How does striped toothpaste retain its stripes after being bottled and squeezed? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Toothpaste/How-does-striped-toothpaste-retain-its-stripes-after-being-bottled-and-squeezed

<comment><USER2> The youtube video in that question is the real winner - [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=p...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=p08_KlTKP50)</comment>


Python Control System - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mck-sbs/PyConSys <comment><AUTHOR> You can create control loops and let the AI (evolutional algorithm) set the PID parameters for you. You can also plot all control variables.</comment>


Comparing Software Engineer Salaries Across Cities - <AUTHOR> https://javednissar.ca/comparing-software-engineer-salaries-across-cities/ <comment><USER2> I don't know where the data comes from, but as a hiring manager at a mid-size public company in SF, I would say these numbers are way, way off the mark.

An ordinary mid-level engineer (3-4 years of experience) would expect to make $150k salary with 10% bonus and about $120k equity. If you add that all up your tax return for the year will show approximately 150 + (150*0.1) + (120/4) = 195k taxable income.

As a rule of thumb I would say:

New Grad: $140k total comp

Mid level: $200k total comp

Senior level: $250k total comp and up

Numbers can go far above that for FAANGs, especially Facebook and Google.

I can't speak to the rest of the numbers, but given the numbers for the bay area are so far off, I would not put much stock in this analysis.

<comment><USER3> It says where the data comes from: Glassdoor. Every time someone uses glassdoor to make claims about salaries in the Bay Area, someone else chimes in to say that they're way lower than their own experience. I wonder if there are two strata of software engineers operating there; a "chump" majority who are on the sort of salaries advertised, and a minority who are much more selective or self-confident and who post a lot on hacker news.

<comment> dan-robertson There are surely a lot of biases in any self-reported salary data. And for firms that pay salary+bonus+equity, it matters a lot how one counts it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What a lot of these types of articles seems to miss out on (other than just being out of date, not including equity, flexibility on CoL) is upside potential.

Senior engineers should be making $250-450K including equity in the Bay Area. As long as you're somewhere in the middle of that, which isn't that hard, you should be doing pretty great. And if you're really good, $600K+ is possible, or $1M+ if you take the management route.

<comment><USER5> This makes me strongly consider moving to the Bay Area. My wife has family there, and we love the city. I've climbed up in pay very quickly here in Salt Lake City which still puts me ridiculously lower than Bay Area salaries. Cost of living is obviously way lower, but $500k in San Francisco would give me a much higher quality of life than $150k in SLC which is about the max around here unless you have a niche skill. A friend of mine just accepted a role as VP of Engineering at a very successful startup and he's not quite cracked $200k.

Options around here are so pathetic that in the best case scenario after your options vest you might be able to pay cash for a brand new Kia Sorento.

My only concern is work life balance. In Utah it's pretty uncommon to find a company where people work over 40 hours a week. This is nice, but I'd like to become "wealthy" and I'm not sure how to do that as a Software Engineer here without starting my own company.

<comment><USER6> Netflix & Google work-life balance is actually pretty good. Amazon it's very variable - some teams have decent hours, others work you to the bone. Apple has a reputation for preventing engineers from having a life, though it might've gotten better since Steve Jobs died. Facebook is probably similar to Apple overall - you work harder than at Google, and also have less time for reflection (Facebook is all about metrics and hitting the numbers).

I would shop around and see if you can get an offer from a FAANG or Bay Area growth company before moving out, though. They'll often pay your relocation, and it's a lot less stressful than moving out, paying Bay Area rents, and hoping you get a job without any firm commitments.

Also beware of down-leveling. People who have not previously worked at a FAANG or hot growth company often take a title demotion (but salary bump) when moving to one of them. I've heard of folks - in the Bay Area, but at a bank rather than a tech company - going from being a Director with ~20 people under them to an IC at Facebook (but making more money), and of people being VPs at their previous company but going back to being an IC to work at Stripe. If you were a senior-level engineer making $150K at SLC you might get a mid-level engineer position at a FANG for maybe $250K, which is basically a wash after CoL adjustments (actually probably a step back in quality of life, because Bay Area housing & traffic is so terrible). But then you have a FANG on your resume, and you can either stick with it and get promoted into those $500K-$1M roles once you get back into management & senior engineering, or you can turn it into a very senior engineering or leadership position at an up & coming startup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seeing this is concerning. I'm 8 years into design Engineering(and self taught programming 12 yes) and at 125k. It seems there is no way up without extreme speciality. I know a FAANG guy making 160k doing server Java but we both think it's a temporary anomaly.

I thought embedded might pay better than design Engineering, but I haven't seen too many people saying they make significantly more.

I'm not sure how to angle my career. I've peaked?

Current thoughts, side business is ultra important for a pay raise. Maybe AI.

<comment><USER8> Embedded makes less for whatever reason.

What I'll say is that over $100k-ish at non-FAANG, the salaries say more about the company than the person doing the work.

<comment><USER9> > Embedded makes less for whatever reason.

Embedded goes into hardware, which is mostly a low-margin product. Whereas software products (be it FAANG or startups) either make a ton of money or are perceived by investors to have a potential to make a ton of money, so they can afford to spoil their devs. In the realm of non-product development, enterprise software can deliver milions/bilions in increased efficiency for the enterprise, so it's another field where there's enough money to spoil devs.

<comment><USER8> Margins are super low on pretty much everything that's not a B2B behemoth. And in a world where a good oscope is $30k, these companies can afford to pay their devs a bit more for the most part too; I've seen their budgets.

I think it's just a market failure where everyone already pays these wages, so no one goes out of their way to pay better. You can see this on the software side with China's "code peasants", or the UK salaries.

<comment><USER9> > Margins are super low on pretty much everything that's not a B2B behemoth

There's tons of in-house custom enterprise software development where, depending on the skills of the manager leading the project, the idea for the developed solution can be sold to upper management as the second coming of Christ (e.g. we'll spend $10m over two years on developers and potentially earn/save hundreds of millions) and this unlocks a pot of gold for the development budget. The manager will then want to hire good/expensive devs as this increases the chance that the team will deliver what he promised to the upper management. I've seen this multiple times in large organizations I've worked for.

<comment><USER8> That's equally true of a lot of hardware. I worked on a storage device that could store an exabyte. Went for 10s of millions before even talking about the support contract where the money is.

It doesn't change the underlying equation.

<comment><USER9> I suspect there's just not enough jobs like that (most is low-margin consumer electronic crap), hence there's little competition (in terms of throwing money at people) for the best people, and the salaries for that skillset don't rise. Meanwhile, all the corporations need millions of Java developers to work on important projects and it creates enough pressure on salaries.

<comment><USER8> The UK needs millions of Java developers too, and they get peanuts.

[https://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Computer_Programmer...](https://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Computer_Programmer/Salary)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looking at the cost of an apartment in a center of a city looks to me like an unreasonable assumption.

Places like midtown Manhattan or central London are populated more by financial people and celebrities than by mid-level software engineers. Such places can be ridiculously expensive because of that.

Instead I'd look at places within 30-45 minutes of commute to the center, which would give much more affordable figures for NYC and London (though not SF).

<comment><USER11> I think a one bedroom apartment in the city center is a very reasonable expectation. I also don't think celebrities and financial types compete with the average software developer for said one bedroom apartments.

I think your comment perfectly illustrates the issue some cities on that list have. Namely, their salaries might seem high on their own, but are not really competitive anymore when taking into account cost of living (and taxes, I suppose).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Glassdoor data seems years old at best, my conspiracy theory is that they invent data points for companies with no salary submissions

<comment> kube-system I bet most Glassdoor accounts were created years ago and haven't been touched since.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't think glassdoor salaries are correct. It looks like they auto-generate salaries using some algorithms for companies they don't have data

</comment><comment><USER14> This doesn't seem right to me.

Zürich was the most expensive place I've ever lived, and I've also lived in New York and London.

<comment><AUTHOR> Admittedly, this analysis isn't perfect since all my data sources have their problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Good on this analysis for looking at the cost of living subtracted from the salary, instead of just the ratio between the two. I don't know why this calculation isn't more commonplace.

<comment><USER16> Yes, I think that net income chart is what people really should be looking at when considering salary vs cost of living but too many times these analysis are so hyper focused on home prices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ugh, why didn't you sort by the Y-axis value before doing the plot...?

<comment><USER18> Because then the order of cities would change for every plot making comparison of two cities a pain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> We're working on a more comprehensive overview of city by city compensation at Levels.fyi including COL and largest employers in a particular geo.

For a salary overview of some popular metropolitan cities right now, check out [https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/San- Franci...](https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/San-Francisco- Bay-Area/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the note! I'm looking forward to seeing your analysis expand!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The salaries for NYC and San Francisco seem way too low. Only using base salaries significantly deflates compensation.

<comment><USER21> I can't speak for NYC, but the salary noted for SF (just under $120kpa) is almost certainly base pay for the most junior engineers you can find who aren't interns. Three years ago my team hired an intern into a FT position for $100kpa base, and it was widely acknowledged that he was grossly underpaid, because he was far below the target midpoint for the entry-level pay band (that company was targeting the 65th percentile, and he was below it by a double-digit percentage).

<comment><USER22> > that company was targeting the 65th percentile, and he was below it by a > double-digit percentage

By what metric?

<comment><USER21> Companies big enough to need real HR departments typically prescribe "pay bands" for every job position, e.g., a "Software Engineer II" might have a band between $100kpa and $130kpa, and to go above that band an employee either has to be promoted or receive a special exemption. Typically the midpoint of these bands (e.g., $115kpa in my example) are targeted to some percentile of one or more salary surveys done by companies like Aon. Those surveys are what set the "market rate", generally. At least for non-FAANG companies, though I imagine FAANG companies use them as well, but with (much) higher multiples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> here is my own breakdown ranking cities based on software engineering pay and cost of living: (the data is about 4 months old, as I haven't updated it in a while) [https://skilldime.com/blog/see-which-cities-pay-the- highest-...](https://skilldime.com/blog/see-which-cities-pay-the-highest- software-engineering-salaries-adjusted-for-col/)

I did something somewhat similar, except you can break it down by skillsets, city, remote/non-remote, etc: [https://skilldime.com/app.php](https://skilldime.com/app.php)

<comment><USER2> This is a nice list, and your numbers for salaries look at lot better than for the submitted post, but I would question your methodology.

While housing is absolutely ridiculous in the Bay Area, the total compensation much more than offsets it without having to live in a tent. I moved from a solid job in Raleigh NC (low COL) to a good (but not especially remarkable) job in SF and my annual savings increased almost 5x. It would take a few more years here before I could _buy_ a house, if I wanted to pay the absurd local prices, but I also have the option to work here for 5-7 years total and then _retire_ to one of the many low COL areas in North America. Living in an apartment for a few years is not that big of a deal when that's the payoff.

I would say being able to retire comfortably to a low COL area in a decade or less a lot nicer option than going straight there and _needing_ to work a full 30-40 year career. Of course you can still work after retiring from SF if you want, but not _having to_ is kind of a big deal.

<comment><USER23> leaving the BA after 5-7 yrs working is a good plan.

Be careful you don't meet anyone. Because, leaving someplace becomes much harder once you've met someone or you have family in the area. moving 2 jobs/ moving 2 social life's is harder than 1. just keep it in mind

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I've moved with my family twice now, each about five years apart. It's not the easiest thing in the world, but it's worthwhile when you have a compelling reason _why_ you're moving. I think in each case so far we've known that our stay would be 4-7 years or so, and thus in each case it's been kind of "bittersweet" but not too hard when the time finally came. It is definitely harder now as my kids are school-aged, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Comparing Software Engineer Salaries Across Euro-American Cities, and Ignoring Software Engineer Salaries across all the other cities where the majority of software engineers live.

<comment><AUTHOR> What other cities would you suggest adding?

<comment><USER24> Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Hangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Manilla, Ho Chi Min, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Bangkok, Karachi, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Osaka, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Kigali, Luanda, Nairobi, Dubai... etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I am amazed how the article manages not to mention Berlin a single time, although it is clearly the most interesting city according to the graphs.

Maybe because it's not an English speaking city?

<comment><USER26> He mostly goes into US Cities only mention Zürich once. He looks at the data more with an American lens.

> Maybe because it's not an English speaking city?

It's because it's a german city. In germany you and the company have to a percentage of you salary to healthcare system [1], which isn't listed on your salery.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Germany#Insuranc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Germany#Insurance_systems)

<comment><AUTHOR> I would hope the tax calculator I used would account for healthcare but admittedly I'm not sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm not sure Glassdoor alone is a good source of salary data. I'm not sure a good source really exists, but I would recommend checking out sites like levels.fyi and the many H1B salary sites that seem to come and go to get more perspectives.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the note! I suspect the issue with those sites is that (as far as I know) they don't offer data on European and Canadian salaries which I wanted for this particular comparison. Feel free to correct me though!

<comment><USER27> I think that is true, especially for H1B sites since that is US specific. But I would say comparing inaccurate data is worse than not comparing data at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Hm. I live in Iowa. Not a lot of developers here. The ones I know, that chart doesn't go high enough.

</comment><comment><USER29> I mean, Kitchener, ON is a nice place, but...

</comment><comment><USER30> Great, here comes another flood of douchebags to Austin.

</comment><comment><USER31> Hmmmm, is this why Austin has had continuous surge in population (from immigration, anecedotly mostly from California) for past several years?

btw Austin is horrible, don't move here. ;)

<comment><USER32> Curious what's so horrible about Austin, as I've thought about Texas as somewhere I might want to move sometime in the future.

Any chance you could elaborate a bit? Would appreciate the opinion of a local.

<comment><USER33> I think it's the "This place is wonderful, you'd love it, but we don't want the whole world to move here and ruin it, so we say that it's terrible" schtick. I think the ;) in there was a hint...

<comment><USER32> Oops! Missed that. You're right. Thanks for pointing it out :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Original Meaning of the Second Amendment - <AUTHOR> http://www.shmoop.com/right-to-bear-arms/original-meaning-of-the-second-amendment.html <comment><USER2> The author brings up a very good point, particularly in this day and age 'the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed'.

However, the focus of all the discussion surrounding this issue is clearly on guns. The citizens of the US (I'm Canadian), I suspect don't provide the same right to those who would like to own a ballistic missile, bomb, etc. Though the arguments regarding the case for protection of liberties could probably be equally raised when talking about any sort of 'arms'.

Would changes to the Second Amendment have an effect on violence or crime in the US? I suspect not, as in Canada, registered weapons are rarely used in crimes, it is the unregistered ones that are the issues. Therefore, why do Americans and particularly the media keep harping on the Amendement which along with being out of date, may not be the actual root of the issues?

</comment><comment><USER3> The Supremes agreed 9-0 in _Heller_ that it's an individual right; I'm reasonably satisfied that the individual vs. collective right issue is settled.

ADDED: Since the "collective right" interpretation was of 20th Century manufacture, the outcome was not surprising.

</comment><comment><USER4> It makes no difference what the meaning of the amendment is. None of the Bill of Rights actually amends the Constitution. There is no clause in the original document that gives Congress the authority to make any law regarding individual criminal acts occurring within a state.

<comment><USER3> EDIT: the below was based on a misunderstanding of what naturalethic was saying, it is "no longer operative".

You seem to ignoring the amendment process as detailed in Article V:

 _The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate._

And the 14th Amendment, which enforces various parts of the Constitution and its Amendments on the states (and therefore has been used WRT "individual criminal acts occurring within a state"), which is the subject of _McDonald v. Chicago_ for which the oral arguments were held earlier this week.

<comment><USER5> > You seem to ignoring the amendment process as detailed in Article V

No. He's using an enumerated powers argument. He's claiming that the Federal govt can only do things that were authorized by the constitution and that none of the things mentioned in the BoR were things that the Federal govt can do according.

I'm sympathetic to that argument, but the modern interpretation of the interstate commerce and general welfare clauses say otherwise.

The 14th, which isn't part of the BoR, says that states are bound in some way by something.

The first cases, which had to do with state govt officials silencing, disarming, and killing freed slaves, concluded that the states weren't bound at all by the bill of rights. That's the precedent that Chicago is pushing.

<comment><USER3> Ah, yes, I should have realized that, especially as someone who considers _Wickard v. Filburn_ (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn>) a decision that will live in infamy.

On the other hand, it has been argued that prior to the 14th, the 2nd Amendment ... pierced the states rights veil, you might say, although again that's a restriction on states, not individuals, akin to the requirement that they have a "Republican Form of Government" (small r republican, of course :-).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Please re-add original author to docs and license - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/1703 <comment><USER2> Hello, I'm Gabriel, the original author of Guake.

Let me clarify the whole story:

In 2006 I had just gotten into college and was learning Python by myself, my English skills (also self-taught) were pretty low and I had to rely a lot on whatever material was available in Portuguese (I'm from Brazil).

In 2007 I had an amazing college teacher, the "drop of water in the desert" kind of teacher. He was trying to convince everyone that they could move from MS Windows to GNU/Linux and that the available desktop software was pretty decent.

The only catch is that he used KDE2 and all the "cool" desktop apps he was showing were built on QT, like a good pupil I always tried to pair up an equivalent GTK option to every QT app my teacher showed to the class.

That worked well for everything: Music Players, Photo Viewers, etc.

One day he showed Yakuake ([https://kde.org/applications/system/org.kde.yakuake](https://kde.org/applications/system/org.kde.yakuake)) to the class and everyone went bananas, this was such an amazing tool.

But then I did not have a good alternative for GTK if I wanted to press F12 to get a drop-down terminal I'd have to install libqt on my Debian? No way!

I set out to write an equivalent of Yakuake for GTK+ (hence the name Guake, with "G" for GTK), at the time I did not know exactly how D-Bus worked and had no idea of how to write Python extensions in C.

The very first working version of Guake was a Gnome Applet that used GTK bindings to libvte to make a terminal always available. Was still not good enough for me.

The next step was to write a regular GTK Window application and try to make it disappear, but I was having a lot of trouble binding F12 globally, it only worked well on Metacity which was the default window manager for GNOME2 at the time.

Guake's user experience was not great, it only worked well on Metacity but was good enough for me to show to my teacher, I was so excited I was able to create my very first GPL software and publish on source forge. I was ahead of everyone in my class at the time, I was learning on my own the things that would be taught only in the next semester and many things that we would never learn in class (such as Python programming).

Some months go by and Guake-Gnome-VTE (the original name) gets some visibility, and this guy Lincoln de Sousa reaches out to me, he told me he had fixed the global keybinding problem by writing a Python extension in C, also he refactored the whole code and even applied GNOME Human Interface Guidelines to it.

It sounded great to me, I was so excited that someone else was interested in Guake, and made improvements to it, I was in awe with open source.

Except for one thing: Lincoln rewrote a lot of things that were working, just for the sake of cleaning up the Python code the aesthetics of it (actually he was applying PEP8 which I had no idea what was before this)

I had these mixed feelings: in one Guake had become what I wanted it to be, the global keybinding worked anywhere, the UI looked even better and the code was a lot easier to understand.

On the other a lot of the code I had written was deleted, I was not a skilled python developer when I wrote the first version of Guake, so I had spent several hours reading, coding and trying things out.

Anyways, the whole thing was a win-win, yay open source, now Guake had 2 maintainers putting a lot of time and love into it.

After some time Lincoln proposed that we moved the code off of Sourceforge to a git repository, self-hosted (we had a very "purist" mentality regarding FOSS and were terrified of having our code hosted by a proprietary software such as Github), he had way more experience than me on pretty much everything and he took reins: the code was hosted in one of his servers and all I did was pay for the domain.

In retrospect, I wish I had just pushed the code to Github at the time, so no the commit history would be lost. The irony in having a purist FOSS mentality: the code was hosted on a server that I eventually lost access to.

Also, instead of importing all the commit history from Sourceforge we just pushed the code to git.

You can look at the first commits on github:

commit 4f4ab35d5cb2363dd464e6b252d1c798bd01c2fb Author: Lincoln de Sousa <firstname.lastname@example.com> Date: Sat Oct 6 13:56:50 2007 -0300

        patch came from svn

commit 8973af85108c889f7dc16af2d8443d0f8ff3ec05 Author: guake_root <guake_root> Date: Wed Aug 1 02:35:20 2007 +0000

The "guake_root" commit swallowed all the history of the original code I had done.

In 2008 I moved out of my city to work for a big corporation in Rio de Janeiro, there my FOSS purism slowly evolved into tolerance for proprietary software, eventually, I even got an iPhone and a MacBook.

That's when I stopped contributing to Guake: I had moved to MacOSX and the project had been taken over by other maintainers. But even the icon is still the one I design on Inkscape, Guake was my first open-source software, I put a lot of time and love into it.

Today 14 years later I seldom use Guake because I seldom use a Linux Desktop, but I must confess that seeing my original authorship vanish from the project is very sad.

<comment><USER3> > I'd have to install libqt on my Debian? No way!

Why are you so firmly opposed to libqt?

<comment><USER4> The issue I might still have today in 2020 is disk space, and extra time downloading updates to those packages at the next update. Even today I'd be reluctant to want to pull in large libraries that amount to an entire UI or desktop framework just for one application, unless I have a really good justification to use that application.

I am also a tad displeased today at how many optional dependencies I don't use get pulled in by package managers on my systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interestingly (to me at least), I was just reading he memcached website (from another HN submission), and even though it's been completely rewritten in a different language, they still credit Brad Fitzpatrick as the original author.

No reason not to. Anyone arguing otherwise is being petty and mean in my opinion. Sure, a bunch of new people have written some/most/all of the current codebase. But they built on top of the project founder's code. Why _wouldn't_ you give them the credit for that?

<comment><USER6> This strikes me as a very old question.

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

In this specific case there seems to be no argument that the original author is who he says he is and he has given specific reasons why it would be in his advantage to be credited as the original author I can't imagine many people denying him that.

<comment><USER7> Ship of Theseus is a great argument for crediting the original author, even if it's been 100% re-written over time: The ship would have started from one (or more) expert ship builders, while the continual patching could be done by comparatively-unskilled hands.

(Not that this is the case in software, but merely saying that that parable would lend itself to an easy answer as to whether to credit the original or not.)

<comment><USER6> You could equally argue that Gail's law is applicable. Without someone creating something simple but working it may never have existed.

<comment> benji-york I suspect you mean "Gall's Law" (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_\(author\)#Gall's_law)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Assuming the license hasn't changed, under GPL it was illegal for them to remove the license. Apparently it's still in the "about" window, so maybe that is sufficient for the license, but I'm not sure about removing copyright banners in a bunch of other places...

<comment><USER9> The license file does not seem changed [https://github.com/Guake/guake/blob/master/COPYING](https://github.com/Guake/guake/blob/master/COPYING) but it did not contain his copyright notice in the first place.

They seem to have had an AUTHORS file in there that according to git blame was deleted in this commit 2 years ago, possibly by erroneously including AUTHORS in .gitinclude:

[https://github.com/Guake/guake/commit/089d72aab3c1708ed3476e...](https://github.com/Guake/guake/commit/089d72aab3c1708ed3476e42fad7659d8b25fdb7)

Before that he was included in the AUTHORS file as "\- Gabriel Falcão <firstname.lastname@example.com>, 2007", his name still appears in a bunch of places in the code [https://github.com/Guake/guake/search?q=Gabriel+Falc%C3%A3o&...](https://github.com/Guake/guake/search?q=Gabriel+Falc%C3%A3o&unscoped_q=Gabriel+Falc%C3%A3o)

I'm not really sure how to find the diff that switched from explicit copyright headers in source files to "Guake authors", maybe that was just done as the default while the code was growing.

Couldn't really hurt to just include some attribution imho, not only for him but other contributors as well. It's kind of odd looking to me that one of the two original authors raised an issue on an active looking project and seemingly nobody even bothered to respond there.

<comment> Anthony-G The git commit you linked would have required the committer to explicitly remove the `AUTHORS` file from the code-base. If a file is already being tracked, it won't stop being tracked if a corresponding pattern is added to `.gitignore`. Removing the file in this way was most likely intentional and not erroneous.

<comment> Anthony-G From the most recent response to this issue, it seems that the file was removed with the intention that the list of authors could be programmatically generated: [https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/1703#issuecomment-5965...](https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/1703#issuecomment-596500947)

I also see that Gabriel has now been credited in the project's `README.rst`.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If anybody reads this and decides it sounds like a nice way to summon a terminal, be aware that if you're a non-Gnome user you can use Yukuake in KDE, and the --drop-down option to the XFCE terminal.

I usually have it bound to Ctrl-` and find it very convenient (also someone satisfying to just show and hide for no reason other than I like the animation).

<comment><USER2> Yakuake is what inspired Guake. I wanted to use Yakuake without needing to install libqt in my machine.

<comment><USER11> Maybe, but the original inspiration was the tilde shortcut for opening the console in the Quake game, hence the names.

<comment><USER12> I think he knows why it's called that :)

<comment><USER11> Ha - first time I read it I didn't pick up that he was the author :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well, as far as I can tell, the Authors file was removed completely. In all of the files that I could find that are old enough for him to have contributed to, his copyright notice remains.

In his own branch, the first commit is October 2007 and the _vast_ majority of commits after that are from Lincoln de Sousa. So I don't think anyone was doing anything untoward here. I'm not really familiar with the project, but it doesn't _appear_ to me that he was ever _the_ original author. If anything, it _appears_ as though Lincoln de Sousa did most of the heavy lifting and he was a regular contributor. I could easily be wrong, but that's my impression.

Still, acknowledgement as being an original contributor in the README seems completely reasonable and the issue has 14 thumbs up.

<comment><USER14> The first commit _on github_ is a 77k lines commit that appears to be a migration of the project from svn to git. So you're looking only at later commit history.

The original project lived here: [https://sourceforge.net/p/guake-gnome- vte/code/commit_browse...](https://sourceforge.net/p/guake-gnome- vte/code/commit_browser)

He explained that and linked to that in his his issue though.

Edit: Linking to the full commit history instead.

<comment><USER13> My bad! Indeed, he does seem to be the original Author. Thanks for pointing me to the correct spot! I'm not sure how I missed that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This seems like a non-story. Original author says "please add my name back," current maintainers say "OK will do." What am I missing?

<comment><USER16> Well, I got that little piece of history from the Gabriel Falcao about how it was all formed which is really neat so that makes it worthwhile.

I think we usually expect these to be someone's cry for help but here it's just an interesting tale. I liked it.

EDIT: Responding here due to rate-limit, I think you're right (on reflection) and I don't like what that means.

<comment><USER15> Agreed; it was quite interesting. I only posted my above comment because calling this thread to the attention of hackernews seemed a bit like trying to stir up controversy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Credit should always be given where credit is due. I believe this is good etiquette. This might also be required by the original license.

<comment><USER18> As far as I know, attribution rights are unalienable at least in my jurisdiction. What that means in practice in larger software projects is unclear, but removing attribution for some people while keeping it for others would be against the spirit of the law.

<comment><USER19> There were no indent in removing or altering the history. Just a project that evolves over time, files are renamed, splitted, etc, and the list of copyright at the beginning of the file is no more relevant. The real truth is inside the git history, sadly part of this truth has been lost by the origian import, and even myself, the current maintainer, does not know it !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Was browsing the Guake issue list for another reason and came across this. I'm genuinely interested to hear what people think of this situation..

<comment><USER20> It's pretty clearcut: The GPL requires to keep copyright notices and author's names. They should re-add him and removing names from free software code without the consent of the original author is absolutely not okay.

We may argue that with licenses that allow this (CC0, Unlicense) it would be okay, but even there I'd say credit where credit is due.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder how active the Guake maintainers really are. If you use it on Wayland, you get an error that it can't claim f12 as a key binding. This is because they use some X11 foo for their keybinding. It's easy to set a custom keybinding via Gnome which will allow you to use Guake, however, they have been ignoring requests to just allow Guake to have no binding (as far as it is aware) for some time now. A short time ago they started enforcing a keybinding, strangely. [0]

[0] [https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/1591](https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/1591)

</comment><comment><USER22> Most FOSS licenses don't require _attribution_ (although ethically it's better to do so), however, almost all requires the preservation of _copyright notices_ , and the name of the author is always part of the notice. For example,

> Copyright (C) $years $author

> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person [...] subject to > the following conditions:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in > all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

And usually, the copyright notices appear in the beginning of all files for clarity.

Although some projects with too many developers may agree to use alternative attribution and copyright identification methods, such as git "Sign-Off", an author file, or SPDX machine-readable license notice. In these cases, it's considered a common practice to use a collective name in the copyright notice, such as

> // Copyright 2019 The Chromium Authors. All rights reserved.

But in most cases, it's a bad idea to remove any name from the header.

\---

In the Guake's case, the copyright notice is changed to,

> Copyright (C) 2007-2013 Guake authors

with the original name removed. On one hand, the use of a collective name is common, it's not too different from Chromium, or other major projects. In a sense, it's acceptable, as long as the method of author identification is clearly defined (e.g. git sign-off). Anyone contributes the project is assumed to have accepted how attribution is done implicitly.

However, the problem is that the original name is removed - changing the notice retroactively should be done with the permission of the author, which is clearly not obtained here. A common practice in such circumstance is leaving the original copyright year and author in place, and appending new copyright information below (or above) the original notice, so it should be something like this,

> Copyright (C) 2007 Gabriel Falcão

> Copyright (C) 2008-2013 Guake authors

This example is generally considered "good" since (1) credit is given where credit is due, (2) it also shows the copyright holders responsible for the project in different period of time.

For example, the copyright notice of Python is,

> Copyright (c) 2001-2019 Python Software Foundation.

> All Rights Reserved.

> Copyright (c) 2000 BeOpen.com.

> All Rights Reserved.

> Copyright (c) 1995-2001 Corporation for National Research Initiatives.

> All Rights Reserved.

> Copyright (c) 1991-1995 Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam.

> All Rights Reserved.

<comment><USER23> I think the situation here is accidental removal of AUTHORS file only. (With accidental .gitignore config)

I think legally, (also ethically)

Copyright (C) 2007-2013 Guake authors

Should be fine as long as they keep his name in authors file.

Edit: Actually they switched to pbr [1] , so AUTHORS file is generated on build. Not tracked on git. Original author is in AUTHORS file

[1] [https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/1703#issuecomment-5965...](https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/1703#issuecomment-596500947)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Looks like they wanted to auto generate instead of maintain by hand the AUTHORS file.

</comment><comment><USER25> Interesting to see this here, I just started using guake a few weeks ago since it supports hyperlinks in the terminal where mate-terminal does not.

</comment><comment><USER26> On the other hand he hadn't commit anything in last decade and he would get credit for others work

On the other hand he's an author...

mixed feelings, I'd say

Autor: {name} Contributed in years: 2007-2009.

<comment><USER27> That's the usual way of doing it. When a project grows and gains more contributions you can have the AUTHORS file have a list of former major contributors and project founders, current major contributors, and a note acknowledging the dozens of occasional and drive-by contributors (who get full credit for their patches in the revision logs).

His request is not unreasonable at all.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Help keep my bootstrapped startup running - <AUTHOR> I'm currently bootstrapping my startup (App Evolved) and have been doing so for the last seven months and I am flat broke. I've resorted to lending money from my parents to pay the accountant and technical (AWS, SendGrid, mLab etc) bill but my parents cannot afford to support me anymore.
Selling my apartment provided the initial investment because approaching multiple VCs lead to no investment. I did ask other family members but that lead to no investment either. My initial investment enabled me to incorporate the company, register the domains, pay a designer for a graphical logo and pay the technical bill for 6 months.
My initial investment is totally depleted. I am starting to panic.
No product is launched. I'm working 9-12 hours a day--sometimes even longer--on the product and it will be launched within the coming months (less than three months). I feel all I need is a little more time and funding before I can launch the product. When my product is launched, everything will change.
I am actively looking for work, as a web application developer, but no employment is being offered yet.
No one else at the company is relying on me for a salary however, I do have an Asian girlfriend whom I'm trying to help.
I really do not want to see my startup fail in this way.
I don't mind sharing the Business Strategy and Company Overview (https://goo.gl/rgQrGR) so you can verify this is a legitimate business and not a scam.
Would you be able to donate some money so that I can keep my startup running? If you do, I will mention you name and Twitter handle on my company's about page under "generous lifeline sponsors" and I will keep your details listed for my company's entire existence.
If you are willing to donate, please visit https://www.paypal.me/AppEvolved
If you are not able to donate any money, can you share some advice on how I can keep things afloat? Have you been through a similar situation? How did you keep things running with no capital? <comment><AUTHOR> Is anyone willing to critique my curriculum vitae/résumé?

I would like your opinion on my skills and what you feel I should add to my curriculum vitae?

</comment><comment><USER2> I've been through a similar situation, and it did not end well for me. If you are asking for donations from strangers on the internet, yes, you are starting to panic. The good news is, you are aware that there is a problem. The bad news is, the problem is real.

I won't give any money, but here is the advice I can give:

1) That feeling of "...all I need is a little more time and funding before I can launch the product. When my product is launched, everything will change." is very dangerous. Get out of hope mode, and get into planning mode. I know it is hard because emotionally you need the hope to keep you going. It's good to take care of your emotional needs, but when you are driving across a desert with an almost empty gas tank, "I'm almost there" is a good way to end up stranded.

2) Realize you are undercapitalized. This is a primary cause of business failure. You need to do something about it. Either get more capital or start cutting corners. If you are trying to build a house, but only have enough money for a garage, you can end up with either a finished garage or a dead construction site. One of those is worth more than the other.

3) If you don't know what is going to happen if you fail, have a plan. Ideally you should have that before starting, but if not, don't end up here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445141](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445141)

4) I don't know the cloud business well, but I have a friend who owns a cloud business and he is able to compete by offering a niche service. It seems that having good relationships with his customers is a more important part of his business than the servers or software. You may be well served at this point by getting a prospective customer or two to sign a letter of intent that they intend to buy your product when released. You could take this to a bank and have a decent chance of getting a loan to get you to the finish. You probably won't get a loan without this.

5) Your value proposition appears to hinge on automated cloud management plus charity tie-in. I'd use your charity contacts to help you network with local prospective customers. Charity tie-in can get you in doors you can't get in on your own.

Best of luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. It seems like you went through a similar situation and survived :-)

I have approached some startup incubators and I'm awaiting response from them. From my experience, banks do not value entrepreneurial risk.

I'm really only left with one option--find a job. I'm not giving up on App Evolved just yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Launch today and charge money?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, if only...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Kickstarter?

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried Kickstarter. It's not available to South African citizens.</comment></comment>


Crypto assets - <AUTHOR> What are the legal implications of running a crowd-sourced 'hedge fund' for digital assets? <comment><USER2> It sounds like you're implying there's no manager of your blockchain, so maybe a better term is unmanaged investment fund or securities pool. Tax implications would be a major subset of legal implications. Investment funds usually begin as limited liability partnerships, so that they can dividend to their members in accordance with various tax requirements. But there are other legal implications affecting digital assets. How do you deal with the inheritance of a member who's died or entered receivership? You might also find that being a member of the securities pool is more valuable than the assets required to do so (your sway on voting might be more valuable than what you'd get by cashing out); selling your membership would be a legal matter. My story: your securities pool may unmanaged by a particular human, but the legal status of a firm with no human oversight isn't well-tested. For example, I've setup a limited partnership with a charter oriented toward being managed entirely in software. In my state, an LLC is formed by one or more humans plus an agreed charter. A charter is usually quite boring, but mine explicitly states that the human partners' stakes may be bought out by the software when certain goals for continuity are achieved. In my state, an LLC is dissolved if more than 50% of its share leaves the company, typically when a partner dies. It is not clear whether an LLC with no more human partners is legally dissolved -- you may be able to fulfill your state's requirements for a limited liability partnership without a human partner. For example, your accounting services would be arranged by software, and the bills and bureaucracy could be handled without human intervention. When I took this charter to a bank, they had no problems setting me up, so long as a majority of my business didn't come from marijuana.</comment>


Ten Years in the Making, Nicholas Felton Files His Final Report - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcodesign.com/3052301/10-years-in-the-making-nicholas-felton-files-his-final-feltron-report <comment><USER2> I hope the best for him. When I saw him speak about these reports and his family life growing up, I was struck with the obsessive tension of it all. I suspect getting away from doing this will be a healthy decision.

</comment><comment><USER3> The option to order a printed copy of his reports always struck me as odd - especially considering that I typically really appreciate visualizations and admire the techniques used to display complex sets of data. But I guess when the entire focus of these visualizations is based around a single person to whom I have no connection, the output of his work seems like an exercise in documenting irrelevance - taken to an extreme.

<comment><USER4> If you've never held one of his reports in your hand, I highly recommend to find a friend who has one. They are incredible in details beyond the contents of the pages: the cutouts, binding, paper, and ink all chosen with care.

Felton's reports are works of art. Deeply personal works, like that of other artists. I don't think that makes it irrelevant.

His medium of data, charts, questions, and timelines is different from other artists, but one uniquely suited to our age.

I have two of his reports and am happy to keep them on my shelf, and to share them with others as a beautiful glimpse into another's world.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the response. Admittedly, I've never seen one first-hand, so perhaps that'd change my mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10394592](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10394592).</comment>


What's Happening with Twitter? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.twitter.com/2010/06/whats-happening-with-twitter.html <comment><USER2> Underlying schema or code changes that drastically affect the service's availability. In terms of mysql you are talking locked tables when there is a schema change. But then I dont know if they still use mysql, they were talking about a move to cassandra. At that scale it is never simple. If a change takes 30 seconds on your dev machine it is not going to be that way in production with a billion rows partitioned across multiple tables.

I am actually curious as to what this "deep" issue is they speak of.

You guys got any examples of infrastructure issues that could cause availability problems in a large scale environment?

<comment><USER3> Schema changes on big tables take hours/days depending on their size. You don't do this in production. What you normally do in a MySQL setup is to run a master-master with one active write master. This way you can run optimizations on one master and switch masters without putting your whole production system in jeopardy. Read more about Flickr's setup for more details.

There are tons of things that can go wrong in large scale environments (network issues, load balancing, slow code, databases starting to swap, databases starting to use a lot of IO etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Over the next two weeks, we may perform relatively short planned maintenance on the site. During this time, the service will likely be taken down."

Translation:

"If the site goes down over the next two weeks, just pretend it was all part of the plan."

<comment><USER5> Except they proceeded to indicate which channels you could listen to for notice of _planned_ downtime.</comment></comment>


Are medical records private? - <AUTHOR>

Somewhat rhetorical: Is the NSA or other government agency also slurping up our medical records?
I'm now out of the loop. This is a question I'm hoping someone is asking.
Back when I implemented health information exchanges, we often had live data feeds to the CDC. Which is a great idea. True, patient data is de-identified. But that's meaningless if you have enough data to mine.
Data feeds between participants were typically SCP or VPN. But I have no idea how much protection that offers. Having worked with hospitals, I suspect the ends points are the weak links.
Sitting here listening to a presentation on the Affordable Care Act and all the reforms, including the new patient protections, I'm reminded to wonder what level of surveillance is being done. <comment><USER2> In my research for my masters degree we found that the security of ehr systems was terrible (systems had Xss, SQL injection...pretty much the SANS top 25 most dangerous errors). In talking with a very large vendor (about 2 years ago now) we found that they were just starting to think about security issues, but were years behind best practices. (For more info [http://andrew- austin.com/publications](http://andrew-austin.com/publications)).

With the push towards health information exchanges and interoperability, I imagine systems are indeed wide open, not just to government agencies, but also random people walking hrough your hospital.</comment>


Solution for comment rage? South Koreans 2nd graders sing the netiquette song - <AUTHOR> http://www.gossipgamers.com/korean-kids-learn-online-manners-netiquette-song/

<comment><AUTHOR> By the way, this is part of a larger Frontline (PBS) episode on how our online lives change the way we exist and think as human beings. While it's a little over-serious, I recommend it.

View online at <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/></comment>


Ask HN: How can we prevent excessive force by police? - <AUTHOR> What steps can we take to build a safer society for everyone regardless of class, race, religion, gender, disability, or anything else?
I think that police departments open sourcing their policies would go a long way. Or wearing body cams in more situations.
What do you smart (non-cynical) internet people think? <comment><USER2> "The 50 Years of Crowd Control Research Police Are Ignoring" [https://slashdot.org/story/371676](https://slashdot.org/story/371676)

"New Era of Public Safety: An Advocacy Toolkit for Fair, Safe, and Effective Community Policing" (2019) [https://policing.civilrights.org/toolkit](https://policing.civilrights.org/toolkit)

[https://policing.civilrights.org/](https://policing.civilrights.org/)

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

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

Are there points in these resources that could be summarized here?

</comment><comment><USER3> Training and drilling to stay calm and de-escalate situations. Training on how to handle confused individuals or individual with mental illnesses.

Be better at working as an organisation and not rely on the action of a single cop. Change laws procedures so that persons of interest can still have hope and that being arrested does not equal to the end of life as they know it. Strangely enough, fair process and trials and forgiving laws help make it less likely that people being arrested attempt desperate violent actions against the cops. In return, it makes the cops job easier and reduces their likeliness to use excessive force.

Again, the probability of getting caught is the most effective deterrent to criminal activity , not the severity of the punishment.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wouldn't look to an industry that produced Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel, Dorsey, Kalanick, etc., for answers.

<comment><USER2> Who would you look to?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The US seems to have a fairly adversarial, legislative rules-based relationship between policing and people's rights to justice, if that makes any sense. This is just speaking as a layman observing from outside. (Contrast with other countries. There are many places which achieve even less control of their police, or the police serve corrupt interests, but there are also countries which seem to have more public consent and less excessive force).

So, the USA - the bill of rights, search warrants, Miranda rights. It's not exactly policing by consent, it's more like an understanding that the police will go to any lengths they feel necessary, so there need to be hard rules that completely invalidate the case against someone if breached.

I guess the same model can continue to be refined through the democratic process. Technology can play a part. One can imagine future laws that impose strict rules about body cams (e.g. that absence of a recording implies innocence, or that 'lost' footage carries a presumption of guilt in police brutality allegations). Ubiquitous surveillance, not to say it's a good thing, but if it's happening anyway, it should be useful in preventing excessive force by police too. Laws could be passed specifically enabling (and preventing treatment as a crime) various technological forms of monitoring of law enforcement by the public.

> What do you smart (non-cynical) internet people think?

I don't know how one would start to rip up American policing and produce a kindly institution that was accepted universally by the community. No-one can be that non-cynical. But I guess I'm non-cynical in thinking that there's still some mileage in democracy and the rule of law, and progress might still be made via the normal channels. Of which, by the way, protesting is a part.

</comment><comment><USER6> Accountability!!

Racism and abuse are cultural and deeply rooted, don't know how you change that without dismantling it. But abuse is learned and cheered upon, then is covered and rarely punished.

You have cases like a cop shooting with a machine-gun an unarmed teen and then not only going unpunished but retiring to cash in a milionary pension because of "PTSD".

<comment><USER7> I'd be careful about that PTSD statement. If the officer really has it from a duty related incident, then it would be best to retire. They could be a danger in that profession if they are "jumpy".

On a side note, the retirement requirements for non-medical retirement should be more stringent.

<comment><USER6> I'm talking about this case, the officer wasn't punished instead now has a huge pension for his traumatic experience [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ooa7wOKHhg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ooa7wOKHhg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Redesign police departments with separation of roles and responsibilities.

In most any other organization, especially ones where there aren't enough qualified workers, you don't have one main role where the entry level people and under performers are all doing the same work as seasoned veterans. You separate out roles, and entry level people do work that requires minimal responsibility and can inflict minimal damage.

You have a swat team, and they get called in when needed, but they don't get to decide when to jump into action, someone else decides that, and the swat team doesn't drive around looking for things to get involved in. There's no reason the shooters and the deciders need to be the same person.

Is there any reason a cop writing a traffic citation:

* Needs a gun?

* Needs to approach another car on foot?

* Needs to exit his own car at all?

What if there was a role for traffic cop, which is entry level, unarmed, where the cop never exits their own vehicle, and where the only job is to write a citation, but _not_ also to run warrants and try to search the citizen's car for illegal items?

If you had that role, the traffic cop isn't on edge, worried he might get shot in the face for pulling over a guy with warrants. The guy with warrants doesn't need to run, he just gets his citation and moves on.

Eventually technology will help enable this, say, once we have remote control drone cars to issue traffic citations.

Sure, there are tons of details to sort out, like a reliable system to identify drivers independent of the physical car (so there's no person-to- person interaction required to write a ticket), but I suspect this is an area where the motives are so misaligned that technology will have to show up which forces these kinds of forward progress. The same way people fought for women's rights for a long time, then the pill shows up and advances things forward by an order or magnitude.

<comment><AUTHOR> This makes a lot of sense.

Why does a cop have to prepare for the absolute worst case scenario when interacting with the everyday public?

The research (and the recent 538 article) show that, by the cop preparing for the absolute worst, it makes the other party feel disrespected ("He thinks I'm going to attack him?? Well..") and ironically, is much more likely to lead to a worst case scenario.

I'm not saying that cops as a whole shouldn't have guns, riot gear, or bulletproof vests. But those should only come out after being shown necessary in an interaction. Yes, this is likely to shift deaths initially to the side of police from the side of the general public. But overall, deaths should go down dramatically over time. Plus we'd live in a healthier society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Body cameras would be good. This would also need to be joined with some policy and law changes, such as amending or abolishing qualified immunity and requiring personal liability insurance.

Along these lines, it would also be good to dissolve or restrict the police union. The union protects bad cops. The goals of the union are in conflict with the interests of the community in these situations. Even FDR was against public unions.

They aren't going to release many their policies or tactics for opsec and efficacy purposes.

A good book (content-wise, maybe not execution-wise) is "We Get Confessions".

<comment><USER2> > _amending or abolishing qualified immunity and requiring personal liability > insurance._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity) (1967, 2005,)

What other professions (other than legislative civil servants) offer exemptions to personal and business liability?

<comment><USER7> The SCOTUS ruling that created qualified immunity only applies to government workers such as police and politicians, so the answer to your question would be "none".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Disolve Police Departments and let citizens organize new police force that they will trust.

<comment><USER7> This could be a disaster. Knowledge of the law and training in policing would be necessary to avoid chaos and deviation (further than we are already) from rule of law.

In theory the community already does this, but in a safer way - by electing mayors and sheriffs that share their beliefs. These leaders should be able to institute changes or appointment people within the rule of law.

<comment><USER2> Is due process by the justice system sufficient for responding to violations of rights?

How can bias in administering due process be addressed by criminal and civil prosecution?

Due process #UnitedStates: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_process#United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_process#United_States)

Use of force: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_force](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_force)

<comment><USER7> If due process and rule of law is not followed, then you will be violating the rights of the accused.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How FreshBooks Use Immutable Infrastructure Concepts to Manage GitHub Enterprise - <AUTHOR> https://www.disjoint.ca/posts/2015/11/26/a-framework-for-deployment-of-immutable-infrastructure <comment><USER2> Given you had to "meet at least the following requirements: It should recover from known AWS failure scenarios It should never lose our data It should be trivial to bring back to a known working state"

How exactly are you going to "never lose our data"? There was a fleeting mention of a snapshot but that protects only to last snapshot. Otherwise it missed to address the subject of guarding the data and its state.

The whole blog post is about spinning replacement node if "nodes in AWS can (and will!) go away in a moments notice". That's a very limited recovery case and even unlikely to be required.

If your instance is EBS based you can just stop/start it and it'll come up on a new hardware. You can automate it as easily as configuring cloudwatch alarm to do it for you. That's not an issue at all.

What you should really focus on is the case when EBS volume is gone or AZ/region is gone or data got corrupted. Spinning up new instances programmatically can be done through trove of different tools and hardly addresses your objectives. Also wanted to ask, given the subject, what's immutable about GHE deployment?

P.S. HN formatting sucks. I tried to re-arrange it a bit.

</comment><comment><USER3> At GitLab we're thinking about adding Atlas/Kubernetes deploy directly to GitLab to make this easier [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/3286](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3286)

I'm really interested to hear what other people think about this.

</comment><comment><USER4> Awkward time to see this on HN; my Freshbooks account appears to be down.</comment>


Rclone – rsync for cloud storage - <AUTHOR> http://rclone.org/ <comment><USER2> this tool is fantastic. I have a custom written script to unload pictures/movies from an SD card and it copies them to a date based directory structure.

I added this right into that workflow and now newly downloaded pictures are immediately backed up to a google storage nearline bucket. I haven't done it yet but I could also target my home NAS so I would have our photo archive in 3 places.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is the demoscene more alive in Europe than N. America? - <AUTHOR> I find demoscene code very interesting even if I can't fully understand most of it. I like the code golfing that goes into it to create some impressive artistic demos. Now what I've noticed is most of the demosceners tend to come from Europe, in particular the northern regions. How did the history of computing develop in Europe that gave way to a stronger demoscene than in North America (especially as US is home to many tech capitals of the world)? That is what I'm asking to find out here. <comment><USER2> I suspect it has to do with a combination of interest (passion) and compensation.

When I first entered this industry and earned substantially less I was really into producing open source and software demos without any hope of receiving a financial reward for it. I wanted to simply produce cool tools, learn improved automation techniques, and become a better developer. I believed that if I became a much better developer I could earn much more years later and also achieve far more interesting work. I had incentive. I still write open source software and I still enjoy it. My personal interest in software is really the only thing that keeps me from burning out.

Software developers make a lot of money in the US and Canada. Some areas of software development must work much harder than other areas just to achieve and retain employment. In my area of frontend development with JavaScript there are a lot of jobs that pay well and you don't have to be very good to get them. There is less incentive to really go above and beyond by writing new technologies to do amazing things.

In Europe developers make substantially less. There is the potential to make as much as their North American counter-parts but only if they are near the top of their profession. The incentive to self-improve and do cool things is absolutely there, because you have to work harder to earn that higher income. At some point a European developer also has to perform some level of self- reflection if the passion isn't there and realize they could be earning far more money working less hard in a different profession.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j5wgp7/who-killed-the- ame...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j5wgp7/who-killed-the-american- demoscene-synchrony-demoparty\\)

> _The threat of software copies was recognized at least as early as 1976, the > year Bill Gates wrote his infamous "open letter to hobbyists" bemoaning the > illegal distribution of Microsoft software, but it wasn't until the mid-80s > that laws were passed banning the practice. The crackdown on software piracy > was not evenly spread throughout Europe, however. Countries like the > Netherlands, Greece, Finland, Sweden, and Norway didn't have strict software > piracy laws, if they had any at all, which allowed the warez scene to > flourish there._

This is the hypothesis I've come to believe. Demoscene has always been tightly coupled with warez. In the United States, release groups had to go deep underground much sooner than their euro counterparts for operational security reasons.

If you were the feds back then, one of the ways to hunt a release group was to find its cracktro/demo authors who tended to operate a little more openly due to the larger demoscene. The release cells in scene groups would then cut ties with their own demo people for this very reason. Demo authors would then feel a lot less cool because they weren't as connected to the release elements of their own group anymore.

As of about 20 years ago, release elements of euro groups began operating under equally strict security regimens. I think in large part it came down to the fact their demoscene had more time to grow roots and flourish than the American scene.

</comment><comment><USER4> As an American that has been living in Europe for 5+ years, I'd say this: American culture, for better or worse, is fundamentally pragmatic. There is an undercurrent of "but how does this make money/get users/impact the world?" to basically every activity, software development included. Creating stuff just for artistic reasons still happens (like demoscene), but it takes a backseat to a focus on industry.

</comment><comment><USER5> Europe has over twice the population of the United States, that could explain some of it.

<comment><USER6> Fair enough but another factor is that Europe in the 1980s was the height of techno/rave culture and the demoscene fed off of that. Also, PCs didn't catch on so fast and 8-bit machines (C-64s, Atari STs) and the Amiga stayed popular in Europe longer providing an accessible, colorful flower bed from which the demoscene bloomed.

One more factor you shouldn't discount: In the U.S., drinking age is 21 and going for a weekend "rager" in another country over a long weekend isn't a thing here. Once you're ensconced in university a couple of years, staying up all night to code a bunch of spinning eye balls over a warp field holds less allure.</comment></comment>


Zombie VCs - <AUTHOR> http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/04/zombie-vcs/ <comment><USER2> Yes -- there are many Zombie VCs. And glad to see Danielle doing this stuff but you have to be careful in drawing these conclusions.

First, many funds don't do Series A's. That is their strategy. At the top of the spreadsheet are several funds that are mid, later, growth and private- equity stage firms (IVP, Warburg). Them not doing Series As has less to do with their Zombie status then them adhering to their strategy.

While there are other issues with the data as highlighted below, this issue of fund strategy is a critical one so wanted to highlight.

Also, picking short timeframes of 3 months or 1 month isn't a great test as funds have 7-10 year lifetimes. A couple of months doesn't make for a trend.

Again, we think there is value in highlighting this data as there tends to only be good news reported but just would caution against errant conclusions.

Notes: I'm one of the co-founders of CB Insights and our firm tracks this data. We actually help LPs (the investors in VC funds) identify VCs doing poorly or who appear to be the walking dead. But it's messy as hell.

More on that here for folks interested - [http://www.cbinsights.com/team- blog/investor-analytics-zombi...](http://www.cbinsights.com/team- blog/investor-analytics-zombie-venture-capital/) (warning: part informational and promotional)

<comment><USER3> Another great thing about Danielles's post is that this will hopefully incentivise funds/investors to update their public information on databases such as CrunchBase. I'm pretty sure some investors are not happy to see their name on that list, not because they are "zombies" but due to a simple case of not updating their transactional/deal information.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure if higher volume of people connecting with VCs is necessarily their goal - a quality over quantity thing.

<comment><USER3> Agree, but public perception is important to most investors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interestingly, more than a handful of the funds listed in the list of zombies are life science and healthcare-related funds.

As someone running a biotech startup, this is rather relevant to me...

It occurs to me that the cutoff of 6 months since last round may be a bit short for the life science world, where funds tend to make fewer, bigger investments with lower frequency.

It's also interesting to note that a few strategic venture funds are listed (Novartis stuck out at me) and that these guys might not fit the same mod, given that they invest with eye on relevance to the mothership.

With those two caveats in mind, there are also some indicators to suggest that early stage investing in biotech/life-science startups has been slowing down over the last few years. There was a big of a boom prior to this, but it's fairly widely acknowledged that there haven't been good returns for the billions of dollars poured into early-stage biotech companies. There's now a bias toward larger series A's on slightly lower risk startups...

<comment><USER6> I would be happy to make you another list that has 12 month cutoff, would that help? We were discussing last night whether health/biotech funds have a different cycle than web tech, would love to know your thoughts on that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Danielle, I enjoy your posts (and there have been a lot of them on HN of late) but question how much faith you want to put into Crunchbase. It suffers a bit from "Wikipedia disease" which is that its sort of self selecting and the quality of the information in it varies quite a bit. A great place to look for symptoms but I don't know how much faith you can put in conclusions drawn from it's data.

<comment><USER8> I can totally vouch for the lack of curating that is done on Crunchbase data because a couple of months ago I had people congratulating me on the 1.2M seed round that my startup had raised ... my startup that at the time did not even exist as a company yet much less had it been looking for investment.

I respect what Danielle is doing and her post have been interesting lately(leads me to wondering what the pivot for referly is going to be) but I definitely would not solely get data from places like Crunch base. They have some competitors out there who curate their data MUCH better but they also happen to charge for access to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _In the same way at a VC will often send you to an associate because they're "too nice" to say no._

Thats one thing that bothers me in business, is the "social contract" of avoiding appearing abrasive or aloof, so everyone tells each other white lies to make everyone feel better. I'm not referring specifically to VCs (I have almost no experience with VCs). Contrast that with somebody like PG who has a reputation for being blunt, but also being constructive and generous with his time.

Accountability belongs on both sides of the table is for everyone's benefit, and Danielle is right to call attention to this.

<comment><USER10> We're also in a business world where we can't be upfront with our insecurities, worries, personal failures (unless they somehow lead to you becoming Herculean thereafter), self-doubt, etc.

No, it is not healthy, and imo it contributes significantly to the detriment of our mental health.

<comment><USER11> Business health, however, thrives on information asymmetry. "How the VC really feels," is just another instance of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The list doesn't seem that accurate. Some of these "VCs" are actually angel groups that don't do Series A, other than follow ons (Webb Investment Network).

Others have started Angel funds (Ron Conway) and no longer invest personally.

<comment><USER13> Then there's outfits like Tiger Global, which doesn't do series A's... and I have no idea what Charles Schwab is doing on this list.

<comment><USER6> All of this data is from Crunchbase, and the column D "Date of Most Recent Series A Investment" indicates they participated in the round though they might not have lead.

<comment><USER14> You hold up "all this data is from Crunchbase" like it's a shield, and basically say the same about your Alexa web numbers for YC start-ups - don't blame me, blame my methodology!

Why not try and come up with a more robust method than pouring over CrunchBase and appending "Na ni na ni boo boo VCs, if this data is wrong, contact me,"

<comment><USER6> It's not a shield, it's a sign. I'm working with limited public data trying to create something new and I'm working on improving it but it takes time - making this post alone was a labor of love and I realize this kind of analysis still has a long way to go. One of the best ways to get data to make these lists better has been to publish what is available and get feedback on what is wrong, where to look, who to ask etc.

When I make these posts suddenly people start returning my emails requesting data.

It also occurs to me that we have no problem judging and speculating about startups based on nothing more than a TechCrunch post with extremely limited public data. It's funny that it is so much less socially acceptable to do this with investors. Maybe I can change that.

<comment><USER15> Going public saying "don't work with these funds" and then telling them you'll take them off the s!!t list when they share their private data with you sounds an awful lot like what in other walks of life people would call extortion.

I have a list of everyone who has paid their credit card bills in the last several months (the list only covers people who live in my apartment.) You are not on it. Is it okay if I put up a public website calling you a deadbeat? If you don't want to be on it, just send me a copy of your bank statements.

My firm (Neu Venture Capital) is on the list, despite doing a Series A a few months ago, a Series B last month, and three seed deals in the last six months. O'Reilly Alphatech is on there, despite raising a $85 million Fund III six months ago. Quotidian is doing deals, Chris Sacca is doing deals, etc. Crunchbase data is incomplete. Saying people have done something based on it is relatively safe; saying people have not done something based on it is scurrilous.

[edit: the second paragraph is a hyperbolic analogy. I don't have such a list and I wouldn't use it that way if I did. That was my point, that it would be wrong to make that sort of implication based on data you know is incomplete.]

<comment><USER16> Comparing this to extortion is quite a bit of hyperbole. You're talking about one journalist, publishing a list on a website... not a gang of armed thugs standing in your store going "this sure is a nice shop, would be a real cryin' shame if sumthin were to happen to it..."

Is dmor asking for money, or trying to strong arm anyone into doing anything? No, dmor is just reporting based on the information she has available. That it might be incomplete or inaccurate is worthy of pointing out, but it's a HUGE stretch to invoke an analogy to extortion.

<comment><USER15> <https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman>

You are misdefining extortion.

<comment><USER15> "...but additionally, in its formal definition, means the infliction of something such as pain and suffering or making somebody endure something unpleasant." [1]

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extortion>, op cit.

<comment><USER16> The full sentence from the above quote:

 _Exaction refers not only to extortion or the unlawful demanding and obtaining of something through force,[1] but additionally, in its formal definition, means the infliction of something such as pain and suffering or making somebody endure something unpleasant._

So we've gone from talking about "extortion", a well known criminal offense with an everyday, commonplace meaning, to quibbling about an alternate definition of "exaction" which may sometimes be used synonymously with "extortion". If you meant to specifically talk about "exaction" then why not say so in the first place?

And in _either_ case, I stand by my assertion that referring to dmor's article as such is a tremendous exercise in hyperbole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Isn't this like the third blog post from daniellemorril.com within the last 2 weeks making it to HN front page ?

Also -- it seems obvious that while the author has tools to crawl web sites and pull data into a CSV, it seems dubious that the author spent anytime in running a manual sanity check before presenting her findings. For example, "O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures" and "O'Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures" are the same thing.

<comment><USER6> Author here. I have presented Crunchbase data as is without any "cleaning" but I assure you I have run a sanity check on the companies involved, and emails are pouring in from founders confirming they have experienced wasted time with investors on this list. I am happy to de-dupe those two items on the list and check for others, and will continue to fix any other errors people report.

<comment><USER18> Do you think you would get a similar volume of emails if you posted a list of VCs selected at random? I suspect so. Many are called but few are chosen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Publishing the list feels unprofessional and manipulative, especially considering:

> When I make these posts suddenly people start returning my emails requesting > data.

Even as a causal observer of the VC market, I was able to spot a lot of false positives in that list.

<comment><USER20> Often "publish-then-correct" reaches the truth faster, asymptotically, than waiting to get everything right before publishing.

Call it "Minimum Viable Truthiness", if you'd like.

<comment><USER19> It just felt to me like retribution for this:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5491293>

Where I'm guessing that refer.ly is trying to raise their own series a and possibly getting frustrated.

That said - entrepreneurs should be more concerned with growing a business than making friends with VCs, so more power to danielle if this is how she ends up making it work.

<comment><USER6> It's certainly not retribution, I posted that story and I think it's interesting - and then it turned into a TC story!

Refer.ly recently pivoted - in fact every stat about our business is on the front page of our site. We aren't raising Series A, we have ~18 months of runway left at our current burn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Brilliant. Takes guts to call out VCs like this. Now, I don't think your 6-month time period is the right data point to measure if they are a zombie or not. There are a lot of different reasons why VCs take short investment breaks, and the 6-month period does not allow for that. I think 18 months is more in line, because it allows you to see more of the failed investments and results overall. A zombie VC should be defined with a ratio of failed (money lost) VS. successful (money gained) deals. If they have a lower than average ratio then we can say that their confidence (and the confidence of their bankers) is down, and they are operating in Zombie mode.

But I'm probably wrong, because I am a value investor.

<comment><USER6> I think that is another valuable thing to measure in terms of overall success and direction the fund is going, and I'd certainly like to. I was hoping this would help founders who are trying to raise Series A right now figure out where to focus first - but I agree taking a longer view would give a more complete picture. It just needs a bit more math and data, but I'm noodling on it.

<comment><USER21> I do agree that it helps, and accomplishes your goal. Though I don't think VCs will applaud your efforts too much (well, some may). They also go through slumps, and unlike entrepreneurs, they don't like to talk about it. It hurts their credibility due to how bankers always want to bet on the lucky horse.

<comment><USER22> Do we need to pander to VCs? I'm also not sure that your assertion that it hurts their credibility is true.

Fred Wilson has publicly admitted himself that he hasn't led a deal all year. I don't think that affects his reputation. If anything, I think people applaud him for his transparent efforts.

<comment><USER21> The VC industry works like stocks. Its more what people are believing than actual hard numbers. Speculation is the name of the game. And speculation is driven by hearsay. So, that is why _traction_ is a popular term these days, and why "founders" hate to talk about actual money earned. You can hear them say _But with more investment we can get more traction and thus leverage the market towards using our product._ Which is wall street talk for _We heard $some_company is going to close a huge deal. We can't say when exactly, but its going to happen. We want to leverage the current stock price to gain a couple of extra points when the sale goes through._

Smoke and mirrors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You're relying on Crunchbase data? It appears (now I could be wrong) that even the Crunchbase data on your own company is wrong. Crunchbase shows referly raised $2m. Is that correct? If the Crunchbase data on your own company is wrong, how can you possibly rely on that data to evaluate other VCs/companies?

</comment><comment><USER24> I really enjoy these posts by Danielle. For entrepreneurs head-deep in product and not at the fundraising stage yet, these posts are really informative and paint a quick picture of the venture scene. Kind of wish there was a dedicated site that pulled data like this in from Crunchbase, etc. on an ongoing basis and produced reports/graphs. Side project idea maybe?

<comment><USER25> I've been building something like that at startupstats.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > _In the same way at a VC will often send you to an associate because they're > "too nice" to say no,_

I'm going to guess that the author has never raised significant money (>$10M) from VCs. The quoted sentence fragment speaks volumes on a lack of understanding of the VC animal kingdom.

<comment><USER27> I don't understand this. I haven't quite raised 10MM in a round at a company I actually cofounded, but I came close to that number, and that 'dmor sentence didn't so much ring true as seem banal and obvious. Associates are who you talk to when VC's want to blow you off. And VC's rarely say no.

<comment><USER28> I've been an entrepreneur. And I've been the low man on the VC totem pole. If I'm the only one from my firm at an event or conference, you want to see me. If you're coming to our offices, you don't.

<comment><USER27> I mean, I'd want to talk to you at a conference anyways, because you're fun to talk to. I'm not trying to be dismissive of people who happen to be associates. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Or they aren't interested in the deals/valuations that they're seeing?

As a former investor, an entrepreneur that thinks he/she understands my business better than I do is a big red flag.

<comment><USER30> Kudos to Danielle for trying to pierce the veil. Feel free to challenge her data and analysis with better data and better analysis.

<comment><USER31> I guess if that's what you're interested in, this could be what you're looking for... though this is a lot like picking stocks based on price patterns: It gives you a phenomenally narrow view based solely on results with absolutely no insight into how or why things are happening or not happening.

I can see how this information, _were it in any way insightful_ , would be useful to a lot of people. However, not only are the criteria very arbitrary, the list is being built from admittedly incomplete and/or incorrect data, and the opt-out-of-my-public-shaming approach is disingenuous at best.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This post merely highlights an important fact many entrepreneurs who are looking to raise capital ignore: you're not in control of your own destiny. If you can't move forward in building your business without investor money, you're forced to spend more time and energy on the fundraising game than product, sales, marketing, and business development.

The data presented here may or may not be accurate or interesting, and the conclusions drawn from it may or may not be valid, but regardless, worrying more about the state of VC firms than your own company is a losing proposition.

<comment><USER16> _...but regardless, worrying more about the state of VC firms than your own company is a losing proposition._

This, a thousand times this. I know I've ranted about this a lot lately, but I think (some|many|most) entrepreneurs would be better served to focus on how to get customers and fund their companies through organic revenue growth, rather than climbing on the "funding merry-go-round" right away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think it's a major flaw to this analysis that alot of those firms specialize in non-series A financing and only do occasional series A investments. Calling them zombie VCs is inaccurate and makes no sense. Examples: SV Angel, Charles Schwab, Warburg Pincus, Tiger Global, etc.

That, plus the fact that Crunchbase is incomplete to begin with, as others have pointed out.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm pretty sure Ron Conway is not a zombie VC.

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't be so sure. In addition to Ron's stats shown on the list, SV Angel also has not participated in a Series A since January 2013, but was on a regular 1-2 Series A deal a month pattern before that (in addition to tons of angel). <http://www.crunchbase.com/financial-organization/sv-angel>

With David Lee moving to LA and Ron Conway much more involved in politics, I'll be watching

<comment><USER13> I thought SV Angel does mostly seed rounds, not series A... seems to me alot of the names on this list are firms that specialize in non-series A deals but might have occasionally thrown a series A into the mix. Flaw in the methodology, I think.

<comment><USER34> > might have occasionally thrown a series A into the mix

dmor said:

> on a regular 1-2 Series A deal a month pattern before that

I think that's enough that it could lead some founders to look to SV Angel for Series A funding. It may be only a fraction of what they did, but it's still useful for people to be informed of this, because Ron Conway didn't announce his intentions in the matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Danielle, Firstly....you have more balls that many guys I know. Kudos to you for doing this.

As Obama said, Sunshine is the best form of disinfectant. High time we get a complete glimpse into the state of VC. Who is bullshitting everybody and who is not. Who is earning their keep and who is living off the exhorbitant mgmt fees they charge LPs.

On behalf of all entrepreneuers, thanks for starting that process.

</comment><comment><USER36> We are seeing more and more Zombie VCs as funds are imploding and partners are being recycled into new funds. Ultimately, they are investment professionals such as Samurais are ronins when they loose their master. I think startups should keep in touch with them because the Zombie VC will reappear either as a VC or working for a cool internet company.

</comment><comment><USER37> This could be a potentially valuable resource but the definition of zombie seems to ignore that at least some of the investors on this list do more seed deals than anything else. It should filter for that appropriately.

</comment><comment><USER38> Applaud the effort, despite the data problems. In its current state I consider it more interesting than useful, but future versions could clearly be massively useful.

One thought: since many reg d filings are purposefully delayed by 1-2 months to control timing (and press) it might be more effective to analyze the time period of 9 mo ago to 3 mo ago.

May also be useful to add levels of caution (yellow is no deals in the 6 mo period, red is no deals in 12+).

Also, factoring in deviation from normal behavior would be a wonderful addition (and would remove some of the folks without much data represented)

</comment><comment><USER39> I'd say that most of the mistakes in this are pointing at Crunchbase not being updated. Some of these firms in the top 10 have had several investments in the past 6 months as reported by Techcrunch...

</comment><comment><USER40> In my experience, if you want reliable info (NOT Crunchbase nor companies who just crawl/spider them and resell it to you, you know who you are right below) use PrivCo, what I use in VC. It's reliable, confirmed with the VC firms and the startup founders. Rarely find anything off (crunchbase if way off as all the HN crew already has figured out).

Just do a search for VC firms and specify what date YOU want their last investment to be...everyone has different critera. If you think if it's been more than 6 months it's a "zombie VC" (I personally disagree, because without getting technical depends on age of the fund...a new 10-year fund invests most of its money in the first 2 years in a nutshell) then pick 6 months on PrivCo VC firm search for last investment. If you think it's 12 months search for 12 months. 18 months, search for that. Don't go by this nonsense list with arbitrary 13 month "cutoff", especially when many of these deals aren't announced - so they do have deals as evidenced from fellow HN crew discussion below missing, so the "no deal in 13 months" is wrong to begin with - you need a dedicated firm like PrivCo (or DowJones VentureSource) to diligently find those deals day after day. Just 1 missing VC deal for a firm throws off the entire "13 month zero deals" input there = output worthless.

Long way of saying search for venture capital firms in my humble opinion using PrivCo and the search criteria: last investment must be within X months, plus must have made investments in the precise sector you want, etc. Then you get the results, export to Excel, and it even has updated names and direct emails of the partners. It's a beauty. Might be others I haven't used too but this is what I personally use: <http://www.privco.com/investors>

Jake

</comment><comment><USER41> I wish there was a way this information could be used to update thefunded.com (assuming they're consistent)

</comment><comment><USER18> This post goes to show why journalistic standards exist, and that bloggers are not journalists.

</comment><comment><USER42> I think there is a market for quantified version of TheFunded.com. But the data must be much better quality than CrunchBase and curated by ex-VCs and not by active entrepreneurs.

</comment><comment><USER13> Maybe this is evidence of the series A crunch more than it is evidence of zombies... some of the names on that list are not what you normally think of in the zombie context.

</comment><comment><USER43> I don't see how PE firms such as Warburg Pincus/Tiger Global belong on this list.

<comment><USER6> Warburg Pincus participated in a $26M Series A in CrowdStrike in February 2012. Tiger Global participated in a $10M Series A in BelezanaWeb.com.br in May 2012 and a $8M Series A in Olacabs in April 2012.

<comment><USER44> Have they participated in any more? It seems like one off investments by giant PE firms probably aren't helpful to any startup that doesn't already have a personal connection to those firms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I love these posts, please keep them coming.</comment>