Jason Kincaid Resigns From TC - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/24/jason-may-the-force-be-with-you/

<comment><USER2> I am a big fan of Kincaid's style. At least from my interactions with him, he has always taken time to actually learn about your product and why it's special or different. Will be interesting to see what he does next.

His departure also speaks to a bigger trend re: AOL/HuffPo, which is their apparently flippant attitude toward talent retention. The steady stream of departures not only at TC, but also Engadget, shows an unwillingness to create an environment where top writers/journalists/media innovators can thrive. Though as an outsider, it's tough to tell if this is really the case.

<comment><USER3> I used to work in AOL's UK office. You have a point, talent retention is a problem, and it's not because the staff are being poached, it's because this company has political battles with massive knock-on effects on employee morale and loyalty which is causing people to flee.

This has happened (and continues to happen) at AOL UK, and I feel for Jason because when you read his post, you see how sad he is to be leaving TC.

There are some really lovely, funny, supportive, and wonderful people at AOL, and to leave them behind is really hard. At times it makes you angry, and you want to blame someone for it, and sometimes you want to write a massive rant about all the shit you saw at AOL and email Business Insider and watch corp comms go into overdrive. But in the end what does it give you?

It's better to say "onto better things" - just look at the Verge... I'm sure Topolsky is glad about leaving Engadget and doing this project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think Alexia is the only one left now. No offense but her stories were awful.

My theory is that TC got so popular because its value was similar to that of a Daily TV Show where we'd tune in everyday to hear from our favorite characters (Arington the "villain" and Alexia the "girl we love to hate"). It wasn't just about the articles or the stories it was the editors and their take on it. We fell in love with watching them and their viewpoint, not necessarily staying up to date. Because there's lots of sites with up to date tech news, opinion pieces, and gadget reviews, many of which where much better than TCs content. But TC put a lot more emphasis on the editor and the personality they injected into their pieces. Even when they were wrong or biased we soaked it all up. Normal news shows have the editor stand behind their piece, almost invisible (which is the goal of journalism) but with TC the editors were proudly in front of their articles, you knew exactly who the article was from just by reading the first paragraph. It wasn't transparent at all. The focus wasn't the news, it was the editors themselves. The human element.

This furthers my theory that above all else, we are addicted to people. It's the human connection. Everywhere you look, social networks, online multiplayer, everything having to do with connecting people has grown immensely over the last few years. We emote by watching others emote, and we form opinions by listening to others' opinions. This is why Fox News has grown so much and why a lot of professional unbiased journalism has faded away. Because deep down inside we don't want "balanced" we don't want "both sides of the story" we want OUR side. When "Journalists" tell us what we want to hear we call them "fair and balanced" and are completely oblivious to their biases. And when their opinion didn't match ours we complain about the network or blog and call it biased, agenda driven, unfair, awful news, etc...

Psychologically, we don't want "mom and dad" telling us what to do and what to think, that's no fun. We want a fun loving neighbor that's just our age and does the same things we do and likes the same things we like. We also don't really want to be educated, doing so requires us to admit that we were wrong, or that we don't know something, and that we have to change our thinking. To seek education would mean that we admit that we are incorrect or inferior or stupid. We want our opinion to be validated. We want "us" to be validated.

We are looking for ourselves in everything (brands cater to us, news caters to us, video games caters to us, movies are whitewashed and stereotyped for us). Look very carefully at Tech Crunch, it had "us" all over it. Arrington the arrogant and dominating alpha male (what every man wants to be), Sarah Lacy the hip, globe trotting, educated girl we wish we knew, Alexia for the high school crowd, MG Siegler for the mac crowd, Jason Kincaid the awkward nice guy / best friend we never had, Paul Carr the opinionated smart guy, and so on and so on. TC wasn't news at all, it was a tech themed personal blog aggregate. Almost like a nonsexual dating site for techies. And it seduced us all, very, very well.

Of course, now that everyone knows it'll be very interesting to see what happens next, now that everyone knows the secret...

<comment><USER5> Of the people who were at TC while it was at the house, where it went from blog to big business, I believe only Leena is remaining and some of the guys from the gadget blog such as John.

Other blogs have successfully churned their writing staff and managed to maintain popularity (Engadget, Gawker). But I think a lot of that unique voice that Techcrunch had is no longer there, replaced with a style that is more mainstream. That said, the audience for insider-style silicon valley startup stories is only so big and the broader tech market is both larger and more lucrative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, how long before TC loses all its original headline writers? Surely the growing number of leavers must massively decrease the value of the site...

<comment><USER7> This is exactly why I don't think we'll see any media companies like Mashable being bought anytime soon. Writers can move on too easily. Why would you invest in something with so little retainable value?

<comment><USER8> Well, that's the very definition of a talent acquisition, isn't it? Software developers can move on just as easily.

<comment><USER9> <http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-10-04/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Jason was my favorite at TC. Although not as prolific as the other, his stories were well written and in an unassuming style.

More than anything, I enjoyed TC Cribs the most since they were the closest thing to really see Valley startups at work - unless you worked for one of them. :)

</comment><comment><USER11> I actually like (or liked) TC (and MG and Mike, and Jason, et al) but all this back-patting is getting a little ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER12> really enjoyed the TC cribs bits. onward and upward!</comment>


Wikimedia NYC accepting Bitcoin donations - <AUTHOR> https://nyc.wikimedia.org/wiki/Donate

<comment><AUTHOR> You'd be hard-pressed to get a proper tax-receipt for your donation though. A downside to the anonymity.</comment>


Tandem Entrepreneurs -- seed investors - <AUTHOR> http://www.tandementrepreneurs.com/

<comment><USER2> I'm one of the guys at Tandem and am glad to see the discussion here. As some posts have pointed out, we explain our approach in detail on our site: <http://www.tandementrepreneurs.com>. To clarify things a bit more...

1\. We're not a VC. We're all entrepreneurs and love building businesses. We put in our sweat first and foremost and happen to invest sufficient capital as well. We only invest our time and money where we can add value.

2\. We offer deep business development and technical skills and an extensive network. We work as the extended team so the startup can stay small but still have the right quality and quantity of talent.

3\. We love the YC approach of supporting entrepreneurs and drew inspiration from their model. That being said, there are some key differences. Namely, we get actively involved in each business. We invest funds to carry the company for two years to a potential exit or to a high growth trajectory. And, like YC, we leave open the possibility of a small, early acquisition as exit. As we all know, this is a likely outcome these days, even though the VCs don't like them.

4\. Because of our involvement we can get involved with founders whose plans are still nascent, and sometimes we'll help put founders together on a business. To us the entrepreneurs are more important than the idea itself.

5\. We typically look for technical founders who have a knack for understanding what their users want and then delivering it quickly. We don't encourage outsourcing development unless it's just for commodity components of the overall service.

6\. We don't consider anyone a "reject" because a fund passed them by. We'll evaluate each team and business on its own merits and go for it if we like the people, think we can add a lot of value, and believe we can build a valuable business together. Obviously, each group of founders has to decide the same on its side.

7\. Tandem is brand new, but we have a lot of experience at building startups. We've made two investments thus far and with three principals only plan to do about 6 per year. In many ways, Tandem is a startup itself in that we're breaking the traditional model, having a blast, taking encouragement and support with open arms, and proceeding full steam ahead regardless of what certain "established" parties in venture finance say.

8\. We are happy to entertain folks that have gone through the YC process as well as those that are entering it. In fact, we're attending the YC demo day next week.

Best of luck in building your own startups, and we'd love to hear what you think about Tandem. Feel free to contact us if we can help.

<comment><USER3> Sounds very positive. The really important thing that isn't addressed very well is how you want to add "sweat".

Most entrepreneurs are interested in having the final say. Real control over product development, marketing, etc. Is your attitude that your team is there to help when necessary but otherwise hands off or do you insist on being involved in day to day operation?

Would you mind clarify this a bit more?

<comment><USER2> Sure. How we add sweat is very subjective and is much easier to answer in context of a particular business. It tends to be very clear on all sides by the end of our first meeting. That being said, here is a high level answer and a couple of examples...

We are entrepreneurs, and as such just do what is needed. If we don't believe we can add value to a business, we don't get involved. We insist that the founders control the various aspects of the business, but we also look for opportunities that need our support on a day-to-day basis in the beginning. Once the business has some level of traction, we step back and make ourselves available when and where you need us (including help on large strategic deals or even to sell the business). If you don't need or want our help and are only looking for money, we are not the right fit.

The key elements in execution are - the right thing to do, the right time to do it and the right way to do it. We participate with the founders to help make these decisions on both the technology and business sides. We help where needed on strategy, marketing, bus dev, and tech architecture and provide the infrastructure needed on the administrative side (legal, finance, pr, etc.).

Couple of real life examples. In one of our businesses, certain technical scalability issues were identified and the question was how to solve them and when to solve them. We got involved and were a valuable resource for the founders as we understood the business objectives, development resources and the underlying technology. If need be, we can tune queries and look at code, but most of the time acting a good sounding board is all that's required.

In another case, there was a key question on the initial go-to-market approach for the business. Here, we brought people from other related organizations to the table to help in our decision. We worked with them and the founders to make an informed choice. So far, the results have been very positive...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Without saying it on their website, Tandem is just another incubator. I would be skeptical of this type of setup.

A friend of mine has dealt with a similar company in Mountain View that shall remain nameless. At first things were going well, then they wanted to outsource the development to India, then they wanted to take 50% of the company. Needless to say he didn't sign with them.

Not all incubators are bad (YC, obviously, isn't), but the bottom line is don't get caught up when numbers with a bunch of zeros on the end get tossed around.

Think hard about their value proposition. If they even mention outsourcing the development, just walk away.

</comment><comment><USER5> Tandem is funding our company. At first I had reservations about a hands-on approach: "I'm an independent, iconoclastic programmer! Just give me my money and get out of my way!"

Now that I am over my ego, I have really come to appreciate the fact that I have to give minimal thought to legal, accounting ... etc. It is also really nice to get immediate assistance with strategic, technical and networking (social, not computer) issues.

I would be happy to answer any questions people have about our experience with them. Either here or via email (email@example.com).

</comment><comment><USER6> It would be nice to know more about their portfolio, such as the companies that have gotten funding from them and achieved a liquidity event.

<comment><AUTHOR> According to this post

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40412>

the news.yc user "blored" got funding from them. And blored's profile (<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=blored>) suggests that their site is

<http://clutterme.com/>

_Edit_ : oh, you said "AND achieved a liquidity event". Yeah, don't know.

<comment><USER7> _offered funding_ , we have yet to decide if we want to accept

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Their FAQ (<http://www.tandementrepreneurs.com/html/how_we_work.html>) says, "We typically invest $850,000 in a company over three stages."

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks like they offer a lot of value. What percentage of the company do they take and what's the valuation they typically expect? Do they offer more money than YC?

</comment><comment><USER9> Everything they said was nice until I went to their application and read this:

"Tandem backs existing and potential founders who combine strong technical abilities with a keen understanding of their users and a deep passion and energy for building services for fast-growing business or consumer communities."

What the hell is that?

<comment><USER10> They prefer to fund smart people who can build profitable services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If only they did biotech...

<comment><USER11> Convince them why they should:-)

<comment><USER10> They should fund me because my company is a money winning proposition with the $10,000 my partner and I put up but we could scale much more quickly with a real investment.

We can't get any money from the traditional biotech establishment without patents. And we can't get patents until we have some money because most of our patentable ideas will require more expensive lab equipment than we have right now. So for now, we try and make some money by bootstrapping and selling incense, then we get the patents, then we get the real money, then we start the interesting research like curing AIDS which offers a multi-billion dollar payoff.

My company is selling a a genetic test for HIV immunity. With funding, we could expand into other genetic tests very quickly and get FDA approval for as much as we can. FDA approval is not required to sell a "home-brew" genetic test but you can charge a lot more money if you're FDA approved because then insurance will pay for it.It won't take much to dramatically undercut all the existing genetic tests on the market, they're all really overpriced.

For now, I'm enjoying the process of bootstrapping and approaching biotech with the Web 2.0 "make it yourself" ethos.

Seedcamp told me they don't do biotech. Techstars sticks to Web 2.0 function companies. CRV doesn't do biotech. HCP does biotech and has a summer program targeted to college students for it. We didn't get in and they didn't tell us why, though it was still a really nice rejection and they invited us to a barbecue at their office.

YC _might_ fund biotech if they liked you enough but they aren't a good fit for me. The biotech incubator geographically close to me is dumb and I won't give them any control of my company. They're one of those state-subsidized institutions that repeatedly lose money. This is why Pittsburgh sucks for entrepreneurs, because despite the brilliant biotech minds coming out of our universities, there is not nearly enough investment money available.

I should probably email Tandem and ask if they do biotech. Anyone know any seed stage funding firms/incubators that would consider biotech?

<comment><USER12> Ugh, I'm near the Pittsburgh area and I certainly agree - it's not the best place for entrepreneurs. It's like the whole area is a "danger zone stay out" for investment money.

Why is this? There are plenty of good Universities in the area - what is Pennsylvania doing to hamper startup companies? Are people just drawn away to other areas like DC?

<comment><USER13> Pittsburgh sucks mightily. I don't know anybody who would stay there given the choice to move somewhere real, like the Bay Area or Boston or New York or LA or San Diego or Chicago or Philadelphia or pretty much any kind of real city, especially one near a coast. The only people I know of who choose to stay there have been there so long that they've forgotten the taste of real food (i.e. food that is not drowned in grease and has not been sitting in a warehouse for three months) and the feeling of living in a real city with real culture.

Now, people who invest generally have money. People who have money generally have a choice of where to live, and are aware of what it's like to live in a real city. Thus, they do not touch Pittsburgh with a ten foot pole.

<comment><USER14> I grew up in Pittsburgh, and there are good bits around CMU. There are definitely some bookish people there. It's not as bad as a completely random town in the middle of the country.

The weather's pretty bad though. I was surprised to read a few years ago that Pgh was one of the least sunny towns in the country. Then I realized why as a kid I associated sun with being on vacation: when we were on vacation, we were in other places, and everywhere else was sunny by comparison.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Update: Inexpensive DIY Firearm Accelerometer (6X Faster) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ammolytics.com/2019-02-23/rifle-accelerometer-update.html <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone!

I wrote a quick article to give an update on the incredible progress that's been made to the DIY accelerometer project I shared before[1]. Most notably, it's nearly six times faster!

This project is fully open-source[2] and I have no plans to sell it complete or even as a kit. Keeping it open allows contributors from all different backgrounds, which led to the improvements I describe here.

I'd love to hear your feedback and answer any questions!

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18888405](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18888405)

2\. [https://github.com/ammolytics/projects](https://github.com/ammolytics/projects)</comment>


Chicago Has Become the Nerve Center of Competitive Pinball - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/chicago-competitive-pinball <comment><USER2> Chicago has _nothing_ on Seattle (OK, except for a manufacturer, and the Sharpe brothers promoting pinball).

Monday Night Pinball in Seattle now has 26 teams with 10 players each, plus a massive pool of substitute players. We've grown to the point of splitting into upper and lower divisions with promotion and relegation.

[https://www.mondaynightpinball.com](https://www.mondaynightpinball.com)

And that's just one weekly event. There are a _ton_ of events:

[http://www.skill-shot.com/calendar](http://www.skill-shot.com/calendar)

<comment><USER3> I was about to say, the size of the pinball scene in Seattle is unbelievable. Two of the top ten ranked players in the world live here, and probably 10 more of the top 100. That's versus 3 in the top 100 for Chicago.

<comment><USER2> Since the start of 2018 those numbers have gone down quite a bit, mostly due to the shake out of "dollar gate", leading to some of the popular local tournaments no longer reporting results to the IFPA. Despite the local rankings dropping a bit, it feels like the community has grown drastically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Shameless plug but there is plenty of competitive pinball in the Bay Area as well!

Selfie leagues are fun for beginners, you can play at your own pace and snap a selfie of your score and submit it online. There are selfie leagues in San Francisco [1] , Oakland [2] and South Bay [3]

But that's just the tip of the iceberg! There's also a more competitive league, the SFPD [4] as well as a fun team league style format [5]

It's a great community and there usually ends up being a tournament of some form almost every weekend.

[1] [https://orangenex.wordpress.com/2016/02/22/san-francisco- sup...](https://orangenex.wordpress.com/2016/02/22/san-francisco-super-selfie- league/)?

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

[3] [https://www.facebook.com/BAPASelfieLeague/](https://www.facebook.com/BAPASelfieLeague/)

[4] [http://sfpins.org/](http://sfpins.org/)

[5] [http://baybridgepinball.com](http://baybridgepinball.com)

<comment><USER5> To add to your comment there are pinball leagues in most cities now. Even if you haven't played since you were young it's still fun to go check them out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It only makes sense really, Chicago has been the ground zero for pinball since it's inception. Chicago Coin, Stern, Bally, Gottlieb and Genco were all operating out of that area. Stern is still operating today and is the main company pushing competitive pinball.

<comment><USER7> Chicago has a ton of coin-op history as well. Midway made games like NBA Jam and Mortal Kombat there.

Is game dev still happening in Chicago?

<comment><USER8> Nowhere near as much as it used to be. A lot of companies shuttered and talent left the area a couple of decades ago. Off the top of my head, the main companies that are still in the area are NetherRealm, Wargaming.net, Barbaroga, WMS Gaming, JackBox, Iron Galaxy, and in the suburbs are Raw Thrills, Incredible Technologies, Play Mechanix, and High Voltage. That might be it.

Only a few of those companies seem to be actively hiring.

Midway closed (and part of it became NetherRealm), there used to be an Electronic Arts office, a Disney Interactive office, Robomodo, Sega was around when they did arcade games, Game Refuge might still exist but it's barely still kicking, Yuke's used to have a satellite office here but that shut down, probably a bunch of others, but nowadays it's difficult to be a game dev and live in Chicago. Part of the reason I'm not in the industry anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We also have (I believe) the largest arcade in North America, at Galloping Ghost, which includes a bunch of pinball tables and also that terrible hologram time travel game from the early 1990s.

<comment><USER10> Logan Arcade has become a mecca for pinball/arcade enthusiasts as well.

I always maintain it is the best bar in Chicago, and EASILY the best arcade bar.

edit: arcade/video games instead of pinball/arcade.

<comment><USER11> Plus, Killer Queen!

<comment><USER12> I was at my local arcade and I was lucky enough to come across a group of friends that met up every week to play Killer Queen. They had the full 10 people and someone asked me if I wanted to sub in while they went for a beer. One of the most exciting arcade experiences I've had in a long time. You get 10 people hunched over that game and it's like nothing you've ever seen or done before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yeah, but can anyone compete with that deaf, blind, and dumb kid?

[https://youtu.be/4AKbUm8GrbM](https://youtu.be/4AKbUm8GrbM)

On a serious note, I played a lot of pinball growing up, it'd be nice to find some old favorites and new tables to play on.

My family actually fixed up pinball machines/arcade cabinets and resold them while I was growing up, so we had a bunch of them in the house.

If I had the space, and demand was still there, I'd probably have started doing it myself by now.

<comment><USER14> Demand is there

<comment><USER13> Perhaps. It wasn't in my area last I checked, but that was a few years ago.

Space, however, is not there anymore. I have more space than I strictly need, but certainly not enough for cabinets and pinball tables.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Belsito is hunched over the game. He's just shot the right orbit, and if he can hit all the major shots to fill Deadpool's chimichanga punch card, he'll be able to fight the T. rex for a chance to shoot the scoop and win the mode, bringing him one step closer to a Mechsuit Multiball. And then all hell will break loose—in the machine and on the scoreboard. He's engaged in a rare three-way-tiebreaker to advance to the next round—one step closer to pinball glory, a championship belt, and $2,500. Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies is helping with play-by-play commentary and the room smells a little like a middle school gym class."

My inner (and outer) nerd loves everything about this paragraph. I've never played a Deadpool machine but with my moderate knowledge of the comic and my past experiences playing other pinball games I can imagine in my mind's eye what the sequence looks like.

Kudos to Lindsey Quinn.

</comment><comment><USER16> Chicago was always the center. Stern is the successor to Chicago Coin and Williams, having bought up the assets of those companies in bankruptcy.

<comment><USER2> The history of Stern is a little crazy. Sam Stern founded Stern Electronics with the assets from Chicago Coin and Seeburg. Seeburg had previously owned Williams, but spun it off into its own company when Seeburg went bust. Sam Stern had manged the Williams division, but didnt get the assets to it when Seeburg went under.

Stern Electronics went under in the 80s and folks ended up at Data East, then Sega. Eventually Sega got out of pinball and sold the assets to Gary Stern, Sam's son, to form Stern Pinball. This was about the same time Williams got out of pinball, and I think their assets ended up at a German company.

<comment><USER17> Pretty good synopsis, but a few things:

Gary Stern started Data East Pinball with the remains of Chicago Coin (and then ripped off the electronic design from Williams). DE did indeed become Sega and then became Stern in 1994.

Williams shut their pinball division down in 1999 and the assets have been licensed out to various entities in the 20 years since. The remaining slot machine company (WMS Industries) was purchased by Scientific Games in 2013. SGI also owns...wait for it... the remains of Bally Gaming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I did a road trip back in 2003 with my Ultimate Frisbee coach and we stopped in Chicago to visit his old CMU Roomate, Wes.

Wes was a pinball engineer at Stern and took us to the factory late night and we played games for hours.

My coach and Wes were extremely impressive players — they would put in a quarter and walk away hours later with dozens of free games racked up on the machine.

One of my favorite memories from my early twenties.

</comment><comment><USER19> How does pinball even have enough depth, with such simple controls, to sustain a competitive scene?

<comment><USER20> As far as depth, it's largely sequences. Most machines past the very early ones have tons and tons of sequences of actions you're trying to take—hit that ramp three times, then drop the ball in that hole over there, then the door opens, put the ball through that hole three times, skill shot, now such-and- such mode starts, complete it, now you've completed the first of eight parts of the machine's "story" or whatever.

So you have any of several sequences available at a time, offering different possibilities (advance toward multiball, set up a multiplier or bonus for a later ball or even a later game[!], go for some really high-scoring combo, activate extra ball, one or more "story" lines of actions to complete at any time, and so on). You might go for high score, you might go for "finishing" the story, some personal challenge ruleset. It'll affect what you're trying to do.

But it's also a hand-eye coordination game, and one of carefully physically manipulating the machine to bump the ball this way and that, so things don't always go as planned and you're thinking of contingency shots, or just trying to get the ball back under control, or shooting it one place because you need it to be somewhere else to make some other shot.

Most machines have some tricks to discover. Intentionally "flub" your plunger shot at the right time on Addams Family to lock a ball for multiball in The Swamp, for instance. Better to wait out some mode to technically complete it rather than trying to do what it wants for extra points, because it requires some risky shots or puts the ball on a part of the table that carries a high risk of a hard-to-stop drain. That kind of thing. Plus stuff you just have to figure out by lore (hold the ball for a bit to stop temporarily stop The Power long enough for one shot on Addams Family, say).

Then there's the feel. Every machine's different. Some have great flow (and that might vary by player), some have awesome theme, some have an incredible melding of theme and play—take Black Knight and its sequel, Black Knight 2000, in which you're "dueling" the Black Knight, which is both a fictional robber- knight and the machine itself, which taunts you ("give me your money!"), with the board structured such that you're on the "offense" when the balls on the elevated, upper playfield with a secondary flipper, and "defense" when it's on the lower board and at risk of draining, but that's not explicit, it's just a natural result of the theme and board design coming together.

So, for competition: physical skill, thinking on your feet, planning, knowing _and_ having your shot timing down for the particular machine. And you can still have an "on" day or an "off" day, just like anything else. I'd put it up there in complexity with your average competitive FPS, certainly. Shares a lot in common, in fact.

Plus, even on machines where the two flipper buttons are the only useful inputs when the ball's in play, they don't always only control flippers. Watch the lights :-)

<comment><USER21> Nicely written up! What would you say are some of the best tables out there for depth of play along these lines? I hear Addams Family come up a lot, and you mention that and Black Knight as well.

<comment><USER20> Addams Family's great. Good middle-difficulty machine. I find the even-better- loved and similarly-laid-out Twilight Zone to be much, much harder, for some reason—I just don't get along with it very well. Some machines are more n00b-friendly than others. Some take it too far and are too easy (Frankenstein) but others hit a good sweet spot.

White Water mentioned by another poster down a ways is a decent starter machine—complex enough, plenty to do to keep you busy for a good long while, but not killer-difficult (Black Knight 2000 would... not be a good one to start with). Depending on how the it's tuned it can have a couple "cheap" drains but they're avoidable with good flipper handling—carefully catching certain returns rather than letting them bounce, that sort of thing.

Theater of Magic's good. Fun theme, doesn't just _love_ to throw your ball down the drain all the time, tons to do, but you still have to be aiming & making shots or you won't get much done.

Medieval Madness has a nice, straightforward, fun theme and set of sequences. It's a bit like Attack from Mars, actually, but I'd call it the less _fiddly_ of the two, if that makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> [http://www.goldenstatepinball.org](http://www.goldenstatepinball.org) Next month in Lodi California

[http://www.caextreme.org](http://www.caextreme.org) San Jose

</comment><comment><USER23> I wonder what the average age is for the people competing and if the sport will go through a generational crisis as the people who presumably grew up with pinball die off.

</comment><comment><USER24> I am pumped for the new Black Knight sword of rage, my local pinball bar is getting one.

</comment><comment><USER25> I read this as paintball and got excited. Pinball is still cool.</comment>


Kubernetes YAML Generator - <AUTHOR> https://k8syaml.com/ <comment><USER2> I wonder what the need for tools such as this or other "Kubernetes-by-example" type pages tell us about the complexity of configuring Kubernetes resources.

Do we need a better layer of abstraction, i.e. better adoption and tighter integration for something like kustomize? Have we fucked up completely with Kubernetes due to it being outrageously complicated for simple tasks? How we redesign this to be simpler? Is the complexity even a problem for the target audience?

I've no idea. I just know I'm a kubernetes admin and I can't write a deployment yaml without googling or copy/pasting.

<comment><USER3> I think of Kubernetes as "the new Operating System", and these complex resources as fiddling with initscripts, fstab, /etc/interfaces, and so on. Writing an operator is like writing your own initscript.

I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually see new abstractions for "you just want a plain 'ol deployment with CI/CD du jour, a persistent volume claim, and a service ingress, just like 90% of all other CRUD webapps? Sure, here's a simple resource for that."

I think we'll start seeing a move towards more "opinionated" tools, just to outsource some of the decision making. No sense learning how to write your own pipelines if you can find a tool that says "we're gonna deploy every time you make a git tag and run `mvn package`, you figure the rest out".

<comment><USER4> Helm has been doing this since the early days. 99% of our charts are created using:

* `helm create` to get the default scaffold

* modify a handful of entries in the generated values file

* done!

Only thing is the default helm chart starter does not allow for autoconfiguring of volumes, and since we're porting a lot of stateful apps to kubernetes we just modified the default starter to include that capability.

Of course it would be nice to not have to maintain a bunch of different virtually identical templates.

Pulumi looks interesting but unfortunately seems to insist on vendor lock-in (see the jerk-around on [https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi/pull/2697](https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi/pull/2697)). So I'm looking forward to the AWS CDK ([https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/](https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/)) maturing a bit.

<comment><USER5> As someone attempting to port a docker-compose application to a Helm chart I'd love to hear more about the resources you used. As someone working with a very simple application I've found the processes to be more difficult than I anticipated.

<comment><USER4> Kubernetes will be far more complex than docker compose. It'll let you do much, much more also.

Some potentially useful tips:

* One docker container usually maps to one pod, which is created by a deployment. You can put multiple containers in a single pod, but this couples them together tightly.

* Use services to assign hostnames to pods

* Have pods communicate to each other using the service names. This works the same as putting them in the same docker network.

* Volumes depend on your cloud provider or if you're running on bare metal. In the cloud it's easy, you just request one and it gets created on demand and backed by a cloud disk.

* If you're using volumes, you probably want to use the Recreate updatePolicy for your deployment. This will ensure the old pod is shutdown before creating a new one. Which is necessary to work with block volumes.

When using helm start with a `helm create CHARTNAME` and take a look at what it generated for you. You'll get some heavily templated yaml that if you're lucky you will barely have to touch.

But it's best to go through these tutorials and learn how to use the basic building blocks of kubernetes directly: [https://kubernetes.io/docs/tutorials/kubernetes- basics/](https://kubernetes.io/docs/tutorials/kubernetes-basics/)

Once you're familiar with what a Deployment, Service, Ingress and PersistentVolumeClaim are you can use helm to template this for you where necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Super cool to see these sorts of tools. They're great for learning the kube API.

For production-y things however, some meta-config language that allows deterministic templateing would be a huge improvement. It allows you to make sweeping/uniform infrastructure changes from a single library or tool change.

Kubecfg is a good example of the basics one could implement [0] although it's examples aren't as fully fledged and organized as they could be.

[0] - [https://github.com/bitnami/kubecfg/blob/master/examples/gues...](https://github.com/bitnami/kubecfg/blob/master/examples/guestbook.jsonnet)

<comment><USER7> heard good things about [https://dhall-lang.org/#](https://dhall-lang.org/#)

<comment><USER8> I've used Dhall in production, pushed it fairly hard and can say with utmost certainty it's be an absolute pleasure. We use it as our application configuration format and derive fairly intricate Kubernetes resources from our app config.

Although it is still in it's early days, it still is excellent to use and will only get better with additional tooling.

<comment><USER9> How does it differ from the CDK/CDK8s/terraform-cdk?

<comment><USER8> CDK uses existing fully featured programming languages that can preform side effecting actions thus lacking reproducibility and that are may not terminate. Dhall is a total language, meaning it will always terminate and a pure language, meaning that a function given an input will always yield the same output. That makes the output extremely predictable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We're using Pulumi [https://www.pulumi.com/](https://www.pulumi.com/) to do our K8 configuration.

We can use TypeScript interfaces (which give us nice ide code completion) to define our yaml.

we can then create functions where we would normally duplicate Yaml. Really nice. [https://www.pulumi.com/kubernetes/](https://www.pulumi.com/kubernetes/)

<comment><USER11> Are you not worried about people writing arbitrary code to do stuff? I've been burnt before where devs used Turing complete languages (python in my case) to generate configs in probably the most convoluted and complicated manner possible. It was impossible to debug and understand, there were side-effects literally everywhere. It was everything you'd imagine from a normal bit of bad code, but it also happened to spin up hardware.

<comment><USER12> As long as the code is generating something like configs, you can write guard rail sanity check tests against the output, or apply linters, etc.

<comment><USER11> But now you're writing code to generate config and code to verify your configs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We built this internally to test that the UI we built for Kubernetes deployments was producing the expected YAML. Thought it would be useful to share.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for sharing this useful resource!

Paul, as an aside, we absolutely love how feature packed Octopus is nowadays. We have been using it since 2.0, and I don't think we will ever give it up. Thanks for making one of the best tools we use a daily basis!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't know how to feel about Kubernetes configuration apparently being so complicated that you need a generator for it, instead of just having the docs and your IDE open in split screen like with Docker Compose.

That said, this still looks cool. I just hope we won't need a Kubernetes configuration generator generator anytime soon.

<comment><USER15> Its not complicated, which makes it easy to generate. No reason not to make things easier to work with if you can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Would be nice to have a linter or something that you know is best practice. Eg if you check your yaml and its more complex than it could be.

<comment><USER17> There are a number of such tools out there. Here's a short list. I'd be interested in any experiences people have had with them in largish production environments.

[https://www.kubeval.com/](https://www.kubeval.com/)

[https://github.com/zegl/kube-score](https://github.com/zegl/kube-score)

[https://stelligent.github.io/config- lint/#/](https://stelligent.github.io/config-lint/#/)

[https://github.com/cloud66-oss/copper](https://github.com/cloud66-oss/copper)

[https://www.conftest.dev/](https://www.conftest.dev/)

[https://github.com/FairwindsOps/polaris#cli](https://github.com/FairwindsOps/polaris#cli)

<comment><USER18> Hey, I'm the author of kube-score, and originally built the tool to support an organization using Kubernetes at a fairly large scale as measured in number of engineers, services, and Kubernetes clusters.

I'm obviously biased, but it's been hugely successful! kube-score is working very well out of the box, and there's only a handful of cases where the "ignore" annotation has been used to disable a check that's too strict for the particular use case.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> That looks super handy! It seems like it'd be possible to "port" to VSCode. Some other comments mention autocomplete in VSCode, but it'd be nifty to run something like this directly in the VSCode UI.

</comment><comment><USER20> We built a similar thing and used in our graphical k8s designer : [https://k8od.io/](https://k8od.io/).

</comment><comment><USER21> Ooooh nice! When I saw the title I was hoping this is what it would be. I'd dreamed of building something like this, but never had the time or the buy in.

Aside from making it easy to generate k8s manifests, this could also be a great learning tool. If you allowed this to generate multiple resources that are linked, it could be a great illustration of how different resources fit together.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is awesome. It is so easy to make mistakes when configuring your k8s services

</comment><comment><USER23> Awesome work for the deployment resource! Now do this for all the other native k8s types and popular custom resources. :)

</comment><comment><USER24> It would be nice if the tool could "import" an existing YAML and show the resulting configuration in the GUI.

</comment><comment><USER25> Awesome! Was waiting for someone to build it :-)

</comment><comment><USER26> This is great, thank you!

</comment><comment><USER27> Looks very useful. In my opinion the configuration format should have been built like this from the get go.

Clear schema (like TypeScript interfaces or something similar) which allows generating an UI.

<comment><USER28> All of the standard Kubernetes resource definitions have a schema [1] [2] which is already used to, for instance, generate Go code [3] and documentation [4].

[1] - [https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/kubernetes- api/...](https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/kubernetes-api/#api- specification)

[2] - [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/release-1.19/a...](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/release-1.19/api/openapi- spec/swagger.json)

[3] - [https://godoc.org/k8s.io/client- go/kubernetes/typed/core/v1](https://godoc.org/k8s.io/client- go/kubernetes/typed/core/v1)

[4] - [https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/generated/kubernetes- ap...](https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/generated/kubernetes-api/v1.19/)

<comment><USER27> Of course there is schema at some level, but it feels like it's not utilized. This UI seems like very good use of schema. Another would be if I open up an VSCode, there should be a way to autocomplete / or give error squiggles if I write something wrong, in realtime.

<comment><USER28> Right, but that's not as much of a Kubernetes issue as a VSCode issue. Everything's there for you to write something like this for your text editor, open source code doesn't grow on trees :).

<comment><USER27> My point being if k8s configuration was developed UI centrically, this problem would not exist in the first place. Because there would be official K8s GUI for configuration, one would not hunt and beg bits and pieces of docs every time editing a config file.

As a side note, usually the schema languages fail at some point, thus I referred to TypeScript interfaces, which are very flexible way to write validation.

There is already a schema support for JSON validation in VSCode, one can use it using `{ "$schema" : "[https://example.com/url/toschema"](https://example.com/url/toschema") }` but it uses JSON Schema format, which I think is not accurate enough in edge cases for UI generation.

<comment><USER29> If it was developed UI-centric, it would have failed much earlier to do anything useful.

The real power of Kubernetes is that it has very simple basic model that allows building complex constructs out of simple pieces, and in fact basic help (which is even used for UI in _kubectl explain_.

All the bits for good UI support are there.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Closer look at Apple's innovations - MacBook Air, Time Capsule - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/17/BUARUGJR1.DTL

<comment><USER2> I agree that Time Capsule is the real and greatest innovation of this Macworld. Backup of portables was always tricky, because a wire had to be connected first. Thus it was forgotten most of the time.

For the MacBook air, it looks nice, no doubt, but it is either dependend on another machine (optical drive) or needs a table full of accessories (optical drive, usb hub). We already left this behind 10 years ago, didn't we? Anyone who wants back a table full of cables and clutter?</comment>


Ask HN: Better approaches to finding dev jobs that don't require a degree? - <AUTHOR> At the moment I'm just opening each ad in turn and scrolling to the point where they list requirements to look, but it's quite tedious and I feel like someone must have solved this problem already - either with a dedicated tool/site or with a magic search term that makes it easier to filter them out.<p>Edit: Extra detail I wasn't sure would be relevant - I am looking in the general London area. Have ~1 year professional experience as a frontend developer but would ideally like to transition to backend development if I can (have some hobby/side-project experience in other things and have programmed small projects for eightish years on and off). <comment><USER2> Ignore the requirements and apply anyway, especially if you're applying to smaller companies. If you're a good candidate they _will_ break their own rules.

<comment> Pete-Codes I've found this as well. I used to never apply to jobs if I didn't meet every criteria and then I just realised, well what do I have to lose by applying?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How much experience do you have? I have always assumed that when a job ad lists a CS degree as a requirement that there's an implicit 'or equivalent experience' clause that applies. I don't have a degree of any kind and I don't think I have ever been asked. Maybe it's different over here (in the UK), though.

<comment><AUTHOR> ~1 year of experience. I am also in the UK fwiw, probably should have put that in the OP.

<comment><USER3> I started out about 25 years ago and I suppose all I can do is to reiterate that nobody has ever asked if I have a degree. I don't really have a good handle on what the IT job market is like for people who are less experienced, TBH, so whether that information is actually useful or not I don't know. I still think it's worth applying anyway. I have worked in places where job ads have gone out for the same role I was already doing and after reading those ads I would have come to the conclusion that I was not qualified to apply. Basically my take is that people love to load those ads up so that they look impressive. When I interview what I want to know about a candidate is: are they smart and can they get stuff done? Anything else is secondary, really.

Location is probably a factor too. I am based near London and there are a _lot_ of dev jobs around here. If you are regional then that may not be the case.

<comment><USER4> Fwiw, degrees were rarer in the software candidate pool 25 years ago, and become increasingly irrelevant as your career progresses. Once you hit about 5 years of experience, the amount of attention anyone pays to it nosedives.

These days, getting those first five years is harder, though. Because of a combination of a glut of juniors on the market plus a culture where it's increasingly common for employees to stay only a year or so, which makes it less worthwhile for a company to invest in training juniors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't have a degree, most of the jobs I've had have required one. Usually if I'm strong in one or two of the requirements, I'll apply and hope for the best. It's really a numbers game anyway.

</comment><comment> Pete-Codes Hey man, I'm working on a solution to this! It is annoying to go through a job description and the very last mine is 'Must Have CS Degree.'

You definitely don't need a degree these days. You can check out some folk that are doing great without one: https//www.nocsdegree.com

</comment><comment><USER6> Most tech jobs don't require a degree, even if they say they want one. I'd apply anyway if you think you can do the job.</comment>


The math behind a neat calculator trick - <AUTHOR> http://divisbyzero.com/2010/02/17/the-math-behind-a-neat-calculator-trick/

<comment><USER2> If you want to work it out yourself first here is the trick. Set calculator to degree mode, enter a bunch of fives (5555 or 55555555), take the reciprocal, take the sin, note similarity to pi. Very fun article.

</comment><comment><USER3> While the trick is quite nice, I personally just press the "PI" button...

</comment><comment><USER4> Calc's are funny.

Try 12345679 * 9x (where x < 10)

<comment><USER5> So what will happen? (tried on all my calc's and they gave the same result as <http://www.google.com/search?q=12345679+*+92>, which I think it's correct).

<comment><USER6> Try 123456789 * 9 * 2.

<comment><USER5> So what result should I be expecting? I'm getting a correct result on my Sharp EL-506W

<comment><USER7> 12345679 * 9 * x where x is a single digit gives you nine copies of x.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is how to get e using a calculator:

sinh(1) + cosh(1)

</comment><comment><USER9> pi / 180 = 0.01745 (a value commonly used for degree<->radian conversion). 1 / 180 = 0.0055555. That's the connection between the "magic" constants used in this trick.

It brings an older, simpler, not nearly as interesting calculator "trick" to mind: 11111111 * 11111111.

<comment><USER10> _It brings an older, simpler, not nearly as interesting calculator "trick" to mind:_ 11111111 * 11111111.

      gnuplot> pr 11111111 * 11111111
      -2047269199

:-). For the intended result, people can put a '.' after one of the numbers to make it a double, or use a better calculator like bc or Python.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Much too highbrow for me.

39103 * 136

Then turn your calculator upside down and read the result.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sure, but can anyone explain 5318008?

<comment><USER13> Wow, I can't believe this made it to the top of Hacker News. Tranformation to Reddit complete!

<comment><USER14> Oh no.</comment></comment></comment>


Turning windows into powerplants - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/transparent-solar-windows-0415.html <comment><AUTHOR> What would be really interesting is if you could tune how much IR (edit: near- IR, actually) light goes through, and how much gets absorbed... that way you get solar heating when needed.

Edit: thinking more about it, why not have the whole visible spectrum be tunable, so that you can create window blinds any time you want them, and increase energy production in the process?

<comment><USER2> First off, normal glass also blocks IR light (which is a good thing) when the outside produces more IR light you want to cool the inside, and when it's producing less you want to heat the inside.

Anyway, the energy from sunlight is for the most part visible light so you can't really use most of the energy without also blocking visible light. The best option is automatic shades which make the outside look dimmer but don't totally block the view.

<comment><AUTHOR> The journal article linked to in the article ([http://apl.aip.org/resource/1/applab/v98/i11/p113305_s1?bypa...](http://apl.aip.org/resource/1/applab/v98/i11/p113305_s1?bypassSSO=1)) mentions near-IR absorption.

<comment><USER2> It's an interesting idea, I am simply mentioning the practical limitations.

At this point it's a question of how cheaply they can scale it up and how much you can improve the efficiency. Looking at some of their numbers they block ~30+% of the light to gain ~1.3% of the energy you are better off with smaller windows and a high efficiency solar cell around the window. AKA 10% smaller windows block 10% of the light + a 20% efficient solar cell = 2% efficiency. Granted, there is probably a market even in it's current state.

<comment><USER3> I think the news article exaggerates the purpose of the device described in the actual paper. It isn't intended as a competitor for opaque power generation cells. The idea is that, since you already need an anti-reflective coating to block IR light, it might as well be a coating that can scavenge a bit of the incident power instead of sending it all back into space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems a bit weird. They claim that they think they will reach an efficiency of 12%, like normal solar cells, but that's of course neglecting the fact that only a fraction (max half) of the sunlight is in the IR. So the amount of energy you'd get is still only half (not that that is insignificant).

<comment><USER5> If that's true then regular solar cells only get a shot a half the energy too. So it doesn't seem so weird to me.

More weird to me, after spending some time in the business, is all these solutions which only require "some engineering" are perpetually around the corner. People, stop taking "some engineering" or granted! :)

<comment><USER4> Well, it depends on what you mean by efficiency. I would say that if I say "I have these solar cells that take sunlight and create electricity with 12% efficiency", I would expect that I get 12% of the total insolation in electricity. If I instead say "these solar cells take infrared sunlight and create electricity with 12% efficiency", then I expect it to be 12% of the _infrared_ sunlight, not 12% of the total sunlight. It depends on what the hypothetical "fully efficient" case is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Besides of windows, one of the first real-world applications of this technology might be in our smartphones in order to gain in battery life. That's what WYSIPS ( <http://www.wysips.com/> ) has planned to do with their similar technology. And they seem a bit ahead.

</comment><comment><USER7> I find this fascinating. Slightly off topic, but do you think we'll see in 10-20 years most new buildings generating a significant % of their energy independently (their own solar, geothermal, waste re-use)?

<comment><USER8> In Germany, Zero-Energy Building is already popular: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_building>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I stopped reading when they said it is only 1.7% efficient but expect it to get up to 12%. That's almost an order of magnitude! It seems unlikely that their prototypes are so bad that they can get an order of magnitude improvement easily. And if it takes years of work to get to 12%, well, everybody else is claiming great performance in the nebulous future, too.

<comment><USER10> Considering that you currently get 0%, that's not bad. If the cost is low enough and people could reduce they're electric bill by a small amount why not dual-purpose your windows? It might even pay for the upgrade over ten years.</comment></comment>


Web 3.0 Will Be About Reducing the Noise - And Twhirl Isn't Helping - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/17/web-30-will-be-about-reducing-the-noise%e2%80%94and-twhirl-isnt-helping/

<comment><USER2> Who has a serious problem with being overloaded with Twitter traffic, Facebook invites and FriendFeed events? TC "journalists", other Valley denizens, and basically the existing Web 2.0 in-crowd. Is this a problem that real, ordinary people actually face when they try to use the Internet? I'm not convinced.

However, the broader point -- as the web matures, there will be a continual increase in the number of information sources, and therefore a need better tools to separate the signal from the noise -- is not novel; people have been remarking on this for years.

Sometimes I think a reasonable heuristic to reduce noise is to dismiss out of hand anything that begins with "Web 3.0 will be about ...".

<comment><USER3> My extended family has an email list. The articles and other links that people forward are already too much to keep up with, mixed in with personal life updates. I think the problem described in this article is not technology- specific, although twitter certainly amplifies it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cool! My site is now officially Web 3.0

<http://ourdoings.com/2008-04-17>

</comment><comment><USER4> It's good to know that _someone_ knows the future for sure.</comment>


Why has Hacker News become so diluted by None hacker news? - <AUTHOR> Hacker News recently - really since 2016 has become so diluted with topics unrelated to hacking... Why do we continue to see posts from major news outlets that really have nothing to do with day to day hacking?   What can be done to bring things back to higher quality of content e.g. less news spam? <comment><USER2> We the hackers by design are curious beings. So, there is nothing that couldn't potentially entertain and engage our minds.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am new here but from what I understand the top stories are top because they were up voted by the members. This means the "problem" is not with the act of posting itself but with the act of up voting, which is reflective of the people active. That's democracy at work. The only way to fix it is the wrong way - discriminate and override, whatever those mean in this context.

</comment><comment><USER4> You sound angry and resentful. And seem to assume 'what you like' = 'high quality'. It sounds like you're just having a nice whine, don't really want solutions. But anyway:

1\. Well, you could make your own version that selects out the kind of stories _you_ think are quality and quietly censors the rest. I might prefer that version too.

2\. Or you could try changing the guidelines: "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

</comment><comment><USER5> Hacker News was like that before 2016 too.

</comment><comment><USER6> It was never about hacking. It was about startup things, and I'm very glad that this isn't very prominent anymore.

HN has never been better!

</comment><comment><USER7> I think this might be the "hackernews effect". As you go checking and reading HN content, they get less and less esoteric until you start think it became too mainstream.

</comment><comment><USER8> No idea, but for the few interesting topics that arise, I find it good to keep a pulse on the "zeitgeist". About 30% of the time. Would you consider contributing articles?

</comment><comment><USER9> I've noticed FireFox quantum pocket 'recommended stories' are frequently front page HN news spam these days.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think it's stuff that hackers like to read not stuff related to hacking.

</comment><comment><USER11> agreed... the worst part is accidentally clicking then the paywall... the culprits are clearly nytimes, wsj, washington post

<comment><USER12> Psst… archive.org is your friend.

<comment><USER13> Or you hacker :), Greasemonkey with 33 lines (including filter) and you newer see nytimes, wsj, washington, techcrunch and usual offenders again</comment></comment></comment>


Lean Startup Without the Startup - <AUTHOR> http://pohandbook.tumblr.com/post/124939364963/lean-startup-without-the-startup

<comment><USER2> It doesn't seem like there are informations you already don't know.

<comment><AUTHOR> What additional information could I add, that would make it interesting for you?</comment></comment>


Namedtuple in Python - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/rkshrksh/namedtuple-in-python-43mi <comment><USER2> I strongly dislike namedtuple. It's such an attractive nuisance. So many people use it (pre-Python 3.7's data classes) as a lightweight mechanism for class creation.

But doing that causes it to inherit tuple behavior even when that's inappropriate for light-weight classes. Consider the example here:

      >>> from collections import namedtuple
      >>> Person = namedtuple("Person", "name age sex")
      >>> person1 = Person("Rakesh", 24, "male")

Because it's a tuple, people can extract the fields like this:

      name, age, sex = person1

or

      sex = person1[-1]

Now, later on you add a new field for "title". It seems like the following should work:

      >>> Person = namedtuple("Person", "name age sex title")

However, it will break many places which used tuple destructuring/unpacking to access the fields.

In essence, when you used namedtuple, you implicitly make some API promises that you probably didn't mean to make.</comment>


How Venezuela went from a rich democracy to a collapsing dictatorship - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/world/2017/9/19/16189742/venezuela-maduro-dictator-chavez-collapse <comment><USER2> I thought this paragraph was the most enlightening:

 _Chávez was an innovator in how he spent money, but he did little to improve how Venezuela actually makes money. He paid no attention to diversifying the economy or investing in domestic production outside of the oil sector. The country relies on imports for many of its most basic goods and services, include food and medicine._

You could probably put the greatest economic minds in the world in charge of a big country like Venezuela and they would still fail to diversify the economy.

Markets are necessary for successful diversification - avoiding shortages and economic collapses when key industries suffer downturns.

I'd say social democracies in Europe have shown pretty conclusively that the way to fund broad social programs to help the poor and middle class is via taxation of market economies. Let a healthy private sector self-organize the production of the economy, and let taxes pay for social programs.

<comment><USER3> And America is showing that if you don't tax wealth enough the inequality causes instability.

<comment><USER4> Not disagreeing, just curious. How much taxation is appropriate for the wealthy? When explicitly does the label of wealthy apply?

<comment><USER3> Who knows. I'm sure there are many economics papers addressing the question. But it's somewhere before you get to the historic inequality levels of today [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GINIALLRF](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GINIALLRF)

<comment><USER5> To be fair, inequality levels were comparable in 1929, which falls outsize of the scope of that chart. Still historic by US standards, but not unprecedented.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Venezuela is simply suffering one of the worst cases of Dutch Disease in the world. The oil prices don't keep up with the spending. With a destroyed economy there is more opportunity for a dramatic system change.

This happened before in Venezuela in the 80s/90s and eventually led to Chavéz getting into power.

<comment><USER7> If their economy wasn't centrally planned and controlled by the government, it would be more resilient

<comment><USER8> This same thing happened under a more liberal capitalist government before. That's literally how Chavez got into power. The biggest difference between then and now is the severity of the oil price drop. An exacerbating factor is that the same forces that tried to coup Chavez in 2002 are of course still politically active and, rationally given their interests, using their economic connections to exacerbate the economic collapse through various means. The United States recently freezed some Venezuelan government finances which is obviously intended to further destabilize the government.

Venezuela is a shitshow, to put it bluntly. But the shallow analyses which focus purely on ideology instead of the physical reality on the ground is asinine, bordering on propaganda (Vox tends to swing randomly between center- left progressivism and center-right neoliberalism). Is the government of Venezuela incompetent? Probably as incompetent as most. Are they dealing with an unprecedented economic collapse caused by structural factors? Yes. On the other hand, most people don't actually know how the Venezuelan economy is structured. They just know "socialism bad" and "capitalism good". It's tiresome because the same structural deficiencies at play in their economy _today_ was there decades ago, when they weren't "socialist".

It should be noted what happens to countries whose economies collapse because their place in the world economy no longer exists and then seek to renormalize via the accepted capitalist channels (like the IMF and the like). The entire country gets sold off to foreign interests and they spend the rest of their decades financing a debt they can never pay off.

As for the repressiveness of the Venezuelan state, it's not surprising. The violence of a state is directly proportional to how threatened it feels. When a state is failing, it is going to be violent. Cf. Spain and Catalonia at the moment.

<comment><USER9> A quick refresher for my liberal friends,

Oil Prices in 2012: [https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=9530](https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=9530)

Food Shortages in Venezuela in 2012 Source from NYT:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/21/world/americas/venezuela-f...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/21/world/americas/venezuela- faces-shortages-in-grocery-staples.html?mcubz=3)

<comment><USER7> They closed import/export for the private sector. Only federal government handles it. Which led to export just oil (inefficiently if I may add), so when priced collapsed they had to decide if pay debt and face hunger, or fight hunger and face a financial default. Guess which one they decided?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Venezuela failed because of the lack of a free market. Almost all economic activity was by the government, there were price controls on everything. It turns out the market is much more efficient in managing resources than any one organisation.

IOW, in case it's not clear, Venezuela failed because of socialism. It's hilarious to see all these long winded explanations that refuse to name the well known philosophy that has repeatedly led countries to the same place. There is no analysis needed. It has been analysed a hundred times already in history.

Suppose I fell off from a hundred story building and died. Now imagine newspaper articles going into gravitational theory and saying that the cause of death was a high speed impact with the ground, which was worsened because it was concrete. That would be stupid. The well known fact is that I died because I fell from a high place. You don't need an analysis for that. It's obvious. Once a phenomenon has been explained and analysed well enough, it can just be named and you need not go into a lot of details and develop your own theory. You can just reuse the name and everybody understands.

</comment><comment><USER11> Declining oil prices and US sanctions.

</comment><comment><USER12> I hope Trump doesn't read this article as a how-to guide.

<comment><USER10> I think that Trump is the last person to look at socialism as a manual. That man maybe one of the most capitalistic person in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Taking the long view, the US and its interventionism is to blame for a lot.

[https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/10112](https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/10112)

ps. Here is decent doc by John Pilger synopsising the US's history of interventionism. (Starts at about 38 mins, before that is some stuff from Venezeula from 2007)

[https://vimeo.com/16724719](https://vimeo.com/16724719)</comment>


What SMART Stats Tell Us About Hard Drives - <AUTHOR> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-smart-stats-indicate-hard-drive-failures/ <comment><USER2> Ten years ago when I was I trying to learn how to "program", I wrote this bash script (to be added into /etc/cron.daily) that dumps a few smart stats that are normally 0 or slow changing, diffs it with the copy from the previous run, and if anything is different (and cron in configured right) it will email you the diff. Every linux machine I touch gets this file dropped onto it. I've replaced many hard drives because of it

        #!/bin/bash

        smartctl -a /dev/sda > /root/smartStates
        grep Reallocated_Sector_Ct /root/smartStates > /root/stats
        grep Current_Pending_Sector /root/smartStates >> /root/stats
        grep Offline_Uncorrectable /root/smartStates >> /root/stats
        grep UDMA_CRC_Error_Count /root/smartStates >> /root/stats

        touch /root/statsOld
        cmp /root/stats /root/statsOld
        result=$?

        if [[ $result -ne "1" && $result -ne "0" ]]
          then
        	echo "Something went wrong"
        	exit -1
        fi

        if [[ $result -eq "1" ]]
          then
        	echo "Files are different\n"
        	cat /root/stats
        fi

        mv /root/stats /root/statsOld
        rm /root/smartStates

<comment><USER3> (Warning pedantic script review)

Add a "set -e" to catch errors. Say if the disk can't be read or file can't be written.

Why reuse the same temp file? Make a new one with mktemp and auto clean it via an exit trap. As it's written this isn't concurrently safe.

Exiting -1 on error? Don't use negatives.

Wrap it all in a main() function and use locals instead of global vars.

<comment><USER4> It's just a small bash script, and one that's apparently worked well for 10 years. Rewriting it to J2EE standards would just be a waste of time; the best outcome is that it still works the same, and the other outcome is that you introduced a new bug refactoring it.

<comment><USER3> > It's just a small bash script, and one that's apparently worked well for 10 > years. Rewriting it to J2EE standards would just be a waste of time; the > best outcome is that it still works the same, and the other outcome is that > you introduced a new bug refactoring it.

I don't see how following best practices for bash scripting (or really shell scripting in general) can be compared to J2EE standards.

Seek quality in all your scripting so it becomes the norm. Otherwise you'll end up having crap like that in something mission critical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> SMART is a fantastic exercise in sensitivity and specificity. As backblaze is showing with this data, SMART stats have poor sensitivity, but what's much worse for those who run big fleets of drives is their poor specificity. Lots of healthy drives are reported unhealthy by SMART. If I'm running a gold- plated database server, that doesn't matter. A couple of extra planned drive replacements is a small price to pay for avoiding unplanned failures. If I'm running a huge drive cluster, it's much, much more expensive.

Take Backblaze's 0.01% for a group of four failures. That's replacing an extra 100 drives per million, at random, and only getting the benefit of correctly predicting failures 10.4% of the time.

This is great data to have.

<comment><USER6> Thresholds are often useful with these kinds of stats. Aka a drive moving one sector might mean nothing, but moving 30 in a week could be great predictor. Further they only have 70k drives across a range of product lines so what predicts drive X failing very well might say little about drive Y.

PS: Rememebr all RAM gets bit flit errors over time. Which is one of the reasons rebooting is often so useful, but also means one off errors are often meaningless.

<comment><USER7> ECC ram will either correct the error or can raise a non maskable interrupt if it can't be corrected.

<comment><USER6> ECC vastly lowers, but does not remove this problem. You can for example get bit flip errors while doing the checksum.

As a personal user it's a non issue but scale things to ~70k devices and you get ~1.7 million device hours per day.

<comment><USER7> Fair enough. Your original comment did not make this distinction.

I dug and found [https://www.fiala.me/pubs/papers/sc12-redmpi.pdf](https://www.fiala.me/pubs/papers/sc12-redmpi.pdf) the title of which is "Detection and Correction of Silent Data Corruption for Large-Scale High-Performance Computing."

They state that for a cray there was a double bit flip about 1x/day for 75k modules. To (probably incorrectly) extrapolate, if you have a server with 16 modules that would be equivalent to a single double failure about once every 13 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Might be a good time to plug my little baby - [https://diskovery.io](https://diskovery.io)

If you want to have a quick, but in-depth look at your drives, it'll give you lots of data, including the SMART table interpreted in a vendor-specific way. It also understands some RAID setups, and more support for this is upcoming. Windows only, at the moment.

To explain a bit of a context - SMART data comprises a set of attributes and each attribute has a value, a threshold and a raw value. Values are opaque 8-bit somethings that are only meant to be compared to thresholds. When they fall under then, then it may indicate a problem. They aren't really interesting. What's interesting is the "raw" values, but as the name implies, they are vendor-specific and require decoding. Some vendors publish the specs, but most don't. Specs that _are_ published are often incomplete or plain wrong. So there's a LOT of reverse engineering and guesswork involved, which makes writing a SMART tool both frustrating and interesting at the same time. But if you need just the "dying / healthy" indicator, it's a very easy thing to extract from a drive.

<comment><USER9> Has anyone ported your work to Linux or MacOS? I guess not since iIt looks like it would be very OS specific. It looks like an incredible tool.

<comment><USER8> It is indeed pretty OS specific.

Not the SMART part, but how you talk to the drives and controllers and how storage is generally sliced into partitions, volumes, etc. Windows has a fairly comprehensive version of Software RAID, but in true Microsoft fashion they do things ass-backwards in more than one place. For example, striped volumes (RAID 0) will use only a part of a partition for each stripe, but to learn that you'd have to talk to Virtual Disk Service rather than regular Disk/Volume management API. This is, basically, as unportable as it gets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow. They provide all of the raw log data from the drives[0]. Looks like an interesting source of data for a Kaggle competition.

[0][https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test- data.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> Isn't the reverse stat more interesting? What percentage of drives reporting an error fail within X weeks? I don't want to know how many failed drives had errors, I want to know how many errored drives fail. (A more accurate title might be "What failed drives tell us about SMART stats".)

</comment><comment><USER12> Small nitpicking here, but the moment it popup a modal dialog asking me to enter my email for some kind of subscription I simply close the tab. I do this since three months ago for any unknown website I visit.

Such nuisance for what might be a good read.

<comment><USER13> Shame...you could've just dismissed the popup and not missed out on an interesting article, it's same energy expended but with a nett gain instead of your loss. A small price to pay for BackBlaze willing to share interesting stuff like this and hardly the most egregious examples of this type of thing. Also these types of complaints have been done to death here over the years and are really, really tedious. Please complain to BackBlaze instead of trying to take this thread off-topic.

<comment><USER12> First of all, I was on a public transport when I click on that link, my 'consuming' experience already not optimal from the point of view of readership. Many technical people, like I do, are busy people with short tolerance on things that detract from what I'm supposed to read or comprehend. Unless I can just read right there right away, I'm just going to skip to the next tab.

Secondly, I noticed that this is a trend right now; where you get to a page and after a few seconds a dialog just thrown into your face with little disregard to you (the reader) is trying to concentrate to read the content. To me that is rude, you don't go to a bookstore while reading the table of content a salesman grab that book from you and tell you "would you like me to take your email address so that we can notify you when we have new books available?" without wondering what kind of establishment that allow this kind of behavior.

Third, I got the link from HN it was easier for me to go back to this tab, login, hit reply than registering a disqus account and then enter a comment there.

With that said, I dont want to _blog_ about this on Medium or whatever, I dont need clicks by moaning about every little things, this is my way of protesting on what I perceive is happening right now and that's why I start with "small nitpicking".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As a data scientist, I would be curious to see the application of machine learning to this problem. I'd start with naive Bayes, logistic regression and SVM.

@blackblaze I'm pretty sure you can automatize a large portion of your investigation that way.

</comment><comment><USER15> First these counters vary in meaning and support by vendor/model, and it would be nice if someone were to come along and mandate further standardized ones. Instead you have to tune everything for each drive model. In this regard SCSI is a little better (more on that later).

Second, timeouts and uncorrectable errors are generally being reported to the controller as part of normal operation. So having SMART tracking them is just a bonus. Either of those two conditions is usually sufficient to kick a drive out of a functional RAID array because those are data loss events. Most drives have layers and layers of ECC, so in order to get an uncorrectable error a lot of bits need to be flipped in the target sector. For that to happen it likely indicates there is something mechanical going on which is likely to affect adjacent tracks/sectors. Of course if you never scrub your drives its possible bitrot accumulates on a perfectly functional device until sectors aren't recoverable.

In my previous life I found it much more interesting to track the rate of soft error counts during scrub operations. Particularly, in larger arrays because sometimes a drive would start getting slower (which is frequently caused by read retries in the drive itself or problems tracking the embedded servo/etc) and the correctable error counts would start to steadily rise followed by actual timeouts/uncorrectable errors. Of course these days, it seems most drives won't show the correctable error counts because it would freak people out. Instead you have to infer it from seek errors and relocated sector counts. Although, it might now be considered a SAS/SATA differentiator. SCSI has standardized log pages with more detailed information. (random google hit [http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals/scsi...](http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals/scsi/100293068a.pdf) page 238) Note the errors are categorized as corrected without delay, with substantial delay, and corrected on a retry. By comparison the SMART data isn't particularly "smart".

</comment><comment><USER16> Google made a study in 2007 that stated: "SMART models are more useful in predicting trends for large aggregate populations than for individual components."

[http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER17> This is good info to know, helps me as a sysadmin to be confident in making decisions for my customers and their data. I regularly use a tool called Crystaldiskinfo to check the SMART stats of drives. Will pay more attention to the raw values in the future.

<comment><USER18> It's interesting that most people rely on the raw values, since the standard does not require them to be meaningful and depending on the vendor it could be anything.

I suspect this is because value, worst, threshold columns are kind of confusing to understand.

<comment><USER19> There aren't too many vendors for spinning disks, and if you have a lot of disks it doesn't take too long to see that the sector count metrics correspond to sectors. In my experience, bad sector count is a good predictor of future trouble, and running disks until they threw read errors (before we were running smart monitoring), they all had lots of bad sectors. That said, there's a threshold, getting to 100 slowly is probably ok, a thousand is probably not.

SSDs though, they just disappear from the bus when they fail; so I haven't been able to look at a dead one and see what looks like a useful predictor. I have seen some ssds reallocating a big block, which kills performance while its going on...

<comment><USER20> "SSDs though, they just disappear from the bus when they fail"

This isn't always true, and actually shouldn't ever be true - it's a particular failure mode you're seeing, and while it appears to be one common across a number of SSD controllers, it's still a pretty sorry fact that it happens.

All SSDs (at least all not-complete-rubbish ones) report some kind of flash/media wearout indicator via SMART, which isn't necessarily an imminent failure indicator (SSDs will generally continue to work long past the technical wearout point), but is a very strong indicator that you should replace it soon and should probably buy a better one next time.

SSDs do suffer from sector reallocations in the normal way, and the same kind of metric monitoring can be done. It's pretty vendor-specific as to what SMART attributes they report, but attributes like available reserved space, total flash writes, flash erase and flash write failure counts and so on are pretty common.

<comment><USER19> With thousands of sata SSDs, I've seen one fail in a traditional fashion (some sectors weren't readable, otherwise mostly fine) and the rest of the maybe hundred that failed would just disappear from the bus. I don't monitor the wear out indicators, but from occasional looking, we're never near a significant fraction of the wear capacity. I'm very happy not to have anymore spinning disks in production, because the ssds fail less often, it's just the failures are more annoying, because it's hard to have an orderly shutdown when disks disappear.

<comment><USER21> Funny how ~18 years later I still have compact flash devices plugged into IDE ports that have never failed. In fact, across a broad spectrum of applications and installs, I have never seen a working CF device fail in the field.

SSDs on the other hand ...

I use SSDs for caching (ZFS read cache and mirrored SLOGs) and I use them for mirrored boot devices in modern, production systems that should have a fast OS device.

But if I want a system to run forever ... if I am optimizing for longevity ... I use compact flash, even in 2016.

(yes, of course I set them to be read-only and disable swap)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This data should be put into smartmontools or a separate tool to give a simple good/bad rating as the actual values are somewhat meaningless w/o data.

<comment><USER23> Hmmm, I wonder if a crowdsourced data collection would be useful/securable?

Would you enable an option for smartmontools that sent all your drive SMART data to a cloud hosted db (with as little identifying information as possible) and tell it when you had a drive fail - in return for that same service alerting you with "best estimates" of your risks of drive failure?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> _Operational drives with one or more of our five SMART stats greater than zero – 4.2%_

This doesn't gel with the prior table, which shows that 4.8% of operation drives have non-zero SMART188 alone.

<comment><USER25> The data is close enough that it sounds like the sets share a good portion of common data, but that there are exclusive items in one or both sets.

I could easily see one set based on a different time, or another that missed a category of drives (EG one also counts drives from testing / non-production units).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Interesting, thanks for posting! Could you talk quickly about why it's interesting to predict drive failure? Is it to understand how many replacement drives you might need to order in the short term, or is there value beyond stock management of drives?

<comment><USER27> In a non-RAID context, for example NoSQL databases that keep 3 copies of chunks of data, knowing about a failure in advance means that you can abandon using that drive slowly, without it becoming an emergency.

<comment><USER28> If you have three replicas, who cares if one fails? Just wait for it to fail and rereplicate from the survivors.

<comment><USER27> Because there's a risk that another replica will fail. And because you can do the copying more slowly if the failure is predicted and not super-immediate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Someone should set up an AI startup for harddrive failure prediction.

</comment><comment><USER30> I get a tingling that Bayes theorem applied to these probabilities could lead to some insights. Might do this later if I find the ambition.

</comment><comment><USER31> > Perhaps one of our stat-geek readers will be able to tease out a conclusion > regarding power cycles.

I think it's obvious. If the drive has errors, this may cause or cause need for a reboot.

</comment><comment><USER32> interestingly not tracking 184 'End-TO-END ERROR', considered by couple of smart tools to be a failure of the drive.</comment>


The Real E-Publishing Story: It's Not the Millionaires, It's the Midlist - <AUTHOR> http://steamwords.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/the-real-e-publishing-story-its-not-the-millionaires-its-the-midlist/ <comment><USER2> For those of you who want some background on why big publishers have mostly abandoned the midlist, this article[1] by Kevin O'Donnell is a good summary. Short version: A Supreme Court ruling related to tax markdowns on slow-selling books made it too expensive for publishers to hold paper inventory of midlist books from year to year. On the other hand, since e-books don't create excess inventory, there are no tax penalties for Amazon (or Apple, or B&N, or whoever) to keep a midlist book "in print."

[1] <http://www.sfwa.org/bulletin/articles/thor.htm>

</comment><comment><USER3> I've lived this. I'm learning programming now, but LSAT prep is my field. Last year I wrote LSAT explanations which should earn me $15,000-$20,000 annually, and I havent even made a physical book on amazon yet.

No publisher would have touched that, but it's more than enough for me, given the one-time effort required.

In fact, the books that I'm writing explanations for are hardly publishable. Every LSAT student has one, but often bookstores don't stock them because it's such a niche market. But inventory is not an issue online.

Let a million niches bloom.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wholeheartedly agree. The same can be said of the music industry: the return of the middle class. Fewer people making it huge by 99% luck, more people creating art because they enjoy it, and actually being able to live off the proceeds.

<comment><USER5> However, if you look at the music industry, online music has become more of a means of marketing for the vast majority. I think most midtier musicians make money by touring and selling merch. (Which may be combined with teaching or day jobs.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Remove the inconvenient paper dongle and introduce pricing flexibility and things that previously were not profitable now are.

I'm all for this as long as it doesn't cause a descent into poorly made, ripoff, or other junk products flooding the market.

<comment><USER7> It very likely will; but then something else will come around that will help us review these stories, and it'll probably make money off advertisments (for books, even).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another great example of how finance mumbo-jumbo destroys industries.

So the publishing industry's balance sheet looks better because they carry no inventory. How is the publishing balance sheet going to look when the industry implodes?

<comment><USER4> > _"Another great example of how finance mumbo-jumbo destroys industries."_

Finance, the art of getting capital to where it can be utilized most efficiently, has created vast, vast, _vast_ amounts of wealth, everywhere it is practiced. Destroys industries? Please. It has created and bolstered more industry than anything you can name. It's the reason you own a car and a house. Finance is not a bad word.

<comment><USER9> You overstate your case. Finance is capital allocation not capital creation, car companies could just as easily operate by directly leasing the cars they made vs using 3rd party's to finance the transaction. Finance increases the market for things beyond who can directly afford them which drives up prices, see home housing markets around the world. However, on net it's still generally considered a good thing.

<comment><USER4> > _"car companies could just as easily operate by directly leasing the cars"_

...which is finance. So why don't they do that, if it's just as easy? And where does the money come from to front the cost of building the car that is to be leased? Because the lessee won't cover the cost for quite some time. Yep, finance.

I realize there's a populist movement, especially among the younger crowds that frequent the interwebs, that influences people to hate everything Wall Street. But I don't think people realize what a fascinating and, more importantly _fundamental_ , role finance has played in history. Present day Silicon Valley does not exist without it. It does, in fact, create capital.

<comment><USER9> _It does, in fact, create capital._ No, it allocates capital. VC's don't directly create capital they take money from investors, take their cut, invest the rest and then you get Silicon Valley. It might seem like a semantic argument, but what your suggesting would be the same thing as arguing that Walmart manufactures TV's. They are involved in the process, but a lot of bad policy shows up when people confuse bank balances with actual capital.

PS: 'So why don't they do that, if it's just as easy?'

A lot of car companies do that ex: <http://www.hondafinancialservices.com/>. Whenever they advertise 0% interest that's the car company handling the loan. However, car companies often resell these loans to third party's to get their capital back. There is a lot of capital out there that's looking for safe investments and repackaged loans fit the bill.

<comment><USER4> > _" It might seem like a semantic argument"_

I guess it is semantics:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_capital></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Add an API to your Web Service - <AUTHOR> http://particletree.com/features/how-to-add-an-api-to-your-web-service/ <comment><USER2> Great article - thanks for the link.</comment>


Mapping, Localization, and Self-Driving Vehicles [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5CZmlaMNCs#t=94

<comment><AUTHOR> Throws some good skepticism on the near-term timeframe estimates being thrown around for the advent of self-driving cars.

<comment><USER2> Indeed, but from the way Prof. Leonard explains these challenges, these are (primarily) problems that can be tackled by different teams at the same time. A bit like solving small puzzles that later make a bigger one. Then, most of the challenges seem to be on visual recognition... the cop says go on a red light, identify the cop, identify the hand signal, etc. I believe this will be sorted out relatively "fast". I think the biggest problem is human interaction, and the cross roads example is a great one. How it is eye contact with the other driver that determines what we do. In a world where 100% of traffic is not self-driving vehicles can be a bigger challenge.</comment></comment>