Ideas don't make you rich. The correct execution of ideas does. - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.forbes.com/jeffbercovici/2011/03/11/excerpt-maxim-founder-felix-dennis-on-the-fallacy-of-big-ideas/

<comment><USER2> The neverending rebuttal of "a great idea is enough".

It seems to me that having a great idea would help... but I wonder if even that is necessary... I've been reading Christensen, on "disruption", and there's the concepts of:

\- _targeting non-consumption_ (or _non-consuming contexts_ \- e.g. users of phones, but not while mobile)

\- _asymmetric motivation_ , where low income or low margins or small markets etc. look great to (poor) you, but a rounding-error to (rich) incumbents. So they don't fight you.

\- _independent value networks_ , where you don't tap into any part of the way the incumbents do business. You don't use their suppliers; you don't use their sales channels, you don't target their customers. To use a value network, you have to fit in with it, you have to integrate with; you have to work with it - these means that you must constrain your business in some way. This has two effects: 1. if it's their network, your business will be more similar to theirs, and therefore easier for them to adapt to it, to attack you on your home ground, and co-opt the new market you created; 2. being constrained by some pre-existing way of doing business makes you less adaptable to whatever this new market needs, what the customers need, what the business idea needs. You are hampered from serving it.

\- _asymmetric skills_ , which is just the experience you get in making your particular business work. It's the accumulation of engineering problems you solve each day and gradually adapting your approach to suit them and having insights about how to reorganize to deal with them best; it's the accumulation of knowledge about your customers, what they want, how to reach them, what matters to them, what doesn't, along with repeatedly getting that to work. And so on - it's every part of making the business work. The more adapted you are to your customers and needs (and assuming this is different from what your competitors do - see the previous point), the greater a barrier to entry it is. That is, you become the incumbent in this new market, and you have the strengths that come along with that.

So, you might have an idea of a new market, that meets the above characteristics, and it seems that that idea would be valuable: a great idea.

However... I'm starting to think that instead of all that careful reasoning, perhaps you could just say "here's _my_ idea" (meaning an original idea, not a copy), and start doing what a business needs to do: find customers, serve them, improve your product, etc.

Wouldn't all the above points follow automatically, provided you just "did it your way"? And isn't that how so many of today's great companies started?

If this is true (is it? I don't know), then the idea doesn't matter at all, so long as it's _yours_ (original and motivating). _Any thoughts on this, esp if you've read Christensen?_

<comment><USER3> > esp if you've read Christensen?

I haven't, but now kind of want to. Links?

<comment><USER4> [http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_19?url=search- alias...](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_19?url=search- alias%3Daps&field- keywords=clayton+christensen&x=0&y=0&sprefix=clayton+christensen)

The big one is Innovator's Dilemma. I finished that and am up to Innovator's Solution.

<comment><USER2> Innovator's Dilemma is definitely the best - it was based on his PhD, it is brilliantly and simply written, and is also supported by actual data.

The above terminology is from the 3rd book, after Innovator's Solution, called "Seeing What's Next". Although he's refined and modified his theories with experience in applying them to many real situations, the book is no where near as well written, even includes a constant stream of ridiculous puns (in the aviation chapter), often uses casual language - and doesn't provide any actual data. Also, the second two books are only _co_ -authored by Christensen (who is a Rhodes Scholar btw).

That said, something like this may be a better resource: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology> and it's all over the web in general, so googling works.

You may also like Moore's "Crossing the Chasm" - the same ideas independently developed at the same time, but a how-to guide, rather than an academic description. He was a marketing guy, who noticed these patterns in how Apple etc succeeded. Andy Grove (for example) agreed with him. This is also a beautifully written book (guy's a PhD of English Lit).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been creating stuff for the last 5 years and if I had to tell you just one lesson from all of it, is this. I have seen in the last year how all my ideas from 3 or 4 years ago are becoming the big successes of the current web scene.

I'm not talking about an idea I had that resembled a current service. No, I'm talking about the same exact actual products and services. I'm in a perpetual WTF? state at how identical my ideas are.

Difference? Execution.

This also has made adopt a posture about the complexity of the idea itself. IMHO strip you idea of unnecessary complexity (advanced functionalities, etc, etc) in order to be able to execute it as good as you can as fast as you can. Simplicity allows better execution.

This seems obvious but is damn hard to accomplish.

<comment><USER6> > IMHO strip you idea of unnecessary complexity (advanced functionalities, > etc, etc) in order to be able to execute it as good as you can as fast as > you can. Simplicity allows better execution.

I think this is one of the important facets that determine how successful your execution will be. Put in too little functionality and it could fail. Put in too much and it could fail as well. All other things equal (design, marketing, etc) it's almost as if you need just enough to introduce the core functionality while still being useful, then iterating on that to bring in additional functionality once your customers grok the initial set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I need to send this to every person who tells me about their amazing iPhone app idea. Angry Birds was a different take/execution on an idea from an old Flash game. Doodle Jump was nearly the SAME app as Super Papi Jump but with new graphics and execution. How many unit conversion apps are there? The guys who made Convert were the last app to do it but they went to #1 thanks to brilliant execution. Fart apps? I'm friends with the guy who made the #2 fart app, and I can bust his chops all I want, but he's now a millionaire.

In the App Store it's actually rare for a mega hit app or game to truly be original: they're all mostly riffs on existing apps or games.

</comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of Ed Catmull's talk about Pixar management at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc#t=21m50s> \-- "If you have a good idea and you give it to a mediocre group, they'll screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a good group, they'll fix it, or they'll throw it away and come up with something else."

</comment><comment><USER9> One of the best thoughts on this subject is Derek Sivers' "Ideas are just a multiplier of execution" post.

<http://sivers.org/multiply>

</comment><comment><USER10> I hear a lot of people that say "I have a huge idea, I can't tell you about it." In most cases, they really haven't thought it through, and it has many flaws.

Execution. Execution. Execution.

<comment><USER11> I love when people tell me that they have the "next big idea," but that they can't disclose it. I lose interest the second someone tells me that, because if it were truly a great idea, they would instead be implementing it. If you have a 'great idea' that you don't know how to implement, it's probably not that great of an idea, because you inherently lack the skills to discover its weaknesses.

<comment><USER12> So, let's see: I have a 'great idea'. One pill taken once that will cure any cancer. World shaking idea!

This example clarifies this whole thread: The need to cure cancer is obvious. So is the desirability of such a one pill. Now let's set aside the obvious. The challenge is how to make that pill. The 'idea' with meaning, then, is how to make this pill.

If someone does know how to make the pill, then they definitely should not tell anyone about it without good legal advice, rock solid NDAs, etc.

But part of what makes this thread a mess is that at present the HN context of information technology entrepreneurship just assumes that, with current computing, the part analogous to finding the pill is trivial and the only challenge is identifying that people would like to have such a pill. This situation won't last very long!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 'The Narrow Road', the Felix Dennis book that's quoted from, is a condensation of his earlier 'How To Get Rich' ( _not_ 'How To Make Money', that's identical to 'The Narrow Road'.) I found the longer version equally valuable and vastly more entertaining.

While Felix is worth reading - a 'get rich' book from some who actually built a business and got rich! - he comes from the publishing world and his advice is very different from the practice of most technology startups.

For example, he advises never giving away any equity in your company, ever, and includes the story of how, early on in his publishing career, he fired all of his senior staff because they asked him for a small cut of the equity pie.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is there really any debate whether you have to execute an idea to make it successful? Are there really people who think you can have an idea, keep it in your head, and become rich just by thinking it? Of course you have to execute the idea, everyone knows that. Ah, but the sage advice is to execute it 'correctly.' That will be a big help to all those poor souls who thought it was better to execute their ideas incorrectly. If they'd only known...

The catch is that there is no way to predict whether your execution is 'correct' a priori. It's like saying the way to win the lottery is to pick the correct ticket. Technically true, but not particularly helpful in practice.

<comment><USER12> "Is there really any debate whether you have to execute an idea to make it successful?"

Mostly no. There are some cases where next to no 'execution' is needed for the big bucks. One example was the Sears employee who proposed a button on the socket wrench that would eject the socket. His 'execution' was a lot of legal wrestling with Sears after they implemented the idea but didn't pay him. Eventually he got paid.

"Are there really people who think you can have an idea, keep it in your head, and become rich just by thinking it?"

No.

"Ah, but the sage advice is to execute it 'correctly.'"

I believe that more "sage" advice is to have a good idea where execution is routine!

Here HN is trying really hard to get into a swamp and ignore the standard, old "sage" advice:

(1) Identify some target customer 'pain'. Want a bad pain so that a solution is a "must have" instead of just a "nice to have" (I know, Facebook and Twitter are so far mostly only nice to have).

(2) Find a solution to the pain. Hopefully this solution is new, much better than anything else, and can be protected.

(3) Use the Sequoia statement: "A huge market with customers yearning for a product developed by great engineers requires very little firepower." I don't fully believe this, but it's not all wrong. It's a version of "Build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door.", which is only partly true, also. Still, I didn't see a lot of Super Bowl ads for Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Here a crucial part, that I would call the valuable 'idea', is in (2), for the solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice, I just ordered "The Narrow Road" on Amazon. Felix Dennis's "How to Get Rich" is one of the best business books I've ever read, I _highly_ recommend it.

Sometimes the startup world devises its own theories on what makes businesses successful, and it's good to balance that out with the views of an old school no-nonsense, and massively successful, old media founder like Felix Dennis. He lays it out straight for you and he's all entrepreneur. Tons of wisdom in his books.

Great review by Derek Sivers on his first book: <http://sivers.org/book/HowToGetRich>

</comment><comment><USER16> This can't be stressed enough.

The last Startup Weekend that took place in Tel Aviv[1] has showed me exactly how important proper execution is. Great ideas are _never_ a guarantee for success.

Having an environment that cultivates top-notch execution is critical.

[1] - [http://blog.y3xz.com/post/3768333929/startup-weekend- tlv-201...](http://blog.y3xz.com/post/3768333929/startup-weekend-tlv-2011)

<comment><USER17> I couldn't attend Startup Weekend, but I have experienced the same phenomenon at other startup events in Tel Aviv. The less technically focused the event is, the more people will sit around and discuss ideas, without coding a single line. If you want to focus on execution, attend a Python or Ruby event, instead of a general startup meeting.

I assume this is true everywhere.

<comment><USER16> I try to attend every PyWeb-IL meeting ;)

<comment><USER17> Cool. I've wanted to attend PyWeb-IL for a long time, but I haven't been able to make it. Hopefully I'll be at the next one - look for a student with long hair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I met Felix Dennis the other day. He knew about my start-up and grilled me about it. Quite good practice for pitching: [http://wannabevc.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/doing-battle- with-...](http://wannabevc.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/doing-battle-with-felix- dennis/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Unless you're Intellectual Ventures. Then you just extract money from anyone who properly executes the idea you bought.

<comment><USER20> Executing on this idea as successfully as they have is far from easy.

<comment><USER19> To my untrained eye, it seems like "raise lots of money, buy many, many patents, build nothing so the target can't bargain with their patent portfolio, and then start negotiating". Once you have that machine working you can iron out the details. It's like domainers - get there first, buy everything that looks vaguely useful and extract rents.

What's the hard part?

<comment><USER20> It's no harder than "build a faddy social network thing that's slightly better than MySpace", or "build a slightly better search engine than AltaVista" to other untrained eyes, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> From: "Do more faster" ( [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0046H9BBM/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0046H9BBM/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=dedasys-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0046H9BBM) )

> We often talk about the Number One startup killer at TechStars—making a > product for which there is no interesting market. TechStars accepts just 10 > of more than 600 startups that apply and presumably they are among the best. > But still, we find that at least one-third of those startups are attempting > to build a product that they want, or that no one wants, instead of what the > market wants.

So, no, the idea alone doesn't make you rich, but having a good idea is worth something, given how many bad ones there are.

<comment><USER12> Here's the solution: Borrow from Edison and the electric light. Look at lighting before the good electric lights -- it sucked. There were open flames that were dangerous. The light quality was awful. Etc. Yes, it was expensive and dangerous, but you have to remember, the light quality sucked.

So, there was no doubt about the customer 'pain' or the 'market' or the 'market potential'.

So, why was there work to do? Because no one knew how the heck to "Do that".

So, the challenge was in how to do that. Eventually Edison pulled it all together, and the earnings have been a lot of what has kept GE going to the present.

It would have been still better if there had been some patents.

It can be still better if the solution is in software, essentially impossible to 'reverse engineer' and very difficult to duplicate or equal, and quite secure in code on servers.

So, TechStars needs to start with customer 'pain' that is huge and clear and not solved. Then TechStars needs to find a solution to this pain. The solution, the 'secret sauce', should give much better results than anything else and be difficult to reverse engineer, duplicate, or equal. For a Web site to order custom printed paper napkins delivered by FedEx (put the print shop in Memphis and let orders in by 10 PM Memphis time be delivered by 10:30 AM local time), that's essentially impossible to protect. So, f'get about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Bet on the jockey, not the horse.

My professor used to drill this saying into us in my Intro to Entrepreneurship class 2 years ago. I still use that quote most when giving advice to other students who have an idea but are hesitant to share it.

My freshmen year in college, I met two students who had just received VC funding, and they told me one tip that had helped them most: they shared their idea with anybody who would listen, because they never knew how somebody might be able to help them along.

If you truly have a good idea, somebody else is working on it too. You might as well talk about it and get all the help you can.

<comment><USER12> "If you truly have a good idea, somebody else is working on it too."

Standard HN cliche number 298,498,229 and nonsense.

I've had several ideas that I can essentially 100% guarantee that no one else was working on. My Ph.D. dissertation was officially judged "new, correct, and significant" -- note the "new". Similarly for each paper of original research I've published. Similarly for the crucial, core idea for the company I'm starting.

Just what is it about original research that HN just cannot understand?

<comment><USER22> Research is a different beast than creating a marketable product. If you're creating a product that nobody is working on or hasn't tried to make before, you have to stop and wonder, why has nobody done this before?

Before Tylenol existed, many people had attempted to tackle the problem of pain management. Tylenol just happened to make a more efficient chemical formula with their research, but the idea of using drugs to control pain was not new. When you talk about your idea, you don't need to reveal _how_ you do something differently, just like Tylenol can talk about their idea without revealing their formula and Google can talk about their idea without revealing their algorithm.

I was in St Louis last week for a business pitch competition, and I watched a med school PhD candidate read his dissertation paper and present his research for the elevator pitch competition. He had absolutely no business knowledge or any idea on how to market his research into a profitable product. But because he was able to talk about his idea and research without revealing anything that would allow somebody else in the room to just copy it, he was able to build contacts with several other business-oriented people in the room who liked the idea and were interested in helping him take it to market.

<comment><USER12> "Research is a different beast than creating a marketable product."

Well there are people in research looking for fundamental knowledge, e.g., string theory in physics or the finest details of biochemistry and genetic material in biology. And there are people doing make-work, junk-think, prof- scam, busy work. And in neither case is there much connection with a product or market.

But your claim is not true in all cases! I'm creating a "marketable product". That the product is desirable and "marketable" is mostly obvious. The challenge is how to create the thing.

I found a way. That way was some original research in applied math. Since I have Ph.D. for such math, I'm able to make a competent attempt at such research and to judge any results for correctness as math and significance for the real problem.

There's essentially no doubt that my idea is "new" and that no one else is working on it. Reasons: First, my work has some advanced prerequisites nearly unknown anywhere among full profs in computer science. They didn't take enough of the right grad math courses, and, actually, neither did more than a tiny fraction of math profs. Some of the courses are rarely taught; the combination of courses is especially rare. Second, the crucial part of the work is clearly original; there's no chance it's in the books or journals, and there's essentially no chance that anyone else with the prerequisites would be trying to get the same results.

To me, that research I did was the crucial 'idea' for my business. At this point, the rest is routine, a simple Web site, some simple usage of relational database, some fairly simple initial data gathering, and some routine publicity.

You are insisting on saying that the research is not business and not the idea and that the idea is the market for a solution for the customer pain. That definition of an 'idea' is new and strange and a big break with centuries of history in technology for business, medicine, and the military and with the whole history of the USPTO.

Yes, your new definition of an 'idea' has become very common in Web 2.0 information technology entrepreneurship.

The people who invented the formula for Tylenol would agree that that invention of the chemical formula, and possibly how to do the manufacturing, was the crucial 'idea'. Just a better pill to alleviate pain was not the idea.

For the market I'm addressing, sure, lots of other people have tried. It's just that for the customer pain I'm addressing, the results from the other guys just suck and the results from my idea, as is quite clear from some of the math, should be much better. Eventually it will dawn on some people in computer science that I must have made good progress in having computer software work effectively with how humans view 'meaning', where they will be correct, and start to say my work is close to earth shaking. But I don't want their characterizations, praise, prizes, approval, admiration, gratitude, tenure, invitations to give lectures, etc.; I want a yacht. Then I want to compose music, starting roughly with the techniques of Richard Strauss, and then pursue mathematical physics, often on my yacht.

Yes, other people have tried to solve the same customer pain, but I do not conclude from this fact that they have been working on the same "idea" I am.

One pill taken once to cure any cancer is not a significant 'idea' or 'market'. The good idea would be how to make such a pill, and then the 'market' would be quite new.

I count aspirin, Tylenol, Advil, Benzocaine, etc. as great ideas for alleviating pain. I don't count the market for alleviating pain as a meaningful 'idea', but you seem to be.

Your new definition for an 'idea' actually can have some value in Web 2.0: It is not very clear just what people want from Web 2.0, the 'social graph', etc. so that a guess at what they want and how to provide it, even if all the necessary technology is trivial, might be a valuable 'idea'. There seems to be some progress here at

[http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social- networ...](http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2)

Still, this definition of an 'idea' is strange, new, very narrow, and in strong conflict with centuries of important history and nearly everything else in 'ideas' today from 'creative' in ads to the USPTO, DoD, NSF, and NIH funded projects, pharmaceutical research, and much more.

I have one more idea: Send Jane Fonda and Al Guru to Japan!

<comment><USER22> I think we are arguing the same point but with different terms.

To me, the 'idea' is how you would describe the product to a customer in one sentence. The execution is how this idea is made. In your case, this would be your research and unique math algorithm. The business plan is how you plan to market and monetize this product. A successful business requires all three factors.

When I said that an idea is being worked on elsewhere, I meant that somebody has at some point tried to solve that pain point for your customers. They are your competition. I stand by this statement. You seem to be arguing that your execution is unique, and I absolutely agree. Your execution has to be unique, or else you would be guaranteed to fail. Based on your description, it seems you are in an ideal position to execute your idea successfully, and I wish you the best of luck.

Based on the above definitions, I am suggesting that you can and should talk about your idea without talking about your execution. Share what problem you're solving, but definitely don't tell anybody the results of your math research. Using your example of a cancer pill, you should talk about your pill to anybody who will listen without sharing _how_ the pill is going cure cancer.

I disagree that business plan factor are trivial after execution is handled. You could make the perfect product with your algorithm, but if you are unable to figure out a way to monetize or market your product, then it will fail. Of course, the relative difficulty of each factor depends on the industry and product.

<comment><USER12> "To me, the 'idea' is how you would describe the product to a customer in one sentence."

Yes, that seems to be a better definition of the 'new', Web 2.0 definition of an 'idea' than I was able to formulate. I just don't think it is a very appropriate, significant, or meaningful use of 'idea'.

I regard the important ideas as the crucial, difficult, powerful 'secret sauce' and the 'execution' as the routine stuff that comes later, especially after customers arrive. With a sufficiently good idea, say, the first Xerox machine, TWA in its first months as it had the only Lockheed Connies in the world, and more, as relatively 'routine' and this because the work before was so darned good. The US is absolutely awash in ability to do routine execution, from a corner store up to a giant corporation, well.

For my project, I've worked out more than the math: The math is now in code ready for production -- tested, timed, documented. It's shockingly fast. I've worked out a server farm 'architecture' that is dirt simple and looks like it will 'scale' beyond what the world could use. Much of the simplicity is because there is a lot of parallelism and redundancy and a lot of data that is read-only for at least a day and maybe a week. Actually, all the big data is read-only in this sense. And, it does appear that in production this big read- only data can be just in virtual memory off either rotating magnetic disks or the newer, faster solid state disks (that love read-only data). Windows Server 2008 (I'm staying with Microsoft) can have 16 TB of virtual memory, and my software does the accesses with very nice, and, thus, fast, locality of reference.

The role of the math is to take the available data, 'crunch' it, and give the desired results. The quality of the results is key and where the work of the other guys sucks.

There is a 'larger business plan' beyond just the crucial, core math: As a byproduct of the work itself, the Web site gets some data from the users. The users give that data as part of getting the results they want and won't mind giving the data because there is no privacy threat.

But from some subtle results in advanced math (the Radon-Nikodym theorem), that data will be the main source of 'base data' for the whole system for everything. So, in particular, compared with the other guys, I have some new data, of unusually high quality, and especially valuable. People won't see why the data is valuable, but it is! In particular, the data will let me do some good ad targeting, and that's where the 'monitization' and 'revenue model' come from. I don't really want to use third party cookies to connect with the ad targeting of the ad networks, and I should be able to do better ad targeting just with my own data and some more of my math.

The software promises to be astoundingly efficient: From the timings, data rates, and data sizes, it appears that for the on-line production servers, four racks should be enough for about $4.5 billion a year in revenue, and 2000 square feet of on-line rack space should be sufficient to serve the world. Right: If 4 racks can give $4.5 billion a year in revenue, then 2000 square feet of rack space should give one of the most valuable companies in the world. Of course would want more space for redundancy, backup and recovery, testing, and development. For more reliability and lower latency, might want more than one data center. Could make a little use of some caching on the network.

I'm not eager to say what the problem is much before I'm ready to go live.

Actually, telling people what the problem is seems to have no upside at all: Plenty of people in venture capital have had descriptions of the work polished to more luster than any gold and really don't give a hoot. The situation is very much as in, "before good ComScore numbers, the project is just an idea, and ideas are easy and plentiful. Execution is everything and doesn't start until after the ComScrore numbers." The flip side of this thinking is an opportunity for me.

Net, what they care about are ComScore numbers. But, as threatens to be increasingly the case, for a successful Web site, there will be a window narrow in time between when the ComScore numbers are (1) good enough for the VCs to invest and (2) so good that I won't need or take their check. The advantages of being 100% owner of a 100% private, very profitable Subchapter S corporation, or even a C corporation, are just huge.

Actually, I'm terrified of having a Board: (1) They could kill my company just from taking up 25% of my time developing information to report to them. (2) There is no way they could possibly understand anything significant about the future of the business and no way I could explain it to them or keep them happy about it.

For the 'algorithms', I would say that they are trivial because the real content is in the math; the only claim of power or quality from the code is the math it implements; actually, given the math, the implementation was not difficult. So what matters is the math, not the algorithms.

This is a general situation in newer computing: An algorithm standing alone has little to recommend it, and just 'experience' will be a long, slow path to 'validity'. Instead, for 'validity', quality, whatever, an algorithm needs a prior 'specification' of what it does. Often that specification will have to be some relatively advanced math. Currently this math is a huge bottleneck for promise in computing.

<comment><USER22> You just provided a whole lot of technical information about the efficiency of your algorithm, and even some financial projections for your company. That's the sort of information that you should keep to yourself unless specifically asked for because it is the valuable part of your company. The problem you are trying to solve is the part you should actively talking about, because that's what's going to get people's interest.

You clearly have a great understanding of the technical side of things, but the business/marketing/financial side is just as difficult. It's impossible to be good at everything, you will want help, either in the form of a cofounder and/or a board that can advise you.

Another saying that my prof used to repeat was "you can be rich or you can be king, but not both." Entrepreneurs like to have control, that's why we start companies in the first place. We think we can solve a problem better than anyone else can. As a result, we try to control every aspect of the company. Unfortunately, this is the fastest way to hurt the company. If you want to control 100% of the company, you will only be able to grow so much. If you are hoping to own a yacht as you mentioned earlier, you're going to have to be willing to give up control and accept advice and help from others. Think of it this way: 25% of a big number is better than 100% of a small number.

Do you think Zuckerberg could have built Facebook to where it is today without help from more business-savvy people? Do you think Google would be as big as it is today if Page and Brin had maintained control instead of bringing in Schmidt to be CEO? Do you think Woz would have built Apple without Jobs? These are all examples of extremely intelligent people who needed help to grow their company. Like I said, it is impossible to be good at everything.

Running a startup is like raising a kid. It's hard enough to do that under normal circumstance. Why make it harder by making yourself a single parent?

Just some advice based on my own experiences, observations, and advice I've received from others.

<comment><USER12> For "interest", venture capital wants to see, first, just the UI/UX and then, second, ComScore numbers. For the UI/UX, that's the last software I'm writing, not the first. Nothing else I said here interests venture capital at all. Nothing. Actually, for the advantage and technological barrier to entry from the math, they just get torqued because they know it's not within their 'deep domain knowledge' and they want to feel that they know more than the entrepreneur. And I tell them the problem I'm solving as the users see it, and that doesn't impress them, either.

It's like, and I suspect, and this is much of the reason for the recent rise of the angels, that to stop another bubble the few, large LPs got together and wrote on the back of a 3 x 5" card the dirt simple criteria for each of seed and Series A, B, C, D. The criteria rule out considering anything I've said here or even the users' problem I'm solving. With these rules, could teach a dog to be a VC in a weekend. So, the LPs won't let the VCs actually 'review' a business plan and apply 'judgment'. So, that's why some VCs blog: That's about the only advantage they have left, that is, to get the 'deal flow', and otherwise are reduced to being just another dog following the 3 x 5" card.

I've seen a lot in business, from small companies to large and successful ones to large and sick ones. I helped start a large, successful one and learned a lot there. One of the main things I learned is, there isn't a lot to learn. I've been a B-school prof where I also ran a consulting company with four important clients in business. So, for someone doing a startup, I am relatively well informed on business and how to start and run one. None of this background impresses VCs either!

Actually, I learned that the most important thing to learn for business is People 101.

Besides, on Main Streets all across the US there are sole proprietors being successful. Actually, they own nearly all the yachts under 100 feet long. My business is really different only in the advantages of Moore's law, the technical core, and the potential. They do it; I should be able to do it, too.

The Koch brothers never went public; they just ran their business.

That I have some technical knowledge doesn't really mean that I have too little 'business knowledge'!

Sure, if I go public, then I'll have staffs helping me entertain Wall Street, the institutional investors, the WSJ and the NYT, CNBC, keep the SEC happy, keep me out of trouble with Sarbanes-Oxley, entertain Congress, etc.

I'm eager to learn: E.g., I work hard on the Internet to learn, from AVC.com, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, C|Net, SAI, HN, and the best I can get. AVC.com has some of the best information, mostly from people who comment.

Early on I won't try to do bookkeeping, accounting, or legal. ASAP I will just get the best paid technical support I can from Microsoft and deliberately resist learning all the details of Windows Server administration. Same for Cisco's products: I have a basic understanding of TCP/IP, DNS, and even MPLS and have written socket software, but I will work to 'outsource' as much as possible on networking to the right people at Microsoft and Cisco.

But a pattern is developing: I have to get this project to some ComScore numbers with just my own eight fingers and two thumbs. And I won't want the ComScore users much before I have some ads to get me some revenue. Then my planning arithmetic indicates that if I do get users, early on the 'free cash flow' from two weeks of revenue can pay to double the capacity of the server farm.

Why? Take reasonable values for charge per click or charge per 1000 ads displayed, take the small size of my simple Web pages, add in current prices for servers and bandwidth, and conclude that in two weeks a busy server can make money enough to replace itself. The key is to get the server busy!

So, after a few doublings, there's a good chance that I'll have so much revenue that a Series A check for a few million dollars would not be very interesting.

So, the venture capital people want me to wait so long that they are very close to having me wait so long I won't want venture capital. Or if I've been live for a few months and go for venture capital, then it's because my business is less good than I planned!

For my having a good, complete, well rounded team, on the Internet no one can tell that a Web site is run by a team, one person, or a dog. If people really like the Web site, then I'm awash in money to 'outsource', hire, etc. Really, the next key, nearly both necessary and sufficient, is just for people to like the Web site.

Maybe the LPs think that VC is like PE where just wait for an owner of a good business to go for fast women, slow horses, and cheap booze, get into a nasty divorce, etc. and then buy him out cheap, put in their own CEO to do just routine things, rebuild the company, and sell it.

There is the example of Plenty of Fish: A romantic matchmaking site in Canada, ads just from Google with no additional targeting, $10 million a year in revenue, two old Dell servers, and one guy. So, right, his business is worth ballpark $1 billion.

For examples, I liked Gates at Microsoft, Ellison at Oracle, Viterbi at QUALCOMM, and a few more.

For Schmidt at Google, it seemed to me that his main role was to make the investment bankers and institutional investors happy. Now he's booted himself upstairs. Seemed to me that Page and Brin were doing fine and now are again.

Even if my company could be the most valuable in the world, I don't much care. When someone offers me $1 billion for it, I'll sell, buy the yacht, and write music. The buyer can take the company and run it up to $300 billion if he wants. If no one wants to buy and I have a Board eager for the rest of the value, then I'll stay and help, out of obligation, and for some pride in seeing the success, but it will delay my work on music and physics.

There is an issue of power and public responsibility: A company or a person worth $300 billion has a lot of power. I would want at least to see that the power was not abused. It would be ugly music to write to leave the company and have someone else take the power of $300 billion and abuse it.

For some of the best advice I've seen in business, I'm not super thrilled. I'm crossing rough waters in a small canoe, and it's not clear to me that having someone else in the canoe will make the crossing easier. I just have to get that canoe across the water. That work is my responsibility, and there's no way I can 'outsource' or really even share that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Not only that, but an idea is not a single thing: <http://berislav.lopac.net/post/3580278793/there-are-no-ideas> (blatant plug, but relevant).

<comment><USER24> So true!

The prerequisite for executing something, is the idea that you have an idea. Otherwise you will never go through the hassle of making something in the first place :)

Before you write something it feels like you already know what you're going to write. Still, writing is though and it takes a long time before you come to a result that says what you figured you want to say all along.

That is, because what actually happens, is that you work hard on converting this network of vague assumptions in your head, which already _feels_ meaningful, into something which can actually be meaningful to others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is becoming a thoroughly overused cliché. Generally true, but so overused, there must be cases in which it is wrong.

<comment><USER26> While I feel that I agree, I'm having a hard time thinking of any counter examples this morning. Perhaps there are there specific industries where the focus isn't executing or creating but instead just being the first? Pharmaceuticals?

<comment><USER25> Pharmaceuticals seems to be a good example: it's one of the few industries where getting the consumer to know of your product is not the issue (Steve Gary Blank wrote that, if a company found a cure for cancer, marketing would be a non issue). At the same time, being the first with the product guarantees patents and there for lots of money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't understand why people continually compare the two as if they're mutually exclusive. Why can't we just settle on the fact that they're both equally critical to a successful company?

Is it because some outlying success stories seem to be deficient in one and it causes people question whether that was necessary in the first place?

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen While this is not news for the people on this forum, it is surprising to hear it through Forbes.

And, my one-line rebuttal: ideas don't matter, unless, of course, they are actually novel algorithms. PageRank was very important to Google's success.

</comment><comment><USER28> The correct execution of ideas doesn't make you rich. Receiving money makes you rich.

You can execute correctly on a $100 million deal, but if you don't cash the check, you're still poor.

To be rich, _cash large checks_.

</comment><comment><USER29> isn't this somewhat obvious? i mean, you could even have a perpetual movement figured out that it wouldn't matter if it didn't work. Now, the definition of "correct execution" may vary, from "does the job" to "awesome"

</comment><comment><USER30> Too one sided.

"A rising tide raises all ships."

The best execution in the world won't save you if you are focused on the wrong thing.

In fact great execution in the wrong direction is a menace.

</comment><comment><USER31> I just thought it relevant to point out Job's old resume(currently frontpaged) says that little "vision thing" as skills. Thats what I think "idea" is. And it's constantly reevaluated and adjusted.

</comment><comment><USER32> I couldn't agree more... good ideas are a dime-a-dozen. What's rare are people who put in the effort to execute ideas, and execute them well.

People tend not to act upon their ideas because of the lack of time, money, or the right skills. I'm trying to help solve the third problem on my site www.iinspireus.com -- helping people find real collaborators/partners with skills complementary to theirs, so that they can realize their ideas.

</comment><comment><USER33> Exactly what does the publisher of Maxim have to teach us about great ideas and/or the execution thereof? "It's all about the breasts"?

[http://www.maxim.com/amg/girls/girls-of- maxim/94039/lindsay-...](http://www.maxim.com/amg/girls/girls-of- maxim/94039/lindsay-lohan.html)

</comment><comment><USER34> in the iPhone you need correct execution and the App Store Mafia to emerge, otherwise no matter how good your execution is, you'll get nowhere.

</comment><comment><USER35> ...unless you are a Patent Troll :)

</comment><comment><USER12> So, yet again we have someone saying that ideas are plentiful, easy, worthless, and don't "count": Or,

"It is the manner in which ideas are executed that counts."

"Ideas don't make you rich. The correct execution of ideas does."

Somehow I remember seeing this nonsense before:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287728>

So, since ideas don't "count", we should shut down the USPTO and tell the US DoD to quit classifying ideas for, say, stealth, laser gyroscopes for inertial navigation, drag-free satellites for better GPS, a lot in sonar, radar, and spread spectrum, etc. And we should tell the lawyers that when someone steals a trade secret idea they have stolen nothing that "counts".

Moreover, we should shut down the funding for NSF and NIH for more ideas.

And we should shut down the peer-reviewed journals of original research since they publish just ideas with usually nothing on "execution".

In particular, we should do away with the Ph.D. dissertation since its usual role now is to present an idea that is "an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication" and where the usual criteria for publication are "new, correct, and significant" which must all be empty since ideas don't "count".

We should shutdown the Nobel prizes since they are given just for ideas that don't "count".

For Newton's second law F = ma, we should quit teaching that because it is just an idea which doesn't "count". Similarly for Einstein's equivalence of mass and energy in E = mc^2 -- doesn't "count".

For the Craig Venter idea of chopping up DNA, sequencing the pieces, and reassembling the pieces in a computer, an idea that got the sequencing of DNA done years faster, we should have ignored that.

For the idea of Reed-Solomon error correcting codes crucial to letting CDs work, it doesn't "count" either.

For public key cryptosystems, their role in Kerberos and authentication and in electronic finance, we should forget about that, too, since they are just ideas which don't "count".

People should quit looking for an idea to settle the question P versus NP since the idea, even if found, would not "count".

And the idea of using tungsten in a glass with high vacuum as an incandescent electric light would not "count". The tungsten idea came from the English chemist Swan, and the needed much better vacuum pump came from Germany(?). Then Edison could give up on baking hair to make carbon filaments and get on with electric lighting.

But, more is claimed: Apparently all ideas are equivalent, that is. don't "count:, and only execution counts. So, might as well start with a bad idea.

If start with a bad idea, then, yes, execution is about all that will "count". Just what is it about bad ideas the author likes so much?

This article is just another attempt of many to run down ideas by apparently someone with less than a weak little hollow hint of a tiny clue about what an 'idea' really is and what a good idea is how valuable it can be.

In fact, with a good idea, execution is routine and the idea was likely difficult to find and is about all that does "count".

There can be reasons for running down good ideas:

(1) They can be new and disrupt things.

(2) They tend to be difficult to find.

(3) In school in, say, math and physics, being able to find the good ideas needed to work the problems can be difficult and hurt the feelings of people who fail to find such ideas.

(4) In venture capital, it might be a good initial negotiating position to claim that "Ideas are easy. Execution is everything." and "Ideas are plentiful." in order to tell an entrepreneur with a good idea that what he has is easy and plentiful and nothing.

E.g., one of the most important steps forward in civilization, technology, and economic productivity was Euclid's 'Elements' on plane geometry, especially the Pythagorean theorem, e.g., crucial for trigonometry, Fourier theory, Nyquist sampling, JPGs, MPEGs, and music CDs! But, for anything so important we'd want a solid proof. All that takes is a good idea. So maybe the author would like to find such a proof, alone, without books, Google, or input from others.

<comment><USER36> I don't think he said they don't count, I think he said they won't make you money, which is different. Many of the ideas you listed were invented by one person and then capitalized upon by another. This doesn't mean the idea wasn't important, just that the person who got rich was the one with the implementation.

<comment><USER12> "I don't think he said they don't count"

Yes he did. He said that execution is what "counts". The way he wrote this it is fair to conclude that he meant that execution is ALL that counts so that nothing else counts and in particular ideas don't count. He was careful never to admit that an idea "counts". He's being polemical, and you are bending over backwards to be literal and generous.

You realize that an idea can be important, but he didn't want to admit that.

That execution or implementation is important for making money with the idea is also not really true: That's why we have the USPTO. Patent licensing is big business, big bucks, and sometimes there's not a lot of 'execution' needed.

Yes, of course, in the usual situation, to get the big bucks have to 'implement' and 'execute'. We know that. Anyone out of the first grade knows this. What he wanted to imply was that execution "counts" so that the idea doesn't -- he wanted to remove the possibility of a good idea. Dumb.

I fully assure you, find a good idea for a one pill solution to any cancer, and the idea will be about all that "counts" and execution will be a very easy case of routine -- have some big pharma company do the trials, put the pills in the bottles, and hire the security guards to push away the desperate customers.

"Many of the ideas you listed were invented by one person and then capitalized upon by another. This doesn't mean the idea wasn't important, just that the person who got rich was the one with the implementation."

Sure: We are agreeing. E.g., without Swan and his idea about tungsten, poor Edison would have been pulling hairs to bake from himself, his employees, his wife, dogs, cats, etc. all as a waste of time. Similarly for the vacuum pump. Yes, I would hope that Swan would have gotten the big bucks, but he didn't. Still, the idea was crucial. Edison would have made no bucks at all from lights without such an idea. Or, just tell Edison to "execute": Right! Try to sell lights that last about 40 hours! "Come on Tom, just EXECUTE! Quit wasting time looking for ideas. EXECUTE! Ideas are easy and plentiful (J. Doerr). Execution is everything (J. Doerr) and all that 'counts'!".

In my project, I started with an idea. I'm attacking a problem nearly every Internet user in the world has and knows that they have. So far all the solutions 'executed' just suck, about like a 40 hour light. Maybe 500 million Internet users would take the problem seriously enough actually to want and use a good solution. Maybe 50 million would become really "engaged" (Fred Wilson, AVC.com). A few million will like the solution enough to become 'addicted' as is common in games (although my project is not for a 'game').

The crucial obstacle to a solution is a good idea, just the idea, just "How to do that". That is, the reason the current solutions suck is closely analogous to Edison not knowing about tungsten.

How to do that ain't easy to discover. What's needed is a good idea not easy to find. With the idea, the rest is routine. If others could find the idea for a good solution, say, think of tungsten, then the problem would have been solved long ago. Net, the idea is nearly all that really matters.

Well, I invented and have the idea. No, it ain't computer science or artificial intelligence or machine learning or some heuristic or any of that nonsense. Instead the solution is some original applied math with some advanced prerequisites. Nearly no one in computer science, including the chaired profs, has the prerequisites and certainly hasn't done my original work.

So, what am I doing? Today it's struggling with some UI/UX details and ASP.NET, and I'm a beginner with ASP.NET and going slowly. Thousands of others here on HN could take my idea and core code (I have the software for the idea in good shape) and totally blow me out of the water on the rest of the software. But, I've kept the idea confidential! So, I've got time for my slow progress with ASP.NET! Again, 99 44/100% of what matters is just the idea.

So, right, I'm not giving away the idea, and my intention is to keep the idea confidential, in software well protected in a server farm and get the big bucks for myself.</comment></comment></comment>


OMG Markdown - <AUTHOR> http://spinhalf.net/omg-markdown/ <comment><USER2> The fact that this whole charade is over one word "standard" because it seemingly takes control away from Gruber rubs me the wrong way.

Jeff Atwood and co have done nothing but praise Markdown. They've worked really hard to flesh out a starting point for a standardized Markdown implementation. I think the word they chose, "Standard" makes perfect sense here.

Instead, both John Gruber and Marco Arment are acting super immature about the whole situation. Reading their Tweets today I keep imagining them stomping their feet on the ground because someone did something they didn't approve of.

I don't mean to add fuel to any fire, but I really think we shouldn't be validating their overly-dramatic behavior. I'm sure that Gruber could have politely sent Atwood an email or even public tweet asking that his project reconsider a better name, maybe even calling it something like "Rockdown." From everything I've read so far, Atwood seemed to want Gruber on board but got crickets instead.

<comment><USER3> I'm with Gruber and Arment on this. It's really simple. Markdown is Gruber's name. So he's the only one with the authority to say what "standard Markdown" is. Atwood and company should just rename their spec and be done with it.

EDIT: To be really classy, after the rename, redirect standardmarkdown.com to Gruber's Markdown home page.

<comment><USER4> I agree they should rename, and after they rename, no one will give a crap about Markdown anymore.

Remember Hudson? Maybe you've heard of Jenkins? Exactly.

All the big players who make use of Markdown are on board with this. If they all adopt this "standard" whatever it's called, it will effectively spell the end of mass usage of "Markdown" as it stands now.

That's why this keruffle is so stupid. Then again, renaming will take away the attention from the stupid yelling over the name, so maybe they should just do it and deprive them of it. Call it Sparkdown or Harkdown or something so the connection is still apparent and move on.

<comment><USER5> > I agree they should rename, and after they rename, no one will give a crap > about Markdown anymore.

I doubt that. RSS is still _widely_ used even though Atom has the more precise specification.

> Call it Sparkdown or Harkdown or something so the connection is still > apparent and move on.

FWIW, Gruber has explicitly endorsed this approach: [https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507590561172176897](https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507590561172176897)

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure RSS vs. Atom is a good comparison. As far I understood it, Atom was created to address the limitations in RSS with a fresh approach, not simply to further refine behavior in a loosely specified format.

And while I'm aware he wants them to do their thing with a new name (an argument I can agree with for sure), I think he'd _probably_ still complain about a connective name (e.g., Sparkdown). I don't know for sure, but given his posture to this whole thing throughout the process, it seems likely. At that point, though, I think they could justifiably just give him the proverbial finger. :)

EDIT: Turns out I was wrong. He gave them a list of similar names (with Markdown in them no less!) in a recent e-mail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think it's worth noting that TeX was standardized and frozen by Knuth (at version 3.14159...). I recall that Knuth wrote that it was important to have a documentation format that didn't drift over time so that in the future TeX would properly process documents written many years before.

Knuth also protected the name TeX. There have been a number of important packages that run on top of TeX, for example LaTeX and ConText and even enhanced implementations of TeX itself, like LuaTeX, pdftex, and xetex; however, only Knuth's TeX can be called "TeX".

It seems that this has worked out for TeX, something similar could be done for Markdown.

<comment><USER7> I don't think Knuth would be happy with "Standard TeX".

In my mind, the problematic part is of "Standard Markdown" is "Standard", not the composition of "X Markdown". "Standard Markdown" makes it the real Markdown for most people, and that is the problem, that it feels like you're trying to steal the work from the original author, not build on it.

<comment><USER8> > I don't think Knuth would be happy with "Standard TeX".

Perhaps that's because Dr. Knuth actually _standardized_ TeX, unlike what Gruber did with Markdown.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Standard Markdown is now Common Markdown

[http://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now- common...](http://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-common- markdown/)

[https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/507672066540453888](https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/507672066540453888)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8271327](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8271327)

</comment><comment><USER10> Serious question ...

What do you do when the founder of a project becomes an impediment to its progress? Gruber is clearly the creator and popularizer of Markdown. OTOH, he's been uninvolved in anything related to it for years (AFAICT).

The corollary to this question is to what degree the founder of a project "owns" aspects of the project (code, name, etc.) after they drop out. I'm not asking about legal ownership but rather moral ownership.

<comment><USER11> This is real simple. You don't get to appropriate the name just because you wanna. Maybe legally you can under some circumstances, but ethically it's completely and utterly bankrupt. I cannot even fathom how anyone could even get the idea to appropriate the name and the project in that way. It shows a complete lack of respect and decency.

Naming it something different is very simple. Really, very simple.

<comment><USER12> I think it's way more complicated than you're making it sound.

So, these things happened:

\- Gruber announces Markdown, and releases an implementation in Ruby and some basic documentation

\- Someone ports Markdown to a different language. -> is it okay to call it Markdown?

\- Said implementation differs from the original implementation in some minor ways, although it still matches the documentation (which is vague enough). This might not even be intentional; it wouldn't be the first time any software has had bugs. Or it might be intentional fixes of actual bugs in the original Ruby implementation of Markdown. -> is it okay to call it Markdown?

\- Other people port Markdown to other languages. Said ports become more popular than the original Ruby implementation, such that pretty very few people who claim to use "Markdown" have actually used said original Ruby implementation. These ports are all subtly different from each other, although they still match the documentation (which is vague enough).

\- A bunch of people decide to create better documentation (since said original documentation has been vague enough to cause problems with interoperability) -> is it okay to call it Markdown?

After answering these questions, I'd encourage you to replace "Markdown" with "HTML", and imagine how that originally went down.

<comment><USER11> I'll grant you that if this were named Something Markdown it would be much, much more subtle. But it's _Standard_ Markdown FFS. That's definitely not ok.

<comment><USER12> Again, I'd encourage you to replace "Markdown" with "HTML" and imagine if your beliefs would still be consistent.

Do you think NetScape should have claimed to support "NetScape-flavored HTML" rather than "HTML"? Do you think the WHATWG should have announced "WHATWG- flavored HTML" rather than "HTML5" in response to lack of action from the W3C (actually a very similar situation to what happened here).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > However, Standard Markdown does violate MD's BSD license:

> Neither the name "Markdown" nor the names of its contributors may be used to > endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific > prior written permission.

> So does MultiMarkdown. So does Github Flavored Markdown.

This is what I don't understand about this uproar. The word "markdown" has been used in multiple products and offshoots from Markdown, and no one has said a peep. What makes "Standard Markdown" different from the existing products?

"Comment Markdown"? "Code flavored Markdown"? "Startup Flavored Markdown"? "Startup Markdown"? "Standard Flavored Markdown"? "A Standardized Implementation of Markdown"? "Specced Markdown"? "The Standard Dialect of Markdown"? Are any of these acceptable?

Why do these folks, alone, need to remove the word "markdown" from their name? And is it specifically the word "Standard", or perhaps the lack of a "flavored"-type word, that is grinding gears?

<comment><USER13> Not that I really care, and sure I don't think that discussing licenses and stuff can be valid or meaningful whatsoever, but I understand why somebody can think of it as a problem and why they can tell a difference between "Github flavored Markdown" and "Standard Markdown". First off, I'm quite sure that if you own some rights on something called "Markdown" and you wan't to abuse somebody, who uses name of your product as part of their own product, then in a battle of lawyers and all these nasty things you can do so, because ultimately it's your right to do so. You invented this stuff and in the license you chose for it it's clearly stated that you don't want somebody else to use its name. So the reason nobody tries to sue somebody for it is that nobody really cares. We are all normal people, not some lawyers after all. If somebody uses name of my product without my written permission, but I don't think it's done with bad intentions and it doesn't hurt me — why should I care? It's like we are living in a slightly more friendly world than all these people in corporations.

So both product names derived from "Markdown" may break some permissions, but only one of them makes somebody care of it. So what's the difference between them? I find it pretty understandable. Say you invented ice-cream and you have the same careless approach to use of its name. It's "Open source product". It becomes popular. So when some guy starts making "cherry ice-cream" you don't think it's bad — it's not the same product that you make, but it clearly resembles it, so people understand what they are going to consume. And you don't mind it, such a nice guy you are. Some other guy living in Hampshire starts selling stuff that he names "Hampshire ice-cream", which you can think is also ok. After all it's pretty natural, to call "ice-cream" something, that very much resembles that very stuff widely known as "ice-cream", but his ice- cream might be somewhat different from yours so it's fine to give it distinctive name.

But then somebody starts making one of his own, which he calls "Real Ice- cream". It's also "Open Source" but its recipe is very detailed and everything that doesn't comply it cannot be called "Real Ice-cream". But "real" isn't only name of his product, it's some natural word and from now on it's implying that every other ice-cream recipe in the world — including your own, the original one — isn't "real".

With "Standard Markdown" it's even worse, as "standard" is pretty clear word in the tech-world. And now when some bunch of guys try to "standartize" something that isn't ultimately their it's only natural that somebody doesn't like it. It's not like markdown is born yesterday, it's widely known thing and it has nothing to do with all these ambitious guys like codinghorror. If you wrote your own markdown compiler it was _just some markdown compiler_. You like how it works, maybe somebody likes it too, you don't really want to change anything. But from now on it's some _non-standard markdown_ compiler. Must be pretty offensive for somebody.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is anyone _actually_ arguing that that no one should ever write a specification? Everything I've seen has been about the co-opting of the name. That seems to be Gruber's issue:

        Marco: What if they just make their own thing,
               give it their own name, and see if it catches on?

        [Gruber]: Exactly!

[https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507590561172176897](https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507590561172176897)

<comment><USER15> Yeah and I already forgot what the new name is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would love for markdown to be in more places, and work the same everywhere. Standard Markdown is a darn good name to use for that, and while Gruber is sometimes right, he is definitely hit and miss (and with gathering together all the ways to add tables to Markdown, and picking one and adding it to the "spec" on his site, he missed.)

</comment><comment><USER17> All this fuss over a name. A name that the purported owner hasn't enforced before. A name that's been used by hundreds of other projects. A name that's been thoroughly genericized, and is descriptive of the project.

I can see why Gruber is upset, but why does anybody else feel the need to be upset _for_ him?

</comment><comment><USER18> From what I've gathered, the only thing Gruber is upset about is the name "Standard" Markdown. I don't think he cares if there is some kind of body that has some kind of standards thing. I'd bet that if the "Standard Markdown" people called it something else and even kept the exact same syntax, he'd be fine with it.

</comment><comment><USER19> I asked Gruber specifically whether he approved, and he was VERY clear, he did not. It's therefore a dick move, period end. Voting me down doesn't change the fact that it's a dick move. The reason the team wants to use the Markdown name is because of the currency behind it. It's Gruber's currency.

<comment><USER20> It's public currency. He hasn't touched the 'spec' in what, 10 years? We've moved on, he needs to as well.

<comment><USER21> Has it occurred to you he hasn't touched the spec because he believes it doesn't NEED to be touched?

That others disagree is not an argument for his having abandoned his ownership or rights to the name.

<comment><USER20> He can believe that it doesn't need to be touched all he likes, it doesn't change the fact that it does. The many subtly incompatible forks dealing with Markdowns ambiguities attest to that.

Want to write some Markdown? Do you use vanilla markdown, github markdown, stackoverflow markdown, PHP markdown, a markdown parser with extensions? What we don't need is yet another fork but a standard. Gruber doesn't want to step up to the plate? Fine. The community will. Gruber doesn't like the name? Deal with it.

<comment><USER21> It's his name and his project.

He gets to decide what the name is, what projects may use that name, and how they may use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is the solution as simple as changing the name to "Interoperable Markdown"?

Markdown interoperability is not now and has never been a goal of Gruber's -- indeed he seems to celebrate the lack of it. Use of the name "<adjective> Markdown" for incompatible derivatives has been accepted for many years. So replacing the word "Standard" with an explicit description of the difference ("Interoperable") between plain old Markdown (whatever that is, since it's not well-defined) and this must be OK, right?

<comment><USER9> > _Only two maybes I've thought of: Strict Markdown or Pedantic Markdown. > "Strict" still doesn't seem right._

[https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507615356295200770](https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507615356295200770)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> IMO Gruber's request is perfectly reasonable:

> They've done more than "formalize". They've changed the syntax. New syntax, > new name. That's all I ask.

\- [https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507651498692849665](https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507651498692849665)

<comment><USER24> They floated the name "RockDown" back then. Whatever happened to that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> What if we called it ANSI Markdown instead?

Read the foreword to [http://flash-gordon.me.uk/ansi.c.txt](http://flash- gordon.me.uk/ansi.c.txt) , and it sounds very similar to the Markdown issue. C is still called C, regardless of what ANSI (and later ISO) did to it.

</comment><comment> X-Istence If Standard Markdown doesn't use a single line of code from the original Markdown, how are the license terms being violated?

I didn't see any mention of Standard Markdown being an modification to the original Markdown code base.

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't think that's an issue of control. Quite the contrary, Gruber wants nobody to have the control, and he doesn't want the language to be standardized, as he believes that it will prevent it from evolving and expanding on its own.

He didn't complain about MultiMarkdown or GitHub Flavored Markdown, because those examples of precisely that evolution. The problem with "Standard Markdown" is that it implies "the one true way", and gives a (theoretical at least) power to a relatively small group to dictate what is Markdown-kosher and what isn't.

</comment><comment><USER27> In his previous article ([http://spinhalf.net/typos/](http://spinhalf.net/typos/)), he rails against typos and about how horrible they are for our comprehension. Not surprisingly, he messes up himself:

"I immediately loose my train of thought."

Me too, man. Me too.

<comment><USER28> As I finished reading his piece on Markdown (with which I agreed wholeheartedly), my eyes glanced down through the next heading, "Typos", through the date, and landed on "efficeint".

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Guys, just rename "Standard Markdown" to _Marky_ , leave Gruber sit on his Markdown name and move on.

MacFarlane, GitHub, meteor, reddit and Atwood/stackexchange can let the world know that "markdown" is now legacy and the future lies in _Marky_

</comment><comment><USER30> The whole ideal of open-sourcing things is that to allow community to further improve it.

got pissed over a name because others do a better job than you at maintaining it is a dick.

I'm with Jeff and the gang on this.

</comment><comment><USER31> _> I believe, MD has proliferated this far, not because it is an ambiguous, open to interpretation spec but in-spite of that._

Gruber apparently directly disagrees with this:

[https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507364924340060160](https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507364924340060160)

<comment><USER32> Yes, but the author's statement was made in direct response to Gruber's; the author was aware of, and responding to that statement.

<comment><USER31> I was wondering that too, but I could not find this quote cited anywhere. Did I miss it?

<comment><USER32> When it comes to blog posts on Markdown standardization, I think that Gruber's stance that Markdown succeeded because of its lack of specification is assumed background information. I don't think that tweet is the first time Gruber has expressed the sentiment.

<comment><USER31> I agree, there was never any doubt that Gruber felt this way.

I just thought it was interesting that the OP's quote was in direct contradiction to a quote Gruber Tweeted yesterday, and thought the Tweet and its context was worth including here, considering it wasn't cited in the blog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Let's fix this by calling it 'RSS 2.1'.

</comment><comment><USER34> Voldemark, the markup language that cannot be named.

</comment><comment><USER35> Agree with everything on that post.

</comment><comment><USER36> A similar situation happened to me, but obviously on a smaller scale.

I added support for using pixel shaders on emulated video game output, but rather than have separate files for the vertex and fragment shaders, I put the pair into an XML file, and also included settings for min/mag filter, texture format, etc there as well; so that it was all self-contained as a single file that you could paste on a forum.

I released this, and some other people liked the idea, but wanted it to support multiple shader passes. Which was great! I wanted to add this, but had a lot of much higher priority items on my plate and couldn't get to it quickly enough.

So they went ahead and added multi-pass, texture lookup, reflection, and a whole bunch of other neat features without consulting me, released their own software and then called it "version 1.1", while continuing to support my spec as "version 1.0"

The results were obvious: lots of users coming to me to ask why their XML shaders weren't working, which turned out to be because they were using a different standard. Shader writers began targeting 1.1 syntax even without using any additional features, which needlessly took away compatibility with my own program.

This wouldn't have been so bad, I could have just supported their new spec once I had time, except that they took the spec in a direction I felt was flawed and against the spirit of it. Referencing external texture files which created file naming conflicts (shader A and shader B both loading their own separate versions of texture.png), losing the ability to post them as inline text on forums, having very inconsistent syntax to what I had been doing, features that were vague in their combinatorial effects, etc.

I ultimately had to abandon my own (retroactively named for me) "version 1.0" specification and start on an entirely new format to resolve that ambiguity.

They were certainly in the right and clear to do the work that I wouldn't, but I do regret that they took my name, and ended up causing a lot of confusion for end users. And now I worry about this happening to all of my formats (I have a markup format, a delta-based binary diff tool, the new multi-pass shader format, and a few others.)

I could try and come up with some licensing term that would most certainly get all of my software kicked out of Debian's main repositories; but there's really no way for me to stop anyone from fragmenting my specifications again, as I simply don't have the money nor desire to trademark things and attempt to sue people for enforcement.

So, with that said ... I'm with John Gruber on this. If he is asking them to change the name, they should change the name. It's just the polite thing to do. Even if Gruber is a terrible steward, he created it. Keeping Markdown in the name is clearly just intended to capitalize on the success of the format, which they themselves did not earn.</comment>


Revenge of the Son of the Lisp Machine [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.ccs.neu.edu/racket/pubs/icfp99-ffkf.pdf <comment><USER2> 1999 or 2000: it's describing an ancestor of the Racket programming environment.

<comment><USER3> The OS features of Racket are still based around these ideas, particularly custodians and namespaces.</comment></comment>


My remote shell session setup - <AUTHOR> https://blog.filippo.io/my-remote-shell-session-setup/ <comment><USER2> Mosh is really awesome. But I disagree with "tmux is the new [GNU] screen". That's like "clang/LLVM is the new GCC". It might have _some_ new features which you might need (such as the LLVM infrastructure, or for tmux the vertical window split which is preserved during detaching), but for many use cases the "old" software is still fine. For the presented one here, GNU screen does exactly the same fine job as tmux can do.</comment>


Where do I learn CSS3/HTML5? Book for experienced programmers - <AUTHOR>

Where do I learn CSS3/HTML5? I have quite some experience with HTML and CSS, but I'm thinking of the "cutting-edge" webdesigns. Some designs out there are really awesome -- how can I learn to write designs like that? I am a Python and C++ programmer so I'm looking for a book for experienced programmers. <comment><USER2> CSS3: The Missing Manual - 3rd edition has some really good reviews.

But I'm somewhat in the same boat as you. In the past few months, I've been doing a lot more front-end development and trying to fill in those knowledge gaps - especially things like css layout.

But I would like really like to find a book or other resource on HTML 5 app development, not just one specific technology. I come from a thick client background, so a lot of front-end development is still painful for me and I would really love a book that presents all the technologies involved and best practices for large, client-side application web development.</comment>


Why Your Boss Is Wrong About You - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/02/opinion/02culbert.html?src=twrhp <comment><USER2> The biggest problem I've seen with performance reviews is that most managers spend very little time working with or observing their employees. Couple that with performance review processes that don't actually measure results and it's a wonder anybody knows anything.

I was once a manager at a medium-sized consulting company. I had an employee we'll call "Roy." He was always involved in the critical parts of large, profitable projects. He generally got 3.5 to 4 out of 5 in his peer reviews. There was another guy, "Jim." Jim was mostly on smaller, simpler systems and maintenance work. He generally got similar scores in his peer reviews. For their first performance review, I gave Roy a 4.2 and Jim a 3.8. Roy got a 7% raise and Jim got a 5% raise. Later on, I was the lead dev on a project with Roy and Jim as my team. Once the project got rolling, getting Roy to actually produce code was like pulling teeth. I talked to the other leads and found out that Roy talked a good game in front of clients but required a baby-sitter to actually get anything done. He was always on the critical components not because he was a great developer, but because the lead or architect was already paying extra attention to the critical components and could more easily manage the babysitting. Jim, of course, got all his work done on time with minimal fuss and even stayed late to finish some of Roy's work.

I went back and looked at those peer reviews... Roy's lead dev had given him a review that averaged to 3.5. The soft skills were mostly 4's, the technical skills were mostly 3's and 4's. (He was an OK developer when you actually got him to work.) My only clue would have been a 2 in "Works Independently." Jim didn't have other devs on his projects so he had Project Managers giving him 3's and 4's for soft skills and 4's for technical skills.

A poorly designed performance review was actually worse than no performance review.

<comment><USER3> >Roy talked a good game in front of clients but required a baby-sitter to actually get anything done

Move him over in sales, he will properly do very well there since he knows the technical part very well but has human skills as well.

<comment><USER4> This is an awesome suggestion. Except for very small companies there's usually a place to move someone where they will excel, if management is willing to take the time to think about it for a moment. Once in a while you have someone who doesn't work out at all, but at least as often you can go for the win-win of moving them somewhere they like and perform well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Summary: performance reviews are not very effective, due to the injection of subjective opinions of the boss. Therefore, we need a variant of performance reviews which gives the boss incentives to inflate performance estimates.

Of course, the author completely overlooks any solutions besides his own pet method, suggesting "taxpayers can't ask for more than that".

They certainly can. For teachers (the situation he uses as a lead in and fade out), they can use Value Added Modeling. In fields with more subjective performance, 360 reviews (reviews by your peers, underlings, overlings and self, discarding any singleton viewpoints) are very effective.

But I guess it's more fun to push your own toy method (and hopefully get hired as a consultant) than propose serious solutions.

<comment><USER6> Well, for whatever it's worth, when they're at the negotiating table, the 2nd most important issue (after comp of course) to the teacher's unions tends to be "assorted protections against a psycho principal". So there's a lot of cruft in the typical collective bargaining agreement that was initially aimed at taking personalities out of the evaluation process but then turns into it's own monster.

<comment><USER5> No, teachers tend to oppose having an evaluation process of any sort. They are just as hostile to objective measures of their performance (standardized testing) as they are to subjective ones.

<comment><USER7> The problem is that the objective standards are harder to measure then you would think.

How are you judging the urban teacher against the suburban one? Is the kid who is getting abused at home ever going to match the one with two great parents? What percentage of your students eat breakfast? What percentage of your students have English as their first language?

What percentage of the individual class are troublemakers? What tools are teachers allowed to use to subdue them? Principals differ on this.

Are there bad teachers? Certainly! Do the metrics identify which teachers are the bad ones? Often, no.

<comment><USER5> _How are you judging the urban teacher against the suburban one?_

From my first post: _For teacher..., they can use Value Added Modeling._

Come up with a statistical predictor of performance, based on observable quantities such as income, ESL, race, free lunch, and previous year's performance.

Teacher alpha = actual performance - predicted performance.

All the factors you described are either highly correlated with easily available quantities (low income), or they are directly measurable. Thus, the predictor performance is likely to include them.

I'd be curious to see if you could even hypothesize a systematic error (as opposed to sampling error) with a large effect that is not highly correlated with with easily observable base quantities (income, demographics, prior performance).

<comment><USER6> I do think that's the general direction things should go in..

But that statistical predictor of performance will always be horribly flawed. Applying a rigid set of a dozen statistics to human beings always misses the mark in a ton of cases. The question is whether it's better than the current system -- personally I'd want to see several iterations experimented with before I'd feel confident at all that it wasn't making things worse. "First, do no harm" and all that.

One huge problem a lot of good urban teachers have with testing is that the tests as written really don't "speak to" poor urban and minority students. The teachers complain that they spend more time teaching the students how to take the test and less time teaching them the material in a way that's relevant to their lives. I haven't ever taught, so I'm just repeating this, but I can see where they're coming from.

<comment><USER5> _Applying a rigid set of a dozen statistics to human beings always misses the mark in a ton of cases._

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

 _The question is whether it's better than the current system..._

Without objective measurements, how could we ever answer this question?

<comment><USER6> Teachers don't see that many kids in a year. Breaking them down into a combination of a few demographics is oversimplifying things to such a degree that I really don't get how anyone can be so blase about it.

I mean, just to start with:

* Are our tests measuring the right things? * Are we measuring the right things about the kids? * Are we capturing all of the data for the things we do measure about the kids?

Those are _huge_ unanswered questions to just be like "oh yeah just average the results for the income quintile, bang, done, we know who the good teachers are".

If a student's being sexually abused at home, and test scores dramatically decline year-over-year, is the teacher a worse teacher for it? Just one edge case. Throw in 4 more and you've got a significant fraction of the scores that the teacher will be evaluated on. These are students' futures and teachers' jobs we're talking about, remember.. I think general teacher resistance to having some sort of oversimplified system shoved on them from above is a feature -- that system needs to be good enough to buy them in before being implemented.

<comment><USER5> Lets crunch some simple numbers.

Suppose 1 in 100 children is sexually abused _for the first time_ in any given semester [1], and a teacher has 4 classes of 30 students each. Then in 2.5% of classes, a teacher will have 4 sexually abused children (vs an average of 1.2). When this occurs, the percentage of children failing will increase by 2.3%.

So lets say on average, a teacher is expected to have a failure rate of 20%. 2.5% of the time (roughly once in their career) they get unlucky and have a failure rate of 22.3% instead of 20%. This will occur 2 semesters in a row about one time in 1500, i.e. it will happen to 1 in 50 teachers (assuming a 30 year teaching career).

Alternative numbers, to show that I'm not using cherry picked numbers: P(abuse)=0.001, P(4 abuses in class of 120) = 2.56e-6, slightly greater impact (failure rate goes up to 23.3% over 20%). If sexual abuse happens at a higher rate (e.g. 2%), then we get into the rather implausible situation that 48% of children are sexually abused, resulting in them failing school.

[1] I don't know the relative proportions, but this seems like a high number. Among other things, it would imply that at least 24% of children are sexually abused, resulting in them failing school. We are also assuming the child has a good upbringing and good grades until the sexual abuse, which I imagine is not the most common situation. The assumption that it is the first instance of sexual abuse is important, because if it occurred in the prior year, it would likely affect their prior year grades and hence their current predicted grades.

<comment><USER6> Well, my point wasn't that child abuse happens at whatever frequency, my point is that a whole universe of stuff happens that isn't captured by those statistics.

Again, I do think that some sort of unified performance measurement is important. But it's really easy to screw something like that up. Teachers spend between 5-35 hours a week with a student depending on schedule and we're summing up that interaction with information that fits on half of the back of a business card? That doesn't tingle your spider sense at all? "Warning, lots of information loss here"?

When you base performance on a metric, then you re-orient everything around the metric. It is very very very important to get that metric right and a right answer probably doesn't fit in an HN post. I mean, nobody thinks engineers should be measured by kloc, let's not oversimplify for teachers either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> like the old saying goes, "its the worst system out there until you look at all the others".

I'm sorry, but a subjective review by a principal definitely has problems (personal biases), but it is a HELL of a lot better than judging teachers solely on how many years experience they have and how many meaningless masters degrees they have (French literature).

</comment><comment><USER9> Whenever measurements are involved one should diligently research the values expected and optimize accordingly.

If you care about such things as getting a good performance review you should know that it measures likability far more than productivity.

If one of the KPIs on the CEO's dashboard is hits to the website, you should drive that up, if it's acquisitions then drive that up.

Performance reviews and KPIs are highly instructional as to what you should be optimizing for. It's the company telling you what they value most. If you find yourself in disagreement with the things being measured it's probably an indication that the value systems you use and your company uses are out of alignment. It's usually much easier to find a company that shares your values than change your companies' values to suit your own.</comment>


Autoscaling on AWS - <AUTHOR> http://qzaidi.github.io/2013/06/21/autoscaling-with-aws/ <comment><USER2> I have found that using a ubuntu base AMI and salt ([http://saltstack.com/community.html](http://saltstack.com/community.html)) makes things much easier to manage. His suggestion of having node.js and nginx baked into the AMI is a big pain when you need to upgrade node.js or nginx (hello security update!). Using something like salt (or puppet or chef) would make this much easier.

But in general, I agree with the article.

<comment><AUTHOR> We enable auto applying security updates in the AMI, and the first thing the provisioning script does is update packages. That said, I would definitely want to explore alternatives - not needing to update while provisioning will take a few seconds off the provisioning time.

<comment><USER3> What if you rebuilt the AMI every time you deployed?

<comment><USER4> That's what Netflix do: [http://techblog.netflix.com/2013/03/ami-creation- with-aminat...](http://techblog.netflix.com/2013/03/ami-creation-with- aminator.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm probably not understanding something but couldn't you use Puppet or Chef for your manual provisioning tasks?

</comment><comment><USER6> What CSS/Framework/whatever are you using for that metro-style dashboard?

<comment><USER7> Looks like Dashing from Shopify:

[http://shopify.github.io/dashing/](http://shopify.github.io/dashing/)

<comment><USER8> Dashing is a great thing to play around with in the evening. I've got a bunch of custom data sources I should really open source for other people, like Heroku dyno counts etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not to detract from this article explicitly on the subject of AWS, but ... if you are relying on _any_ single cloud provider then you are probably not going to scale beyond a certain point, since it means that reliability (ie. heterogeneity - re: cloud providers, physical/logical points of presence, legal jurisdictions, etc.) is not all that important to you. At a certain point, a cloud provider neutral approach is called for.

<comment><USER10> Not that simple. Having only one cloud provider allow you to make the most of it.

Once you have two providers, you are forced to only use the features offered by each of them and use an abstract layer (API agnostic dev).

Plus, AWS offers a wide range of strategies to ensure the availability of its infrastructure (Availability Zone, Regions, CDN etc.)

<comment><USER9> _Once you have two providers, you are forced to only use the features offered by each of them and use an abstract layer (API agnostic dev)._

Abstraction layers don't necessarily need to produce lowest common denominator results.

 _Plus, AWS offers a wide range of strategies to ensure the availability of its infrastructure (Availability Zone, Regions, CDN etc.)_

You still wind up vulnerable to quirks of the single provider though! For example, account freeze for whatever reason (financial quirks, legal issues, regulatory change) any multi-site failures (eg. financial, operational, legal, security) at that provider.

<comment><USER11> > Abstraction layers don't necessarily need to produce lowest common > denominator results.

Except in the special case that you can build the functionality not provided by using other functionality that is, I think they do, since otherwise it's leaking. A leaky abstraction is often worse than none.

<comment><USER9> I think your assumption is that cloud providers with different features cannot be abstracted without making the whole abstraction 'leaky'.

While your perspective may hold for a traditional, rigid, single-layer, abstraction layer with the most simplistic, binary-level feature presence, it does not hold for better formed solutions. From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_layer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_layer): _All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection_ (David Wheeler).

Some real world differences between cloud providers: available hardware, available installation images (OS images), available bandwidth, available logical location on the internet, available physical location (legal jurisdiction, etc.), scale-out time, cost model.

How do you conceive of these differences, and then deploy arbitrary services to an arbitrary number of individual instances running unique combinations of cloud provider specific features on unique cloud-provider deployed OS images in parallel? There are various approaches, but it's not that hard to come up with a functional set of abstractions. Think about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great points. Something like logstash for logging (which supports graphite/statsd type output) is a nice addition to the logging setup.

Also, for some apps deploying code during instance launch can be time consuming. Depending on your monitors and auto scale config, this might be acceptable. For some it may be appropriate to put code right in the ami and only ever deploy via new ami.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is good as far as it goes -- nice to see further corroboration that EBS is not always the best solution.

What I'd really like to see is details of how the traffic monitoring works, how you calculate how much extra capacity to spin up, and how quickly you can react to load events.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's unhelpful to needlessly abbreviate ordinary words, like "infra" for "infrastructure" in the first paragraph.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right - committed a fix, but looks like github is taking longer to rebuild the pages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Lost me at NFS.

<comment><USER16> How does your organization mount volumes found on another host?

<comment><USER15> S3/EBS at the moment. MogileFS/SMB in the past though mogile and S3 are more properly referred to as object stores.

<comment><USER16> Ah. I'm new to AWS, had not yet explored 'storage' options.

I guess I'd been thinking of AWS as being 'vmware' but more so, without thinking hard about how it could be different.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


White House wants to turn space station into commercially run venture - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/02/11/the-trump-administration-wants-to-turn-the-international-space-station-into-a-commercially-run-venture/ <comment><USER2> From its inception, ISS payloads for for-profit microgravity manufacturing have been considered as a driver for human spaceflight funding.

A bit of Spacehab history with a classic retro illustration ;)

[http://www.astronautix.com/s/spacehab.html](http://www.astronautix.com/s/spacehab.html)

One potential application moving forward are the very large, low defect protein crystals grown in the APCF

Advanced Protein Crystallization Facility - Protein Crystallization in Microgravity

[https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experime...](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/249.html)</comment>


Why Elizabeth Warren Feels 'Uneasy' Online - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/14/opinion/elizabeth-warren-big-tech-privacy.html <comment><AUTHOR> "I sometimes think, 'What if some creepo is looking in the window?' It could be a corporate creepo... It's wrong. We need to put a stop to it."

Respect others as you would want to be respected.

Don't be a #corporatecreepo</comment>