Astro Physicist figures out fastest boarding plan - <AUTHOR> http://overheadbin.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/08/30/7527894-physicist-figures-out-fastest-boarding-plan

<comment><USER2> The paper itself is here: <http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.5211></comment>


Show HN: Hacker News Detox - <AUTHOR> https://www.hndetox.com/hn-direct <comment><AUTHOR> For 2019, my focus is on making my life more efficient, and a big part of that involves reforming my computing habits. Among my worse habits is constantly checking Hacker News, since after all, this is the pulse of the industry.

Like most of you, I don't want to miss a single top story, and I don't want to check to Hacker News constantly. My solution was to build a jobs queue and program it to check Hacker News for me. Then, every morning and night, it would email me a list of the top stories.

The emails are designed to feel very familiar to the Hacker News experience. With the added the metadata page descriptions, it feels a lot like a newsfeed. I'm considering replacing these descriptions with ML summaries, and adding adding a preview image to it. What do you think?

Anyways, I've been really enjoying it and I hope you might too. Try it out and let me know what you think!</comment>


Accessibility: Buttons - <AUTHOR> https://macwright.org/2019/04/06/accessibility-buttons.html <comment><USER2> What I'm missing from the post is the difference between links and buttons and why it's important. When a screen reader user hears "link", he/she expects to be forwarded to another page (or anchor). A button on the other hand indicates an _action_ , e.g. a hamburger menu or a modal.

I would go for native buttons (and reset their styles) in most cases over trying to implement every part of the ARIA specs.</comment>


Show HN: I built an app that subscribed to all development newsletters - <AUTHOR> https://web.getcultivateapp.com <comment><USER2> cool idea! I kept trying to click on one of the tags hoping it will filter the list on articles with that tag only.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! That was the plan, coming soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How did you manage Unsubscribe links?

<comment><AUTHOR> After hours of testing on many newsletters, I managed to use combination of regex and email parsing to remove them. If I subscribe new sources, I might need to test again, but so far it works on all the newsletters I have subscribed.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What was your most productive (day|week|month|year) ever? - <AUTHOR> It could also be someone else's. What happened that day, and what techniques have you developed to try to recreate that day?<p>I'm asking because I've been more productive these past weeks since I completely blocked out social media on my machine and I put my phone in another room during work hours, and I should have done that years ago. :( <comment><USER3> The funny thing is that I knew the answer immediately upon reading the title. I got the flu (the actual flu) about 10 years ago, and was out of work for over a week. It was my very first staycation, and I didn't have any contact with anyone. During that time, even though as sick as I've ever been, I completed and released my first iOS game (a very zippy direct-to-OpenGL implementation) and added a substantial number of features to my desktop game engine.

It was amazing. I felt so alive. However, at this point, I could (somewhat tongue in cheek) credit this week with ultimately ruining my life and career. I became obsessed with recapturing that feeling, and with finding a way to support myself with my own work (as opposed to the company's work). I quit my job one year later and happily worked on my own stuff for the next 2 years. This began a pattern of living on the ramen budget, being a single hermit, only going to work when I'm broke, and quitting after a year or less. Disastrous. Why, as I write this, I haven't gone to work in over 2 years, and I'm broke again and looking for a job. I have unprofitable side-projects and repos out the wazoo though.

What makes me most productive is when I truly love what I'm working on.

<comment><USER4> Same here. Half a year ago I quit my job to start working on something I consider important (open access to academic articles), and it's been my most productive half-year ever. That said, I have set a deadline for myself for having to be able to fund my regular living expenses in six more months though, either by having obtained a grant to cover the remaining start-up costs, by working part-time given that I still believe I can make it self- funding if I spend more time on it, or give it up altogether and hopefully use the experience to find a more stable job doing something I consider important.

<comment><USER3> I encourage you to stick to these realistic plans. I have succumbed to bargaining with myself lately. I said, "If this project does not get X users or make Y dollars in Z time, I will get a job." Then, I said, "I will make a smaller-scoped thing that may have more mass-appeal, and if that fails, I will get a job." Then it was, "I will go all out trying to market these things, and if that fails, I will get a job." I made the decision to stop the foolishness and really start looking for a job full-time only yesterday.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the advice. I'm very aware of the inclination to start bargaining, although I'm not sure yet it that's enough to prevent it properly. To be fair, there's been some bargaining already, which I feel can't really be avoided given how some initial assumptions may be wrong. For example, I've observed that I've had retention problems after my first launching, so I'm currently switching things around a bit to see if I can lower that barrier to entry. Initially, I'd planned to have x users at this point, but I don't think it's that odd to try a few more small experiments to see whether there's still potential in it. I just hope that not being afraid to throw them out will be enough to stop in time.

However, I also know that especially the part where "I might start working part-time if I feel there's still potential in it" has a lot of wiggle-room for bargaining in terms of whether there's really potential. But then at least it'll just be a side project again, which will hopefully keep me grounded :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I had slacked off for a semester in university and got 0 study credits, where nominal study performance should have yielded 30 credits (EC). This worried me because some of those points were part of my freshmen year and the university had just instated a rule that students entering their third year without having completed their first year would be expelled (the p-in-2 rule) designed to get rid of slackers prevalent in the otherwise lenient European style university.

My best friend was also faced with a harsh deadline at the time, having to finish his bachelor degree before a certain date so we made a covenant to study at the library together this entire day, every day, for that quarter.

I made a crazy ambitious plan to complete exams for 9 courses, worth 45 EC in total. There was some low hanging fruit that I just had to read the course material for, but also some (for me) hard courses. I think 2 calculus courses, Algorithms Data structures and Complexity and a Discrete Mathematics I. Especially that last one was giving me a hard time, having failed the exam three times already even though most of my friends felt it was a fairly easy maths course.

I look back at those few months fondly. Although I was socially isolated, not going to parties not seeing any friends besides just that one, I grew closer to him and I felt good because we just were so productive.

Of those 9 courses I failed two, yielding 35 EC in just one quarter. I know there's geniuses out there that do that sort of thing on the regular, but for me just passing a single maths test was an achievement, let alone passing 6 more in the same week.

</comment><comment><USER6> During college I had a semester with 5 engineering classes and was the president of an engineering club. I didn't realize when signing up for classes, but all 5 courses had engineering projects worth 25-60% and still had final exams. I had no choice but to suck it up.

I started something I called "12 hours of productivity". It didn't matter what time I got started in the morning, but from then until 12 hours later I was being productive.

* I wouldn't get on reddit, Facebook, or similar sites.

* I could be doing class work, be in class, do club stuff, or study. I would eventually run out of club stuff. Even if I procrastinated with that, eventually I'd have to move on to school work.

* a few short breaks were included

My productivity soared, though I couldn't have done it for long term (years). It got me through the semester from hell though.

</comment><comment><USER7> I started planing my days around a 4 hour period where I am fully concentrated with no mail, meetings etc. I set myself goals for this period and do not care about the rest of the work day. Just get this 4 hours in and you're good. I work more than 4 hours a day, but most of the work is getting done in those 4 hours.

Consistency is key in life! With everything, working out, eating healthy, raising children.

<comment><USER8> I've been doing the same thing. Morning is my productive time of the day. I work from home, so before I take a shower I make a pot of coffee and then after shower I get on it.

If I can accomplish a couple (maybe only one) things in that four hour period in the morning I feel good.

I also like to go to the gym around 3 in the afternoon. The gym time gives me a little time to reflect and plan. And then after that I have a good 2 hours of "endorphin" rush to work some more before I start getting tired and relax, do some more planning, research (not implementation stuff) for tomorrow.

Eating healthy seems key too. I've never been a breakfast person, but I force myself to eat some protein and maybe some fruit so I'm not crashing (and then eating the wrong) thing mid-morning.

I've also got a 5 year which can drain the energy levels, so I need to plan so I can spend time with him at night.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, there's the day I knew I was a real programmer.

In a 24 period, I saved a customer's hundred thousand dollar sale by redoing a hand written assembly function synchronized between three cores. I ended up with something single core and 10,000x faster.

Before that day, I'd never touched assembly language, the customer's hardware, the processor family, the problem space, an oscilloscope, nor anything embedded outside an Arduino.

Story here, forgive the writing style: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14637859#14639134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14637859#14639134)

</comment><comment><USER10> > "We sat down one morning," recalls Steele. "I was at the keyboard, and he > was at my elbow," says Steele. "He was perfectly willing to let me type, but > he was also telling me what to type.

> The programming session lasted 10 hours. Throughout that entire time, Steele > says, neither he nor Stallman took a break or made any small talk. By the > end of the session, they had managed to hack the pretty print source code to > just under 100 lines. "My fingers were on the keyboard the whole time," > Steele recalls, "but it felt like both of our ideas were flowing onto the > screen. He told me what to type, and I typed it."

> The length of the session revealed itself when Steele finally left the AI > Lab. Standing outside the building at 545 Tech Square, he was surprised to > find himself surrounded by nighttime darkness. As a programmer, Steele was > used to marathon coding sessions. Still, something about this session was > different. Working with Stallman had forced Steele to block out all external > stimuli and focus his entire mental energies on the task at hand. Looking > back, Steele says he found the Stallman mind-meld both exhilarating and > scary at the same time. "My first thought afterward was: it was a great > experience, very intense, and that I never wanted to do it again in my > life."

> \- Guy Steele on a hacking session with RMS in the 1970s.

I always like this story. And I wish I had an experience like it.

<comment><USER8> A nice example of pair programming. I had never heard that story before.

</comment></comment><comment> EZ-E I grew up disliking coffee - and as such I never got to drink it

One day I decided to order a coffee while eating at McDonalds because I didn't feel like drinking soda and I wanted something different. I drank it, didn't sleep for 24 hours but got a massive amount of things done with a new found focus

Since then, I like coffee

<comment><USER11> I'm giving up coffee for lent, you just made me miss it a lot more :(

<comment><USER8> I'd like to give up coffee because I tend to crash from it, but it sure is hard to resist that nice rush you get in the morning from it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My recipe for constentration is to eliminate sources of distraction. Simple? Not so much. Anything can be a distraction today. This is what I do:

\- Delete Snapchat, Instagram, Messenger from phone

\- Disable notifications for all messaging apps (including badge count)

\- Keep Do Not Disturb (iOS) on a schedule during work hours

\- Disable all notifications on MacOS

\- Use software that distract less. For me this means removing every single button I don't need. Hide all the things!

\- Eliminate clutter on desks. I don't keep anything on my desk that is not related to the current task

Here is my favourite thing at the moment: set /ONE/ to do. To do lists are productivity killers for me, because I'm constantly looking and thinking ahead, instead of focusing the problem I am solving now.

In Visual Studio Code, for instance, I use the plugin `title`. This is very simple, it lets me set the title of the window. In the title of the window I write what I'm doing. For instance: "Clean up user model".

Edit: one more thing. Give your setup some love. If you're working on your computer all day, keep making your environment more friendly and relaxing. This can be software; customizing the colors to your liking, customizing keyboard-shortcuts; or it can be hardware such as a better chair or a stand for your monitors. I recently bought Ergotron HX Desk Dual Monitor Arm for my monitors, and it increases my happiness and thus my productivity.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you asked me this a decade ago I would have said 2003, when I was working 80 hour weeks. But looking back now, in terms of what I accomplished and produced, it was a lot less than I do now in terms of rate-of-production.

I'm writing this on an iPad Pro, which is my computing device for recreational things. I don't have social media. The niche sites/forums I belong to I can only access from this iPad or my phone. My workstations are for work only and Hacker News and other sites that I frequent are blocked. I disable notifications—no messages, no popups, no email—just work!

In terms of time spent during a week, I spend more time as a single father than I do as a software consultant. My time working is focused and productive but short. On days that I don't feel productive I tackle the low hanging fruit. On days that I am productive, I go for it.

Sounds like you're taking the right steps.

<comment><USER14> Do you work remotely ?

<comment><USER13> Yes.

<comment><USER14> Any tips? I know there is a large amount of tips on the internet. But I find it very helpful to talk to people who have done it themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Chemotherapy was accompanied with steroids (to help with sickness) which made me stay awake almost all day. Instead of taking more meds to help with sleep, I had many productive nights working on an iOS hobby project.

<comment><USER6> Probably not a system most people would voluntarily submit to, but I'm glad you made the best of things. Hope you're doing well now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I use [https://kanbanflow.com](https://kanbanflow.com) to manage my week.

Instead of classic Todo - Doing - Done, my board is divided into Todo - <USER2> - Tuesday - ... - Sunday - Done. The board contains both work-related and private tasks. If a new task comes up randomly during the day, I just add it to the board and immediately resume whatever I was doing. Since I've scheduled the new task for later, it's not occupying my mind anymore.

The app has a built-in pomodoro timer. I don't necessarily use it in a strict sense (100% deep work) but I don't do any non-work-related tasks when the timer is on, so it helps me fight procrastination and schedule my breaks.

I've blocked most sites that I identified as time-wasters. My phone is in my drawer on "silent" and I usually don't pick up the phone at all during my working hours.

I've noticed that one of the most important things for me is gaining momentum. If I work 2-3 pomodoros first thing in the morning, it's usually going to be a productive day overall, but if I start with procrastinating, the whole day often ends up not very productive. So I pay much attention to how I start the day.

On a not strictly work-related note, going to bed and waking up at the same time significantly improved my overall life satisfaction. During my last holidays, I took measurements how much sleep I naturally need (~7.5h) when there's no pressure to wake up early. Then I started taking care to always be in bed at a set time (11 p.m.) and get the right amount of sleep.

<comment><USER17> if you use kanbanflow the way you described, what is the difference with a calendar?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I once walked among London's canals and parks for 8 hours in a day and wrote a script I'd been meaning to write for years that visualised in ascii the degradation of server threads from log files.

Every time I got stuck, I stopped and walked again. I think I only did about 2 hours of 'work' that day, but it would have taken me weeks to do under normal circumstances and distractions. I slept like a log that night.

<comment><USER19> How did you stop to write code? Did you write your code in a notebook? On a smartphone? Or did you walk with a laptop in a bag that you would take out when needed?

<comment><USER18> The latter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash When I was in college I did a startup. It petered our but my schedule was excellent: Friday's were for girlfriend and social life; Saturday's were nonstop startup work, and Sundays were for me. I was also taking an obscene amount of credit hours, but I made sure to only deal with that during the week.

The key wasn't focusing on productivity, it's balance. When you feel like you're spending the right amount of time on the people you care about, the work you need to do, the work you want to do, and most importantly, yourself, the productivity will happen. Otherwise, your body is trying to tell you that something is off balance.

</comment><comment><USER20> 2012 when I started a business with a friend. We moved out of the city and into a small town in the mountains an hour away and lived off of our savings. I wrote more code that year than ever before and I wrote almost all of it from scratch, making my own crappy but perfectly suited framework. Because I wrote it all, I understood it all and productivity was phenomenal. We self organized without sprints, or stand ups, or any other processes, and we made some great stuff. Many a day was spent writing code and then mountain biking in the afternoon, some of it was bliss, some of it was horrible but overall a valuable experience.

</comment><comment><USER21> A semester during my undergraduate degree, my registrar account was allowed to sign up for a class after I made a case they should waive the pre-requisite for me. During my sign-up window, I was unable to enroll in the class before it was filled, but noticed I could sign up for any class without being flagged. I ended up taking the most difficult classes in my program all at once, forcing myself to work near 24/7, riding the wave of volatility with heavy consumption of substances. The final result was a firey explosion, but at least it happened the next semester and I was able to graduate early while mostly taking electives for my last semester.

This period of "productivity" taught me a lot. As a lot of folks here are already aware, it is a slow and difficult process to increase the workload one can handle. Temporary support from things like caffeine, sugar, alcohol or drugs can extend these periods making it easy, but over time the effect weakens as you become more familiar with the mental state, making the initial support a crutch. Years later when completing my masters, I found the urge to fall back on some of the habits incredibly appealing during the weeks when I felt stressed and wanted to go on "autopilot". If I look at the future productivity earned from the compound interest of staying up, angry and upset, but still working through the discomfort, then I have had nights that were 10x what that semester in college was, because those nights will yield 100s of hours in the future that I would otherwise not be able to work through.

</comment><comment><USER22> Spring of 2012. I ate a ketogenic diet and went to the gym (cardio) for half an hour daily. Lost weight, felt great and was able to breeze through studies.

Haven't been able to recreate it, as it was only possible due to being at university with a fairly light timetable and a very close gym.

</comment><comment><USER23> Contrary I think to most of the rest of the audience here, my most productive came when I was directly (in the same room) working with people on a specific project.

I find being surrounded by people working on different elements to bring something together much more motivating and productive than banishing all outside disturbances. This might be because marketing is less in need of "the zone" than programming, but frankly, having that direct accountability of working with other people on pulling a campaign together really gets me focused and firing at 100%.

When I'm doing that, I don't seem to get distracted by notifications, bloated software, my phone, Facebook, HN etc...

My most productive period where I was managing a campaign launch, but working with my peers. It skews a bit if you're either managing from atop or below, because when you're at the same level there's camaraderie that makes it just click (great colleagues being a requisite, of course).

[This isn't an extrovert/introvert point either, I'm the latter, and whilst this way of working is draining from that perspective, it seems to be highly productive for me.]

</comment><comment><USER24> In 2003 I worked on the same project and nothing else for about 70 hours a week for 3 months. In absolute terms, I'm a lot more productive now, but given the tools I was using at the time, it was by far the most productive period of my life so far.

Here's what I did:

* I went to a vacation rental * I had someone with me to handle non-code things who would leave me alone to work even though we were in the same 1BR apt * I had a tiny office with one entire wall being a window looking out over city, which was a wonderful combination of low local distraction combined with a broad distance full of things to occupy my surface attention while thinking * I ate only after work, by planning, so that I didn't think about meals or snacks for most of the working day

I did not turn off social media. Well, in those days it was a combo of slashdot and about 10 messaging systems; the problem with actually not checking messages is that I worry about what I'm missing, but if they're on (or I think they are...) and I'm not getting anything, then I don't think about them for hours on end.

</comment><comment><USER25> A 45-day off-the-grid vacation after several years of burnout. The result was Filter Forge 2.0, which included a lot of new systems (Lua scripting, HDR colors, ambient occlusion, non-seamless filters etc.)

The key was to get off the grid, shed all responsibilities, take long walks in the woods, avoid dopamine loops, and let my mind wander without purpose.

<comment><USER26> Wow. "Avoid dopamine loops' is a profound and succinct statement. Thank you.

Just out of curiosity, how did you prepare for this? Did you let your family/friends know you were going to be off grid? Did you stock food in a remote cabin somewhere? Did you keep regular working hours?

<comment><USER25> My family was with me on vacation, but I could take long walks alone. No, not a remote cabin, just a small resort town. Mobile internet wasn't mainstream back then.

No working hours at all. Full vacation mode. No direction, no purpose, no obligations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I was riding my bicycle a lot at the time trying to figure out a availability solution with Postgres. I'd ride my bicycle (40km) 24 miles one-way to work -- each leg took a little less than 1.5 hours. I really only coded and prototyped about 3 hours / day. The 3 hours I spent at a keyboard were incredibly productive. The time on my bicycle allowed me to digest information and let my brain relax. By the time I sat down at a computer each day, I knew exactly what I was going to code or test. I'd test and have information. Then, the bike ride home would be thinking about the results. I was proud of the outcome: [https://github.com/compose/governor](https://github.com/compose/governor)

</comment><comment><USER28> It better be today or I'm not going to survive. It's 6:47am, I better get some coffee for what is about to happen.

<comment><USER29> Reminds me of myself, last Friday. Just arrived in Vienna to learn I had a presentation coming up. Had to plan my day, the presentation, type it out, draw graphs, sleep, with not too many hours available. Plowed through successfully but decided to start with a nap. Good luck!

<comment><USER28> We all have those creative moments when it is easy to produce. It is another thing to produce when everything is complicated, we still have to imagine the solution because we don't know it and it can't be searched on Google, and disheartening. There is something to be said for people who are discipline to keep moving during these times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Tomorrow is going to be my most productive day ever!

</comment><comment><USER31> The week before exam and the days in between. I was trying to work on a side project but could not get a lot of work done. But a week before my semester exams I was very productive and full of new ideas. I completed most of the work on side project before the last paper. I was highly productive and creative before exams. This has happened twice.

</comment><comment><USER32> Right after they released the HN api. I made an app called feedhint, that took me three days non-stop. Not only that, I had a bunch of exams aligned that very week, but that didn't matter. All I wanted was to create that app, personalized HN RSS feeds based on keywords. Had some good feedback also! Felt really great.

<comment><USER18> Where is the app now?

<comment><USER32> Ended up selling the domain. hnrss is a much better alternative these days: [https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/](https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I recommend blocking all social media on your desktop browser. I use StayFocused [0] to help me do that.

On mobile, turn off all non-human notifications and alerts.

Sundays are the most productive for me. I use a weekly checklist on Taskade [1] to help me track my progress throughout the week, and on Sundays I would archive the list and start a new one from the templates.

[0]: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankej...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankejkbhbdhmipfmgcngdelahlfoji?hl=en)

[1]: [https://www.taskade.com](https://www.taskade.com)

</comment><comment><USER34> My most productive days were when I was a math undergraduate. I would work pretty much all the time for weeks. This was before internet invaded our lives. I was also very productive the last few weeks before I had to submit my PhD thesis. No particular technique, just the stress of deadlines or studying in a competitive environnement.

Occasionally, I work non-stop for a few days on some programming projects, but I wouldn't consider myself productive. I get very excited and obsessed by the coding but I'm not very efficient, in the sense I tend to code more than I think and it's counter productive.

</comment><comment><USER35> During a major hurricane I was without power for a week. In that time I wrote more songs, more poems, and finished more paintings than ever before. The takeaway: creativity requires occasional periods of boredom.

</comment><comment><USER36> For my final semester of university, I read tons of books, wrote lots of essays (both for school and personal), worked a paying side-contract, and went 110% on a project for school.

My schedule made this possible. All my classes started in the afternoon and ended at 10 at the latest. This matched with my natural levels of productivity perfectly. Reading and podcasts in the morning, homework/class in the afternoon, and pure output at night. It was perfect and I know I'll be spending the next while trying create the conditions to live like that again.

</comment><comment><USER37> There was a week last year where I did a huge amount of work on a mobile game. I was in a state of "flow" the whole time, and it felt like the time was just flying past. RescueTime tracked over 100 hours. Many other weeks were around 60-80 hours, but I was having a lot of fun and learning tons of new things. It's not too healthy though, and I took a long break after launching the game.

I can sometimes get into that state when working as a contractor, but it's very rare.

</comment><comment><USER38> I would say it was yesterday. Though I worked may be 2 hours yesterday, I felt like the result was good. I think its mostly the clarity of what I need to do that helped, (I had the idea the previous night and couldn't really sleep at all the for the entire night). [https://github.com/yellowflash/godel](https://github.com/yellowflash/godel) . That's what I have been working on.

</comment><comment><USER39> First I acknowledge that is not really useful to single out a day as productive or not. The finest-grain level I check is days streak. And in that case, I usually say that I had a good week or good weeks, or once I had a whole good quarter.

When I average the year, I have been having more productive years more or less consistent. Like the global warming, the year that wasn't really productive was still higher than the least productive year before the last peak.

Well, with all that said, some patterns seemed clear to me:

1 - Societal overload: that place and country you live directly affect your productivity. I lived for many years in the biggest city of a 3rd World country, where the government works daily to make your life miserable and hard. The moment I moved to Europe, I had a surge of productivity because those "little" things that rob you of your energy were gone: the violence, the crappy infrastructure, and a technology market generations behind than the 1st World.

2 - Peers Level: being the ugliest among the pretty is better than being the prettiest among the ugly. When you are the least good among very competent engineers you have a lot of opportunities to learn from people that know more and better than you. You become a sponge of methods that can help you to work better and faster.

3 - Reused experience: The best world scenario is to be a generalist and be able to work on whatever is thrown at your hands because you are clever and skilled. However, it doesn't mean that you can't get really skilled and experienced in some aspect of your craft. For instance, through the years I become an expert on bootstrapping greenfield projects and prepare to hand them over to a team that will look after them. This has been invaluable and my longest days streak happened in this situation.

4 - Keep reassessing your toolset all the time: we tend to feel comfortable and confident with the tools we know how to use. That's fine. But keep an eye open to new technologies. There might be one new technology that solves (or attempts to solve) some fundamental problem that you daily face - that if it didn't exist, you would be even more productive.

5 - Manage your attention: nowadays we live in a world perfected to steal your attention. Learn how to manage it effectively. You can't be productive if you are distracted or constantly interrupted.

I hope it helped you. (PS: HN is a huge attention stealer.)

</comment><comment><USER40> I quit my job and started travelling. After finding out that I was much smarter than most of the people who travel around all their life and who got rich by investing, I started to read upon it. I decided that I put split all my net worth between an apartment, gold and Bitcoin. It was incomparably by far the most productive day of my life.

<comment><USER41> Agree on the first part, but what was so smart about the apartment/gold/BTC combo? Just good timing on all? Or was it more thought out than just good timing?

<comment><USER40> It's more like before I was thinking of promotions as a way to move up the job ladder and making more money, but my view changed to spending the minimal amount of time working, not caring about promotions (which get you extra 15% money with a lot of problems and more than 15% extra work), but getting out of fiat currencies.

I don't think my investments were pure luck as I read a lot about the long term pricing of commodities. Right now my net worth is mainly Bitcoin (I still believe it's highly undervalued), and I didn't change it, but I didn't want to sound like an average Bitcoin promoter, as that's not what I wanted this comment to be about.

Also I quit my job as I don't need to work anymore in my life (that's why I made this account as a throwaway)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I've given a bit of thought to these periods and the theme in them has a few factors that indicate one general one.

First factor was reading a book that changed my perspective. When I was a consultant, simply spending 5hrs reading a book on negotiation returned an additional 200k over the next 36mos.

Second is the time I took all my vacation at once and spent three weeks with a teacher learning a physical skill. It gave me the confidence to level up massively in my career.

Third was after taking a month long motorcycle trip across the US. I developed multiple decks and wireframes for startups I would return to and make the focus of my life today.

The theme in them was interrupting the nagging chatter of my ego and its anxieties and the need for external approval, which came from unstable relationships and social media (same thing).

The result was periods of pure performance where stuff comes out like you are singing it. The way I get into the zone today is to do something that pushes me past a limit of ego/anxiety resistance. Either by getting coaching and instruction, becoming absorbed in the complex ideas of a book or new area of knowledge, or physical accomplishment.

There was a comment here the other day about junior and intermediate programmers completing the fist %80 of a project, then leaving the remaining %20 to the next person - who recommends chucking it and refactoring, only to complete that initial %80 again.That %80 productivity that comes from learning something new is massive, but it's not sufficient to deliver the polished %20 that makes a product.

The zone for me today is bursts of staccato productivity against that last %20, with a view forward against where it will yield diminishing returns.

As a manager, the very best way to wreck flow is to put choices on staff and then criticize them for the results. There is this anti-pattern (I call it a false-Socratic dialogue) where ostensibly intelligent people present their staff with choices, thinking it's educating them to "choose right," when the overall effect is to just punish them randomly for making independent decisions.

The constant theme in 10x developers I have observed is that they don't internalize interruptions from others. Often this is because they miss or ignore the social cues of concern and approval that derail others flow, either because of a spectrum thing, confidence from better options, or the narcissism that helps some people succeed.

The flow I develop through these other factors is related to that state in that the anxiety from uncertainty in how I relate is silenced, and I can create freely. As a result, the last 4 months on my demo have been immensely productive.

<comment><USER43> Curious to hear what book you are referring to, and what physical skill you learned that carried over into your career

<comment><USER42> Thanks! Specifically didn't mention them because the effect of activities themselves is the point.

If you haven't read a book on topic-x, the first one is going to change your perspective pretty radically and put you in that iterative and open learning mode.

The activity (see post history for clues;)) was about sublimating that same ego/anxiety by accepting guidance and instruction from a great teacher who had mastered something.

Super productive and high achieving people tend to have absorbing hobbies for (I think) related reasons. It's not that there is a "trick," it's that there is a general effect that all those tricks produce, which is that state of creative flow that results from removing our negative self-conscious reactions.

IMHO, for me that included silencing self-critical mental filters by overloading them with stimuli from things like constructive authority, physical exhaustion, and awe and excitement at a new body of knowledge.

My thinking is that the things people do as flow and inspiration hacks roll up into this overall process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I don't believe that repetition of an action will make you productive on the long-term basis. It's all about being aware of the cycles, of which makes you unhappy hence unproductive. I've been most productive when I have some headspace and now all it takes is a cup of tea.

</comment><comment><USER45> My most productive time is when I am thoughtful of what I want to accomplish and write it down before I start. It's really helped me using a script wrapped around Tmux sessions to achieve this. Two simple questions:

What are you working on? What did you work on?

</comment><comment><USER46> The day I deleted my Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/Social Nonsense accounts.

</comment><comment><USER47> The last day before bachelor thesis deadline. I peaked that day!

<comment><USER48> I went straight 3 days no sleep and wrote about 20-30 pages (against my supervisor's advice).

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> The last work day before I took a management role.

</comment><comment><USER50> I usually feel like it's yesterday :)

</comment><comment><USER51> pomodoro</comment>


Facebook Announces Video Monetization - <AUTHOR> https://fortune.com/2015/07/01/facebook-video-monetization/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is really interesting for a few reasons. They are copying the same revenue split as YouTube. At the same time they have historically had a very different definitions of what constitutes a "view" and this is going to lead to some interesting arguments about ad pricing.

I am really curious to see what Facebook has that duplicates YouTube's very resource intensive ContentID platform for claiming copyrighted material and redirecting ad revenue to the claim owner. I also wonder how Google is going to handle the uploading of YouTube content onto Facebook now that there will be serious money involved. Relevant story about the phenomenon (I work for Fullscreen so this is my CEO talking): [http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/facebook-video- piracy-f...](http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/facebook-video-piracy- fullscreen-1201512488/)

On a personal note I find Facebook's video API to be better (docs, reliability) than YouTube's.

<comment><USER2> I hate facebook videos with passion. Youtube videos are much better quality wise. Whenever somebody uploads a fb video that i like, I go ahead and look it up on youtube.

<comment><USER3> Plus, youtube works on the desktop, while facebook requires that you install a plugin (in 2015!!!).

<comment><USER4> I don't have any plugins installed, and Facebook videos play just fine for me.

<comment><USER5> That's interesting. Facebook just tells me all the time to install flash player on my pc..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Youtube can easily cut off these partners if they feel fb is a threat. Is it worth losing the biggest audience for a couple more dollars per view?

<comment><USER7> No they can't. That goes against the US antitrust law. Likewise, Coca Cola can't tell a shop that they won't sell them their products if the shop also sells Pepsi.</comment></comment>


Malicious ZIP archives found in the AKP leak on the Wikileaks site - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bontchev/wlscrape/wiki <comment><USER3> So a spammy email in one of the thousands leaked happened to contained malware? And this is newsworthy why?

People here are using this to question Wikileaks integrity but it seems like a minor mistake given the contents of the dump. This has happened before in hacker dumps on a number of occasions but this one isn't even malicious (targeting wikileaks users).

I don't open random zips from spam emails on my machine and I wouldn't from random wikileaks emails without checking them for viruses like the author of this post did.

There is even an argument for Wikileaks to _keep_ the malwared content for research purposes. Maybe just include a warning for those who aren't technically inclined enough to know to not open them in a clean VM.

<comment><USER4> Because there's a growing campaign trying to paint Wikileaks as a the "bad guys" (again).

Combine that with the fact that most people don't want Trump to win, so they're automatically on Clinton's side, and with Clinton's deflection of the DNC hack documents that pointed to election rigging towards _who hacked_ the DNC, and that anti-Wikileaks campaign is suddenly a lot more effective.

So now when other sites write about Wikileaks it's usually from the "Here's 3 more ways in which Wikileaks did something bad" angle.

I so wish the U.S. moved to a proportional representation/multi-party system sooner rather than later. I'm so sick and tired of their extremely partisan crap. It seems to make _everything_ worse off. The partisan reality-distortion fields are getting bigger and more powerful than Apple's in the Steve Jobs era.

<comment><USER3> True, Wikileaks has become politicized recently. I like to check the comment section on NYTimes and other news sites around election times. They always seem to be far more partisan than usual. Almost like people are whipped up into a frenzy supporting their sports franchise to the point it almost seems fake.

Considering there are hundreds of millions of dollars going into either side of the campaign I'd question the source of any online comment taking a highly partisan position that perfectly fits into party lines. Could be either direct 50-cent armies [1] style astroturfing or regular people influenced by other comments fed elsewhere online, or worse, articles fed to reputable news sites.

Even GCHQ docs from the Snowden leaks showed that five eyes have been successfully experimenting with controlling online conversations since at least 2012. So it's definitely doable with a dedicated team.

This is modern PR. Another thing that sites like HN/reddit increasingly have to contend with to keep content authentic and quality...

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party?wprov=sfla1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party?wprov=sfla1)

<comment><USER5> > Wikileaks has become politicized recently

 _Recently_!!!?

<comment><USER6> It's mad that people aren't aware enough to realize what's going on with them. WikiLeaks must be good at putting out noise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When you've got a small organisation with limited resources and less help from others (like say, media groups), it's not surprising stuff like this will slip through.

And hey, it's also not surprising a bunch of email sent to powerful figures would have scumbags trying to infect their PC with malware in the process. If Obama had a public email, a large percentage of that would be either infected by something or trying to steal credentials via phishing.

Should they have removed dodgy malware? Sure, but for an organisation with limited resources, a founder stuck in an embassy for years on end and far less of the press willing to help them out, having this stuff there isn't exactly unexpected.

<comment><USER8> > And hey, it's also not surprising a bunch of email sent to powerful figures > would have scumbags trying to infect their PC with malware in the process.

I doubt it was consciously sent to specific powerful figures. "Invoice attached" spam is just shotgunned to the world.

> If Obama had a public email, a large percentage of that would be either > infected by something or trying to steal credentials via phishing.

It would, not because he's Obama but because it's email. I see a lot of this in my spam folder, and I'm not important at all, I'm just a reachable address.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I read through about 1/2 of the AKP "leaks", it was a tremendous waste of time for anything but improving comprehension of Türkçe.

At a point in time, I truly believed Assange's goals were justice and transparency, now I am beginning to feel like he has his own political agenda, and is making sophomoric attempts to affect political change.

In 2016 Wikileaks's agenda seems to be:

      - Anti-Hillary
      - Anti-Hillary
      - Pro-Trump
      - Pro-Putin
      - Anti-Hillary
      - <USER2>

The AKP leak falls into that last line. The coup happened, it was frightening (I watched two F-16s fly over the city at mach1+ for six-hours, and the helicopter which landed at BJK was so close to us at a cafe we could see the faces of the guys inside when it banked), and they capitalized on that fear to increase their own credibility and to demonize the ruling party here.

Unlike previous leaks Assange and his gang didn't put ANY effort into vetting the "leak". He didn't have to, because within certain crowds Wikileaks is an indisputably trusted source. His perceived persecution makes him beyond reproach, and now any criticism can be blamed on a conspiracy theory.

Rapist? CIA/Sweden persecuting him. Bail jumper? CIA/Mi5 persecution. Committed the crime of jumping bail? CIA/Mi5. Hiding in Ecuador for years? Illegal CIA detention. His best buddy Jake Appelbaum is a rapist? CIA.

This amount of trust and credibility would certainly make it easier for him, or a foreign agent, to spread malware. It's probably just a slip-up on not scanning the emails before publishing. But if it isn't, what are the odds that they are traced back to Russian hackers?

(Edited for typos and formatting. )

<comment><USER10> Wikileaks' actions this year have done nothing but prove to me that Wikileaks is just another arm of the alt-right.

When you add in Julian Assange's antisemitism and lack of respect for women, it all makes sense.

<comment><USER11> Claiming someone is alt-right is starting to have the feel of McCarthy era claims of communism. We are supposed to associate that label (and thus the person) with the deeply unsavory, without looking at their actual, specific positions and actions.

<comment><USER12> _Claiming someone is alt-right is starting to have the feel of McCarthy era claims of communism._

I don't know what they stand for. But I visit generally progressive-leaning places on the internet and know I'm supposed to hate them.

I still haven't even figured out who the "reactionaries" are or what they believe in. I think what happened is some people used the wrong word when talking about "contrarians" and through a game of telephone turned created a new political boogieman.

Is the conservative side of the (American) political spectrum really going through this much ideological turmoil and restructuring? I haven't heard about it in any of the mainstream news when I glace at it, nor from the conservatives I talk politics with at work. It looks like a way for the left to shill hate.

<comment><USER13> The alt-right is what happened when 4chan trolls, MRAs/PUAs, and Stormfront had a baby called 8chan.net/pol/

It's a small group of maybe 10,000, of which 5,000 don't even take the positions seriously, just love to troll millennial college "activist" consumer-types. The Clinton speech about the alt-right will have the same effect as Geraldo Rivera's goofy coverage of Neo-nazi skinheads in the 80s - multiplying their numbers a hundred-fold.

<comment><USER12> _It 's a small group of maybe 10,000, of which 5,000 don't even take the positions seriously_

Then why the fuck is anyone talking about them? Is the left really so terrified of taking positions or believing in anything at all that they have to scrape the bottom of the barrel like this for something to talk about?

<comment><USER14> Probably because questioning whether they're really the big boogeyman is enough to mark you as one of them in the core, outspoken, well-connected parts of the left.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can anyone explain if the title and vague explanation is really true? Malicious ZIPs implies to most that simply opening the ZIP, perhaps with a particular ZIP archive tool, is sufficient to cause infection. If this is the case then it's a 0-day and this fact needs reporting and analysing separately from all the noise regarding WikiLeaks.

<comment><USER16> A more accurate summary would be "Wikileaks releases many AKP emails, including lots of received spam. Some of the spam has ZIP files _containing_ malware."

So good question, and it looks like the answer is this isn't a novel attack, just normal malware-spam and an imprecise summary.

<comment><USER15> A load of fuss about nothing then :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> But how does it work? do you get infected just by opening the .zip file?

<comment><USER18> No. The zip file contains a JavaScript file that the user has to click on to get infected. Typically, the target is Windows, which hides the file extension of known file types by default. So the user ends up seeing a file called 'transactions 31234' (actual example), which has an icon depicting a document. Double-clicking on it causes the script to execute in Windows Script Host (WSH), which gives the script access to internal Windows APIs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Considering the potential espionage value of political operatives in the AKP [1], mightn't the inverse set be a good place to search for previously unidentified malware?

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_and_Development_Party_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_and_Development_Party_\(Turkey\))

</comment><comment><USER20> It's is known that Wikileaks release files with malware in it from the source they're leaking; only thing the would be news, which is unlikely in my opinion, is that someone is using Wikileaks for malware distribution.

Anyone viewing files like this should always treat them as extremely dangerous.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Since there is much speculation here about Assange's motives, why not at least consider how he himself describes them? In this interview with Bill Maher:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-EJAIXdGp8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-EJAIXdGp8)

Assange explains that he found it to be "good fun" to release SS and credit card numbers of thousands of random, innocent people.

If we consider that Assange may be one of those (we know they exist, in significant numbers) who get pleasure from hurting other people, much of his otherwise perplexing behavior suddenly makes sense. Why not delete malware from your servers once a security researcher has located it for you? You can hurt more people if you leave it there.

<comment><USER21> I think you're taking Assange's words out of context. He was talking about the release itself, in that it showed how the DNC actively worked to hamper Bernie's efforts despite being a "neutral" organization. (Neutrality is one of the conditions for the DNC to receive tax breaks for their convention).

> Why not delete malware from your servers once a security researcher has > located it for you?

Assange has repeatedly said that they do _not_ filter or edit in any way the contents of their leaks. That means that they don't remove credit card information, social security numbers, or malware.

Is that a good practice?

Well, it depends on what the goal is. Wikileaks has the stated goal of increasing transparency in the government. They could release an edited version and achieve transparency, but editing the contents would mean that the documents are no longer "pristine" in the sense that they have not been altered in any way. This would make a legal process depending on these documents more difficult: A jury may ask themselves whether other things have been removed -- did Wikileaks also remove any content that would affect their decision?

Thus, refusing to edit the content fits with another goal other than just increasing transparency: to do so in a way that the documents can be used in a legal setting with no question of their veracity.

<comment><USER22> > Assange has repeatedly said that they do not filter or edit in any way the > contents of their leaks. That means that they don't remove credit card > information, social security numbers, or malware.

This is not true. They redacted all but the last 4 digits of the credit card numbers.

> They could release an edited version and achieve transparency, but...

They _do_ edit. They removed all but the last 4 digits on credit card numbers. So, they edit in the ways they deem appropriate. I think the consensus is that generally, their extremely limited (and IMO, irresponsible) redaction policy does pose a threat to innocent people. The argument against responsible redaction seems to be: "Well, who knows where that social security number may lead!" Under this line of reasoning, _everything_ is fair game, and I find that abhorrent. If an innocent photo were discovered in those emails of a naked child, say the son or daughter of someone working for the campaign, you're telling me that it should be included in the archive simply to protect the sanctity of the dump? Puh-lease. Transparency is important, but not at the risk of our own humanity.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe that in the cases where only the last four digits were in the record, that was not due to Wikileaks' redaction - that's just what was in the file. They did not do anything to the SS numbers, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Forbidden knowledge promised in files from an unknown source, sitting right there for the taking. It's the phishing equivalent of fish jumping in the boat.

</comment><comment><USER24> bravo</comment>


A Breakthrough Against Leukemia Using Altered T-Cells - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/health/a-breakthrough-against-leukemia-using-altered-t-cells.html?_r=0

<comment><USER2> I know complaining about comments on newspaper article forums is never super productive. But still:

"What this article did not mention was the thousands of people who prayed and gathered together for a candle lit prayer vigil for Emily and her family when things were so critical."

Rage. I guess God just didn't value the life of my 10 year old cousin enough to save her despite all those candlelit vigils we put on for her.

More on topic: great article and great science.

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome story. One major question about this therapy (<http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1103849>) is what life will be like without B-cells. They're pretty important to a functioning immune system.

<comment><USER4> "In the 10 years or so since the widespread use of B-cell depletion, there is little to suggest that a long-term paucity of B cells puts patients at risk for malignancy or opportunistic infections, nor that it leads to treatment- resistant RA or complications." ([http://www.futuremedicine.com/doi/abs/10.2217/ijr.12.7?journ...](http://www.futuremedicine.com/doi/abs/10.2217/ijr.12.7?journalCode=ijr))</comment></comment>


Origin of "Software" - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20000805/mathtrek.asp <comment><USER2> Cool article!

The 1958 usage doesn't prove that Tukey invented the word "software", just that it wasn't invented later. I'm inclined to believe it, though, because of the corroborating fact that he also invented the word "bit". That's pretty compelling. And impressive.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting article, although it seems to me that the term itself is rather self-explanatory, not a term that needed to be coined. "Ware" is just an item, and "hardware" had surely been around long before computers. So once computers came around, I assume people instinctively referred to tangible computer equipment as "hardware." Calling the intangible elements "software" probably soon followed. I wonder when terms like "firmware" or "midware" originated?</comment>


4WD swincar e-Spider off-road electric vehicle - <AUTHOR> https://www.swincar.net/ <comment><AUTHOR> Clearly, it isn't an alternative to an e-tron or i-pace, but yet another point of attack on ICE is surely a good thing.</comment>


Mozilla and Palemoon – Mozilla losing their temper? - <AUTHOR> http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=17&p=83262#p83218 <comment><USER2> I'm not a Mozilla employee. It's sad to see one of the very few genuinely good companies get attacked by uniformed users looking for controversy to get worked up about. Creating an account to post this link here and the comments in the linked thread are perfect examples of that.

We don't know what Mozilla said, officially or unofficially. We don't know if it was a random employee or an official company statement. They also haven't been given a chance to defend themselves. Let's not assume the worst because it gives people something new to rage about on twitter.

<comment><USER3> Well respected? In earlier times for sure. But Mozilla of today has totally left power users alone. I would not call that what is left a genuinely good company

<comment><USER2> What I really mean is morally good. Call me naive but I think the majority of employees at Mozilla do want to make the world a better place. Mozilla doesn't sell your data or undermine your privacy unlike its main competitors. It doesn't want to lock you into their ecosystem and hold you or your data prisoner. They have a core mission to bring people access to the web and not have it controlled by a few select companies. I think they're fighting the good fight.

I disagree about power users to a small extent. Rust has to be one of the best things Mozilla has ever been involved in. Servo looks really promising. e10s has actually worked out and Web Extensions will finally make addons secure. It's not an easy path or transition. Constantly modernising such an old codebase is a huge challenge I don't envy. I think the criticism levelled at Mozilla is too harsh some times. They've taken risks and sometimes it doesn;t always work out, like FirefoxOS phones.

<comment><USER4> You misteriously forgot about some stuff, like Hello, the Pocket integration, or the Brendan Eich case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The ambiguity of this whole post is really weird. No specifics on what was asked, or of who asked. Under what circumstances would it actually make sense for any official representative of a company to reach out to the operator of the Pale Moon forums to ask them to do... basically nothing? No specific requests were made, apparently, and no criteria were provided.

<comment><USER6> It's cheesy drama between maybe 4 devs and has no place on HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't know, really. I'm not the most pro-Mozilla person around, but if there's no proof... Not even the name of an employee... I can't believe it, sorry.

</comment><comment><USER7> Any evidence to support this allegation?

Mozilla could just as well be a victim of badmouthing.

</comment><comment><USER8> Could someone provide a short summary of what this is about?

<comment><USER5> Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox. The maintainer has a long history of an at- times-antagonistic relationship with the core FF development team. This appears to be another footnote in that long history where he claims to be receiving pressure from some mysterious Mozilla employee, in this case to censor his forums in some unspecified way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=11810&start=...](https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=11810&start=20#p83307) \- for everyone who is interested in finding out if the attack was just a cry for attention or backed up with facts.

</comment><comment><USER9> The Big Sort comes to software: [http://www.thebigsort.com/home.php](http://www.thebigsort.com/home.php)

I expect much more of this to come.</comment>


Why the American Empire Will Rise Again - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/opinion/25brendon.html

<comment><USER2> We can only bet on the black swan events that will shake our civilization to its very core, for better or worse. These events are unpredictable, unconvincing by all evidence of the present day, and extremely high impact.

Given the increasing complexity of modern civilization, it should be no surprise to us that we fails to predict and continue to fail to predict and be blindsided by the major disruptive events of world history.

Even the use of mathematical models in finance feed back into a ever fast growing feedback loop, escalating the speed and severity of impact when these mathematical models on ever increasingly fast computer simply fail to perform.

The fate of USA is unknown, but it is surely going to be something unexpected, gigantic in impact, and blindingly fast.</comment>


Eggs, Milk, Bread - the World's First Grocery API - <AUTHOR> http://blog.programmableweb.com/2009/07/14/eggs-milk-bread-the-worlds-first-grocery-api/ <comment><USER2> i've been trying to say this for a while, but everything is going to move to the mobile device. as the hardware catches up, the experience is going to become as ubiquitous as the desktop (or rather the laptop).

your driver's license? put it on your phone. paying for something? put it on your phone. waiting in a line? just order it on your phone. there's obviously some technical barriers right now, especially with e-commerce, but it will come. social media is flavor of the day right now, but when the hardware catches up, things like wallets are going to disappear.

<comment><USER3> There's no such barriers in Japan, where it is common for one to pay for items using your cellphone. They can also order things on their phone by taking pictures of a standardized 2D barcode on a flyer or poster.

The hardware _has_ caught up, it's the telecoms that have not.

<comment><USER4> Telecoms certainly have to take the first step (and they'll drag their feet the entire way), but the second step is getting people to change their lives around the technology. IMO, most of the US would still lag behind (in terms of mobile technology) even if the wireless infrastructure was upgraded because they don't really care to use it (i.e. they're happy with the way they do things now).

As for this API, I think it's fantastic, but they should really take it a step further. If there's some sort of national or international consortium of retailers, they should create a free, unified API such that a good produced anywhere in the world will have an entry in the system. It'd even be cool if they added a rebate submission system into it as well, instead of having to mail in rebates for things.

<comment><USER3> If you build it, they will come.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Combine something like this with ubiquitous RFID and a refrigerator/pantry/freezer that can read it and you could have a program that keeps track of the food you have, warns you when something can be expected to go bad, and suggest recipes based on what you have. That would be useful and would reduce the amount of food wasted.

<comment><USER6> I would definitely like to be able to look into the contents of my fridge before I left work (to know what to pick up). Expiry dates, especially for items in the pantry that don't get turned over as often as the fridge contents would also be handy.

Recipe suggestions don't work that well in my opinion (you can do this already to some extent, for example with bigoven.com but also with a simple google search). You need non-trivial intelligence to do that automatically. The one thing a cook knows is what ingredients are important. For example if I have shrimp in the freezer and orzo in the pantry, I can google for "shrimp and orzo recipe", end up with a recipe with 8 additional ingredients of which I have only 2; and yet I would know whether I could make it (eg. I don't have fresh basil but I could throw in some dried thyme and it would still be edible, skip the olives, etc etc). So I don't see this as a big selling point.

The other thing I look forward to with ubiquitous RFID is whether we can eliminate the unload cart/scan/repack groceries hoopla. I use reuseable bags, some insulated for frozen goods - I'd like to wander round the store, back my bags as I go along and as I like them packed (anal? moi?) and just pay and stroll out.

<comment><USER5> >For example if I have shrimp in the freezer and orzo in the pantry, I can google for "shrimp and orzo recipe", end up with a recipe with 8 additional ingredients of which I have only 2; and yet I would know whether I could make it (eg. I don't have fresh basil but I could throw in some dried thyme and it would still be edible, skip the olives, etc etc).

This is amenable to automation. You could tell a computer which ingredients are expensive, which are likely to be unnecessary, and which can be substituted. I wouldn't expect it to work perfectly, and it wouldn't do anything you couldn't do by hand with google, but if it saved you some time it could be useful.

>The other thing I look forward to with ubiquitous RFID is whether we can eliminate the unload cart/scan/repack groceries hoopla.

You could also eliminate the problem of keeping track of how much money the items in your cart cost, and whether you're being charged what the label said, because the price would pop up as you put it in your cart. But a good API might lead to convenient online ordering and ubiquitous delivery, which should appeal to you if you're environmentally conscious enough to reuse bags, because the amount of energy saved by having a delivery driver make a round compared to having hundreds of customers drive back and forth would dwarf the savings you make by not throwing out some plastic bags.

<comment><USER6> Fair point. The energy cost of delivery could or could not be lower than consumer pickup - I think it would depend on the area. In low density areas it may be that consumer pickup during normal commute patterns does have a lower energy cost. But I would order online if I could to save time, even if I had to pick up my order myself.

BTW in my area plastic bags are frowned upon not so much due to energy production cost but more due to disposal problems (the only local landfill is almost full). In fact the local council occasionally toys with banning their use completely. So even people who are not the traditional environmental types are starting to use them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It says in the article they're going to release information including customers favourites .. that's personal information - they'll need individual permission to do that.

You can imagine the headlines "Tesco.net confirms MP for Basingstoke is sex fiend" when the favourites show the married MP that is away from home all week buys 20 condoms, 2 packs of lube and a copy of the Gay Times every week.

<comment><USER8> They'll only include an individual customer's favorites if the customer has authenticated with a particular application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The only way local advertising will work is a pay-per-lead model.

The only way that will happen is if companies like these guys open up API's.

I'm very impressed!</comment>


NFL paying Neurologists fit data (OTL investigation) - <AUTHOR> http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/14711203/nfl-donations-brain-research-benefit-league-linked-doctors-raise-worries-influence-science-lines <comment><AUTHOR> Another case of money influencing research. Glad to see OTL doing a public service and showing the NFL's association with the studies they hide behind</comment>


HG Wells's Forgotten Fiction - <AUTHOR> https://www.newstatesman.com/hg-wells-tono-bungay-fiction <comment><USER2> In 1913, HG Well's wrote about a major war ending in the use of atomic weapons. It would seem that some individuals truly are prophetic.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been working my way through gutenberg books on the kindle - and included a few HG Wells. You forget how good "War of the Worlds" actually is as a novel

Id also recommend PG Wodehouses books on Kindle like Jeeves and Wooster

</comment><comment><USER4> I have a favorite in Wells' unknown back-catalog, the rom/com Wheels of Chance[1,2]. Wells really felt the pleasures of bicycling, but also understood (and took mischievous enjoyment in) the revolution it was creating in his society. For a cyclist it is great fun to have this glimpse of how the bicycle was seen shortly after its invention.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheels_of_Chance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheels_of_Chance) (review/synopsis)

[2] [http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1264](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1264)

</comment><comment><USER5> FYI this is mainly about Tono-Bungay, which you can download here:

[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/718](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/718)

Because of the name, I classed it among the Pacific adventure books like Mardi and Typee and so on. Apparently it's very different from what I thought.

I also enjoyed The Food of the Gods, which takes an interesting and unexpected turn about halfway through. The First Men in the Moon is quite strange but a fun read.

<comment><USER6> The First Men in the Moon is part of that era of delightfully pulpy adventure and sci-fi novels. At one point I was on a Project Gutenberg kick, and the tail end of the pre-1923 public domain is a wonderful world of fantastical nonsense. Burroughs, H Rider Haggard, the Jules Verne back-catalog. It's so optimistic, a product of a world that was on the upswing and hopeful, where there were still blank spots on the map to fill in and science was moving in leaps and bounds. The shock of the Maxim gun and Krupp cannon murdered that brand of European optimism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You can read high quality ebook editions of some of the other novels mentioned here at Standard Ebooks: [https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/h-g- wells/](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/h-g-wells/)

We'd love help in producing more HG Wells works for people to read for free!

</comment><comment><USER8> The short-story collections (one has 80) are well worth looking into! I recall several of his shorts as vividly as his bigger works.

And here's the Wells section at Librevox: [https://librivox.org/author/146](https://librivox.org/author/146)</comment>


Pattern Matching – Make the Compiler Work for You - <AUTHOR> http://deliberate-software.com/function-pattern-matching/

<comment><USER2> I've recently started learning Erlang and Elixir and the feature that made me fall in love is pattern matching, combined with great support for recursion. Yes, some people will say pattern matching is just the same as if/switch statements but I think it's so much better. Pattern matching let's you push that conditional logic one level lower (similar to polymorphism and duck typing) and it makes reasoning about code so much easier.

<comment><USER3> Pattern matching is 1) conditional on values, 2) conditional on _structure_ (not something you can get in imperative languages), 3) data extractor from data structures, all at the same time. Yes, it's helluva convenient. Pity it didn't make it to imperative languages (yet).

<comment><USER4> It's in rust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not sure about other IDEs, but for Eclipse for Java has a warning/error flag for enum/switch issues described here.

[http://help.eclipse.org/juno/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclipse....](http://help.eclipse.org/juno/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclipse.jdt.doc.user%2Freference%2Fpreferences%2Fjava%2Fcompiler%2Fref- preferences-errors-warnings.htm)

> Incomplete 'switch' cases on enum

> When enabled, the compiler will issue an error or a warning whenever it > encounters a switch statement which does not contain case statements for > every enum constant of the referenced enum nor a default case. A default > case is assumed to cover missing case statements for any enum constant, so > the compiler is silent in the presence of default cases unless the option > "Signal even if 'default' case exists" (see below) is enabled.

EDIT: oddly, I thought the blog post's first example was Java, not C#. Man, I forget how similar the syntax is.

<comment><USER6> As a side note, traditional enum completeness checking in C is broken, in that you can only choose _either_ to be warned statically when you need to add a new case (no default case) _or_ to handle things at runtime if you get something unexpected (a default case).

Fairly recent gcc (last few years) now has a -Wswitch-enum flag which says "warn me even when there is a default label" which is the safest option (I assume clang has something similar though I haven't actually checked).

<comment><USER7> This option is also _really_ annoying when you have switches over really large enum types, such as key codes, where it is usually legitimate to have a default case.

I guess even more annotations are needed ;)

<comment><USER6> Heh, doubtless. If you have a switch statement where adding a case to the enum doesn't mean you need to _consider_ whether to add it to that switch, it sounds like an appropriate place to use pragmas to disable the warning for the one switch ([http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Diagnostic- Pragmas.html](http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Diagnostic-Pragmas.html)). If you _do_ need to consider that switch, then I'd say you should still suck it up and list every case (though possibly collapsing similar groups of cases into a single macro... "#define NUMERIC_KEYS case KEY_KP0: case KEY_KP1"...).

<comment><USER8> GNU C has the Case Range C extension ([http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Case- Ranges.html#Case-Rang...](http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Case- Ranges.html#Case-Ranges)) which allows you to write "case KEY_KP0 ... KEY_KP10:".

<comment><USER6> Oooo, very nice!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Welcome to the expression problem!

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

</comment><comment><USER10> I was coincidentally just blogging about doing this in Java

[http://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2014/05/03/pattern-matching- in-...](http://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2014/05/03/pattern-matching-in-java/)

</comment><comment><USER11> F#. If you're working in .NET, you might also be interested in [PEX]([http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/pex/](http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pex/)) - it can catch edge cases like these, automatically generate high coverage unit tests, etc. and integrates nicely into VS.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wouldn't the OP get the same result by staying in C# and changing the outer if-else to a switch? I'm not super familiar with C#, but many C++ and Java compilers do that. (Pattern matching is still a cool feature, as some of his later examples show, I just don't think his first one motivates it.)

<comment><USER13> Yes, I'd never let his outer if-else get through code review. Visual Studio even has special support for generating a correct switch statement (all values + default) for enums.

Still, I'd love to have first-class pattern matching in C# and of course algebraic data types...

<comment><AUTHOR> The correctly generated switch case isn't the point. It's not that it can't be generated the first time, it's that it can't detect the accuracy of the switch case every time there is an edit.

Also, the enum in a switch is the least powerful thing F#'s pattern matching gives you. Consider the second to last example, where I turn three nested switch statements into a single match. Now the compiler checks on the _combination_ of those three for anything missing. That is far more powerful than any static analysis tool I've seen can detect. Think, any time you need polymorphism, instead of reaching for classes and interfaces, you can just have a "combined" match that not only checks that you have all the types, but that the conditional work each type was doing is "all there". That's some powerful stuff.

What that leads to is the inverse of traditional polymorphism, now the "behavior" for a type can reside where it's needed, all together right where used. Not only is this safer, but it's much more likely to be the axis on which it will change.

In my experience, the traditional interface and class polymorphism changes in such a way that I need to edit every class. Usually, it's an extra parameter one class needs, or a different return type. Changes like that mean editing every subclass. Instead, if I used "match" for my polymorphism, those changes would just be all together, next to each other.

What you lose with this inverted polymorphism is you no longer have a single place to see all the behavior for a single type. We've changed the grain of how the type is used to run such that seeing the behavior for a single function for all types is possible, but seeing all the functions for a single subclass requires going to several classes. The good news here is _you can choose which style you want for every single function_. You can even have this function be a match on the type in place, while this other lives on the subclass! Now you can choose the best axis based off the likely change pattern. Going to be changing the interface a lot? Make it a match. Going to be only changing the internals of a single subclass a lot? Put it in the interface. And it's easy to change one to the other, so you don't even have to get it right the first time!

That being the case, and seeing how powerful the match is at detecting missing edge cases, I'd suggest always start with match for polymorphism, then convert to an interface method when needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> (EDIT: Funny, I made the same mistake as kyrra, thinking it was Java. At least my last line still applies...)

The true solution, that doesn't involve using a new language, is to include the data for the switch inside each of each element of the enum, instead of treating it like C enums. That forces you to define all you need for "German" and give it to a constructor; otherwise the compiler complains about it. Come on, it's one of the _very few_ things from Java that I miss when I do C++.

By the way, in Spanish it's "cero" not "zero" :).

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, but something still has to link the enum to the concrete class, then conditionally instantiate the concrete clas, right? Do you have an example of what you are talking about?

As to cero, yep, whoops!

<comment><USER15> At least in Java, Enums can implement interfaces. The following is valid:

      public interface ILanguage {
        String convert(int number);
      }

      public enum Language implements ILanguage {
        English {
          String convert(int number) {
            switch(number) {
              case 0: return "zero";
              case 1: return "one";
              default: return "...";
            }
          }
        },
        Spanish {
          String convert(int number) {
            switch(number) {
              case 0: return "zero";
              case 1: return "uno";
              default: return "<comment>";
            }
          }
        }
      }

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> D solves this particular problem in a simpler way: it has a `final switch` block, which forces the case set to be complete. It doesn't have arbitrary boolean expressions as seen here, but it does add an interval syntax.

[http://dlang.org/statement.html#FinalSwitchStatement](http://dlang.org/statement.html#FinalSwitchStatement)

[http://dlang.org/statement.html#CaseRangeStatement](http://dlang.org/statement.html#CaseRangeStatement)

</comment><comment><USER17> First time I used pattern matching was in 1996 with Caml Light, followed by Prolog clauses.

Miss their power ever since. Thankfully FP is finally spreading into the industry.

</comment><comment><USER18> Although completeness checking is a good idea, it is _not_ a feature of pattern matching (ghc still does not enable it by default as of 7.8; conversely both Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA are able to detect and warn about missing enum cases in switches).

<comment><AUTHOR> That is true, but checking all the values of an enum is just the tip of the iceburg. Consider something as sophisticated as the second to last example in the post, where, because of pattern matching, I am able to to "flatten" an if and a switch into a single match. Since it is a single expression, the compiler can provide completeness checking on the _combination_ of the two. I am very curious if there are any static analysis tools that can provide that level of safety without pattern matching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I encountered a similar issue at work. How one would do compile-time completeness validation in C++ without using some extra stuff like Boost or the new features of C++ 0xXX?</comment>


Snake game made in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tristangoossens/snake-go <comment><USER2> If you are interested in gamedev and Golang, a while back I did a video series teaching programming via game projects in Go. Starts out with text games, then 2d, then some opengl 3d stuff at the end. Jump in wherever you like! All free.

[https://gameswithgo.org/](https://gameswithgo.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ill definitely check that out, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Snake games are my go-to when I learn new languages, it's always under 1000 lines of code and can usually be done without libraries. In not a lot of time you can learn how the language:

        -   does timers
        -   does sleeping and/or threads
        -   handles user input
        -   gets some kind of output to screen
        -   provides basic data structures
        -   writes and loads files for high scores

There are a lot of things that I like about the original Snake that most people don't put into their hobby projects:

        -   There is a delay right before you hit the wall.
            If you are playing at the fastest speed and barrel towards the wall,
            it slows down to the slowest speed when you are on the final square
            before game over.
            I always loved this because the it made the most deadly obstacle the
            snake body which is the one that you yourself created.

        -   When it polled input it stored one of each press.
            If you pressed up then left, and the next tick the snake would turn
            up, and the next tick the snake would turn left.

        -   There are only four parts of the screen max that are updated each
            tick, the new snake head is drawn, the previous snake head is drawn as
            a body, the previous snake butt is cleared, and maybe a new egg is
            drawn.
            Very common to see a snake game draw the entire screen, or redraw the
            entire snake on each tick.  Super frustrating to have a game get start
            to stutter more and more as your snake gets longer.

        -   You could play using two buttons instead of four.
            The game could be played by using buttons 2=up 8=down 4=left 6=right.
            But it could also be played using buttons 1=up-or-left and
            9=down-or-right because you can only change from your current
            direction to two other directions since you can't have a button to go
            the opposite direction, and you don't need a button to go the same
            direction.
            It was never super intuitive though, a "right turn" or "left turn"
            button would make more sense.

The only critique I have for this is your snake almost doubles speed when you move up or down which is pretty jarring.

<comment><USER4> Good points, I never realised about the screen update size, although most renderer will redraw the whole screen every frame (immediate mode).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You should call it Go Snake Go!

Also, I always wondered what it would be like if you mixed a snake game with Conway's Game of Life. Watching a snake go around the screen blasting through automata would be interesting ( or maybe not).

<comment><USER6> [http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/flash/la2/index.html](http://www.asahi- net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/flash/la2/index.html). LA-2 is close to what you're describing although it's a shmup instead of a snake game. It's old so unfortunately it's a Java applet that might be hard to run now :(. Google has been very successful in killing all old interactive content on the web.

<comment><USER7> Interesting! Let me give this a try :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am actually trying to get my project out there, as this is actually my first big project.So every star would be appreciated(maybe we can even reach trending)

<comment><USER8> Is your ultimate interest more in game dev or the 'classic' Go problem space (servers, concurrency, scaling, etc.), or both maybe?

Like what would your 50th project be, ideally?

<comment><AUTHOR> I would'n't know actually, i would say that they both sound good to me. I am only 17, so ive got plenty of things ahead of me :)

<comment><USER8> Aha, with that kind of skill and ethics at such a yound age, indeed! Way to Go ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks good!

Also made something similar, although with much less features and in a single file: [http://github.com/hoffa/snake](http://github.com/hoffa/snake)

<comment><AUTHOR> i gave it a star! i think the simplicity of the game is what makes it special!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a bit off topic but since there might be some Go folks in here, does anyone know of a Go equivalent of WebGoat (an intentionally insecure code base for testing vulnerability scanners)? Doesn't need to be a WebGoat clone, just an insecure code base written in Go.

<comment><USER11> The recent Square CTF had some good Go related challenges, e.g.

[https://squarectf.com/2019/lockbox.html](https://squarectf.com/2019/lockbox.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Quick question; Whats been the performance like, specially with Go's GC. I know snake is probably not a project to push the language run time to its limit but still would love someone to chime in. I may be wrong here but i assume that GO's GC is more geared towards concurrent data access tasks like web servers.

I am currently evaluating 2 tiny frameworks; ebiten and oak. Oak is super interesting as it doent uses sdl/glfw etc in its core. But has a rougher api. Ebiten on the other hand feels very frinctionless.

</comment><comment><USER13> Really cool! As a Go noob, I love the comments everywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah i put them there so if anyone would ever want to recreate it, they would understand my functions and maybe work on top or from them

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Congratulations! It may not seem like a big accomplishment, but it is. It's one thing to toy around with a language, but creating a fully realized product is a big deal. There's nothing that compares to that feeling when you load up your project and it just works as you expect it should. You should definitely walk around the next few days with a big grin on your face :).

</comment><comment><USER15> I have an idea: there are a couple of these already, pretty fun to play. There could be a service, in which you can SSH into then play these games! with scoreboards, forum, discoverability and stuff. It would be a pretty niche product/service, but would be fun to build and play! It could be the steam of modern terminal games :D

</comment><comment><USER16> If you want to play it online I just cloned it into repl.it and it worked: [https://repl.it/@amasad/snake-go](https://repl.it/@amasad/snake-go)

<comment><AUTHOR> i think we might need more users to test it, here is a link to the pull request. please test these and leave your feedback

[https://github.com/tristangoossens/snake- go/pull/2](https://github.com/tristangoossens/snake-go/pull/2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Finally QBasic has a serious competitor.

<comment><AUTHOR> I dont really know what you mean by that, but thanks?!

<comment><USER17> Just a silly joke. one of the more famous example programs that came with QBasic for MS-DOS was a snake game called Nibbles: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibbles_(video_game)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibbles_\(video_game\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What next, a chess game?

Oops.

<comment><USER19> Plug: [https://github.com/notnil/chess](https://github.com/notnil/chess)

<comment><AUTHOR> This looks awesome, i gave it a star

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Now write it in Clojure and compare your line counts

<comment> sahil-kang Here's one in Common Lisp if you're interested in comparing loc with a lisp :) [https://github.com/SahilKang/cl-snake](https://github.com/SahilKang/cl-snake)</comment></comment>


An Analysis Of Market Demand For Web Programming Languages - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/30/an-analysis-of-market-demand-for-web-programming-languages/

<comment><USER2> Interesting that PHP is still doing so well.

I think that's because of wide variety of CMS applications build with PHP that are so common. Also it's cheaper to hire a PHP programmer than .NET, Java or Ruby one.</comment>


Paul Graham: Y Combinator Companies Have Raised Over $1 Billion - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/25/paul-graham-y-combinator-companies-have-raised-over-1-billion/ <comment><USER2> How very Silicon Valley of the author to treat these numbers almost like they're profits, or any reasonable sort of "income" at all. The real question is: how much of that money has already been multiplied tenfold, through exits, IPOs or exorbitant profits?

<comment><USER3> Why are HNers so dense when it comes to fundraising? No, the treatment doesn't come off at all sounding like profits or income. Yes, fundraising is definitely a point of success. Why do HNers have such a hard time with this? Money is an important resource for growing companies! Sheesh.

<comment><USER4> I think they're not so much dense as bitter. There's a subset of HN readers who regard startups as a whole as a sort of con game, and are angry that the participants get so much attention. There may not be that many of them, but their anger makes them disproportionately active as commenters and voters.

<comment><USER5> I probably belong to that subset. "Bitter" is an uncomfortable term, but probably accurate. Personally, it's not that I think startups are a con game (and certainly not YC); it's that YC represents a tremendous amount of support and resources and influence that aren't available to people like me who are working just as hard, and are just as skilled, but aren't a good fit for YC.

It's tough in practice to not get a little envious of that support when you don't have it.

I still think it's good manners to keep my jealousy to myself though. This _is_ a YCombinator forum after all; bringing bile here just because we're not alums is not cool.

<comment><USER6> Definitely good manners to keep the jealousy to oneself, but more important to get rid of the jealousy altogether. Resenting others for their success/progress is a huge energy waste (been there, done that).

<comment><USER5> I don't resent anybody for their success or progress. That's not what I said, and I'd hate for anybody to misinterpret me that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's pretty incredible to think that YC is likely the highest performing venture fund in history.

For 380 companies that works out to about $7.6 million invested into a portfolio of companies worth $7.78 billion. Assuming a 2-7% stake for YC(after dilution), that puts the value of YC's share at $155-$545 million on that $7 million invested.

<comment><USER8> ~20x isn't close in the pantheon of record venture deals, especially when normalized to an IRR (annual return).

Benchmark Capital is often cited since their $6M investment was worth 500M+ at IPO less than a year later and then eventually ballooned to being worth $5B as shit got crazy.

the 12.7M Accel invested into Facebook in the A was worth ~$10B at IPO. I think even that is less on IRR than the ebay deal

<comment><USER9> Right, but those are single deals. You could show similarly silly numbers for YC/Heroku, etc... How did Benchmark and Accel do in aggregate is the question? I don't think that data is public, is it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What's interesting is that if 2-3 years ago, ycombinator had the ability to identify and pick winners. I have the impression that in the past year it became the other way around.

Y combinator by picking companies are in fact the kingmakers and are creating the winners.

<comment><USER10> Not too clear about what your last sentence means. Could you please clarify?

<comment><USER11> He means that in the past, they made good guesses about which companies would be winners. Now, they have so much clout that merely by picking a company they can make it a winner.

Of course, they're still making smart picks. It's just easier for those picks to succeed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for translating it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> And how much money have they generated to date?

<comment><USER4> Quite a lot, actually. While some startups (e.g. Twitter) take a while to generate significant revenues, it happens that the most successful startups we've funded were not of that type.

<comment><USER13> I'm curious what proportion of YC's success has come through very public, consumer-facing companies like Reddit, vs. companies the outside world never hears of, that quietly make tons of money behind the scenes selling to businesses and/or governments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I do wonder how many (if any) successful YC companies have bootstrapped (except for the YC funding).

<comment><USER15> Depends on what you mean by successful. :)

I can't think of any YC-funded companies that have slowly grown organically into modestly successful long-term businesses. Paul Graham made a comment somewhere that YC actually has no problem if the founders want to build a "lifestyle" business, and won't push for VC-backed moonshots if it's not in the founders' interests, but I just haven't heard of that outcome happening. It's possible I just don't know about them, though.

There have been several that sold for reasonably good totals without raising any funding, if that counts. For example, Clickpass sold for $1m, and raised no funding except YC's $20k.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Raising venture capital is an interesting way to pay salaries.

But maybe a more interesting title is how much profit YC companies have made.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's interesting, they invest an average of $15,000 in each company so let's say they have invested somewhere around 6M.

According the the FAQ (<http://ycombinator.com/faq.html>) they take an average of 6 or 7 percent stake in each company.

For shits and giggles let's use 6%. A low end estimate of their ROI would be around a whopping 174%. Their current holdings of the 7.78 Billion would be around 466 million.

This is all wacky math I realize but it's interesting to take into account how well this fund has done.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're not taking into consideration the various dilutions and other preferred rights from other investors but all in all - it's clear that this fund will be very successful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Didn't Paul breakout the outcomes of Y Combinator companies a while back (e.g. acquired, sold, in business, etc)? It would be interesting to see if anything has dramatically changed.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm doing quick 3 min survey on what people think about certain venture capital firms and see if there is any correlation to their industry, location, school etc. Will post results back here upon completion.

<https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VCstartup>

</comment><comment><USER19> That's amazing. Assuming the valuation of $5B, YC is now worth $250m.

<comment><USER20> More amazing, given that over half of the companies are from last year and this year, and it is mostly agreed that they have only gotten better and better by Demo Day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> How much is Y Combinator's share (if any)?

<comment><AUTHOR> _We make small investments (rarely more than $20,000) in return for small stakes in the companies we fund (usually 2-10%)._

Taken from <http://ycombinator.com/about.html>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Impressive numbers

</comment><comment><USER22> Obligatory:

<http://imgur.com/7yyJC></comment>