisdom and insight. I realize you're doing this in real time, so to speak, and that's part of the exercise. Even still, I would humbly suggest deeper introspection and less melancholy. I know it's ridiculously hard to do that -- but your team (and your readers) will be experientially richer for it. (The first installment in this series, for example, though controversial, was a lot more incisive).

You are off to a very compelling start here, and I don't want to deemphasize that. I feel for you (and your team) in a very real way, and I wish you the best in drawing meaning from what is to come in the next 30 days.

<comment><USER11> Doesn't matter, it isn't real. Just PR/fiction to get HN upvotes.

<comment><USER12> Even if it is fiction it is good one. I'd buy the book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Who has presence of mind to craft a well-written blog while your life's work is crashing down? Smells a little too scripted, the drama a little too perfect.

I enjoy reading.

 _But I don 't think it's real._

</comment><comment><USER14> "[name/pronoun] is killing it"

Everytime I hear that on a podcast or read it online, my douchometer pegs the needle. For an industry based in science and facts, there's far too many buzzphrases and abstractions thrown around by so called leaders.

Seriously, when I listen to a podcast and hear "killing it" or "Yeah buddy!" in one of those 2am infomercial voices, I assume they have a fresh coat of spray tan, a fauxhawk, and are wearing sunglasses inside while recording.

</comment><comment><USER15> I assume the writer's trying to sell the company on the strength of the team, getting them (and him) jobs and hopefully returning his investors' money.

This is a good goal to have when your original plans don't pan out, but the writer needs to internalize that if it doesn't work out, the members of his team will find other jobs and be fine. His investors will be fine, too - <USER2> knew the risks going in. And finally, he will also be fine. He should try to sell his company, but if he doesn't manage to do it, he does _not_ need to beat himself up, or feel for a second that he's failed _again_ \- which, based on the tone of his post, I'm a bit concerned he's going to do.

</comment><comment><USER16> Plot twist: there is no start up, and this tumblr is an allegory for HN readers who thrive on triumph and failure.

Edit: and then I read the other comments and realize I'm not the only one with this thought.

</comment><comment><USER17> At the risk of making your very real journey seem trivial, I'll go ahead and say it: I'm hooked.

Just do me a favor-

don't _A Million Little Pieces_ me, bro.

<comment><USER18> With this second installment, I'm pretty sure this is fiction. Kudos on the concept, though.

The posts are both very well written and have dramatic twists right on schedule. But s/he's using web marketing writing, with bolded thematic sentences alternating with short paragraphs.

We've seen posts from foundering founders on HN before, and it's usually more like a wall of text. This time, note how this author leaves us on a cliffhanger. Someone in their position should be trying to show they're still in control. So they'd explain more about their plan.

So I think we're dealing with someone who knows startups, who also is an experienced writer, and wants to subvert the business blogging form.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> 'I dreamt of building something that would shake things up and improve the web.'

A serious question from an outsider - is this something people really believe or is it a platitude?

I seem to see this statement often since I started reading HN. On the other hand success seems to be measured in selling companies for large sums of money and moving on to something else. Does this really improve the web?

<comment><USER20> There are a large number of individuals whose inflated self-image needs an objective reality check...

Thinking that one can do anything is good self-motivation, but one shouldn't deny the evidence that "anything" and "everything" are not the same concept, nor that one's particular "anything" may be neither simple nor valuable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Probably this is fiction but still the content is good to be hooked up. Most likely it will be ended in something like 'I saved my friends and company, and I can still follow my dream....'

</comment><comment><USER22> What are you, a teenage girl? Give up the "woe is me" act. I cringed when I read your first post, but this one is even worse.

</comment><comment><USER23> This time and energy would be better spent either _doing something about it_ or discussing it openly with the team/investors. If the situation is as dire as indicated, what the hell are you doing spending time griping dramatically about it on the internet? If people's livelihoods _and your startup_ are on the line, DROP THE BLOG and go be a responsible founder.

If this is, as some have suggested, a PR campaign/stunt (which doesn't seem entirely over the top)... then it's in poor taste, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER24> Please stop the drama.

<comment><USER25> Agreed. I'm cringing the same way I would cringe at my 10th grade journals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26>
        One of the first things you learn as an entrepreneur is
        that on some level, you're only as good as your pitch.
        The accelerators reinforce this by teaching you the
        art of storytelling, a skill that helps an investor
        sign a term sheet as much as it helps the father of a
        young child decide to take a pay cut to be part of
        something that's amazing.

Honestly, I reckon that's what this is all about. He's telling a story. It could be an exercise in storytelling! If so, anonymous failing founder - you're doing a good job. I'm hooked!

If not, listen to the advice in these comments.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'll assume that's a real story (because why not?), and somewhat echo nkohari: This is not the end of the world. Companies rise and fall. People who work for startups do (and should) know the risk and life-to-death ratios involved. A startup has more chance of failing than making it, statistically. As long as you tried and did you best, you can only learn from the experience and move on to implement that learning in your next adventure.

</comment><comment><USER28> "One of the first things you learn as an entrepreneur is that on some level, you're only as good as your pitch."

On some level that may be true. I think the primary level though is that you're only as good as your product. Smart pitches alone get you nowhere. If you don't have a solid, functional product (and one that meets a true market need) the pitch is irrelevant. Nobody buys ideas. Good products sell themselves.

<comment><USER14> I'm so glad Google had a great pitch 14 years ago, otherwise I never would have switched from the superior Lycos search.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm curious what accelerator they were a part of?

We did TechStars and this was not our experience at all. In fact, we explicitly decided to not raise and continue bootstrapping. They never pushed us to raise or to "lie."

Their advice on raising was we should pick one or the other and move on. The worst thing would be to have an internal turmoil about raising or not raising.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm dying to know what your startup does (or did)

<comment><USER31> PR and article placement

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> If you have a strong team and you are in the Bay Area, don't worry for them. They'll be unemployed for less than a week.

</comment><comment><USER12> Love the ending. You are such a good writer.

"As I look out at the sunrise this morning, my dreams of building something that mattered have been replaced by a dream of doing right towards those who have trusted me through this journey and walked the road with me. A road I couldn't have walked alone.

I'm going to save my team."

</comment><comment><USER33> Growth is not always good, if you don't have the processes, the people and even if you as an entrepreneur are not prepared to growth, then don't do it.

</comment><comment><USER34> There is no substance in this post and it shouldn't be here.

The first post was okay, this one is basically writing for the sake of writing something.

</comment><comment><USER35> Whenever these things happen to me and my startup, I always get insane bursts of energy.

I think if you want to survive in this world, you need to have this ability of a super-sayan that when you very close to death and survive, you only emerge multipe times stronger than before.

</comment><comment><USER36> corny and obviously fake

</comment><comment><USER37> Blog spam. Go away.

<comment><USER38> Blog spam has a meaning. It's a copy and paste of another article. This is not blog spam.</comment></comment>


Shopify Capital - <AUTHOR> https://www.shopify.com/capital <comment><USER2> > "Merchant cash advances do not have an interest rate. Instead, Shopify will > purchase a set amount of your future receivables at a discount."

Their page never specifies a "discount" rate and only show the 10% remittance rate. This makes their example table at the bottom near fraudulent because the "daily revenue" column is already discounted. I'd bet their discount rate is the same ~13% it was six months ago [src].

They know your revenue history, so I expect they're offering something which will likely take you 9-12months to pay back at the remittance rate (10%) based on your projected revenue. Note since this isn't a loan, if you pay it back early by growing revenue, Shopify still makes the same returns (13% discount rate) on their capital. Good deal for them, likely comparable to credit card rates for businesses, but since it's cash it's more flexible (pay employees, payoff loans, brides, etc).

[src]: [https://twitter.com/seobrock/status/669269206584553473](https://twitter.com/seobrock/status/669269206584553473)

<comment><USER3> How is this functionally different from a loan? It appears to be identical.

<comment><USER4> There's no interest that grows over time. You pay back the same amount.

Shopify is betting that they can predict when you'll pay it back, then set a discount that makes them more money than time-based interest. If they lose, they still get their money back eventually, and if they win, hey, that means you grew faster than expected, which is great for everybody.

<comment><USER3> I don't believe there is a requirement that interest on loans be compounded or time-sensitive.

<comment><USER5> I think you are correct, it is just that it is actually required that you do charge interest.

However, I worked with a woman who was Jewish. She showed up in a new car one day and we went for a ride.

I asked her how and when she went and got the car.

She said "oh I got a loan from the Jewish community" or something to that effect.

I inquired what that meant; she said that she was able to get a loan from some Jewish social circle and she didn't have to pay interest because she needed someone else from the Jewish circle who was willing to back her and pay the loan of she failed to pay.

I didn't ask what the consequences were if she failed to pay - but she just mentioned that "if you know Jewish people... Getting money isn't hard"

<comment><USER6> Unrelated parties are not required to charge interest on loans. (However, interest generally will be imputed on loans between related persons.)

<comment><USER7> > Unrelated parties are not required to charge interest on loans. (However, > interest generally will be imputed on loans between related persons.)

You're never required to charge interest, but in most situations if you _receive_ a below-market loan (from anyone other than a spouse) over $10,000 the IRS will impute interest.

<comment><USER5> Interesting, I was loaned enough money to buy a house from a family member, and I was required to pay them back with market interest... Thus my comment was from experience - even though I may be wrong?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find the way these programs are presented (Square has a similar offer) to be opaque to the point of dishonesty. How am I able to compare this "interest free" loan with a small business line of credit from the bank?

They offer a chart of what repayment looks like, but no "total interest paid" descriptions. I can't help but worry that the way these are designed is more about skirting regulations and confusing borrowers than they are about offering people something genuinely useful.

Reminds me a little of cheque cashing shops... Find a group who aren't able to access mainstream financial services (in this case small online sellers) and charge them excessive rates for your "generous" offer.

<comment><USER9> _How am I able to compare this "interest free" loan with a small business line of credit from the bank?_

If you're able to get a small business line of credit from your bank, take that, it will invariably be superior. Sadly, that product has virtually disappeared from the marketplace for small businesses with revenue less than ~$1 million. The underwriting costs are too high, the product is too risky, and the revenue potential is too low. The bank will, instead, steer you towards credit cards. Credit cards are a wonderful product but they don't substitute for the need.

There exist a bunch of alternative lenders who are eating this space up with pricey-products-which-actually-get-issued. OnDeck gives fairly uncomplicated lines of credit, for example. Their stock offer is 36%. (I have one, and occasionally use it.) Kabbage (love the name) does a merchant cash advance with implied APRs which are even higher. There are more costly options still, including traditional hard-money lenders and merchant cash advance providers.

This offering is closest in character to Paypal Working Capital.

<comment><USER8> Sample size of one, but I have friends who run a small shop doing trade work (earning far less than 1m/year) and they were able to fairly easily get access to 10-20k of loans with interest rates in the <10% ball park (don't know exact numbers, also not mine to share). So to hear that kind of loan has "virtually disappeared" is surprising.

<comment><USER10> Frequently those 10% loans are for, say, 6 month payback periods so the effective APR is over 20%.

<comment><USER11> Generally interest is annualised and measured in APR.

<comment><USER10> Actually, on these types of loans, generally not.

For example: [https://squareup.com/capital](https://squareup.com/capital)

I don't really get how they arrive at their numbers but on first glance it looks insane. On the $10k loan with the $1,300 fee. If you had daily sales of $1,000 you'd pay the loan off in 100 days making the APR somewhere around 50%.

They are frequently fee-based, not rate based. And are frequently less than a year with the rate being highlighted, not the APR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In case any of you think this is something new, its not. It's called _Factoring_ and its been around since the renaissance:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoring_(finance)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoring_\(finance\))

Of course, when Shopify, Square, and PayPal put their startup-land spin on it and call it "Capital", it sounds cool and new (the fact that they wont use the term says a lot). IMO factoring should only be considered as a last resort of capital or when you have some large/long-term enterprise contracts and need to ramp up production fast (eg Wal-Mart wants 100K of your widgets or the State of CA just ordered $4M worth of software from your 3-person shop). Even then, there are usually other sources of capital with better terms available.

<comment><USER13> I used to work for a cashflow factor in the late 90s. It's a legit business need, but with few legit players. Almost like payday loans for business. It's due for a brand uplift and some visibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The most details of these products out there is at [https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/workingcapital/tour](https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/workingcapital/tour) under the Pricing tab. As a merchant, you agree ahead of time to a loan amount and a withholding rate, and depending on those parameters and your sales volume, you're given a fixed fee that is tacked onto the loan principal. Repayment then occurs by the lender withholding some amount of the payments that you receive until the principal + fixed fee gets paid back.

As a one-time/infrequent shot, it's actually a really nice lending product in that it's not going to cause undue strain on your business if your sales start to flag since the payments go down along with it (and because the total interest you pay is fixed, the implied APR is actually better that way). Where they can become problematic is when a merchant keeps rolling one after another of these since then you're paying a high price for credit and would be better off with a small business credit card or line of credit.

Definitely would like to see more transparency with these either way though. When used properly, both the lender and the borrower win, and so I find it odd that lenders try to obscure the details.

</comment><comment><USER15> Looks very similar to Paypal's offering: [https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/workingcapital/](https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/workingcapital/)

Beware though. While they pitch it as "no interest, just a fee", the typical effective APR of a PayPal Working Capital loan is between 15 to 30 percent.

I suspect this has similarly high fees, since they seem to be hiding the information.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a huge thing on Wall Street at the moment.

Bloomberg wrote about a couple of guys that started such a business and got bought for (maybe, exact terms not stated) $60 to $100 million.

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-10-06/how-two- gu...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-10-06/how-two-guys-lost- god-and-found-40-million)

</comment><comment><USER17> As someone who has built a lot of saas products off Shopify this makes total sense. Square, Amazon, and PayPal have already gone down this path and proved its highly profitable. I would be curious if Shopify is white labelling a banks offering or if they are making loans a core competency. If the later then its really dangerous for this area is starting to become regulated and is shifting quickly. This risk is one the reasons Square moved away from doing it themselves to actually using third party banking partners to make loans. Also as many of those in the industry already know large loan providers are starting to anticipate a shift in the economy and are moving to invest in collection services rather than sales. If you don't have a competency in making good loans/ collections then you can get in trouble in a down market. That said I do love how companies like Shopify are figuring ways to empower more entrepreneurs to start and grow their businesses. I personally would have though it would have been better for them to open store processing data to qualified third party lenders and provide them an easy way to evaluate, price, and sell loans. This competition would have driven down the price of loans for businesses and Shopify could focus on making great software and just taking a cut off an area that isn't their core focus. Similar model to what has worked for them in other areas outside their core focus (i.e. apps/ theme/ experts market).

</comment><comment><USER18> Predatory lending as a service.

</comment><comment><USER19> merchant cash advances have been around since before the internet. it is an EXTREMELY common marketing tactic in merchant services.

so shopify sells merchant services, and uses one of the most common marketing tactics. and they made a fancy landing page.

it's a tactic to prey on desperate businesses where they can be taken at the source of their money before it's even put into their account.

</comment><comment><USER20> I hope Stripe borrows this idea, I think it's a great win-win for all parties.

</comment><comment><USER21> high APRs on this type of thing</comment>


PASAT, a working memory test: add up the last n digits presented to you sequentially - <AUTHOR> http://cognitivefun.net/test/15

<comment><AUTHOR> I am interested in fellow readers's performance, as I would assume everybody here is fairly above average in terms of WM capacity and math ability. It turns out this test is surprisingly hard. Nobody seems to have made it beyond n = 4.

A warning, this test is flash-based. A disclaimer, I am the site creator.</comment>


Lost Posture: Why Indigenous Cultures Don't Have Back Pain - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/06/08/412314701/lost-posture-why-indigenous-cultures-dont-have-back-pain <comment><USER2> Squats and deadlifts are how I cured my back pain. I recognize that I tend to have a missionary zeal about this subject because I think it has had so many benefits for me...but seriously, if you don't have any health issues that prevent you from doing so, you should be lifting heavy weights with a barbell. Your clothes will fit better, people will be more attracted to you, you'll have more confidence, and you'll be amazed at how strong you become. If you're a healthy adult male under 40, 1 hour a day for 3 days a week will get you to "pick up 400 pounds off the floor with relative ease" within a year.

<comment><USER3> > 1 hour a day for 3 days a week will get you to "pick up 400 pounds off the > floor with relative ease" within a year.

Do you have a link to a particular regimen that worked for you?

<comment><USER4> You will find quite a few beginner programs that you can make tremendous progress on. Some of the most popular are Starting Strength[1], Strong Lifts 5x5[2], and Ice Cream Fitness (ICF)[3]. Anything with progressive overload/linear programming (adding more weight to the bar almost every workout) will work wonders for you.

[1] [http://startingstrength.com/](http://startingstrength.com/)

[2] [http://stronglifts.com](http://stronglifts.com)

[3] [https://www.muscleandstrength.com/workouts/jason-blaha- ice-c...](https://www.muscleandstrength.com/workouts/jason-blaha-ice-cream- fitness-5x5-novice-workout)

<comment><USER5> I would add "Simple and Sinister" for Kettlebell geeks (like me). Unbelievable level of conditioning can be achieved with only 2 exercises, The Swing and Get-up.

<comment><USER4> I own and enjoy kettlebells but I didn't actually start getting _a lot_ stronger until I started barbell training.

As you mention kettlebells are fantastic for conditioning but are not the best tools for getting stronger because you can't (easily) progressively overload the amount of weight you are lifting like you can with barbell training.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I had a friend that did the most intense kettlebell workouts fairly frequently. I was surprised at how small his gains were compared to traditional weightlifting methods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The author mentioned in this article, Esther Gokhale, wrote a book several years ago with the somewhat goofy title _8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back_ , which I can't recommend enough, especially if you suffer from back pain. It really transformed the way in which I think about my posture and ergonomics in general.

One of the things she touched on in the book, which the NPR article seemed to miss, was a hypothesis that poor posture in the Western world is the result of a cultural shift in the early 20th century. Particularly that slouching and unnatural postures were a sort of rebellious statement against the Victorians for 1920's youth.

Bad ergonomics and posture became so hip that they found their way into furniture design - something that became very clear to me after having a herniated disc and a vintage mid-century couch in my living room..

<comment><USER8> Does one really need the book to learn the "secrets?" Is the entire book basically "stand up straight and your back pain goes away?"

<comment><USER9> That's a lot of it, except that it turns out that how to "stand up straight" is very counterintuitive. You will hurt yourself if you just try. Really, the book is not enough; you need the class, or at least the videos. They also teach you better ways of walking and bending.

<comment><USER10> _" it turns out that how to "stand up straight" is very counterintuitive"_

That sentence sums up most of my last decade or so's reading and learning on posture nicely :)

Posture: it's harder than it looks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >Everyone knows that weak abdominal muscles can cause back pain. In fact, Mummaneni says, stronger muscles might be the secret to Gokhale's success.

Don't really need to say anything else. Get into weight training and stick to it.

<comment><USER12> The problem with some back pain is you're unable to walk or bend over, let alone actually exercise, until the pain is masked by something else.

<comment><USER7> If you're acute like that there are a lot of exercises that can make the situation much worse, particularly if you don't have a diagnosis and are unsure of where the injury is located.

Best course of action is go to a Dr and push them to prescribe physical therapy over surgery or meds. Once you know the site of your pain and have a good physical therapist they will give you safe exercises that protect from additional injury. Some lazier doctors will often resort to pain killers or worse, surgery, as a quick solution, but in most cases a few sessions with a good physical therapist is all you need

<comment><USER12> If you're acute, and prescribed physical therapy but can't stand, it's not going to work either though. There's no problem with being on opiods for a short period of time to relieve the pain, and allow you to take on a proper course of physical therapy, and get the exercise and movement you need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Author's book successful on Amazon: 4.6/5, 600 ratings, gushing reviews from MD PHDs in the Mayo clinic.

Published in 2008.

</comment><comment><USER14> "An acupuncturist in Palo Alto, Calif., thinks she has figured out why."

Ok, lost me right there.

<comment><USER15> I agree ... my first thought when I saw the teaser was ... the average lifespan for the pre-morden world was about 25. Back pain is a problem in your 40's - 50's I doubt if a culture will change for such a rare problem. It is like us getting rid of all stairs because people in their 60's aren't as mobile. But then if you are willing to believe in acupuncture you are willing to believe in anything.

[http://www.webmd.com/pain-management/features/common- pains-o...](http://www.webmd.com/pain-management/features/common-pains-of-age) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy)

<comment><USER16> FYI, even in the paleolithic era, if you lived past 15, the life expectancy was 54. [1]

Using average lifespan in your argument portrays a world where no-one lives to their 50s. When in actuality, most adults died in their 50s (but there was a very high level of child mortality which brings down the average).

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As one that is in and out of PT fairly frequently, I can tell you how absolutely FRUSTRATED PTs and orthos get by people that have lower back pain and want some medication or special chairs or stem, as opposed to buckling down and strengthening their abdominal muscles.

Weak abs = lower back pain. For most cases. In my early years playing football, I used to get lower back pain from the contact. I was weightlifting regularly, but always skipped my ab exercises because I hated them. One year I was like, screw it, I'm going to do these. Abs got strong, back pain disappeared.

This posturing stuff engages your core and helps keep the spine supported properly. If you want faster results, get in the gym and get an abdominal routine going.

</comment><comment><USER17> Plus look at toddlers and some Asian cultures. They can squat full dept with no problem. My toddler can squat and stand up without issue. I can - but I've retrained myself and opened up my hips/hamstrings and worked on core strength. baby's mama cannot perform a full depth squat let alone with any weight on the or front rack position. The old Asian lady down the street can and does when she does her gardening.

I think that coupled with a lot of people have at least mild APT because of a weak core is the major issue. It causes hip strain.

<comment><USER18> I wouldn't be surprised if most of that flexibility in Asian cultures comes from using a squat toilet (or open defecation) everyday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I took Esther's course in 2013, and it's had a huge effect on my life.

Getting into the correct position involves moving some muscles I didn't know I had, but, once achieved, it feels amazing. Sitting feels like being massaged. I can twist my neck further. When I practice karate, all my movements become faster and easier. The only problem is keeping the posture once achieved, as all your old movements can cause you to revert (and yes, it takes some core strength, but that's a small part).

</comment><comment><USER19> "An acupuncturist in Palo Alto, Calif., thinks she has figured out why."

Acupuncture is know to work (even if you put the needles randomly) Please bring me a scientist :)

<comment><USER20> What the article describes is real science. That makes her a scientist. She's also does acupuncture, which makes her a pseudo-scientist. The two aren't mutually exclusive, and here is a person who is both. That's the real story, in my opinion.

<comment><USER19> To be a scientist you need to know how to research, thing that takes a minimum of 4 years with the supervision of a senior professor. Also your results need to be reviewed by other researchers... And even with all this process in place many times we make mistakes... so imagine what can I tell you about an acupunturist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Pro tip:

> take a deep breath in and grow tall. Then maintain that height as you > exhale.

<comment><USER22> Thank you, these sorts of cues are among the most valuable things trainers provide in my experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Maybe they don't have the luxury to complain that much.

</comment><comment><USER24> Back pain in the industrialized world is overwhelmingly psychogenic. It's Tension Myositis Syndrome as described by Dr. Sarno. Given only x-rays images, spine specialists completely fail to identify the individuals who report back pain. _Most_ people with no back pain have various structural abnormalities.

These people getting back pain and carpal tunnel syndrome were all getting ulcers 60 years ago. Then the idea that ulcers are just an infection took hold so the psychogenic manifestations of stress shifted.

<comment><USER25> Are you suggesting that back pain and carpal tunnel don't exist?

<comment><USER24> They exist and are psychogenic. The nervous system, directed by the brain, can induce localized inflammation.

<comment><USER26> I know it's just my own anecdotes but I find that really hard to believe given how painful my back pain has been. It was so painful once and lasted for about a week that I seriously considered that I would end my life if the doctor told me there was nothing they could do.

For me, at least recently, the trigger seems to be lifting something heavy and wrong way. It doesn't hurt that day but the next day I literally can't move in certain directions without searing pain. Just turning in bed, getting in or out of bed, getting in or out of a car, walking, using the toilet, sitting down or getting up, all of it hurt.

The doctor claimed it was muscle spasms. She gave me some muscle relaxants and it went away. I've since try to work out more. I haven't had an episode in a while but I can't sleep on my stomach like I used to as curving my back that way has been known to trigger it.

<comment><USER13> [0][http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence) [1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tension_myositis_syndrome#Medic...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tension_myositis_syndrome#Medical_evidence)

The claim here is that a significant proportion of these illnesses are psychogenic; even if your anecdote was convincing it would do nothing to challenge the original argument, as you could easily be part of the 47%[1].

Furthermore, you base your conclusion on the severity of pain you experienced, in your opinion, being beyond what's possible for a psychogenic illness. You don't offer evidence to support this opinion, and, as there are many types of psychological distress that drive people to ending their own lives, I find it unconvincing.

In any case, I hope you keep an open mind and find an effective way to manage and improve your health. The lifts recommended in other parts of this conversation might be more in line with your values.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Patients On Hookworm Therapy Swear By Treatment - <AUTHOR> http://cbs5.com/health/hookworm.treatment.therapy.2.1016319.html <comment><USER2> A study of the use of porcine whipworm eggs to treat Crohn's resulted in my all-time favorite headline:

"Diet of worms can cure bowel disease"

[http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4852-diet-of-worms- can...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4852-diet-of-worms-can-cure- bowel-disease.html)

(for those who don't remember their AP Euro: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_of_Worms> )

study link: <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15591509>

</comment><comment><USER3> You might not be able to tell from this particular article but this is being seriously studied:

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

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17123987>

<http://news-releases.uiowa.edu/2004/may/052104worms.html>

I believe they use worms that cannot permanently "infest" hosts.. they have to be reintroduced on a regular schedule.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Scots said he experienced some itching where the band aid was, which he understood, was the larvae making their way into the blood stream.

What happens next is the hookworms then travel from the blood stream into the lungs, where once there, causes the patient to naturally cough. Patients then cough the microscopic helminthes up into the throat, then swallow them, and this is how hookworms get to the intestines, where they latch on, and they begin to mature."

That was actually kind of cool to read. Parasites hack their way into our bodies.

</comment><comment><USER5> And in related anecdotal news...

Arthritis Patients Swear By New Laser Treatment <http://www.thebostonchannel.com/health/4050529/detail.html>

The Weed that Cancer Patients Swear by [http://www.naturalbuy.com/the-weed- that-cancer-patients-swea...](http://www.naturalbuy.com/the-weed-that-cancer- patients-swear-by/)

Acupuncture popularity soars despite thin evidence [http://www.santafenewmexican.com/HealthandScience/Acupunctur...](http://www.santafenewmexican.com/HealthandScience/Acupuncture --popularity-soars-despite-thin-evidence)

</comment><comment><USER6> Imagine that. People who have voluntarily infested themselves with parasites are inclined to justify that decision to the press. I am shocked.

</comment><comment><USER7> A Kuro5hin classic about the subject: <http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/4/30/91945/8971></comment>


Reddit Is Being Manipulated by Professional Shills [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjLsFnQejP8?reddit <comment><USER2> Just run under the assumption that all information is subject to intentional and unintentional bias, and requires careful analysis. It's a safe assumption most of the time, and you need to form that habit of thinking anyway.

To be honest, those shills on Reddit tend to be pretty obvious, but then they have to be given their target audience. More importantly they only really exist on some parts of Reddit, and it's only really easy for them to get lost in the scrum on the big boards like politics and news. You get the occasional obvious bit of PR floating through ELI5 or AskScience, but it's quickly spotted and killed.

When PR can be accomplished by random flaks, it's useful. When they require expertise on part with their targets to achieve their goals, it necessarily restricts their target pool, and increases their overhead.

<comment><USER3>
      More importantly they only really exist on some parts of Reddit

One thing I noticed in my time on reddit is that subreddits aren't insular silos. Values, opinions and views-du-jour often bleed over into other subreddits in ways that are hard to predict. Reddit is a really unique culture in that it is constantly, subtly, and rapidly, fluctuating. Just because a fraction of subreddits are being exploited through shilling doesn't mean that redditors in your favourite subreddit don't go there and that they themselves are (consciously or otherwise) not being affected. Even if they don't read the articles, then they saw those highly voted headlines. There's no escape! This involves all subreddits!

<comment><USER4> I think you are wrong about reddit being "a really unique culture", at least in this context.

To me it seems very obvious that fundamentally it is exactly like how societies, communities, and communication has always operated, be it local gossip, newspapers, global communication, or hell even the differing thoughts/parts in our own minds.

Im not saying it hasnt changed things, of course the internet has changed most everything, just that the part we are talking about isnt something new. It has evolved certainly, but fundamentally the same.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you to some extent, that inherently there are no new dynamics here. However Reddit still manages to capture that small community feel while still bringing in millions of people a day, I think that's what's unique about it and also why it is so successful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is obvious and has been for years. Reddit is full of astroturfers, spammers, marketers, disinformation, trolls, and other generally undesirable behavior.

I generally look at reddit like one fractional step above facebook, it's basically internet pollution curated by the most effective spammers.

<comment><USER6> Then you're on the wrong subreddits. The ones I like the most are small or medium, have in depth conversations, analysis and interesting content. Or just gifs of cats, which is also something that I need from time to time.

You tailor your own reddit experience.

<comment><USER7> "Or just gifs"...

This was posted a week ago in nice little subreddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Cinemagraphs/comments/5zirfy/my_fir...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Cinemagraphs/comments/5zirfy/my_first_cinemagraph_a_never_ending_can_of/)

Quote obvious product placement, right?

Now, this is today's top cinemagraph: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Cinemagraphs/comments/60wpk6/woman_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Cinemagraphs/comments/60wpk6/woman_smoking/)

Less obvious, right? Or am I too skeptical?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> By the way the person (upvote seller) who was called in the first part of the video ironically didn't do his part to make sure that the caller wasn't scamming him.

He didn't ask any questions and he didn't put the caller on the spot. Doing that (if well done) would have allowed him to potentially uncover the true purpose of the call even if it wasn't admitted. He allowed the caller to control the conversation (with his backstory) and as a result went along with everything and just answered questions. Also hard to believe that the average caller to this service asks questions like that and sounds like that. [1] Part of what I do involves ferreting out the truth when contacted by phone and by email so maybe this was just obvious to me after hearing the interaction.

[1] Because they are real customers. Anyone who takes calls for a living and isn't asleep can usually tell the patterns of what a real customer sounds like.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm a huge fan of Elon Musk, and I really want him to be successful, but sometimes I feel that the overzealous tendency of his fans (and likely PR people) to automatically give praise for anything he does or says (here on HN or on reddit) is actually counter-productive.

What if Elon starts doing something dumb some day and then when well-informed people try to provide meaningful criticism, they just get criticised and downvoted? I think that could actually undermine support from some of the people that Elon wants it from the most.

<comment><USER10> I think Elon Musk has a bit of the reality distortion field around him like Jobs did. If you take a step back and look what he tries to achieve vs. what just about every other business (tech or not) does, it's a stark comparison.

Musk no longer represents himself and his companies, but he represents a future where we can do things we thought were just dreams (cheap space travel, electric cars that perform better than internal combustion types, ubiquitous solar power, etc). That's a lot of future from just one guy.

<comment><USER11> >...he represents a future where we can do things we thought were just dreams

He does more than just represent. He makes smart people believe that hard things are possible and that it's going to be worth it to try.

A little bit of reality distortion can be a good thing, especially when reality is tending to suck.

<comment><USER12> If there's a lot of financial analysts and engineers saying "this isn't feasible" and they are being ignored then that's a bad reality distortion field.

Hyperloop One in particular comes to mind here. Some people say its feasible. Some say it isn't. Both have valid points.

I like his work. I just don't want to see Musk fail due to lack of focus on one particular part of the dream and a lack of people on his team willing to say no.

<comment><USER13> Unless he invested and I don't know about, Musk has nothing to do with any Hyperloop companies besides presenting the incomplete idea of a hyperloop and that it's worth pursuing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One good example of this is that every morning there is on the front page of /r/all exactly one article about the nba. Never two, never zero.

<comment><USER15> The r/all algorithm was tweaked last year during the election to prevent subreddits from flooding the front page. What you observe may simply be the result of that, rather than vote manipulation.

<comment><USER16> I'm more likely to blame vote manipulation, especially when it's a brand new anti-Trump sub (of which there seems to be a new one every few days) rising on r/all. The number of specifically anti-Trump subs is getting out of hand and I can't believe that they're all organic up votes at this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why does this surprise anyone? I have a relative who is part of a PAC which "mobilizes" constantly to keep certain stories up high, nuke others, and even more. they aren't limited to reddit, she has a list of sites to get the word out on.

the problem with fixing such issues is that many site owners want the traffic and some support the subject matter being pushed whether politics, education, products, or more.

you don't even need paid groups to slant sites, the fanatics of some games, authors, or even technologies, have enough sycophants to insure their message is the only one heard

</comment><comment><USER18> It's very clear around certain topics--GMOs, pesticides, gun-control, and a few others. There are accounts that follow those keywords and only comment on related articles and only during 9-5 business hours.

<comment><USER19> Could you list a few?

<comment><USER18> Firemylasers, jf_queeny, sleekery, and Decapentaplegia are the most frequent I've noticed.

<comment><USER20> > jf_queeny

Considering that J. F. Queeny[1] founded Monsanto, that seems like a strange choice for a covert shill account. While I don't read much about other issues you may be referring to, being a farmer[2], I end up coming across the GMO and pesticide topic fairly often and I've noticed it tends to attract a lot of misinformation about agriculture. I expect, in many cases, these accounts follow these interest groups because they are easy targets to make fun of. Bullies perhaps, but unsurprisingly the internet has them just like the real world.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Francis_Queeny](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Francis_Queeny) [2] It's Sunday afternoon. You'll have to trust I'm not working overtime. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not surprising. I've grown increasingly tired of reddit over the last few months, but I haven't found an adequate alternative. Any suggestions? What sites do you commonly visit?

Maybe this is my own bias showing, but whenever I read a Microsoft article on reddit, my shilling senses start tingling. I've seen a few confirmed examples, although luckily they usually end up getting banned.

<comment><USER22> Have you tried Voat?

I couldn't stand it, but it works for some.

<comment><USER23> I'm glad Voat exists, but it's not somewhere I frequent. The more Reddit and Twitter crack down on speech the faster Voat and Gab will grow.

<comment><USER24> Voats model is good but filled with angry men (and the people on fatpeoplehate seem to be mainly women from what I've read). We need a max exodus from Reddit to even the odds

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Really doing a disservice to those of us who do this for no pay, day in and day out, simply for the love of shitposting.

</comment><comment><USER26> Wish i could relocate the comment on a Boingboing story where one of their admins mentioned having tracked comments on a certain topic to a online PR company.

His attention was drawn to the comments because they were heavily reported when made, and would be largely of the same structure but with a new user name each time. So he pulled up the IP they came from and all of them was made from the company owned address.

<comment><USER27> When the shills in question are lazy, it can be pretty straightforward to detect, yeah. This sort of thing was very high on my list of "problems that will need mitigating if this has any chance of working" with my Suitocracy project.

The more research one does on astroturfing and the like, the more depressing it gets. Dedicated desktop VMs running different browsers and OS's, directed through different proxies to get different IPs, etc. Where social media is involved, detailed online personas are set up for each one, with reasonable histories for using later down the track.

I think the best we can realistically do is to raise the cost of successful astroturfing/shilling to the point where it might not be economical to do, at least on a meaningful scale. As others have said, community involvement and skepticism play a huge role in that.

<comment><USER26> Yeah i think things have gotten more "professional" these days. I think it was happening back when blogging was the new buzzword, and MSM had taken to referring to sites in their news reports (complete with a screengrab of the article in a corner).

I was only really checking out the site because of Doctorow's stuff, and was even turned away from that as he had the annoying habit of posting random horror articles alongside his tech stuff (and the rest of the writers seemed like the typical SXSW bunch).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> While this is bad, in my experience, I feel that paranoia about shills does far more damage to online communities than any paid shill could.

...or maybe I'm being paid to say that. (I wish I was).

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm pretty sure interviewing Gallowboob and taking what he says at face value is a pretty good example of being manipulated by a professional shill.

</comment><comment><USER30> So, I just posted a comment pointing out people like upvote club sell upvotes for HN, but it looks like at least they don't have the option to sell HN upvotes anymore. What happened, did the mods finally beat them? Or did they ask nicely that they stop that?

<comment><USER31> The market for false likes/views/followers/etc becomes an increasingly difficult place to sustain (especially financially) as detection of typically fraudulent use grows constantly easier with machine learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I thought there was a story about nike interns(or some other big company) using interns to leave good reviews and comments on reddit.

Anyways this is nothing new and something that obviously goes on without saying.

</comment><comment><USER33> Worth watching, I skipped past this a few times, as we all know it goes on, but it's good seeing him phone up a reputation agency and see what they say.

</comment><comment><USER34> next week: hacker news is being manipulated by professional shills every day.

<comment><USER35> Sadly it's true. Some companies game the HN ranking algo, and employ shills to divert the discussion of their product. At least two companies (that are infamous for such shady tactics anyway) do it actively regularly on HN.

The first thing to prevent it, would be to change the HN ranking algo so that stories with more comments than votes are not automatically punished and forced many pages backwards from the frontpage. Add a report button to report users. Implement an admin interface to monitor certain users and ban them.

<comment><USER36> You've made these accusations many times but never supply a drop of evidence. We've repeatedly responded [1,2,3] and asked you to stop, yet still you persist. I appreciate your concern for the quality of HN, but at some point this becomes abuse in its own right.

It's unfortunately common for users to feel absolutely certain that other commenters are astroturfing when they merely happen to disagree about company X or issue Y. The underlying assumption is: 'no one I disagree with could possibly be commenting in good faith—they must be disingenuous'. This is a cognitive bias. Nearly always, when we investigate these accusations we find nothing—nothing except that the accuser really dislikes $BIGCO.

Real astroturfing and shilling do exist, I've personally poured countless hours into combating them on HN, and I can tell you from long experience with the data that they don't look anything like what you're positing.

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844253](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844253)

2\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11988639](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11988639)

3\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12322393](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12322393)

<comment><USER37> First, I want to thank the guys behind HN and Dang for being very open about any HN vested interests. I have no doubt HN tries hard to be honest. No complaints here.

That being said, I am very suprised you mentioned "drop of evidence". It is very upsetting you said that. There is hard evidence.

The fact is: There are may dishonest people in this world. They may justify their honesty, but that's not the point. See the PLETHORA of dishonest reviews (with proof) on Amazon, Yelp, Ebay, etc. And HN is the perfect place to game comments/upvotes/topics, and you bet it is. Firstly, it's simple to game HN. Actually, too easy. And the returns are really good. The audience are high- income earners, and intelligent people. The topics can be very niche (which means highly targeted). In fact the mentality that "HN can't be gamed" is better for the gamers, since other HN users will really believe most comments are genuine.

HERE'S THE DEAL:

I will do a project "for free" for the public good. This will hopefully establish proof. If I am allowed by HN legally, I will show my study of how I can easily, massively game HN. And you will not but able to detect it. I will not make money of this, but I will provide detailed statistics about traffic and CTA clicks. I will provide a dollar value of the fruits of my gaming, if it was to be real. I would be just one person doing this in my spare time. When the fruits are so sweet, PR companies will employ full-time paid individuals and maybe even teams.

P.s. Dang, I know you try hard to remove "shill" comments /upvotes /topics. Yes, you catch the amateurs. But the whole point of shilling is to blend in be undetectable. You don't and simply cannot catch those. And on a seperate, there was a study that "doctors who believe they cannot be gamed/bribed, are actually the most gamed/bribed".

<comment><USER36> I said there was no evidence in a specific user's claims, not that there was no evidence anywhere. See my third paragraph.

There are two problems. One is that astroturfing and shilling exist. The other is that some users are too eager to see an astroturfer under every bed and a shill in every pot.

Both problems are destructive and we need to deal with both and not pretend that one subsumes the other. On HN the approach is simple: (1) if you think you see abuse, please let us know at email@example.com so we can investigate; and (2) don't accuse other users of astroturfing and shilling unless you have evidence, and keep reminding yourself that an opposing view (e.g. them liking/hating $BIGCO while you hate/like it) is not evidence.

<comment><USER37> Yes, accusing a specific company certainly requires proof. So I apologize if I was defending that.

You say "astroturfing and shilling exist". It is likely a "very high" percentage. "Very high" does not need to be 60%, but it is relative. Even 10%-20% is very high, which I think the ratio might actually be. It is just too attractive--the bang-for-buck ration is just too sweet.

Please note, I don't say this with pleasure. I'm an honest shop and it is painful seeing competitors astroturfing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: I made an app with the data from the 1-on-1 Meeting Questions thread - <AUTHOR> https://friendly-nobel-d8e2e6.netlify.com/ <comment><USER2> This is very nice. Thanks</comment>


Ask HN: Why can't I upvote posts? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I believe you need a certain number of Karma points. You have just 1 point.

<comment><USER3> Are the thresholds for things public? I was expecting (based off what, I can't remember) to be able to downvote at 100, but I'm now on 2xx and I still can't.

<comment><USER4> The thresholds are non-public, and adjusted from time to time based on pg's perception of the growth of the site. My impression is that comment downvotes seem to occur about 500 karma these days. There's no post downvote that I know of.</comment></comment></comment>


Searching for web innovation in rural America - <AUTHOR> http://malheurenterprise.com/editors-note-searching-for-web-innovation-in-rural-america/ <comment><AUTHOR> Malheur County, Oregon has a population of about 30K people in 25,610 km2. It is very rural but still needs good journalism about local events and politics.</comment>


The middle guys are dominating Australia's startup scene  - <AUTHOR> http://www.shoestring.com.au/2014/03/middle-guys-dominating-australias-startup-scene/ <comment><USER2> Fits with my impression that Australia has a tendency to rent seek. It's manufacturing sector is pretty well hollowed out.

I couldn't follow the jargon much, so what do I know.</comment>


What it's like to have sex with someone with Asperger's - <AUTHOR> http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2010/11/18/what-its-like-to-have-sex-with-someone-with-aspergers/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BrazenCareerist+%28Brazen+Careerist+-+by+Penelope+Trunk%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> This was a really interesting read, its actually quite refreshing reading something with such bluntness.

I wish the world could take a page from people with Aspergers, i'd get along in life better without all the mind games, unspoken rules and social etiquette.

<comment><USER3> Just a hypothesis, but ...

Perhaps that just means that you're closer to the Aspie end of the spectrum. Perhaps most people in the world actually _like_ the mind games, the unspoken rules and the social etiquette. It's true that many don't, but it's certainly true that some do.

<comment><USER2> It wouldnt at all surprise me if i was, i share many of the same characteristics but on a more subtle level.</comment></comment></comment>


Dogpatch Labs by the Numbers & Founders - <AUTHOR> http://ryanspoon.com/blog/2010/11/27/dogpatch-labs-from-founders-perspective/

<comment><USER2> We've been mulling this over for a while, but we now recommend to startups we fund that they not work out of coworking spaces. A startup needs its own territory, however crappy.

The most successful startups seem to have a very concentrated flavor of themselves. That effect is diluted if a company is working out of someone else's space. If you try to imagine early Google or early Facebook working out of a coworking space, you just can't do it. They wouldn't have stood for it.

Another problem with working out of someone else's space is that you won't seem as impressive to investors. Investors often like to visit startups in situ. You don't seem as real if you don't have your own space.

Workspaces seem to fall on a continuum, and it's hard to say precisely where the cutoff is. The test is whether the space feels like your own. But there are a lot of borderline cases. E.g. it's ok for several startups to share an office.

<comment><USER3> I'm bummed that you've began blanketly discouraging your companies from working at coworking spaces, instead of encouraging them to find the right coworking space (& community) based on their needs.

I also find it interesting that you'd qualify multiple startups as sharing an office as acceptable, but other shared arrangements as not. I've actually experienced the opposite effect, where having a more diverse (as in, not just startups and their own echo chamber) membership leading to the discovery of new insight and opportunities that wouldn't have happened if multiple industries weren't being given an opportunity to work side by side.

If you're talking about shared office spaces, then I agree.

A coworking space, however, shouldn't simply be renting cheap space. They should be working hard to foster a community of members to grow and contribute to that space, and share benefits of everyone's contributions. I have to imagine that this comes with a lot of similar benefits that getting involved with YC seems to provide. Shared space is just the battlefield for those interactions. I might be making unfair presumptions, but from an outsider's prospective, YC seems to provide a similar context/battlefield with its investments.

I'm the co-founder of a coworking community space in Philadelphia called Indy Hall. What I think is important about coworking spaces is that they provide an opportunity for people to get to know each other on a personal basis before the working relationship takes hold. This leads to stronger potential co- founder matches, and overall, a higher probability of people that need to find each other finding each other.

In terms of ownership, we work hard to encourage our members to take ownership of the space that they inhabit. All of the best things about working at Indy Hall are things that our members decided should be there, and we helped make possible.

Coworking simply isn't about space, though it's easy to mistake it as such. Coworking is about context, and an important context in terms of organic innovation and the spread of ideas.

Steven Johnson's recent book, "Where Good Ideas Come From", explores places - not necessarily spaces, but places - where throughout history innovation has happened. He cites places like salons in London and cafes in Paris, and the roles those places played in true renaissance periods. The common thread was that those places tended to be populated by people with half-baked ideas, and they provided a context where it was possible for those half baked ideas (Steven calls them "slow hunches") to bump into each other. It's that serendipity that is often mistaken for a "genius" or eureka moment. It's that serendipity that leads to the magic you think you can only hope for.

At a real coworking space (not just a shared office, of which there are many who are mislabeled as coworking), interactions are designed to facilitate those possibilites, and accelerate that serendipity.

<comment><USER2> The difference between multiple startups sharing an office and a coworking space is that in the former case there's no third party whose space they're in. It's their space.

I'm sure there are advantages to coworking spaces. I just think the disadvantages outweigh them, at least for YC-funded startups. They're already part of a community of startups, so they don't need to seek one in the place where they work.</comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoin: The 6 innovations that changed the world - <AUTHOR> http://shamoon.me/bitcoin-the-6-innovations-that-changed-the-world/

<comment><AUTHOR> Thoughts?</comment>


Why I moved from Google Blogger to Wordpress - <AUTHOR> http://max-michaels.blogspot.com/2012/05/i-moved.html

<comment><USER2> I recommend the following plugins:

\- 404 Redirection \- Akismet \- All in One SEO Pack \- Better WordPress Minify \- Disqus Comment System \- FeedBurner FeedSmith \- Google XML Sitemaps \- WP Smush.it \- WP Super Cache

I personally use them on my blog <http://marlonribunal.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't forget to make it federated with ostatus <https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ostatus-for-wordpress/></comment>


Apache Kafka on Azure – Public Preview - <AUTHOR> https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/hdinsight/apache-kafka/ <comment><AUTHOR> Submitter here, full disclosure: I am a Microsoft employee.

With that being said, a hosted Apache Kafka is something I'm super excited about. I'm a huge Kafka fan and haven't found anything yet that compares to it with regards to performance.</comment>


BBC buys 22k computers botnet. - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/7932816.stm

<comment><USER2> $350 for a 1000 bot net? Maybe you could run Crysis on it</comment>


TiDB – a global scale distributed DB - <AUTHOR> https://pingcap.github.io/blog/2017/10/17/announcement/ <comment><USER2> From their blog: "TiKV is a distributed key-value database. It is the core component of the TiDB project and is the open source implementation of Google Spanner." I think the Cockroach DB guys would take offence at that.

So how do they use a Spanner-like design without specialized hardware? I had to really dig but the answer is "We are using the Timestamp Allocator introduced in Percolator, a paper published by Google in 2006. The pros of using the Timestamp Allocator are its easy implementation and no dependency on any hardware. The disadvantage lies in that if there are multiple datacenters, especially if these DCs are geologically distributed, the latency is really high."

Using Spanner's design but without the real hardware that makes it practical seems like a step backward. A Calvin[1] based approach like FaunaDB would probably have been better - but they can't do that and still have MySQL compatibility (you can't do interactive client-server transactions with Calvin.)

I'm skeptical of a database built over a generic KV-store. There was a much- hyped database a few years ago that failed to live up to the hype because of exactly that architecture. I can't even remember the name now when I was trying to find the post-mortem analysis for it in Google.

I'm also skeptical of a database claiming to be good at both OLAP and OLTP. One requires a column store, the other a row store. You can be half-decent as an OLAP store and good as a OLTP store. There are no column-stores that are also good at OLTP. But OLAP is the real big-data problems of today, and using half-decent for that is likely to get you in trouble. There's no reason a database can't do both by using two separate storage engines under the hood, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

[1] [https://fauna.com/blog/distributed-consistency-at-scale- span...](https://fauna.com/blog/distributed-consistency-at-scale-spanner-vs- calvin)

<comment><USER3> > There was a much-hyped database a few years ago that failed to live up to > the hype because of exactly that architecture. I can't even remember the > name now when I was trying to find the post-mortem analysis for it in > Google.

FoundationDB, acquired and taken internal by Apple. There were a few different blog posts about the layering aspect of it, with mixed opinions.

They built a transactionally consistent distributed database that was mysql client compatible and within 50% of mysql single node performance. If creating that and getting it bought by Apple is failing, I hope I'm lucky enough to fail like that.

> I'm also skeptical of a database claiming to be good at both OLAP and OLTP. > One requires a column store, the other a row store. You can be half-decent > as an OLAP store and good as a OLTP store.

This is a rigid and narrow view. There's lots of other design possibilities such as fractured mirrors, column decommission only within pages, etc.

I wouldn't call a single db that can do both OLAP and OLTP easy or a slam dunk, but I also wouldn't rule it out. VoltDB is well proven and worth looking at.

<comment><USER2> Thank you, it was FoundationDB I was thinking of, post-mortem analysis from the VoltDB guys here[1]. I'll contend they failed though because Apple bought them as an acqui-hire and killed the product. They were acquiring good engineers with a track record of executing well at a premium. It's a common recruiting strategy for tech companies. It doesn't mean that FoundationDB was a successful product - certainly it means it was not successful enough for the founders to risk turning down a lucrative acqui-hire deal.

> his is a rigid and narrow view. There's lots of other design possibilities > such as fractured mirrors, column decommission only within pages, etc.

Yes definitely I over-simplified to make my point, but I'll stand by it. OLAP and OLTP are different enough workloads and the engineering tradeoffs for being good at one of the other make it hard to excel at both. VoltDB is a row store, best suited for OLTP. Vertica is a column store best suited for OLAP. VoltDB can also make a decent OLAP database. Vertica does not make a good OLTP database. Both databases come out of Michael Stonebraker's work (although given the number of people required to make complex products like VoltDB and Vertica happen, it seems unfair to credit him unduly.)

But especially in the case of a sharded, distributed database where communication overhead is likely to dominate many types of queries (VoltDB, TiDB), one might not notice the inefficiency of using a poorly-suited design, like a row store for OLAP. This can make the differences less striking. This might also hide the inefficiency of basing everything on a generic KV store in TiDB.

[1][https://www.voltdb.com/blog/2015/04/01/foundationdbs- lesson-...](https://www.voltdb.com/blog/2015/04/01/foundationdbs-lesson-fast- key-value-store-not-enough/)

<comment><USER4> Ah, yes, a completely speculative "post-mortem" by someone who knew nothing about the technology, but wanted some free press for his own database out of the news, knowing that the FDB team wouldn't be able to respond.

And I still can't respond to equally uninformed speculation about the FDB transaction, because that was confidential.

But I can say that the article's technical thesis about the design space is wrong. A layered design (and, really, all databases are layered, so we just mean a design where distributed concurrency control is below the layer of the data model) is good for performance, exactly because it makes it practical in engineering terms to use the right data model for the job, often getting asymptotic wins rather than tiny constant factor ones. Row and column stores, hierarchical document or "table family" stores, conventional indexes, compressed bitmaps, spatial indexes, etc can all be reasonably efficiently mapped to K/V pairs and then take advantage of the same fast distributed storage and concurrency control. You can use them for different indexes in the same database or the same table. You can, just to throw out an example, store recently changed rows in a row store while transactionally moving them into a column representation in the background, and combining both seamlessly for reads. And you can have things that aren't a good fit for the relational model, like queues, graphs, and full text search indexes, in the same database and operate on them transactionally. You can still co-locate compute with the data, and you can actually scale indexes because they _don 't_ have to be co- located with the data as most databases wind up doing. And let's not forget that you have at least a _chance_ to actually get the hard distributed systems part right, as so few products do, because it is not hopelessly entangled with your data model and execution engine.

To address some specific speculations from the article: you don't have to read metadata every transaction; you can just cache it in memory and just ask the distributed store to make sure it hasn't changed in conflict with the transaction (via a tiny read of a serial number, for example, or a usually- empty range read of a log of metadata changes). A key/value store designed for layering needs to be able to go full speed with real, cross-node, multi-key transactions rather than focus on a single node "fast path" (like, if I recall correctly, VoltDB does). It's also highly recommended to be able to do concurrency control on arbitrary ranges rather than just individual keys, both for performance and serializability reasons. Indexes, as I've already mentioned, are _vastly_ more scalable in this type of design than most others. And you get to decide whether you want to read from them serializably or not. One way you can do push down (which in the modern world of 10GBE networking is way more important for OLAP workloads than OLTP, but let's be perfectionist) is to co-locate SQL and K/V store nodes and to let the higher layer see where data is located in the lower layer so that it can partition queries (at least approximately) to one of its own co-located nodes. You keep all the nice abstractions and the statelessness of the SQL nodes, and you can read data locally (a nice optimization would be to have a super fast shared memory path for doing this in the database driver).

There is _some_ cost for every abstraction. But because human ingenuity is finite, successful abstractions on net greatly increase what we can do. We don't write everything in machine code, or build new custom networking hardware and protocol stacks for every piece of data we need to send, even though there might be some microoptimization opportunities if we did.

The real performance problem that any new SQL database is going to face is that its query planner isn't _exactly the same_ as the one people are trying to switch from. So if the customer's random web app has 1000 queries, and 995 of them are faster on the new database and 5 of them are worse, guess what happens? The 1000 queries by selection bias ran _acceptably_ on the old database, but the 5 worse ones can be arbitrarily worse, because the badness of query planning in such a rich query model isn't really bounded. So the application is now brokenly slow. So there is going to be a long, long game of whack-a-mole, and users' experience of the performance is going to tend to be negative no matter how good or bad it really is. In my view, the ideal database interface for scalable production "OLTP" applications would be as powerful as SQL, but do less magic in the query planner - it would make it more explicit in the query how challenging the execution plan is supposed to be, so that you don't have queries that explode into unscalability. Pushing a little more work onto developers in order to save the skins of the ops people when the cardinality of some table changes.

Sorry, /rant. I don't know anything about the engineering of TiDB or TiKV and can't comment on them. But I really strongly believe that a layered architecture is the right one both for databases and for lots of things that people don't think of as databases but that wind up having to solve all the same concurrency control and fault tolerance problems.

<comment><USER5> As I mentioned in a previous comment, you can fix some of the problems; caching metadata is a great example.

The real issue is not whether abstractions are good, but at what layer and how pure/leaky they should be.

If I build a SQL engine on top of RocksDB, I still need a way to scan a bunch of tuples and apply a predicate. It's probably faster if RocksDB lets me hand over a predicate and returns an iterator of matching tuples than if I have to iterate on top of rocks DB. Maybe this difference is large -- maybe not. It depends on a lot of details. Certainly a custom storage layer turned to apply predicates fast _is_ substantially faster.

If I build a SQL engine on top of a _distributed_ KV store, then I really want to push the predicate scan down to the individual nodes, and I probably still want to push the predicate down even lower. For most queries, I also want to have understanding of how data is partitioned.

You can do all of this, but the abstraction gets leakier and leakier as you start to get reasonable performance. At the time, the FDB SQL layer didn't seem to do any of this. Maybe not at Apple it is much smarter and more intertwined.

The planner issue you mention is real, but I'm slightly more optimistic that engineers are willing to identify slow queries and figure out how to adapt them to the new system if the rewards are clear.

N.B. If you're using SQL for KV gets/puts, or if you're joining one row to a handful of others by primary key (e.g. lookup order items in order), then this stuff doesn't matter much. But if you give someone a SQL layer, odds are they'll want to run a query sooner or later, even an OLTP-ish one.

To address the "completely speculative "post-mortem" by someone who knew nothing about the technology" bit: I was only talking about the FDB SQL layer performance and design, much of which was public at the time of the acquisition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, how does it compare to cockroachdb?

So far i've seen: \- Apache v2 license \- Aims at compatibility with Mysql vs postgres for cockroach

<comment><USER7> There are some key differences between TiDB and Cockroach.

1\. User interface and eco-system Despite that TiDB and CockroachDB both support SQL, TiDB is compatible with MySQL protocol while Cockroach chooses PostgreSQL. You can directly connect to TiDB server with any MySQL client.

2\. Architecture The whole TiDB project is logically divided into two parts: the stateless SQL layer (TiDB) and distributed storage layer (TiKV). As TiDB is built on top of TiKV, developers have the freedom to choose to use TiDB or TiKV, depending on their own business. If you only want a distributed Key- Value database, you can just use TiKV alone for higher performance and lower latency.

In a word, our system is highly-layered and modularized while CockroachDB is a P2P system. The design of our system results in the fact that we use two programming languages: Go for TiDB and Rust for TiKV to improve the storage performance.

And benefit by the highly-layered architecture, we build another project[1] to run Apache Spark to on top of TiDB/TiKV to answer the complex OLAP queries. It takes advantages of both the Spark platform and the distributed TiKV cluster.

3\. Transaction model Even though CockroachDB and TiDB both support ACID transaction, TiDB uses a model introduced by Google's Percolator. The key feature of this model is that it needs an independent timestamp allocator. Like Spanner, each transaction in TiDB will have a timestamp to isolate different transactions.

The model that CockroachDB uses is similar to the TrueTime API that Google described in its paper. However, unlike Google, CockroachDB didn't build the atomic clocks and GPS receivers to keep the time consistent across different data centers. Instead, it uses NTP for clock synchronization, which leads to the problem of uncertain errors. To solve this problem, CockroachDB adapts the Hybrid Logical Clocks (HLC) algorithm.

4\. Programming Language TiDB uses Go for the SQL layer and Rust for the storage engine layer. As Go has a Garbage Collector (GC) and runtime, we think it will cost us days to tune the performance. Therefore, we use Rust, a static language, for TiKV. Its performance is much better. CockroachDB only uses Go.

[1] Spark on TiKV: [https://github.com/pingcap/tispark](https://github.com/pingcap/tispark)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the details!

I'm pretty sure cockroach use RocksDB for the underlying storage so it's written in C++.

<comment><USER7> I mean the raft/mvcc/transaction layer which are on top of RocksDB and below the SQL layer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Contrary to the assertion in the press release, there's no evidence Abraham Lincoln ever said, "the best way to predict the future is to create it." That would be Alan Kay.

[https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/09/27/invent-the- future/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/09/27/invent-the-future/)

<comment><USER9> Anyone who has read any of Lincoln's papers knows that simply isn't the way he would talk, or really anyone from his time period. The language that we use today around innovation, envisioning futures, boldly creating the world we want to live in, etc. is post-WWII.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Benchmark from half a year ago:

[https://pingcap.github.io/blog/2017/05/23/perconalive17/#sys...](https://pingcap.github.io/blog/2017/05/23/perconalive17/#sysbench)

Previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13298664](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13298664)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10180503](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10180503)

<comment><USER7> We will release a new benchmark result soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Congrats to PingCAP on the 1.0 launch.

I've used TiDB for some side projects and I was really impressed. Excited to see how things continue to develop!

</comment><comment><USER12> Paging Jepsen. Paging Jepsen.

Edit: some work's been done:

[https://pingcap.github.io/blog/2017/09/01/tidbmeetsjepsen/](https://pingcap.github.io/blog/2017/09/01/tidbmeetsjepsen/)

<comment><USER13> They're also working on using a custom-built system written in Golang to test TiDB (though this is in the early stages): [https://medium.com/@siddontang/use-chaos-to-test-the- distrib...](https://medium.com/@siddontang/use-chaos-to-test-the-distributed- system-linearizability-4e0e778dfc7d)

<comment><USER14> Hi @anishathalye, thanks for your [https://github.com/anishathalye/porcupine](https://github.com/anishathalye/porcupine). It's a great project! Would you like to help me to check whether our model check is right or not with Porcupine? That would be highly appreciated!

<comment><USER13> Sure! Sent you an email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How would you run spark on top of the production db without affecting its performance?

<comment><USER16> TiDB doesn't want to solve all the problems, no silver bullet, right? And I think it's all about workload, some analytical workload requires CPU/Network resource instead of I/O, and OLAP workload isn't that frequently. Storage layer and computing layer are separated in TiDB stack, I think it's possible for some workload.

<comment><USER15> The problem is that OLAP is run by analysts/business/data.science people and they may mess up with their queries/workloads. without isolation the production performance could impact the user expirience

<comment><USER7> We use different isolation levels and priorities for OLAP and OLTP workload.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Their references to use cases from an article sounds funny "Migration from MySQL to TiDB to handle tens of millions of rows of data per day".

Come on, even Excel can handle tens of millions of rows of data per day.

<comment><USER18> Excel can not handle more than 1048576 rows

[https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Excel- specification...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Excel- specifications-and-limits-1672b34d-7043-467e-8e27-269d656771c3)

<comment><USER19> Not to mention that file locking would make it literally impossible to concurrently edit the file.</comment></comment></comment>


Time Warner Cable to Upgrade to 300Mbps Down/20Mbps Up - <AUTHOR> http://www.timewarnercable.com/en/enjoy/better-twc/internet.html

<comment><USER2> My service was upgraded a few months back. It was a nice bump in speed and my bill did not go up, surprising. It was at about 35mpbs and now hovers around 110mpbs (though supposed to be around 200mpbs). I am not complaining.

<comment><AUTHOR> This would be the second upgrade I've gotten from Time Warner, without a price increase. I started at 50 down/5 up (which usually clocked at 70-85 down, 5-6 up), and they upgraded me to 100 down/5 up (usually clocks at 130 down, 5-6 up). The 20 up is what I'm most looking forward to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why are up speeds so abysmal? Is it a problem with infrastructure, or is it throttling because they think most uses for upload is illegal?

<comment><USER4> Good question, and I don't know the real answer; Ars says that cable providers can offer speeds up to a gigabit per second: [http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/why- co...](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/why-comcast-and- other-cable-isps-arent-selling-you-gigabit-internet) but IIRC doesn't specify whether the upload caps are a technical or business issue.</comment></comment>


PHP is now on Github - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/php/php-src/

<comment><USER2> I actually didn't realise just how active the php project is! Got to love stats and graphs from GH.</comment>


Python for my Grandpa - <AUTHOR> http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/weblog/arch_d7_2006_06_03.shtml#e356

<comment><USER2> I think that trying to explain all this stuff (big sweeping gesture) to people without technical backgrounds is beneficial exercise, for several reasons. Any major programming or business work is going to involve quite a bit of communication, with people as well as computers. Being unable to comfortably explain how your creation works to a potential client is a great way to get rejected, and is probably at least as damaging as being unable to be on the same page as a collaborator. Also, explaining something to someone else can help you discover aspects you don't fully understand, and often they have useful abstractions that may not have otherwise occurred to you.

His Python explanation is a bit mystifying (particularly the hand-waving about static vs. dynamic typing at the end; if he was going to just skip them, he probably could have avoided bringing them up), but to his credit, this can be _really_ hard to do well.

For one example, I'd compare the difference between an interpreter and a compiler to an interpreter standing between two diplomats and a translator slowly rewriting poetry or legal documents. The former has more immediate feedback to work with (raised eyebrows, for starters), but has to do everything on the spot, while the latter has a lot more time to rewrite things concisely and elegantly. In this sense, an interpreting person who is quite fluent in both languages and excellent at reading body language might be comparable to a skillfully optimizing JIT-compiler.

I think mail-order packaging could be a useful metaphor for part of the efficiency difference in static vs. dynamic languages: a static language determines how much space something will need in a shipping container, while a dynamic language saves time by putting most things in roughly the same size boxes and loading them up with plastic shipping air bubbles. Granted, this is only part of a complicated issue, but it's still a _useful abstraction_ , without getting into a bunch of details about boxed and unboxed types, type systems, pointers, and other implementation details.</comment>