A neuromorphic-computing 'roadmap' - <AUTHOR> http://www.kurzweilai.net/neuromorphic-computing-roadmap-envisions-analog-path-to-simulating-human-brain

<comment><USER2> Isn't that article just blogspam? I don't see what value it is adding over the original publication:

[http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnins.2013.00...](http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnins.2013.00118/full)

[Even the tl;dr crowd could skim the introduction and the conclusions].

</comment><comment><USER3> "Because analog devices do not have to process binary codes as digital computers do, their performance can be both faster and much less power hungry"

That's either a non-sequitur or an oversimplification.

<comment><USER4> The idea is that neuro chips are error tolerant and such can deal with manufacture tolerances better. As we shrink silicon more perhaps we will abandon fragile digital design and go for self organising neuro inspired design.

I am somewhat skeptical as we don't do that kind of computimg in software. I can't yet imagine doing a whole application using 90% neural nets.

<comment><USER5> Rather than "fragile digital" it may be more apropos to say "efficient analog". If anything, analog is more fragile -- affected by changes in temperature, drive voltage, chemical gradients across individual chips. Digital is an escape from that fragility, but at the expense of power efficiency and speed.

<comment><USER4> I think of digital as a logical house of cards. A single flip of a bit has a cascade of effects. Analogue is affected by lots of things, but good analogue design is robust to these perturbations. Digital circuits can't be perturbed outside their tolerances. Digital design can't generally deal with a noisy AND. It this kind of manufacturing noise they want to deal with with neuromorphic chips. As I said, I am sceptical myself but that's the justification I have heard from this research domain.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ultra High Security Password Generator   - <AUTHOR> https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm <comment><USER2> This is unbelievable. A quote:

> Every one is completely random (maximum entropy) without any pattern, and > the cryptographically-strong pseudo random number generator we use > _guarantees that no similar strings will ever be produced again_.

It's a bit early in your page's text to be lying, especially to a technically astute readership.

First, there is no such thing as a "cryptographically-strong pseudo random number generator". It's a pseudorandom number generator, and the probability that it will produce the exact same password on the next invocation is the inverse of the word's bit length. That means "no similar strings will ever be produced again" is an outright lie.

Second, the more results it produces, the more likely that there will be repetitions of prior results. For the reason, read about the birthday problem:

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

> Every one is completely random (maximum entropy) without any pattern ...

False, which is the meaning behind "pseudorandom". In fact, the exact same sequence of passwords will be produced by the same algorithm using the same initial seed, over and over again. All a hacker needs to do is find out which of the common pseudorandom number generators is in use, provide the same initial seed, and he has all the provided passwords, arranged in order.

Finally, the two claims --

1\. ... no similar strings will ever be produced again ...

2\. ... cryptographically-strong pseudo random number generator ...

\-- represent an obvious contradiction. If the generator produces a high- quality pseudorandom sequence, then _ipso facto_ it must be able to produce the exact same results again. This is a requirement of the provided definition.

Moral -- don't let uneducated salespeople write your technical descriptions.</comment>


Gruber: 'Dropbox is the last app that doesn't offer automatic software updates.' - <AUTHOR> https://alpha.app.net/gruber/post/424366

<comment><AUTHOR> Full quote: _'I think Dropbox is the last app I use that doesn't offer automatic software updates.'_

Dropbox's official information on updates (although I'm with Gruber, i.e., I've never received an auto-update):

 _'If you want to have the latest stable version of Dropbox, you don't have to do anything! Dropbox will silently update itself in the background._

 _To tell which version of Dropbox you're using, simply hover your mouse over the Dropbox icon in your system tray. A small dialog box will appear with the latest version. You can also find the version number by visiting your Dropbox preferences and selecting the Account tab. The Dropbox version number appears in gray._

 _If you don't have the latest version yet, don't worry! Auto-upgrades are rolled out over the course of several weeks after a new update is available. We're very conservative about auto-updating. We never want to risk breaking a working version of Dropbox.'_

<https://www.dropbox.com/help/13/en>

</comment><comment><USER2> Yup. I don't think the DropBox auto update actually works.

I'm on 1.4.12 on this machine while the last version that you can download directly from DropBox is 1.4.17.

Something is not working right.</comment>


Ask HN: I'm not seeing it anymore - <AUTHOR> I'm not sure what I'm looking for here, although I trust the advise this community has to offer more than most.
It's 2 weeks until Christmas, and about 3 before I lose my house and almost everything else I have.
I worked for 5 years with some company, and got let go on the spot. 5 years of my life, no one even said goodbye. I'm told that's normal.
I've worked hard since I was 15. I've been working on startups since high school.
You know how it is, I thought I was going to be a millionaire by 21, then by 21 I realised how much of an idiot I was in high school. But I'm not sure I have any hope left now.
I read, I try to better myself, I do everything I can to make something of myself. I feel I have so much experience for my age. I've written a book and I'm working on another. I've worked on countless projects (all failed, but still), and I'm obsessive about learning by nature.
I feel like I have so much to offer, but no one care's because of my communication skills. I'm autistic, shy and depressive - which translates to toxic for any "positive team oriented" companies. Or more simply, all of them.
Companies seem to like my applications. I haven't found it hard to get interviews, but I find it impossible to get replies after that.
I know I'm running out of time, and I'm getting scared because I don't have anywhere to go after Christmas.
My family keep telling me I should give up and find a retail job or similar because this has been going on for months. And perhaps that's all I'm worth honestly. Communication is important. Perhaps there isn't a place for someone like myself in this industry.
I'm exhausted. I've worked non-stop for 10 years, and for what? I'm in a worse position than most my friends who dropped out of school. It's a joke. A Christmas story void of all moral and meaning.
Rant over.
Merry Christmas everyone. Truly. <comment><USER2> I dunno about retail. But look into IT jobs in the defense sector or government, or higherEd. Eg, a job that is stable and not based on VC or grant-based; not some tenuous startup.

Look into your local 4 year university job sites (usually jobs.*.edu)

</comment><comment><USER3> Take a moment to relax. Yes, shit is bad for you and I'm sorry for everything you've experienced. Try to relax for a bit, at least a day or so.

Becoming a millionaire isn't easy, very few people will achieve such status, so don't feel so terrible over it. It's okay, you still did what you could and I'm sure you've learned a lot. And even if you didn't, even that's okay, you don't have to be a superstar or a millionaire, you just have to be you.

For now, remember Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It may be beneath you (and it probably is), but just get a job to survive for now. It really isn't about "what you are worth," it's about survival first, then once you have a fallback can you get back up and fight. You can't fight if you have no limbs to walk on, so make sure you can survive and slowly work back up.

Regardless, you need to believe in yourself. Take a breather, a moment to relax, but believe you can get back in there to fight again, because you can.

Cheers.

EDIT: also echoing tenken, there are other jobs you could get that aren't retail that might still be worth it to you. Keep an open mind and you'll be surprised what you could get yourself into.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I'm sorry. I should have been clearer.

I'm not stressed about not being a millionaire or anything like that. I'm old enough not to be aiming, or expecting that anymore.

I just want something that's somewhat rewarding which can also provide a roof over my head.

Thanks for your comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > I'm autistic, shy and depressive - which translates to toxic for any > "positive team oriented" companies.

What about remote or contract work? There's plenty of jobs that don't require you to talk every day or be physically present.

</comment><comment><USER5> Merry Christmas! Hope thing resolve and get better for you. It's a hard time of year for lots of us.

Not sure where you are located but there are serious lack of qualified technical resources in the Northeast. Consulting gigs at Fortune 500s are usually fairly easy to get too, just look in boring cities that aren't Boston or NYC. Also, agree with Remote opportunities others suggested.

Many programmers can relate to the not team oriented thing, you're not alone in that one. Consulting and remote gigs can get a foot into the door at a place that values getting shit done over team love.

Good luck, hope things turn out for you. Merry Christmas!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

I've never been the best at getting consulting gigs. Do you have any advise beyond just browsing various boards for contract positions? I tried cold emails before without before too.

I'm actually looking for remote positions at the moment as I agree with the consensus here that would be preferable for me. However, I live outside the US so opportunities are much fewer. And even with remote jobs there is still an interview. My anxiety remains noticeably severe even over Skype, and my speech problems are also very obvious.

<comment><USER5> What's your specialty that you have experience with that others don't?

It helps to have one thing that someone needs. I started my last gig by having more JavaScript and web experience than most others in my market at the time. I landed the role because one company was making a significant investment at the time I was looking.

Think about the one or two experiences you have that might be hot in the news or in corporate sectors... Hadoop, JavaScript, Machine Learning, Cognitive Computig, Analytics, Robotic Process Automation, Microservices, Internet of Things, etc.

As far as the speech, just be up front that you are a hard worker and deliver results but that you prefer text/email as your primary means of communication. Look for interviews that have a proof you can code, those will tend to actually evaluate skills and ability over trivialities like verbal communication (this is especially trivial in remote work).

Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would you be open to taking another interview? I'm this handle @gmail</comment>


Introducing the Priceonomics Analysis Engine and API - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/introducing-the-priceonomics-analysis-engine-and/ <comment><USER2> Some ideas/feature requests:

1\. extract twitter/fb/ecc. contacts

2\. (optionally) follow about/contact pages to improve contact information

3\. improve Facebook likes if the website declares a FB page/app (as an example, check out theneeds.com, we have 14k likes, but priceonomics says 203)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback! Right now the Social analyzer pulls how many people shared that one specific page on FB (or liked it or comment it), rather than how many followers a Page has or Users an FB App has. We could add that per your suggestion though.

We currently use it to see how popular various articles are on the web since FB likes is a good proxy for overall traffic. FB like are public whereas page views typically aren't.

<comment><USER2> I ment more about extracting that the page's twitter account is @..., and the Facebook page is fb.com/...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Love what you guys are doing! In a similar space in terms of structuring the web (although I'm not doing general purpose tools like you are).

Can you comment on why I'd use your API instead of writing my own stuff? I'm very comfortable with crawlers and data extractors, don't mind running my own infrastructure. I've played with Kimono and Import.IO quite a bit, but they get in my way and actually slow down my work.

Also, do you have any advice on gathering info from social media? I've found some places are fairly liberal (facebook), some are locked down tightly. I'd love to know what the professionals do in terms of infrastructure and scraping policy too...

<comment><USER5> The main reason we think there needs to be a platform for crawling and structuring data is that it's a huge hassle to reinvent the wheel every time. If you have experience writing crawlers and have been able to afford the time to learn to write them well, you've basically already reinvented the wheel. But now you also have to maintain the wheel. We think it would be better if people started working together on the problem of structuring the web. Besides running infrastructure (which has it's own challenges), there is really no reason why everyone needs to build their own extractor for every website. People generally want to extract the same things, and just a handful of quality implementations should be enough to satisfy almost everyone.

One of the keys to actually having an extractor repository is providing incentive for people to build and maintain the extractors, which is actually where we're headed once we allow developers to start building their own applications on the Analysis Engine.

If you're good at extracting structured data from HTML, you should continue writing your own extractors and even consider selling access to them. On the other hand, if you can't be bothered learning the art of extracting data, why not pay someone to use their commercial grade extractor?

So, to summarize, you should use our API so that you can better leverage your time and contribute to the creation of even better structuring tools.

We really like the stuff that Kimono and Import.IO are working on. They are significantly lowering the barriers to getting started at extracting/structuring data, which is great for everyone. Of course there are limitations to what their tools can do, but that's what you'll see every time someone attempts to simplify a complicated process. We aim to be the glue that connects people with data acquisition, structuring, and analysis tools.

Crawling social media is pretty tough because social platforms tend to be very reserved about access to their data (probably due to the enormous amount of personal data they have). It's a disturbing trend for sites to require an account before they even let you past the landing page. It's basically not publicly available data anymore. That's actually not something we have much experience doing, since we haven't had any customers ask for it yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How do you get around sites blocking the IP of your engine?

</comment><comment><USER7> One thing you may want to do is parse html to get relevant data into a structured format so end-user doesn't have to write a post-parser.

<comment><USER5> Thanks zeeshanm! We actually have a lot of parsers that do just that, we just haven't yet made them available on the engine. We're also looking at ways to let people create their own and make it available to other users, since we think that's the best way to get to a fully structured web. Are there any sites in particular that you think we should focus on first?

<comment><USER7> I was thinking more along in the lines of creating a dynamic parser. It's an interesting and a challenging problem and I have thought about it for some time. There may need to be some human intervention involved but by design it should be dynamic.</comment></comment></comment>


Pulse will come pre-installed on the Kindle Fire - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pulse.me/amazon-kindle-fire-welcome-to-the-pulse-famil

<comment><USER2> Without criticizing Pulse, why are you all so congratulatory of this move? What does Pulse do?

<comment><USER3> "Pulse is an elegant news reading application for iPhone, iPad and Android devices. It incorporates colorful panning story bars and fills them with content from your favorite sources. Pulse redefines news, giving you the opportunity to experience the news you desire from traditional sources, your favorite blogs and social networks – all in one beautiful interface."

<comment><USER4> This sentence should REALLY be on the post linked by OP

<comment><USER5> Absolutely. I've never heard of pulse before so I went to the blog to find out what it was. But nothing. Same for the homepage. There is just a link to the blog post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Huge win for Pulse as well as Amazon. If you're an Amazon Prime subscriber you've now got news, movies, tv, and books from the instant you boot up. Genius move on Amazon's part.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow, not sure how I missed the existence of Pulse. It's a really interesting news reader.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, definitely my favorite reader for iPhone after trying a boatload of them. Presents information in an attractive and economical manner and every time you think "I wish I could do that", there's a way to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pulse looks nice. But I don't quite see how it's an advantage for the users, since they could just install it. It's more likely it'll annoy those users that don't want it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Out of all the news readers I tried Pulse has been the one I like most, but I don't understand why none of them support some sort of offline mode.

</comment><comment><USER10> Incredibly huge win for Pulse. A huge congrats is in order to everyone involved in making this happen.

</comment><comment><USER11> Congrats guys! That is awesome!

</comment><comment><USER12> this is great; though as an android user, i much prefer the ui of taptu personally.

</comment><comment><USER13> Dang, this is awesome!</comment>


Debian: how to decently sort du -sh * - <AUTHOR> http://blog.giuseppeurso.net/debian-how-to-decently-sort-du-sh/index.html <comment><USER2> There is a much better solution (on systems which support it, OS X doesn't).

du -h | sort -h

sort -rh for reverse sorting, pipe into head or tail for the first/last few etc.

[http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-do-i-sort-du-h-output-by- si...](http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-do-i-sort-du-h-output-by-size-under- linux/)

<comment><USER3> Or, for all systems:

du -sk |sort -n

Sure, the results are in kilobytes but it's not that hard to read. It's even clearer in a way, it's obvious at a glance as to which entries are orders of magnitude bigger, since they have more numbers next to them.

<comment><USER2> Yes, that is probably better. I needed to use du -k (Centos).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just used on my nas!</comment>


Why we won't sign your NDA - <AUTHOR> http://codegestalt.com/fistbump

<comment><USER2> I think that this comes down not so much to the arrogance of "Our idea is so good, we must stop people copying it!", but more the ignorance of "I read a lot about NDAs, they seem like something that might make people take us more seriously as businesspeople".

</comment><comment><USER3> Couldn't agree more and we actually have a similar piece on our company blog, <http://www.cubeia.com/?p=1084>

</comment><comment><USER4> I believe NDAs make sense when you're developing for unreleased proprietary platforms. If you get outsourcing work to develop a piece of code for the next Samsung phone, preventing you blog the phone spec months before the launch is probably very reasonable. Wannabes adopting bigcorp schemes - it's just cargo cult.

<comment><USER5> NDAs make sense in a lot of scenarios, just rarely do they make sense right at the beginning of a business relationship.

In my (marketing) work I have never had to sign an NDA to start talking to a company nor have I asked anyone else to do that, however once we move into actually working together then I have both been asked to sign and asked others to, frequently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pretty meh. As much as there's a sea of ideas out there, ever increasing is the see of dev and design talent. Get over yourself. If there wasn't such an arrogance around your post I may have given it credence. I can tell you more, but my feedback requires you sign an NDA.

Sincerely,

An Internet nobody.</comment>


Atom.io - <AUTHOR> http://atom.io

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure if you are the author, but I get some kind of failure page and redirected to [https://atom.io/auth/failure?message=invalid_credentials&str...](https://atom.io/auth/failure?message=invalid_credentials&strategy=github)

<comment><USER3> this is a github project: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302941)</comment></comment>


Help me surprise Catherine - <AUTHOR> http://surprisecatherine.com/

<comment><USER2> If the community puts up $12k for Catherine to attend this program (which, to echo other sentiments, seems _really_ expensive for a three month iOS intensive given what's available out there for free, both content and community)...

If that happens, Catherine should -- after she's graduated and is making a nice income (which she will be, as an iOS developer) -- pass it along and give $12k back to help the community somehow. Give it to a program in NYC that's helping give underprivileged kids access to technology, for example.

That would seem fair to me. It does seem a little weird to beg for donations so someone who already seems pretty smart and well-connected can further their career a bit (in an expensive way -- see above) when there are so many ways $12k can be used to really change someone's life. Or many people's lives.

<comment><USER3> This is love. Not begging.

Catherine isn't asking. Her boyfriend is, and he's doing it without her knowledge (presumably).

He wants to support his girlfriend and her passion for iOS development, and he's asking for help from people who might feel some empathy.

I received some scholarships & grants to go to college, I suppose that means I'm obligated to create my own scholarship fund?

<comment><USER4> According to a WSJ article[1] a few days ago about Flatiron's $5.5 million funding round, "More than 98% of its students get jobs through the Flatiron School's placement efforts."

It's hard to criticize someone for asking for help (you have to do what you have to do), but if the Flatiron School is truly this successful at preparing attendees for real-world development and helping close to 100% of them find work after just four months (as opposed to four years), I think it's to be expected that some folks are going to be less empathetic.

Interestingly, despite Flatiron's $12,000 tuition, the WSJ article says "The school's student acceptance rate is less than 8%." That suggests they're not just accepting anybody who can pay; ostensibly they are filtering for ability/accomplishment. If this is the case, and the placement figures are accurate, there's no reason Flatiron (and programs like it) couldn't make their money on the back-end. Assume that graduates are placed in entry-level positions paying $80,000 on average. A 20% placement fee would earn Flatiron $16,000, $4,000 more per student than tuition. If you assume a class size of 30, and a 98% placement rate, you're looking at an _additional_ $116,000 in revenue per graduating class.

Yes, there's risk with this model, but if these schools are truly capable of placing nearly all of their students in in-demand development jobs after just four months, the risk seems modest. After all, when the market turns, the pool of people willing to pay $12,000 for a four month program is going to dry up anyway.

[1] [http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/04/09/flatiron- scho...](http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/04/09/flatiron-school- raises-5-5m-to-teach-tech-skills-place-graduates-in-jobs/)

<comment><USER3> Ponying up $12k shows some amount of initiative, as does applying, and sticking through the course.

I know we're getting off-topic here--

Generally, I'm all for having more people who are qualified to write code, but I'm opposed to For-Profit Education systems as I believe incentives aren't aligned.

Right now, Flatiron needs to establish itself as credible, and worthy of your tuition and time, by separating itself from the other would-be "L2Code Schools." So it's in their best interest to be highly selective.

But what happens when they hit critical mass? The risk of turning out like the Art Institute, where they no longer care about the quality of applicants, and are instead focused on revenues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think putting up a .com and making it to the front page of Hacker News will make this much of a surprise.

Open source projects need money (hello OpenSSL) and children are dying. Paying for someone's Objective-C/Xcode tuition isn't my number-one priority at this time. Perhaps someone else will swallow the bait.

<comment><USER3> And just how much have you donated to Save the Children & open source?

<comment><USER6> 5-numbers. And yes, this e-beg cr*p shouldn't be on HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow. Best of luck to both of your but I have to say a dev boot camp for iOS is the last thing I would ever consider spending 12k on even when I was just learning Objective-C.

Now blowing 12k on a trip overseas together after a 2 year long distance relationship... that's something that I could get behind.

That said, please please make sure the class sizes are very small and the instructor ratio is like 1:5 max. You will be paying a premium and if they put you in with 30 other people or even 15 (60k/month for them btw) you are just getting ripped off.

For 12k you could hire an experienced iOS dev to teach you this stuff in a couple hours a week. Even if Catherine paid 125/hr (and I bet someone would do it for less for the hell of it) that's still almost 100 hours of 1:1 time. Just food for thought. I'll donate anyway in hopes you take a nice vacation :)

PS. My friends website of as many tech schools as he could find says the rails program @ Flatiron has 32 people to a course - [http://schools.techendo.co](http://schools.techendo.co)

<comment><USER8> 32 x $12k. 4 months. Medicine? No, iOS programming. Note to self: Start Tech school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Have you exhausted all possible scholarship options? Try a curveball approach at The Flaitron (I'm sure you may have already, though) and anywhere else where educational funding may be available.

I didn't think I'd be able to make it to a WWDC scholarship from the UK until I went past the usual funding bureaucracy at my university and went directly to the head of dpt who was kind enough to authorise a bursary for me.

I don't think money should ever hold people back people skilled and intelligent enough from the educational resources and creative outlets they can use to the full to prosper.

It's one of the tragedies of our time.

I wish you all the best!

<comment><AUTHOR> She has been emailing Adam, the president of The Flatiron School about it. There is a $750 discount off the tuition, which she would qualify for, as well as a payment plan where 50% of the tuition is due up front, with the remaining 50% due over 6 months after graduating. I'm not sure if she is 100% eligible for that, but that would certainly make things much easier.

I agree that it is sad that money is what holds people back. It's a cruel system that I can't wait to see ripped to shreds by new & easier access to education.

I appreciate the kind words! :)

<comment><USER10> Easier access to education? $12k for 3 months is not easier access to education. That's just silly.

Start with Paul Hegarty's iOS class on iTunes U, it's free and it's terrific. Do all the assignments (if you get stuck you can find other people who have done them and see what they did but I really recommend doing it yourself.) Sign up for NSScreencast.com and watch 1 or 2 a day, taking notes. Go read as much Ray Wenderlich stuff as you can that's not dated (some of the stuff on his site's kinda old, but no matter.) Then build an app and put it in the app store, it can be lame but you have built so many practice ones it's good to actually get something in the App Store. Go read some stuff at objc.io, some stack overflow, whatever.

You are now an entry-level iOS developer. I just saved you $12,000 and you don't have to beg strangers on the internet for donations. Seriously, $12,000? I guess it's true: the best way to get rich in a gold rush/bubble is selling pickaxes. There are enough great resources out there that you are silly if you do this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was saying how $12k for the education is NOT easy.

Thank you for the tips. I will certainly pass them on (as well as read up myself!).

I mentioned this in a reply to you a little lower, but I'm not trying to beg here; I am offering design services, and she is selling hand-sewn stuff on Etsy.

<comment><USER11> come on, you and I know you want people to click on donation button

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If it's a good investment in her career she should just go get a loan. Alternatively, if she has a passion for programming and the skills you say she does she can take 12 weeks of her own time and learn to be an entry-level iOS developer for a lot less than $12k.

Begging is unseemly, and the whole "you can be a programmer in 3 months just give me $12k" thing is also kind of uncool.

<comment><USER12> I don't think you read the page clearly. She's already a programmer; she's trying to accelerate her learning process. Which frankly is worth the $12k, but getting an uncollateralized loan for that kind of thing can be difficult.

<comment><USER13> Fuck the haters. Keep it up! You should use twitter to reach out to writers at Mashable, Fast Company, etc and tell them this story. This story has feel-good written all over it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I'm gonna try and reach out to some tech bloggers and see what happens. Official accounts of Mashable, Fast Company, etc seem to just tweet their articles, with no @replies ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I really hate when people ask for help or advice achieving a certain goal and what they get in response is a bunch of yap about how they shouldn't want to do that in the first place.

But I dislike stuff like "The Flatiron School" even more so. I want to help you and Catherine. I remember too well driving junk-yard cars for days straight only to spend a few hours with my long-distance _[1]_ because plane tickets were impossibly out of reach. The others are right though: I'd sooner donate to send you guys on a cruise than essentially give money to the "Flatiron" folks.

I know that seems entirely unhelpful. Sorry.

 _[1] I did marry her in the end and that sweet suffering has become part of our collective mythology, now imparted to our own wide-eyed children. Succeed or fail, you 're doing the awesome part right now._

</comment><comment><USER15> She's very lucky to have you.

Have you heard of Hacker School in NY? Not only is it free, I think they offer $5k grants for female programmers who need living expenses. Generally the candidates for Hacker School and DBC/Flatiron don't overlap much, but if she's a programmer who's just moving to a new language, it might be worth looking in to.

<comment><AUTHOR> She applied to Hacker School back in December, but unfortunately she was not accepted. I didn't know about that $5k grant though, that is pretty amazing!

<comment><USER16> Did she try reapplying? They're accepting Summer applicants right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Woha $12000 for a semester? things are getting out of hand...

</comment><comment><USER18> A couple of thoughts:

1) What is the educational value of a course at Flatiron School - is there any accreditation? 2) What are the other options: graduate program at good program (Stanford, UW Seattle, Berkeley, or if NYC, why not check out the NYU digital arts program or the new Cornell initiative that Bloomberg has been touting)? Internship or entry level job into Google or another organization that has good mentorship? Granted, these may be even harder to get into, since competition is w/ CS majors from stanford/mit...

Just my thoughts musing out loud, not actually in the CS field, but it's interesting to ask - what's a good steppingstone for a young person just out of college into a CS-related job?

</comment><comment><USER19> If I give her money will she give me returns as profit with 20%+ of my sum after she graduates and starts making 100k?

<comment><USER20> You just described [https://www.upstart.com/](https://www.upstart.com/) which is something she could consider.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Disclaimer: I help run App Academy

You may want to look into our program ([http://appacademy.io](http://appacademy.io)). Students only pay us if they find jobs as developers after the program. In that case, the fee is 18% of your first year salary, payable over the first 6 months after you start working.

It's web focused, not iOS focused, but we do have a strong emphasis on fundamentals, and grads have often picked up iOS on the job within a few months.

</comment><comment><USER22> If you like it, promote it; if you don't, just flag it. (I flagged it because this isn't content or discussion)

</comment><comment><USER23> How is this begging? You don't have to donate, you can hire him as a designer. And he's offering a discount. If you A) need a designer B) want to help him and his girlfriend out, that's an added bonus.

People "donate" on Kickstarter when they pledge money to a project without pledging enough for a full reward, but we don't consider that begging. It's patronage. Not everything has to be black and white where if you give $5 here that means you're a bad person because there's someone less fortunate out there who could have used the money. If you think it's not worth it, then donate elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER24> This culture of begging is really starting to get to me. I'm all for helping non-profits, and those that cannot help themselves. Student loans if it's that important, guy.

</comment><comment><USER13> I used Upstart.com to fund thoughtbots Rails program. I highly suggest looking in to that. Also, youre an awesome boyfriend. Good luck, dude. Wife that girl up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Woah, looking into that now. Thanks!

And I'm just playing catch-up for all the things she's done with me.

(and I'm working on that wifing thing)

<comment><USER25> I'm a big fan of wifing the right person when you find them but ... your implication is that you live your lives in ways designed to make each other fulfilled and happy. __Never stop doing that. __It 's that important. Good luck from a happily married man (almost 27 years). Now I need to deliver tea in bed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Mind sharing some of her works? I'd like to see what she's done before considering donating.

</comment><comment><USER27> Hi Cody - good luck with the fundraising. Wouldn't it be ironic if you and Catherine ended up developing a site/app to help thousands of others worldwide to fund their college courses?

Kickstarter for education - perhaps it exists already?....

<comment><USER28> upstart.com and pave.com are similar in concept to that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Just bought a makeup bag from her Etsy shop that my girlfriend is sure to love.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> You are the best!

Funny story: she set up that Etsy a couple days before visiting her family in Florida, and actually lugged her sewing machine on the plane just so she was able to take any orders while away. Just to give a glimpse of how great she is, hah.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Unless I've missed a major price crash, Will's 1 BTC donation[1] is worth substantially more than $43.

1\. [http://imgur.com/zAqhqTk](http://imgur.com/zAqhqTk)

</comment><comment><USER8> $12k, 4 months! Wow. Sucks to be in college nowadays.

This guy (along with being boyfriend-of-the-year apparently) has the right idea.

Ignore these people. Debt === slavery! You are doing the right thing.

(Only #3 of his approach is begging. #1 & #2 are _advertising_ ) People get really angered at begging lately it seems..

p.s.. I'd say to give back to the "community", just make an app like watsi or something, and not spend your life's work finding more efficient ways to find people to f--k within a 10 mile radius..

<comment><USER31> It's not college. It's "hacker school". Lots of these out there advertising that they'll take you from zero skill to web/mobile developer in 3-4 months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think as a boyfriend that is really sweet. Forget what she should or shouldn't be studying or where, you are being incredibly supportive.

</comment><comment><USER33> > There's four ways to help

Should be "There are four ways to help".

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, fixed! Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> crappy e-begging</comment>


Man behind web's biggest illegal film site arrested following - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/20/man-behind-webs-biggest-illegal-film-site-arrested-following-legal-itunes-purchase/ <comment><USER2> This seems like more or less the final death knell of quality public trackers. What a shame.

<comment><USER3> Yes, yes, the sky is falling. we've heard it before when btjunkie went down, when demonoid went down, when isohunt went down.

Someone comes to take their place, and learns from the mistakes of the others. And everyone goes back to what they were doing before.

<comment><USER3> And now kickass torrents is back up. Sky didn't fall that hard.</comment></comment></comment>


Salary for Founders of a Broke Startup - <AUTHOR>

I know that Y Combinator recommends that startups pay their founders to avoid legal hiccups later (Lecture 18 from How to Start a Startup) - but what about startups that are side projects with no investment?  Is it still legally required to pay the founders?  Do the founders have to loan money to the startup so that it can pay them? <comment><USER2> It's never legally required to pay the founders. The founders' equity, which should be vesting over time, can be considered their only compensation. Be forewarned that this can still lead to massive tax pains later on if an 83(b) election isn't filed[1].

No matter how broke you are, you should be able to find a lawyer who can help you get set up. You can use the same founding documents, amendments, and appendices for your future bootstrapped ventures, so it's worth doing it right.

Some firms will take equity in exchange for legal work, so that's also something to consider. I've never used a firm like that, so I don't know how that all works.

A dangerous and _extremely_ common side effect of doing your own legal work is in-fighting with co-founders. When you have rock-solid, thorough founding documents, you've already agreed on what to do for an exhaustive list of contingenies: what happens if someone wants to leave, if someone isn't pulling their weight, if someone dies, etc. etc. My founding docs are about 50 pages.

It's extremely important that you set everything up right, and it shouldn't cost you more than $1,500. I've known firms that will give you a boilerplate package for your particular state for about $500, so shop around.

1\. [http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/2008/02/15/what-is- an-83...](http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/2008/02/15/what-is- an-83b-election/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, we did everything through Clerky which is recommended in the Y Combinator lecture I mentioned ( [http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/fairpay/fs17b_executi...](http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/fairpay/fs17b_executive.htm) ) - which unfortunately is the same lecture that states quite strongly that you should always be paying minimum wage...

<comment><USER2> (I'm not a lawyer. None of the following is legal advice.)

1\. YC is not gospel, and (by definition) none of their companies are bootstrapped. That means their experience and advice aren't necessarily targeted at people like you.

2\. Clerky isn't a substitute for a real lawyer. You and your co-founders might have needs/preferences that aren't represented by a "fill-in-the-blank" document.

3\. Clerky is YC-backed, so the recommendation to use Clerky should be taken with a grain of salt.

I can't stress this enough: _talk to an experienced, real-life startup lawyer_. There is no substitute. I know that seems old-fashioned or inefficient to our crowd, but I've learned the hard way on several occasions that you shouldn't do your own legal work. The cost of getting a professional to do it is so low that it's a no-brainer.

Related to the law you mentioned: it doesn't matter what the vesting schedule is. 20% is 20%. Furthermore, the law is similar to the internship law. Someone has to feel wronged and then report you to the govt or sue you in order for it to be a problem.

Basically the law is trying to protect early employees from being exploited. It's not really targeting founders. Of course, you should verify those statements with a lawyer, as I might be wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> In my opinion:

The legal structure of a company should be tailored to its capital structure and owner's interests. Delaware C corps are a reasonable choice for companies that have passive investors and whose owners are striving toward increasing outside investment to fund rapid growth.

In the side project state or early prototype state, another simpler less costly form may make sense. An LLC can be acquired by a C-corp when and if a C-corp becomes more appropriate to the immediate future capital structure of a company. What matters early on are:

      how control is structured
      how new founders may be added
      what happens ifwhen a founder leaves
      what existing assets [intellectual property] are assigned
       to the company.

While it may not be long lived for a company that takes off, there's a cost for optimizing for a growth model that may not happen.

</comment><comment><USER4> AFAIK no legal requirement exists saying a founder must have a salary greater than $0. But founders must find value in their compensation package in order for them to not quit. Pay them nothing and they're that much more likely to quit.

</comment><comment><USER5> You trade your present time for future return while working on side projects. You might have different outcomes, your side project would have got traction, you can move on with idea to startup. Or it may help you to find early invester or co-founder through that.

If everything else failed, side-project definitely helps to find a suitable technical job that fits your resume, because you spend a lot of hours on working on technology you liked. When you are not succeeding, don't forget to open source your work. That add credit, too.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I may have actually found a legal reason for this. I found an "Exemption for Executive Employees" \- [http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/fairpay/fs17b_executi...](http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/fairpay/fs17b_executive.htm) \- wherein it appears to me (also not a lawyer) that anyone who owns at least 20% interest in a company is exempt from minimum wage requirements. Since everyone involved owns more than 20% I think this one is good enough for me!

<comment><AUTHOR> And then the counter to my counter-example that I don't know is whether or not it still counts as at least 20% interest if at least 20% of the interest hasn't vested yet...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Obviously, I don't have all the information to make an informed opinion. Also, IANAL. No cash to pay salaries might be indicative that its time to shutdown or at least seriously contemplate doing so.

<comment><USER2> Disagree (in some cases). Many side projects will go months with no cashflow, which is fine because the owner(s) have day jobs.

No cash to pay salaries for a funded or full-time startup does mean that the startup is dead, though.</comment></comment>


Don't Tell Your Friends They're Lucky - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/44/luck/dont-tell-your-friends-theyre-lucky <comment><USER2> The article (and some comments here) seem to conflate _luck_ and what I will call _lot_. "Luck" I define as random happenstance during one's life. _You can manage luck._ Doing so is the central theme of many board games. You can increase your luck "surface area" by taking more chances. Entire industries (e.g. insurance) exist to manage luck.

Your "lot", on the other hand, I define as what you were born with. How you were raised, where you grew up, what kind of education you got -- everything you _can 't_ control that _does_ have a significant impact on your life's outcomes. You can work to improve your lot, or minimize its impact on your life, but it's very difficult.

Of course there's some correlation: those with a good lot often learn early how to manage luck, and those who manage luck well can negate a poor lot.

Hence I begrudge no-one with seemingly good "luck": often (possibly more than not), their fortune is simply a byproduct of how they managed their luck. Good for them!

But those born into a good lot? They're the true "lucky" ones.

<comment><USER3> I would add a third category: _fortune_.

Lot is what you were born with.

Luck is when random things do or don't happen regardless of skill. You can manage it to an extent. Bad luck through being careful and various types of insurance, good luck mostly through participating. Buying bitcoin 3 years ago and selling at great profit now is pure luck. Maybe you influenced the market to grow, probably it was pure luck.

 _Fortune_ is the result of stochastic processes. You can do a thing, invest your skill and knowledge, and it can work out or not. Sometimes it works better, sometimes less. For instance, you launch a product that can do between $2k/month and $5k/month and it hits $4.5k/month instead of $2k. That's fortune. Your input affects your chances, but nothing is ever certain.

With time, fortunate events compound and the more often fortune works out for you, the higher your chance that it will continue to do so.

Or as Peter Dinklage says: "I hate that word—'lucky.' It cheapens a lot of hard work. Living in Brooklyn in an apartment without any heat and paying for dinner at the bodega with dimes—I don't think I felt myself lucky back then. Doing plays for 50 bucks and trying to be true to myself as an artist and turning down commercials where they wanted a leprechaun. Saying I was lucky negates the hard work I put in and spits on that guy who's freezing his ass off back in Brooklyn. So I won't say I'm lucky. I'm fortunate enough to find or attract very talented people. For some reason I found them, and they found me."

<comment><USER4> I'd separate _hard work_ into two components:

A. The rewarding part of your craft, e.g. the flow you get into when deeply programming all night. B. The sacrifices your craft requires, e.g. the living in the unheated apartment.

One thing the hard work people forget is that it isn't very impressive to just do type-A enjoyable work for sustained and or even super human periods. Other people would _pay_ for that experience.

I think this separation opens up a few interesting ways of viewing those who are "too lazy" to do the hard work. First, different people flow in different tasks and so even if you gave Peter Dinklage a chance to work for openAI on any project he wanted, he might find it tiring and burn out. This is obvious, but by induction, there's this whole class of school-type activities that many people seem to mentally resist.

Second, there seem to be different expectations on how much of B-type work one has to do in order to get the A-type work they crave. I think people perceived as lazy are those who doubt that almost any amount B-work they contribute will earn them their goal, only more the same. This is excellent when it discourages the average thirteen year old from pursuing pro sports as a career, but I think it also might be the largest reduction to productivity in our economy we have today, as discouraged people tend to lower output and cause problems for their company. And that's only the economic side, the social side of hopelessness and lack of meaning is way worse!

<comment><USER5> This is a very interesting comment, articulated better than I have been able to explain to others.

I've always been fond of saying showing up to work on time and working your butt off is the low bar to success. All this does is buy you entrance to the ride, and opens up doors of opportunity for you which are worthless unless you take advantage of. Just working hard at some dead-end job 9-5 doesn't get it done, there are millions of people who can successfully do this and get nowhere in life.

Finding someone who understands the 'B' work is by far the most important part of their career is rather rare. I've called the lack of motivation to do this from the vast majority of people "laziness in thought". It's much harder to gain discipline and do well in this part of your career than simply showing up and doing what you're told as well as you can.

It also doesn't help that the school system more or less trains you almost exclusively for the "A" type work, and actively encourages ignoring the "B" and letting someone else handle it for you. This is a very hard attitude to break as taking control of your own path is rather scary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My father and I have somewhat productive political conversations: He's fiscally conservative, I tend towards the liberal side of the scale.

Drilling in to find what we really disagree about, it seems to boil down to two concepts: (1) I view success as a matter of luck that your effort can make better or worse. He views effort as the single most important deciding factor in success in life (2) I'm willing to tolerate an amount of "unfairness" in people getting help they "don't deserve", while he finds this very offensive.

I honestly feel that if considered luck to be a larger factor and effort to be a lesser factor, his political stances would change pretty dramatically. (same applies to me in reverse). I wonder how much the social willingness to accept luck as a factor impacts popular political positions. (Perhaps not much, as the author in the article promotes a consumption tax, which is generally seen as more regressive)

<comment><USER7> The liberal view of this issue may have the virtue of being correct, but it's very counterproductive from the individual's standpoint.

I know that the ideology espoused on sites such as dailykos.com were very detrimental to personal drive and success in my college years of 18-22.

That ideology kept pounding home the idea of the unfairness of the economy, of the lower share of the pie allocated to labor vs capital and the increasing inequality of American society.

All of those things were true no doubt, but they were not _useful_ for someone who had been hacking since 4th grade.

I file it under bad luck that the same people that had a correct analysis and opposition to the great mistake of that time, the Iraq invasion and occupation, also had such a neurotic and self-limiting and destructive view towards work, productivity and the modern economy, and that I was too inexperienced in the ways of the world at the time to understand this very important concept.

<comment><USER8> So your position is that we should just all believe outright falsehoods if it's "useful?"

<comment><USER9> To be ever so slightly pedantic: regardless of whether we should, we do. We're afflicted with a slew of cognitive biases.

<comment><USER8> I don't really see that as relevant to this particular discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think this touches upon one of the biggest weaknesses of the current economic system. We systematically waste the human capability of millions of people because the system essentially randomly gives much better opportunity to some over others. Meritocracy somewhat exists but mostly to the extent that people can maximize the opportunity they've drawn as their lot in life.

I like the idea of Basic Income, but it's a somewhat limited solution to capping how far down someone can fall in society - what would really supercharge a future economy is opening up avenues to truly distributing equal opportunity. Wealth inequality suppresses this strongly, when people receive better margin of income over the absolute minimum economic allocation of their wages, they can then allocate their own wealth from their personal outlook in multiple ways - including starting businesses which may change the world.

<comment><USER11> _We systematically waste the human capability of millions of people because the system essentially randomly gives much better opportunity to some over others._

We don't do anything. The nature of reality is that there is not equal distribution of [anything]. The universe is a dynamical system - portions of the system will through probability always get stuck at local/global minima.

<comment><USER12> Sure, but the universe is also a place where it rains on your head, and then the sun burns your skin off, and wolves casually stroll in and eat your children. That's what the universe does when left to its own devices, and we don't like that, and we change it.

"It is the way it is because it's natural" is a pretty naive fallacy.

<comment><USER13> > and we don't like that, and we change it.

And the ones who do the work to change it reap the biggest rewards that come from those changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Debating the actual importance of luck seems a lot less important than developing the proper attitude towards luck.

Pretending luck doesn't exist can lead to arrogance and a lack of empty for people who haven't succeeded. On the other hand, believing that luck controls everything can lead to fatalism.

It might seem best to find a happy medium, but being wishy washy about this whole thing just gives you opportunities to blame your own failure on circumstances outside your control, while continuing to take credit for success. In the general case, looking for balance between opposing ideologies makes no guarantee that you'll walk away with the best parts of both instead of the worst.

In practice, it's probably best to drop the determinism/indeterminism dichotomy completely and just focus directly on the desired end attitudes.

On a side note, the reason American society is obsessed with meritocracy has nothing to do with a belief about the nature of luck. Denying luck as the path to success is just a way to make people work harder.

<comment><USER15> Another commenter used the phrase "luck surface area", which I think plays well into the concept that everything is hinged on an element of luck, where harder workers and people with better birthright generally have larger "surface area".

<comment><USER16> While I agree that you can increase you "luck surface area" (e.g., by taking more chances), that doesn't mean it will help. It implies you also are increasing you "unlucky surface area", so if you "somehow" attract (?) more good/bad luck, you might as well just end up being far more miserable than if you had not. In other words, I don't believe luck to be a variable, it seems much more of a constant that you've been born with.

<comment><USER15> Yes, but what is "bad luck"? For most people "luck" really means "how wide have I spread my net" \-- how many people are willing to give me opportunities? When we say "luck surface area" I don't think we mean legitimate zero-sum odds, because we're only talking about luck idiomatically. You don't have much to lose by putting yourself first in line for as many opportunities as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's certainly true that you need to be very lucky to become a billionaire - generating wealth at that level usually involves tremendous numbers of other people loving whatever business you have decided to create. But if you're reasonably intelligent, at least in the US, it's quite possible to become a millionaire without much luck, through decades of hard work and discipline.

Examples: software engineers at large companies that stick around for decades (usually through options), doctors (at least specialists, such as cardiologists and anesthesiologists), and lawyers that go to the best schools and are able to land jobs at top-flight firms. Even tradesmen that stick to their craft, such as master electricians or plumbers, can quite reasonably expect to achieve millionaire status over the course of their lifetime assuming that they manage their money well.

So yes, luck plays a huge role in the creation of enormous sums of wealth. But if you live in a country with abundant economic opportunity such as the US, there's no reason to be poor unless you have been extremely unlucky (health problems, accidents, etc have befallen you), you are unwilling to work, or you've made extremely poor life/financial decisions.

<comment><USER18> You are ignoring the fact that someone born into a poor family in an inner city like has an underfunded, underachieving public school, overwhelmed and inexperienced teachers, a below average guidance counselor, no role models who have gone to college, parents who do not know anything about applying for scholarships or financial aid, a diet of fast food, and few examples of other people in similar roles who became millionaires. In a lot of cases, the best chance of success for people in these situations is to be LUCKY and win a lottery to get into a charter school. Or, to be LUCKY and have the physical tools needed to get a sports scholarship.

<comment><USER19> _an underfunded, underachieving public school, overwhelmed and inexperienced teachers, a below average guidance counselor, no role models who have gone to college, parents who do not know anything about applying for scholarships or financial aid, a diet of fast food, and few examples of other people in similar roles who became millionaires_

That sounds like my life except for the inner city part. Substitute "redneck- ville" though, and it's the same basic principle. And I will say that I think the idea that these things mean you need massive amounts of luck to become "successful" (depending on exactly how you define successful) is bullshit. I never had any particular amount of luck that I can identify, relative to my peers who were born in similar circumstances, and while I'm not a millionaire (but I'm still working on it), I've been what most people would call reasonably successful. In my experience, what it takes is mainly insane work ethic, an indomitable attitude, dogged determination, and relentless pursuit of your goals.

<comment><USER18> First off, congrats on getting to where you are today. It sounds like your hard work is really paying off. I would just note that one of the points of the article is that it is difficult for a successful person to recognize the lucky events in their life. Perhaps in one of your job interviews you hit it off with the interviewer because you went to the same college or were both from "redneck-ville." Another person with equal skill and work ethic could have not gotten that job because they weren't form the same background and didn't have the rapport with the interviewer. I think you can say in that scenario one person got lucky and the other was unlucky. No one is saying it is bad to be lucky. It just helps with empathy when you take the world view that not every outcome is completely fair and logical.

<comment><USER19> I don't see anybody really saying that "every outcome is fair and logical" though. My issue is just all this luck talk is counter-productive. I mean, if you convince a group of people that life is nothing but luck, how have you helped them? Why bother working hard at all, if you don't believe it can possibly pay off?

<comment><USER18> The talk about luck is meant to encourage empathy and understanding. If your world view says that success is based only on your work ethic, then you will assume that all people who are not successful did not work hard. With that logic it is pretty easy to conclude that we should not help people out or support unsuccessful people because it's solely their own fault that they were not successful. Some would argue this is the wrong world view and that we should acknowledge that many unsuccessful people work really hard and just got dealt a bad deck of cards. These different world views lead to different priorities in public policy among other things.

<comment><USER19> _If your world view says that success is based only on your work ethic, then you will assume that all people who are not successful did not work hard. With that logic it is pretty easy to conclude that we should not help people out or support unsuccessful people because it 's solely their own fault that they were not successful._

I'm not saying anything about you specifically, but that sounds a lot like a kind of "anti-libertarian" straw-man argument I hear a lot. Certain people like to claim exactly that libertarians believe "that all people who are not successful did not work hard", which is far from true.

I think everybody understands that some people work very hard and still fail to achieve "success" (depending on how you define success). But what I think should be taken into account is that:

 _Some_ people who fail to achieve "success" do so because they didn't work hard enough.

Hard work, good decisions, etc., _do_ play an important role in the amount of success you attain.

Obviously reality falls somewhere in between "luck is everything" and "hard work is everything", but I get the sense that some people promoting the "it's all luck" mindset have an agenda in terms of denigrating the fundamental idea that effort and initiative count at all. Again, not saying that's you, and I'm probably just over-sensitive on this subject.

<comment><USER16> This thread is very important to the discussion, because it highlights an apparent opposite mindset of the article.

As I posted elsewhere in this thread already, I think the real issue is that the ideas of Robert Frank are not about these "regular" cases in the middle income range at all. (At most, I'd conclude that the interviewer asked questions that would touch persons in that range, too, and who likely form the majority of the site's readers.)

If you are doing OK-ish on the upper end or OK-ish on the lower end of the middle income strata of a Western (!) society, your "lot" should be quite tolerable. And nobody would deny that with extremely hard work and discipline you can move from the lower end of middle income to the upper end of middle income. However, if you are doing really bad and are below the poverty line or really well and are in the top 1% range, that certainly requires a good portion of (possibly: bad) luck. It already starts at conception, with your "birth rights". And the aim of the article (or rather, of Mr. Frank's theories), as I interpret it (them), is pointing that out that we need to find measures how to smooth those extremes, not about figuring out if some middle income person had a bit more or less luck, or if it even mattered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Progressive consumption tax is ridiculous. It requires your tax rate at the point of sale to be dependent on all your purchases to that point in time. That's just not practical. Or it may require every purchase you make to be recorded for tax-time when you then pay the taxes. Either way it requires the government to know every purchase you make, or at least the price. This is not something anyone should want.

<comment><USER21> One way to implement a consumption tax is to measure everyone's income and then subtract out whatever they've saved in the bank or otherwise invested.

That doesn't mean such a tax is not ridiculous for other reasons, though.

<comment><USER22> There are plenty of ways to scam such a system. For example, you could create a phony investment fund which always collapsed at the end of the year creating a loss which hid your expenditures.

<comment><USER21> That might be true. I don't actually know how much more auditing of funds and brokerages than what goes on already would have to happen in order to prevent that sort of thing.

I don't think the problem is obviously insurmountable, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Veil of ignorance. There's a significant part of the upper end (wealth wise) of the population that like our classist society just the way it is, or maybe that it should be more classist. Everything should be a rent, there should be no public lands, everything is to be exploited, and if you're on the short end of the stick it's merely unfair, not a wrong or a failure of society. Or the more extreme versions of this, higher class folk have better money, better ideas, better genes, make and sell better things. They are better than others. Democracy and socialism are threats to these notions.

</comment><comment><USER24> Maybe I'm naive, but I don't think any one denies the role luck plays in one's success or not. However, to completely discard effort and determination is selling everyone short. I'm running a successful company partially because of "luck", I happened to start it at the perfect time, but also because I pour every ounce of money and time I have into it. My nights and weekends don't exist. Some people aren't willing to put in the time to turn luck into success.

Telling people that success is just a matter of luck will only reinforce the thoughts of unsuccessful people to believe they're "unlucky". You are able to make your own luck to an extent.

<comment><USER25> This is exactly what the article is talking about. You're not acknowledging how much of your success comes from luck, you see yourself working hard and you don't like being told you're lucky. You're not only lucky because you started your business at the correct time, you're also lucky because you had the resources and connections to be able to start a company in the first place. Most people never have that opportunity.

I have no doubt that you work hard and put in the hours. But part of the reason that you do that is because you've been lucky. I'm sure you know that most business ventures fail. Some of those businesses, maybe the people there didn't work hard enough, and that's why they failed. A lot of them did work really hard, though, and they failed anyway, for myriad other reasons. Many people work hard and fail anyway. That doesn't exactly encourage further hard work. You're lucky that your hard work is turning into success.

The position that "You are able to make your own luck to an extent" is one of extreme privilege that can't exist without having already had loads of luck that you didn't make yourself. You wouldn't tell people starving in Africa and India that they're just not working hard enough to make their own luck, would you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just like when people are trying to sell you something, they call it an "investment"; people trying to implement government spending programs call it "spreading opportunity".

Some government programs really do spread opportunity, but that requires close examination and criticism; I don't just buy into it because a politician calls it opportunity. Is college an opportunity? It can be a huge opportunity to get ahead in life; but it can also just subsidize a partying lifestyle and a phony major for four years. It depends on the college, the student, and the structure of the opportunity.

It's hard to tell the difference between spreading opportunity and spreading results. It often requires looking at the details, measuring along the way, and it is often different for different people.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, probably one of the strongest arguments for both Progressive Tax and Basic Income is that the current system is deeply broken, and despite doing a lot of good, carries a solid amount of waste along the way.

I do think it's important to remember that a lot of mess of social spending programs happened, at some point, for good reason. You can give everyone $12k/year, but it won't take long for people in SF to ask for an extra housing subsidy to counteract real estate prices, followed soon by rallies against eugenics when lower income Americans don't get extra children subsidized.

I'm not at all against social spending, or necessarily against any of it's alternatives, but as a software engineer, I sometimes have difficulty remembering that problems like this don't exist in a closed system and resist top-down design.

<comment><USER26> It's not just that it creates financial waste. Phony opportunities are dead ends that take other opportunities off the table.

If you have only a few plausible opportunities, you are likely to make them count. If you have a hundred but 50 are phony, you will waste your time, feel entitled to results (hey, I went to college, I deserve a good job!), and become discouraged.

<comment><USER27> Quite optimistic thinking, some kids might not have ANY opportunity at all and the 1 shot at college will change their world and ours for the better, or not, but at least there was an opportunity.

I wouldn't call college, or any person educating/bettering themselves, a waste/phony, I think it pays dividends throughout life. Does it immediately help? Not likely, but life is long and a right educated mind (or humbled person) will turn it to good for them and the people around them the best they can in most cases.

An educated populace leads to more opportunity I believe across the board and smarter authorities as people question more. However, we love those short term metrics and calling out single failures that overpower the successes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think a lot of people do not realize that you are lucky if you are born into a middle class or upper class family. Having parents with some savings allows you to take extra career risks because you know that you can likely get help from your parents if none of the risks pay off. It is more difficult to make the decision to work at a startup or buy a house if you are totally on your own when things go south.

</comment><comment> real-v This reminds me a little bit about one of my favorite philosophers, Alain de Botton. Sometimes, he discusses meritocracy and meritocratic societies.

Basically, in a meritocratic society, such as the US, people tend to believe everyone's lot in life is deserved; luck is not considered a big factor. This creates a problem where the poor believe the rich made it through their hard work, while the rich believe that poor people deserve to be poor because they are lazy or stupid. People are where they are because they deserved to be there.

I used to place a high value in the concept of a meritocratic society, but experience is convincing me that the lack of compassion that such societies experience is not worth trade off.

</comment><comment><USER28> I think a lot of people are emotionally unable to deal with a world that is as dramatically unfair as ours is, so they fall back to the childish notion that people who have fallen on hard times deserve it and successful people controlled their own destiny to get there, because the alternative is too uncomfortable to think about.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, that's probably part of it, but remember also that the people controlling narratives are by definition in power, and that people in power have strong incentives to justify their position.

<comment><USER28> I'm not sure what you're getting at, do you mean the ends justify the means?

<comment><USER14> Oh, not actually.

I just mean that people have benefited from the existing system will naturally be incentivized to legitimize it. In this case, that entails promoting the narrative that we live in a meritocratic society where talent and hard work rises to the top.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If you get a chance to experience an "exit", where a number of people suddenly have much more wealth than others around them who are essentially doing the same things but joined the company at a different time, you will get to see all the different ways that people internalize that event (both positively and negatively).

Luck is very much a part of success and a big part of the way that Vikings talked of sailing with successful leaders ('they have a lot of luck'). And most importantly luck has no bearing character. But internalizing that can be hard when someone you despise gets rich, or someone you really care about fails to get the rewards that others in the same place have.

</comment><comment> charles-salvia In the United States, at least, poverty tends to be concentrated geographically in inner-cities and rural areas instead of being evenly spread out. This would seem to indicate fairly conclusively that location and environment affect opportunity and wealth more so than an individual willingness to work hard. In fact, being born into an environment of concentrated poverty like this molds your mental state and perception of the world, to the extent that the idea of breaking out of poverty may not always even appear as a _possibility_ , thus discouraging you from even believing that hard work might pay off.

<comment><USER16> May I remind you that luck includes bad luck, too? ;-)

(In other words: the "luck phenomenon" happens at both ends of the spectrum, not just the ones that got or were born rich and wealthy.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This seems to take a sudden leap from a relatively uncontroversial (I'd think) proposition into a political program. I wonder about this bit:

> The price of the average American wedding in 1980 was $10,000. In 2014, the > most recent figure I had, was $31,000.

According to a random inflation calculator I checked online $10k in 1980 would be worth almost $30k today. [https://data.bls.gov/cgi- bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=10000&year1=19...](https://data.bls.gov/cgi- bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=10000&year1=1980&year2=2016)

</comment><comment><USER30> > Then at the end students got a bonus for their participation experiment and > they were told that they could donate some or all, any fraction of their > bonus, to one of three charities, their pick, just by saying so to the > experimenter. What she found was that people who had listed external causes > of the good thing happening donated about 25 percent more of their bonus to > a charity than the people who had listed things they had done to cause the > good things to happen. The control group was somewhere roughly in the middle > of those two.

> There have been many experiments that have shown if you prime people to feel > the emotion of gratitude, they become much more generous toward others, much > more willing to pay forward to the common good.

> If you want people to think about the fact that they've been lucky, don't > tell them that they've been lucky. Ask them if they can think of any > examples of times when they might have been lucky along their path to the > top.

That's the gist of the article. People get defensive when you say "you're lucky", because they interpret this as "you don't deserve your success". By reframing the message and asking people questions about times where they were lucky, then this can make them feel more generous.

Very practical advice for anyone who is delivering a speech at a fundraiser.

</comment><comment><USER31> Tangentally related, I find it interesting that we often call people lucky when something very bad happened to them, but they somehow managed to survive the situation or land on their feet. We aren't as keen to describe people as lucky who avoided danger entirely.

Lone survivor in a plane crash? Lucky. Took a cruise instead? Meh.

Personally I think it's preferable to not be in the crash, than to have survived it.

<comment><USER32> This isn't much of a leap -- it's the difference between an independent and a dependent variable, of which in these situations, most people have a good intuitive notion of.

Given a disruptive event that happened to the person and they were able to avoid a worse fate that befell others in the same event (e.g. others died in the same plane crash) is more strongly perceived by people as an instance of "overcoming the odds" than when someone did not experience that event at all. By the time the disaster is past the event horizon (e.g. the plane is, say, in an unrecoverable stall and plummeting toward the ground), the odds of avoiding lethal shock, injuries, or dismemberment seems fairly low.

It's perhaps a perversely named 'survivorship bias', where all victims -- survivors or not -- got into that situation as a cumulative result of all of their (and others') choices leading up to that moment, and that altering their plans ahead of time (by deliberately changing travel plans) would have invalidated the conditions required for their participation in that _particular_ event. Interestingly, though, merely "missing the flight" is often considered to be very lucky, despite often not guaranteeing that the outcome would've been identical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> "luck" is not a good choice as a word here. They mean something like a chaotic event that ended up being positive to them.

Also, just waiting for such a positive chaotic event to happen to you, is probably not the best strategy.

If you make good social interactions that you maintain, then those positive chaotic events are more likely to come your way.

<comment><USER34> > "luck" is not a good choice as a word here. They mean something like a > chaotic event that ended up being positive to them.

Isn't that what most people mean by "luck"?

<comment><USER33> When people talk about "luck", they mean a absolutely random event that cannot be influenced in any way. A chaotic event can become less chaotic by controlling or reducing some of the parameters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm a strong determinist. Effort, hard work and skill is irrelevant (any relevance comes from the fact that you're already in your statistical band for expected success and are trying to maximize within that). I believe most of your success is determined before you even take one step on this planet. Step one is acknowledging the truth: your initial circumstances dictate your future. Once this is acknowledged, we as a species can begin focusing on making the initial conditions ideal for everyone.

Note: I am not saying you shouldn't work hard. I am just saying that it's not doing as much as you think. Individual examples of success (I've done decently despite two parents who didn't finish elementary school, live in inner city, etc) are not of relevance for planning the future of the human race. The world is chaotic, so there will be outliers in spite of the "determinist property" of the world.

Parents' own desperation to "set their children up" for success is anecdotal confirmation of this fact.

\---

Some examples:

Socioeconomic status v. Education [http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/education.a...](http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/education.aspx)

Health v. Education [http://www.nber.org/digest/mar07/w12352.html](http://www.nber.org/digest/mar07/w12352.html)

Health v. Socioeconomic Status [http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/work- stress...](http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/work-stress- health.aspx)

Parent education v. child long term success [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2853053/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2853053/)

Skin color v. attractiveness [http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0095798405278341](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0095798405278341)

Height v. success [http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and- families/...](http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and- families/health-news/tall-people-more-likely-to-be-successful-in-life-study- find-a6919431.html)

Weight (at birth) v. success [http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/5882](http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/5882)

Attractiveness v. success [https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/games- primates-play/201...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/games-primates- play/201203/the-truth-about-why-beautiful-people-are-more-successful)

Gender v. success [https://www.historians.org/publications-and- directories/pers...](https://www.historians.org/publications-and- directories/perspectives-on-history/january-2013/gender-and-success-in- academia)

Eye color v. alcoholism [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886900...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886900001574)

Geography v. socioeconomic success [http://www.cid.harvard.edu/archive/andes/documents/bgpapers/...](http://www.cid.harvard.edu/archive/andes/documents/bgpapers/geography_socioeconomicdevelopment.pdf)

<comment><USER36> I would rather believe in Existentialism. I come from a very poor background. Much of my childhood friends are either dead, in prison or working minimum wage. If I would have "acknowledged" the truth, like most of them did, I would have ended in the same position.

Humans are not animals. We can evolve of our own free will. Statistics do not apply at the individual level.

<comment><USER37> And what caused you to not acknowledge the so called truth. Determinism implies that even this acknowledgment was beyond your control, even though you feel like it wasn't.

<comment><USER36> I do accept that there is some "determinism" in life. You do not choose the game, you do not choose the board and you do not choose the pieces.

However, _you_ are playing the game. To say that you have no control and that the game is playing itself is to have "mauvaise foi".

Life might limit your options but only you can make choices.

To wait until life cuts out all options but one is not letting life make choices for you. It's deceiving yourself. No choices are made, options are simply slowly getting removed from you. That's not _having no freedom_ , that's _not acting on your own freedom_.

Hardcore existentialists will even say that the act of not acting on your own freedom is an act of freedom itself. You are free to let life take all options from you.

<comment><USER38> Suppose I could show you a "Raphmedia" response that I calculated, held aside while you were making this post, then showed you my calculated responses (top-5). If we compared the corpus to what you wrote, would you think differently about determinism and who you are? Maybe right? This presuppose I know a lot about Raphmedia, I'm thinking brain scan type detail (Google does pretty well with the search bar autocomplete using a lot less info).

I sort of feel like Raphmedia could be encoded, same here as well. Still, I enjoy the chats :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I am anti-determinist and Soren Kierkegaard (founder of existentialist thought) so inspired me that I named my son Soren. The fight between the two parties of thought is huge and bigger then Windows vs OS X.

> Jean-Paul Sartre:

"What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be."

Society sees luck in terms of fairness. This article used the word fair or fairness zero times. Fairness is a HUGE issue in deterministic thought especially dealing with how we perceive others around us.

</comment><comment><USER40> > The whole process of constructing life narratives is biased in ways that > almost guarantee that people won't recognize the role of chance events > adequately.

This is also a cultural thing. Here in Sweden it is easier that people dismisses their achievements to not look like they are bragging and to accept that chance is part of life. I do that myself. And I feel better and less stressed recognizing that luck is part of why I have what I have.

So I work not too hard - that can be bad for my health and a bad long term investment - not too little - work is needed to achieve anything and you have to do your part to not let other down. So you work lagom.

</comment><comment><USER41> This topic always reminds me of a line of pg's from years ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621768](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621768).

<comment><USER42> Thanks for posting - I was just thinking of this myself !

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> So if I believe in luck I will be more inclined to pay high taxes? I don't think that's how it works.

I mean of course people with money who realise not everyone who is poor is poor because they're lazy bums will be more inclined to help a "poor person" than they would if they believed all poor are lazy bums. But does that mean they will accept high taxation? Say I am rich and narcissistic, I believe I'm better than everyone and that my skill put me on top. I then realise that other who are skilled are poor and I want to help them become richer. Do I believe that paying the government to use my money for welfare to be the most effective use of my money to fulfil this end? Probably not in that case.

Furthermore some people are lucky, some unlucky. This does not mean that no effort but mere luck goes into building an empire. If luck was the only factor then sure, this argument or taxation might hold. But there's a lot more than luck to it, which is much more in the control of the individual.

<comment><USER16> If you can't see luck as deciding factor in being extremely rich or poor, your world-view will dictate that hard work and discipline can get you out of poverty. Therefore, there is no need to help other people and the only tax you need to pay is the minimum needed to keep the nation state you depend on afloat. If you see luck as a factor, then you either understand that those with good luck need to give a bit more (=pay more tax) so that those with bad luck are better off, or you are a cruel person and just say "well, unlucky you, go to rot, I don't care." So yes, accepting luck as a factor in life plays a fundamental role, including your (possible) willingness to pay tax. At least, if you posses some kind of empathy.

> Furthermore some people are lucky, some unlucky. This does not mean that no > effort but mere luck goes into building an empire. If luck was the only > factor then sure, this argument or taxation might hold. But there's a lot > more than luck to it, which is much more in the control of the individual.

The point here again is that for the extremes the luck factor becomes dominant over anything else: If you are among the very worst off, you probably didn't just accrue that due to being lazy (or, in fact, anything within your control, assuming you are not somehow mentally handicapped - which is bad luck, again...). And similar for the opposite end: There are a significant number of persons with nearly the exact same abilities and ambitions as the very top performers, so the final "selection" of who gets to be the top performer depends far more on luck than on those skills (as the article outlines, by the way).

<comment><USER43> No.This was exactly the response I was expecting and giving more does not equal pay more taxes.

Putting an equal sign between helping your peers/being altruistic and paying taxes is the logical flaw in my opinion.

I argue that paying taxes is not the most effective way of helping others and therefore whether I believe becoming rich is a matter of luck or not becomes irrelevant in regard to whether rich should pay high taxes or not.

Though of course not everyone will have my views on that matter and therefore a subset, however big, will follow your line of thought instead, meaning the number of happy-to-pay-tax people would increase if their perception of luck changed as proposed in the article.

However what I'm arguing against is that A >necessarily< leads to B. As it does depend on other factors too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> It's hard to detect good luck - it looks so much like something you've earned. - Frank A. Clark

</comment><comment><USER45> I believe [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13437977](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13437977) ties in with this in that many "lucky" people prepared so that when luck struck things were aligned to take off.

</comment><comment><USER46> Ben Franklin has a great line on this topic - "Diligence is the mother of good luck."

The author illustrates this major point with an example of the "TOP" cellist in the world:

"One [cellist] earns eight or nine figures a year while the cellist who is almost as good is teaching music lessons to third graders in New Jersey somewhere. . . The person who is eventually successful got there by defeating thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of rivals in competitions that started at an early age. . . [but] the luckiest one . . [is] that person who is going to win the contest most of the time."

EG - you need to put in the hours of preparation & subject yourself to competition of the highest order to even have a chance at being the "luckiest" in your field.

<comment><USER14> This just pushes the question back one step. How many people have the opportunity to buy a cello at a young enough age to practice enough hours to become the best?

I'm not saying it always ends in luck, actually I just don't think this is the right line of reasoning. Frank's point is about the importance of luck in the real world, but also about taking the appropriate attitude towards it. As weird as it might sound, those two points aren't necessarily related.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> "It takes 10 years to achieve overnight success."

[http://www.inc.com/empact/why-successful-people- take-10-year...](http://www.inc.com/empact/why-successful-people- take-10-years-to-succeed-overnight.html)

</comment><comment><USER47> Related reading: Fooled By Randomness, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

</comment><comment><USER48> There is a pretty good book that addresses some of the business aspects of this... "Competing Against Luck" by David Duncan and Clayton Christiansen (the same guy who wrote "The Innovator's Dilemma"). I'm not done with it yet but so far it goes into some interesting detail about how to reframe everything people pay for as jobs... and that building a successful business is about understanding the job to be done and mastering it.

<comment><USER49> I've read the book and the title still makes no sense to me. I was expecting a book about how to 'rectify'(in the electrical engineering sense) chaos in business.

It seems like "Jobs That Need Doing" or "Products Have Jobs Too" would have been much better titles for the book.

<comment><USER48> Agree, I think the title is more about marketing the book than accurately describing the content. That said I think there are a lot of people (me included sometimes) who make interesting things without thinking carefully about what the user really wants to achieve... so the book has some value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> A few of the commenters here mention meritocracy, and it seems to me that they value it, or think that it is something we should strive for. I would just like to point our that the term "meritocracy" originally carried a negative connotation, with a very elitist endgame[1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Early_definitions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Early_definitions)

</comment><comment><USER51> the first thing that impacts your future success is the luck of the conditions of your birth. you have no control over this. hard work MAY make up for this, however having a "better" birth condition plus this same hard work does not negate the value of that first starting position.

this is lost on many successful people who wrongly attribute the entirety of their success to their own efforts and presume that anyone who is not successful has simply not worked hard.

</comment><comment><USER52> Not super related but I cant resist. The guy in the article looks almost EXACTLY like Steve Jobs.

<comment><USER53> Standard urban/casual intellectual uniform.

<comment><USER54> Only in the United States.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> This reminded me of the film "Match Point" directed by Woody Allen. IMO his best film.

<comment><USER56> Came here to second this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> here's my formula (and I've been around the block a few times).

decent level of success = 0 units of bad luck + 3 units of skill and 2 units of hard work

yuge level of success = 5 units of good luck + 3 units of skill and 2 units of hard work

</comment><comment><USER58> Dont tell your friends there is no such thing as luck. There are only factors that are too numerous for you to account for them all.

</comment><comment><USER59> huge success may have luck, but it is always in combination with greed.

The average worker and entrepreneur wannabe in Silicon Valley has nowhere near the requisite and absolute focus on pure self interest that Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc. have/had. Look to how Woz or Paul Allen was treated by them.

</comment><comment><USER60> Why would I? They live in this timeline.

</comment><comment><USER61> Frank is a terrific writer and his books are excellent (rare for an economist).

<comment><USER14> Any other recommendations?

I enjoy reading Dan Ariely but ended up feeling like a lot of his studies ended up veering into anecdotes and then overgeneralization.

<comment><USER62> Debt The First 5,000 Years

It's the most influential non-fiction book I've ever read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> A lot of this "luck" can be traced back very easily to causes like "had two parents who gave a damn" or "had enough to eat eat growing up." The people pushing this narrative that you're not really responsible for your failure / success want it both ways. They want to make you admit that you benefit from living in a peaceful stable society with infrastructure, while also not wanting to hold parents accountable for having too many kids too early, or admit that impact that divorce has on young children. It always comes down to pushing some narrative that is meant to justify further state intrusion into our lives and the dismantling of the family unit, all with pseudo-scientific (see "the gray sciences") justifications and emotional appeals. Spare me the bullshit, I aint buying it.

EDIT -

Looking for another example of this obvious propaganda? Try the latest episode of RadioLab:

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/radiolab-presents-media- busted...](http://www.radiolab.org/story/radiolab-presents-media-busted- americas-poverty-myths/)

<comment><USER63> Though this is really just giving people the opportunity to down vote me twice, I feel the need to expand on this:

The war on self-determination, and promotion of the notion that you're not really responsible for your lot in life is an ongoing narrative. Basically the introduction are always the sanest arguments: There's a history of racism / sexism that people are still struggling to overcome. The benefits of having a safe society with infrastructure. Of course the implications they then allude to are that if you question the wisdom or effectiveness of any particular conclusion or prescribed policy they advocate for, then you are racists and hate public roads (this should sound awfully familiar to any libertarians). Also the hypocrisy of saying that others are just ignorant of all the hidden things that helped them succeed, while also ignoring things like single- motherhood and having large numbers of children as being obvious causes for failure (both for the parent(s) and children) is particularly glaring.

What it comes down to is basically not wanting those who succeed to feel like they are in any way superior to others, by giving all credit to institutions that the modern neo-marxists (who now call themselves progressives) support (such as public school systems), while also not wanting those who fail to feel like they are in any way inferior to others, by giving all credit to institutions that they dislike (like law enforcement). Also the benefits of institutions they dislike are also completely ignored (family, religious communities, etc...)

Make no mistake, this is a lie meant to justify stripping you of your individual freedom by asserting that you are not in fact an individual capable of any sort of self-direction, but a predictable causal robot of the society in which you live. The continuing inability of the social sciences to make reliable testable claims is merely in an inconvenience to their demographics as destiny mentality. That such an ideology, which attempts to shackle you to easily sorted "identities" bills itself as transcending these barriers, is some sick form of double think that is now spread as gospel by public educators (the priestly caste in this faith that refuses to admit that it is one).

I urge those of you who are have children, and are concerned for their well- being to make sure you expose your children to the insanity of this philosophy in the same way that you would seek to vaccinate them from the virus of religious BS. Because make no mistake, if you don't tell them about it with the appropriate criticism and skepticism, others will do it for you, but in an attempt to sway your child to giving up their self-determination to a nanny- state, and embracing a perverse view of justice called "social justice" where the individual reaping what they sow is of no consequence, and all that matters are peoples not people.

<comment><USER64> I recently saw a very enlightening video on the subject of individualism versus collectivism that somewhat echoes your thoughts: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNB38U04sNM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNB38U04sNM)</comment></comment></comment>