Thoughts on Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://blog.samaltman.com/thoughts-on-bitcoin <comment><USER3> I normally love SA's writing, but this opinion piece is really narrow minded and I think misses the point.

cs702 had a fantastic comment a few days ago in another thread [1]:

        Bitcoin befuddles experts who analyze it from a narrow perspective,
        because  it is not just a new medium of exchange or a new store of
        value: it is also a new kind of point-of-sale payment system (one
        that doesn't require payment processors), a new kind of global
        financial transfer system (one that doesn't require financial
        institutions), a new kind of time-stamping certification system
        (one that doesn't require notaries or county clerks), a new kind of
        contract-enforcing mechanism (one that doesn't require lawyers), etc.

        With rising global adoption, many new kinds of applications are likely
        to be created to take advantage of the Bitcoin network, the design of
        which even specifies a built-in script for defining and executing new
        types of transactions involving any arbitrary number of parties.

        In short, Bitcoin is a technology platform -- one that is benefiting
        from network effects.

        It may fail as "money" (in a narrow sense) and still succeed as a
        global platform.

Even from SA's narrow perspective, it's not clear why "legitimate transactions" is a requirement for success. As long as there is a large enough community of people who want to use it to transfer value for any reason, it'll continue to sustain itself.

The one takeaway he offers in closing is spot on though: " _Just as it'd be stupid to convert all your dollars to bitcoin, it'd be stupid to not pay attention._ "

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6810839](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6810839)

<comment><USER4> Sorry, I think the legitimate transactions idea is actually one of the stronger parts of this piece.

> As long as there is a large enough community of people who want to use it to > transfer value for any reason, it'll continue to sustain itself.

That's precisely the problem.

A community of speculators will only remain stable or increase in number where the price of the asset continues to grow. In the case of Bitcoin, the price can only grow if legitimate transactions increase, or if more people speculate. With every increase in price the number of people willing to speculate decreases, to the point where you run out of greater fools to sell the asset onto, causing a crash.

That means that an increase in legitimate transactions is really the only way to sustainably grow the value of the network, because it is the only method resistant to falls in price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The following graph shows the estimated volume of transactions:

[https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction- volume?...](https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction- volume?showDataPoints=false&show_header=true&daysAverageString=7&timespan=all&scale=1&address=)

You see immediately from the graph that the growth in number of transactions is relatively slow, considering all the media attention, and certainly far, far slower than the increase in the exchange rate.

Note that this graph is not the same as the number of "legitimate transactions" mentioned in the OP. But it's at least consistent with the point of view suggested in the post.

<comment><USER6> The graph is log10-scale, so it's difficult to see a 50% or 100% increase in volume.

It's definitely not a 5x or 10x increase though.

<comment><USER5> You can remove the log scale:

[https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction- volume?...](https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction- volume?showDataPoints=false&show_header=true&daysAverageString=7&timespan=all&scale=0&address=)

I used the log scale to make the point that transaction volume is relatively slow-moving on a log scale. That is certainly not the case for the exchange rate!:

[https://blockchain.info/charts/market- price?showDataPoints=f...](https://blockchain.info/charts/market- price?showDataPoints=false&timespan=all&show_header=true&daysAverageString=7&scale=1&address=)

Incidentally, the volume graph has a notable spike in December 2011. I've Googled and asked around a bit, but don't have a good understanding of what caused the spike.

<comment><USER7> Since this is just volume measured by number of bitcoins exchanged, wouldn't it be more accurate to scale it by the exchange rate of your primary currency (ie. the product of the two graphs)? That seems like it would more closely represent the value being exchanged.

Edit:

Looks like they have this graph as well: [https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction- volume-...](https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume- usd?showDataPoints=false&show_header=true&daysAverageString=1&timespan=&scale=1&address=) (log scale).

This seems to support the conclusion that transaction volume (in USD) is growing significantly, although the trend is confounded by large price movements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If a receiver of bitcoins sells them for dollars right away, that isn't necessarily money laundering or tax avoidance. I don't know if you've tried to transfer money overseas lately, but banks tend to make it difficult and expensive. An international wire transfer is not a trivial thing to set up; in many cases it still involves _faxes_.

If bitcoin succeeds only as a payment network, where users convert from and to dollars at both ends, it can still provide a very valuable and legal service.

<comment><USER9> International transfers are not intrinsically difficult or expensive, the real cost is in pennies. The reason why cross border payments are priced like they are is due to the lack of incentive, either economic or regulatory. BTC is a massive economic incentive for banks to charge more in line with the their true costs. Even if BTC fails as a currency itself, its greatest success might be catalysing innovation on prices and products at the incumbents.

<comment><USER10> Well, there's a lot of paperwork and time involved. Most U.S. banks raised their international wire fees to ~$60 at the end of October to comply with more regulations.

<comment><USER11> Or discontinued support for outgoing international wires altogether, as my Chase account did.

That freaked me out, but unfortunately it didn't freak me out enough to make me buy a bunch of Bitcoins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The way I value bitcoin is to take the fully diluted market cap (21 million * $850 ~= $18 billion) and apply a money velocity which I assumed to be similar to US M2 velocity of 1.6 ($18 billion * 1.6 ~= $28.5 billion). Since global ecommerce transactions are about $1 trillion / yr this implies that bitcoin should penetrate 2.85% of ecommerce. Big assumption here is that bitcoin does not work for real-world transactions as the confirmation time is > 15 min. This may be oversimplified because a lot of real-world transactions don't need to be real time. I'm also excluding time value effects which you can insert back in if you like.

From the data I have seen, the bitcoin real economy could be orders of magnitude smaller than that implied by the current price, although there is no way to know precisely how large it is. This is including "illegal" transactions (I'm not sure why sam is discounting drug transactions, unless he means to imply that these will be shutdown. It does make sense to exclude gambling transactions as they are extremely high velocity).

Note that sam's point about merchants immediately converting BTC back to USD serves to increase the money velocity (perhaps by >10x). This would mean that BTC is pricing in a real economy even larger than $28.5 billion. Based on current BTC-denominated real transactions, fair value of BTC is at most only a few dollars.

<comment><USER13> I think much of BTC's valuation come from expectations that money velocity and market penetration will increase.

EDIT: Sorry I meant to say the velocity will decrease.

<comment><USER12> A higher money velocity => lower BTC/USD, but yes, the current price implies a huge future growth of the bitcoin economy. This is what sam is saying and I agree. I happen to think that we will not see that growth/adoption, but that is a different question.

<comment><USER13> Oops, yeah, I meant the other way around.

<comment><USER12> There's no obvious reason why BTC velocity should go lower than USD velocity. If anything, its electronic nature and potential for fast settlement times should indicate a much higher velocity than USD M2.

<comment><USER13> >Note that sam's point about merchants immediately converting BTC back to USD serves to increase the money velocity (perhaps by >10x).

If this changed, it could at least get closer to the velocity of usd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sam sees the flaw in his own argument - when he mentions gold and the possibility of its use a store of value. But he doesn't understand the full significance of his own comment. Moldbug has by far the most compelling (imo) theory on the origin of money and why bitcoin (and gold) float far above their use value. These two posts cover it very well:

[http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2011/04/on- mone...](http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2011/04/on-monetary- restandardization.html)

[http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoin...](http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoin-is-money-bitcoin-is-bubble.html)

I highly recommend them to anyone trying to understand the economics of bitcoin

<comment><USER15> Really fascinating articles, thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this is spot on.

All sorts of people I rarely speak with have been coming out of the woodwork to ask about Bitcoin. These people are invariably regular folks that have heard about this thing that has been appreciating at an unbelievable clip. This is extremely alarming for me.

<comment><USER16> Same. I've tried to warn them about this whole mess (even if the value is appreciating I think it's at best a risky investment and at worst partaking in an immoral scheme).

This article reiterates 2 of my favorites points --

1\. the lack of real-world transactions, coupled with

2\. the fact that these transactions are usually done via 3rd party processor or immediate conversion back to USD. If vendors had faith in it as an actually currency, they wouldn't feel the need to do so. This is not true adoption, this is simply an attempt at expanding one's market by accepting a tradable item.

Glad to see some more sobering articles emerging as I've been wondering why no one has coherently written these things. Most of the negative BTC articles on HN are poorly written and used as a straw man.

<comment><USER17> Re: #2 - Vendors need to pay rent, suppliers, and employees - all of whom presumably don't accept BTC. So that's probably why you see Coinbase, BitPay, and others that default to converting BTC to fiat the moment of transaction.

<comment><USER16> i see what you're saying but if they have profit margins they could opt to keep some BTC. i think the issue at this point is that if one decides to hold onto BTC they are put more in the position of an "investor" rather than a bank-account owner.

business owners can't all be expected to drink the kool-aid, so they don't really seem to be assisting Bitcoin adoption outside of making it a choice in their payment processor

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> After all the insane articles that claim things like "Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme" or "Bitcoin is anonymous", it is quite nice to read a well-informed and sane article.

</comment><comment><USER19> The metric of "legitimate transactions" is interesting, but I don't see an easy way of tracking it. [http://coinmap.org/](http://coinmap.org/) tracks brick-and-mortar retailers that accept bitcoin. Maybe there should be an opt- in registry, like a global Bitcoin YellowPages?

</comment><comment><USER11> _A currency without the major use case being legitimate transactions is going to fail._

Couldn't he have said the same thing about a protocol like BitTorrent?

<comment><USER20> He means legitimate as in "I gave you bitcoins for a concrete purpose" rather than "recognized as legal by a government." People are using BitTorrent for an actual purpose, so it's different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't know why it is required that it is used in legitimate purchases. No one questions the value of gold, yet not many people use it to make purchases. I suspect bitcoins value will follow the same pattern as gold, once it is stable. When the world is full of uncertainty, it's value will rise. When things are steady, it's value will fall.

<comment><USER22>
      > No one questions the value of gold, yet not many people
      > use it to make purchases.

Gold is purchased and used to make art, jewelry, electronics, medical devices, and so on in addition to being hoarded as an investment / currency reserve. Those products have real tangible value. Very few people are interested in buying bitcoin just to use the bitcoin address as artwork, for example. Tulip bulbs had more actual value. At its peak, one tulip bulb cost around €25,000 and WAS being used for legitimate purchases: milk, cheese, cows, wine, etc. Even after the price of tulip bulbs crashed, you could still at least plant them and grow flowers. If bitcoin reaches that price and crashes to next to nothing, what could you use your bitcoin for?

<comment><USER23> Although this is true, gold's total value is much higher than could be supported by those uses alone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> We've already seen few bubbles on bitcoin. Investing overshadows usage of bitcoin as a currency. Everybody knows that.

One title I haven't seen: "X no longer accepts bitcoin."

</comment><comment><USER25> "The fact that the few merchants willing to accept bitcoin generally convert to dollars right away suggest an underlying lack of faith in bitcoin—or at least a problem with the volatility."

Its not a lack of faith l, it's lack off trade acceptance. If merchants accept bitcoin they need to convert back to dollars because that's what their business calls for. In other words, if they could pay their bills with bitcoin, then bitcoins would flow back and forth without an issue, removing your suggestion that this is about lack of faith.

<comment><USER26> > The fact that the few merchants willing to accept bitcoin generally convert > to dollars right away suggest an underlying lack of faith in bitcoin—or at > least a problem with the volatility.

Few merchants accept gold either. Yet gold reserves in the world amount to US $8.2 trillion in value.

Edit: removed part on volatility

<comment><USER27> Given the choice I think they will not have a problem in picking gold instead of bitcoins. Gold has some history behind it, and compared to bitcoins is more liquid and less volatile.

(volatile for about 3000 years - do you mean available?)

<comment><USER28> > Gold has some history behind it

"It has history behind it" really seems like a fallacy to me. Many things had histories and were replaced, or changed dramatically, due to new technologies. Horses, swords, aluminum, newspapers...

I see Bitcoin being a very realistic threat to the high price of gold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Why distinguish between legal and illegal transactions? I guess the assumption is that value grounded in illegal transactions is inherently volatile due to the risk of it getting shut down?

<comment><USER30> Because the value illegal actors find in Bitcoin isn't in its role as a currency, but rather in its role as an anonymous method to globally transfer wealth.

Even if millions of people use Bitcoin for that use case, it doesn't mean Bitcoin will ever have staying power for the "reserve currency" use case.

<comment><USER31> The term for "a method to transfer wealth" is "currency". (And in fact, "currency" is used metaphorically to indicate methods of transferring anything at all.)

<comment><USER30> There's a large difference between a currency being used for anonymity and a currency being used for stability and trust (hence the use of "reserve" vs. "anonymous" in my post — I omitted "reserve" in the first sentence).

<comment><USER29> Hm? Currencies are primarily used as a means to store and exchange value. The other things are secondary features that you may use to do things like pick between two currencies.

<comment><USER30> Y'all are getting hung up on insisting that Bitcoin is a currency, which nobody is arguing. There are important differences in the use cases that make a currency valuable to society, though. And Bitcoin is a far cry from demonstrating its value beyond the anonymous use case (or speculator use case). It is not stable or trustworthy yet, and will not be used as a reserve currency until making huge gains in both areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Even if it just becomes the primary mechanism for moving money around, that's a multi-billion dollar industry. Think Western Union, ACH, Paypal, etc. To me, that seems like a safe(ish) bet.

Being able to buy bubble gum, well, we'll see :)

<comment><USER33> Will it be cheaper than PayPal? A believer in Murphy's Law might speculate that the package of services needed to make Bitcoin reliable enough for regular consumer use, will also involve a level of fees comparable to PayPal.

</comment></comment><comment> emin-gun-sirer The post assumes that Bitcoins will fail if they are not suitable as a store of value. It overlooks the fact that a currency can succeed as a medium of exchange, even if it is not suitable as a store of value.

<comment><USER34> Being a good store of value is in fact a detriment to being a good medium of exchange. A currency should not be a good store of value, it should be a predictable store of value that inflates very slowly so as to discourage hoarding and encourage spending. PPC looks like a better currency than BTC for this very reason.

<comment><USER35> Is PPC PrimeCoin, PeerCoin or something else?

<comment><USER34> PeerCoin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> From the article:

 _low transaction costs for worldwide commerce would still be great._

I'm late to the whole bitcoin phenomenon, but here is what I really like about crypto-currencies. My US credit union (not even a commercial bank) charges me 40 dollars for an international wire transfer to Canada, and the bank on the other end will charge me 15 dollars. If this were done in bitcoin or a similar currency? Nothing, as far as I can tell, if you do it through the right exchange. And that's how it should be.

I suspect that banks don't even know to be worried at this point.

<comment><USER37> I just looked at transaction costs on 2 exchanges and they were both at 0.2% for < $1000. One offered reductions for higher value transactions, the other was fixed.

Kraken and BTC-E resp.

<comment><USER36> I might have been a little quick to jump to a conclusion, there. ;) But is there anything currently stopping someone from opening up an exchange whose only fees are an initial membership fee?

<comment><USER37> Greed?

Or possibly just that an initial-membership-fee model risks not covering costs long term and so looks like a potentially unstable proposition?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm going to buy a bitcoin after the bubble has passed. What do we think the real price is. Like $10 or $100? What's the projected bottom? I'm hoping for less than $10, because cheaper is better. The thought that I would never be able to afford an entire bitcoin has a negative psychological effect, which may be silly.

What I like about alt-coins is how one can use that for games. Imagine making a game where a custom alt-coin, a bitcoin-fork coin that has no value outside of the game, used for transactions. Seems like a cool idea to me anyway.

<comment><USER39> To be honest I think the bottom is going to be around $500. Pretty much everyone I know who is even the slightest bit interested in bitcoin is waiting for this crash to happen so they can jump in. Just a guess though.

<comment><USER40> Looks like the last time it traded below $500 was November 17th[1] - <USER2> everyone you know who is interested has only become interested in the past two weeks?

[1] [http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg30ztgSzm1g10zm...](http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg30ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zi1gMomentumzv)

<comment><USER39> Yep, since the spike.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Heaven help us if Bitcoin becomes the world reserve currency without some central authority like the Fed controlling the money supply. Bad things would happen without counter cyclical fiscal policy.

</comment><comment><USER42> Just like investments in Bitcoin startups are binary, so are investments in Bitcoin itself. Put some USD into it and don't worry too much about it. People waste millions on lottery tickets with much smaller chances of success, so, I'm tired of all these negative articles, just because Bitcoin dropped 20-30% and then almost fully recovered in a day. Sell off if you wish - there are enough people to buy your Bitcoins cheap. And by the way, the tulip craze is an obvious myth.

</comment><comment><USER43> Question: why isn't gold the international reserve currency?

<comment><USER44> Chapters 1 and 2 of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation provide one popular theory as to why it collapsed around World War 1, from a cultural anthropology perspective.

[http://uncharted.org/frownland/books/Polanyi/POLANYI%20KARL%...](http://uncharted.org/frownland/books/Polanyi/POLANYI%20KARL%20-%20The%20Great%20Transformation%20-%20v.1.0.html)

Liaquat Ahamed's _Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke The World_ provides another congruent account, from a more detailed historical/economic perspective, as to why gold was abandoned.

[http://www.amazon.com/Lords-Finance-Bankers-Broke- World/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Lords-Finance-Bankers-Broke- World/dp/0143116800)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Why should anyone feel compelled to follow or invest in bitcoin? The time to buy bitcoins is when you need them to get something you want (as it should be for any currency).

<comment><USER34> > Why should anyone feel compelled to follow or invest in bitcoin?

To make money speculating of course. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Sam - 你忘记了中国的影响。

The price is bitcoin is proportional to the "hot money" flowing out of China. Doesn't matter if that's an illicit market, it's still the most significant factor.

Whether or not one believes that hot money is going to stop/slow should strongly influence your estimate of the price of bitcoin.

That said, it's top heavy at $900-$1100, and reasonable people should be selling a portion of their holdings.

<comment><USER47> Why is it reasonable to sell a portion of their holdings? What does that actually achieve for the holder?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Can't help but wonder how many tech savy career drug dealers have just decided to become day traders after watching their btc soar in value.

</comment><comment><USER49> The tulip craze is a myth, I'm surprised people still buy into it.

It's stupid that tulips would go that high, and funnily enough it didn't happen.

<comment><USER50> Citation?

<comment><USER51> Read the Wikipedia article on Tulipomania, or _Famous First Bubbles_.

OP should too, actually, since his comment that

> The price of tulip bulbs has yet to recover from its 1637 peak.

betrays several fundamental misunderstandings of the tulip market at the time. Of course the top tulip bulbs depreciated. That is like saying 'a patent has never recovered its peak value' or 'Windows 3.1 never recovered its March 1992 peak'.

<comment><USER31> That wikipedia article seems to fully support the idea that tulips did "go that high"; it also notes that a legal change transformed tulip futures contracts into tulip option contracts, which enabled the price of tulips to rise substantially without costing speculators extra. It shows a catalog page of the time offering one tulip bulb for over ten times the contemporary annual earnings of a "skilled craftsman". If I assume that a "skilled craftsman" in the US earns $20 / hour (less than I made as a summer intern at amazon before graduating college), that puts the price of the bulb at at least $400,000. For the price listed in that catalog, you could also have bought 25,000 pounds of cheese.

It also notes that while flowers in general averaged 40% annual price depreciation at the time, tulips averaged a more impressive 99.999% annual depreciation.

<comment><USER49> > Many of the sources telling of the woes of tulip mania, such as the anti- > speculative pamphlets that were later reported by Beckmann and Mackay, have > been cited as evidence of the extent of the economic damage. These > pamphlets, however, were not written by victims of a bubble, but were > primarily religiously motivated. The upheaval was viewed as a perversion of > the moral order—proof that "concentration on the earthly, rather than the > heavenly flower could have dire consequences".[53] Thus, it is possible that > a relatively minor economic event took on a life of its own as a morality > tale.

^ From the same wiki page ^ No idea with the picture you reference where it's from.

The point about economic theory is the market needs to be fluid. It says nothing about crazy people in a small private market(obvious I guess)

The "Tulip" craze seems to me to just be the normal fundamental dogma that you get when people don't fully understand systems. People distorting instances that are not linked to push their views. To me the interesting thing is people 400 years ago also feared financial systems.

<comment><USER31> Seriously, understand what other people are saying (or make some sort of note in your comment that it's unrelated to the one you're responding to).

The wiki page says that there was very little financial damage from the tulip crash. It also says that "There is no dispute that prices for tulip bulb contracts rose and then fell in 1636–37". I responded to the claim that high tulip prices were a myth. The wiki page cited does not support that idea to any degree. And the portion you cite, in particular, also does not support that idea. It says there was little economic damage from the crash, which I acknowledged, but barely mentioned, because it was irrelevant to my point.

The picture, as wikimedia notes, is from the tulip book of P. Cos, which you could read about here: [http://www.oldtulips.org/index.php?section=broken&content=ea...](http://www.oldtulips.org/index.php?section=broken&content=early_tulip_catalogs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> His article is premised on this:

"The estimates I've heard from smart people that really follow bitcoin are that legitimate transactions are up only about 2-3x from a year ago"

That's hardly scientific. I've used Bitcoin for several purchases of "legitimate" things, and look to continue to do so whenever possible.

<comment><USER53> Well, not to belabor the point, are you saying that your anecdotal evidence is better than his anecdotal evidence? Or that we shouldn't take the perspectives of Sam Altman's experts' opinions too heavily?

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Have you check Bitcoin sales on Craiglist?

[http://austin.craigslist.org/search/?sort=rel&areaID=15&subA...](http://austin.craigslist.org/search/?sort=rel&areaID=15&subAreaID=&query=bitcoin&catAbb=sss)

<comment><USER55> Funny thing about that are the people selling the shovels. I had no idea BFL was selling firmware upgrades to increase hash rates on existing ASIC miners. Simply brilliant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Great read! I just posted an essay from way back (2008) on bubbles to hacker news: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6831300](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6831300)

re-reading it gave me some perspective.

Good luck and Cheers!

</comment><comment><USER57> >Tax is a big deal, of course, but even nations can't always compete with the popular sentiment tidal forces enabled by the internet.

How has the Internet outrage about NSA spying affected the US government?

</comment><comment><USER58> A major legitimate use is wiring money internationally at a low cost.

</comment><comment><USER59> Relevant Futuram clip:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbCk1XNfTs4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbCk1XNfTs4)

</comment><comment><USER60> My biggest issue with bitcoin is that it should be redeemable for something tangible other than $USD. The first virtual currency that addresses this and is directly convertible to watts or calories will be the currency to beat.

<comment><USER61> you just defined 'currency'. basically, your issue with bitcoin is that it can't be exchanged for goods and services.

this is quite the chicken and egg problem. but basically when people 'believe' it's a currency, they will accept it as one - thereby justifying that belief since it will be true due to all the other people accepting it.

dollars are only a worldwide currency because people and institutions think it's one - and if it were to stop being treated as currency it would stop being accepted as one. totally tautological - but there's currency for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Will it hold?

</comment><comment><USER63> I've been watching bitcoin since $30, bought at $80, and sold last night. I think that Stefan Molyneux (or however you spell it) is right on when he says that bitcoin is "a revolutionary protocol for information synchronization." However, it is by no means unique, and as we've seen, anyone can start their own bitcoin-type cryptocurrency. Apparently, the Canadian government is working on their own, and I don't think it will be long before other central banks begin to follow suit by adapting the bitcoin protocol for their own purposes and presumably solving some of its myriad problems in the process. And of course, when given the choice between a new-and-improved cryptocurrency that's guaranteed by a central bank and the old one that's guaranteed by nothing, Joe Blow is going to pick the former. Bitcoin is an amazing idea and I do believe that the idea behind it it will revolutionize transactions, but it won't be alone for long, and once the improved versions begin showing up, those who've held on to bitcoin because it's an amazing idea (it is) without realizing that bitcoin itself has only a very thin economic moat are probably going to have a bad day.

I've been trading and investing stocks for about 7 years now, and I think I've learned a thing or two in that time, but one of the most important things I've learned is that if holding onto something is making me uncomfortable, it's time to sell. Holding my bitcoin was making me uncomfortable as of a couple of days ago, so I sold. On the other hand, I've also learned that if everyone is expecting something to do one thing, it usually does the opposite, and it seems that pretty much everyone agrees that bitcoin is in a bubble. If it does crash, I'll get back in, but if it doesn't, I won't regret selling. I've been on the emotional rollercoaster of watching relatively large sums of money invested in a volatile asset fluctuate wildly, and I'd rather not go through that again. Just my two cents.

<comment><USER64> I wanted to buy right when it hit $850 a few days ago. I redeemed my $11k mutual fund, but the wire transfer took until Friday to go trough. By the time I was able to buy bitcoins, they were $1111 on coinbase. Bought anyway. Got 9.89BTC.

Just lost $2k of that investment, according to the markets. Though it seems to be recovering somewhat. Ow.

Anyway, I'm long on bitcoin. Maybe it will crash and I'll lose everything. Twice it's crashed, then the recovery has eclipsed the previous peak by several X. So I don't know.

I do know that if banks hasn't been so slow, then I would currently be telling the story of "I was able to grow $11k into $13k." One problem BTC solves is moving money around instantly. It doesn't close for Thanksgiving holiday.

Mtgox needs to become wiser as well. There's currently no trade fees, because they wanted to participate in BTC Black Friday. That kind of thing encourages people who are holding onto $15k coins to sell all of them if they think the market will go down. An extra 0.4% on that much money is significant. Mtgox really shouldn't be so willy nilly.

<comment><USER65> _> Though it seems to be recovering somewhat. Ow._

As with most investments, you need to think medium and long term. Barring some kind of final(!) crash, there isn't anywhere to go for BTC but up. Mainstream media and ordinary people are just now starting to talk about it. Stay with your investment, and don't sell before it at least doubled. If it crashes temporarily, that's fine too: chaos is a ladder.

Within reasonable confidence, I'd say: Whatever you do, do not sell at a loss. _That 's_ the moment when it _becomes_ a loss. Don't lose your nerve.

Personally, I had a bit over 100 BTC. When it reached $20 the second time, I sold it because I could use the money and also because I became nervous. While it wasn't the _biggest_ money mistake of my life, it's certainly a whopper in retrospect. Don't be like me ;)

<comment><USER11> _While it wasn 't the biggest money mistake of my life, it's certainly a whopper in retrospect. Don't be like me ;)_

I have a problem classifying random things like this as a mistake. You didn't have enough information at the time to predict that BTC would exceed $1000, and you don't have enough information _now_ to predict what it will do, either.

It's just a game of musical chairs. The only "mistake" is to play. Some mistakes we pay for, while others ultimately benefit us.

<comment> behold- IMHO it would be a huge mistake not to invest a few days worth of income in bitcoins . Most likely you'll loose them, but there's a reasonable chance you'll get 100x back in a few years. I invested $2500 in the summer of 2012 and just last week cached a small part to buy a Citroen C5 saloon.

<comment><USER66> 100x back in a few years? So the market cap will be >1T, and Satoshi will be the richest man (?) on earth? Don't think so. Maybe 10x, and the chance of this is probably not great enough to balance against a crash.

Good call divesting some of your BTC in favor of physical assets.

<comment> behold- IMHO China, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Abu-Dhabi, etc. can't be happy with US printing trillions of USD every year. They need a stable currency to keep their enourmous savings in, but the Fed monetary policy is eroding those savings. Bitcoins would be a perfect alternative. If governments start buying them, the total value can easily go > 1T.

Plus are you implying that hackers, like Bill Gates, Larry Page and Satoshi, can't possibly be (or deserve to be) ultra-rich?

<comment><USER67> If any of those places were unhappy they would stop buying US treasuries. But they keep buying them.

There isn't a "can't be happy" feeling to a market - just what people actually do. At the scales and volumes involved, it is literally impossible for any of those countries to divest themselves of treasuries suddenly (for one thing, bonds don't work that way).

Moreover, governments only invest in real things. The productive output of the US is a real thing because all those places buy tons of US goods and services. Bitcoins are not real things. Perhaps moreover, why would any one of those places invest in a currency at a scale which would simply let them purchase the computing power to take it over permanently?

<comment><USER68> If an individual or group were to purchase the computing power to "take over" the currency Bitcoin would lose all of its value.

<comment><USER67> Which perhaps should highlight why nationstates aren't going to buy it?

Because the money levels being talked about are large enough that you could trivially destroy it. Which means your entire foreign exchange rate is subject to whether someone wants to screw with the blockchain.

Which means at any junction, some third actor can hold the entire currency hostage - unless the governments invest in huge amounts of hashing hardware to protect it. Which is (1) a colossal waste of money and energy and (2) would, in turn, give them the capability to do the _exact same thing_.

Bitcoin will _never_ be a currency held or traded by governments.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to get into robotics? - <AUTHOR>

So I recently grabbed a vacuum robot off Groupon and the thing literally blew my mind. I have seen videos and played with drones, but this thing did a pretty damn good job cleaning my basement. Needless to say I am impressed. There is a future here. (Not in vacuums, robotics. I know, welcome to the party.)
Let's pretend I had one of those life changing moments where I want to pursue robotics. As a software engineer, what shot do I have?
- How does one get into robotics?
- Do software engineers play a similar roll within robotics firms?
- Is it an easy transition or is there additional education / skills needed?
- Anyone work for one? Is it as exciting as it seems?
Other thoughts in this realm are welcome. <comment><USER2> Hi! Practicing roboticist here.

So, there are _lots_ of different parts of robotics you could get involved in. I suppose the first question to answer is "what is your background?" How are your maths (linear algebra, matrix systems, machine learning, etc)? What part of robotics are you interested in? Some examples include perception, mechatronics, motion control, planning, object recognition, system design, and more.

The answers to those questions are necessary to answer the "getting in part" as well as the "easy transition" part.

Software engineers at a robotics firm generally fall into two areas: motion control/industrial programmers and research-like programmers. As you can imagine, the types of tasks motion control/industrial programmers do revolve around getting big industrial robot systems/production systems to dance to their tune, while research-like programmers are generally implementing research-level algorithms on new hardware/firmware/software systems.

I've worked for a few robotics firms in my time and will likely continue to do so. Now is an exciting time to be involved in robotics, especially given the falling cost of hardware.

If you have any more questions or want a follow up conversation, please don't hesitate to hit me up. My email is my profile link.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very cool! And thanks for the detailed answer! I may shoot you an email to get some more thoughts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Join a hacker space, and found a RoboCup Junior league team. Junior league is one of the cheapest and easiest classes in robot soccer, and its normal that the kids have adults to help them. _evil grin_ Our hacker space Junior team has good support from B-Human players, who is one of the strongest teams in standard league.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting.. I will check it out. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Start with Arduino to see if you might enjoy robotics. Arduino is easy to use, reliable, cheap, and there are lots of books on how to make robots with it.

It is "real" electronics -- the skills you learn with it will be directly applicable if you want to try more advanced boards.</comment>


Kickstarter project cancelled because of fraud ... - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/606787527/the-tech-sync-power-system

<comment><USER2> kickstarter responded to this. no evidence of fraud. the creator canceled the project.

[http://www.betabeat.com/2011/09/15/when-kickstarter-goes- wro...](http://www.betabeat.com/2011/09/15/when-kickstarter-goes-wrong- were-419-backers-almost-taken-for-a-27637-ride/)</comment>


Ask HN: I want to understand how coding works, how do I do it? - <AUTHOR> I'm from a non-tech background. I'm now building a product. I want to understand how tech of an app or a website works. How frontend communicates with backends? How APIs work? I don't exactly want to learn coding, but understand how an app or a website works; how do I do it? Any links to non-tech guides? TIA. <comment><USER3> (Disclosure, reposting from my r/learnprogramming comment in 2015) Here's what I wish I understood when I started programming, in 10 sentences:

"A computer receives, stores, and manipulates information. Programmers refer to information as 'data'. Data can be structured to represent concrete things - a song, a picture, a street address, an entire telephone book. Data can also represent abstract things, such as the relationships between you and all of your friends. Computers can only store data that can be represented as a collection of numbers. This is where all those Zeroes and Ones come from - they are how the computer stores numbers. Programmers write code, which is itself a kind of data, to tell a computer how to manipulate data. Programmers break data manipulations into small, understandable steps, and then compose the steps together. Programmers create abstractions by finding patterns in code and giving those patterns or ideas a name (and often a theoretical background). Programmers gain productivity by layering abstractions, at the cost of not understanding or controlling the entire system."

This really helps me think about coding as the process of writing data transformers. If I can represent something as data, then I can manipulate, transmit, and store a representation of that thing. I can allow users to control how the data is manipulated through a user interface.

It also helps me gain clarity around my next steps. What data do I need to accomplish the task? Where does that data live, and where does it need to be? How can I get the data that I need from the data that I have, or from the people who interact with my code.

Perhaps most importantly, it helps me grapple with leaking abstractions - <USER2> it helps me understand that there is always some cost paid for the abstraction, whether it's a lack of control over a program's runtime environment (with garbage collection, for example) or merely a more complex compiler or interpreter.

It's never necessary to understand everything that a computer is doing, but when something unexpected happens, it is important to be able to peel back the abstraction onion and figure out where ones mental model of a computational task diverges from reality.

Also, do check out r/learnprogramming for better resources than you will find on HN.

(Edited to better match HN style guidelines)

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's some starting points

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

[https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_in...](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface)

</comment><comment><USER5> How involved are you with building the product?

<comment><AUTHOR> Co-founder / Design.</comment></comment>


Is automation coming for your job, developers? - <AUTHOR> https://builttoadapt.io/is-automation-coming-for-your-job-c54eff43f3e8 <comment><USER2> I've predicted the downfall of creating new CRUD applications for decades. and yet they still keep coming.

Never underestimate the power of programmers/developers/web developers/mobile developers/designers/gurus reinventing the wheel to the keep the paychecks coming.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, for many existing parts of the job. This has been going on for 20 years.</comment>


Ask HN: A tool that tracks various websites for keywords and give you updates? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for a tool that would search a number of websites for certain keywords and show me the aggregated results on a page.
For instance, something that would use Hacker News, Lobsters or Reddit own search engine and return the aggregated results. You can then check the results from time to time and see if there's any update.
Any idea if something like this exists? <comment><USER2> To the extent that any of those sites have RSS feeds, you can do something like that with our project Neddick[1]. You can define a "channel" which is fed by _n_ RSS Feeds (and also Twitter accounts and/or IMAP email accounts) to build an aggregate view. Then you can define a "filter" for the channel based on various criteria. We also have real-time notifications using the same kind of criteria, where you can receive an email, an XMPP message, post to a webhook, etc.

It's still somewhat beta'ish, but most everything I just described is working today.

We're working on turning this into a SaaS offering, but that's not quite ready yet... if you wanted to use it, you'd have to self-host. I hope to have a Docker image ready soon, which would simplify deployment.

Sadly the documentation on deployment is a little out of date. If you wanted to give it a try, basically create a postgres database named neddick_dev, clone the repo, install Grails 3.3.6, and then run the runneddick.sh script from in the repo directory. You'd also want to tweak the neddick.home property defined in runneddick.sh to point somewhere meaningful.

We don't currently have any built-in support for leveraging a site's built in search mechanism, but I could see it being a useful addition. If somebody wanted to contribute that kind of functionality, I'd be happy to include it. When we would get around to building it ourself is hard to say.

[1]: [https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick](https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick)</comment>


A dog sitters website - <AUTHOR> http://www.jleniadogsitterroma.it <comment><USER2> It looks nice, but is the annoying loader really necessary? I don't see why the page can't just load instantly.</comment>


Which English? - <AUTHOR> http://www.gameswithwords.org/WhichEnglish/ <comment><USER3> I find myself thinking of scenarios where most choices would be correct. I play ____ the soccer team.

Pleased to meet you. I am an active sporty guy and 'I play in the soccer team'.

Pleased to meet you. I am a tick, a playful little parasite. I like to jump from person to person in small groups. Today, 'I play on the soccer team'.

Pleased to meet you. I am a playful infectious disease. 'I play inside the soccer team'.

Pleased to meet you, I am Lot's son. As you may have learned in a famous bible story, my mother turned into a salt statue while taking a casual glance at the destruction of Sodom. Less known is that she belonged to a soccer team and the whole team also turned to stone while in the middle of an important game. Today, the team has become a famous landmark and the grounds for a soccer school to which I belong. 'I play at the soccer team'.

<comment><USER4> This has to be best best comment I've seen about the project yet! You mind if I use this as an example for my students? (I mean, I will anyway. I just want to know if you mind.)

<comment><USER5> So if it doesn't list English in the top three native language guesses, does that mean my English is very ungrammatical, or merely that it's ungrammatical in a particular way? All three languages were Scandinavian but I have no connection there.

The NY Times had a similar quiz that attempted to predict your region and, IIRC, predicted mine fairly closely. I didn't get such accurate results this time so I'm wondering if my grammar is slipping ...

<comment><USER6> The #1 guess for me was Norweigian, while English was #2. I've spent all my life in the American South.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What it's testing for:

1\. Passive alternation

2\. It-clefting (simply `clefting` in some circles)

3\. Another it-cleft?

4\. It-cleft + possible scope ambiguity

5\. Quantifier scope ambiguity (do you get quant raising, basically)

6\. More clefts? Don't recall, but maybe they're mixing it up with the overt complementizer (`that`).

7\. Ditto above

8\. Passive construction again

9\. More quantifier scope stuff

10\. Lexicon inventory (modal shall is antiquated in most (all?) dialects)

11\. Idunno, phrasing. Not-quite-collocate decisions

12\. Aspect-tense interaction, I guess...

13\. 'Conjugation', or how do you express tense?

14\. Lexical selection/wh-feature spellout (does `+person` override the 'incorrect' case-marked `whom`?)

15\. Skipped this one due to a double-click, too much coffee

16\. Even more lexicon stuff

17\. Lexical selection, or 'what kind of thing needs a determiner?'

...okay this is tedious. My point was going to be that a lot of these, especially the syntactic construction ones, seem very specific. I don't know of any dialects of English for example that switch the assignment of roles (A speech delivered Bill, eg) so freely as some of these questions suggest, and I thought _all_ dialects had passive construction and it-clefting. Maybe I'll go through again and answer all the wrong things and see where it thinks those features are from.

Anyway, this was interesting. If this sort of thing also interests you, waste the rest of your day on The World Atlas of Language Structures! [1] It's a ton of fun.

[1] [http://wals.info/](http://wals.info/)

<comment><USER8> > I don't know of any dialects of English for example that switch the > assignment of roles (A speech delivered Bill, eg)

This is a complete guess, but perhaps this exists to identify english-as-a- second-language speakers from languages where this form exists?

(English is my first and only language and I know very little about languages. The test guessed correctly that I am Australian)

<comment><USER7> Yeah, that's entirely possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting case study here: I got very different results in my two attempts at the quiz, based on how I use school grammar and generative grammar rules in answering the questions.

In my first attempt, the algorithm guessed that my English dialect was 1. Singaporean 2. US Black Vernacular 3. American (Standard), and it guessed that my native language was 1. Vietnamese 2. Chinese 3. English.

Then I turned off my school grammar, including some generative grammar rules (from linguistics) in my head, and just truly went with my guts. This particularly affected the answers I gave to later questions. The second time the algorithm guessed that my dialect was 1. American (Standard) 2. Canadian 3. US Black Vernacular and that my native language was 1. English 2. Norwegian 3. Dutch.

This second set of results was very much off the mark but conformed to what I intended my answers to be.

My background: a native Thai speaker, born and raised in Thailand, started learning a bit of 'real' English at about eleven, lived in the US for two years when doing my Masters. I'm currently in Thailand but I mostly read and write in English for about fourteen years. My everyday spoken language is still Thai, but most of the movies, music, multimedia I consume are in English.

Possible implications:

1\. Over-application of school grammar could result in unnatural use of language.

2\. With enough exposure to proper language materials, non-natives can get pretty close to the native speaker in grammatical knowledge, even fairly subtle ones, at least according to the short and incomplete quiz here.

If any American English native speaker has time on their hands, I'd be grateful if you can tell me the differences between my writings (you can click on my username for more samples) and those of an educated native American English speaker.

<comment><USER10> So in skimming your comment history, I'm no english teacher; your use of past tense seems almost forced.

While as far I'm aware correct grammatically, your last paragraph gives plenty of hints that you're non-native: "If any American English native SPEAKERS HAVE [picky] time on their hands, I'd be grateful if you COULD tell me ("let me know of" maybe) ANY differences between my WRITING [big one here] (you can click on my username for an archive of my comments) and THAT of an educated native American English speaker.

There may be subtleties in your sentence structure that you'd be better off asking a linguist about; but you definitely come off as both educated and non- native in skimming.

<comment><USER9> Thanks a lot for the comment. I kind of notice that I overuse past tense a bit too, I'll try to go more with my guts next time. My general lesson: Oftentimes when I try to apply school grammar or logic, I tend to be a bit more off than when I apply the patterns I absorb through experience.

'Writings' is an interesting case. I believe mental lexicon is a lot harder for non-natives to grasp, simply because there are a lot more of them and English does not always treat them consistently. For example, I thought that a collection of written work is plural, while apparently you consider it a collection or an abstract object, and therefore used without an article and cannot in general be in the plural form.

However, this is what I found using Google 'define writing':

      2. written work, especially with regard to its style or quality.
      * books, stories, articles, or other written works.
      plural noun: writings
      "he was introduced to the writings of Gertrude Stein"

So, dear native speakers, which is more appropriate in my use in the GP comment? writings or writing? :-)

<comment><USER10> There was another good post on here I saw recently on how we're using bad dictionaries, [http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary](http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary)

For example the better (while old) Websters Revised only has these two entries for "writings":

      3. A book; any written composition; a pamphlet; as the writings of Addison.
      ...
      5. Writings, plu. conveyances of lands; deeds; or any official papers.

It specifically mentions that writings are more formal and pretty spot on for how we use the word.

TLDR; use this [http://machaut.uchicago.edu/websters](http://machaut.uchicago.edu/websters) 1913 websters dictionary rather than the newer, while correct, dictionaries that don't capture vernacual. It's a shame a state of our dictionaries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of my favourite things to do in online forums such as Stack Overflow, where there are many non-native English speakers, is to determine where a person is from based on which grammatical errors they make. It's more subtle than accent or other cues, but it is remarkably consistent.

<comment><USER12> I followed Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course on Coursera. The course itself was great, but halfway through I realized he had to be from Malaysia or Singapore, because he started talking about "alphabets" instead of "letters".

<comment><USER11> Yeah, besides word choice ("I have a doubt" = "I have a question" in Indian English) you also have more interesting things like discourse deixis—"consider that code: …" instead of "consider this code: …"—or how uncertainty is expressed—"some" instead of "a" for example shows up in Daft Punk's "Something About Us".

<comment><USER13> Interesting! "I have a doubt" is also a common mistake for us Spanish speakers. This is because for us "tengo una duda" is an acceptable way of saying "I have a question".

<comment><USER14> German here. It felt _really_ weird when my American boss asked me whether I have a doubt. Yes, most people in his team are from India.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One question in particular got me thinking that this quiz could also identify people with a scientific background, who read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, or in general people not inclined towards future shock:

> Fill in the blank. Check all correct answers.

> The sun is in ________.

> ☑ the sky

> ☑ a sky

> ...

</comment><comment><USER16> At the end it says: "Calculating score... Meanwhile, please answer these questions."

At first I was like, "They're kicking off a deferred job for that?"

And then I was like, "Oh, they just want me to answer questions."

</comment><comment><USER17> They appear to list three guesses for variety of English for everybody who takes the quiz. They correctly spotted that I'm a native speaker of American (standard) English and listed the other two possibilities as Canadian (I do listen to radio from Canada, by rebroadcast on Minnesota Public Radio) and ebonics (which everyone in the United States hears sooner or later).

The guesses for my language background were spot on too. Like many Minnesotans, I have a few dialectal usages that reflect Scandinavian influence, and besides English as a first language, the other two languages guessed for me were Norwegian and Swedish. I have Norwegian ancestry (in part), so I come by those dialect habits honestly.

<comment><USER18> Counterdata: I've lived in California my entire life, my only other language exposure in day-to-day life is Spanish, and I have no Norwegian ancestry or local connections. It still thought my second- and third-most likely native languages were Swedish and Norwegian. I'm guessing those languages have ease picking up "native" English.

<comment><USER19> 32 years in California, then 22 in Washington. I too got Norwegian and Swedish as the guess 2nd and 3rd guess for native language.

For my English variant, Standard American was first, then Canadian, then Singaporean.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > I told Sally I was worried about the exam. She said, "Don't worry. > ____________"

> She'll be right!

I feel like this question is cheating. This could be the only question in the survey and it would be able to identify Australians.

<comment><USER13> Why would Australians say this? Is it because for them an exam is a "she"? (disclaimer: not a native English speaker myself, though the test guessed "American English (Standard)").

<comment><USER21> I don't know the origins, but we seem to use 'she' as a synonym for 'the situation'.

She'll be right. She's all good. She's apples.

etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I finder interesting that they don't do a good job at breakin up no American English. We ain't just one big ole' dialect, ya know?

I hail from downeast Maine (downeastah) and it thought I was a native dutch speaker, some fucking horse sh## right there, let me tell ya.... My linguist friends can do a much better job at pinnin me, spot down to the county, after college and WITHOUT my tryin. Aight.

Seriously, might want get some pronunciation questions in there—at 314M people the US is a pretty big chunk that they group into only two (that I saw) dialects, ebonics and standard. Of course being a youngin and gone to school, I've probably picked up one or two outa townah habits in my talkin.

FYI I'm ampin it up, if haven't noticed; but I do talk this way around my "muddah" so I don't get muckeled up one side down the otha—still no idea what that means but it doesn't sound nice, maybe a slapping, bitching, no idea... but holy hell do I need a translator to understand my grandparents are saying, this isn't American standard down here (and why is it always down?)

<comment><USER22> The same is true of the other dialects as well, even good old Mother England's. Compare the ways in which the upper class and the chavs talk. North versus south. Different vernacular, different grammar types, innit?

<comment><USER10> Yeah seemed more a which language did you originally speak rather than what english do you speak, questionnaire. I seriously can't understand what half of the generation before me is saying on my mom's side—it isn't my English for sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> For the US, also check out the short quiz from the NY Times [1] based on the Harvard Dialect Survey from ~10 years ago.

It got both mine and my spouse's hometown area dead right.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday- review/...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday- review/dialect-quiz-map.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER24> That was very interesting for me, an Australian living in the US. Phoenix specifically. I'm constantly amazed at how quickly American's can spot that I'm an Aussie.

I've gotten pretty used to the obvious different words between Australia and the US; rubbish = trash, car boot = trunk, pram = stroller, take away = carry out / to go, etc.

However this quiz highlighted a bunch that I wouldn't have been aware of, such as no one in the US knowing what soft-drink is and nature strip wasn't even on the list for "the grass beside a road".

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I got Ebonics. This quiz is whack.

<comment><USER25> Ah see what you did dere.

For english dialect I got:

1\. Singaporean 2\. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics 3\. American (Standard)

and for native language I got:

1\. Swedish 2\. Norwegian 3\. English

I'm 100% native English

<comment><USER26> > _I 'm 100% native English_

Same here regarding habitat (Gloucester), my results were:

Dialect: 0\. English 1. Welsh 2. South African

Native: 0\. English 1. Finnish 2. Romanian

But my mother is Welsh, and I lived in Cardiff for three years. I'd say that is fairly accurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It was absolutely spot on for me. I grew up speaking native (Canadian) English in a Cantonese-speaking home in a Portuguese neighbourhood, and it picked up on all three of those exactly.

</comment><comment><USER28> >Up the audience's expectations, the critics built.

I just got that sentence on asking if it were grammatical or not. I believe that is referred to as yoda grammar?

>Our top three guesses for your English dialect: >1\. Canadian >2\. American (Standard) >3\. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics

Number 1 is correct. However I would admit to speaking american, and I did listen to a lot of rap growing up, so ebonics might be reasonable? But I am a white kid from the rich suburbs, so it's a bit odd but possible I suppose.

</comment><comment><USER29> Other: impossible to complete on iOS due to insane drop down boxes that don't allow one to make or even view the proper selection. So, I suppose, I'm in the entitled American group. Finally, popular.

edit: dead I guess? If anyone has showdead on and sees this, I'd be much obliged if you could take a gander at my history and theorize as to what got me banned. Email in profile. Thanks in advance.

</comment><comment><USER30> None of the top three guesses are correct in my case, not even close. I wonder if this is because they have more data for Chinese and Portuguese (Brazil) speakers.

        Our top three guesses for your English dialect:
        1. South African
        2. Welsh (UK)
        3. New Zealand

        Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:
        1. Chinese
        2. Portuguese
        3. English

<comment><USER31> Same for me, Indian:

1\. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics 2\. New Zealand 3\. Singaporean Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:?

1\. German 2\. Dutch 3\. English - See more at: [http://www.gameswithwords.org/WhichEnglish/done.php#sthash.i...](http://www.gameswithwords.org/WhichEnglish/done.php#sthash.igF1TVhT.dpuf)

#3 (Singapore) is a little bit close and #3 is correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've noticed that prepositions seem to change usage over time in different regions. For example, "different to" has become common in British vernacular, even though "different from" is still typical for formal British English and in American vernacular. Sometimes I hear "different than" but I'm not sure where it is commonly used.

</comment><comment><USER33> Is there really a significant population that self identifies as speaking Ebonics?

That whole methodology seems rife with biases. The instructions are in standard american english. The pictures are confusing. The input controls are broken on mobile. I reject written sentences ad ungrammatical even though I hear and speak them fine.

<comment><USER34> The instructions ask you to choose what feels right, not what you learnt at school to be grammatical. So you should expect poor results if you rejected right-feeling sentences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Worked very well for me, correctly guessing my dialect which is spoken by relatively few people (not one of the 'standard' ones). I definitely found this surprising, especially considering I haven't lived in my home country for the better part of a decade. Very cool.

<comment><USER22> I'm from Australia. It thought I was Welsh. Apart from a strong sheep segment in the economy and being considered second-class by the English (and who isn't?), there's not much in common between the two countries... :)

<comment><USER35> Possibly because Welsh English is quite close to Australian English according to this blog post:

[http://gameswithwords.fieldofscience.com/2014/05/the- english...](http://gameswithwords.fieldofscience.com/2014/05/the-english- grammars-of-world.html)

<comment><USER22> Interesting visualisation, but if I'm reading it correctly, a smaller number means more similar, and the number for Australian->Welsh is the third highest number for the Australian dialect, suggesting that they're more dissimilar than others.

Hrm, that's if you mouseover Australian. If you mouseover Welsh, Welsh->Australian is indeed the lowest number of the list. So, according to these numbers, Welsh is most like Australian, but Australian is least(ish) close to Welsh.

Weird.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm from India and a native Hindi speaker. The algorithm got a result far away from the correct one.

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:?

1\. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics 2\. Singaporean 3\. English (England)

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:?

1\. Russian 2\. Turkish 3\. Polish

</comment><comment><USER37> Top 3 guesses:

       1. American (Standard)
       2. Singaporean
       3. Canadian

(#1 is correct, #3 is close)

Native Language

       1. English
       2. Norwegian
       3. Chinese

(#1 is correct, interesting about the other 2)

</comment><comment><USER38> It wasn't until after I had finished that I realized I was mixing up two distinct concepts in my responses:

1) What I would consider correct phrasing for my own speech, and

2) What I would accept as correct when spoken by someone else

</comment><comment><USER39> Creepy :)

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1\. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics 2\. American (Standard) 3\. Canadian - <USER2> more at: [http://www.gameswithwords.org/WhichEnglish/#sthash.yDkuaast....](http://www.gameswithwords.org/WhichEnglish/#sthash.yDkuaast.dpuf)

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1\. Dutch 2\. English 3\. Norwegian - See more at: [http://www.gameswithwords.org/WhichEnglish/#sthash.yDkuaast....](http://www.gameswithwords.org/WhichEnglish/#sthash.yDkuaast.dpuf)

And yes: I'm Dutch.

<comment><USER40> I'm Dutch as well, and I got:

1\. American (Standard) 2. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics 3. Singaporean

1\. English 2. Dutch 3. Swedish

I think it's cool that my English is good enough for it to judge me a native speaker, while it still has enough information to see similarities to other Dutch people who took the quiz. Swedes' English is quite good as well, so that makes sense as a third guess.

No idea where "US Black Vernacular / Ebonics" and "Singaporean" are coming from, however. I'd be interested to see which choices exactly make my English similar to those dialects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I got Ebonics, and it guessed that I am Vietnamese or Finnish. I consider myself to speak standard American English, and I am a Korean. Not enough training data? Is that why it's on HN???

<comment><USER37> No idea why Finnish, but the Korean population near where I live often speak with notable dialectal markers indicative of Ebonics. I think it comes from the relative popularity of hip-hop culture in Korean popular culture.

This interview is a great example. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeb- PJJN9sk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeb-PJJN9sk)

<comment><USER41> Well, plus I actually grew up in the states!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> "It was the monkey that pushed the bear." What possible room for interpretation is there here? Unless you're not paying attention.

[http://i.imgur.com/cxGR1Mm.png](http://i.imgur.com/cxGR1Mm.png)

I think this thing is broken. I did catch myself almost selecting something ridiculous-sounding a few times because I didn't read the sentence close enough, though; maybe that's what happened. But there were a ton of "US Black Vernacular" options that I never picked.

<comment><USER34> I guess most people from "ebonics" postcodes who took this quiz and trained it are more educated than their neighbors so they ended up picking the US standard English options like you did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm impressed - it suggested New Zealand as #1, and Australia as #2. Raised in Australia and New Zealand, with kiwi parents.

<comment><USER44> I got Australia #1, New Zealand #2. Born and raised in Australia and never been to NZ. Pretty similar dialects though I guess :)

<comment><USER45> It said I was from New Zealand. I've never been to New Zealand in my life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> From Costa Rica, learned english in Scotland as a kid but had american teachers growing up. They guessed:

        1. American (Standard)
        2. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
        3. Singaporean

        1. Norwegian
        2. English
        3. Dutch

Seems like Singaporean should be penalised just by mere demographics/statistics.

<comment><USER47> Being born, raised in living in Scotland I got:

1\. Scottish (UK)

2\. English (England)

3\. Irish (Republic of)

Surprisingly accurate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Wow, this is pretty good. It guessed my Finnish native language. Although it said my English dialect is 1. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics 2. Singaporean 3. New Zealand. Well, I don't think I have any specific dialect so it might be just pretty random.

</comment><comment><USER49> Didn't peg Hawaiian Pidgin even though I purposefully answered a couple questions that way (like "stay x") while choosing standard grammar otherwise. Top was just standard American English, the other top three were just like black Vernacular.

</comment><comment><USER50> Would love to see more details as to WHY I got the suggested responses. As a prescribed grammarian, born and raised in the northeast US, I was definitely surprised to see Canadian and ebonics. Assuming not enough training data yet...?

<comment><USER4> When we're done with the project, we'll put up a final version that actually gives you a breakdown of why you get the score you do, what parts of the world certain grammar rules are particularly common -- all the things people (including me!) want to know.

We're actually getting some of that up bit-by-bit as data comes in (you can watch for it on our site blog). Thank you to everyone who has been participating so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I'm Brazilian, and their top guess for native language was Portuguese. Good work!

</comment><comment><USER52> Wow. I was born in NZ, and my family are all Kiwi's. I moved to Australia when I was 7. The guesses for my dialect are 1. NZ and 2. Australia! Very well done. I'm curious to see how good the algorithm ends up being.

<comment><USER53> The guesses for my dialect were 1. NZ and 2. Singapore but I'm Icelandic and have never lived anywhere else. (I'm not saying that it's flawed but I thought it was interesting)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> This is really cool, I didn't know that so many of those sentences might be considered valid.

It got my country right with it's second guess (New Zealand), which is pretty good considering what a small sample of kiwis it must have.

<comment><USER55> Ticking both "she'll be right" and "it'll be OK" was probably the big giveaway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> My results: 1\. US Black Vernacular 2\. Singaporean 3\. New Zealand

and my native language: 1\. Greek 2\. Finish 3\. Russian

It is actually German. I am trying to find a pattern here, but i believe these results generated statistically/by machine learning?

<comment><USER57> I also got Singaporean and New Zealand as well as the three native languages (albeit in different ordering) while being a German native speaker. I'd claim it to be mere chance that these are somehow related to standard German sentence structuring, especially the use of the passive in the first few questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> English speaking Canadian:

      1. New Zealand
      2. South African
      3. Welsh (UK)

      1. Norwegian
      2. English
      3. Romanian

Seems a little off.

</comment><comment><USER59> This is an interesting variation of a semiotic commutation test, although while not honoring emergent grammar (Paul hopper) as much as I do.

</comment><comment><USER60> Very interesting. Point of correction: Welsh is not a dialect of English! It's a completely different language.

<comment><USER61> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_English](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_English)

"Welsh English, Anglo-Welsh, or Wenglish (see below) refers to the dialects of English spoken in Wales by Welsh people. The dialects are significantly influenced by Welsh grammar and often include words derived from Welsh. In addition to the distinctive words and grammar, there is a variety of accents found across Wales from the Cardiff dialect to that of the South Wales Valleys and to West Wales."

<comment><USER60> Right, but that is not Welsh...

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

<comment><USER61> Nobody claimed it was. Talking about "Welsh English" refers to a Welsh- language-influenced dialect of English spoken primarily in Wales by people who also speak or live among/are influenced by speakers of the Welsh language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I got

1\. New Zealand 2\. South African 3\. Australian.

With native languages as

1\. English 2\. Chinese 3\. Greek

I'm English speaking Australian. So it got very close.

</comment><comment><USER63> totally incorrect for me. Didn't guess my nationality and put Russian at third place in native languages.

</comment><comment><USER64> Guesses native language:

1\. English 2\. Chinese 3\. Greek

Guesses dialect:

1\. Australian 2\. Singaporean 3\. American (Standard)

I'm Norwegian.</comment>


GOOS=fuchsia - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-dev/2xuYHcP0Fdc <comment><AUTHOR> > As the operating system does not provide a syscall interface for

> files, the file system is implemented as a protocol spoken over

> zx.Channel objects to a file system process.</comment>


Look out, Microsoft Surface - the iTable might just trump you in every way - <AUTHOR> http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/01/10/look-out-microsoft-surface-the-itable-might-just-trump-you-in-every-way/ <comment><USER2> Doesn't the surface also detect objects placed on top (eg phones) and can in some cases interact with those devices (again, phones)

While I think this is defintely cool - I don't think its a step up, merely a competing product which is always a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER3> The product from this company that is analogous to Surface is cheaper by about 2500 but how is it better if it does not even have an SDK yet?</comment>


The 'Grammar Vigilante' of Bristol [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-39459831 <comment><USER2> He sets wrongs right in the middle of the night -- he is the hero Bristol deserves.

<comment><USER3> He sets wrongs right in the middle of the night, he's the hero Bristol deserves.

<comment><USER4> That's a comma splice. Original comment was more correct than this.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, maybe a semicolon there would have been OK. Double hyphen is OK in the absence of an easy-reachable en-dash or em-dash imo.

<comment><USER6> No hyphen, no semicolon. There's a magic, underused punctuation mark for just this purpose. It's called a period.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> But now the kerning gets all messed up...

<comment><USER8> What's keming?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Since we are being pedantic, doesn't grammer refer to the spoken language and not the spelling conventions used to represent it, in other words this person is a spelling bandit, or more specifically a punctuation bandit

<comment><USER10> The lack of or extraneous apostrophes is clearly a grammar mistake, not only a spelling one.

<comment><USER11> Not really, it would be a grammar mistake if they actually meant, let's say, "its" in place of "it's". Since the pronunciation of the two is the same, they word they actually meant to write is "it's", they just spell it wrongly.

Oh, can I add another pet peeve. "Semantics" when discussing naming of things when the meaning is clear. "Semantics" is about meaning, not about naming. But it's "semantics", obviously :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't really have much of an opinion about this because, although it's harm, it's pretty small harm. If I could, I'd just ask him whether he thought English wouldn't be a steaming pile of slop if everyone used it correctly?

</comment><comment><USER13> More power to him!

While they covered up the guy's face etc. they've shown his "apostrophizer" \- surely that's enough for anyone who spots a guy walking around with it at night in a hoodie to pick him out?

<comment><USER14> > More power to him!

Do you really think damaging property belonging to other people is justified by bad grammar?

<comment><USER15> I think its justified

<comment><USER3> I think it's justified.

Fixed punctuation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Man Who Knows Whether Any Startup Will Live or Die - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/01/growth-science/

<comment><USER3> > According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about half of all > businesses fail within five years.

> He [...] thinks that even a model that's only right about 50 percent of the > time could help investors and entrepreneurs avoid particularly bad ideas

...does he have a bridge to sell me too? What am I missing?

(One can simply predict "always succeeds" and will be right half the time.)

<comment><USER4> Perhaps what has been missed is the difference between a single coin flip and a combination of coin flips?

Consider one startup.

        f(x) = #fail

succeeds better than 50%, and

        f(x) = #succeed

succeeds less than 50%. This is due to the nature of startups.

Sure, it's easy to get about 50% accuracy for one startup by flipping a coin:

        f(x) = if rand(1) > 0.5 then #fail else #succeed

But consider the case of two companies A and B. There are now four outcomes:

       A = #fail, B = #fail
       A = #succeed, B = #fail
       A = #fail, B = #succeed
       A = #succeed, B = #succeed

If we flip a coin, we have to flip it twice. Our probability that two coin flips match the correct tuple is 25%, and bumping that up to 50% is a massive improvement.

Investors diversify their portfolios. In a portfolio of 100 startups there's probably a winner. Improving the selection of companies means reducing the number of a fund's portfolio companies necessary for a reasonable probability of a winner. More smaller yet successful funds makes capital more efficient.

Better pruning of boolean search spaces has real value. Hence:

        When predicating that a company will fail,
        he adds, they're right 88 percent of the time.

<comment><USER5> That's... not accurate. There are two success conditions (Fail, Fail) and (Succeed, Succeed), and two failure conditions (Succeed, Fail), (Fail, Succeed). If you flip two coins, the chance that they come up _both heads_ is 25%, but the chance that they come up _the same_ is 50%.

<comment><USER4> The odds of (#fail, #fail) for two startups (A, B) are much greater than 50%. When investing in two companies (#fail, #fail) is not #success.

At a 1% #success probability the failure rate is ~98%. The 1% #success rate is based on the a knowledgeable person choosing A and independently choosing B. If that person can obtain information that lets them improve their selections to %2 #success probability, they can reduce the total number of investments necessary to achieve any particular expected return on investment.

Reducing the number of investments may improve the investor's ability to influencing the outcome of each company in their portfolio, because the investor can allocate more time, energy, and resources to each company in their portfolio [resuming the investor brings business expertise to the table].

<comment><USER5> The article is claiming that the guy can _predict_ which things are going to succeed and which are going to fail, not _make_ them succeed or fail. His evidence for this is that 50% of the time, he's right (e.g. [success, success], [fail, fail] are both success conditions _for him_ ). For him to be adding any information to the system, he has to get it right more often than either choosing randomly or using a fixed zero-information strategy (always bet fail/always bet succeed). You explicitly said that the joint probability matters, but then miscalculated the joint probability of him guessing correctly by random chance.

<comment><USER4> I apologize for not making myself clear enough to communicate as effectively as might be hoped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would be incredibly interested to know how the model was crossvalidated. It is utterly trivial to cherry pick features post-facto to correctly predict winners, however people who are unfamiliar with machine learning might not know this.

</comment><comment><USER7> "He admits the models will never be perfect, but thinks that even a model that's only right about 50 percent of the time could help investors and entrepreneurs avoid particularly bad ideas that, to the untrained eye, look like excellent opportunities."

He basically admits his model is no better than a monkey

<comment><USER8> > He basically admits his model is no better than a monkey

Well, technically, a monkey with a coin to flip. "Heads this startup will succeed, tails it will fail"

<comment><USER9> Now coin flip wouldn't be anything near 50% accurate, unless there is a world where more than a small fraction of startups survive!

<comment><USER10> What? A coin flip would still be 50% accurate. If 10% of startups succeed, and we say that heads is "succeed" and tails is "fail":

5% of startups will be predicted to succeed and will succeed (correct prediction)

5% of startups will be predicted to fail and will succeed (false prediction)

45% of startups will be predicted to succeed and will fail(false prediction)

45% of startups will be predicted to fail and will fail (true prediction)

50% true predictions, 50% false predictions. A coin flip is always 50% accurate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure having better predictors of what businesses are good is necessarily a good idea. Part of the attraction of silicon valley is that it takes some of the risk out of trying new things, even if they might be bad ideas. This culture of trying things leads us to find the occasional really good idea. If we sit around all day plugging our ideas into models to see if, statistically speaking, the will succeed, we won't find the really novel ideas that look bad but are actually good.

</comment><comment><USER12> Retroactively fitting a model to prove history is not that difficult. Accurately predicting the future may be a bit trickier. Just ask technical stock traders.

<comment><USER13> Well it depends on proper cross-validation, sample size and of course predictability (i.e. 4 * P(Suc.|data) * P(Fail.|data)<<1). But online prediction is of course what will tell the long term reliability of any model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> from the article:

 _He admits the models will never be perfect, but thinks that even a model that's only right about 50 percent of the time could help investors and entrepreneurs avoid particularly bad ideas_

dunno why but I can't stop thinking that tossing a coin could achieve the same goal :)

<comment><USER15> That only works if startups fail 50% of the time. If they fail more frequently, a coin flip would be wrong.

<comment><USER14> I stand corrected, you're right. I'm supposed to know better.

<comment><USER16> Nope, you're still right.

Assume startups fail 90% of the time. 50% of the time your coin comes up tails, and you claim the startup will fail. 50% of the time your coin comes up heads and you claim the startup will succeed.

You guess correctly 0.5 (the chance your coin comes up tails) * 0.9 (the chance the startup fails) + 0.5 (heads) * 0.1 (success) = 0.5 of the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't understand what the inputs to the model are.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wish this guy the best in improving his algorithm. If it really worked, it could do a lot of good. But the economy is so complex, I doubt he'll ever make the model more accurate than a coin toss. I predict the model will just make people overconfident in their investment decisions.

<comment><USER19> Investing is anti-inductive; if his algorithm actually starts to be used in investment decisions, people will keep gaming it until it will no longer be a useful signal.

<comment><USER20> Reflexive is the term used by George Soros: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexivity_(social_theory)#In_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexivity_\(social_theory\)#In_economics)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> zupa-hu Too bad that the very best startups are always the outliars (aka without historical data).

<comment><USER21> Do have any data to back that up? It seems a blanket statement to call "the best" start-ups outliers. What defines "the best" startup?

<comment> zupa-hu As the topic was about investments, in the context the best means whichever makes more money I guess. You are right, I have no data to back that up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Misleading title but an interesting article nonetheless. The comments here really show how much statistics are misunderstood by the public, even by a more technical-minded crowd.

</comment><comment><USER23> > even a model that's only right about 50 percent of the time could help > investors

That's equivalent to a coin flip. I didn't get the point he was trying to make. 66% looks good though.

</comment><comment><USER24> title: "The Man Who Knows Whether Any Startup Will Live or Die"

text: ""He admits the models will never be perfect, but thinks that even a model that's only right about 50 percent of the time could help investors and entrepreneurs..."

Which is not surprising... if the title was really true, this man would likely be richer than Warren Buffett at this point.

<comment><USER25> Wouldn't a coin toss be right 50% of the time?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The data mining bias / model risk here is huge. Let's see how he gets on truly out of sample.

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if he has applied the algorithim to his firm to improve his chances of survival

<comment><USER28> Yes. From the article: "According to Thurston's own model, Growth Science's own chance of survival following its current business model is about 69 percent. Adding the automated service would actually improve its chances, he says."

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Hi Y'all, Thomas here (guy in article). Just want to start by saying (1) this is a very intelligent thread, and (2) I didn't write the article, was just interviewed for it. You never know what's going to be written, no matter what you say.

Here's how the models really play out. We compare our accuracy against the 10 year survivorship benchmark of 25% (not the 5 year). When you look at small businesses, VC-backed, and corporate ventures (ex. new products coming out of companies), the 10 year survival rate is around 25%, plus or minus 10% depending on the industry.

Our models have made thousands of predictions for around nine years now - <USER2> the predictions were live, real-time and forward looking (no back-testing included here). From those predictions, around 3,400 have matured to date. That is, only around 3,400 of the results have happened - the businesses have either become big successes (ex. Uber) or failed. In our research, we have to actually wait for businesses to live or die to test our accuracy.

From the roughly 3,400 predictions that have matured, we were right 66% of the time when predicting survivors, and 88% of the time when predicting failures. When we scratched beneath the surface, we were really around 66% accurate in both cases (just most businesses fail, which is why gloomy predictions were 22% more accurate - just a function of dumb luck since most things die).

So we consider our algorithms to be 66% accurate, which is much more accurate than anything we're aware of in human history (remember, the baseline we're compared against is 25%).

If you do a statistical analysis (to make sure our predictions weren't just luck), the models maintained a statistically significant correlation with 99% confidence. There was less than 1 chance in over 500,000 that the results were a function of luck (definitely not a coin toss).

We've used these models in venture, and our performance puts us in the top 5% of all VC funds for our vintage years, so we've monetized these models effectively with real dollars and made considerable gains.

I hope this gives folks a better sense for how it works. There's been a very emotional backlash to the Wired article today (not accusing this thread, just thinking of some others) and it's weird because it's just basic scientific research. Pretty drab stuff on most days, but apparently offensive to some people. Not sure why. We're using statistics to improve venture and startup odds, just like stats have been used to improve just about every other field humans have ever taken seriously. Seems obvious that stats are similarly useful in the startup world, and my dream has always been to help more businesses use stats to succeed.

Anyway, definitely a lot more controversy and emotion than I would have expected. Otherwise pretty basic science, not claiming perfection, just striving for improvement, using data as best we can, etc. I hope at least some folks see this for what it is - nothing out of the ordinary in any other domain of science. Why should entrepreneurship be any different?

<comment><USER20> So if the baseline is 25% survive, then 75% fail, for a sum of 100%. How is it correct to compare that baseline to two numbers (66% and 88%) which don't sum to 100? Is failing different from not surviving?

<comment><USER29> Great question - as this thread showed it's a 2x2

Possible outcomes:

1\. The models predicted survival, and the business survived 2\. Predicted survival, but the business failed 3\. Predicted failure, but the business survived, 4\. Predicted failure, and the business failed

Here's how our results stacked up: #1. 69% of observations (it wobbles around 66%, but was 69% in the last update) #2. 31% of observations (notice #1 + #2 = 100%. Out of 100% of the times we predicted survival, we were right 69% and wrong 31%) #3. 12% #4. 88% (again, #3 + #4 = 100%. Out of all the times we predicted failure, we were right 88% of the time and wrong 12%).

Again, there's more luck when you predict failure, so it's really around 66% for both positives and negatives when you dig deeper into the stats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The output of his model is contrarian to what every accelerator and VC firm in the Valley says about investing. They believe the team is the most important factor of success. Thurston says its 12%. We love pushing the envelope!

</comment><comment><USER31> "The Machine That Won the War."

</comment><comment><USER32> Ignoring the already-discussed issue of overfitting, I'm going to discuss something that surprises many, but shouldn't.

 _Using this process, he discovered some surprising things—most notably that a company's team is only about 12 percent predictive of a company's success._

I'm surprised that it's even that high. In the real world (e.g. outside of the VC-funded world) the team is important, because they're going to grow the company from scratch, and that requires getting more things right than wrong over 5+ years. On the other hand, if you're Snapchat, you have several investor-level people working to protect the company from its founder-quality problems and its own worst impulses, and the company will IPO or be bought before its cultural rot reaches a critical point.

The Valley's founder-quality problem creates a lot of awful corporate cultures, and it has dragged the status of engineers way down, and it's generally been bad for the world... but it doesn't kill businesses _because_ the investors are able to keep enough of them on track to produce successes. The influence of VC "rocket fuel" and guidance is why a company can have terrible founders and still succeed.

<comment><USER33> There is a factor at play here, I think, and it's the age. Many investors are simply older and are more experienced individuals. I'm not even sure if their VC status matters here any more than their age.

(In a rather comical example, two youngsters want to put together another chat app with cool new smiley icons, then two VCs step in and ask: how are you going to monetize on smileys?)

Investors should definitely be viewed as part of the team - one, and two, age should also be taken into account. I wonder if Growth Science considers this as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> >> Using this process, he discovered some surprising things—most notably that a company's team is only about 12 percent predictive of a company's success. "You need to find a good team that won't ruin the company, but hiring 'rock stars' isn't that great," he explains. The market the company is entering is far more important than who's running the company.

Makes you wonder why we're paying these people so much money.

</comment><comment><USER33> I wonder if they use Bayesian logic, because they should.

I also suspect that even though the article does not disclose a lot, the major factor at play in their model is the market sizes. I'm pretty sure their online version would heavily rely on the industry/segment you select. In other words it's a business-plan-looking-good approach which in today's rapidly changing world becomes less and less relevant. So I'll remain skeptical about it.

<comment><USER35> > I wonder if they use Bayesian logic, because they should.

Looking at his qualifications, I think it is safe to say he too took statistics 101.</comment></comment>


Scientists See Signs of Lasting Immunity to Covid-19, Even After Mild Infections - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/16/health/coronavirus-immunity-antibodies.html <comment><AUTHOR> I interpret this as some good news. If having Covid-19 provides lasting immunity (years?) then I think that would mean the 5 million or so Americans who have had it and recovered and go back to normal life. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER2> Yes, there is a lot still missing. We don't know if everybody who gets the disease has immunity, and we have no idea how long such immunity would last. Until those things are figured out, giving out "immunity passports," as it were, to resume normal activities, is a mistake.

<comment><USER3> They are finding that prior exposure to other coronavirus infections (common cold, animal viruses) leaves behind t-cells that are activates for covid-19, as long as 17 years. And that a large percentage of the population has these t-cells. [0]

Perhaps that explains why we have appeared to reached herd immunity in places like northern Italy, NYC, etc. The tests for b-cell antibodies don't detect t-cells.

Worst case predictions are just not panning out for this virus. It is like other coronavirus infections. It was expected to decrease in severity and become endemic, perhaps another common cold variant of something that comes up like a bad flu year every once in a while [1]

[0] [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2598-9](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2598-9)

[1] [https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/04/two-scenarios-if-new- cor...](https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/04/two-scenarios-if-new-coronavirus- isnt-contained/)</comment></comment></comment>


New Heroku pricing "Membership" monthly fee for new accounts - <AUTHOR> http://d.pr/i/PX4y

<comment><AUTHOR> I apologize for the Droplr URL. I couldn't find any public information on this anywhere, and it looks like only new accounts can see this page. If you have a Heroku account, here is the URL where the screenshot was taken:

<https://dashboard.heroku.com/membership></comment>