The Life of a Pot Critic for the Denver Post - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/fashion/the-life-of-a-pot-critic-denver-post-clean-with-citrus-notes.html <comment><USER2> Theres a fundamental flaw in this type of review. For all of us reading this article we assume this jack ripper strain is the bomb, but really it just happens that the grower he got it from grew some good jack the ripper or whatever. I work in the industry, and mostly people will be like, Oh I tried this strain and its no good, but its just because they got it from a mediocre grower and indeed it wasn't as good as the real deal. Also, there are hundreds of seed companies selling similar strains under various names and thus one persons og kush isn't the same as another.

The problem with this is, outside of places like Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, under the guise of medical marijuana its now more important for the specific review of a flower that can be reproduced by the grower. Ugh, I am just saying, these reviews are specifically of the nug that guy smoked not of the overall strain but they pretend it is of the overall strain.

<comment><USER3> It seems like the current methodology is, to use wine analogies, to compare grapes instead of harvests. Charles Shaw has a Cabernet, but it's a very different beast from Joseph Phelps', and they will both have variations from harvest to harvest.

Perhaps in the future we'll see the marijuana landscape settle down into a few widely recognized and harvested strains, with different growers touting their harvests and growing techniques over those of others.

<comment><USER4> But wine tasting is mostly bullshit. Double-blinding means even expert wine tasters fail to agree on good wines or to identify years or makers.

[http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine- tas...](http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-tasting-junk- science-analysis)

> Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine > competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed > an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.

> Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of > samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the > panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would > be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.

> The first experiment took place in 2005. The last was in Sacramento earlier > this month. Hodgson's findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the > years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates > are terrible at judging wine.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, but then there is this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBi9PfZve84](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBi9PfZve84)

(I had to dig around to find out where I found this; it turned out to be a link entry on Daring Fireball, May 2013.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting!

So here's what makes me think so hard about this: All the experience that qualified him for his job was, for lack of a better term, in a "grey market" \- what I mean by this is while the Medical System was established, due to it being officially still banned by the Federal Government, he was breaking the law. Not Colorado law. Federal "if you send this across state lines you are forever ruined" Law, right?

Fate is cruel. There are, without a doubt, thousands of young men who are easily as qualified with the product, whom are locked behind bars. This is inefficient. You don't want Maureen "Serious Journalist Doesn't Take Marijuana Seriously" Dowd as an ambassador, you want an educated, intelligent person (in agreement with the article here).

I've not got a lot more to add on this subject, other than I find it very, very strange that it was, relatively speaking, so easy to get the job. I have an actual writing degree, an advanced degree in education, and spent the first couple years of my life watching nearly every job posting reveal inflated expectations for qualifications and/or experience.

That is a very real problem, so maybe I'm partially just grumbling that it was so easy for him, whereas getting a, you know, "real" white-collar job means the Secretary needs a Bachelors and minimum 5 years experience for a salary of $37,000 in a major metropolitan city. This may seem extreme (especially to STEM professionals) but it's genuinely true, and if it isn't a problem in your industry - or not debilitating - be vigilant so it does not.

<comment><USER7> I would love to read more articles by Maureen Dowd about her experiences using ridiculously large amounts of any substance she's unfamiliar with and then quietly freaking out in her hotel room. The article you reference was unintentional comedy at its finest.

"Fine Scotch critic Maureen Down drinks 750ml bottle of Macallan 18, concludes alcohol should be illegal"

<comment><USER8> This is the article being refereed to for anyone interested;

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/opinion/dowd-dont-harsh- ou...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/opinion/dowd-dont-harsh-our-mellow- dude.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Dude should use a vaporizer instead of smoking. Much healthier, and he could taste a lot more of the subtle notes instead of having them burned away.

OTOH, maybe he _needs_ to burn the pot to taste it after smoking tobacco! It's like a wine critic eating salsa between tastings.

<comment><USER10> Marijuana is a drug with few studies. Have there actually been any that investigate vaporizers vs smoking?

I suppose any studies with regard to tobacco might have some relevancy, but marijuana isn't tobacco. It's a very complex plant and I wish the states that legalized it had included funding for clinical studies in their statutes.

<comment><USER11> I got the impression the GP's main point was about the taste, which seems valid, if oversimplified. It seems like he should be tasting using a variety of methods, so as to recommend the vector that brings out the best in each strain.

And certainly he should not be smoking cigarettes! The comparison to a wine critic eating salsa is quite apt.

But your point about the lack of research is a good one. Unfortunately the federal government makes it very, very hard to conduct legitimate cannabis research in this country.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is slightly tangential, but I really hate it when reputable news outlets use the term 'pot' in reporting. I'm not talking about the headline, where different style rules apply, but further down in the article where they use the term 'pot' in a descriptive way. ('Pot wasn't legal... ')

Cannabis and marijuana are more neutral terms, whereas the connotation of slang terms like 'pot' is usually slightly derogatory. You rarely see the word 'booze' used the same way in similar news pieces - not that it never happens, but it's nowhere near as common.

<comment><USER9> At least around here (SF Peninsula/Silicon Valley), "pot" isn't a derogatory term at all. It seems to be what most everyone calls it, users and non-users alike.

Except for the kids. They call it "weed". Which is a bit confusing because "weed" used to mean the cheap stuff and "pot" the good stuff.

A few people called it "dope" 25-30 years ago, but that didn't last. Before that it was "grass", but that really _was_ the bad cheap stuff, ten dollars a lid (an ounce of leaves in a baggie with the flap sealed by spit) from Mexico.

The dispensaries and producers seem to prefer "cannabis" \- there's Buddy's Cannabis for example - or "medical marijuana", but never just "marijuana".

In fact, the dispensaries never call it "pot" either. It's "medicine" or "flowers", or just referred to by the name of the specific strain.

<comment><USER13> so tell me about your site

<comment><USER9> I'm sorry, what site are you referring to?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I really think this glamourises weed, and moves us towards a point where there will be companies marketing weed at us.

We need to stop throwing people in prison for using heroin and cocaine. But if the only alternative is to put someone in the business of getting people addicted to heroin...Well, why should we accept that dilemma?

We need to find a third way, in between drugs being illegal, and them being a marketable product like any other. And shit like this isn't helping.

<comment><USER15> Whenever you get concerned about this sort of thing, just look at the Netherlands for an example of how you can have a very public marijuana culture that's still quite small. Usage rates are the same as elsewhere.

It's just not an actual problem. By all means, forbid advertising like most places do with tobacco. But there's little harm in it becoming a legal commercial product.

<comment><USER16> The amount of such concern trolling is immensely out of line with whatever the threat is supposed to be. Makes you wish some of that concern would be applied to other already-existing aspects of our society.</comment></comment></comment>


Type III Societies (Apparently) Do Not Exist - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.07844 <comment><USER2> This really tells us extremely little about advanced civilizations, beyond that we haven't seen them doing a few variations on a very specific activity—harnessing all the stellar radiation in their galaxy.

There are huge number of assumptions based on that idea. A fundamental one is that a civilization in a relativistic universe would grow to densely inhabit a galaxy. Another is that they would _need_ that much energy. Another is that even if they _did_ have need for that much energy, they'd bother collecting EM radiation from stars.

That third is an interesting one to me. Now, you could muck up the night sky for the entire Milky Way, or you could, with Sufficiently Advanced Technology (tm), annihilate a total of 10 Jupiter-masses a year across the whole galaxy. For your average star system, that's extracting energy from 1.1 billion kg of mass a year, or roughly what NYC's garbage collection services dispose of every two weeks.

Pondering that, I suspect it's the wrong idea to imagine that a very advanced civilization, something we can only understand in the dimmest sense, would be constrained by something as specific as stellar energy emissions.

<comment><USER3> > Another is that they would need that much energy.

Even _if_ they needed that much energy, the best way to do that [that we know of] is to build a Dyson sphere. With every star shrouded by a Dyson sphere you no longer need to shroud the galaxy.

A more critical assumption is that a type III civilization even _cares_ about masking its presence. If they were even worried about being attacked, the speed of light would mask their progress for a great deal of time and, because of the distances involved, even seeing them once the light reaches you would be a massive accomplishment - most likely you'd have to search for individual stars in _another_ galaxy which are disappearing in unusual ways.

A type II civilization could possibly build a telescope with a large enough aperture but I assume that type II civilizations would be long past their ignorant warring ways.

<comment><USER4> Dyson's spheres have low long term fuel efficiency. They are better off destroying the stars and burning their fuel in fusion reactors. At least with our current understanding of physics.

Also, a civilization could have dimantled Andromida Galaxy 2 million years ago and can't tell yet. For more distant objects the gap gets rather wide.

<comment><USER5> Stars use different fuel than reactors. To fuse simple hydrogen, four nuclei have to collide at once. This is so unlikely that it requires a very large mass of fuel to sustain a reaction: at least the size of the Earth, according to one article I saw.

It's entirely possible to burn deuterium in small reactors but there's only about 1/2500 as much deuterium as hydrogen.

(Perhaps some unthinkably advanced civilization could figure out how to get energy from hydrogen fusion in a small reactor, but you did specify "our current understanding of physics.")

<comment><USER4> That's not accurate, stars have several fuel cycles for pure hydrogen. At 1.3 solar masses you sun mostly get: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNO_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNO_cycle)

As to size, on galactic scales all our current fusion designs are tiny. Scale it up to even just 20 miles on a side and proton proton fusion is doable. For a type III civilization capable of destroying starts that's also tiny. Remember your suggesting dysons spheres as the 'reasonable' option.

PS: The proton proton chain also produces deuterium as an intermediary. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton%E2%80%93proton_chain_re...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton%E2%80%93proton_chain_reaction)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They call economics a "dismal science", but I find such attempts at 'astrophysics' (or whatever this and stuff like the Drake equation are called) even more dismal...

Tons of unknown variables filled-in with vigorous hand waving, ad-hoc and unproven assumptions left and right, etc, and some high school math thrown in for good measure...

<comment><USER7> I think you're taking a wrong look at this paper. This paper isn't actually about whether or not type 3 societies exist. This paper is about the fact that there appear to be no galactic clusters that show a particularly abnormal, greater, amount of electromagnetic emission than the known standard. Which, actually, I'm pretty dang surprised hasn't been searched for already. Then, in order to be a little whimsical and make sure the paper gets read, (s)he explains where they came up with the idea for this experiment.

Seems to me like a completely rationale thing to measure about the universe. Imagine if the result had come back true?

<comment><USER8> > This paper isn't actually about whether or not type 3 societies exist.

Ah, I see. It's a play on words. "Apparently" is meant as "is visible", not in the sense of "this is true". Astronomer humor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Plot twist: the "dark matter" in the universe actually consists of Type III societies harnessing the electromagnetic radiation of their galaxies by a means as-yet unknown to us.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately, this idea has been explored and discarded. Thermodynamics requires the emission of detectable EM energy from such shells, just at longer wavelengths. We'd expect to see dark matter emitting in microwave or IR, but we don't.

<comment><USER11> It doesn't require that a Dyson Sphere be an isotropic radiator, though. It could be emitting its heat in a different direction.

<comment><USER12> Well, if you emitted it all in a beam away from the plane of your galaxy, that might make you very stealthy. That would impart thrust on the sphere... which if it wasn't perfectly balanced might cause it to wobble, and then start rotating...

... and now we have a sci-fi reason for quasars. :)

<comment><USER2> You could direct the waste in two beams perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy, in order to balance net thrust.

I question how stealthy that would really make you, though. If someone was bothering to look for stealthy civilizations, they'd just have to scatter some observatories around their region of the galaxy, then watch. Eventually, your structure would occult a star from the POV of one of those observatories, or they'd pick up your beam scattering in interstellar gasses or dust clouds.

<comment><USER12> Of course you'd need two beams. If you used a single beam it would be a stellar rocket... which might be fun in different ways. Certainly gives the phrase "interstellar warfare" a different meaning.

I realize this is all space opera, not hard SF. It's still fun.

<comment><USER13> "But Sir, these are the correct stellar coordinates for the Zorgoph home world! They should be right here!"

"There's nothing here, Captain. Nothing at all. So you're saying that they moved an entire star system? In the last solar cycle?"

Good times, good times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If we expect to see the "brightness of the blackbox caused by the radiation of a Type III Kardashev Civilization", and we inspect galaxies that are maybe millions of light-years away from us, would we not be looking at how did those galaxies look millions of years ago?

That is, maybe there are Type III Kardashev Civilizations and their usage of the energy of their galaxy in fact radiates energy that would be visible to us... except that they've evolved to that point much later that the light we're receiving since it takes millions of years for that light to reach us.

In those millions of years they could very well have reached that technological level, but it will take some more millions of years for that to reach us... by that time mabye that Civilization doesn't exist anymore... Maybe our civilization doesn't exist anymore...

In this case we extract information from the radiation that comes from those galaxies, and the information is too slow to travel such vast distances, since it can't go faster than the speed of light.

In summary, we're looking for ANCIENT Type III civilizations.

<comment><USER15> > In summary, we're looking for ANCIENT Type III civilizations.

Yes. This is because of the low probability that intelligent life develops somewhere else at even close to the same time as it did on Earth.

Our best understanding is that life has existed on Earth for something like 4 billion years, and complex life has existed for about 500 million. However, complex life capable of building spacecraft (or even radios) has only existed for a few hundred thousand (that is being extremely generous, of course), and only developed that technology in the last ~100 years.

If intelligent life has or will evolve somewhere else in the universe, and progresses anything like it did here, then the odds seem overwhelmingly in favour of one of two scenarios:

\- It evolved millions of years ago, and if it has not wiped itself out, is virtually god-like by our standards due to its head start on technological development.

\- It has not yet evolved, or at best is the equivalent of primates or the proto-humans of several hundred thousand years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder what ants think of airports? Or what mice believe about tube trains as they scuttle under the platform.

We are separated from mice (or at least somewhat similar animals) by approximately 40m years of evolution, I think that the separation to a Galaxy altering level entity would be much more profound, and frankly we wouldn't understand what it was if it came and tickled us.

<comment><USER17> We are in no way separated by 40m years of evolution. Our common ancestor 'is'. That mouse you see today has been evolving just as long as you have, but with different priorities.

<comment><USER18> Our common ancestor 'is' what?

We are separated from mice by 80million years of evolution -- 40million from the common ancestor, and 40million to the other modern species.

Or simply 40million years of divergent evolution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Harnessing stellar output might not be that interesting. Power density inside stars kind of sucks (about that of a reptile) and stars have bad failure modes.

You're probably better off disassembling the suckers and storing their matter in a sensible way, rather than have it sit there, burning. Stars are kind of like trash fires; maybe we should be looking for _less_ energy in a type III civ, not shielding.

<comment><USER20> Just to play devil's advocate -- density isn't everything either.

Plants on Earth play an incredible optimization game. Water is necessary not just for chemical metabolism, but because _throwing it away_ is an essential part of the internal material transport systems of a plant. Evaporation in the leaves creates a relatively lower osmotic pressure in the higher levels of the plant. Between capillary action and the slight but insistent pull to replace evaporated water in the leaves, plants have a pumping mechanism with essentially nil energy input: minerals and nutrients gathered in the roots just ride on up with the tide.

Stars may be a similar story for efficient fusion. Sure, with sufficiently advanced technology, I can make inordinately denser energy sources with less boil-off. But do I want to? Maybe letting the brute physics of a gravity well do the job simply has unbeatable efficiency -- just like evaporation as one end of a pump for plants on Earth is clearly no comparison to any motorized pump for volume, but for cost-effect, nothing else comes close.

<comment><USER19> A Type III civ is probably going to take the long view. The _really_ long view. And in the long run, efficiency is everything.

Stars are just so wasteful; all that energy going into convection currents, and you have to build this big damned sphere to capture all the energy. Better to lift the damned thing and, at the very least, make a dwarf star out of the larger ones. Now you're talking trillions of years of burning (it's still a trash fire, but at least it's manageable).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Could be great news- it rules out (within some limitations) most of the _really bad_ paperclip-maximizer scenarios.

At least if society is doomed we'll only doom ourselves, and not the entire Milky Way! One takes what cheer one can get when pondering this sort of subject.

<comment><USER22> It means it won't take long after we are doomed. Singularity which can bring doom and eternal life comes at almost the same time. I would pick longevity over Singularity any time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> My speculation has for a long time been what I call the uniform cooling hypothesis. There are no type III civilizations because such things haven't happened yet.

If the universe is all the same age and if the emergence and evolution of life is tied to the overall thermodynamic evolution of the universe, then everything might be approximately of the same scale and complexity within a certain standard deviation.

If this is true then when we go out there we will meet all the others who have also just developed to that level.

<comment><USER24> Yes, but if someone is off by just one percentage point, then they're 13 million years ahead. There needs to be something so unlikely about sentient life, that it only arises approximately one at a time in each galaxy, or the Fermi paradox would apply.

<comment><USER23> This hypothesis works best if we propose an extremely narrow developmental range.

Of course since we have basically no data, we can't actually argue either way beyond vague hand-wavey speculation. You can't calculate standard deviation from a sample size of one.

<comment><USER24> In general, sub percentage point uniformity is taken as evidence of a very strong synchronization mechanism. The extreme uniformity of the cosmic ray background was taken as evidence of inflation, which is quite an extreme position, if you look at the numbers.

That such a synchronization mechanism should work with such precision over the entire universe seems very unlikely. Filtering would not require synchronization, so that seems much more likely.

<comment><USER23> The only way I can imagine it being that synchronized is if evolution itself is somehow tightly coupled to cosmic inflation.

Here's the speculation in more detail:

Evolution can be viewed as an information transfer mechanism that learns about the universe and transfers that information into the genome. (This is one interpretation found in evolutionary information theory.) As the universe inflates there is more total information in it, and therefore more information for evolution to learn. At certain points, a kind of information density "critical mass" is reached and phase transitions occur: the emergence of life, complex life, cooperative/multicellular life, higher order intelligence, industrialization and complex society, etc. Since the total amount of information in the universe is (we're speculating) tied directly to the arrow of time, this occurs simultaneously everywhere at approximately the same time.

Again this is hypothesis bordering on speculation since we do not know of any mechanism that directly couples information content to cosmic inflation like this, or even how we would go about measuring such a thing objectively. For instance it's not possible to differentiate between random and encrypted data using Shannon information measures, so what statistic would you use?

<comment><USER24> Then I'll invoke Occam's Razor. A simple filter explains the situation more cleanly, and doesn't need the addition of a wild-sounding mechanism that affects evolution that's attached to inflation.

Furthermore, if it has such a powerful and pervasive effect on evolution, why haven't we already discovered it in our studies of evolution to date? We live on a planet chock full of evolving life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> He estimates f_l, the probability of life arising in a habitable planet, as 0.1.

Abiogenesis has never been observed to occur independently of its presumed occurrence when life started on Earth.

Given the current state of scientific knowledge on this topic, the only certain lower bound on this number is the probability of molecules in a suitable "organic soup" arranging themselves into a self-contained bacterium. And that probability is a _very_ small number.

If f_l is _very_ small, then there is no need to be pessimistic about our own long-term survival. We see no advanced alien civilisations, because there is no other life out there of any kind - the rest of the observable universe is sterile.

<comment><USER26> Even if abiogenesis is common, the transition from simple to complex cells is incredibly uncommon. As far as we can tell it only happened on earth once in 4 billion years.

f_l may be 0.1 but f_i is almost certainly multiple orders of magnitude smaller.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't think societies/civilizations are a viable organization scheme on cosmic time scales. What if very advanced civilizations all reorganize themselves into symbiotic aggregations of less-than-wholly-individual entities? Communications between these entities inhabiting virtual reality is so fast that the aggregate seems like a hyper-intelligent hive mind to human- like sentience?

If we take mind upload as a given, then it should also be possible to create "clones" of our minds with ease. This level of technology will have a profound effect on the value society places on individuality.

<comment><USER27> > What if [...] all

"all" is usually the key issue with solutions to the Fermi paradox. We can certainly find reasons for any given civilization to go the other way, but it's more difficult to argue that _all_ of them do.

<comment><USER24> There are very strong reasons to believe that all civilizations (multitudes of independent, individualistic semi-cooperating sentient creatures) are inherently chaotic and therefore unstable. There are loads of arguments as to why they are doomed to fail, or to try to expand exponentially. If we take a cold and realistic eye to technological civilizations, they do seem doomed to self-destruct or "sublime" into something incomprehensible. There aren't many examples in nature of things that are the confluence of two or more super- exponential processes that are long-term stable. (In our case, those would be population, energy use, and technological change.) In fact, I think there are basically none.

<comment><USER28> I think you take a particularly narrow view of what constitutes a "society". Arguably, current human society is the product of over 10,000 years of continuous development. Yes, there have been numerous changes in structure and power, but our fundamental "human" identity hasn't really changed in that time.

I would also argue that life itself has proven remarkably long-term stable on our planet. Granted, it has not been stable enough to produce a type-III society, but if we remove homo sapiens from the planet for a thought experiment, there exist other species that are developing communication or tool-use skills and might succeed us even on the technological path.

So my view is that, unless we continue to fail spectacularly, life will still continue without us. Even if we do not reach type-III, that does not necessarily preclude Earth from producing a type-III society in the future.

<comment><USER24> _I think you take a particularly narrow view of what constitutes a "society". Arguably, current human society is the product of over 10,000 years of continuous development. Yes, there have been numerous changes in structure and power, but our fundamental "human" identity hasn't really changed in that time._

Sounds like you are the one who has a narrow view of "society," rather. In the abstract, it only need be something like "a multitude of cooperating but competing, independent self-preserving, self-advocating sentient interests." That's fairly abstract while still being a sure recipe for highly non-linear and chaotic effects.

 _Even if we do not reach type-III, that does not necessarily preclude Earth from producing a type-III society in the future._

But then you're setting up a situation where a series of chaotic and unstable arrangements snuff themselves out or flare-out in a puff of singularity- colored smoke, ending with the appearance of the first stable meta-societal form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Whether technological societies remain small and planet-bound like our own, > or ultimately span across galaxies is an open question in the Search for > Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

What questions in this field are _not_ open?

</comment><comment><USER30> Somewhat tangentially related: a non-scientific discussion on what Type I, II, and III Societies are, and why they might not quite make it.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhkwT466ykc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhkwT466ykc)

</comment><comment><USER31> Why would technologically advanced species explore the (mostly empty) universe, when they can sit inside their holodecks and have much more fun?

<comment><USER32> 4 reasons come to mind:

1\. Advanced societies have probably solved the aging problem, leading to either extremely long lives or effective immortality. As long as these societies keep reproducing (and they will, unless they deliberately engineer out the urge to procreate, which I consider to be unlikely), they'll need space to spread out. Sure, they could probably pack themselves like sardines into a single solar system, but that only works if they'll be spending 100% of their time in virtual reality, and that would be begging the question.

2\. A need for resources. Type III societies can capture 100% of the output of a star, but even this amount of energy might not suffice once society grows large enough. And even at that level it's still probably easier to manipulate matter than it is to convert energy into matter, so it'll be more efficient to harvest planets and asteroids and whatnot for raw building materials, which means leaving the solar system.

3\. Even assuming they manage to create virtual reality that is 100% indistinguishable from reality, it's likely that there will still be a lot of beings that will reject the idea of living 100% in virtual reality simply because it's virtual. Even if it's indistinguishable from reality, they'll still know it's not real. So they may visit VR, but will want to actually live in the real world. Or in other words, humans have shown a tendency towards the perverse, and it's not unreasonable to assume aliens will too.

4\. Any kind of scientific research still being done at that level will likely require the use of reality instead of VR. VR is a simulation, and even if it's indistinguishable from reality to your senses, it's still presumably not actually simulating reality down to the planck level (because it's part of the universe, it cannot simulate the entire universe at the same fidelity that the universe itself operates at, as that would presumably require more information than the universe contains), and so there's probably a fair amount of research at that level that simply can't work in simulation and requires testing against actual reality.

<comment><USER24> _1\. Advanced societies have probably solved the aging problem, leading to either extremely long lives or effective immortality. As long as these societies keep reproducing (and they will, unless they deliberately engineer out the urge to procreate, which I consider to be unlikely), they 'll need space to spread out._

If they had as little agency around the issue of population control as you suggest, this makes me question their status as "advanced."

<comment><USER32> I did not suggest that they have little agency around population control. What I suggested was that aliens will continue to _want_ to have children, and so space will be needed for those children given that the parents won't be dying any time soon.

Beyond that, if you have effectively infinite space and resources, there's no need at all to have even the slightest bit of population control. Population control is only necessary to ensure adequate resources (including space to live) for everybody. But when there's no constraint on resources, there's no reason why anybody shouldn't have as many children as they desire.

<comment><USER24> _I did not suggest that they have little agency around population control. What I suggested was that aliens will continue to want to have children_

So you suggested that their civilization as a whole had little agency around population control.

 _Beyond that, if you have effectively infinite space and resources, there 's no need at all to have even the slightest bit of population control._

You're forgetting simple geometry. Space empires can only expand proportional to n^3, while their population could potentially expand proportional to k^n. Also, in a situation where there are multiple star-faring "species," a hegemonic, exponentially expanding entity might well be viewed by others as worse than obnoxious.

<comment><USER32> You're ignoring constant factors. Space empires will likely expand much faster than dictated by population needs, to the degree that, as it spreads out, it will presumably experience a reduction in population density. Sure, with multiple star-faring empires, there may be a limit to how far in space a given empire can expand, but a Type III society is capable of building all sorts of gigastructures, including ringworlds and dyson spheres, so even a moderate expansion out of a single solar system will provide plenty of room for population expansion. It's also likely that immortal or long-lived species will end up having a relatively low number of children (given effective immortality and complete control over reproductive capability, it seems likely that aliens will choose to have a low number of children over their lifetime and will likely wait much longer before having their first child, which means even a simple doubling in population will take place over a relatively long time).

Given these reasonable assumptions, it seems likely to me that most space- faring civilizations of this level of technology will never experience any kind of pressure on living space. If you've ever read the Culture series (by Iain M. Banks) then you might reasonably expect such a civilization to "Sublime" before running out of space. Or to eventually alter themselves so as to remove the desire to procreate in a deliberate move to "retire" from the galactic stage.

I said "most" because there is of course the possibility that some species comes along that has the urge not just to procreate but to have as many children as possible as fast as possible, and manages to achieve this level of technology without ever altering this behavior. Such a species that is driven to expand its population as fast as possible may then experience restrictions on living space, but such a species would eventually have to enact population control, which could take the form of altering themselves to remove this urge to procreate as fast as possible and therefore will become just like "most space-faring civilizations".

<comment><USER24> I am a big fan of _The Culture_. Also, it sounds like you just posited that advanced civilizations would effectively exercise population control, otherwise avoid shortages and avoid the necessity of rapid spatial expansion though technological means.

<comment><USER32> My belief is that advanced civilizations would naturally end up with what is effectively population control, without any actual active work towards that goal. As birth control becomes easy and prevalent, unwanted pregnancies stop happening. And it seems reasonable to me that, given greatly extended life span / effective immortality, people will naturally choose to wait longer before having children (if they have any at all) and will have relatively few children and/or will have a long duration between children. So this does pretty much amount to population control, without having any actual restriction on any given individual's ability to have children.

<comment><USER24> _So this does pretty much amount to population control_

From the POV of an outsider or a different species, would any entity care about the difference between "effectively/pretty much" and what you deem to be "actual" population control?

I doubt it.

So basically, you haven't been disagreeing with me, just splitting hairs on what the words "population control" means. I'm using a more generic criteria: Is the population controlled?

<comment><USER32> I think I'm drawing the distinction between "active population control" and "passive population control". I define "active population control" as anything where the goal is to control population and active steps are taken in that direction, typically with the effect of reducing freedom of individuals (e.g. a simple control would be "no more than 2 children per couple", which means an individual cannot decide to have 3 children). Whereas "passive population control" is basically where population growth ends up controlled as a side- effect of other changes, generally without any limits on the freedoms of individuals (for example, eliminating unwanted pregnancies would be a form of passive population control; the goal isn't to control the population but rather to eliminate an undesired situation, and no individual's freedom is curtailed, but the overall effect would be fewer children across the entire population).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Or, the blackboxes might not emit the radiation we expect because of some technology or physics that we don't know about yet.

<comment><USER34> Like maybe there is a very good reason NOT to be emitting radiation at that obvious wavelength, because we might not be the only ones looking...

<comment><USER35> We are very secure trough obscurity.

<comment><USER6> Security through obscurity give huge success at minimal effort.

It might not be 100% secure but it's not meant to be, either. Just more secure than nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Why should an advanced civilization necessarily create the artifact mentioned in the article. The conclusion because we don't see this artifact, so type III societies don't exists seems too strong. Maybe they don't create giant veils around galaxies and instead have virtualized themselves, or can simply convert matter to energy at will. What use would there be in wrapping a giant ball of dust around a galaxy when you can convert matter directly to some other energy/form? Probably I think "they" are formless and more information based than physical. We aren't even sure if this reality is real or a simulation anyway, so why limit our thinking to advanced civilizations in the world as we know it?

<comment><USER37> The problem with the Kardashev scale is that it ties the advancement of a civilization with its energy consumption.

In order to qualify as a Type III civilization, you pretty much need to harvest ALL of the energy in a galaxy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm unconvinced by the Kardashev assumption that energy is the limiting factor for civilisation.

It's more likely that beyond a certain point you have all the energy you can use, and the limiting factor becomes collective intelligence.

I'd guess that in the same way that processors keep getting more efficient, so do civilisations. At the highest levels the energy signature of a civilisation is virtually indistinguishable from the cosmic microwave background - if it's observable at all.

<comment><USER39> > It's more likely that beyond a certain point you have all the energy you can > use, and the limiting factor becomes collective intelligence.

Why is this more likely?

<comment><USER28> My off-the-cuff response is that energy could be harvested locally in many places, but society as a whole will be bounded by the speed of communication (which might not exceed c). It's possible that too long communication lines will fracture society into separate "islands".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> After reading The Dark Forest, my bet is that an advanced society would never advertise themselves in such an obvious fashion.

</comment><comment><USER41> well.. if we don't get off this planet within the next (approx) 4 Billion years.. our species will snuff it as the sun grows to a red giant.

so assuming all life across the universe starts from similar beginnings as us, then this tells us something about what an advanced civilisation needs to be capable of to survive.</comment>


Credit card technology transition is trying for travelers - <AUTHOR> https://m.sfgate.com/travel/article/Credit-card-technology-contactless-13644391.php <comment><USER2> TLDR: use tap-to-pay credit cards, or ApplePay, or other similar technology.</comment>


Ask HN: Which is the most useful programming language? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Most useful for what? JavaScript and C are both very useful languages, but you probably don't want to write an operating system in JavaScript or a web site in C.

</comment><comment><USER3> The language you know.

<comment><USER4> Exactly.

Then if you know multiple languages, the most useful will be the one you can use the more often, on the various platforms you have to write programs for, and for the various kinds of programs you have to write.

In this respect, I find Common Lisp particularly useful, since it's really a multi-paradygm programming language, in addition to being a meta-programming language: when you need to solve a problem, a feature that is not provided by the language, in Common Lisp you can usually very easily add this features thanks to macros.

[http://cliki.net/Getting+Started](http://cliki.net/Getting+Started)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you have a website you want to sell? - <AUTHOR> If you have any website or blog that you no longer have time for, list them here and let's see if others want to buy it from you. <comment><USER2> For a serious list of eateries in Effingham Ill, or a parody site selling tshirts, etc:

[http://effinghamsandwich.com/](http://effinghamsandwich.com/) \- for all your Effing Sandwich needs

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://prague420.tk/](http://prague420.tk/)

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://test-api.net/](https://test-api.net/)

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.dealomni.com](https://www.dealomni.com) \- domain and source code $2k

</comment><comment><USER6> Ninja.ai

</comment><comment><USER7> strengthstash.com

</comment><comment><USER8> whispe.rs</comment>


What Happened to Yahoo - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html <comment><USER2> Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article.

 _...the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had._

Is Apple a big winner, like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook (the other companies he mentions repeatedly)? Bigger. (Check the last 1, 5 or 10 years on Google finance for the GOOG or MSFT comparison. FB is not public, but...) Do they have this obnoxiously elitist focus? No. They still manage to hire great engineers, though.

 _So which companies need to have a hacker-centric culture?... any company that needs to have good software._

I wouldn't say that Apple is dominated by a hacker culture at all. It's dominated by Steve Jobs and a focus on design and attention to detail. Yet that seems to produce much better software than Google or Microsoft, IMHO. That's _very_ subjective, I realize, but the market seems to agree. At any rate, Apple does produce _good software_.

So are the hacker culture and the elitist focus really necessary for a technology company to succeed? Is Apple a complete anomaly while Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are typical? What say you, pg?

I realize it's borderline suicidal to post an HN comment that simultaneously calls out pg and lauds Apple, but it's criminal to completely leave the best (imho) technology company out of a discussion about attributes of great technology companies.

<comment><USER3> I don't know enough about what it's like inside Apple now to say. Certainly from what I've heard there used to be a hackerly culture in the past. I remember reading how mystified and offended Gil Amelio was by it. But I don't know what things are like now. Is there anyone here who can talk about it? Is the atmos hackerly or corporate?

<comment><USER4> It's a very hackerly culture (in some ways still living off the inheritance of Woz), but you won't ever hear about that for two reasons:

1\. Secrecy is part of the culture.

2\. Engineers work _hard_ at Apple, and many teams are _surprisingly_ small. There are no 20% projects at Apple because nobody has the time.

<comment><USER5> 2\. That is not all that different from Google.

<comment><USER6> Most Googlers I've talked to call it the 120% project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [edit: this thread has some insightful replies by others that are worth reading.]

I'm sorry, this may be PG's backyard, but I've gotta call bullshit. Note: I am not a Yahoo employee or corporate shill.

1\. "At Yahoo this death spiral started early."

Apparently this death spiral took TWELVE YEARS (the WWW is 20 years old), and Yahoo is still #1 (or #2) in terms of total properties on the web. How is this a death spiral?

2\. "If there was ever a time when Yahoo was a Google-style talent magnet, it was over by the time I got there in 1998."

Are you kidding me? You're implying all the current Yahoo engineers are idiots? Then how come each piece of code they release is revered, lauded and used by everybody?

Speaking of talent: Yahoo got best paper at EVERY data-related conference in 2010. No single lab(Google,MS) or university(Stanford etc) has ever done this. Clearly you can achieve this without talent, pg!

3\. "In the software business, you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture. Probably the most impressive commitment I've heard to having a hacker-centric culture came from Mark Zuckerberg, when he spoke at Startup School in 2007."

Which company is responsible for inventing the term "Hack Day": Yahoo. Which is the only company to _promote_ hacking culture to students? Yahoo. Yahoo != Hacker-friendly? WTFFF!!! (edit:goog does soc, but it doesnt have engineers travel around the world teaching kids hands-on like yahoo does)

4\. Google and Apple are shiny and get all the attention. Yahoo's the internet's underbelly. It's audience may not be SF hipsters, but they exist and there are a lot of them. Just because they're not like you doesn't mean they dont exist. Just because Yahoo doesnt cater to you doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

5\. pg's product got hosed after inclusion into Yahoo. This happens. Reading a Yahoo critique from pg is like reading a Google critique from Evan Williams (Blogger), or a Google critique from the Dodgeball guys. It's a biased opinion.

6\. It's a miracle Yahoo has survived for so long despite being criticized by the media /market for more than half its lifetime. The only other company that has had it worse was Apple, when they fired Steve Jobs. Yahoo doesnt have a Steve Jobs, and has been managed badly, but the engineering is SO GOOD that it STILL does a good job overall.

<comment><USER3> I never implied all the Yahoo engineers are idiots. In fact I explicitly said the opposite: that the quality was uneven. Uneven means some good, some bad.

Also, Viaweb didn't get hosed after being bought by Yahoo. It prospered enormously. I don't bear them any ill will.

<comment><USER8> I'd like to hear you talk more about what's happened to Yahoo stores. I worked with a Yahoo store (side consulting) for about five years now. Your Yahoo essay seems consistent with what I've noted. The Viaweb/Yahoo Store thing was very good in the late '90s but they haven't changed much since then and it's very dated now. I think they're coasting on the revenue, which I imagine is slipping away to eBay, Amazon, Shopify, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In 2002, Yahoo! began a serious effort to compete with Google in search by buying Inktomi (plus Altavista and FAST). In what must have been early 2004, I came over with the rest of the Inktomi crew to work on search. The Inktomi people were top notch, Yahoo! seemed earnest about doing what it took to go head to head with Google, and the integration efforts were done really well. While I was there I worked in an island of Inktomi people (plus some from Altavista), and I repeatedly got the impression that Y! people, technical and otherwise, were a little soft, maybe even complacent, relatively speaking.

I do feel Y! did a great job -- and made a great decision -- in integrating its search acquisitions; but those acquisitions threw into sharp relief what Y! really was. It's hard to get into too much trouble when all you're doing is throwing horoscopes onto web pages; but Yahoo! never struck me as being serious about software, and as Paul says, they didn't seem to think that was a problem.

Somewhere in 2005-2006, Y! made an attempt to revamp its search ad services with a large-scale software project called Panama. It was going to do a lot of things, including ad ranking refinements to improve revenue per query, and allowing advertisers to create more complex ad campaigns. This project seemed to undergo huge troubles, and I wonder if it was ever completed in any real sense, because I heard so little about it, and everything I heard suggested disaster.

Honestly I don't know if the fruits of Panama -- such as improved auctions for ads on search result pages, which is a critical thing -- were ever deployed. But a couple years later they made the Microsoft deal. Over the last couple years, select people at Y! have moved on to Google, and many many others are now at Microsoft.

<comment><USER10> Panama was eventually deployed (end of 06: [http://techcrunch.com/2006/12/13/yahoo-begins-panama-roll- ou...](http://techcrunch.com/2006/12/13/yahoo-begins-panama-roll-out-in-the- us/)), but it didn't compare well to Google's offerings in that it still didn't give as good relevancy for advertisers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _" You can get programmers who would never have come to you as employees by > buying their startups. But so far the only companies smart enough to do this > are companies smart enough not to need to."_

Yahoo did do this through the Inktomi (Yahoo Search, 2003-2010) acquisition. I've worked in that organization and learned a tremendous amount from the people. At that time the hiring bar had been considerably raised from what Graham describes (I have no idea whether that was the rule or the exception at that time, I was there 8 years later), nobody was shy of rejecting weak candidates. Much of the knowledge did diffuse to rest of the organization and it's important to note that along side the "dot-com-wannabe-millionaire- vesting-in-peace" crowd the essay describes, there _was_ plenty of genuine technical talent (anyone who has worked there can attest to presence and influence of hackers).

Unfortunately, for many reasons, that talent has slowly bled out. There was also a great amount of friction between Search and rest of the organization e.g., resistance (by Search engineers) to dog-fooding of what was often inferior technology. Search was, however, able to maintain a different platform, remaining on Linux, with their own platform/software stack, but were some "wtf" moments like porting and forcing the adoption of a custom user space locking library from FreeBSD when Linux already had futex (on the other hand, the fact there was a custom locking library built in a "media company" does say something).

The other key mistake made is that they would position bright, capable new hires in areas that weren't directly correlated to revenue and treated as cost centers. That just seemed highly illogical to me. It's a mistake that's often difficult to fix: once young graduates are used to working on glamorous projects, it's much harder to get them to work on more mundane, but revenue critical projects such as advertiser systems. Google's strategy of a uniformly high hiring bar (vs. some teams hiring people other teams rejected for roles involving the same skill-set) and assigning hires to business priority projects (while allowing individuals to transfer if the project wasn't their cup of tea, with proper incentives in place for some projects) seems to be (at least from an outside point of view, I've never worked at Google) better.

<comment><USER12> _Unfortunately, for many reasons, that talent has slowly bled out_

This reverts back to the original article. Poor _strategic_ leadership.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "In technology, once you have bad programmers, you're doomed. I can't think of an instance where a company has sunk into technical mediocrity and recovered."

In any conflict, there is always a risk of fighting the last battle. I see today many companies, inspired by the lessons learned from the first dot-com bubble, making the opposite mistake; thinking that they need to be a technology company when they're really a experience providing company.

Twitter is the refutation to pg's thesis. Despite their initial technical incompetence, they managed to attract a top-notch technical team because they managed to deliver a crawl-over-broken-glass experience (it's so compelling people are willing to crawl over broken glass to experience it, see also: craigslist, plentyoffish).

It was interesting attending the YC work at a startup day and seeing RethinkDB present. Their pitch, in not as many words was basically "Look, we're the only company here that is actually working on a problem that demands world-class engineers (in the non-debased sense of the term)". For most of the other startups, despite all their bluster, the technology platform they were using was commoditized and technology was not their differentiating factor.

<comment><USER14> I disagree with your "incompetent" assessment of Twitter.

First, there's a lot of false info out there about what parts of Twitter were built using which technologies and why it had uptime issues.

Second, their issue was massive scalability. A high-class problem.

<comment><USER13> I've talked to people who currently work at twitter who are pretty open that a large part of their job is paying down the technical debt from the early days. The engineers who were at twitter in the early days were by no means bad but it's pretty open within the company that they weren't "world class"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Disclaimer #1: My job is technology evangelist for Yahoo! So refuting this is probably the definition of my job.

Disclaimer #2: This is my own completely unsanctioned opinion and does not necessarily represent Yahoo!'s views or opinions.

I'm obviously biased here, but I have a great respect for HN and PG so I wanted to talk about this.

PG accuses Yahoo! of two things right at the very top of the article and the rest of the article is more details on those things. They are a) access to easy money removed Yahoo!'s desire to find the next big thing b) ambivalence about being a technology company.

I'm not going to substantially repute a) because I think it is true. However, I think it's a pretty big ask to expect someone being successful to see past the current success to the next big win. PG admit's neither he nor Larry and Sergey really understood how big search was. As such I feel it's a slightly ad-homonym attack to blame Yahoo! for not being Google. We didn't win the big prize, but we also aren't AOL, Lycos or Ask.com either. Just because we didn't become Google doesn't mean Yahoo! has failed.

As an engineer though PG's second point strikes me as deeply unfair. I joined Yahoo! in 2004 in the UK. The team I joined was exceptional. For a team of 30 people there were about 15 book authored by the team. I personally had written W3C standards and multi Web Standards Project founders littered the team. The rest of the team were coders, much better than I.

Now I work in US for the developer network and I get to see the vast range of technologies that Yahoo! does from Y! Research through to the engineering teams. There is a reason 'Hack Days' started here, because the engineers here are passionate about those technologies and playing with them.

I'm also on the Yahoo! Open Source Working Group and I see all the open source we put out of the door. We should probably do a better job of telling people how much, but it's a lot more than you think. I find it troubling that PG who left the company 10 years ago, can now, accuse me and my colleagues of apathy about technology when it's so fundamental to what Yahoo! does.

I think what PG is really talking to is two things. Firstly, it's important for a company to have a 'core competency'. Describing ourselves as a media company makes it clear to our investors and our employees the field of play. Secondly, the ease at which a cash-cow, such as Google's search war chest, allows them to make their presence felt in the technology community reminds people about all the things they touch. I am both proud an envious that Google have the freedom to do that, but again, it doesn't mean Yahoo! failed because we don't.

<comment><USER16> My sense from meeting Yahoo devs is that they are ok, in that they have the credentials, but didn't seem very passionate or excited about new tech. Can you bring up some examples where Yahoo is pioneering a new field? (search, media delivery, social etc, what ever Yahoo as a company is really excited and passionate about internally...)

<comment><USER15> How about Hadoop? Sure Google released the Map/Reduce paper, but it was Yahoo who wrote 90+% of the current industry standard.

What about Node.js? That's pretty en vogue right now. We are currently hiring Node.js engineers and have a number of core contributors in various parts of the company.

YUI and our other front-end work at Yahoo! is world class. People like Crockford are considered leading experts in doing quality front-end web engineering.

Our data centers are also cutting edge, I'm not an expert in this area, but I'm told we are at least on par with Google. Some of the new project are completely cooler-free, the whole building being designed to control heat and power flow.

<comment><USER17> Yahoo Search API (whatever its real name is... BOSS or something?) is also fantastic and much superior to Google's (which isn't even really a search api).

<comment><USER18> Agreed, it's awesome. Yahoo should be focusing resources on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I heared that when one of the large investment banks (forgot which one) got a new CEO, the first thing he did was stopping all IT outsourcing projects. He did realize a modern bank is, in fact, a software company, and you shouldn't outsource your core activity.

<comment><USER20> I believe you're referring to Jamie Dimon, now of JPMorgan Chase, who canceled a $5bn IBM IT outsourcing contract because he believed that technology was a core competency of a modern bank.

<comment><USER21> Yes - he did cancel the Billion Dollar contract but not because I.T suddenly became a core competency. Non-front office facing I.T is being pushed to cheaper locations - primarily to Scotland and Southampton in the UK and is not considered a Core Competency , its outsourcing in a different form , its called IN-Sourcing.

The primary reason for the cancellation of the contract was the sheer amount of beauracracy IBM imposed. Their modus-operandi was - pick up staff who were working in "non-critical" areas and make them report to IBM managers. So now all-of a sudden if i need to get something from our DBA i can't walk upto him and ask him , i need to raise a request in a god-awful system which goes to his manager who would be sitting in a remote location in a different time-zone "managing" the work-load of the DBA who sits 5 feet away from me. In the majority of the cases for access to sysadmins and DBA's who were an integral part of your team before you now had to go through this route.

I will leave the readers to draw their own conclusions to this marvellous scheme.

<comment><USER22> I conclude that the marvelous scheme was, in fact, slightly non-marvelous.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, but it probably worked out pretty well for IBM, and lazy/mediocre managers could pretty easily abdicate responsibility for things while not getting fired for buying IBM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hindsight is easy. If you look back at the two decades before 1998, it was basically Microsoft, Intel (and to a lesser extent Oracle) buying (hopefully) or crushing every single engineering-centric company out there. They used good ol' monopoly power and FUD, which is pretty far from an engineering culture. Borland, Lotus, Apple, etc. IBM had successfully made a transition to a service company and the conventional wisdom was that that was all that saved them from being crushed in turn. Jerry Yang was just following the conventional wisdom.

EDIT: Most importantly they had just witnessed the spectacle of Netscape, a company that seemed unstoppable, just completely buried by MS.

</comment><comment><USER25> PG: "But [Yahoo] had the most opaque obstacle in the world between them and the truth: money."

Sounds like yet another variant of Upton Sinclair's Law: "When a man's paycheck depends on his not understanding something, you can depend upon his not understanding it."

<comment><USER26> The actual quote, from _I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked_ :

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

A terrific read. <http://www.amazon.com/dp/0520081986>

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I find it interesting that Yahoo is considered not to have a "hacker" culture when they produce things such as YUI, YQL and YSlow which seem to have no reason to be there other than that they think of themselves as a company that has hackers and coding in their DNA. I guess these are small examples in the large scheme of things but it still seems odd that there is this disconnect - at the high level, they are just media company, at the low level they are right there in the hacker community producing, I would say, above their weight.

</comment><comment><USER25> Rich Yahoo in 1999 overlooked the value of search.

Rich Google in 2004 overlooked the value of social networking (both their in- house hit Orkut and outside services).

<comment> matthew-wegner What is Rich Facebook going to overlook?

<comment><USER28> In a few years it will be glaringly obvious.

<comment><USER29> It is easy to be a general AFTER the war.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> As far as I was concerned (admittedly I was still a kid at the time), all that mattered was the Yahoo homepage was garish and full of ads, and the results were hard to sift through (because they were full of 'sponsored links' and the page was equally garish). Google was the antithesis of all that, and that's why I used, liked, and rooted for Google.

<comment><USER31> That's exactly what I felt. Google respects me(no flashing ads), I respect Google.

I was a kid too when I used Altavista, it was a great search tool back in the day... until they f _ck_ d it totally.

I had seen it happen with other services like ftpsearch(you know the name of a file, you got it instantly).

When I saw the first Ad blinking on my face(Altavista put suits on place, "monetizing stuff") I discovered reading on searchlores "Google": It was so easy and powerful and NO annoying ads!!

I couldn't believe it, and expected it to surrender to the MBAs forces soon as the other had. But they got money to buy some freedom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> "It's probably too much to hope any company could avoid being damaged by depending on a bogus source of revenue. But startups can learn an important lesson from [the fact that] in the software business, you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture."

I think Yahoo made the correct decision on both counts. As far as depending on a bogus source of revenue, all new advertising mediums are massively undervalued at first, then massively overvalued, and then only eventually even out. It would be a huge mistake not to plan your entire business model around this cycle. Yahoo did this, and they made literally billions of dollars because of it. Sure, if they had chosen to go into a different sort of business they could have perhaps extended their reign, but it's hard to argue that they made the wrong choice.

As for not having a hacker-centric culture, I think they made the right choice here as well. Every time Yahoo bought a startup, their stock rose more than they paid for the company, meaning every time they acquired their tech through a buyout the execs took home massive paychecks. Whereas every dollar they spent on elite programmers was money out of their pocket.

I think the lesson here, if anything, is that you can make mostly the right decisions and your business can still decline over time.

Incidentally, I heard a great story about one of the Yahoo sales guys. Apparently he bought his own inventory at the end of every month to meet his quota, because the stock he was getting vested was worth more than the 100K or so he was required to fork over each month. (Because he obviously couldn't actually make any sales.)

</comment><comment><USER33> "Most technology companies eventually get taken over by suits and middle managers."

Interesting statement. I suspect this process is well under way at Google these days.

But _why_ does this happen? Is it just that once companies grow large enough, you need middle managers, (who then consolidate power and control)? Is there a more nuanced explanation?

<comment><USER34> "I suspect this process is well under way at Google these days."

What's your basis for this speculation?

<comment><USER33> ""I suspect this process is well under way at Google these days."

What's your basis for this speculation?"

Conversations with friends who work there mostly. One of the advantages of being older is that you know people in most companies who talk to you off the record over beer, sometimes in very "high" positions.

<comment><USER35> I had a similar realization this year. For the first time I realized I knew people who currently work at, or very recently just worked at, all the big software companies: Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook. It may be partly helped by age, but also perhaps if you've ever worked at a large company with a ton of engineers, then leave, and those seeds scatter, eventually at least one ends up taking root at each of the big shops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Funny. I made a similar comparison with Facebook. PG said that Yahoo was a de facto pyramid scheme, although ponzi scheme is a better analogy: <http://blog.jperla.com/facebook-is-a-ponzi-scheme-0>

>> By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto pyramid scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in. When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of "Eureka!" I was shouting "Sell!"

</comment><comment><USER37> Summing up:

* The Innovator's Dilemma, _and_

* Mistaking a key driver of innovation and growth (software development) for a cost center.

</comment><comment><USER38> Here is a Forbes article from 1998 Spring about Anil Singh and his team's perspective: <http://www.forbes.com/asap/1998/0223/068.html>

<comment><USER39> Choice quote:

 _"I'm here to generate sales for the company, and whether that means we have good products, bad products, or indifferent products," he says, "I have a job to do -- meeting our plans from a top- line standpoint."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Aside: sorting advertisements by bids originated with goto.com in Feb 1998 (from Idealab), years before Google started using it.

It was a great idea, original and effective, though I'm not how to feel about their patenting it. If they hadn't, they would have been copied and crushed without credit. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goto.com#Origins_of_Goto.com>

As it was, they got 2.7 million shares from Google's infringement, and later acquired by Yahoo for $1.63 billion.

</comment><comment><USER28> _"in the early days Facebook made a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing."_

No offense, but hiring programmers for HR seems like a terrible idea. HR people's main capacity is to understand people and relationships, not exactly something programmers are known for being good at.

<comment><USER41> If most (all) of your early employees are hackers, how does it not make sense to hire a hacker to manage HR?

<comment><USER42> Because different jobs need different skill sets? Why does being a 'hacker' make you qualified or even appropriate to manage something like HR or marketing?

<comment><USER41> How many hackers are CEO's and how many of those were ever qualified for that job at the start?

<comment><USER41> Down vote and no opinion? Hmm.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1596814>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> How Software Companies Die: [http://www.zoion.com/~erlkonig/writings/programmer- beekeepin...](http://www.zoion.com/~erlkonig/writings/programmer- beekeeping.html)

</comment><comment><USER44> Don't miss the allusion ("Theirs was not to reason why") to the poem The Charge Of The Light Brigade. Into the Valley rode the 500. Very funny.

</comment><comment><USER45> Great post. This left me wondering -- what do you think would have happened if Yahoo had been successful in their $1b bid for Facebook? Would FB have turned the company around by instilling a start-up/hacker culture. Or would it have just died there, infected by Yahoo?

</comment><comment><USER46> It's bad to nitpick, but I take issue with the quote "It's hard for anyone much younger than me to understand the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995.":

I was born in 1981 and I clearly remember the fear and awe Microsoft inspired in 1995 :) .

There were articles about how Bill took things personally and crushed competition.

I read the 1992 biography "Hard Drive" ( [http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive- Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making- Microsoft-Empire/dp/0887306292/ref=pd_sim_b_3) ); Bill was kind of a role model back then (a successful and well-known technologist).

Edit: See also ojbyrne's comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1596737>

</comment><comment><USER47> <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/yahoo.html> Anyone remember this article in Wired from way back in 2007? It goes into the details of the technology company vs a media enterprise dilemma of Yahoo as identified by Paul Graham in his piece and how then CEO Terry Semel messed it all up.

</comment><comment><USER48> Somebody please help poor pg and design him some prettier buttons than those purple beveled monstrosities..

<comment><USER3> It's Yahoo Store. Those buttons were slick in 1996.

<comment><USER49> I wrote some Perl code that improved the look of those buttons (based on Trevor Blackwell's engine) at Viaweb back in 1997. I distinctly remember Paul, Trevor and others gathered around my screen to admire the new buttons. So nobody criticize the Yahoo Store buttons!

<comment><USER50> I remember waiting for them to load on 56k. You really had to go all out with the bevel instead of regular text?

<comment><USER49> The images that are used by a Yahoo Store website are created once and for all and then stored as very small .gif files. For example, all the buttons in Paul Grapham's web-site are stored as the .gif file <http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/paulgraham_2117_16484650.gif>. You can download that file for yourself and examine it and learn that it has a size of 2896 bytes. So even on a 56K connection, it should take a fraction of a second to download all of the buttons Paul uses.

<comment><USER50> It's possible that my memory is faulty on the matter. I was probably around 14 or 15 at the time, but I remember looking for a nice heatsink/fan combo so I could try overclocking, a project which would later lead me to make a really awesome water-cooling contraption (it involved a sizable A/C radiator soaked in ice water, hooked up to a doubly stacked set of 60w and 80w peltier coolers -- I ultimately had problems with frost which ended up frying things).

At any rate, I (think) I remember waiting forever for each individual and unappealing icon to load at this store. It's completely possible that the store was a Yahoo Store knock-off, or that it was before the optimization you mention. I guess we'll never know, since I've probably cleared my cache since then.

<comment><USER49> It wasn't Yahoo Store. We always had optimized buttons because of Trevor's engine. It was one of our key advantages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> There is no single Yahoo (part of the identity problem Yahoo has) and therefore you cannot generalize a culture across Yahoo.

Each division within Yahoo really had its own culture. The search group culture was entirely different from the media (news, sports, etc.) group which was entirely different from the listings (real-estate, etc.) business.

A group like Yahoo Search (prior to its sale) was an entirely tech centric organization. Many of the top engineers from Yahoo Search Yahoo! are now co- founders within top Silicon Valley startups.

</comment><comment><USER52> Yahoo went bad because:

1\. It has no notable engineering foundation;

2\. It has no clear vision about what it is and where it's going; and

3\. Like Microsoft, it's put a business person in charge, which is the death knell of any tech company. You need someone with a technical foundation or a product person, not a business wonk.

<comment><USER53> Yahoo went bad because a business person was put in charge? From my point of view I would say that is generally the rule rather the exception. Particularly for those firms wanting to go public.

I'm going to defer to mixmax's quip about putting a gardner in charge of a gardening firm's finances [1] as the alternative.

You can't argue Jobs or Schmidt are not business people. Although Schmidt could be used to either refute or backup your point depending on how you feel about Google these days.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1596850>

<comment><USER54> Schmidt has a technical background though. Among other things he was the co- author of lex.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I think there's something to be said for focusing on what the market rewards, and clearly the market wasn't rewarding yahoo for having great technology in 1998. Nor did it reward Google for having great enterprise search. You can't fault Jerry and David for not seeing search when the market had clearly supported banners with no basis for search as a viable model yet.

<comment><USER56> When did Google have great enterprise search?

<comment><USER57> I remember trying a Google intranet search "appliance" around 2003 and it was way better than the previous (homebrew?) intranet search we had.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Relevant question on Quora: Why did the web services (Web 2.0) group at Yahoo faill after acquiring Flickr, delicious, upcoming, mybloglog et al:

[http://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-web-services-group-at- Yahoo...](http://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-web-services-group-at-Yahoo-fail- after-acquiring-Flickr-Delicious-Upcoming-MyBlogLog-and-others)

</comment><comment><USER59> What Yahoo employees think about Yahoo: <http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Yahoo-Reviews-E5807.htm>

</comment><comment><USER60> _So which companies need to have a hacker-centric culture? Which companies are "in the software business" in this respect? As Yahoo discovered, the area covered by this rule is bigger than most people realize. The answer is: any company that needs to have good software._

In my time, I've heard and seen an number of non-software companies choke, stumble, and even become acquisition targets because of bad software. Budget car rentals was one that immediately comes to mind that I can actually talk about. For awhile I had a spate of bad customer service experiences where the reps explained that "our system crashed."

If PG is right, all companies are going to need a hacker-centric culture!

Another takeaway from the article: Bogosity kinda works, but only on shorter timescales and for a minority of participants.

</comment><comment><USER61> > _"I remember telling David Filo in late 1998 or early 1999 that Yahoo should > buy Google, because I and most of the other programmers in the company were > using it instead of Yahoo for search. He told me that it wasn't worth > worrying about. Search was only 6% of our traffic, and we were growing at > 10% a month."_

I'm assuming that their other 94% of traffic came from their content/media business, mail, and other portal-related activities. Since search seems to be a large part of the internet now, has their numbers changed today, or have they stayed about the same?

And search was such a small thing back then—did Google set the example for search becoming one of the most important actions on the internet?

<comment><USER62> Search has always been important to the web. But as it wasn't at all sticky, it didn't seem to have money making value. This is why Google originally tried to do enterprise search. NOBODY got that targeted ads via search was the way to go.

And if Search didn't turn out to be a big money maker via ads, Yahoo would probably still be the biggest web company and Google would probably be a niche company last FAST -- making a profit, but not being the new software power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I really don't get these Yahoo is dead stories. It's still the biggest site in the world if all it's properties are put together.

<comment><USER64> [http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...](http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1281573170623&chddm=589628&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NASDAQ:YHOO&cmptdms=0&q=NASDAQ:GOOG&ntsp=0)

Saying "Yahoo is dead" (pg didn't, btw) is a sensationalist way of saying "Yahoo is in a slow, steady decline."

To predict this, look at the leading indicators:

      - new products
      - strategic acquisitions
      - flow of talent
      - company morale
      - growth relative to competition
      - positions in key emerging markets

Yahoo seems to be struggling in all these areas.

Also, using "biggest site" as a metric is one of the problems with Yahoo that pg mentions in this article.

<comment><USER65> It probably doesn't hurt to look at one of Yahoo's contemporaries along the same metrics, AOL.

<comment><USER66> it probably looks healthier still when compared with the traditional "media companies" they stole the brand advertising market share from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> So Yahoo's problem was they were trying to get big, and one way was to call themselves a media company (earn ad dollars, avoid MS radar). However, by doing this, they stopped acting like a technology company, and lost their focus on technology and solutions, but rather chasing the next banner ad buyer.

In contrast, Google was concerned about perfecting its search product, and therefore was focusing on what would help in that regard (hackers), which helped sustain its hacker culture.

</comment><comment><USER68> Yahoo! is definitely not beyond being turned around, though it will take a huge effort.

</comment><comment><USER69> Try logging into yahoo domains. It's nearly impossible. I think Yahoo's problems are 100% UI and navigation related.

</comment><comment><USER70> "In the software business, you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture."

I think you have to tread carefully in an area like this if you are a programmer. Many opportunities to to confirm a bias.

First, the world is not composed of productive hackers and politicians. In a media company, for example, there are writers, producers, actors, etc. Some of them brilliant. A good strategy for a media company could be to have the best of these.

Second, it's not always obvious what business you are in. I think this is especially for startups because they don't have a big version of themselves to look at. If you are a budding fast food chain, you know what business you are in and you've got examples. Yahoo didn't.

Not all internet companies turned out to be technology companies. Not all such companies in the future will either.

I'm sceptical that Yahoo was ever a great media company either.

</comment><comment><USER71> How about the 3rd universal factor: growing too big too soon?

</comment><comment><USER72> I would remind people that PG's credibility as a successful "big thinker" is largely based on the cash he made winning the dot-com lottery by selling his first company to people who, as he says, had little idea of, and less interest in, what they were buying.

</comment><comment><USER73> "But they had the most opaque obstacle in the world between them and the truth: money."

rings true for humans too.

</comment><comment><USER13> From Quora: [http://www.quora.com/How-valid-are-the-reasons-for-Yahoo- pro...](http://www.quora.com/How-valid-are-the-reasons-for-Yahoo-problems- mentioned-in-Paul-Grahams-new-article-What-Happened-to-Yahoo-Are-they-still- valid-in-current-Yahoo)

The main point of Graham's article is that Yahoo! didn't have a hacker-centric culture. If there was a time when that was true, it must have been before I joined.

A company without a hacker-centric culture doesn't encourage the kind of risk- taking and experimentation I saw when I was at Yahoo! Search. As an engineer, I had direct input into product features at every level, from ideation to design to implementation to launch. If I had a crazy idea, I was encouraged not just to tell people about it (up to and including executives), but to implement it and see if it tested well with users. I was able to add my own personal touch to parts of the product (sometimes big parts) without needing to ask permission or wade through excessive red tape.

This may not sound impressive to someone who's used to the way things work at startups or small companies. But this was at one of the largest Internet companies in the world, on one of the most visited websites in the world. For Yahoo! to give me and other engineers the kind of freedom and power we had is not normal for a company or a product that operates at this scale.

</comment><comment><USER65> The essay seems to draw the conclusion that the difference between Yahoo and Google was more or less a matter of historical happenstance. Google did well because at the time Google was being built, they simply weren't (and couldn't be) part of the typical business model of the day, while Yahoo simply became trapped by it.

</comment><comment><USER74> "The worst problem was that they hired bad programmers."

Can you provide any specific examples of how bad programmers hurt Yahoo?

<comment><USER75> Bad programmers wrote a bad search engine, and Yahoo lost all their traffic to the good search engine?

<comment><USER11> > Bad programmers wrote a bad search engine, and Yahoo lost all their traffic > to the good search engine?

Yahoo didn't have their own search technology, until acquisition of Inktomi in 2003 (they used Inktomi to serve their results prior to using Google, whom they used until ~2004).

Correct way to put it is "they didn't hire enough good programmers to build a search engine". A web search engine isn't something bad programmers can build. They acquired a _great_ search engine (the algorithms were, IMO, better than Google's and more immune to gaming, they were a first distributed search engine paving the way for Google's "cluster of commodity hardware" architecture [1]), but it came too late.

[1] See [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.83....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.83.4274&rep=rep1&type=pdf) for what I mean by "paved the way". Their mistake was using Solaris on SPARC (appropriate choice in 1996) for a few years too long (Google started on Linux/x86 right away, Inktomi transitioned by the time of Yahoo's acquisition).

<comment><USER76> More than that, Yahoo's deliberate strategy at the beginning was to not build their own search engine, but just to buy the services of whatever was best out there. At one point that was Alta Vista. Later it was Inktomi. After all search was a well-studied problem, and they thought it was pretty much solved. So why put a lot of energy into building expertise in how to build what they thought would be a commodity.

Then Google demonstrated that search was not a solved problem, search was not a commodity, and it was too late.

<comment><USER14> I don't think anybody thought search was "solved" in the 90's, nor today.

<comment><USER76> Read _Founders at Work_. You'll find that the founders of Yahoo thought of it that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> I loved the last sentence on hacker culture:

"But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example."

</comment><comment><USER78> Difference is the focus:

Business people -> ROI,IRR -> fast profits

Hackers -> hard-to-do -> sustainable profits

</comment><comment><USER79> Very similar to AOL's situation except they went even further in becoming a media company.

Dial-up access was their inflated source of revenue and their focus for much of the 2000s was on ad sales and not hacking.

</comment><comment><USER80> They hired many very good programmers. That's just crazy to say otherwise. But if you lead programmers into a dessert you can't blame the troops when you die of thirst.

</comment><comment><USER81> The definition of hackers back in the 90's is (and should be) different than the definition of hackers today.

</comment><comment><USER82> The interesting thing is that Yahoo could have solved their problems by buying Google for a pittance.

</comment><comment><USER83> A minor stylistic nit: I wouldn't have put 'hosed' in the lead. There are many equally valid words that convey the same meaning without such a colloquial feel to them; in other words, in 10/20 years they won't look as out of place as 'hosed' might.

</comment><comment><USER84> Excellent Essay PG! I was at Lycos about the same time, and what was going on there was very similar to what you describe at Yahoo. Search was considered a commodity and out sourced to FAST. Lycos wanted to be considered a "Media Company" too.

</comment><comment><USER85> > _The prices seemed cheap..._

cheap -> low

<comment><USER85> Why is this down-modded?

"Cheap" is a property of having a relatively low price. Therefore it's either low prices or cheap products, but not cheap prices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> Tens years from now, will you be writing the same article with the title "what happened to Google?". I'd say likely. Companies come and go. Just like assuming Facebook is the THE social graph because somewhere somehow another entrepreneur is working on that next Facebook or Google.

<comment><USER87> 10 years? I'd say it will happen in less than half that time. Personally, I think the cycles (like everything else) are getting faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> Sorry, PG, but I believe your post is an example of "dancing 'round and 'round and suppose while the secret sits in the middle and knows".

The most important thing is, the CEO very much needs to know nearly everything important for his company. For a company heavily involved in software, the CEO needs to understand software in general and the software of his company in particular.

In a startup, he needs to be able to understand all the software, in detail, from the 'architecture' down to line by line. So, for this he needs to have enough knowledge of computing to understand, evaluate, and construct the architecture and have good knowledge of all the crucial 'software tools'. So, if the software is in C++ and Apache, then the CEO needs to understand these two. Windows? He needs to understand some or all of .NET, the CLR, C#, Visual Basic .NET, ADO.NET, ASP.NET, etc.

Now we come to a curious point: For the CEO to acquire that knowledge takes more of his time than writing the code, given the knowledge. So, really, once the CEO has learned to write the code, he can, for less than the time investment in learning the tools, just go ahead and write the code. He should.

Since the CEO wrote the code, maybe that makes his company a 'hacker culture'? I hope not: There are things more important than ASP.NET, etc. While knowing ASP.NET might be necessary, it is not sufficient. Just because the CEO drives his car does not make him a chauffeur. Instead, the software is just part of his job.

Next, my experience is that the best software developers and, in particular, the ones best at the most technical details of software, and the best at software 'architecture' are not 'hackers' and are not even 'computer scientists' but are mathematicians who took out a few afternoons to understand, say, AVL trees, extensible hashing, Cartesian trees, minimum spanning trees, DeRemer's LALR parsing, and monotone locking protocols but also understand dynamic programming, linear programming on networks, Lagrangian relaxation and non-linear duality, Poisson and Markov processes, and martingales. Sorry 'bout that!

With that technical knowledge and work, he has to pay close attention to the product, customers, revenue, hiring, etc.

Not so strange.

</comment><comment><USER89> PG: And without good programmers you won't get good software, no matter how many people you put on a task, or how many procedures you establish to ensure "quality"

IMHO truer words have never been spoken.</comment>