Is It Time for the US to Drag Jobs Out of Silicon Valley and into the Heartland? - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/innovation/is-it-time-for-the-us-government-to-drag-tech-jobs-out-of-silicon-valley-and-into-the-heartland <comment><USER2> Silicon Valley is a place where you have lots of smart people because the smart people all go there because that's where the other smart people are. You can get them in a room and they can figure out amazing things.

It's kind of like Los Alamos for nuclear physics. Sure, you can put a team together elsewhere, but it's never going to be quite the same because those happenstance conversations won't have the right people in them.

Let's say for a minute that you could break this thing up into dispirate groups. What's the advantage? You'll be splitting up the best team ever created and hoping they somehow reconstitute. Sounds dangerous to me.

<comment><USER3> _> What's the advantage?_

More affordability for the people in those groups, and thus less separation of tech people from members of other sectors and socio-economic levels.

It's good to have _enough_ people concentrated in one region to form great teams and give people options and mobility. But, beyond that, it starts becoming a negative to tech people and non-tech people.

SF and Seattle are _insanely_ expensive. Most of my friends here in Seattle are in tech, and over the past few years, I've watched most of my non-tech friends get priced out and be forced to leave the area.

I don't think it's good for individuals or humanity as a whole for people to spend all of their time in a bubble surrounded only by people like themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some long time Silicon Valley residents would be thrilled with this - like the Cupertino planning commissioner who opposes building more housing for Apple employees because those engineers will turn high schoolers into prostitutes.

[https://twitter.com/HousingValley/status/1154781703262498816](https://twitter.com/HousingValley/status/1154781703262498816)

You can't make this stuff up.

<comment><USER5> Wow just Wow where some of these apple engineers be "coloured gentlemen"

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm curious how discrimination economics affects the relative lack of investment in some of these areas. Particularly for transgender people and immigrants (a larger group).

If immigrants/engineers are getting murdered in hate crimes in your city, why should the whole country pay to subsidize the fact that your city is an unpleasant place to work and live?

</comment><comment><USER7> There is a pay problem. In the heartland there are lots of employers that think $75K is too much for a senior engineer. My junior engineer starting salary was $55K in 2000 which would be _more_ after inflation adjustment than what many will offer. Lower cost of living doesn't make up for being short changed.

<comment><USER8> Salaries in "the heartland" have gone up quite a bit in recent years. Have seen this first hand as a startup hiring locally in a smaller college town in this region. I think remote work has had a big impact on forcing local companies to be competitive. It's a net positive

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> We do have a "boomlet"-ing tech scene in St Louis, MO and metro areas in the surrounding states. The thing that crimps the growth is access to risk capital. Companies here had to list with a bay area address, just to get a look from the VCs.

What the govt can do is fill the role of VCs and make good returns in pure financial terms as well. Missouri has a small fund that's been very successful, but the new GOP governor cut funding as soon as he got in.

<comment><USER10> Silicon Valley is risk adverse and unwilling to invest in firms outside of its own geographical and cultural bubble. So perhaps that's what the article should have mentioned, one angle that could involve government funding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It doesn't seem like anyone has actually RTFA. The Brookings contenders for the next Silicon Valley aren't random farming towns in the Great Plains. If you look at the chart at the bottom they include Madison, Minneapolis, Albany, Portland, Nashville, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Charlotte. A lot of these cities are already up and coming to the point of rapidly escalating rents.

<comment><USER11> Their criteria unintentionally selected for metros with a restricted housing supply, by including "only those that saw population or real GDP growth slower than the nation as a whole". That can indicate a slow-growing economy, but can also indicate that you're not building enough new housing for population to grow at or above the national rate. Portland and Nashville are obvious examples here - nobody who has been there recently believes that they are struggling, but they've been adding population slowly because they're not building enough housing to meet demand.

<comment><USER10> You're not wrong, but my overall point is that it seems like a lot of people in this thread are arguing against the prospect of moving to intolerant backwater villages, whereas most of the ones that Brookings listed are already hot secondary destinations. And many of them aren't even located in the Midwest! Guess IEEE was referring to basically everywhere not on the coast when they say "the Heartland".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Its relevant that the US DoD contracts helped build Silicon Valley in the first place. It makes sense for the government to encourage firms to other regions. [https://steveblank.com/secret- history/](https://steveblank.com/secret-history/)

</comment><comment><USER13> The crux of this argument is that federal funding should be involved, which is what got Silicon Valley started so it can have some merit.

Silicon Valley's culture is hard to replicate, and by culture its just the consolidation of venture capital firms and the aspirations of liquid wealthy people who want to play angel investor themselves. Would newly wealthy tech aficionados in the midwest really stay in opioid land with its extremes of temperatures, or would they just get the condo in south beach Miami and disappear?

Having one local Warren Buffett means only insurance and real estate plays get funded, as an example. Having only a couple Warren Buffetts means you get some people that "only invest in what they know" and aren't willing to learn anything.

You really need a market of venture capital, run by people that got rich there. So pumping an area with federal funding is a much better step than just slapping a "Silicon" label on the nearest geographic formation.

<comment><USER14> I live in Ohio, and I would stay here. I'd rather contribute to my community than abandon it.

<comment><USER13> The only reason this article is trying to get the federal government is involved is because more economic outliers say that then actually do

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> PG's essay from 2007 seems relevant: [http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> I feel like these places outside of Silicon Valley would run into many of the same problems if a bunch of high paying tech jobs were dropped into these places, such as steep increases in housing prices (although still cheaper than the SF Bay Area) and resistance of current residents to change/new housing. You take a look at places receiving an influx of new well-paid residents, like Boise, and you can see that these problems are also cropping up there.

</comment><comment><USER14> The "eligibility index" here is kind of a bullshit number. R&D per capita doesn't make sense as a measurement to begin with, and even if it did it doesn't account of population density and the artificial nature of the borders of some of these places. Some cities have more or less of their suburbs within their borders, which is going to drastically affect those R&D per capita numbers.

Overall though I think the concept is very good.

</comment><comment><USER17> Smart company leaders are already doing this by hiring remote worker teams. They don't need to "drag" anyone. FAANG are woefully behind the curve in this regard and would rather waste money building office empires in big cities. Nobody wants to relocate their entire life across the country away from family/friends just for some BS tech job that could just as easily be done from home.

<comment><USER18> The "office empires" make perfect sense at the size of FAANGs. When you need to hire that many people every year, many of them who have never worked in "the real world" before, how do you do the best to ensure they all have access to knowledge, resources, support, and oversight? Not everyone is good at self directed work from home. That doesn't mean they can't be an outstanding employee. Hiring is expensive and if you can avoid having major churn in employees you'll save quite a bit of money.

On top of that, being a major employer in a city gives your company sizable clout when it comes to lobbying the local government. Don't like the new tax plan? It will probably work out in your favor to let the city know that it would really hurt hiring and salaries at the biggest employer in the city. Heck if it hurts enough, you might even have to move to that nearby competitor city who is offering all those sweet tax breaks. You don't want to but it's the only responsible thing to do for all of your employees. It would be a shame to see a bunch of those employees leave the city and cause housing prices to drop for all the rest of the citizens. What's that? You're reconsidering that tax bill? I knew you'd make the right choice for your constituents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The government shouldn't invest billions in proping up existing or new cities.. it should spend time reversing ISP regional monopolies and giving citizens choice on internet access.

The barrier to entry of a high tech job sector is primarily internet connectivity. You can't run a web server out of your house if your ISP doesn't allow it.. or if the top speed is 3Mbps. Sure, you could push stuff to a third party, but that increases development costs (in dollars and knowledge). And if you're doing a lot of data pushes, a 256Kb upload speed will be painful if you're pushing a 90MB container up to the cloud.

IT people flock to areas that have internet. It was a requirement both times I moved that there's >25Mbps high-cap wired internet. I would NEVER move to a place with less. I would be eager to move to a place that offers gigabit fiber that I could run a server behind (I mostly do cloud work, but I do enjoy having some at-home services).

<comment><USER20> You do realize we have internet in the rest of the country, right? I get over 150 Mbps regularly at my house with Comcast. Upload is around 3Mbps. But I could change to Comcast business to get symetric at my house. Or I could colocate in any number of DCs in my area. Or I could move to another neighborhood and get USI Fiber[1] for about $100/mo. I don't because I don't want to move from the current neighborhood I am in.

Internet access may suck in many places, but not everywhere. Don't assume that you need to be in SF to get good internet. Most metropolitian areas in the US have good internet.

[1] [https://usinternet.com/fiber/coverage- map/](https://usinternet.com/fiber/coverage-map/)

<comment><USER21> This happens even within the Bay Area. After going from Comcast Business cable to Sonic gigabit fiber in San Francisco I can never go back. It's like going from an HDD to an SSD for the first time. They both technically do the same thing, people argue online if the speed difference really matters, but it's the _latency_ difference that makes it so amazing. I get 2ms pings now. It makes the network mentally invisible in a way that's hard to describe without experiencing.

<comment><USER20> Don't get me wrong, I would love fiber. USI has been laying down fiber across Minneapolis at a very fast rate over the last 10 years. I think almost half the city is covered now. But I really like my neighborhood and I don't want to move. I am sure USI will get to me eventually, but it will take time and my road will be expensive due to being on a hill above the street level.

<comment><USER21> Absolutely, and that's why good access shouldn't be so concentrated. My comparison to San Francisco was in the sense that it's difficult to find good and equitable and affordable residential access in the country's tech capital much less across the vast rural areas inland.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The criteria the Brookings paper used to determine eligibility doesn't make sense. Specifically this bit:

"Looking next at the remaining top 20 metro areas with the most innovation sector jobs, only those that saw population or real GDP growth slower than the nation as a whole since 2010 are considered eligible to become designated growth centers. By dint of that, cities such as Raleigh, N.C., Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Austin are set aside because they are already self- sustaining superstars. They are safe bets for any new tech graduate looking for a job or any tech firm looking at add a few hundred jobs somewhere. Allowing these places to be eligible would simply reinforce existing spatial imbalances."

This decision disqualifies growing Sun Belt metros including Austin, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta from inclusion, _specifically because they are already growing_. The result is a list that is biased towards metros in the northeast and midwest, which are shrinking for a variety of reasons, not strictly due to job opportunities.

This has two problems:

1\. It sets the program up for failure: Targeting shrinking metros means that the policy intervention needs to offset existing decline before it can demonstrate any positive growth. This is not easy! There are lots of public programs already targeting these metro areas (particularly state-level programs), and they are still shrinking.

2\. It makes it very unlikely that the program would develop a new "superstar" tech city comparable to NYC, because you've already excluded the most probable candidates.

Adding some regional balance for fairness and (valid) political concerns is a good idea, but a program that proposes to subsidize growth in Chicago and Minneapolis while excluding Atlanta, Dallas, and Raleigh-Durham seems neither fair nor sensible.

</comment><comment><USER22> Keep piling big budget infrastructure like subways into existing cities seems like a dead end, you push the living cost ever higher, concentrating workers ever more into city centers, congestion, then more big budget infrastructure, this is just a vicious cycle.

If electric vehicles are the future, young people shouldn't be afraid to creat their own new cities with scattered companies and minimum infrastructure investment, you only need roads and charging stations. Cheap land make for cheap houses and low living cost, in fact, isn't this what their fathers did to achieve the American dream life young people nowadays so pine for?

This seem to be the only way the American dream can still be realized.

<comment><USER23> Cars require too much land area per person. Two dedicated parking spaces is only scratching the surface. There's gas stations, repair shops, dealers, and of course the actual roads. By the time you carve out enough space for these, sprawl is necessary, and horrible traffic is unavoidable.

Personal cars are a failed experiment and a total aberration from historically successful modes of human development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Many great comments on this thread but I, a sikh immigrant who wears a turban, would rather leave the US than live anywhere except for the valley or NYC. Comments on this thread address everything from internet speed to "gov intervention is bad" but fail to miss a very important point - US tech workforce has a lot of immigrants and cities outside the list mentioned in the article are actively hostile to immigrants.

It would be very difficult to build tech hubs without making them friendlier towards an immigrant workforce.

I spent 6 days in Houston visiting a friend, here's what I remember from the trip:

\- Random airport check in a private room (check) \- Called random names more times in 6 days than in my entire life (check) \- Stared down actively in every bar I went to (check)

Imagine being on an evening out, people staring at you trying to figure out "what" you are and knowing that they may be carrying a gun on them. Silicon valley (and NYC) is a place where its okay to be whoever you are, and that is something government intervention can't inject no matter how hard they try.

I hope my comment doesn't come off as offensive, just trying to provide an important perspective which I believe the article misses.

<comment><USER25> This is an important issue, though I'd like to present the opposite experience. Only a small fraction of the country lives in New York or SF, but the US is among the top countries in the world for inclusive attitudes: [https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/...](https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2018-06/the- inclusiveness-of-nationalities-ipsos-global-advisor.pdf). For inclusiveness of naturalized citizens, it's #1 by a large margin. (This is based on surveys asking people like whether they would consider a naturalized citizen a "real American" or "real German" or whatever. For that question, 76% of Americans answered "yes" versus 13% answering "no." In Italy, it was 41% "yes" to 36% "no." Incidentally, also do pretty well on LGBT inclusiveness, having a higher net "yes" score than Spain, Italy, Germany, or the U.K.—which together comprise more than half the EU.)

That's consistent with my experience as a Bangladeshi immigrant. I grew up in a DC suburb in the early 1990s, before that area became diverse. A few remarks aside, I've always felt welcome, including in rural parts of Virginia, Illinois, Georgia, etc. I was on a plane to Dallas a few months ago. My seat mate was delicately trying to figure out my ethnicity. I explained I was Bangladeshi, and he didn't know what that was. Then we had a very good conversation about how had really gotten into Indian food, and had put together a tandoor. Speaking for myself, I'd rather live in Houston or Kansas City or Pittsburgh than anywhere in the coasts.

Also, where would I go, besides back to Bangladesh? You think the Berlin tech scene is more welcoming than the Salt Lake City tech scene? Maybe people will not say anything uncomfortable or offensive. But a Bangladeshi immigrant can become American, and people will recognize that as substantive and not merely a euphemism. But he'll never become German, or Japanese, or French. The United States elected a son of an immigrant President. Not just New York and California, but Wisconsin and Michigan and Iowa. That's never happened in Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Spain, or Italy, or any EU country that I'm aware of.

I don't say this to diminish anyone's experience. But I think to the extent that people on the coasts are wondering what the rest of America is like, they get a balanced picture.

<comment><USER10> And even in the conservative South, you see Desis getting elected to governor.

> That's never happened in Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Spain, or > Italy, or any EU country that I'm aware of.

Ireland.

<comment><USER26> Bobby Jindal never identified that way nor did Haley.

<comment><USER25> I agree that neither identify as "desi" but it's worth unpacking that a bit. Both are the children of immigrants. (Jindal's mother was pregnant with him in India before coming to the U.S. Both had two wedding ceremonies (Catholic and Hindu for Jindal, Sikh and Methodist for Hailey.) Both have discussed their parents' immigrant background publicly. Obviously, neither presents as white.

In fact, they have a very common and very American immigration story. Even as children of first-generation immigrants living in the south, it was so easy for them to assimilate that they grew up identifying as "American" more than "Indian-American." This is the story of _many_ children of immigrants. My dad, for example, hates the labels of "hyphenated American." So my brother and I grew up identifying as just "American." But this isn't possible most places.[1] Its not just about how you identify yourself, but how other people identify you. In most countries, society forces immigrants to identify with the country they left or their ethnicity. There are only a handful of countries that are so welcoming that the children of immigrants can _choose_ to identify with nothing other than their new homeland.

[1] Ironically, as I've gotten older, I've started to identify as Asian more than before. But I'd chalk that up to the balkanization of American culture and the drift away from what I can easily reconcile with my Asian immigrant values.

<comment><USER26> Yes, Jindal likes to call it his mother's "preexisting condition"

To some extent I have as well, but I think in my case it is more to stick it to Pakistanis who think I don't have any rights on the first part of the hyphen

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> A lot of Silicon Valley tech companies are actively trying to hire remote engineers all over the US and the world. Market forces are doing the job better than a government initiative could.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is literally the best idea idea I've seen in print all year long: "They argue that the federal government should create eight to 10 regional "growth centers" in the U.S. heartland."

New cities, we desperately need. The entire housing fiasco is caused by an imbalance between the number of jobs and the amount of housing. all the jobs are, ironically, in places that really don't want to grow. so the logical thing to do, is to move those jobs to new places that do want to grow.

This could really ignite the economy in a way that's not zero sum (like most other solutions). There's so much free wealth out there for the taking (land that's not being used for any productive capacity ~ you could literally create wealth out of thin air).

<comment><USER29> New cities we desperately don't need. There are plenty of small cities than can be grown instead of destroying more wild nature, which we are fast running out of.

<comment><USER28> You know those hen farm houses where hens are squeezed together by the 1000s into a tiny area with poop all over the place. Some people think that's not nice to do to a chicken. I think it's not nice to do that to human beings. And yet that's exactly what we're doing to the people in SF, Poop included.

If you don't create new cities, the people still need to end up somewhere. You can move jobs to smaller cities or create new ones, whatever. the point is, you need to move jobs to areas that want to grow.

Have you seen the new neighborhoods that are being built in places like CA? Every single tree gets chopped down, ever last one. That's because developers are forced to build with density because the cost of land is so high. if you want to prevent the slaughtering of trees, you'll need specifically create minimum distance regs or reduce the # of trees that can be cut down legally. at the current rate, there's no nature for anyone to enjoy in the neighborhoods that are currently being built.

<comment><USER30> Show me the chicken that's unhappy in a $750/mo 750sqft apartment? The only reason that doesn't exist in CA is because of NIMBYs and their ridiculous zoning policies.

<comment><USER31> > Show me the chicken that's unhappy in a $750/mo 750sqft apartment?

There's a lot of chickens unhappy about $1600/month 200sqft apartments. (a real example from SF - [https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...](https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollective/micro- apartments-making-160-square-feet-livable-san-francisco/1038601/) )

Because that's the dystopian nightmare in SF, and to move jobs out of silicon valley to elsewhere, would be to export that same dystopia to more places.

We already see this in _Michigan_ of all places. You can make a SF salary and pay $1600/month for a micro-apartment. Or you can take a 50% pay cut, to pay $800/month for ~200sqft micro-apartment. They are equally ridiculous and equally unaffordable, once you account for the currency/wage differences, despite the fact that we have no zoning restrictions in this town.

We obviously need more housing, and need to build more housing, but housing is inherently pollution-heavy. You can not build your way into affordability alone, because the act of new construction inherently _generates_ more unaffordability. It alone can never solve it.

> The only reason (cheap apartments) doesn't exist in CA is because of NIMBYs > and their ridiculous zoning policies.

No, that's only a tiny part. Zoning is a small reason, but not the primary one. The biggest reason CA apartments are expensive, is the financial pollution generated by the companies there.

If you built a brand new city in an empty cornfield somewhere, with no laws or zoning of any kind, it would be somewhat cheaper than San Francisco, but every single apartment would still cost ~$1100-$1600/month. Because _most_ of that price is due to the financial pollution from the companies, not the zoning.

<comment><USER32> > You can make a SF salary and pay $1600/month for a micro-apartment. Or you > can take a 50% pay cut, to pay $800/month for ~200sqft micro-apartment. They > are equally ridiculous and equally unaffordable, once you account for the > currency/wage differences, despite the fact that we have no zoning > restrictions in this town.

They're not equal. You almost certainly end up with significantly more disposable income in SF.

<comment><USER31> Agreed. And that kind of makes the whole situation worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is it time for the government to drag financial sector jobs out of New York? Is it time for the US to drag credit card companies out of Delaware, or agribusiness out of the heartland and toward the coasts?

No. It isn't.

Funny the regionally exclusive monopolies that we seem to have tolerated for literally decades and the ones we suddenly, for some reason, don't.

Or maybe it isn't funny at all. Maybe it's a totally predictable outcome of a system that is highly tolerant of calcified, politically-connected regional monopolies. A system that is intolerant of disruptive, politically-indifferent or unestablished regional monopolies.

In other words, this isn't about economic efficiency or anti-trust law. It's about political sour grapes first. Everything else second.

<comment><USER34> This gets at the heart of this. This isn't t part of some consistent political philosophy or legal framework. This is policy based on angry people wanting to get revenge on a specific topic.

Unfortunately I think the tide is moving in the direction of this being an acceptable way to govern and while people may get individual things they want out of it I think the end result is a net loss for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The Government has no business in picking and choosing which cities to promote. The free market will take care of that. The government should instead focus on why everyone is leaving the heartland because it's not just because of the beach.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'd directly benefit from this, but still, I'm inclined to say no.

For starters, when it comes to this sort of thing, the government is inevitably running toward where the ball just was instead of where it's going to be. That's just the nature of the game - legislation is (or at least should be) a slow process. Second, these kinds of interventions inevitably result in rent-seeking behavior. I don't want the kinds of games that agricorps played with the dairy subsidy being related to how far you are from Eau Claire, WI getting imported into the tech industry. And finally, capitalism: If it's really most economically efficient for tech to hyper-concentrate in silicon valley, then fighting that will probably produce a whole lot of deadweight loss. If it isn't, then market forces will guide the situation toward a natural resolution.

(Perhaps only after the eventual dissipation of the reality distortion field being fueled by a certain generation of techies' determination to heat their own backyards by burning the money that fell into their laps during previous tech bubble. But still.)

<comment><USER37> I'd also benefit from this, but I'm for the idea so may be biased.

>And finally, capitalism: If it's really most economically efficient for tech to hyper-concentrate in silicon valley, then fighting that will probably produce a whole lot of deadweight loss. If it isn't, then market forces will guide the situation toward a natural resolution.

Capitalism trends toward more efficient usage of resources. But it doesn't care about humans and their quality of life. It works with that (people spend resources on their healthcare for themselves and their families), but it's perfectly "efficient" for some people to stay impoverished.

The government is a great entity to cover this gap. And Brookings' proposal isn't so bad: fixed 10-year duration, cities chosen by RFP instead of by politicians, and funds focusing on R&D instead of "make money now" projects. Most R&D moves as slowly as the government, so it's not a bad target.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> No. We don't need government intervention to bring tech jobs to the large cities listed, they already have them. I could have my pick of jobs if I were willing to relocate or commute to one.

It's a singular failure of Silicon Valley that so many tech jobs still need to be done in person. All physical infrastructure is going to need a contingent of warm bodies onsite (or at least on-call locally), but there's no reason in 2020 that the vast majority of tech positions can't be remote.

<comment><USER39> My team regularly designs systems on white boards, we discuss, refer to the board as we write docs, and implement.

I've attempted the same thing remote.

Unfortunately, there is nothing more creative / better than having those in person sessions. I hope one day VR can replace this, but today there just isn't anything there.

I should note, we are an internal research and consulting group inside a large corporation. So it is specialized, arguably most full-stack jobs can be done remote.

My personal suggestion is to build teams in cities (5 people per team). These teams can be setup in a small office and maybe you get 3-4 teams per office. That's how my group is currently setup and it works fairly well. The only issue is ensuring facilities are decent and backfilling team members because it can be a challenge to backfill and often attrition snowballs

<comment><USER40> For remote collaboration, have you tried something like the Meeting Owl to bridge that gap? [https://www.owllabs.com/meeting- owl](https://www.owllabs.com/meeting-owl)

<comment><USER39> I haven't but we have done a camera on a whiteboard. It just doesn't work super well. I think a lot of it has to do with just being stuck in a room together without distractions from personal stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I think companies will be incentivized to do this for two reasons. Cost and echo chamber. If they geodiversify they lower costs and the workforce is less of an echo chamber.

</comment><comment><USER42> Yes.

</comment><comment><USER43> We seem to be incapable of challenging entrenched city councils and fixing our housing problem, so we may deserve it.

</comment><comment><USER44> I think it would be a good policy to incentivize it.

I often tell my anecdotal story about working for a valley company who was 'forced' to hire some midwesterners and there was a serious bias towards valley hires for jobs that really could be done elsewhere. TL;DR Valley company thought tech support HAD to be in the valley / required some high spec resumes ... it very much did not. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21746219](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21746219)

I do wonder if those POVs towards the existing tech centers would make any government incentives irrelevant.

</comment><comment><USER45> Amazon wanted to open an office in New York--not exactly the heartland, but it does spread out the jobs a bit. But there was resistance and they cancelled the plan.

How can you "drag jobs" out? Government ordered migrations of people? Massive subsidies?

<comment><USER46> Amazon is opening a new office in NY by 2021, just without the huge tax breaks that they were originally pushing for. The tax breaks were the main reason that folks like AOC were pushing back against them opening a new headquarters in NY.

<comment><USER47> 1500 people versus 25k. A huge loss for nyc. Also lost tax revenue for nyc and the state.

<comment><USER48> If Amazon believes it is in their best interest to be in NYC, then they will eventually grow to that 25K number regardless. There's a long track record across the country of companies demanding concessions in promise of jobs, only to have the jobs never materialize. In many cases, companies are going to do what they want, so there isn't any real incentive for governments to play along.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Formal Angel Groups - <AUTHOR> http://www.techvibes.com/blog/formal-angel-groups-2013-02-15

<comment><USER2> I'd put forward another downside of angel groups, from the prospective of an entrepreneur:

Collusion - whether intentional or not.

The mere fact that you're meeting all, or a large percentage, of the possible investors for your round at the same time, and they all know each-other, the greater the chance they will be able to dictate terms and the entrepreneur may have little negotiating power. If one group (as may be the case in Dayton, OH - I have no idea) makes up a large percentage of local investors, look out!</comment>


Liquid Cities: Japanese architecture and science fiction - <AUTHOR> https://placesjournal.org/article/liquid-cities <comment><USER2> _" 1960s through the 1990s"_

Yes. After the 1989 real estate crash, Japan's economy was way down for several decades. Japan led in advanced technology in the late 1980s, and then just seemed to give up. It was so strange. I'd expected Japan to come up with a way to get out of that mess, but that never happened. Then the population peaked, and now most areas outside Tokyo and Osaka are slowly dying off.

<comment><USER3> > Japan led in advanced technology in the late 1980s, and then just seemed to > give up.

I wouldn't necessarily say that--what happened was cellular phones. And cell phones absolutely ate technology.

The Japanese (especially the teenage girls) took to those like a duck to water. Japanese phones were _WAY_ ahead of the West for absolutely forever.

The other problem for Japan was _language_. So, exporting culture was difficult. However, it did happen--"Ghost in the Shell" was 1995 which led to The Matrix in 1999. Anime probably peaked about 2002-ish and then effectively just became mainstream.

The US gets a big cultural advantage from the fact that the world has almost completely defaulted to English as the Lingua Franca.

<comment><USER4> > Japanese phones were WAY ahead of the West for absolutely forever.

Not really. Fun fact: In the early 1990s, the largest cellphone brand in Japan was Finnish company Nokia, and Nokia lost its edge there mostly because you could only sell phones through operators and the suppliers played dirty: for example, they refused to sell Nokia color LCD screens.

Now Japanese phones in the late 1990s were indeed the bees knees, but they were incompatible with the rest of the world (PDC/i-mode instead of GSM/WAP/GPRS), they missed the boat on 4G as well (NTT FOMA was the first out the gate, but not standard), and when the iPhone came along it was too late.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome)

<comment><USER5> Even through the late 2000s, Galapagos phones were way more advanced in terms of capabilities than anything available in the west, including the first couple of iPhone generations.

Trouble is, they wouldn't or couldn't sell them anywhere else, and eventually the rest of the world outpaced them and ate their lunch. Yes, the radio standards were incompatible... Would it have been so hard to make an international model? I think they just didn't feel like they needed to.

This pattern keeps happening where Japanese companies develop amazing products for their domestic market, and then staunchly refuse to bother selling them elsewhere, allowing global competitors to win in the long term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Structural anthropologist Masakuni Kitazawa foresaw a "society administered through highly sophisticated mechanisms for forecasting, planning, and control," based on "quantitative analysis of data and compilation of a set of optimum conditions for that society's well-being," in which a technocratic "power elite" would gently control all aspects of life, making it difficult to draw "a clear boundary between service and authoritarian control." " sounds familiar..

</comment><comment><USER7> Japan's futurist image is left over from the 80s. Tokyo architecture doesn't hold a candle to Singapore and many other cities around S.E. Asia. Kuala Lumpur is full of buildings that surpass anything in Tokyo in terms of looking out of a Sci-Fi movie.

Cities like Hong Kong and even Hangzhou from the right locations look way more like "Neo Tokyo" than Tokyo itself has ever looked.

<comment><USER8> You're totally right, but as a complete aside, Tokyo's architecture still feels _nice_.

It seems to strike the right balance between density and sunlight, cars and pedestrians, aesthetics and practicality.

Having relocated to Singapore earlier in the year, I rarely feel "comforted" by its design - like I could walk around for hours enjoying the ambience of the streets.

Could also be the oppressive heat and humidity though.

<comment><USER9> Everyone has a different taste, but for me Japanese architecture is horrid. Sure, old temples, shrines and castles are beautiful, but other than that...

The tiny streets everywhere, the buildings with only a few centimetres of separation between them, the cheap plastic look of many buildings... Everything feels cramped and chaotic.</comment></comment></comment>


Adobe Muse - HTML websites without writing code - <AUTHOR> http://muse.adobe.com/

<comment><USER2> From the intro video:

"Muse is a tool for the graphic designer. And I mean that in the most sincere sense."

I downloaded the demo. For me, it's defined by the absence of a source code view. That said, the Muse site itself is built with the app, which is impressive, but must have required incredible patience. The code it outputs is less than impressive: the body code begins with six nested divs.

At $15/month, it may find an audience among keen hobbyists, though. Professional graphic designers I know who've expressed an interest in web design have all drifted towards Dreamweaver or taught themselves to hand code sites from scratch, and I'm not sure that Muse is enticing enough a toolset to break this trend at present. If they're trying to appeal to graphic designers (typically Mac users), the fact that it's an Air app is likely to be a big hurdle for adoption.

<comment><USER3> Why would the app running on AIR pose a problem?

<comment><USER4> Because most if not all AIR apps have non-standard interfaces that feel clunky, slow, and out of place on Mac OS X.

<comment><USER5> Kinda like Java all over again, isn't it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's interesting that the pricing model is purely rental. I can see a lot of small businesses/hobbyists using this. $20 to get your website done will grab a lot of attention.

For professionals it could be a good mock-up tool. Being able to quickly show a client a website and alter it in real-time is going to save a lot of time, even if it means having to recode the entire site from the ground up.

Client's for the most part don't really care what's going on under the hood, just that their site looks super sexy.

Which of course will lead to this tool being abused by every half wit who can draw a straightish line with a ruler.
 all round...

</comment><comment><USER7> From the FAQ: "Muse is an Adobe AIR application."

I'm not convinced that AIR is good enough for large desktop apps. It's been a while since I've checked out AIR's progress, though -- maybe my prejudice about AIR is behind the times.

<comment><USER8> Nope, AIR still sucks on windows and is unsuable on everything else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Funtip: Turn off javascript, render navigation and other elements on "Muse" based pages non-functional.

The lack of any meaningful fallback is disappointing. Accessibility to content should at all stages be a priority.

<comment><USER5> You're right. Far too many sites depend on Javascript and Flash to function. In my opinion, sites that can't function without those are broken.

<comment><USER10> So what is the non-intellectual-purity argument for why Javascript dependency is bad? I've heard people talk for years about why it's so important to support noscript, but tbh I feel like this is the year 2011-- the internet is not (only) a set of hyperlinked documents any more, and javascript is an essential part of the experience on many/most non-trivial websites. (note: not trying to troll; I'm honestly curious)

<comment><USER11> There is no reasonable argument for going out of ones was to cater for non-js users. It's on by default in every browser. If a user turned it off for whatever reason they they'll know to turn it on again if they need to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wait so instead of building the tool people actually want, Adobe is spending the profit from their ludicrously over-priced products on this!!?? And at the same time trying to perpetuate the pointless Air ecosystem...

Bye Adobe <http://scrumpy-jack.com/post/543705069/bye-bye-adobe>

</comment><comment><USER13> Great! I was really missing Frontpage.

</comment><comment><USER14> The markup generated from this tool isn't so good (no surprise). e.g

Adobe should spend their time and money investing in a resource for designers to learn and perfect HTML/CSS/JS techniques rather than building useless tools like Muse.

<comment><USER7> That's akin to someone saying back in 1988 that, instead of building a graphical tool like Illustrator, Adobe should have invested in educating designers how to write PostScript by hand.

("Processing cycles on the printer's raster processor are incredibly precious! Can you imagine, this printing job would easily run 70% faster if only the PostScript document were hand-written instead of produced by some junky layout tool...")

99% of designers will never write code, no matter how exciting educational prose and tutorials we may come up with. It's a shame to drive away those designers from the web just because of old-fashioned HTML snobbery.

<comment><USER15> Writing clean HTML is about a lot more than performance. It's about compatibility, maintainability, future-proofing, accessibility, and so on.

History has shown us repeatedly that these sorts of wysiwyg programs write really bad markup, which is a symptom of their pretending that HTML is capable of things that it is not.

<comment><USER7> _... their pretending that HTML is capable of things that it is not._

That was unavoidable because HTML wasn't capable of doing the kind of layout that designers wanted. This was back in the late '90s, when the demand for WYSIWYG web design tools boomed but the HTML standard was splintered by incompatible vendor-specific extensions.

We can do much better now; hopefully Adobe Muse does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> first thought: oh another Microsoft Frontpage.

</comment><comment><USER5> Personally, I prefer a text editor, but I recognize that is not the solution for everyone.</comment>


Hummingbird Evolution Was Fast, but Is Slowing (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.livescience.com/44593-first-hummingbird-evolutionary-tree.html <comment><USER2> Swifts (the ancestors of hummingbirds) are pretty cool birds of course -- e.g. european species such as common and alpine are extremely fast and elegant flyers -- in particular though I always find it interesting to see the way some swift species will flutter briefly by flowers in treetops. It definitely makes you wonder whether that behavior was present in the swift-hummingbird ancestor (I haven't looked into whether anyone has mapped that behavior onto a swift phylogeny -- let me know if you know!)</comment>


Raspberry Pi-powered AI beats human in dogfight - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/artificial-intelligence-raspberry-pi-pilot-ai-475291 <comment><USER2> Powered by a Raspberry PI? Nothing in the article shows or indicates that the AI was powered by a Pi

<comment><USER3> > When the Raspberry Pi computer was first launched [..] its creators probably > didn't imagine the $35 device would one day take on a professional fighter > pilot in a dogfight—and win. [..] But that is exactly what a doctoral > graduate at the University of Cincinnati set out to do [..] he built a Pi- > powered artificial intelligence pilot.

Did you read the first two paragraphs?</comment></comment>


Lottery Winner Jack Whittaker's Losing Ticket - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-13/lottery-winner-jack-whittakers-losing-ticket

<comment><USER2> There's a longer story with a lot more about the lottery win and fall of his family and community that goes more in-depth, from 2005.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp- dyn/A36338-2005Jan25?la...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp- dyn/A36338-2005Jan25?language=printer)

The best advice I ever read if you win the lottery: get an attorney to claim the money on your behalf and don't tell anyone. I had family friends destroy their lives after winning a substantial amount and it's not pretty to watch.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure why this article keeps getting upvotes. This is an article about a person who won their state lottery 10 years ago, then lost all the money through constant, consistent poor decision-making. The winner was a small business owner, that's the only connection I can make.

I've heard this story dozens of times, usually from morally-aggressive people as an anecdote for why money is evil. I've heard it discussed on radio talk shows, and also by radio DJs. I could swear I've read about it here before, and I'm sure I've seen it on TV too.

<comment><USER4> I think the interesting point is that he already had a lot of money, and was perfectly capable of handling it. But when the money was handed to him (rather than earned) he went off the rails.

I'm not qualified to say whether that is a known psychological reaction, but it would seem relevant to the startup world.

<comment><USER5> My guess: unearned money gives one a sense of social status, and high social status (like power) corrupts. Most of the destructive things these people do are related to social status.

It doesn't sound to me like he necessarily has a money-management problem. He probably still is quite rich. It's the rest of his life that is ruined.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's seems impossible to interact normally with others if the entire world knows you've become wealthy. The interesting thing about SV is that you can cash out of a successful start up and still be completely unknown outside of a smallish circle. You don't necessarily even need to tell your family the scale of your success. You can just get a bit more generous at Xmas and donate more substantially to your favorite charities. People with simply appreciate the extra efforts rather than expecting/demanding access to your new fortune.

</comment><comment><USER7> Having read too many stories like this, if I do win a lottery, I will spend no more than 0.1-1% per year for the first five or ten years, with the remainder locked in a trust account with my financial adviser, with additional safe- guards so he or his staff can't redeem or abuse the funds. In large part I could do this and feel happy doing it, because I wouldn't feel the necessity to spend my way to happiness and $100k would be more than enough for my own & my family's expenses, including foreign travel, and for "scholarships" for my closest friends' children (most not going to uni for another ten years anyway).

<comment><USER5> My uninformed advice for this improbable event: I think that's a good policy _and_ you want to keep other people from knowing. Once you have a 10m+ lottery win, keep it out of the press as much as you can.

The interesting thing about the story is that no one knew that he was a millionaire before the lottery. He worked hard and didn't "look rich" so he could have a more normal life. Once he was a lottery winner, he got hit with a bunch of extortions. (Of course, he also did some stupid shit on his own accord.)

It doesn't sound like he "wasted it all" either. It sounds like he's still extremely rich, but that his life is completely fucked up.

One of the issues I think is that the appeal of Big Money to a lot of people is social status. That's what creates the temptations that lead these people to ruin. What most people don't realize is that the highest of the high in social status are torn down and eaten for sport because that's human nature.

Honestly, I can relate a lot of his rich/old fucked-up-ness with my smart/young fucked-up-ness that I had to deal with. When you have something "big", people fuck with you. Most people don't, because very few are that insecure and petty, but you get a disproportionate amount of creepy attention that comes from a very insecure 5% focusing on ~0.5% of the population. In his case, though, it's <0.00001%.

<comment><USER7> Simple things like renting a house/apartment in another town to live in for a week or a month before collecting, registering a new telephone number, perhaps now even signing up for new dummy email address, for folks to contact you, and never living there or using those after you win, will help to stay anonymous.

Not sure why people claim the money so quickly. I rarely check tickets I've bought within a month or two of the purchase date. I guess the thought of possibly winning is better than knowing that I wasted those few dollars on it, but also that nothing much would really change (other than a new laptop and camera).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was at the grocery store right before the big Powerball drawing and almost got in line to buy a ticket. Then I realized I wouldn't want to win that much money and wouldn't have the slightest clue what to do with it. It would be more stress handling the money than working.

Now, I wouldn't mind starting a business, selling it, and walking away with a few million or 10, it can give me time to grow into my money. But to win a public lottery worth 19's or 100's of millions... I'll pass.

<comment><USER9> Won't stop people from coveting what you have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We (meaning CS types who follow startups) are an unusual crowd. We're introspective and understand human societies and ourselves better than a lot of people do. Our main motivation for wanting money is (a) autonomy, and (b) building cool stuff. It's ambition that drives us, and we'd still work after a huge windfall-- we'd simply work on much better terms, and probably a lot harder (because such wealth takes out the "had to pay bills" excuse for typical middle-class underachievement).

The motivation for most (98%) people who want extreme wealth to want it is social status. That's not always a nasty thing. Sometimes it takes the form of extreme generosity, or large donations to children.

That's why the sensible path is so rarely followed. These aren't stupid or bad people. They try to use their money for its only remaining purpose (social status) to most people at extreme levels, and they get into a self-destructive loop, because high social status itself impairs judgment and leads to more recklessness.

<comment><USER10> I don't disagree with you starting from the third sentence, but those first two are remarkably self-congratulatory. It's not clear how being a CS type who follows startups leads you to understand human societies better than anyone else.

<comment><USER5> You may be right on this one, but I like to believe that, in aggregate terms, we're more introspective and enlightened than the general population.

Exceptions exist. Give $100 million dollars to any of the idiots on the Bravo "Silicon Valley" show and you'd have a dead crack whore. [0]

[0]: I have no sexist intent in using "crack whore". This assertion applies with equal strength to the men.</comment></comment></comment>


To Succeed, Growth Hacking Has To Focus More On Product Than Marketing - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/01/to-succeed-growth-hacking-has-to-focus-more-on-product-development-than-marketing/ <comment><USER2> in business school (or any Marketing 101 class) marketing doesn't actually mean strictly promotion/advertisement. one of the traditional four ps is product, but I guess the term marketing has been overloaded

<comment><USER3> I didn't want to be pedantic but I felt the same way. The term marketing means much more than just promotion. It also encompasses word-of-mouth, branding, positioning, amongst others, which are the other valuable things the author recommended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Find someone who's a great product person and who really knows user experience and understands user value..."

I think the author is missing the point. Even the best products can falter if the company doesn't know how to get distribution. Unless you're an extreme outlier, you'll need both great product and great marketing. And that's really hard to get in one person.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think this video by Chamath Palihapitiya about FB growth strategy is super interesting ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raIUQP71SBU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raIUQP71SBU)).

Relentless focus on building the thing the customer wanted vs focus on viral marketing strategies. That said, they had an inherent viral growth strategy by targeting their initial user base to a very sociable/vocal college crowd. That wasn't a growth hack, it was merely solving a problem that most college kids had.

</comment><comment><USER6> Growth hacking is largely gimmick driven. It's about quick wins. Here's an article I wrote about why gimmicks have to work with the product: [http://joshuaziering.com/on-marketing-gimmicks/](http://joshuaziering.com/on- marketing-gimmicks/)

</comment><comment><USER7> An evolution of the term 'growth hacking'? Interesting take.

</comment><comment><USER8> I thought "growth hackers" were media buyers and blackhat SEO'ers.</comment>


Chrome Asks You to Select Default Search Engine on First Run - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/#!/maguay/status/1568576746033152 <comment><AUTHOR> I just installed Chrome 7 stable on a new install of Ubuntu 10.10, and the first time I ran it I was presented with this screen asking me to select a default search engine. Very nice Google's asking it so directly, though I have to assume this is because of antitrust concerns...

<comment><USER2> this is not new.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I'm not surprised. Still, it was the first time I've seen it, and I figured many others that haven't setup a fresh install in a while might be interested to see it.

Do you know when it was added to Chrome?</comment></comment></comment>


The Startup Daily — Great Ideas from Great Books - <AUTHOR> http://thestartupdaily.com/ Inspirational stuff for your daily RSS Feed. <comment><USER2> I'll have to check out some of these books personally but I'm curious if anyone has read the "The Dip: A little book that teaches you when to quit." I'm interested if someone can give a little more detail as to how the author explains and turns into a procedure, the process of understanding and the actions of when to quit.

Two quotes the site claims are, "If you can't be the best in your class, you should quit" and "Quitting does not make you a failure, you quit to avoid failure." It struck me as a little dangerous and possible that if this is the kind of understanding that results from the book, people might skip out too quickly - something that I see in education too often when persistence and effort could have done wonders. In my opinion, it is very important to know when to ADMIT failure (as opposed to avoid failure) and learn from it. Surely it's also good advice that at some points in our lives we should know when to cut our losses and move on to the next thing. Does this book do this in a deep and objective way?

There is a lot of evidence that people are pretty poor at assessing themselves. Second, the idea of failure avoidance is a common trait of people with fixed implicit theories of self and low effort-belief (traits correlated with lower performances, at least on tasks in the domain of education.) Third, people are really good at justifying their actions to preserve their self concepts. Ingredients that unless accounted for, seem like they could be dream killers with a slight push called "go ahead, quit."

Now, I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt that the actual book probably goes much more in depth as to when and how to make this sort of assessment but I thought I'd bring it up. Your thoughts?

<comment><USER3> You're right that it is dangerous advice if used as an excuse. One of the points that Seth Godin makes—that I didn't have space to go into in that short writeup—is that it's a good habit to determine what would make you quit something before you even start, this way you never quit because the short term pain is too great. This also helps prevent you from getting blinded by pride and sticking with something too long (He uses the example of Nixon and the Vietnam war in the book).

I think the book does look at it in a objectified way, and in the signature Seth Godin way that is both simple and deep for his fans, and too obvious to his critics.

Note that The Dip is actually a super short book, maybe 75-80 pages. To veer off topic a bit I think this in itself is interesting, and a trend I'd like to see more of. Not just because people are busier than ever, but because publishers push writers to "fill out" so many business books when the core point could be made in less than 100 pages. Some ideas are complex and require 1000 pages, many could be done justice in a few chapters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Get home, check Hacker News, see your own site listed = sweet! I launched this just over 3 weeks ago so it's still a little sloppy, but improving as fast as I can. I would love any feedback from HN people.

</comment><comment><USER4> One phrase summary of startup books. Awesome.

<comment><USER3> I'm glad you like it. Just to clarify, they are sometimes summaries, and sometimes just something from the book that seemed useful, and may have little to do with the theme of the book. (I need to improve my messaging or I'm going to get people emailing me "you completed missed the point of that book!")

Short and useful to startup folks is the goal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love this site, thanks for posting this. Added to daily reading.

<comment><USER6> Subscribed.</comment></comment>


Are more lives lost due to Covid confinement? - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/is-the-covid-19-pandemic-cure-really-worse-than-the-disease-heres-what-our-research-found-141700 <comment><USER2> Putting a price on human life is a slippery slope. The clear path is to reduce as much harm as possible, the key obstacle to perfect policy is the people who are supposed to follow it. We've already scene a second wave caused by early reopening, further prolonging human exposure to COVID and once again leaving business in a lurch.

</comment><comment><USER3> And how many lives will be ruined by the still-unknown serious consequences of the disease? Perhaps it's time end these stupid articles.</comment>


Ask HN: On a scale from 1-10, how ugly was your MVP? - <AUTHOR> 1 being "it barely got finished and barely works", and 10 being "I had a very polished product" <comment><USER3> Judge for yourself:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20071115235344/http://www.s3stat....](http://web.archive.org/web/20071115235344/http://www.s3stat.com/)

I'd call that a solid 1.

\- 99designs logo

\- $10 template

\- Handmade graphics (from screenshots of Webalizer, no less)

The product itself was literally Webalizer reports, along with some quick and dirty forms to input enough information so that we could generate those reports (running directly on the webserver, of course), and a list view to link back to them.

Note the $1/month pricing, and no mechanism to actually charge credit cards to collect said dollar.

But a lot of people signed up, and some of them are still around 13 years later.

<comment><USER4> That is really cool, out of interest did it ever make money?

<comment><USER3> Yes. It replaced my developer salary several years back, and I've been living off of it ever since.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I saved the screenshots [https://histre.com/blog/history/](https://histre.com/blog/history/) ;)

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm about to release something I've been working on as an MVP.

Backend currently is a 6 and frontend is a 2. A lot of what it does revolves around automated analysis and various optimization problems, so the backend is minimal but it has plenty of validation and testing (integration testing and fuzz testing)

Frontend is very basic at this stage since I don't want to bother with CSS at this time (I'm the only person who mechanically knows how things work at this stage, do I'm trying to leave styling and polishing to somebody else on the team).

Will probably take a landing page approach and have a sign up for some sort of private beta

</comment><comment><USER7> Arguably a MVP for a new product or service could just be a sign up / payment page for a non existent offering. If not enough people try to sign up there's no point building anything.

Would this be 0 or -5 on the scale?

<comment><AUTHOR> Eh in that case I guess the MVP would be just a landing/signup page (as you mentioned), which could still be totally polished and cleaned up - so could still totally be a 10 :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> 0 - We didn't have one. Just a landing page. Signed our first 50 clients with just a fancy powerpoint and door to door sales. It was a double sided marketplace so then had to bring those 50 clients to persuade our first "supplier" on the other side to integrate.

We lost a most of these initial clients before we could actually build what we wanted to. But then once complete a lot of them came back. In this phase id rate our MVP as a 7. We already had enough feedback to build something quite useful.

</comment><comment><USER9> Just a landing page, made in ~30 minutes - [https://codelines.dev](https://codelines.dev)

I'd call it 0 because it isn't even available yet.

It's hella simple but it works. It actually works great. People understand what we're building right away and are signing up, giving us feedback.

One really doesn't need fancy stuff. Just launch fast.

</comment><comment><USER10> 2.

Crashed three times a day per user. Images were cropped off blogs (with permission), inconsistent branding. It was in the food vertical but the logo was poop brown. But it got 1200 users on the first day, organically.

3 months and about 10k users before we fixed most of the crashes. It was about 5 months before a professional logo and color scheme (though the free logo my friend built for us was much appreciated).

<comment><USER11> Wow! Care to share what site this was?

<comment><USER10> It was a Malaysian low carb recipe app. Malaysian food is high carb in general and there were several blogs on it, but few united the info in one place. We made money off selling low carb ingredients, e.g. konjac noodles, stevia.

I sold the whole company though, together with the app, IP, content, etc. They decided not to maintain it, so it's shut down now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd say about a 5. We cared about getting it out there and getting as much feedback as possible from customers. We decided we didn't want to focus on perfecting the UI/UX or even features if it wasn't going to be valuable to our customers. So we'd rather get something janky out there and iterate than spend extra few weeks/months in a bubble.

</comment><comment><USER13> MVP was like a 2 when it started making real money but even 5 years into it, I would say we are at like a 7 in my opinion. Not sure if we ever will hit a 10 or even a 9 in terms of shine and polish:)

</comment><comment><USER14> 2-3, but I really think the voiceover was worth it! [https://commutestudy.com](https://commutestudy.com)

</comment><comment><USER15> It was about a 4.5 for me. We had a product that was very barebones but it did what it promised

</comment><comment><USER16> easily a 4 - Co-Founder felt embarrassed trying to show it to clients but it worked and people could give us money. knocked it out in like 2 months. - <USER2> we're 2 years in, still here.

</comment><comment><USER17> 3.5</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone in the Ottawa (Canada) area on HN? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a computer engineering student at the university of Ottawa. I'm wondering if there are any others out there who may be willing to get together and form connections.
I have a cool idea for a small startup too that some of you might be interested in.
My email is on my profile, feel free to post here or send me a message. <comment><USER2> There must be a few (I am one). There are a few gatherings for like minded individuals such as <http://teamcamp.ca> and <http://startupottawa.com>. Also there are many meet ups advertisedon meetup.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks ciscott, subscribed to both of those feeds. I'll also keep an eye on meetup.com -- should have looked there first actually.</comment></comment>


Churchetto – Free, open-source church management software - <AUTHOR> http://churchetto.com/ <comment><USER2> 1\. The website doesn't really explain what the software does. No screenshots.

2\. Open-source? I didn't see any links about the source.

3\. You ask me to create an account, but you do not indicate what I am agreeing to in so doing. Where's the TOS?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. I haven't bothered with that yet. Started the project 10 days ago, so I just assumed I'd find time to get to it later. 2\. [https://github.com/Zach417/churchetto- web](https://github.com/Zach417/churchetto-web) 3\. See #1 lol. Thanks for the advice, though! I'll add that to my list of things to do.

<comment><USER3> There are secrets in the config.json file you've committed to that repo. If this is the same code you're running on the site you should add the filename to .gitignore, git rm the file, commit those changes, and then change the secrets on the production version.

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops! Rookie mistake. I've removed it and changed the secrets. Thank you very much!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Did I miss something on the front page? It's a statement, three sub-statements and nothing else from what I could tell. Didn't see any photos or screenshots or a feature list. (Chrome, OSX.) If you have one crack at HN traction, you need to make sure your first hit is more informative. Sometimes it's worth waiting to submit to HN until you have a bit more prepared.

Here's an example of another guy with a web-app for managing personnel: [http://www.hrpartner.io/](http://www.hrpartner.io/)

Really nice site. Screenshots, features, explanatory video, testimonials, etc. Hopefully that gives you some ideas.

<comment><USER5> Hey there! I am the creator of www.hrpartner.io - Thanks so much for the shout out @prawn! (I saw my Clicky stats spike from news.ycombinator.com and wondered why. :)

OP - Happy to help out and answer any questions re: marketing or web site setup etc. As other have said - screen shots seem to be a great eye draw for people (we run Heat maps on our home page too). We added the video recently, and it seems to help too, although I know we have to reduce it from 3min down to around 1min.

I've had conflicting feedback that our home page contains too much info, to our home page does not explain the breadth of features enough! To that end, we are currently testing out several variations of landing pages, and am happy to discuss if you wish.

Another source that I highly recommend is the free eBook from Salesforce called "The Saas Startup Founders Guide" \- great discussion on building a marketing message. [https://startups.salesforce.com/article/The-SaaS-Startup- Fou...](https://startups.salesforce.com/article/The-SaaS-Startup-Founder-s- Guide)

I've gotten plenty of great feedback from the crowd here in the past, and looks like you are seeing some of that too. As I said, happy to help out if you want to ping me directly at devan (at) hrpartner.io

Good luck with Churchetto.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> From the github page:

"Our vision is ... improve the relationship between churches and young people by craftily utilizing church data ..."

From the Oxford Dictionary:

crafty: Clever at achieving one's aims by indirect or deceitful methods

Hopefully just a poor choice of words?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just a poor choice of words! Changed it to "expertly". Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not really - there's also OneBody [0].

[0]: [https://church.io/](https://church.io/)

<comment><USER8> We took "the first" out of the title. (Standard practice in fact.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The website crashes both Safari Technology Preview and Chrome Canary. Weird!

<comment><AUTHOR> Very weird. Thanks for letting me know!

<comment><USER7> Sorry, I wasn't clear - it happens after I log on. There are four boxes with "Loading...", which load up the CPU and this crashes Chrome and in Safari the tab stops responding and all you can do is close it.

<comment><USER9> Happens to me, too. Latest Safari 9.1</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Worth it to violate a NDA? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
Long story short: I was hired to build a website and somehow it turned into a B2B.  I was effectively acting CTO for the 4 1/2 years I was there, so I know _everything_ - and I was the only IT person for most of that time.
Anyway, the founders turned out to be fundamentally criminals - the CEO flat out lied to a customer about the nature of the data they were going to get and the customer eventually figured it out.  They threatened to sue, etc.  When the attempt to gaslight the board of the customer failed, I got strong armed to actually the build the system to generate the data the customer wanted - I was owed $20k in invoices by then... (don't ask, my fault entirely) and if they had been sued, I would never get my money...
So I built it, contract saved, then I got forced out of the company (again, long story, lots of stress..)  After the CEO sent me a email mocking me for quitting, I had a nervous breakdown.
A year later, I am still troubled by the whole thing.  These people harmed not just me, but the sales guys and the other part time contractors who they yanked around.  There is no reason to suspect they have changed their behavior, so they are a threat to everyone that they do business with.
The NDA I signed covers "business info" in a general way, but disclosure of criminal acts certainly is an exception.  I can prove all my assertions as I was there and have the email trail.  So what do I do?  My comment history will show I've ranted about sociopaths, but now that I'm feeling much better in general, I still feel the need to do something based on professional ethics...  These people, as I learned out later, have done business like this for the past 30 years - the guy who introduced me finally told me some stories - damn idiot...
thanks. <comment><USER2> Legal contracts can't require or safeguard criminal behavior.

Although it never hurts to involve a lawyer, instead of relying on your own amateur interpretation of the contract and the law.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is all downside. Let it go, move on with your life.

<comment><USER4> +1 for this. Sometimes you just have to move on, no matter how much you want to get back at someone.

One criteria I use is how much is my motives driven by emotion. If it boils down to "I want to see this person suffer.", its better to move on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Your answer is in your question - disclosure of criminal acts certainly _is_ an exception.

If the acts involved were immoral, but not criminal, then you'd have a quandary, but in this case, you may even find that _not_ reporting their actions (depending on what they are/were) could come back to bite you.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't think you would be breaking and NDA... I am an NDA is not a cover for criminal activities...

</comment><comment><USER7> What criminal act took place?

<comment><AUTHOR> Negotiation in bad faith with the customer, though I ended up fixing that...

they deliberately breached my contract as well and treated everyone like shit (forcibly reinterpreting the sales guy's contracts to avoid paying them what they were owed, etc)

now that I think about it, these are more in the line of 'immoral' subject to civil penalties / civil suits as opposed to criminal acts against the public good, like dumping toxic waste...

so the general ethical quandary is 'to what extent am I responsible for not informing other who will be harmed by their actions?' The reason I ask is that the person who could have informed me, didn't, and so I ended up in this mess. I don't want that to happen to other people - I would have done it a year ago, but I was exhausted with everything.

Everyone before me has made the same decision, to not tell people... and so they have been getting away with this general stuff for 30 years. Back room gossip only goes so far and now they are loose in the IT community, thanks to me. I should have immediately quit when I was feeling the impulse.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, you're going to have a hard time justifying breaching an NDA unless you yourself plan to file suit, in which case you wont have to breach your NDA.</comment></comment></comment>


Redis in Ruby, An online book about rebuilding Redis, for fun - <AUTHOR> https://redis.pjam.me/ <comment><AUTHOR> Redis in Ruby is a project I'm currently working on, so far the first three chapters are available.

The idea is to attempt rewriting Redis, in Ruby, to learn more networking, threads, processes, system calls and so on.</comment>


The Internet Wishlist - <AUTHOR> http://theinternetwishlist.com/ <comment><USER2> A very cool idea, but this could get disorganized really quickly.

It looks like someone manually filters ideas before they are posted on the site, which can become extremely cumbersome if you get thousands of ideas a day.

How does one automate clumping similar ideas and filtering spam?

</comment><comment><USER3> Down.</comment>


Show HN: My New Web Page Looks Like Windows 95 - <AUTHOR> https://victorribeiro.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, ever since I made FOS I was about to redesign my website using it. I finally did it, my website now looks like an old operational system.

<comment><AUTHOR> by the way, this is FOS [https://github.com/victorqribeiro/fos](https://github.com/victorqribeiro/fos)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Love it! Works great on my samsung galaxy note9 too.

<comment><USER3> +1 for responsiveness, didn't try on the phone but the responsive design mode on Firefox works well!

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, I wrote the library to be some what robust. Someone on Reddit told me it glitched on iPhone, but didn't told me anything else. I tried with chrome and Firefox and works fine. both desktop and mobile</comment></comment></comment>


Kite v2: $300 Open Hardware Android Smartphone - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2070436562/kite/ <comment><AUTHOR>
      * Snapdragon 450, Octa-core ARM Cortex A53 @ 1.8 GHz
      * Adreno 506 GPU
      * 2 GB RAM
      * 16 GB on-board storage, microSD card slot for additional storage
      * CAT 6 LTE/3G/2G, 2x nano SIM slots (dual-SIM dual standby)
      * WiFi a/b/g/n/ac
      * BT 4.2 LE
      * Low power GPS engine
      * USB 3.0 OTG port
      * Fast charging support for LiPoly batteries
      * Integrated sensors - 9 axis eCompass, accelerometer & gyroscope
      * Support for two displays and two cameras.

More details at: [http://www.kiteboard.io/blog](http://www.kiteboard.io/blog)</comment>


Why the World Is Drawing Battle Lines Against American Tech Giants - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/technology/why-the-world-is-drawing-battle-lines-against-american-tech-giants.html?emc=edit_dlbkam_20160602&nl=dealbook&nlid=65508833 <comment><USER2> I found this article really frustrating.

The US government forces American tech companies to spy on users, so US companies are to blame?

These services are so useful and well-liked around the world that they should be considered a threat?

The author is amazingly willing to accord French bureaucrats the right to regulate the cultural consumption of Frenchmen. How is this defensible? Should we knock Netflix because it makes it harder for French social engineers to impose their preferences on their own citizens?

Companies like this don't come out of Europe for a reason.

<comment><USER3> The article starts by asking you to view things from another perspective. It's not asking you to "knock" Netflix, it's inviting you to consider the point of view of people who do.

American media is subtly hegemonising. All media carries with it the culture of those who produce it, but US media also carries a very strong assumption of "defaultness": that everyone is a (mostly white) American at heart. What effect does this have on the viewer, especially on kids who grow up with a diet American cartoons and action movies? The normalisation of American values in the use of violence to deal with threats and crime. Kids learning US (view of) history instead of their own local history. People learning American alongside their own language, while Americans (and Brits) don't learn another language: that makes the cultural exchange more one-way. Americans don't have to worry about French culture seeping in and erasing American cultural values, notwithstanding the occasional panic about "freedom fries".

If you're not American, you run the risk of becoming an underrepresented minority even in your own country. The problem is even worse for _local_ ethno-linguistic minorities such as Gaelic and Welsh in the UK. Ironically France is only as homogenous as it is due to centuries of centralisation and standardisation deliberately driving out regional linguistic variation.

The popular HN view is probably going to be that minority languages can and should "fail in the market" and die out, leaving only English. Like endangered species. But with every language dies a culture and a literature.

<comment><USER4> The irony is that for there to be diversity there must be protectionist policies and xenophobia to preserve it.

<comment><USER5> Policies maybe, but not necessarily xenophobia. Xenophobia starts where multiculturalism fails. IMHO European multiculturalism has failed not in its idea, but in its implementation.

<comment><USER6> _Xenophobia starts where multiculturalism fails. IMHO European multiculturalism has failed not in its idea, but in its implementation._

Then implementation of multiculturalism is always in a state of partial failure. I guess it always has "bugs?" Intolerance always seems to seep in, even from the most vocal proponents of tolerance. In fact, there seems to be a correlation between how stridently one advocates tolerance and how much intolerance seeps in with it.

<comment><USER5> Yes, there will always be some intolerance, whatever the "norm" and "deviation" are. Let's see it as a necessary part of diversity, which in turn is a necessary part of evolution.

Even xenophobia, as an extreme form of intolerance, has its roots, often far in the past, when it was somehow relevant for that particular society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article fails to mention some of the most significant events that have happened in this space: Google news fights.

Multiple countries have tried to force Google to pay to continue operation of Google News. Google was willing to simply stop operating Google News in those countries, rather than paying for the privilege. It turned out that the media companies needed Google more than Google needed them, and they worked quickly to get back to the prior situation (which is what Google wanted).

<comment><USER8> The best part is that the media companies are now explicitely licensing the content to Google (for free). Google competitors won't have those licenses and won't have the market power to get them for the same conditions, so they made it harder for Google competitors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a bit overblown. Amazon doesn't have the retail sales of Walmart even in the US. Walmart has been able to dictate to manufactures rules for packaging and distribution for a couple decades now. Somehow we survived and now they are being disrupted. Europe may be "vulnerable" to US tech companies but it is not clear they will be as successful in China, India and other parts of the world.

<comment><USER10> Of all of these companies, Amazon will be by far the most disruptive to these other countries.

The key difference here is that Amazon slowly built and perfected their model here in the USA, allowing domestic competitors time to adapt to the ever growing efficiency and disruption brought by Amazon.

Amazon can then take this perfected model and drop it like a bomb in other countries. (Not that they haven't already done so in certain segments, but wait until Amazon Fresh hits some of these countries)

Eventually, even the US is going to face a HUGE disruption with the advent of self-driving trucks. As bad as that will be in the US, it will be worse in Europe, where wages for truckers are much higher and will incentivize replacement. I predict that Europe will be much, much later to approve self- driving vehicles than the US will for these reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I see four parties in play, but the author describes only two:

1\. Foreign governments

2\. American government

3\. American companies

\----Not mentioned in the article----

4\. Foreign citizens

5\. American citizens

Groups 3, 4, and 5 are more-or-less aligned.

Groups 1, 2, and 3 have more conflict than anything else.

Since American companies are doing an end-run around control, governments are frustrated. I'd never expect otherwise, and I wish the American companies all the luck.

<comment><USER12> Maybe 4 and 5 are not quite so aligned? In democracies, governments should still be viewed as instruments of the voters to a significant extent.

Significant quantities of French voters have supported a government that tries to preserve and extend the French language and culture. In some ways, countering the influence of a large American company and the culture it imports can be seen as a legitimate expression of French voters, n'est-ce pas?

<comment><USER13> > governments should still be viewed as instruments of the voters to a > significant extent.

At least in the US at the federal level, certainly not.[1]

[1]: [https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...](https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf)

<comment><USER12> Does that mean the presidential election's outcome won't make a significant difference for the vast majority of Americans, that whoever is elected - Sanders, Clinton, Trump, et al - will basically administer the Federal government the same way?

<comment><USER13> I wouldn't say that. The president has a tremendous amount of international influence, and they have control over federal departments and the military to direct a significant amount of their behavior.

They just aren't the people that will change campaign finance reform, build walls, or raise the minimum wage. That is kind of what congress does. So you could elect any president and only see legislation they want passed because either they bargained with the other party in congress or their party had a majority in it already to pass the legislation.

It is only force of habit that most people expect the president's party to go with their policy ideas in congress. If Bernie were president, for example, you would _not_ expect the Dems or Reps in congress to ever support him on anything, because hes anti-establishment.

<comment><USER12> The study's abstract says, among other things, ".. economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."

Toward the end the study notes: "When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."

At the national level, US democracy is an illusion.

<comment><USER14> [http://navimumbaiescorts.in](http://navimumbaiescorts.in)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The reverse is also true. The U.S recently prevented Intel from selling $1 billion worth of chips to China [1], so China is getting to work developing their own supercomputing chips on their own tech.

[1].[http://nextbigfuture.com/2016/05/us-supercomputer-chip- ban-d...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2016/05/us-supercomputer-chip-ban- delayed.html?m=1)

</comment><comment><USER16> Don't mix up France and Europe. Yes, the EU tends to dance to France's tune, but their attitudes are not universal or even dominant throughout the Europe.

<comment><USER17> Are you saying that the rest of Europe is less anti-America/anti-Capitalism than France?

<comment><USER16> Absolutely!

<comment><USER18> That's good to know. A lot of what we hear about European opinions are by way of France.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am not sure I agree with the specifics but I think generally it's healthy for the world to keep multi-national companies in check. So even if it's a stupid law that blocks multinationals the effect will be positive in my view if it fosters a local tech scene.

The big Silicon Valley companies are already killing a lot of innovation so it's better to stop them from reaching more dominance.

<comment><USER16> How are they killing innovation?

<comment><USER19> I would say the iphone was a total innovation killer. Apple restricts ideas to only things they like. Maybe we wouldn't have such polished phones but we would have more interesting ideas emerge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I hope that people will learn that the fact the giants are so big is what the core problem is, even for American citizens. For example, the filter-bubble is real and dangerous, along with operation mockingbird (I'm sure under a new name now) propaganda pushes, and the giants become useful mediums for things like pretending a war or invasion is OK or the banks "need this next bailout of 200zillion dollars".

What we need is to move to decentralized platforms not controlled by any one company of person or government. Centralization is a weakness, not a strength, and decentralization is a strength. These are fundamental lessons of the internet, and it's high time we made sure the fresh geeks who didn't live through the 90's cryptowars are taught it's lessons.

FOSS is where it's at, and I am convinced RMS will be seen a visionary to ahead of his time to be fully understood or appreciated in the capitalist society he spawned in.

When Microsfaceboogleslapple Brain interface comes out and everyone starts plugging in, I will either be using the GPLv6Brain or nothing at all.

</comment><comment><USER4> The world is slowly learning from China.

<comment> guard-of-terra Learning how to have slaves for population?

How noble of them. Not really.

<comment><USER21> I lived in China. Can confirm I was not a slave, at least not in the sense that America had black slaves.

<comment> guard-of-terra But are you prevented from visiting a wide range of websites?

That is them deciding for you what you can and can't do. If you're not Chinese citizen then it's your choice being there. But if you're a Chinese citizen then all choices are made for you, what qualifies you as a slave.

<comment><USER22> Of course not being able to access a website you want (and censorship in general) is not good, but comparing that to slavery is absolutely ridiculous.

<comment> guard-of-terra Not being able to make choices for yourself is slavery.

Slavery is not about hard work or poor conditions. There were plenty free men who had it harder and some slaves that led cushy life.

Slavery is about not being a master for yourself.

<comment><USER23> By your definition, i am pretty sure that you are a slave.

<comment> guard-of-terra I happen to be, since I live in a country on par with China.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> France is a souverain country that uses his legitimate right to create laws that protect french peoples culture, health, etc. It is more recently after companies that use unethical tricks to not pay taxes to the country. This is stealing the french people. Considering the brutality and souless behaviour of creditors to Greece, the behavior of the French souverain country against tax frauds is perfectly legitimate and regretable necessity.

I whish Americans had more consideration and respect for foreign countries.

</comment><comment><USER25> Aside from taking China's approach to block external services, if a company doesn't have any physical presence in a country (shipping products, office, .fr domain), do they really have any recourse to force the country to do anything? Is there any reason for google to not just shut down google.fr and let french people use google.com. Assuming the media companies are cool with it, is there any reason why netflix would be required to change their behavior in france if they're just using the US version of it?

</comment><comment><USER26> The French would have far fewer complaints about these companies if they were French, even if they behaved in exactly the same way.

The concerns are real, but the underlying issue is that having foreign firms succeed over local ones upsets people. One needs only listen to how often the politicians mention that the companies are American.

</comment><comment><USER27> I say we take it further- France should have to support movies in Languedoc and Alsatian and Breton as well. Surely the French nation can only benefit from such diversity. After all, New Guinea has 6000 languages surely such diversity of thought has them only minutes away from conquering the world...

</comment><comment><USER28> 1\. Impose tax on corporate revenues, not profits

2\. Regulate market capitalization of corporations

<comment><USER29> 3\. Profit?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Just once, I'd love to see one of these tech companies call these ridiculous bluffs.

"Fine. You want to try and force us to carry local French TV, and fully pay for the production of said local TV programs? We will be cutting off all Netflix access to France, effective immediately."

It would take less than ten minutes for these cowardly bureaucrats to cave.</comment>