Don't bury or cremate – soon you may compost your corpse - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/august-17-2019-the-benefits-of-video-games-composting-corpses-brewing-ancient-beer-and-more-1.5155492/don-t-bury-or-cremate-soon-you-may-compost-your-corpse-1.5155504 <comment> m-p-3 There is a place like that near where I live in Canada, your remains gets transformed into a fertilizer and a small tree is planted right above it.

I already specified it in my will to go for such a solution or in the same vein, as long as it remain as eco-friendly as possible.

I really like the idea of having a tree with my name on it, instead of a tombstone.

<comment><USER2> Even better if it's a fruit tree.

<comment><USER3> Lol I would not eat the fruit from a tree with a known dead body feeding it. Even if the science claims it's okay it just seems weird.

<comment><USER2> The atoms in the food you eat, the air your breathe, and the water you drink have been part of trillions of dead bodies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There was a great article on nrk.no about how people are still not decomposed in their graves after 70 years: [https://www.nrk.no/viten/xl/plassmangel-og- blaleire-gir-stor...](https://www.nrk.no/viten/xl/plassmangel-og-blaleire-gir- store-utfordringer-pa-norske-kirkegarder-1.14563866)

One example is clay. Burying in clay rich ground will slow decay because it limits the flow of air.

Another example is from the late 1950s where people would be buried in plastic wrap, to make the burial process more sanitary. They did this for 15-20 years. None of those bodies have decomposed much, but worse is that all the liquids are trapped inside the plastic :|

<comment><USER5> Pop a straw in and you have the most macabre capri-sun

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> People are long-lived apex predators, wouldn't this have a heavy metal problem? Tuna and other apex predators tend to be dangerous to eat due to the buildup of pollutants inside them, and they don't live nearly as long or eat nearly as much as a human.

<comment><USER7> And a potential prion problem as well. Plants grown in prion-contaminated soil can absorb prions, and animals who subsequently eat the plants can become infected. [1] And while composting might be enough to destroy most infectious diseases, it certainly isn't enough to denature prions.

[1] Sandra Pritzkow et al. "Grass plants bind, retain, uptake, and transport infectious prions." _Cell Reports_ (2015). [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4449294/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4449294/)

<comment><USER8> I sincerely hope I can't get mad cow disease from eating a banana.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The introduction of cremation and the establishment of the first necropolis' in Paris (I think) and London was a huge social advance. Being able to talk openly and frankly about modes of interment, the recognition of a growing class of atheists, deists but not christians, a migrant population created many new states. London had a special railway line to the cemetary, and you got black-lined ticket to ride the coffin-train-hearse.

At times (from 1660s), to ensure the survival of the wool industry and raise taxes for the state, the shroud was a defined quantity of wool cloth, of a stated quality, which had to be sufficient to wrap the corpse like a Christmas cracker, tied head and toe. I like to imagine it was much like a farmer growing grapes destined for the wine-lake: you shear sheep, to make cloth, to wrap corpses, to earn taxes for the national economy.

I don't see why we can't get to the same kind of open-minded "why not" with composting. We've already had woven coffins, and the ending of routine embalming in many cultures. The liquid biological digester I find slightly more mechanistically worrying. Nobody talks about what you do with the fluids afterward (I think its using Lye or some other caustic solvent to dispose, and its not aiming to fertilize trees the way composting is)

<comment><USER10> Thankfully there's a good choice of natural and forest burials in the UK now. Surprisingly it can be the cheaper option. Actual composting is but a small step from there...

Burial at sea used to be another natural option. A body sewed into sail canvas, weighted with rocks (or cannon balls), which continued beyond WW2. Now it's a whole damn full size coffin, and regulations for the minimum amount of weight bolted to it - steel or concrete!

[https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/burial-at-sea- fur...](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/burial-at-sea-further- information/burial-at-sea-coffin-requirements)

<comment><USER11> The body being sewn into canvas for the burial at sea was related to the people having canvas hammocks. You were buried in your hammock after they sewed it up - the last stitch went through your nose.

<comment><USER10> Aye, but they stuck with canvas long after ships switched to bunks not hammocks, and on the ocean liners etc.

Happily there are better ways to be sure of death than the last stitch of Nelson's day. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In some places you can go for a 'natural' burial where you are minimally processed and simply placed in the ground in basically a natural material burial shroud.

In a lot of places, however, this is highly illegal and there are minimum requirements for burial (which can include embalming and/or a casket and/or a concrete and/or a burial vault which is basically a concrete sarcophagus that caskets go in).

Here in Indiana the only requirement is you have to be placed in a designated cemetery or graveyard 'within a reasonable time' however, pretty much every cemetery here requires a casket and a burial vault.

I used to bury people for a living and always found it so dumb, I'd have to excavate the grave, get chains under a vault and lift it with the backhoe, very slowly drive it out to the grave to prevent it swinging and cracking, lower it into the hole, go put the backhoe up, come back and jump down int he grave with a dust pan and get any dirt that fell into the vault and climb back out without knocking more in, cover it with a tarp and a piece of plywood then do prep an hour or so before the body was to arrive to have it ready for the graveside service.

Then... people would throw handfuls of dirt into the vault _eyetwitch_ and after they left I'd remove all the fake grass and stuff, go get the small tractor, wrestle the vault lid into the front loader bucket, slowly drive out to the grave, wrestle it out of the bucket and get some straps on it, lift hte straps with the bucket and lower it down, let slack out slowly on one end to lower one side of the lid on, remove the straps, lower it more and then play 'don't crush my fingers' while I'm laying next to the grave trying to get the straps out without slamming the lid down and breaking it.

THEN I could put the dirt back and get back to cutting several acres of grass and walking around with a backpack full of diesel to weed eat while trying not to get sun poisoning again.

Man, do not miss that job.

<comment><USER13> Laws requiring embalming/caskets are pretty uncommon. There aren't any laws at the US Federal level, and only a handful of states have any restrictions. Finding a funeral director to provide a natural burial can be more difficult, although most large cities have at least one option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not naming the Recompose "Product" 'Soil-End Green' is a missed opportunity.

<comment><USER15> beat me to it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> For those interested in the thermodynamics, composting generates heat and methane/CO2 emissions. If the composting object (body, trash, etc.) sufficiently disrupts the soil nutrient level (metal content, etc.), it becomes less suitable for healthy plant growth.

There is a growing debate as to whether it is better to incinerate (cremate) for energy generation/offsetting, because the output can be more effectively filtered/separated. (One must of course plant organic matter to offset CO2 output).

This is why many European countries incinerate their waste to reduce risk of disrupting the land.

</comment><comment><USER17> I thought Muslims perform their burials in style of compost.

In Pakistan,

The dead body is wrapped in cloth shroud and the grave is dug six feet and is lined with concrete blocks (ground is bare Earth). Coffin is not used. The body is laid in the grave then if I remember correctly, grave is covered partially (25% - 33%?) with soil and then thick concrete/stone slabs are placed on top to cover the grave. After that, the grave is covered with mound of Earth.

<comment><USER18> concrete is super terrible for the environment compared to wood.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I personally want to be interred in a mushroom infused burial suit [0]. The idea of going back to the progenitor fungal network really comforts me actually.

[0] - [https://coeio.com/coeio-story/](https://coeio.com/coeio-story/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Given the dwindling space for burials:

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/bisnow/2017/11/03/urban- cemeter...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/bisnow/2017/11/03/urban-cemeteries- running-out-of-space-as-baby-boomers-enter-twilight-years/)

and the energy/greenhouse gas emission costs of cremation, I can see this taking off.

There's a picture and caption not discussed in the text:

> Katrina Spade, upper left, the founder and CEO of Recompose, a company that > hopes to use composting as an alternative to burying or cremating human > remains, looks on Tuesday, May 21, 2019, as Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, > centre, signs a bill into law at the Capitol in Olympia, Wash., that allows > licensed facilities to offer "natural organic reduction," which turns a body > into soil in a span of several weeks. (Ted S. Warren/AP Photo)

Was Spade involved in bringing that legislation about?

<comment><USER6> The dwindling space for burials... In the middle of urban areas.

<comment><USER21> Not just urban areas. The swamp where I live is getting pretty full. It's getting harder harder to find a place to bury bodies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Or be eaten: [https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7383903/How-...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7383903/How- cannibalism-taboo-sets-humans-apart-rest-animal-kingdom.html) [warning: Daily Mail]

</comment><comment><USER23> My will specifies above-ground consumption by insects, followed by a clear urethane casting resin ossuary.

It also specifies cats-eye cubic zirconium retroreflectors in the eye sockets of the skull. It gives me a little thrill to imagine being discovered in a storage unit 200 years from now and creeping someone out because they saw the eyes glow from their flashlight.

Having a little trouble finding 25 mm diameter spheres of cubic zirconium, though, so I can't die yet. I can get a big chunk of it and maybe cut that down in a lathe, but I'd almost rather buy 5mm beads and make an array.

</comment><comment><USER24> I would love to know how this process compares to simple burial in a wicker basket or something like that. I always assumed that decomposition in soil, without any embalming chemicals or hardwood coffin, would be about as natural as decomposition would get.

I guess the compost from this process would be of higher quality, but compared to burying your loved one in a machine where they have to decompose for a few weeks, I think returning them straight to the earth would feel better for the relatives.

<comment><USER25> Decomposition would be best in the open, not buried in the soil. You need oxygen for all kind of life to eat your corpse.

Sky Burial would be my favorite way to go.

<comment><USER26> I come from a culture where this is the norm. In fact they encourage vultures to eat the dead during the sky burial.

I've always liked the idea. Living in the Pacific North West, I would love to be taken to the top of a mountain and left at the top.

That said, I understand that this nice idea is not appropriate, because at scale it would ruin the mountains for the living :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Reminds me of Record of a spaceborn few, a book by Becky Chambers.

It goes into detail how on a generation ship the bodies are composted and become nutrients to grew new food upon.

</comment><comment><USER28> In David Weber's Honor Harrington series, the original settlers of one of the planets (Grayson) found the soil was too polluted with heavy metals that they needed to create purified soil of their own for growing food. So amongst other things they buried people in their gardens, though by the time of the stories, they had transitioned away from being food gardens.

</comment><comment><USER29> Personally, I'm an organ donor and donating my body to science. I don't care what happens to it when I'm gone.

<comment><USER30> What do they do with it once "used"? I know, search it, but it's a morbid topic I'd rather read no more about than possible.

<comment><USER31> The family / next of kin gets the body back after it has been used, normally cremated.

<comment><USER32> I've filled out the forms for myself lately and it depends what you choose. You can choose for the body to be kept indefinitely if you want or returned to the family after a period, in the UK at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This has been done over centuries, and is still standard in Europe, where the embalming fad never has caught on.

<comment><USER34> Natural burial is completely different to composting. Have you read the article?

 _When someone dies, their body is taken to a human composting facility [..] After wrapping the deceased in a simple shroud, friends and family carry the body to the top of the core which contains the natural decomposition system [..] It would be done in a contained vessel which [..] would be rotated to provide physical disruption so oxygen could access all parts of the composting material. This would also help control the moisture level._

 _By the time we completed our trials, we were developing material that was very pleasant to handle, it was a very fine compost that was relatively stable, [and] it smelled good_

Where in Europe is this standard practice, exactly?

<comment><USER35> Active composting isn't. However most graves seem to already be efficient enough at it that you can bury a new corpse in one every few years without being blocked by the remains of the previous inhabitant.

<comment><USER5> Other posts in this thread mention issues with the soil composition, like if it has a high amount of clay, bodies are well preserved. Really may depend on where specifically you're burying the bodies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Soon? Looks like someone's ahead of the curve:

[http://www.hngnews.com/lodi_enterprise/article_37e5f4bf-f699...](http://www.hngnews.com/lodi_enterprise/article_37e5f4bf-f699-59c5-bd2e-71ca056e4bbc.html)

</comment><comment><USER37> I completely agree with this method - I've just opted to be put in a faux coffin filled with my body and 100lbs of explosives. That should take care of "scattering my remains".

Seems like a definite "slam bang" finish to whatever my life amounts to.

</comment><comment><USER38> I wonder if is the beginning of an industry where you can sign your body away to be used as fertilizer, with the proceeds going to your estate.

Opens up some grim possibilities though.

</comment><comment><USER39> I wonder if this has happened in the past, we just don't have archaeological records of it because the bodies have been composted?

<comment><USER40> Of course it has. There are many cultures where it was normal to simply dig a hole in the earth and put the body in there, either directly, or wrapped in cloths or in a wooden casket.

The composting happens slower that way, but it still does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> While composting has a lot of benefits, I would be very sad to attend a friend's burial if they were to be composted. Feels like a disrespectful way to let someone go.

I'm also concerned about disease transmission. Cows' diseases may not necessarily affect us but humans' certainly will. The need to disinfect kinda defeats the purpose (pollution with chemicals)

Hope about we just compost other things and let human bodies be

<comment><USER42> I don't think it's particularly disrespectful, isn't all that's needed a change of perspective? What makes it disrespectful, precisely?

The common method of embalming in North America seems more disrespectful - pumping a body full of chemicals that weren't there in the first place and helping to pollute the earth.

<comment><USER24> Composting seems like a mixture between cremation and natural burial. At the funeral ceremony, the deceased disappears into a machine, as with cremation, but eventually the body will feed the soil, like with natural burial.

I think it's mostly a slower, cleaner version of cremation, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Actually quite interesting and one of the most sensible things I have heard in a long time, you know , our maker had sustainability in mind when creating us, we are the ones who chose otherwise.

Cool idea

</comment><comment><USER44> I can't help but think of the movie How High.

</comment><comment><USER45> You mean, bury. If you bury a corpse, without embalming it and doing funny things to it, it rots like everything else.

</comment><comment><USER46> I thought we are all worm food

</comment><comment><USER47> finally</comment>


Save the iOS: An open letter to Apple, Inc. & Sir Jonathan Ive - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/thoughts-on-user-interaction/4213500e58ef

<comment><USER2> Oh my god... so whiny. An annoying read IMO.

Just keep using iOS6 if you are so inexorably fond of drop shadows, dock, tacky icons. You haven't even used the new OS... maybe try it before you whine about usability.

<comment><USER3> > You haven't even used the new OS

From TA:

> ...after seeding iOS 7 on our beta devices, we are all like...

<comment><USER2> I really meant use - not just few hours of interaction, if that.

I'm honestly curious if other people share the author's sentiments; a yearning for "state of the art" icons like the old Safari icon. It always reminded me of the Netscape Navigator 2.0 splash screen.

<comment><USER3> Apple has been _very_ consistent in its hardware and software designs over decades. It should be no surprise that people who _want_ stuff to stay the same are using Apple devices right now. (Not _exactly_ the same - but mostly the same, like the icon set that the author embeds.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "But when form meets simplicity, it cannot loose it's soul."

And when knee-jerk whining meets terrible grammar? What then?

</comment><comment><USER5> Jesus Christ.

iOS 7 is an excellent revision that brings iOS into the modern age. There's a goddarned video on Apple's website that explains how it's still modern, fresh, but familiar, and that also explains the excruciating detail they had to go in to revise it.

I don't see how usability is affected at all; the new OS looks great, and it's change for the sake of progress (a la Android), not change for the sake of change (a la Windows 8).

If you don't like it, then maybe you have a problem with change...

...or you just really, really like leather calendars.

In any case, I think Steve Jobs was greatly holding the company's talented designers and engineers back with his vice-like grip on every decision that the company made. He brought Apple back to life, it's now Jony's, Craig's, and Tim's turn to work together and push it to the forefront, further than Steve ever could have done.

<comment><USER6> > not change for the sake of change (a la Windows 8).

Congratulations on your award for Most Stupid Remark on HN, fanboy division

> the new OS looks great

The old OS looked great. Even if you didn't like it, it showed an immense amount of taste. Designers are complaining because the new version, very obviously, doesn't.</comment></comment>


Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 are ready to go - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/news/2012/08/VS2012-Live

<comment><USER2> >From Visual Studio Blog it is known that the source code for Visual Studio 2012, formerly known as Visual Studio 11, consists of about 50 million lines of code. And despite this fact new release contains lots of new features and improvements.

Wow, 50 million lines of code is completely earth shattering to a student like myself who has only dealt with line counts that were five digits long.

<comment><USER3> What a strange thing for the article to say. Is the implication that once you hit 50 million lines it becomes impossible to add new features?

<comment><USER4> I don't know, keeping such a huge code base simple enough to be able to add new features without breaking stuff sounds indeed amazing to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I do wonder if they went with the awful upper-case main menu in the end.

<comment><USER6> Yes they did. I think it seems like an awfully minor thing to complain about, then again that's easy for me to say as since 2010 I've always used an extension to hide the menu bar :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> With VS2010 they forced users to use a tabbed doc view, so I still use VS2008.

<comment><USER8> Did you try Productivity Power Tools with Tab Well UI?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The main improvement to me is it just feels much faster and more responsive and solid (at least on my setup). VS2008 and 2010 were pretty bad in this regard.</comment>


MiLifePlus: Bluetooth Health Sensor For iPhone and Android - <AUTHOR> http://www.indiegogo.com/MiLifePlus

<comment><USER2> There is no way this product will ever ship. Greg, what are you even going to do with 150k or even 250k or 1mm? You already burned up almost a million bucks on this exact same idea when I was working for you and it was a huge waste because of your terrible execution and stubborn reluctance to seek or take any advice from anyone whatsoever.

The market has judged you and found you lacking. Cede your resources to a more efficient actor in the market and go home.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's unfortunate, even if MiLife+ turns out to be everything as described, my and most others experience with WakeMate was terrible. From poor hardware, to a buggy app, to the general indifference of their customers' suffering, does not instill confidence in any future products related to WakeMate.

Shouldn't there be an extensive apology blog post that apologizes for the failures of WakeMate and contrasts that with what MiLife+ will be in both product and quality of service?

<comment><USER4> Don't forget just abandoning the Android version completely, without bothering to tell anyone. I really don't believe they are going to support the new Android app any better.

It's not exactly giving me confidence when there are tweets like this one: <http://twitter.com/wakemate/statuses/218007015379845120>

Seems slightly unethical to use you former companies twitter account (and email list it seems, based on the ad I received) to market for your new company.

<comment><USER5> Twitter account now changed name from "Wakemate" to "Greg":

<https://twitter.com/#!/wakemate>

<comment><USER4> It's still taking an account that was used exclusively for things relating to wakemate and using it to market a completely different product. Look at the history for the account, it's pretty clear it's not just a personal account that had been used for wakemate stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I first heard of this via email ... an email that had a spelling error, associates itself with Wakemate (but is a different domain) and when I visited the Wakemate site, find it is offline.

Up until I saw this HN link, I had assumed the Wakemate accounts had been compromised and marked the email as spam.

Given the issues they had with customer relationship/communication management with Wakemate, it looks like they haven't learnt from their past mistakes.

<comment><USER4> It might as well be compromised, it looks like someone who had access to all the wakemate info has decided to start marketing a new product from a new company using all the old wakemate accounts: <http://twitter.com/wakemate/statuses/218007015379845120>

<comment><USER7> Arun from wakemate here. This is the first I'm hearing of this. Trying to get a handle on the situation now.

Also the website is up at www.wakemate.com. (not working without the www but we will fix it.)

Edit: working without the www again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm going to echo everyone else's concerns here and say that the drama from wakemate, lukewarm-to-nonexistant support, and now just letting the wakemate domain expire altogether have not exactly inspired confidence in this product. Maybe if a year down the road, it seems to be useful, I'll pick one up.

There's a lesson in PR here, though. I'm normally all over these types of products. This should have been the easiest sale in the world.

</comment><comment><USER5> Did anyone else catch that they said Kickstarter in the video and its clearly on Indiegogo?

(link to YouTube specific time, but its the same video from Indiegogo) - [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCZQvguYTqg&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCZQvguYTqg&feature=player_detailpage#t=157s)

<comment><AUTHOR> Kickstarter doesn't allow "Exercise and fitness products", "Health and personal care products", or "Medical and safety-related products".

<http://www.kickstarter.com/help/guidelines?ref=footer>

<comment><USER5> Right, I get it -- the video just shouldn't say Kickstarter when it's hosted on Indiegogo

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Having gone through a bunch of wakemates that stopped working or were DOA's, their horribly unresponsive service as a result of that (and not to mention their botched launch), I have absolutely no faith in this team being able to deliver.

Which is a shame because the product itself, like the wakemate before it, sounds very cool.

</comment><comment><USER10> I hate to be piling on, I'm sure this is an unpleasant enough thread for the Wakemate team to read, but MiLife+ is a pretty horrible name. Wakemate was a great name. MiLife+? Come on, even Microsoft names their products better than that!

<comment><USER11> I agree. WakeMate was a great same. MiLife is too close to MLife, the insurance company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hi everyone. Arun from wakemate here. This is the first I'm hearing about any of this. Trying to get a handle on the situation now.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm usually excited about these things, but count me out on this one. I was an early backer of Wakemate (pre-ordered over a year before it finally launched). I have yet to receive everything I paid for, the product itself was defective, and I could never get any responses from customer support, so I'd rather not go through that again.

</comment><comment><USER13> This seems to be the same thing as a fit bit, jawbone up, etc. Except worse in that it requires a phone and unlike the fitbit, will interpret tooth brushing as vigorous exercise. On top of that, it requires a subscription. The BodyMedia series of devices are better than this one and are the same price.

<comment><USER14> And even worse, still, in that it's being offered by the same people behind the WakeMate disaster: broken promises, long waits, defective units, poor software, non-existent support, and power plugs that burst into flames.

Remember when they promised that they were going to ship power plugs that didn't catch on fire? They never did that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not to nitpick, but the spelling mistake in the email announcement doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

<comment><USER16> I came to say the same thing because things like "Click here for all the detials or to order" completely turned me off and made me think their mailing list got hacked and some new spam magnetic balance bracelet was being announced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Would have loved some final communication from the WakeMate team. They seemed to just quietly fade away. I was one of the fortunate ones who got sent a replacement wristband when mine stopped working, but now I only use the app as a basic alarm without the wristband.

I can't imagine getting anything else from their team unless I heard some explanation of what happened with WakeMate.

<comment><USER17> In December I finally received this email after they realized the devices were not compatible with iPhone 4S:

To be perfectly honest, as you can probably tell, things have not been going well for us. We simply don't have the cash to fix the problem. We likely will not be selling anymore wristbands though we will continue to keep the service running for existing customers. I'm really sorry!

all the best, Arun

I will say that even though the outcome sucked, Arun was always very pleasant and helpful in our numerous email exchanges.

<comment><USER7> Thank you! Arun from wakemate here. This is the first I'm hearing about any of this. Trying to get a handle on the situation now.

Also as always, if you have any WakeMate related concerns please email me: arun[at]wakemate.com!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm really interested in this, but to be honest the drama from the last product makes me hesitant if I can trust the company. I'll probably wait until they for sure have them in stock.

</comment><comment><USER19> It also looks like they took down the website and app for Wakemate, which seems to have come as a surprise for the dozens of people that were still using the product.

<comment><USER20> I seem to remember something about the app simply uploading its collected data to their site where all the analysis happened. Is a Wakemate device even useful without the site, or did they just hang all their remaining customers out to dry without so much as a public announcement? Another argument for not just data portability but vendor independence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It sounds like this is news to the rest of the team, it's just one person who's gone off on his own and taken the twitter credentials and email list

</comment><comment><USER22> Looks like they decided I'm not sleeping enough, as their intro video plays like a lullaby.

</comment><comment><USER23> Reading this it sounds like the WakeMate team split up and Greg now has a new company that is trying this MiLife+

</comment><comment><USER24> How are they tracking diet automatically through the wristband? Can someone please explain that to me?

<comment><USER25> I'm guessing it probably comes from the app on your iPhone just like WakeMate interfaces through a mobile phone for setup and the rest.

It makes the wrist thingy kinda irrelevant, but maybe they correlate your heart rhythm with the food that you ate or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I haven't followed the drama from the WakeMate product. I just used it to wake up at the right times and it did a fine job at that.

<comment><USER26> I think the drama is that, for many people (myself included), WakeMate _didn't_ do that. It would not charge, or sync, or lose connection overnight, or any other number of problems.

Granted, their customer service offered to help me out but others weren't as lucky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> How does this thing know when I'm eating or exercising? I assume it's got a gyro and accelerometer; how does it know if I'm doing squats or just waving to a friend on the street?

</comment><comment><USER28> By the way, the wakemate.com domain was expired.

</comment><comment><USER29> The concept (Wakemate) is still pretty good. Why is no one else taking a run with it?

<comment><USER30> Have you checked out LARK, they do the same thing that Wakemate did...</comment></comment>


Launch On TechCrunch, Get Bought By Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/09/launch-on-techcrunch-get-bought-by-google/ <comment><USER2> A not so subtle hint from Arrington to his detractors: "I make it rain".

<comment><USER3> Yeah, well shall we count the number of companies that launched on TechCrunch and then disappeared into oblivion as well? Arrington does not bring the rain, he is just standing behind you, pissing on your leg and saying "wow, did you see that dark cloud that just went by?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Couldn't disagree more on his statement: "Never start a company just to start it. You start a company because you have an idea that you think will be great for some customer and great ideas are always worth doing"

IMHO the biggest reasons to start a company is just to start it. The biggest companies have started that way - most famously HP. Ideas are mostly incidental and most of the time the first ones rarely work out. The biggest ideas are not really that clear early on - Writely was only a great idea because it got acquired by Google.</comment>


Why do Harvard kids head to Wall Street? - <AUTHOR> http://baselinescenario.com/2010/05/04/why-do-harvard-kids-head-to-wall-street/

<comment><USER2> I'm breaking my own personal rule of the internet by saying this, but I went to Harvard in the late 90s, and I was friends with a bunch of math/physics types while I was there. A good number of them went to Wall Street.

I think a lot of what this says is accurate, but I think it downplays something important. It's not _just_ that there's a lot of money in Wall Street, it's that it's not a great time to be (for example) a physicist in this country, or at least it wasn't when I graduated. I remember a friend of mine telling me how you were typically looking at two postdocs after your PhD, and then your options were either to be an academic or to build weapons. (That guy, ironically, is the one who stuck with physics.)

So apparently a lot of people took the money. Those kids could grind, and it all must have just seemed too easy. I find it hard to judge too harshly. A part of me feels like we failed them as a society, in the way we collectively assign value to human activities. Because their minds are capable of things I can only imagine, but we couldn't think of anything better for them to do than this.

<comment><USER3> I don't think one should judge at all. People take a very broad brush painting Wall Street these days, which is understandable but still wrong. I prefer to judge people, individuals, not categories of people, however defined.

Also, why should "we [...] as a society" think of something "better" (who defines that?) for these bright minds? Surely, they know best how to make their own choices (where I'd emphasize _make_)?

<comment><USER4> Moral relativism is not the answer. By judging people you make certain careers less attractive. People from top colleges are often status-conscious, so the media can influence their decisions by painting Wall Street in a positive or negative light. This can be a good thing when if talent is indeed "wasted" at Wall Street.

> Surely, they know best how to make their own choices

People don't generally make their own choices. People tend to gather 2 or 3 options (4 or 5 if they're from top schools) and then they "decide" by picking one of those options. It's completely baffling, but people are guided by the choices in front of them, not by where they want to go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The takeaway line: "The typical Harvard undergraduate is someone who … is driven more by fear of not being a success than by a concrete desire to do anything in particular."

To the extent that this is true, it applies equally well to most people who excel in school, and I think there's a point there that the author leaves untouched.

And that is that it's emotionally very hard to watch your friends — especially people who appear less intelligent, diligent, or otherwise "worthy" (that's subjective, obviously) — make significantly more money than you. In the long term, that can strain friendships, and I think it's a major explanatory factor in why smart kids go "waste" their talent in finance and consulting.

In other words, appearing to be less successful than one's peers is something that few overachievers are emotionally capable of handling.

<comment><USER6> I think you miss the point that they make it very easy to go with Wall Street, they tell you exactly what to do, coach you in interviews, and constantly call you to convince you to come to them. They hound people, make them feel special, wanted and even needed. Difficult to compare that to all the companies I have interviewed at, even when they did want me to work there.

So you have the big bad world of the unknown, or this nice bunch of people, who also went to your school, and really want you to come over to New York and hang out with them.

<comment><USER7> I recall Microsoft, Google, and other large engineering companies making very similar efforts (and the tech companies certainly push lifestyle factors much more directly). It's the same in lots of areas, not just finance and consulting. The main difference seems to be that these finance and consulting companies recruit across a huge variety of departments, so are relevant to many more students.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This seems pretty accurate, and if so it would explain why so few of this type of student start startups after college. A startup is exactly the opposite situation: you really have to commit to something, and you are immediately and uncompromisingly judged by customers. It's the opposite of a decorous way to keep your options open. But of course risk and reward are usually proportionate.

<comment><USER9> I have not seen any data, but I don't think that's totally fair. Students from my class or those within one of mine at Harvard have started Facebook, Scribd, Airbnb, Paperless Post, drop.io, Baking for Good, and probably others that I am not aware of. Granted Facebook was not "after" college.

I am also not sure that in this regard risk and reward are proportionate. Again I have no data, but I think a random sample of 100 people from Harvard who went into finance 5-15 years ago may have made more money to date (and taken far less risk) than a random sample of 100 college students who started startups 5-15 years ago.

I think the fear of not knowing what else to do, not the money, is the primary force that leads most to finance or consulting. Anecdotally, 0-10% of my friends from college have any concrete thoughts at all about what they really _want_ to do.

<comment><USER8> Considering there are IIRC 1600 students in each undergrad class that probably counts as few.

As for the risk/reward ratio, you may be right, or you may be wrong, but since neither of us have any data we should probably default to the assumption that they're proportionate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Something appealing about Silicon Valley was that losers like me could bust ass and really make a big difference and get rich on the way. You just needed to hack and hustle. Apple was the model. Two weirdos building and selling really cool stuff. Relatively simple business model: make things, and sell them. If you read the history of Apple, in the early days they hired straight up nerds and dropouts and bizarre people. One of the early guys who ended up designing hardware was self-taught and pulled in from the janitorial staff or mailroom or something like that. Finally a "legitimate" way to make a career for oddballs who would not be able to get an interview for a job cleaning toilets at Goldman Sachs.

It's a very different world now where Ivy League overachievers are writing blog posts about choosing between startups and investment banking. Google is the new model. From a weirdo outsider's perspective the Google era startup story sounds very similar to the investment banking path, with a few keywords switched here and there. Elite educations, maybe going all the way back to Montessori school. Please list your GPA and take this quiz for a chance at a week long interview hazing session. Operate under the context of "changing the world" but stay focused on maximizing return in the markets of eyeballs, clicks, keywords and ads. Complicated business models; make something which you don't sell and makes no money, but the data can be packaged into a new form of financial instrument for the online ad market. Sell off the thing in a couple years for a few mil, buy an Audi, try to do it again. Goal is to ultimately hit it big enough so that you can avoid building stuff entirely. Dream about ultimately becoming an investor yourself, coaching other type-A wunderkinds through the difficult life process of choosing one high-paying career over another one, and maybe complaining about taxes and poor service at French Laundry on your blog.

It's a little oversimplified, but wanted to bring back the notion that the startup scene also represents a path to success for creative and strange people without otherwise great career options. It's not just a way for Harvard kids to make as much money as they would in banking without having to wear a suit.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. The ability for an "outsider" to get in and be successful in the startup world on hustle, smarts, and hard work rather than "pedigree" has always been very appealing to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is incredibly accurate.

I'm speaking as a senior at a college to which a huge number of firms come to recruit and a huge percentage of the senior class heads into banking or consulting.

I'm doing neither, but the draw was definitely there. Especially the part about lifestyle appeal over money appeal. When companies recruit, they never explicitly talk about how much they pay, but their recruiting videos and the demeanor of the recruiters and employees who come to visit say everything needed.

<comment><USER13> "Especially the part about lifestyle appeal over money appeal."

I heard someone say that during the height of the dotcom boom, Yahoo made over a billion dollars by putting a big purple chair in the lobby. Something about social signaling to attract the right sort of people on the cheap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Another factor: the big finance and management consulting firms like to vastly overvalue Ivy League degrees. A kid leaving an Ivy League school has been told for years that he's special for going to that school, so he'll be much more comfortable in an environment where that illusion is maintained.

</comment><comment><USER15> In this thread, it has been said that people on Wall Street aren't creating anything; they are just moving money around, making a profit on arbitrage, etc.

I would like to disagree, and recall the second paragraph of this comment by xxzz: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1242980>

<comment><USER16> When tied to fundamental underlying assets, investing creates liquidity and capitalizes businesses over the long-term. In its current form, Wall Street "investing" is more like high-stakes short-term gambling. Somehow we got to the point where banks were so leveraged that a single incorrect "investment" nearly resulted in the collapse of our financial system. Is that sort of "investing" creating real value?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Speaking as a college freshman, what I see wrong with finance is that fundamentally, these people, who have essentially spent their whole lives learning to solve complicated technical problems, are being employed by society to essentially produce nothing.

Thats the issue I see with it. I guess only time will show if my perspective changes.

<comment><USER18> Resource allocation in a modern economy _is_ a complicated technical problem. That's the problem investment banking was invented to solve. That it has been corrupted doesn't alter this basic idea.

<comment><USER17> I could be totally wrong here, but I get the sense that despite that being the intent of wall street, that basic concept has been very much abstracted away into a complicated game of mutual insurance and risk management.

All I'm saying is that perhaps society would be better off if the resources were allocated a little less efficiently, but those "best minds" were applied to some other field.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I currently work for an investment bank and have worked at a fortune 500 web company. From a technologists standpoint, the cultural chasm between the two is great.

This is largely because pure technology companies can succeed by culturally incentivizing good engineering, which is timeless. Banks have much shorter horizons in building systems of comparable complexity, and thus have a far greater need to constantly mobilize and change architectural direction. This is just a fact of the industry: technology advances, finance is cyclical. One of the cultural side effects, which certainly can have sinister implications, is that financial institutions lean heavily on monetary incentives to provide such mobility.

There has obviously been a lot of bad press on structured credit, but the basic concept is ultimately a great innovation in risk management.

Surely there was excess. But before ye great engineers start throwing stones, consider how much your current occupation is aided by the massive corridors of fiber optics constructed during the tech boom.

</comment><comment><USER20> The way I see it is: I like to solve difficult problems, which is why I became an Engineer. But now that I'm older I realize that the Wall Street guys are also solving a difficult problem, namely how to maximize your returns.

Instead of taking a wireless signal and deciphering what bits were transmitted, you take a stock market signal and decipher where the market will move next.

So, instead of solving engineering problems and getting paid decently, one can solve financial problems and get paid much much more.

If the intellectual stimulation is there in both cases I don't see why someone would choose to be an engineer any more.

<comment><USER6> You miss the point were the Wall street guy gets huge bonuses when he succeeds, and you get a nod.

Of course, this can't go on. The Wall Street guy doesn't actually create anything, just uses arbitrage to make some cream off of all the dollars these investment banks move around. Or exploit some foreign imbalance. They are the ultimate middle men.

You still need actual people to solve the problems in this world. Or will this all be moved off shore?

<comment><USER21> There is a lot more to Wall St than skimming a few dollars office space style off of the stock market. Ever heard of an IPO? It's what software startups dream of!

We absolutely need smart minds to go into finance because some sort of economic system must exist and everyone will admit the current one needs improvement. Still, there's not reason to resent people who invest in companies that succeed and make a lot of money doing it. This is almost certainly good for the economy, and I would bet that the majority of people who read HN do the same thing Wall Streeters do on a smaller scale by investing in the market.

<comment><USER6> An IPO is an initial public offering. Do you know what that means? Wall street doesn't create anything, it just sells stock to its clients and others. Often it sells stock to clients before the IPO, which it then sells for the clients again when the stock price reaches a certain number.

This is one of the reasons Google went for a dutch-style auction process for its IPO, and wall street was pissed, since they couldn't use their usual methods to make money from that.

The other things Wall St does is mergers and acquisitions, where they make huge amounts of money on consulting fees.

I mean, sure they do a lot more. They increase liquidity in the market, they help companies get loans, but most of it is moving money around, and getting a fee for it.

<comment><USER22> If it wasn't useful no-one would pay them for it.

<comment><USER23> Just because someone thinks they're paying for something useful doesn't mean they are paying for something useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm a senior at Yale. I'm pursuing a start-up after graduation rather than a banking/consulting job.

I'm certainly afraid of what the future holds. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't. And this fear almost had me applying to McKinsey and Goldman (along with 30% of my class). But in the end I realized that doing something I'm deeply passionate about (hacking) far outweighs any of the apparent benefits of a cushy Wall Street gig. I think it's time for me to stop worrying about leaving doors open, and start sprinting through one. Maybe I'll end up choosing the wrong door, but I'm confident that I'll learn more at that pace and with that passion than I ever would have in the monotony of a chic midtown office. I've never been so scared in my life. But I've never been so hungry. We'll see how it goes.

(Btw, incidentally, my brother (one year younger) is interning on Wall Street this year. I'm interested to compare notes...)

<comment><USER6> See, now why not take that wall street job for a few years? You would have extra capital to spend time working on your startup, maybe make some good contacts, and maybe seek an insight into a world that could really benefit from a startup-wannabes insights.

All the time, you could be looking at someway to make their job easier -> there is your startup.

<comment><USER25> I would say that this is a good strategy, except that sales to banks is likely to be very high touch, and they are strongly infected with Not Invented Here syndrome. They have extreme security needs and large IT/programming departments, so I think it would be hard to find a niche that they would be willing to buy.

I strongly agree with the building up capital thing, though. If you can save up 50k, and you can handle everything yourself, your runway becomes extremely long. Just have to be careful not to get addicted to the salary.

<comment><USER26> Speaking from anecdotal experience, this is not true. As an example, I heard some employees from the company I worked at left to start a company to make messaging software. They ended up with a half-broken IRC client with a terrible UI and no features. They then sold it to the bank for millions of dollars.

If it's expensive, banks like it. Quality is a plus, but not required.

<comment><USER25> It was my impression when I was interning at Citi (quant/strategy/trading) that they weren't very experimental buyers, and frequently liked to reinvent the wheel. They certainly didn't redo EVERYTHING. Besides that, there aren't that many big banks to sell to. I'd say it's trickier than average to get a market fit. But maybe you're right that they'll buy any old crap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can someone please explain to me why HN readers dislike Wall St so much? There are honestly a lot of interesting things to be "hacked" and a hell of a lot of money to be made if you're good at finance. The personality traits that make people a success at startups (perseverance, critical thinking, people skills, creativity, analytical skills, etc) are the same ones that make people a success on Wall Street. A Wall Street job is not a wrong choice, and neither is doing a startup, in fact there are a lot of similarities.

<comment><USER27> Primarily because most of these people aren't really creating things. They're moving money around, but as we've clearly seen in the last few years, they're doing a very poor job of optimizing capital placement in the economy.

There's no question that there's lots of money to be made on Wall St., but such activities don't really seem to improve the world or anybody's life other than the bankers. Compare that to people who form startups that can literally change the world for the better.

Wall St, with its massively inflated salaries and bonuses creates a huge brain-drain which attracts bright students away from more socially-useful activities. I think anger about that is the primary source.

<comment><USER21> _can literally change the world for the better_

There is plenty of software that does not really make the world a better place. How much of the time do we engineers spend complaining about crappy code that doesn't work? Or take video games, sure they provide entertainment, but do they have a net positive impact on society? It's dubious at best (not that I don't love SC2).

I don't want to sound too negative, but maybe a lot of finance people aren't adding much value, but neither are most programmers. And there are clearly counterexamples in both industries.

Furthermore, try to imagine our economy without the stock market. It would be very different. That's a clear indication that there is _some_ value there. Granted the market is surely not an optimal system, but that's a hard problem that smart minds absolutely need to be working on.

<comment><USER28> Entertainment is essential to every civilization as the Romans discovered with their bread and circuses.

Of course you may have a point when games like World of Warcraft ruin people's lives, but from a monetary (and thus time) magnitude, wall st. has wiped out people's savings that have taken decades to build.

<comment><USER21> Why do people think Wall St took their savings? It's your own decision what you do with your money, and if someone invests in something they don't understand then it's their own fault if they get burned! The stock market has rebounded astonishingly. The people who lost their life savings panicked and that's their own decision. In 2008 I had about 2k which was invested in two stocks (my entire portfolio, everything else was going to tuition). I sold out at the bottom of the market for a 40% loss. If I held them today I would have about a 45% _gain_, not bad for 2 years! Even if the market had not rebounded that is the risk you take for investing in stocks instead of something else. Remember, Wall St is a lot more than consumer investments anyway.

Also, I didn't say there wasn't value in entertainment, I said that it probably doesn't provide more utility than Wall Street's activities although really it's comparing apples to bowling balls.

<comment><USER28> Can you honestly say that to the people who were buying triple A investments that turned out to be junk thanks to credit default swaps? Who's fault do you think that is?

Do you blame sick people for not being smarter than a doctor in diagnosing their own sickness?

Do you blame people for dying in a bridge that collapsed because they weren't smart enough to see it was poorly designed?

I could go on and on. The point is that Wall Street has somehow become the only place with no accountability, and everyone is supposed to be an expert.

<comment><USER21> When I-35 collapsed in Minnesota was your initial reaction to hate all people who build bridges?

<comment><USER28> No, because unlike people who work on Wall Street, they are held accountable and are paid far less for the amount of utility they provide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Models and Bottles. I'm dead serious. A couple of friends of mine became bankers because of that and I can't say that I haven't been jealous at times.

</comment><comment><USER30> So, if I'm reading between the lines correctly:

* working in finance is bad

* working in corporate law is bad

* working in consulting is bad

* working at a startup is bad

* working as a college professor is bad

* working a "public interest" job is good

I don't see anything here that makes me want to take this person's point of view seriously.

<comment><USER26> I don't think he said that. He says that your goal may be to save the world by being a public defender, but when you start working as a corporate lawyer with a nice apartment, you stop caring about the goal.

What he's implying is that it's "bad" to throw away your life-long ambitions for a bit of extra money. If your life-long ambition is to be a kick-ass corporate lawyer or investment banker, then there's nothing bad about that at all.

<comment><USER31> My only friend who became a lawyer who didn't "sell out" is the one who never planned to become a lawyer. He was an electrical engineer who was hired as a technical expert at a big IP law firm. They eventually offered to pay for him to go to law school. Everyone else I know wanted to save the world and now works for The Man. What the blog author writes is very true in that regard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Without those kids on Wall Street there would be far less kids on startup street. Limited liquidity (no IPOs, no financing of takeovers), no high-risk investment funds, high FX spreads killing international customer and supply chains, etc.

<comment><USER33> The IT industry is not very representative. Most of the economy is in rather quiet industries like construction, manufacturing, retail, refining, etc., where it usually takes about 100 years to get noticed.

<comment><USER32> It doesn't matter, most firms of any signicant size require financing sooner or later, and generally that tends to come from wall street one way or the other.

Go down to your local franchised fast-food shop. Chances are the kitchen equipments been leased from the franchise and financed by a finance lease from an investment bank. The impact of risk-tolerant financing on the economy is huge, it's pretty much everywhere when you scratch under the surface.

The same applies for FX spreads. If you're importing or exporting any goods (pretty much everyone these days) then you're benefiting from the tighter spreads created by investment banks that are market making.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Fundamentally, what he nails is the recruitment question.

People make decisions based on their sense of what is possible. We hang out on HN and join things like YC to be surrounded by people who reinforce the possibility of our big crazy dreams.

College career offices are the single most antiquarian institution on college campuses, and the institution most letting a generation of people into the embrace of the only external groups who are willing to pay for the privilege to be there.

Still, there is massive movement against this tide. Teach for America is outrecruiting these firms at many of the best schools - which demonstrates the opportunity for alternative organizations and just generally alternative thinking.

But most schools are not Stanford, and most students don't think in terms of startups yet. Finding ways to spread an entrepreneurial culture on campus and connect it to the broader movement towards a new shape of the American business landscape has huge potential to shift what is at the root of this story.

</comment><comment><USER35> This article has a few weak points.

First of all, not everyone at Harvard is going to law school or pursuing law in any manner (including graduate students there).

Of my friends who attended Harvard, surely some have moved into the finance field but I think part of it is that it is one of the few fields that can (and will) compensate and challenge them properly. Others have gone to work for Google and Microsoft. Others have gone into consulting firms and others have struck out on their own and ran their own consulting firms and companies. By no means is it a clear pipeline that funnels everyone over.

From MIT I see a lot of people going into defense related areas, and not Wall St (more so than Harvard).

And while some Harvard (or any) undergraduate students have little experience at 'life' or getting things done, just look at last weekend's ROFLCon for an example of what a handful of recent Harvard undergrads can do in their spare time.

</comment><comment><USER36> _Sutton is famously (and probably falsely) known for answering a reporter, Mitch Ohnstad, who asked why he robbed banks by saying, "because that's where the money is."_

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

</comment><comment><USER37> Given the financial crisis of the past few years and the reasons behind it, I think the magnetic draw of Wall Street has lessened to some extent. Smart students still have the same fears of not being a success and the same draw to something that promises the possibility of greatness, but they're looking into other outlets. Anecdotally, I've seen a pretty big handful of my non-technical friends applying to Google and similar places. Googlers seem to have a nice lifestyle and the company has done a good job at fashioning their image such that they're seen as an instrument of social change (google.org), innovation, and ethical consistency.

</comment><comment><USER38> My biggest question from this article is "What is the alternative to Wall Street?" What else should our best and brightest students be doing?

I feel like the passion and creativity required to do a startup aren't any more common in the ivy league population than they are in the general population. Every intelligent person doesn't have the ability to _make_ things happen. And job in the public sector or for a non-profit doesn't seem appealing, especially not to competitive people. So if you're going to get a regular job, Wall St seems like it's as good a place as any, especially if they're actively recruiting you.

</comment><comment><USER39> Did Jeff Bezos answered this question?

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwG_qR6XmDQ>

</comment><comment><USER40> I think the basic motivation for why Harvard kids head to Wall St. are clear enough (and decently explained in this article). What would be more interesting though would be to explain why an ever increasing greater proportion of Ivy League students go into finance/consulting today (as opposed to 20 years ago).

</comment><comment><USER41> All companies are about making money. Wall Street is more honest about it, and does a better job of rewarding its employees. The ridiculous money culture ends up centering around stealing money rather than fulfilling real societal needs. Next, the money gets wasted in conspicious consumption..

</comment><comment><USER42> If you've always been a success it's really hard to do something that carries the risk of failure.

</comment><comment><USER43> This is exactly why, in hindsight, I am extremely thankful I did not go to an ivy. I would almost certainly be stuck in a well-paying, soul-sucking finance job.

Whew.

<comment><USER44> ive personally found finance is the complete opposite of a soul sucking cushy corporatre gig and infact working in a sme or larger company in the valley the real cubicle soul sucking el dilbert gig. yes your card says * famous web company but in reality all companies primary function is to make money, its just the branding is change the world vs lets make a ton of cash.

im going get downvoted like hell for this but saying all finance jobs are soul sucking cushy jobs is like saying your startup, yes YOURS, is the next google/facebook/twitter/blah

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> If it makes the author feel any better, the kids that went off to "save the world" are mostly doing much less good than they imagine.

</comment><comment><USER46> Because stockbrokers are salesmen, and posh Harvard kids sound posh and make great salesmen.

</comment><comment><USER47> Money + Motivation

</comment><comment><USER48> Because of the money . . .

</comment><comment><USER49> because it pays?

</comment><comment><USER50> I can explain in under 200 words how to bring a lot more bright people into technology startups.

The following program, sponsored by VCs: VC firm takes you on as a protege. You don't know anything; you're not expected to. There's no guarantee of funding, although the door is open, and you draw a meager stipend (if needed) rather than a salary. You work for startups for the next 7+ years, possibly in the VC firm's portfolio companies, possibly elsewhere. At the end of the 7-year period, you choose between (1) partnership in the firm as a businessman, (2) the same but as EIR, or (3) to remain in startups as a serial entrepreneur. You spend a day per month at the VC firm, shadowing senior partners, but most of your time you spend with your head down coding.

I would have loved to have had such an opportunity coming out of school, and would have easily been one of the few most qualified applicants in the country... but this program didn't exist when I was 23 and, as far as I know, still doesn't.

VC firms out there need to make this happen for the next generation of young people.

<comment><USER12> I don't think it's all together clear that startups should be trying to recruit bright young people just out of college.

<comment><USER50> This is a good point, actually. The quality of person required by a startup is much higher than what an investment bank needs, and most of the people going into IB/MC wouldn't be qualified.

Also: analyst programs are designed to filter for the people with an unconditional work ethic-- people who will cut corners and work 100-hour weeks but simply will not miss a deadline, no matter how arbitrary, and people who will take the most awful work with a smile on their empty faces. This is a bad employee from a startup's perspective, because startups need people who write quality code (hard to do if you're working till 3:00 am) reliably and are willing to question others' decisions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> It was a good times 10 years ago, but now it is finished, and we (the ordinary people) must somehow deal with all the results of their activity (mounts of debt backed by junk or toxic assets, flawed financial instruments, like CDOs, etc.)

So, 15 years ago smart people were making money on Wall Street, while smart techies making money in Mobile and Communication sectors.

They were a good opportunities to those, who was smart enough to see them, while the rest of us were coded PHP and HTML (or J2EE - the luckiest ones) for food. =)</comment>


How to Invent the Future I by Alan Kay - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-invent-the-future-with-alan-kay-part-i/ <comment><USER2> What's the "Visions: Cosmic and Romantic" that's referred to around 36 minutes into the video? Google doesn't turn up anything.</comment>


Ask HN: Who here (successfully) uses lead generation services? - daniel-levin

Recently I discovered a few services that offer sales leads as a service. They seem to be able to put you in direct contact with exactly who you want to sell to. These guys [0] provide a massive database of companies and their respective representatives to contact. You can find the leads you want by using searches and filters on the business database. This other service [1] provides you with actual leads.<p>Does anyone have experience using these services for customer acquisition? Do they work (and for what kind of business)?<p>[0] http://www.afriseek.com/index.php (I'm based in South Africa)<p>[1] http://www.saquotes.co.za/join-saquotes.html?gclid=CJz_zvjTjLoCFbDMtAodSTgA3A <comment><AUTHOR> I've worked with lead generation services a lot in the past and currently do a lot of work in this field.

Honestly, you need to know a number of things:

1) Do they allow for returned leads?

2) Do they allow for rejected leads?

3) Do you have a service like BriteVerify in your country that will allow you to verify legitimate information?

4) Will they work on a further down the pipeline metric (as opposed to getting paid per lead, will they work for a higher fee for a booked appointment)

5) Do YOU have a sales cycle that can work with these kind of leads?

6) Do you have an email nurturing plan in place?

7) Do you have the metrics on who buys your product?

8) Do you have the metrics on how long it takes them to make their decision?

9) Will they give you test leads to determine how valuable their traffic is?

10) Do you have to give savvy online marketers a reason to compete against you in your media buying marketplace?

If you can answer yes to all those question you might consider using their services

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I just looked over the services you linked to and honestly I have extremely low confidence that you'll find anything of any real value.</comment></comment>


Amazon now loads over HTTPS - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/? <comment><USER2> Pretty huge! This bugged me a lot, given that it's combined with the fact that WPA is trivially sniffable by capturing any joining handshake (and you can cause one by disconnecting someone).</comment>


Microsoft is investing in ride-hailing firm Grab - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/09/microsoft-says-it-will-invest-in-singapore-based-grab.html <comment><USER2> Hopefully they can fix their shitty unreliable and buggy app, but I don't think there is any hope for their non existent customer service, beyond repair. Grab bought out Uber in SE Asia and literally no one is happy about it. #bringBackUber

<comment><USER3> Indeed bring uber back! I tried to sign up for grab because I'll be traveling to Thailand in a few weeks. Just the act of signing up apparently flagged my account for fraud. How I don't even know!!! Their support is nearly non- existent except for simple replies.

Honestly, Uber's support is only slightly better. Traveled from Lima to Atlanta in the same day, Uber flagged me for fraud. Took Uber a 2 weeks to fix it. Although they'd send me quick replies saying it was fixed, still couldn't get it fixed for 2 weeks.

I fear for the app future where you get blacklisted and you're shutoff from things that you need and there's no support or redress.

<comment><USER2> Haha all true, us expats in Bangkok are truly pissed off.</comment></comment></comment>


Y Combinator Demo Day 2013: Still Looking for the Next Airbnb or Dropbox - <AUTHOR> http://pando.com/2013/03/26/y-combinator-demo-day-2013-still-looking-for-the-next-airbnb-or-dropbox/

<comment><AUTHOR> > Really, though, it was no mind-blowing affair.

> There didn't seem to be any knockout winners

> I don't think there's a big winner in this bunch either.

Teespring and Zenefits were in that batch.</comment>


Functional programming in C (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://lucabolognese.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/functional-programming-in-c/ <comment><USER2> This is an interesting idea. For one of the first year programming courses here at UWaterloo, we start by teaching students Racket. To ease them into C, we use a subset we refer to as "functional C."[0] This is really just C with a few restrictions. The main ones are that all "variables" and parameters must be const and all branches of an if statement must return a value.

While these restrictions may seem silly to the HN crowd, it leads to an interesting way of thinking about solving problems.

[0] [https://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs136/handouts/03-funct...](https://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs136/handouts/03-functional- c-post.pdf)

<comment><USER3> > and all branches of an if statement must return a value.

Is indeed a bit strange. I guess I can see the reasoning, though.

"const by default" doesn't seem all that unreasonable to me - isn't that one of the major driving forces we're seeing in "new" languages - that based on years of experience, "accidental" mutability should be avoided -- mutability should _not_ be the default?

How does this subsetting of C affect the error messages the students are (most) likely to see? Does -Wall typically catch treating a const as mutable? (I assume so, I'm just curious about this, as I'll soon be teaching a beginning programming course - and a sub-set of C might be an interesting option).

<comment><USER2> We are pretty liberal with the warnings. -Wall will catch trying to mutate const variables. We also use address sanitizer[0] with clang which helps a lot with common memory errors. All this makes the code run (relatively) quite slow but since anything they're testing should complete in a few seconds regardless, it's not a problem for us in practice.

[0] [http://clang.llvm.org/docs/AddressSanitizer.html](http://clang.llvm.org/docs/AddressSanitizer.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'll be that guy who mentions Rust.

It's linkable with C. It has first-class support for discriminated unions. Very powerful automatic cleanup. Library of minimal-overhead common data structures. Plus immutability, and a few more things heavily inspired by functional languages.

So instead of a bit odd, not-quite-portable C macros I wholeheartedly recommend using a bit odd, not-quite-portable Rust instead.

<comment><USER5> Seconded, I think Rust is an excellent choice for writing new code in large C code bases. The compiler catches so many memory bugs, I think it's a worth using. I think it'll help more people contribute to open source as well. They're less likely to add new bugs or security risks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ugly and unportable code. I can't see practically any benefit.

      #ifdef __GNUC__

          value       =   c->kind == Volvo    ? ({
                                                  struct Volvo* it = &c->Volvo;
                                                  itoa(it->x, temp, 10);
                                                })
                        : c->kind == Ferrari  ?   (void)c->Ferrari.model, c->Ferrari.brand
                        : c->kind == Fiat     ?   c->Fiat.model
                                              :   union_fail("Not a valid car type");

          testCar(c, value);

      #endif // __GNUC__
      }

<comment><USER7> Agreed, "functional" code in C is when you write pure functions with no side effects and nest them like `f(g(h(x)))`. Everything else is an abomination.

<comment><USER8> I love this style. I accidentally "discovered" that pure functions were good through trial and error in my younger days, before I'd looked into functional programming. However, while I'm not necessarily a gigantic fan of functional languages, I think functional principles should be taught to everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Also worthwhile mentioning is functionalC [0].

The blog mentioned on the Github page is down but the relevant URLs can be accessed from the wayback machine at [1] and [2].

GCC also supports nested functions [3] (as a GNU C extension).

Unrelated, but [4] specifies a pure C implementation of Go channels and libmill [5] is a library that introduces Go-style concurrency to C.

[0] [https://github.com/cioc/functionalC](https://github.com/cioc/functionalC)

[1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20160406001106/http://blog.charl...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160406001106/http://blog.charlescary.com/?p=95)

[2] [https://web.archive.org/web/20160304120857/http://blog.charl...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160304120857/http://blog.charlescary.com/?p=150)

[3] [http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Nested- Functions.html](http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Nested-Functions.html)

[4] [https://github.com/tylertreat/chan](https://github.com/tylertreat/chan)

[5] [https://github.com/sustrik/libmill](https://github.com/sustrik/libmill)

<comment><USER10> I'll piggyback on your comment to add another functional version of C to the discussion, Single Assignment C.

[http://www.sac-home.org](http://www.sac-home.org)

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Related: Here is a really good blog post by John Carmack after forcing himself to code functionally in C++ for a month:

[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/169296/Indepth_Functional...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/169296/Indepth_Functional_programming_in_C.php)

Some really choice quotes in there.

<comment><USER5> And here's one by Jonathan Blow as well (references Carmack's post as well) [http://number- none.com/blow/blog/programming/2014/09/26/carm...](http://number- none.com/blow/blog/programming/2014/09/26/carmack-on-inlined-code.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't like the approach here, and the fact that it's gcc-specific. Many years ago I wrote a small macro library for discriminated unions/sums which I think is much cleaner and looks like actual C [1].

With some fancier variable macros + C11, you can even make closures in C viable [2].

[1] [https://github.com/naasking/libsum](https://github.com/naasking/libsum)

[2] Incomplete, but both curried and uncurried closures are possible: [https://github.com/naasking/cclosures](https://github.com/naasking/cclosures)

</comment><comment><USER13> I was initially hoping this would be about the book "Functional C" (Hartl & Muller, 1997). [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0201419505/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0201419505/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Nice experiment, but anyone writing such code in production should get his fingers chopped.

<comment><USER15>
        $ chgrp sane_c_devs /usr/bin/gcc
        $ chmod 0770 /usr/bin/gcc

Of course, the following scenario is not impossible ;)

        $ getent group sane_c_devs | cut -d: -f4 | tr , "\n" | wc -l
        0

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is as bad an idea as 'OO' C.

having had to deal with the grief that was a late-90s attempt at OO C.... stay away from this.

Tooling is designed for idioms of the language. Attempting to be 'clever' means you have to throw away all the benefits of that tooling as well as reducing your maintainability and confusing the optimiser.

<comment><USER17> Plenty of successful projects use some form of 'OO' C. The Linux kernel is probably one of the most successful.

I'm not saying all C programmers should use OO techniques, and I'm not saying all OO programmers should reach for C, but I don't think blanket statements like "OO C is a bad idea" and "stay away from [OO C]" are useful without context (and with context they are almost meaningless).

<comment><USER16> The linux kernel is an extremely mild form of OO. Mild to the extent that is effectively idiomatic C code.

What I'm referring to is the manual creation of virtual pointer tables and dereferencing _everything_ through it. This completely defeats the optimiser as it can't see thru the pointers. The case I'm referring to was a complete WTF in hindsight.

<comment><USER17> What is the difference between what you are calling virtual pointer tables and what the kernel does in a lot of places?

[http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/fs/ext4/symlink.c#L93](http://lxr.free- electrons.com/source/fs/ext4/symlink.c#L93)

<comment><USER16> Its the extent to which it is done.

virtual pointer tables are an age-old 'C' mechanism of providing runtime configuration for drivers and such like.

the WTF project, took that idea and had virtual pointers for _everything_ methods, data, superclasses, etc.

Every line consisted of something like the following:

obj->vptr->methodA(obj, objB->vptr->methodB());

it very rapidly becomes a readability and maintainability nightmare.

<comment><USER17> Sorry, I'm still not following your argument.

<comment><USER16> dereferencing the vptr in the Linux device tables tends to happen once per (say) function.

the WTF project would have '->vptr' and worse '->super->vptr->method(), maybe 20 or 30 times per function.

 _every_ call in the codebase or data reference would be via a '->vptr'.

That really makes a difference.... its unreadable. literally.

<comment><USER17> So based on one project's misuse of a technique (OO in C) you dismissed it as "bad" idea, "stay away from this", it's "attempting to be clever", and the rest?

I think that's why I'm not following you. You've dismissed OO in C in its entirety, and advised others to do the same, based on your experience in one project which misused/overused the feature.

<comment><USER16> no.

The level to which it is used in Linux is effectively idiomatic.

The project I'm referring to used the technique properly. Its just a bad technique.

<comment><USER17> You've said it is a bad technique no matter how it is used, and you have said it is an ok technique if used at some levels (like the Kernel) but not others (like the WTF project).

So you can see how I'm confused about what your opinion really is, I hope.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I did the following experiment a while ago (map and flatmap in C):

[https://gist.github.com/machuidel/d7cc099ddc4970c6ddf4](https://gist.github.com/machuidel/d7cc099ddc4970c6ddf4)

By adding more abstractions it should even be possible to support semigroups, monoids etc.

Of course this was just for fun.

</comment><comment><USER19> In the same spirit, I wrote some functionally-flavored extensions for GLib a few months back. [https://github.com/djcb/gxlib](https://github.com/djcb/gxlib), taking a bit of inspiration from Rust and SRFI-1.

It's fun to get some of the functional flavor, while still being very near the bare pointers.

</comment><comment><USER20> I wonder how the "discriminated union" thing is better than an enum + a structure for each type + a structure with a field for the discriminator (the enum) and an union of all structures. It certainly is much more readable, and idiomatic. And this doesn't add any benefits that I can see.

<comment><USER21> That's exactly what it's doing. There's no benefit to using these macros except that it's shorter and maybe (?) therefore clearer.

<comment><USER22> It's certainly not clearer if we have to guess.

<comment><USER21> Guess what?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sorry, I hope nobody minds a humorous posting (a quote from meet the parents):

 _Dina Byrnes: I had no idea you could milk a cat!_

 _Greg Focker: Oh, you can milk just about anything with nipples._

 _Jack Byrnes: [He reacts] I have nipples, Greg, could you milk me?_

<comment><USER24> > I hope nobody minds a humorous posting

Not at all. Please go ahead and post it.

<comment><USER23> Okay here goes:

 _> your mom_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I so much adore the fact that you can do all paradigms with C relatively easily.

<comment><USER26> I'm confused... what do you mean 'easily'?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> (2013)

</comment><comment><USER28> I know things can go downhill quickly when I read things like this:

>There is one irritating thing about C as a viable programming language.

Given its history, I don't see where this guy comes from that he can declare whether C is a viable programming language or not. Especially when his real complaint is not about C at all.

>Microsoft's compiler support is not good.

While some may complain that I'm making a minor quibble, my point is, when you make statements like this, your credibility falls a notch or twelve and I have to look at the rest of the article with suspicion.

<comment><USER29> Viable in this case means for FP, I'd guess. MS's C compiler support has been crap. In 2013 they didn't have C99 support, right? Just like he says. Even now it seems their C support is driven by the C++ requirement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> On Windows one compiles C99 code as C++, that's all.

<comment><USER31> Since VS2015 MSVC should have most of C99 support already. So there are no reasons to avoid C99 usage nowadays at all.

<comment><USER32> VS2015 MSVC supports C++14, which requires C99 library support, hence why Microsoft updated the support.

Likewise MSVC will support C11 libraries when they get around to be fully C++17 compliant.

For any newer C standard the official Microsoft position is to use clang with the Visual C++ backend, called C2 which Microsoft is turning into a backend to be shared between clang, Visual C++ and .NET Native.</comment></comment></comment>