Logic Pro X - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/logic-pro/whats-new/ <comment><USER4> I've been a long time Logic Pro user. Since the updates to Logic slowed to a trickle I've also been using Ableton Live a fair bit. I've always appreciated Logic's clean, well laid out interface (as opposed to say, Cubase) and its general sense of respect for the intelligence of its users.

Unfortunately it seems Apple has gone in the direction of Garageband-ifiyng Logic; pushing it towards amateurs who want to easily piece together their musical ideas from other people's sounds. The interface is dominated by the flashy new features such as the 'Drummer' and 'Drum Kit Designer' which effectively let you combine a limited set of preset drum sounds with a limited set of preset drumming styles. The result is a similar 'toy' feel to that of Garageband.

Professional tools for creativity afford the user the ability to manipulate, combine and repurpose them in as much depth and complexity as user can manage, so that they may seek out new forms, rather than just creating pastiche rehashes of existing ideas. It is apparent from the direction Logic has taken that it is no longer aimed at the professional market, but rather more to the 'Prosumer' category, who aspire to be 'Pro', but who still need a lot of hand- holding.

The most displeasing change I've noticed so far is that the 'bypass' button on each instrument and effect, which neatly fitted in with Logic's formerly clean and understated visual style, has now been replaced with a large glowing on/off 'light'. It is succinctly represents all of the changes across the application which discard neat and elegant design for absolute naive ease of use.

I have a feeling I'll be using Ableton more from now on.

<comment><USER5> Your comment is a bit like free jazz: it's all very impressive on the surface, but it doesn't really _mean_ anything and ultimately one feels like it was just an exercise in ego massage.

Logic has long had a home in the 'pro' world at the songwriting and demo production stage. You'll be hard-pressed to find an engineer in a commercial studio doing tracking or mixing in anything other than Pro Tools (though they certainly exist), but Logic has a healthy following with artists themselves. When viewed through that lens, the changes made in this version are a pretty natural progression for the software: for the most part, they're aimed at the writing and tracking process.

With that in mind, the 'Drummer' feature is less 'Garageband-y' than it might look: it's a considerably more flexible alternative to the giant pool of pre- recorded beats (Apple Loops) that Logic has had for a long time. Such a tool is pretty useful to the songwriter putting a demo together, to the music-for- picture composer, to the ever-growing army of artists who ship off near- completed songs to musician-for-hire studios on the web. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's heard those loops in commercial recordings (often in TV music, which is composed under deadlines to tighter budgets). I'm looking forward to being able to have my temporary backing rhythm follow the sections of a song: far better than trying to find a matching loop or building a beat from scratch when all you want is to lay down a guitar part and focus on developing your idea.

Your argument about the bypass button is just silly. If you have a bunch of plugins open on screen at once, it's obviously better to be able to see, at a glance, which ones are on or off. The old way made that harder. Clearly you have never sat for half an hour tweaking a compressor, certain of the improvement it was making, only to realize the damn thing was in bypass the entire time.

I can see more Pro-oriented things in there than you: a redesigned channel strip that reorients itself according to signal flow. Meters that work. A scriptable MIDI processor. Flex pitch, or whatever they called it. I also see a crisper UI and a clever way to facilitate interaction with complex instruments and plugins (the Smart Control macro thingies).

Of course, I'm just an amateur, so I suppose my opinion doesn't count. I suspect that you are too, but perhaps I'm just more comfortable with it.

\-----

EDIT: I guess my long-winded point is this: why does it matter whether you think the program is becoming 'easier to use' (the horror); all that should matter is whether the new features are meaningful to you, and whether it breaks anything you need at present.

I work in enterprise software by day, and our UX team is constantly looking to consumer software and devices for usability ideas. There is absolutely nothing inherently bad about making something difficult become easy to use. It cuts down on errors, makes people happier, decreases stress, and makes them more productive. All of these things are just as valuable in the studio as they are in the accounts receivable office. There is nothing 'pro' about making life difficult for yourself.

<comment><USER4> As one of the other replies to your comment touched on, I am of the belief that it is very difficult to optimise a complex interface for all skill levels (while maintaining the same level of productivity for users at the high end).

You seem to be taking the term 'amateur' as dismissive or even insulting. I absolutely do not mean any offence by it, simply that it represents a shifting of focus of the application to a different group of users with a different set of needs. However, I see this group as already being served by something such as Garageband (perhaps with just a few additions of functionality).

I lament a truly great tool for high end users becoming watered down and less efficient for its established base, who know what they're doing and just need the interface to get out of the way as much as possible.

Regardless, I was attempting to express my genuine sadness and disappointment in one of my favourite tools becoming a bit less useful to users such as myself, I certainly didn't intend it to come across as an 'ego massage'.

<comment><USER5> I would encourage you to spend a bit of time with the new user manual for LPX. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by what they've done: there's really nothing missing, concealed, or watered down; even the environment is still there. There are just some new ways to access that power.

Arguing about this stuff is all fun, but ultimately we're all musicians (among other things). Snarkiness doesn't help anyone, so I apologize if I caused any offense to you personally. I do stand by what I said about your _comment_ though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Has anyone tried using Github to manage and share a Logic Pro project?

I work on music with someone 300 miles away and I'd love to have the power of git. Right now were both using different DAWs and export audio to dropbox. This release of Logic looks great and my partner is already using Logic so if I switch over and implemented git we could ideally be working off the same files all the time with version tracking, backups and branches.

I could see it potentially being very large though and merging audio files probably wouldn't be possible so maybe this is something that still needs to be built?

<comment><USER7> I've actually been storing my Logic projects on GitHub for a while. It works pretty well for the most part, but I do run into some issues when dealing with the size of the files. Perhaps Logic X shrinks them down in size a bit in comparison to Logic 9, but I doubt it.

Here's the repo if you are interested: [https://github.com/jpsullivan/LogicProjects](https://github.com/jpsullivan/LogicProjects)

One day I'd really like to make an open source album that people could fork to remix entirely new sounds. It'd also be nice to get some people talking about best practices when mixing. Perhaps a Logic Bootstrap if you will.

<comment><USER6> I was also thinking about how cool open source albums would be! Your 'band' could now be 100 different people all spread out around the world. Then perhaps instead of an album being 'done' we'll just release v1.0.

<comment><USER8> And then if you had an idea on how to improve the music, it would just be a nice fork-edit-pull request away from improving the album. Truly collaborative music could be really cool.

<comment><USER9> > _And then if you had an idea on how to improve the music, it would just be a > nice fork-edit-pull request away from improving the album. Truly > collaborative music could be really cool._

Only artists don't usually like it when somebody else "improves" their music -- that's a recipy for havoc. They have what is called a "vision" for their piece, so that any improvement would have to play within that vision.

Not to mention that what's an "improvement" to one, is an abomination for another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For a company that just threw out skeuomorphism as a design principle, the amount of drumkit, pedal, amp and mixing deck images this thing has is surprising.

The pitch correction stuff is cool - I dreamed of that sort of stuff a while ago, but never made any attempt to try to work out how it'd work. I wonder how it works with voices and the like, as opposed to string instruments.

<comment><USER11> If you want flat use Ableton Live. They've been flat since before flat was cool, and it's a much better DAW IMO.

<comment><USER12> Ableton's not just about flat/cool/design. It's about providing proper UI controls. Why waste half your screen with gigantic knobs that make input a pain? Instead, a label and a value is all you need. Why have a long selector switch if a dropdown suffices? If you want hardware, then buy a hardware controller with little displays so you can get all hands-on.

When setting up really complex sounds and devices, I can't imagine any other approach. How do you represent a device that contains, say, 10 sub-devices? Ableton makes it super clear to setup and inspect.

Unfortunately, it seems like few other companies agree with this approach and spend lots of effort drawing backgrounds and rendering knobs and switches.

I think it's a hold over from the days when to experiment with sounds, you actually did have to go plugging various cables in and playing with knobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The price tag really reflects that the music industry is the poorest of all creative industries (aka video, photo, 3D and web). When i think about all the genius algorithms and technologies that products like Ableton or logic Pro ship it really saddens me.

<comment><USER14> As with many of Apple's recent price drops (OSX, iWork, etc. etc.) I think it's a highly strategic and intentional move, not reflective of the greater market, but showing that Apple is enabling the larger success of their brand by enabling more people to purchase and use these pro apps at a lower price point. Plus, it will sell Macs, both laptops and Mac Pros. Smart.

<comment><USER15> This strategy benefits Apple, but screws over independent software developers/vendors.

Look at the top 10 apps in the Mac App Store. That list is always dominated by Apple's applications like Logic and iWork because of this pricing strategy. Nobody else can afford to sell a DAW for $200 and make money. IMHO it's some kind of anti-competitiveness but I don't know if there's a term for it. Maybe it's just a fact of life when Apple owns and controls the entire software/hardware ecosystem.

<comment><USER16> That's not totally true. I've heard from several professional musicians who use Reaper ( [http://www.reaper.fm/](http://www.reaper.fm/) ) and it sells for $225.

<comment><USER17> Reaper also has the excellent discounted license for $60 which covers a lot of musicians who would otherwise be forced by the singular license of Reason / Logic Pro / Ableton Live.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Exciting addition, almost missed it:

 _Scripter_

 _Extensible plug-in that can process or generate MIDI data using standard JavaScript._

<comment><USER19> I know this is a niche feature but I think it's an important differentiator (and something that I love After Effects for).

I'm probably the only person who's excited to code up my own Arpeggiators and Rhythm pattern generators...

<comment><USER20> I don't even know what an Arpeggiator is, sounds cool though.

<comment><USER21> If you play a chord into an arpeggiator, it... well, it arpeggiates it. In other words, it plays each note of the chord individually in a particular rhythm (e.g. 16th notes) in a particular pattern (e.g. up/down, up, random). Very, very common in electronic music.

<comment><USER20> Cool I had no idea, I'm about as musical as... umm, yeah i've got no analogue.

Does it get scaled in specific patterns or is random ok?

<comment><USER22> Patterns, random, fast, short, whatever. Most packaged arpeggiators have all sorts of knobs to twist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> One of the drummer demos is very reminiscent of "A Sorta Fairytale" by Tori Amos:

[http://cl.ly/163g410m402w](http://cl.ly/163g410m402w)

Just a tad faster and the kick is more busy, but very much the same feel.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think this is going to push me fully over the edge to record my non-EDM music on the Mac. I had been teetering between FL Studio & Sonar on Windows and various OSX-based DAWs for this purpose and am ready to settle on something permanent. Logic adoption has been growing substantially and I feel 100% safe jumping head-first into the Logic ecosystem.

In general, I've been a Mac user for everything but production for over a decade and am so sick of keeping a Windows machine running for sake of production. I don't think I could switch over for EDM/hip-hop though, as my workflow is so engrained in FL Studio and I use so many advanced controls and features.

<comment><USER25> Curious, have you ever considered Reaper? I'm considering making the jump over the course of the next year or so (switching DAWs is such a pain).

<comment><USER24> I've never heard of Reaper -- I'll have to look into it!

Switching is a serious pain, especially when music is a free-time hobby and you want to spend that time actually creating and not learning new tools and workflows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can any musicians in the know about music software comment on how this compares to say, Ableton Live?

<comment><USER27> I've used a lot of DAWs. Namely Logic, Sonar, Nuendo, Protools, Reason, Ableton, FLStudio and Reaper. And my conclusion is that Reaper is by far the best. Your opinion may be different, but give it a try. It has a free trial period and the full version is very cost effective. Add in the SWS extensions and the scripting support (I'm using python) and it becomes very powerful. Put the House of White Tie skin on it, add in some reamote slaves and combine with the fact that it is rock solid and never crashes... and you have, IMHO, what is currently the worlds best DAW.

<comment><USER26> Could you elaborate a bit on what you can do with scripting in Reaper? That sounds very interesting.

<comment><USER27> You can use it for all kinds of things. I use it for automating repetitive UI tasks. Say, taking a high-hat track, finding a high-hat transient, splitting all the drum tracks on that point, grouping those drums takes into a group for editing and moving onto the next transient. That's a bit derived, but anywhere where you find yourself manually repeating UI actions over and over again, you can save yourself hours by scripting it. You can save your scripts as actions and then even bind them to a key.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> No 32-bit plugins is an interesting choice. Logic 9 can be launched in 64-bit mode with a 32-bit bridge that opens/closes based on whether or not you have any 32-bit VST/AU plugins trying to run. I've got a couple of Sonnox plugins that aren't available in 64-bit which is going to keep me off Logic X until they [Sonnox] get their act together.

Edit: Clarifying a poor use of a pronoun.

<comment><USER29> Really, at this point the developer of those plugins is to blame.

Ableton recently decided not to work on bridging 32 Bit plugins too and I really prefer them and Apple to spend their resources on other issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Very happy about this, although probably means I'm going to redo all the tracks I've been making in the last few months while getting to grips with Logic Pro 9...

</comment><comment><USER31> The $199.99 price tag is a surprise. Could anyone speculate as to why they'd be pitching it this low, given the price of competitors products?

<comment><USER32> Probably as a hedge against people who already own Logic 9 getting annoyed that there's no upgrade price...

<comment><USER22> I'm sort of pissed, as I bought Logic (a personal copy, used to use ones at school when I attended) about six months ago. Spending another $200 now, despite really liking the new features, sucks--I'm an amateur, that double-dip hurts my hobby funds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> For me, the most interesting part is the iPad remote. Looks like Apple is getting into distributed interfaces.

</comment><comment><USER34> As mentioned in another comment ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6052122](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6052122)) I've been considering getting a DAW to hobby shop around with. I've lightly dabbled with several over the years, and am very comfortable on my actual instrument, but am a bit overwhelmed when I look at some of these for doing anything other than just recording and basic mixing/editing (would be nice to build some background/accompanying tracks from some of the synths etc). I think I just need to pick one and dive in to figure out how it all works - <USER2> there any resources anyone here can recommend for doing just that? Are the provided tutorials from the DAW vendors sufficient?

<comment><USER35> If you're looking to get into it, but reluctant to spend $200 off the bat, I'd recommend taking a look at REAPER (www.reaper.fm) - it's significantly cheaper ($60) and the only area it's really lacking compared to Logic and the like is the bundled samples/synths.

<comment><USER36> I was about to say that, Reaper is great, it's only $60 and the guys that make it seem great too ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> For the price i would say this is a pretty ok deal. the other Digital Audio workstations(DAWs) offer a lot of the same features. I was a protools engineer for a while and some of the things they are touting are far from new and protools usually lagged behind sonar and cubase in raw feature set. I have been punting on upgrading from protools 7.4(5+ years) and m-audio delta 1010lt and 44 for a very long time (10 years). What I want to see is hardware that takes advantage of the huge throughput of thunderbolt or usb3, that allows for higher quality audio and many ins and outs. as far as software Reaper - <USER3> havent used it in a year or so - for the price is the best DAW on the market no question.

</comment><comment><USER38> Good thing I bought Logic 9 four weeks ago...

<comment><USER39> So what's the upgrade policy? I suppose since the Mac App Store doesn't support paid upgrades, everybody gets the new version for free?

<comment><USER40> Nope. Everybody has to pay $200.

<comment><USER39> Interesting.

As far as I remember, for the past 3 years, every app put into those stores by Apple themselves received unlimited upgrades.

Everybody wanted to do paid upgrade, pressuring Apple into adding some paid upgrade feature into the store. Apple always declined, saying "do as we do, support unlimited upgrades, you'll earn enough because the market is growing".

Some devs did paid upgrades by creating a new app with a new name, creating some issues along the way (people that just bought the old version a day ago have no upgrade path etc.) Not idea.

People guessed that Apple would add some "paid upgrade" feature once they needed it themselves.

Now Apple decided for the first time to create a paid upgrade, and apparently they - just created a new app...

Apple could have done better here.

<comment><USER40> I believe that this is a new item though. For example, usually you can see the reviews for the previous versions in the app store but there are no reviews for Logic X.

<comment><USER39> Absolutely, as I said, "new app" (= new item).

AppShopper also automatically started tracking them as 2 items:

\- [http://appshopper.com/mac/music/logic- pro](http://appshopper.com/mac/music/logic-pro)

\- [http://appshopper.com/mac/music/logic- pro-x](http://appshopper.com/mac/music/logic-pro-x)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Check out Blend.io. Its a betaworks-studio product for open-source, cross-geo music collaboration. It currently supports Ableton Live and Maschine but support for other DAWs (including Logic) is coming soon.

<comment><USER41> Btw, Blend is still in private beta but you can use the invite code: EARLYACCESS to sign up now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> "Retro Synth. Far-out sounds. Not so far away."

hopefully this means they got rid of the ridiculously over-complicated extraterrestrial-looking synth interfaces in favor of something that actually makes sense.

<comment><USER40> Yeah. Considering how much Apple prides itself on good UI design, I have no clue how ES2 happened.

<comment><USER43> It's by Emagic, not Apple. It used to be available as a separate product: [http://www.zzounds.com/item--EMAESC](http://www.zzounds.com/item--EMAESC)

<comment><USER40> It's a part of an Apple product. Apple does not make their laptops either yet you consider elements of the computer design to be from Apple.

<comment><USER43> I was referring to the fact that ES2 was designed before Apple acquired Emagic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Do the pitch bend and modulation wheel controls (via MIDI) actually do anything with most of the synth sounds?

I've only just started tinkering with the "little brother" Garage Band program, but I was disappointed how bad support was for the pitch bend wheel from my keyboard into the supplied patches. (using pitch bend would cause secondary "note on" events which never got a "note off")

<comment><USER28> Yes, they almost always control something important. In VST/AU instruments they're often assigned to crossfade volume so that you get a natural tone colour change across the dynamic range.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> This took forever... I'm impressed by the many updates but think I might just stick to Pro Tools. Switching DAWs is a bit like switching programming languages, in a sense, huge time cost.

The built-in iPad remote control is cool though. Neyrinck makes a good one for Pro Tools, however: [http://www.neyrinck.com/v-control- pro](http://www.neyrinck.com/v-control-pro)

</comment><comment><USER46> 'Modern' interface a little extra Melodyne-like functionality with flex pitch, everything else just seems like it was already there but is now easier to access (ie arpeggiator without having to use the environment window)... Am I missing anything major?

<comment><USER28> The drum stuff seems new, but at first glance looks quite gimmicky. As a professional composer, the last thing I want to see is a picture of a drumkit and various performers in the middle of my DAW interface.

<comment><USER46> Yeah, that's what I mean - we already have the ability to easily create drum kits in Ultrabeat, that just seems like a simple interface for new users. Not sure if it's worth upgrading, personally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> For all the talk about how Apple hates skeuomorphism, when I got to this part I started wondering if I was looking at an April Fools' joke: [http://imagebin.org/264732](http://imagebin.org/264732)

<comment><USER14> It would be very poignant of you to point that out if the interface was not trying to _emulate famous and well-known real-world objects._

Music people eat that up. It's entirely the right choice, and the rest of the interface is clean. There are no problems here, just good design overall it seems.

<comment><USER48> > There are no problems here

Speaking as a longtime user of both physical audio gear and audio software (not to mention one of the "music people"), I think there is a big problem: knobs.

Knobs don't translate well to the screen. It's hard to do a twisting motion with the mouse or a finger on a touch screen. So a lot of programs just make them a kind of compact slider/fader -- you move the mouse up and down, and the knob turns. This is an interaction that can have some problematic interactions with scrolling and/or screen real-estate availability even after you've figured out how this works. And it's not exactly intuitive.

And there's often just better ways to do things. For example, I'd be happy if I never saw another EQ knob again in software -- being able to visualize/tweak a spectrum envelope is a clear winner over having to twiddle knobs. Or heck, I'd rather have MAX or pd's box-value compact faders that I can enter values into (along with sliding the mouse up and down) than knobs.

I know the familiar is often fun and _feels_ accessible, I even know there are sometimes where the compact-fader thing is helpful. I just think knobs are way over used in software and it is a problem.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I'm sure there actually _are_ lots of UI problems, and you could generally design a UI that is better for controlling the effects and levels than the physical analogy used here.

But it's hard to beat a UI that not only feels accessible, but is accessible if you've used the (often famous) hardware in real life, and not only that, teaches you how to use it so that if you ever encounter that specific pedal or this effects unit in reality, you have some clue of how it works. Maybe it's not a concern and I'm making this shit up, but it is at least a cool advantage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This looks great. The pitch correction tools are gonna make it a lot easier for that pop singers to sound great even if they aren't. I also REALLY like the iPad remote feature.

</comment><comment><USER50> Aside from all of issues (good and bad) surrounding design, features, pricing, etc, I'm just glad to see that Apple is still paying attention to the pro users.

</comment><comment><USER51> Holy crap... my upgrade from Live 8 to Live 9 costs 250 euro. And this is 200 bucks. I wish I was not so deeply in love with Ableton so I could move to Logic.

</comment><comment><USER52> I hope this doesn't result in another Final Cut Pro X, in that case, everyone back to Pro Tools or whatever alternatives are available.

</comment><comment><USER53> The most important feature for me is Retina support, no other DAW has been updated for Retina displays yet.

</comment><comment><USER54> Is this fully cocoafied like FCPX?

</comment><comment><USER55> they should just call it Garage Band Pro now. this used to be pro software but they've really killed off their professional users.

<comment><USER56> I have never used any version of Logic, but the reviews I have read are all saying that none of the power features have been removed. The Macworld review is titled "Logic Pro X loses none of its power, gains great new features" [0]. The Loop even explicitly says "Rumors have circulated for a long time that Logic Pro was going to be discontinued or that it was going to be reincarnated as some sort of 'GarageBand Pro.' ... this is far from a GarageBand knockoff. This is the same professional digital audio workstation software that we've used for years, only better" [1]. And again, macProVideo says "many people feared Logic would be 'Dumbed-down' into a 'LogicBand / GarageBand Pro,' ... I'm pleased to report, it's the same Logic you know and love, but with a fantastic facelift and some brilliant new features." [2]

[0] [http://www.macworld.com/article/2044283/logic-pro-x-loses- no...](http://www.macworld.com/article/2044283/logic-pro-x-loses-none-of-its- power-gains-great-new-features.html)

[1] [http://www.loopinsight.com/2013/07/16/review-logic- pro-x/](http://www.loopinsight.com/2013/07/16/review-logic-pro-x/)

[2] [http://www.macprovideo.com/hub/review-2/logic-pro-x- review-t...](http://www.macprovideo.com/hub/review-2/logic-pro-x-review- top-5-new-features?utm_source=hubrss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=logic-pro-x- review-top-5-new-features)

<comment><USER55> I've used logic extensively since 1991 on the Atari. I spoke with two other professional users last night and they agreed. Reviews not withstanding, those of us who were power users feel cheated. There were strong rumors that this version was never even going to come out and that the dev team had been reduced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Finally! :)</comment>


Skip Lists Done Right - <AUTHOR> http://ticki.github.io/blog/skip-lists-done-right/ <comment><USER3> Java has a lock-free concurrent skip list in the ConcurrentSkipListMap class [1]. Herlihy et al. claim that existing skip list algorithms (including the Java implementation) are complicated, and instead provide a supposedly faster implementation [2].

The two techniques they use are:

\- Optimistic traversal of lists without grabbing a lock: Only when it arrives at the item being seeked, it grabs the lock and validates that the list is unchanged.

\- Lazy deletion: marking a node as deleted and removing it from the list later.

[1] [https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/concurre...](https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/ConcurrentSkipListMap.html)

[2] [http://people.csail.mit.edu/shanir/publications/LazySkipList...](http://people.csail.mit.edu/shanir/publications/LazySkipList.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> Redis uses a skip list (doubly linked) implementation for sorted sets, here are antirez's (BDFL) comments as to why from 7 years ago:

There are a few reasons:

1) They are not very memory intensive. It's up to you basically. Changing parameters about the probability of a node to have a given number of levels will make then less memory intensive than btrees.

2) A sorted set is often target of many ZRANGE or ZREVRANGE operations, that is, traversing the skip list as a linked list. With this operation the cache locality of skip lists is at least as good as with other kind of balanced trees.

3) They are simpler to implement, debug, and so forth. For instance thanks to the skip list simplicity I received a patch (already in Redis master) with augmented skip lists implementing ZRANK in O(log(N)). It required little changes to the code.

<comment><USER5> Data structures in Redis have evolved a bit in the last 7 years. One of the main workhorses is indeed something called a "ziplist". The implementation (especially the format description at the top) is worth a read: [https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/90a6f7fc98df849a9890ab...](https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/90a6f7fc98df849a9890ab6e0da4485457bf60cd/src/ziplist.c)

For those who are familiar with pre-2.6 Redis code, there used to be something called zipmap, but it was deprecated in favor of ziplist.

<comment><USER6> I have not looked at Redis code in eons, but I think it's not exactly true - all the structures are there, it's just that redis will favor ziplist for the very small ones.

A ziplist is a list of compact varying length integers (or strings) where only the bits that make a difference are stored (I contributed the 24-bit version to Redis[1]). The argument is that a sequential search over a small data structure always wins over more complex things like hash tables, skiplists, etc.

As you get more data, Redis will switch to using skiplists or whatever - <USER2> is a config setting for that (-max-ziplist-entries and -max-ziplist-value).

[1] [https://github.com/antirez/redis/commit/5a86ab47995586f0a0ef...](https://github.com/antirez/redis/commit/5a86ab47995586f0a0ef18472eafd6e9131644c1#diff-b109b27001207a835769c556a54ff1b3)

<comment><USER7> Elaborating on gtrubetskoy comment, ziplists are doubly linked lists (of integers and strings) encoded into an array of bytes that stores the size of both the next and previous element so you can quickly find the location of the next/previous element. This makes ziplists space efficient and have great cache efficient, but expensive to insert into since you need to reallocate the array and shift a potentially large number of elements over every time you inset/delete. These properties make ziplists useful when they are small, but not so as they get larger, so Redis will switch to different implementations once the ziplists reach a certain size.

Interestingly, Redis lists are implemented as a double linked list of ziplists, where the size of each ziplists is bounded. This gives you good caching as the quicklist is being traversed, while limiting the cost of an insertion. Redis will also compress ziplists not near the edge in order to save space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like I already do pretty much all those things in twoskip:

[https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/03/cyrus-databases- twoskip...](https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/03/cyrus-databases-twoskip-and- beyond/)

(except for the level choice. Which is a bit meh to me, because a write will probably trigger 3 fsyncs, so the cost of level choice is very low)

That said, my next DB won't have any skiplists in it I don't think, or at most an in-memory one, but not on disk.

<comment><USER9> >That said, my next DB won't have any skiplists in it I don't think, or at most an in-memory one, but not on disk.

What will you use instead (and why)?

<comment><USER10> B-trees, LSM trees, or any data structure that's actually designed to be cache friendly.

I think his claim that his optimizations can beat a b-tree is bullshit otherwise he would've shown benchmarks.

<comment><USER8> I haven't written it yet. I suspect I can't beat b-tree in entirely random read workloads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While I really do like this article and the really interesting techniques it showed me, I'm bothered by the fact that they constantly mention performance but there's not a single benchmark on that page. It's not that I don't believe that these are huge theoretical gains, it's just that I'd like to see how these perform in practice compared to other approaches.

</comment><comment><USER12> Skip lists are a hidden gem! I first learned about them from a GitHub developer at OSCon a few years ago, and at time they seemed like black magic.

It's a shame that universities (or at least mine) don't teach more interesting algorithms like this... it would make the algorithms/data structures coursework so much more interesting.

<comment><USER13> Georgia Tech definitely teaches it in the intro data structures and algorithms course. I don't remember if we had to implement it, but it definitely came up in lecture.

<comment><USER14> We had to implement them when I took it with Dr. Waters at least (Summer 2015). CS 1332 is a pretty good intro course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Most interesting aspect of the article was the last section and first comment, linking to SkipNet: [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/alecw/usits-20...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/alecw/usits-2003.pdf)

Ideas like SkipNet are what differentiates a hack like me from genuinely smart people who can look at the definition of in-memory data structure and spot properties useful to an Internet-sized system

</comment><comment><USER16> Skip lists are probably the easiest way of getting O(log(n)) lookups on ordered lists.

Recently I got rid of huge bottleneck on an oldish piece of software by moving from a vanilla linked list to a skip list. And I did do many things suggested in the article (e.g. having a vector of fixed length for the pointers, and thus a fixed tallness).

Funnily enough, for my case, I managed to do without a RNG just fine. I just have an element that is of tallness 'k' every 2^(k*3) insertions (e.g. every 8th insertion is 1 level tall; every 64th insertion is 2 levels tall; and so on). For my particular pattern of insertions, this proved to be more than enough, and and simplified things a little bit.

<comment><USER17> > Skip lists are probably the easiest way of getting O(log(n)) lookups on > ordered lists.

I wouldn't say that. The algorithms for AVL/red-black/splay trees are not especially complex, and they contain much less subtlety than skip lists. If you just look them up on wikipedia and see the list of operations, it's not particularly hard to implement them. Skip lists, on the other hand, are very easy to get wrong (this is the premise of the linked article, after all).

Using a skip list is frequently the better choice for performance and memory reasons (especially if you're iterating through the list), but they are not necessarily simpler data structures.

<comment><USER16> I did a brief survey before deciding to go with skip lists, and found them to be easier to grasp and reason about. (e.g. there is no need to balance trees; a skip list is very similar to a linked list, and linked lists are very simple).

I remember somebody saying that "in a sane world skip lists would always have been discovered before red-black trees".

This historical accident (skip lists were only discovered 1989; while rb-trees date back to the 1970s) is probably the reason why skip list use is not more widespread, and seen as somewhat exotic at times.

(AVL and Splay-trees also predate skip lists.)

<comment><USER18> Skip lists are just B+ trees in disguise.

Look at the basic diagram here.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%2B_tree](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%2B_tree)

See how there is an "express lane" containing just (3 5), and the lower layer contains the entire (1 2 3 4 5 6 7) list?

The main difference is that it's a combination of arrays and links rather than parallel lists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> MemSQL (distributed relational database with in-memory tables) uses skip lists: [http://blog.memsql.com/the-story-behind-memsqls-skiplist- ind...](http://blog.memsql.com/the-story-behind-memsqls-skiplist-indexes/)

</comment><comment><USER20> [Shameless plug] I've written a skip list implementation you can play with from the browser:

[http://leandro.me/MyDataStructures/#/data-structures/skip- li...](http://leandro.me/MyDataStructures/#/data-structures/skip-list)

Tip: click "Insert a random item" a bunch of times to populate the (initially empty) skip list.

</comment><comment><USER21> The pseudocode + example given for the initial implementation of 'insert' doesn't seem right, no 'below' connection is made between the two '13' nodes.

The way to fix this would be to let 'insert' return the node inserted at the given level. There already are a few returns in the 'insert' pseudocode right now, but it doesn't seem like anything is being returned right now.

Something like this:

        -- Recursive skip list insertion function.
        define insert(elem, root, height, level):
            if right of root < elem:
                return insert(elem, right of root, height, level)
            else:
                if level = 0:
                    new ← makenode elem
                    old ← right of root
                    right of root ← new
                    right of elem ← old
                    return new
                else:
                    if level ≤ height:
                        new ← makenode elem
                        old ← right of root
                        right of root ← new
                        right of elem ← old
                        below new ← insert(elem, below root, height, level - 1)
                        return new
                    else:
                        return insert(elem, below root, height, level - 1)

Or more simply:

        define insert(elem, root, height, level):
            if right of root < elem:
                return insert(elem, right of root, height, level)
            elif level > height:
                return insert(elem, below root, height, level - 1)
            else:
                new ← makenode elem
                old ← right of root
                right of root ← new
                right of elem ← old
                if level > 0:
                    below new ← insert(elem, below root, height, level - 1)
                return new

</comment><comment><USER22> Maybe off-topic, but thanks for putting what tools you used to do your illustrations with, always happy to see what people are using for that.

<comment><USER23> Dia and TiKZ, they make the diagrams I produce seem a bit..rough..

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The author states in the "Extra Remarks" section:

"Performance is mostly about the same, but skip lists are more DoS resistant if you make sure that all links are F2F."

Can someone tell me what F2F stands for? I am not familiar with this acronym.

<comment><USER25> My guess is friend-to-friend, i.e. a private peer-to-peer network.

<comment><USER24> I see - P2P, so something like Chord. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've read this page before, and again today, and I still don't understand how these unrolled lists are supposed to work in practice.

Based on the author's example at [https://i.imgur.com/FYpPQPh.png](https://i.imgur.com/FYpPQPh.png), how do you take an unrolled skiplist that has a bottom row like this:

        [1,2,3] -> [4,5,_] -> [7,8,9]

And insert 2.5? An inevitable tree restructuring would have to occur, which vastly complicates the insertion logic.

<comment><USER27> That first chunk will get split, 3 will get copied to new chunk, and list is restructured. I think the selling point here is you paid this price but get dividends on reduced cache misses in the future.

<comment><USER26> Interesting. Whether that approach is efficient depends entirely on the workload. That complicates the analysis. (And one of the major benefits of skiplists is that the analysis is supposed to be simple.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Aren't skip lists more-or-less essential for indexed search engines? I wouldn't say they're uncommon considering how much indexed search surrounds us.

e.g., [http://lucene.apache.org/core/6_3_0/core/org/apache/lucene/c...](http://lucene.apache.org/core/6_3_0/core/org/apache/lucene/codecs/MultiLevelSkipListReader.html)

</comment><comment><USER29> I just came across skip lists as part of a sliding-window aggregator in Apache Samza's metrics system[0]. So cool! Being able to work with a range of values in somewhere between O(1)and O(log n) time, while still providing ordered key/value mappings, is great. Dug through java.util.concurrent looking for more structures, but this seems to be the most interesting of the bunch.

[0] [https://github.com/apache/samza/blob/master/samza- api/src/ma...](https://github.com/apache/samza/blob/master/samza- api/src/main/java/org/apache/samza/metrics/SlidingTimeWindowReservoir.java)

</comment><comment><USER30> Archived: [https://archive.fo/H7F9e](https://archive.fo/H7F9e)

The site doesn't work without scripts and trips up links2, so you can use the archive link instead (it works without scripts).

</comment><comment><USER31> Something to note: you state that BST's have logarithmic time in order successor, but many implementations use threaded binary trees which provide an amortized constant successor operation. Great article though.

</comment><comment><USER24> So my takeaway is that two main use cases for this DS are:

1: as an alternative to a distributed hash tables

2: as an alternative to a self-balancing tree such AVL tree etc.

Are there any other common uses cases for skip lists?

<comment><USER32> Some memory allocators use them for tracking free blocks because insertions/removals are cheap and they're good at best-fit style searches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > I can't seem to find my favorite trick: deterministic (ie. without rng) > skipping by linking on traversal instead of insert/delete.

Says one comment. Can anyone explain that?

<comment><USER34> [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=139478](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=139478)

[http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/research/CS252/252Paper.pdf](http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/research/CS252/252Paper.pdf)

I have an old implementation (in C) of paged, deterministic skip lists here:

[https://github.com/jabr/olio/blob/master/skiplist.c](https://github.com/jabr/olio/blob/master/skiplist.c)

[https://github.com/jabr/olio/blob/master/skiplist.h](https://github.com/jabr/olio/blob/master/skiplist.h)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Might anyone familiar with both data structures be able to briefly explain how this actually differs from a B-tree?

<comment><USER36> There are a lot of differences; here's a couple:

A skip list node contains one key and has a random fanout; a B-tree node contains 1-N keys and has fanout equal to <number of keys> \- 1.

A B-tree is guaranteed amortized log(N) lookup/insert/delete time, a skip-list has a high probability of a log(N) lookup/insert/delete time, but does not guarantee it.

The advantage of skip lists over b-trees is that they can have a smaller constant-factor, and are more cache friendly under many workloads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5iu8bd/an_anal...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5iu8bd/an_analysis_of_skip_lists/)

</comment><comment><USER38> Another nice thing about skip lists is that you can traverse them _backwards_ without adding backpointers with a recursive algorithm and an O[logn] size stack.

</comment><comment><USER39> What framework are you using to publish the blog?

<comment><USER40> Looks like Hugo[1] running the Bleak[2] theme.

      [1] http://gohugo.io/
      [2] https://github.com/zenithar/hugo-theme-bleak

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Excellent article, I really love algorithm and datastructure. if anyone else is interested like me, I recommend this book [https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-3rd-MIT- Press...](https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-3rd-MIT- Press/dp/0262033844)

<comment><USER42> It is also very handy if you need to flatten a small (< 2 kg) household pet.

<comment><USER43> I always say college was very practical learning as at different points in time I was able to kill a mouse with both algorithms (this very book) and computer architecture.

<comment><USER44> It took you 2 books to kill 2 mice, but I'm sure with more observations it would have been obvious that your approach was actually O(logN).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Skip Lists. Seem handy for increasing access times on ordered lists...

Any Lispers care to comment?

<comment><USER46> what's your method for quickly searching an ordered list? Binary search falls apart since you don't have free random access.

<comment><USER45> Skip lists allow for that, sort of.

In Lisp, most people would just, you know, not use a list for that. You _can_ do that, you know...

The only reason I asked about lispers is that lispers really like lisps, and I was curious if any of them had implemented skip lists for some reason, and if so, how.

<comment><USER46> > ... just, you know ... you know ...

Yes, I know. Do you? You made the suggestion that skip lists are inferior to ordered lists, not me. (good for "increasing access times on ordered lists") I'm still perplexed as to your rationale for that statement.

<comment><USER45> No, I didn't, AFAIK. I'm baffled as to where you drew that from...

<comment><USER47> Maybe because you wrote "increasing access times", which could be read as "skip lists are slower." Not what you meant, probably.

<comment><USER46> This was my understanding of that comment. How else could that be read? I am not able to think of another interpretation of that statement or a context when increased access times would be desired.

<comment><USER45> The intended interpretation is that skip lists make access to specific items in ordered lists _faster_.

I am actually a native speaker, so I have no excuse here. I just suck at writing, I guess...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Continuously updating info in an email sent/received hours ago (Elixir/Phoenix) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@DerKobe/provide-up-to-date-information-in-an-email-sent-hours-ago-with-elixir-phoenix-1b160840c879 <comment><USER2> How many of your potential targets do as I have always done and disable all active/remote content in emails for safety and privacy?

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly. We simply do not know. (very early stage startup working towards product-market-fit here)

<comment><USER2> Fair enough!

From your pov hopefully much lower than I think it should be. B^>

Rgds

Damon</comment></comment></comment>


Free PyCharm IDE for Students - <AUTHOR> https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm-educational/

<comment><USER2> Eclipse is free and works just as well.</comment>


Show HN: Chrome extension to navigate dependencies in Ruby projects on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/NARKOZ/crank-for-rubygems

<comment><AUTHOR> A chrome extension for easy navigating to gem pages in Github.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/aeekfpaigbeblmpeli...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/aeekfpaigbeblmpeliiomcamnipcglii)

Wherever you browse 'Gemfile' or '.gemspec' files on Github, clicking on gem name will take you to it's Github repository page.

Uses sla.herokuapp.com under-hood.</comment>


Show HN: Relief – Physical Therapy Programs to Fix Back Pain and Posture - <AUTHOR> http://userelief.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

I've struggled with back / neck / wrist pain (like many programmers do) for the past few years, spending countless dollars on physical therapy, chiropractors, and gimmicky products.

This inspired me to collaborate with a few physical therapists and fitness trainers. We built Relief to provide evidence-based treatment programs delivered through high-quality guided videos. Examples include the 7-day low back pain program, McKenzie Method, 7-day posture program, forward head + anterior pelvic tilt corrective routines, yoga for back pain, and more. Think Calm / Headspace for musculoskeletal problems.

I'd love to get some feedback and hear about your experiences with musculoskeletal pain! We've made a bunch of the content free, and the rest can be accessed through a no-risk free trial.

<comment><USER2> I have really have any back pain, but I have horrible slouching posture, standing and sitting. Will this help standing up straight become more natural?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Been using this for 1.5 weeks and I can say the content is high-quality and I'm already experiencing reduced pain in my sciatic nerve (started a few months ago, didn't have time nor money to see PT). Would recommend you give this a shot.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great to hear that it's been helping! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > On average, Relief's physical therapy, yoga, and mindfulness sessions help > users reduce pain by 60% in the first month. It's more effective than > surgery or injections.

Do you publish the data that led to these conclusions? Have the statements on this page been evaluated by the FDA?

</comment><comment><USER5> I have not subscribed, but awesome site, looks high quality and useful.

<comment><USER5> If you don't mind, I was wondering what payment system to you use for the subscription stuff? Is it something like Zuora? Or did you have to build it from scratch?

<comment><AUTHOR> I looked into Zuora (really expensive) as well as some other systems like Chargebee, Recurly, etc. I ended up building it with Stripe Billing, since it was actually quite straightforward and offered a lot of flexibility with features. I think a benefit of using something like Chargebee though is that you can also take Paypal</comment></comment></comment>


Regaining control of your attention - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/how-i-got-my-attention-back-c7fc9297d347#.3j04ooh2p <comment><USER2> _Mario is finite, bounded. The edges are clear. You pay once, and there's no other way for Nintendo to extract money from you. No single player is a mark. There are no whales. In Mario you can not only see the end but get there._

My favorite games to play on my phone are those made by Square Enix. Final fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Dragon Quest, lots of classic remakes.

They range from $6.99 to $20.99, which made people balk when Square Enix first starting publishing on mobile, but you pay once, and you get a full game to play, no bullshit.

Once again, cheap is better than free. Pay a few dollars and never get bothered again by ads or pay-to-play, but most importantly, you don't feel like you're being manipulated by a never-ending game that starts to feel much more like work than play.

<comment><USER3> > Once again, cheap is better than free. Pay a few dollars and never get > bothered again by ads or pay-to-play, but most importantly, you don't feel > like you're being manipulated by a never-ending game that starts to feel > much more like work than play.

But old school/classical ff games always have that grinding and levelling part where it also feels more like work than play. Games from before were also designed to be addictive (whether it was intentional or not).

<comment><USER2> Sure, there's points where you grind experience, but it's towards the goal of finishing the game. Grinding experience and leveling up aren't the game itself.

<comment><USER4> That is true, kind of, but grinding efficiently was probably the very first time I learned the lesson "work smart, not hard". There is a microcosm of reality in grinding which I think is why some of those games ultimately felt more rewarding than ones that omit it. I don't want the time I spent playing Diablo II back, it was worth it. I can't say the same for some other titles I've played.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _"We believe that we live in the 'age of information '. That there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense this is the case, in many important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An Unenlightenment. An age of missing information."_ \-- Bill McKibben, _The Age of Missing Information_ , 1992

McKibben's book, just like Neil Postman's _Amusing Ourselves to Death_ , is even more relevant to the internet age than the television age.

There is something insidious about "information" that's doled out like slot tokens at a casino. Something dangerous about "facts" that are carefully designed to fit with what we _want_ to believe. Something manipulative about "teaching" that is designed to fit through the gaps in our mental defenses for the benefit of the "teacher".

This week I've met otherwise "normal" people who are flat-earthers, anti- vaccers, and who believe Hillary is a Satanist and Trump is the "Bringer of Light".

But ultimately who cares if your hairdresser is an anti-vaccer, or your tennis partner is a flat-earther? Does it really matter if that cute girl at the check-out is an anti-Semite? Does it harm anyone if the guy building your deck believes in zero-point energy?

So long as people fulfill their economic roles quietly and efficiently, does it really matter what's in their hearts and minds? It's all relative isn't it?

<comment><USER6> > Does it really matter if that cute girl at the check-out is an anti-Semite?

This matters rather a lot if you're Jewish. You're arguing that "it doesn't matter if you don't look up", _Star Wars_ passim.

Similarly it matters if your hairdresser is an anti-vaccer and spreads something contagious to you.

A certain amount of difference can be looked past, but when it comes to matters of life and death - and it can come to that surprisingly easily when things get heated - it matters.

<comment><USER7> You've not really made the case that those are life and death examples though. It's more likely the person who's not an anti semite is the one who's going to get heated in any discussion about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Go to Cuba.

Internet is only available in hotel lobbies and government parks. It runs you 3$/hr.

However, be warned that Cuba (including Havana and the resorts) is a machine designed to extract money from foreigners. While you can get by for <$15/day, the government recommends $100. It's the only place where Rick Steeves gave up on his 'travel like a local' creed and went with private drivers and the touristic experience.

He was right. It's nearly impossible to find an authentic experience in Havana. They'll tell you anything to make you happy and get your money. Even the family I stayed with - who I assisted with translations, technology, and donations - tried to rip me off on my last day. It's just business.

Treat it like a great retro theme park. Ride around in classic american cars, walk around entirely safe at all hours, and overpay for everything. The art, music, and architecture/decay is awesome. Just don't take it too seriously :)

<comment><USER9> Just a reminder, folks: this is one anecdote (or two, if you count the Steeves one he included).

How'd you feel if your city was summed up thus with buckets of tar and a great big brush?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Admittedly off-topic, but why add unnecessarily ignorant asides (in the first sentence to boot):

"...I lived on the grounds of an old estate down in central Virginia, next to a town called — terrifyingly — Lynchburg..."

...when a 10-second Google search reveals the less-than-terrifying reality:

First settled in 1757, Lynchburg was named for its founder, John Lynch, who at the age of 17 started a ferry service at a ford across the James River to carry traffic to and from New London.

<comment><USER11> Not totally damning, but 10 seconds more would reveal that "lynching" is named after his younger brother: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lynch_(judge)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lynch_\(judge\))

<comment><USER12> OK, but the younger brother moved away from the area that would be called Lynchburg even before it was named that. The town is not named after the crime and the crime is not named after the town.

<comment><USER13> > The town is not named after the crime and the crime is not named after the > town

And yet, the crime is named for the brother of the man that the town is named for.

Pardon the metaphor, but you're hanging on a pretty thin thread.

Also note that burkaman was pointing out the irony of an insufficiently researched (and churlish) accusation of insufficient research.

<comment><USER14> > And yet, the crime is named for the brother of the man that the town is > named for.

So guilt by association is a thing now?

<comment><USER11> Nobody is guilty of anything. It just isn't really true that the name is completely unrelated to slavery and lynchings.

<comment><USER14> But it's by such a tenuous thread that it's deceptive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I genuinely expected this article to contain a single sentence that read, "stop reading hacker news at work".

<comment><USER16> Don't tell me how to live!

<comment><USER17> spread anarchy[0]

[0] [https://i.imgur.com/NIqQB.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/NIqQB.jpg)

<comment><USER18> Oh God, Imgur is crossing over into HN now. I don't think I'm ever going to escape the black hole that is the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Regaining control of your attention doesn't mean not using your phone. It means being self-aware. The author is relying on a crutch. Not using the phone is just removing a single source of distraction, it does nothing to actually help attention regulation. It's like saying, I fixed my impulse issues by never walking in to gas stations, so now I don't have to worry about buying lottery tickets! You didn't fix your impulse issues, they're still 100% there.

<comment><USER20> The "impulse issues" are reinforced by the phone. I've very often noticed when I've set aside my phone for a few hours (the rest of the evening until bed or whatever) that I have to literally _set it aside_ at some distance from myself because otherwise it ends up in my hand without my even consciously deciding to check it. It's like a reflex. And then once it's safely at a distance, I repeatedly experience the urge to check it whenever I don't happen to be very focused on something else. The frequency of that urge diminishes over the course of a few hours and is accompanied by an increase in my ability to focus on something else for stretches of time. Sometimes I've even taken a weekend offline completely, and the effects are even more pronounced, and they last beyond the offline time. This is what the author means by "attention is a muscle". It's not that there's some baseline impulse issue and the device is merely an outlet. The device is causing the issue, or at least exacerbating it.

<comment><USER19> The device aggravates this issue only because the author is unconscious enough that they aren't even aware they are making a decision to use or not use the phone. While it may be a necessary step to take a break from something that captures your attention, it's important to be able to be aware of your behavior and your desires independent of the context. A person should be mindful when they choose to spend time on the phone of what they are deciding to consume. The phone is not a magical device, it just has a lower effort barrier and so unconscious behavior is easier. It doesn't mean one can't be aware of what they're doing while using it. It also doesn't mean that one can't use the device while developing awareness.

<comment><USER20> I think we pretty much agree here. For me the best way to remain aware is to periodically abstain, and the effects on my awareness persist after the abstinence.

<comment><USER19> I turned of notifications of all kinds 99% of them were not worth clicking. I do periodically abstain, but I when I do use I try to stay self-aware. I mentally keep track of how long I've spent, and what I spent my time doing. I then periodically ask if I thought the previous 15 minutes was spent doing something I was interested in or if I was just on autopilot / guided by clickbait. I still use my phone a LOT, but I definitely am doing more of what I enjoy, and reading things that are more meaningful to me.

<comment><USER20> All good tips.

I've been using QualityTime (Android only, I think: [http://www.qualitytimeapp.com/](http://www.qualitytimeapp.com/)) to measure and track usage daily. Seeing it quantified was a bit of a shock even though I thought I was doing a good job of mentally monitoring myself.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the recommendation. I'm going to try that out. On the Desktop I use RescueTime which has helped a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Rivality is the counterpoint of virality.

Information is free. Attention is inherently rivalrous. The author, Craig Mod, seems to get this:

 _Time boxed disconnection has proven to be both generative and — most importantly — sustainable._

Time-boxing is _setting bounds on attention._ Depending on what you do, it can be difficult to enforce -- some types of creative work simply want to expand to fill time, and rebuilding state is difficult. If that work requires online access ... beware the manfalls.

 _Attention is a muscle. It must be exercised._

Muscles also need recovery time. Alvin Toffler's _Futurshock_ is one of the earliest works I've seen which seems to grasp that intellectual effort has similar bounds.

There's also Gleick's _The Information_ , which notes the opposition of information and attention.

</comment><comment><USER23> We just finished making an app for people looking to use apps less and in a more intentional way.

[http://YouJustNeedSpace.com](http://YouJustNeedSpace.com)

We had to launch it as a web app because Apple said an app that encourages you to use other apps or your phone less is not appropriate for the app store.

<comment><USER24> >We had to launch it as a web app because Apple said an app that encourages you to use other apps or your phone less is not appropriate for the app store.

Really? That's the sort of app I'd pay for. Ideally, I'd spend less time on my phone, and more time on my (apple) computer.

Pretty shortsighted of apple.

Product feedback: I don't really know what it does, or how it does it. I accessed this on a computer, so I couldn't preview.

Just got my ipad, so I had a look. Interesting idea. I actually switched to launching all apps via spotlight typed commands though, so I don't think I can use it. The spotlight method _did_ reduce a lot of impulse use though.

<comment><USER23> > That's the sort of app I'd pay for.

Good new! You can! We use Stripe. I'm sure our conversion rate is a lot lower than if we were in the app store. But it's still possible for people who love it to help us keep working on it.

<comment><USER24> Oh, I wrote it before the "feedback" section. I think I'll stick with my spotlight launch method, as it removes the physical action urge entirely.

Do you think it would be useful to add a physical item nonetheless?

<comment><USER23> Do you usually access your problem app though spotlight?

If so, you could try creating a space icon linked to your problem app and give the space icon a name that will cause it to appear above your problem app in spotlight results, then search for it in spotlight a few times and see if you can get the space icon to appear in Top Hits when searched.

The principle behind all of this is to get the space icon to appear in your app launch flow where the icon of your problem app used to.

<comment><USER24> Ah yes, that could work. I'll try it when I have my phone handy (I don't bring it to the office).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If human nature is to take the path of least resistance, then it really comes down to "Friction vs frictionless." "Distractions," e.g. Twitter, are engineered to be as frictionless as possible -- low effort, quick dopamine fixes. It is on us to engineer meaningful tasks to have as little friction as possible.

Doesn't have to be complicated:

      1. Mute notifications
      2. Install Chrome "Timewarp" extension
      3. Break work down into bite-sized tasks

Some sources of friction are less obvious, and require studying the problem. E.g for me, I found:

      1. Perfectionism
      2. Fear of not knowing/mental fog (the kind you encounter when learning something new)
      3. Fear of futility (that your efforts are in vain)
      4. Not knowing where to begin

To be strong sources of friction, so I actively work to reduce them.

<comment><USER26> That's quite interesting how you think about tasks you want to do with "sources of friction" that way. How did you go about studying/identifying the less obvious sources?

<comment><USER25> Probably read them on a blog and made the connection later when I was searching for reasons why I keep procrastinating. Putting a convincing name to the mental force that holds you back gives you something to fight/say no to. Or you can pretend it doesn't exist and hope it goes away (doesn't work for me).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I hate hate hate, bitterly, angrily, and even desperately, those fetishes about a better, nicer, more innocent past. We all heard it; we all partake in the orgy of present-bashing and past-glorying before. However, let's wake up and, seriously, get our attention back to the present.

Look, yoga and meditation have existed for a looooooong time. And guess what, for every time period, be it modern "over-loaded" time or ancient time, only a handful of people can master them. And what are they? Oh, yeah, attention controlling. I mean, if the past is so focused and attentive, shouldn't everyone be meditation master? Shouldn't people be super productive and focused and attain greatness? Guess what, they don't. What does that imply?

It implies this: please, for the love of progress, stop your whining and start appreciating how much luck and resources you have access to today. Please. Pretty please.

And what's with the fetish against "algorithm"? I despite those who take regular but uncommon concepts and make a demon/angel out of them. Algorithm, simply put, is how to calculate something or how to solve a problem. Sorry, algorithms do not have "tendrils". They neither scheme against you nor love you. Think about it: if you trip over a rock, does it "conspire" against you? If you burn time on some game, don't blame the game, please. Blame the publisher, maybe. Don't blame the poor tech. It does nothing but to please you.

Back to time and attention. Is it challenging to keep my attention in today fast pace world? Sure it is. How easier compared to starving world of the old? Or racist world? Or back-breaking labor (think agriculture before advent of machine and fertilizer)? Luckily, I have not been made to find out. Very luckily. And I think everyone can appreciate that luck.

I always appreciate advices on control of attention and focus. I might not find them valuable (I frankly feel like I can focus just fine with emails singing their songs, for example, so I don't need to completely cut cord). But I would not make a statement against those. I need all the ideas and advices: attention is very hard to control.

However, the whining and fetishizing and conspiracy theorizing must stop. Please. One nation have voted for economic regression while another elected a racist bigot as their First Citizen. Why? Because of all of those whining and fetishizing and conspiracy theories. So, please, stop. For the love of progress, stop.

<comment><USER28> I, for one, don't like the tone. You mention the progress. Don't you think we'd have made a much bigger one if it wasn't for all those advertisements, gamified social media et al providing less value than they cost us in attention?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> _" Did I have it before Twitter became a demagogue's pulpit? When it was just a few of us, goofing around?"_

If I had two points to up-vote a story, I'd give it to this story.

I have always been in the fight to maintain attention. I can remember cutting the wires to a radio to maintain focus, studying for school. For me the question I ask is, _" How do I work on the Internet, but not be sucked down the addictive ^attention^ sucking black-hole?"_. This article is looking for this balance. [0]

[0] I also note, pg updated his article _" Disconnecting Distraction"_ noting the techniques he thought would work, do not. [http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> I, one of the millennials, find it difficult to focus, both at home and at work. Mobile chats, Slack, Hangouts etc. drains all the focus. It's difficult to get back in the zone. One moment you are chatting with your wife, in a deep meaningful conversation, the next you are checking WhatsApp or FB for a dopamine rush. I like what Louis CK says about it. Not his exact words. "Just because something is out there, doesn't mean it has to be done. It's OK to feel sadness and loneliness. Through the experience we get the beauty of clarity. But we douse it with a quick rush we get from a like or a mention."

I am equally a culprit.

</comment><comment><USER31> [http://stopgaming.reddit.com](http://stopgaming.reddit.com) helps some people out. I made a video about why gaming sucks and how you should make real life your game instead. I was shocked that people actually liked it.

It's interesting that he also mentions twitter and facebook but the comments here seem to skip the social media angles. I wonder if we feel subconsciously collectively that gaming has done us more harm than social media. I know it has done me more harm.

</comment><comment><USER32> This book, a good read about the invention and adoption of the telegraph, includes references to information overload from the 1800's.

[https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable- Ninetee...](https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Nineteenth- line/dp/162040592X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1484338680&sr=8-1&keywords=victorian+internet)

</comment><comment><USER33> In her book "Quiet" Susan Cain covers the topic of introversion and productivity. Recommended.

Personally, I find turning off my cellphone and email client to be adequate to work into my schedule several quiet thinking times a week. I usually hike with friends a few times a week but I also use long solo hikes as another resource for thinking.

</comment><comment><USER34> Regaining control presumes you had control to begin with.

I'd wager having little control over attention has been the default mode for couple generations. The world is full of distractions that start from childhood. Gaining control over attention requires awareness and a more deliberate effort, through meditation or the like.

</comment><comment><USER35> Are there any tools that allow you to enforce such things as 'internet only in the afternoon'? I would pay a ridiculous amount of money for a router that could disable access to certain websites according to time based or usage based rules and something equivalent for my phone. I would build it myself but I'm always just too damn distr...

<comment><USER23> We built an app that doesn't do exactly but, but it's similar. Instead of focusing on external restrictions, it reprograms your mind to make you less distractible.

[http://YouJustNeedSpace.com](http://YouJustNeedSpace.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> An aside point of curiosity: That is quite a dictionary at the end of the HTML...

</comment><comment><USER37> OT: What are these sub brands from Medium like Backchannel and Hackernoon? Are there more sub brands/communities and why did Medium create them?

<comment><USER38> Backchannel and Hackernoon are separate publications that are hosted on Medium. Backchannel is owned by Wired, and Hackernoon by AMI Publications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> How to regain my attention span...

Quit HN

/s

...

/s

<comment><USER7> You just have to make choices. I made a change a few years ago so this is literally the only place I read online discussions (because the signal to noise ratio is generally acceptable). I've dumped reddit, Twitter etc and the inevitable comments section at the end of every page on a news site. It gives me more time to read proper writing (books) or just stare out of the window and think. I still use instant messages but just not on my phone so they wait until I'm home. I can always phone or text someone if it's urgent (this hasn't happened yet).

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Is there an App that gets rid of all technology? :)

<comment><USER41> There are a couple of pieces of technology that can do it - though the general end-result is we're extinct as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> > Before palatable young white guys who say "bruh" with alarming frequency > spun daily monologues into Sony HD cams for audiences of millions?

This is racist

<comment><USER43> Did he say that all white guys say "bruh"? Or is he talking about the subset who say "bruh"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> It's rather ironic to see this title on the front page of HN.</comment>


Psychedelic Fishes from the World's First Encyclopedia of Marine Creatures - <AUTHOR> https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/08/15/louis-renard-poissons/ <comment><USER2> Misleading title. They only have "psychedelic" color schenes, they are not psychoactive psychedelic fish.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> > When a modern ichthyologist examined the book a quarter millennium after its > publication, he determined that only about one in ten of the species > depicted was drawn from the imagination; the rest were identifiable down to > the genus, many even to the species.

This is fascinating. I skimmed the 500 MB PDF download of the 1754 book [1] and I can confirm that anyone familiar with the reef fish/animals of the Indo- Pacific (these are from the Spice Islands [2] in the Indonesian archipelago) can easily pick out individual species. I was surprised by the number of times the same species, according to my non-ichthyologist eyes, was repeated (e.g. Picasso Triggerfish and Rainbow Mantis Shrimp).

The artist was very good at capturing the shape and patterns of the animals (maybe not so good at grouping them by species). The colors seem to be more interpretive than realistic, probably because the fish were from local markets. Rather than being "psychedelic", some of the most spectacular colorings, such as the Clown Triggerfish [3], are depicted with bland colors.

[1] [https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/200575#page/7/mode/...](https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/200575#page/7/mode/1up)

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

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

</comment><comment><USER4> I was disappointed the article didn't talk more about the mermaid. For anyone else like me interested in that, I found a high resolution version [1], transcribed the old-fashioned French and wrote a translation:

> _240\. Monstre ſemblable à une Sirenne pris à la côte de l 'isle de Borné ou > Boeren dans le Departement d'Amboïne. Il étoit long de 59. pouces gros à > proportion comme une Anguille. Il a vecu à terre dans une Cuve pleine d'eau > quatre jours et ſept heures. Il pousſoit de temps en temps des petits cris > comme ceux d'une Souris. Il ne voulut point manger, quoy qu'on luy offrit > des petits poisſons, des coquillages, des Crabes, Ecrevisſes, etc. On trouva > dans sa Cuve apres qu'il fut mort quelques excrements ſemblables à des > crottes de chat._

> _240\. Monster similar to a Siren_ [Mermaid] _caught on the coast of the > island of Borné or Boeren_ [I can't find these places in a modern > dictionary. Maybe Borneo?] _in the Department of Amboine. In length it was > 59 inches and in size had the proportions of an eel. It survived on land_ > [i.e. after it was caught] _in a tank full of water for four days and seven > hours. It made small cries like those of a mouse from time to time. It did > not want to eat, whatever anyone offered it: small fish, shellfish_ [the > French word refers only to molluscs] _, crabs, crayfish, etc. Several pieces > of excrement similar a cat 's were found in its tank after it had died._

1\. [https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/50095192#page/220/m...](https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/50095192#page/220/mode/1up)

</comment><comment><USER5> Is anyone familiar with color printing technology from 1678–1746? How were those color images printed?

<comment><USER6> FTA "populated by 460 individual hand-colored copper engravings"

<comment><USER5> I don't quite understand what a hand-colored copper engraving is. Does that mean that the entire image is composed of a bunch of separate perfectly overlapping hand-etched plates? How would you break up an image like that and line them up on separate copper plates by hand? The images seem too precise.

<comment><USER7> I believe it would be just one plate, that the colors would be painted onto individually.

[https://www.antiqueprints.com/Info/engraving.php](https://www.antiqueprints.com/Info/engraving.php)

<comment><USER5> I don't think it could work that way.

In printing with an engraved plate the ink is spread out over the engraving and then the surface of the plate is wiped with a rag.

The printed image is a result of the ink that remained in the etched grooves without being wiped off. I don't see any way you could mix colors on a single plate without it becoming a blurry mess.

I'm thinking maybe the outlines were printed in a single color and then the colors were hand-painted in the book itself, sort of like 'paint by numbers.'

[https://www.finerareprints.com/blog-and-tips-about- antique-p...](https://www.finerareprints.com/blog-and-tips-about-antique- prints/what-is-an-engraving)

I can't find anything about printing color with engravings pre-lithography other than 'they painted in the color.'</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How startups should die - <AUTHOR> http://blog.42floors.com/startups-die/#.UkGtI2RKlq4 <comment><USER2> Absolutely yes to "Pass the Hacker News test". Seneca's letter Epistle XI is one of my favorites and teaches this exact lesson.

It closes with "Cherish some man of high character, and keep him ever before your eyes, living as if he were watching you, and ordering all your actions as if he beheld them." [http://www.stoics.com/seneca_epistles_book_1.html#'XI1](http://www.stoics.com/seneca_epistles_book_1.html#'XI1)

I've found it to be a great technique for making better decisions.

<comment><USER3> There's also the deathbed technique. Imagine you're 91 years old, with a few members of your family around, and you're thinking back over your life. How would you wish you would have made the decision?

Admittedly, this only worked really well for me after I sat with a grandparent at their deathbed.

<comment><USER4> My grandfather worked in real estate and owned a number of commercial buildings that he lost during the great depression. It took him sixteen years, but he paid every one of his creditors off with interest.

I always took it as an example of the right way to act. But I have relatives that thought he was a fool not to declare bankruptcy and move on. There will always be people on both sides of that question, but he continues to be my inspiration as an entrepreneur.

<comment><USER5> Interesting story. Did your grandfather make the money to pay off his creditors through entrepreneurship? How did his career go once he had paid off the debt?

<comment><USER4> Yes he started a business installing furnaces. He was well respected by the guys who survived in real estate and had no problem finding business. When the war was over he did go back to real estate but never as big as before. He explained that he never would again be comfortable to be so highly leveraged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was once on the other end of this -- witnessing a startup that failed "the wrong way". The unethical way.

I decided to use a startup to raise some money for a non-profit. Their business model was to help fund events / organizations with their platforms, and take a fixed 2-3% commission on the funds raised. I raised $500 using the platform. But I never received the check for the $500.

I knew the founder personally. I e-mailed him and week after week he said, "the check is coming, there has been some sort of accounting error". 2 months passed, and no check. Then 3 months.

So, I e-mailed one of his investors, a mutual friend. He said, "Oh no, I think they are in a very bad place and may not have any money. I have stopped using the service." I e-mailed the founder again. He replied that my money was gone, but that he had committed himself to pay it back.

He was looking for work, though, so he wasn't sure when. Then, the platform's domain name quietly stopped responding to web requests, and the whole platform went offline.

I'm now in this weird position where I'm debating pursuing legal action. I'm still in touch with the founder. He keeps saying that he will pay soon, but doesn't.

The money actually came from over 20 people who had donated to the cause. They are unaware the money never made it to the non-profit. The check I was trying to receive was meant to just be a direct donation to this cause. The founder's mismanagement actually led to $20-$40 being "stolen" from about 20 people. In a way, I acted as a middleman, by encouraging people to donate via this platform. And now, I feel very responsible to get this money back. Do I pursue legal action? I've debated it.

So, here's another piece of advice about how startups should die: "if it's not your money, it's not your money". In other words, if your platform deals with money (e.g. accepts donations, facilitates payments) it is _NOT_ OK to use money you owe your customers to fund operations. That is called _theft_ , plain and simple!

<comment><USER7> > That is called theft, plain and simple!

Not theft, but fraud. Unfortunately, it happens in many startups that don't have a qualified finance/business guy in a senior role.

<comment><USER8> Off the top of my head there's also breach of trust and possibly trading while insolvent.

If you take money from A in order to give it to B on A's behalf, you are a trustee of the money -- it belongs to you in common law but not in equity and you _cannot_ repurpose it for something else. If the money cannot be conveyed to B, you _must_ return it to A.[1]

Lawyers and accountants typically keep funds held on trust in a completely different _bank_ from their own business accounts, just to avoid even the possibility of error leading to a breach of trust. To avoid even the _whiff_ that funds on trust might be comingled with regular income.

Trusteeship can arise without anyone signing anything and it comes with high legal standards. If you have a business model that involves doing something like this, you need to consult a lawyer in your jurisdiction about the local laws for trusts.

IANAL, TINLA.

[1] As an aside, I suspect this is part of the problem Readability had with their "we have money waiting for you to collect, Mr Webmaster!" growth strategy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _I remember sitting down with Paul Graham as our startup was failing. I > remember how unbelievable difficult it was to get myself to that meeting. > The last thing in the world I wanted to do was to tell him my startup was > failing. It took him 30 seconds to process the failure and then he moved on. > He was so unbelievably supportive and so excited for whatever it was I was > going to do next._

And this, my friends, is the fundamental difference between SV and the rest of the world. From my knowledge and experience, something like this simply does not happen outside of America. I haven't decided whether this is universally a good or a bad thing, but one thing is for sure - (us) Americans are very tolerant of failure and that is a _good_ thing for startups.

<comment><USER10> "is the fundamental difference between SV and the rest of the world. From my knowledge and experience, something like this simply does not happen outside of America."

To state the obvious first SV != America.

And outside of SV there really isn't the sense of "failure is quite ok no biggie".

If you are located in a typical place in america and you lose people's money (I'm not talking about startup shot in the dark funny money) you will be viewed as a failure and less likely to get money again.

If you open up a restaurant or a typical small business (with either your own money or friends and family or a bank loan) and you fail you are thought of as a failure. It's really that simple. Most people won't say "ok he learned something let's take another shot".

Key difference is SV (or with any pooled investment fund) is that they understand that what they are investing in is shot in the dark. And besides it's not their money it's primarily their investors money. OPM. And even if it's their money they are betting on many horses a small amount. Not the ranch.

Had PG been working as an engineer at HP at the time and had put a large sum of his personal money into a venture that failed (money that might be needed for his children's college fund) he might have not been so "unbelievably supportive and so excited for whatever it was I was going to do next."

<comment><USER7> > Had PG been working as an engineer at HP at the time and had put a large sum > of his personal money into a venture that failed (money that might be needed > for his children's college fund)

This is why you never invest more than you are willing to lose. If you do, and the venture fails, the blame for your reduced quality of life rest not on the failed founder, but on the imprudent investor.

The nice thing about SV is not just the big pool of investors, but the big pool of prudent investors who don't behave foolishly.

<comment><USER11> > This is why you never invest more than you are willing to lose.

Absolutely. It can also skew the decision-making process. People investing more than they can afford to lose are not going to be giving helpful advice or making the right decisions for the business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wrote like 10 topic sentences for comments about shutting down a company and then just erased them, because what a horrible set of memories that topic brings out. I like reading about failure from Jason because he's had a win and is on his way to another, so he can talk about it with a pretty even mind. Personally, I've only got like 10% of a kind-of-win since shutting my first company down, and it still makes me absolutely ill.

<comment><USER13> Jason (OP) here.

Yep, know that feeling. Well.

Would love to have you over to the office to chat. Ping me offline. jason at 42floors

<comment><USER14> Seriously, no way would I pay a bill that the business owed when it was shutting down out of a personal credit card. It's the business, not you who is liable. Also, if you can pay on a credit card, you can pay the business on a payment plan and it will cost you a lot less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I liked this article thank you. My theory on dying startups is that if its not working its better to go out with a bang (eg a crazy pivot or a high risk high reward gamble) rather than a bleed out.

FedEx was a good example of this, if I recall correctly the CEO took all the cash they had and went to Vegas with it. Usually wouldn't turn out well, but that time it did. If you need money, and have exhausted all your options you have to take a course of action that gives you a chance, no matter how slim, over the slow bleeding death which would be a long painful and hopeless experience.

Not compromising ethics like you mention is so important in life. Ethical decisions are harder in difficult circumstances (teetering over the cliff of failure) but those moments in life are when your ethics count for the most and mean the most, and as you mention they can also pay off in the long run (but this shouldn't really be a consideration from a purist ethical standpoint). The captain shouldn't go down with that ship.

<comment><USER16> If the business is sure to fail and you have money left but no clear idea what to do with it, wouldn't simply liquidating and giving partial returns on investment be a reasonable option?

<comment><USER17> It depends (imo), on the amount of money you have left and who its from. If you've raised $1m from well-to-do-but-not-rich family members and with $500k left you're realized you're totally unqualified to be in your business, or the concept was terrible, no valid pivot, etc., then yeah, give the people back your money.

But if you've raised $1m from professional investors and you have $100k left, for example, you might be better off trying to double down or raise more money.

<comment><USER18> If you had $100k left and you tried the FedEx gamble, and lost, you could very well get done for reckless trading. I don't think that's worth the risk.

<comment><USER19> It should be a risky venture for the company (ie a new strategy). I think gambling in Las Vegas would count as fraudulent.

<comment><USER18> Maybe I should have responded to TomGullen's post since he mentioned the FedEx story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "back in 2007, we were enabling college students to debate issues on their campus. And in the unfortunate theme of that era, we had lots of people using it but nothing resembling a business model."

Let's all be thankful things have moved on so much since that era!

<comment><USER13> They really have. When I look around the current batch of YC companies, I find that virtually every one has a built-in business model from the beginning.

I think the craze of 2007 was that you could make something that would become popular. Popular felt so much better than not popular. Max Levchin once called it blowing up a balloon. They get big fast, but they're just full of air.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why is the founder taking on personal credit card debt to pay the bills of the company? Shouldn't the company just go bankrupt and then that's the end of it?

</comment><comment><USER22> I am in the process of shutting down my first company and I would like to thank you for sharing your experience because every decision I make right now has huge ethical implications.

<comment><USER14> Don't pay your debts on credit, that's just idiotic. If you can pay a credit card company monthly, then you can pay your debts the same way as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> My first startup was a bit of a fad. A fast rise to millions of users, and then a slow peter out -- no matter what we tried. We also didn't know what we were doing, to be fair. Anyway, as we were on our last legs we got a couple offers for our email list of about 6 million users. My co-founder wanted to take them to get _some_ money out of it, but it was an easy "no" for me. We were doing this on the side of day jobs, so failure probably didn't feel quite as catostrophic and we didn't feel as desperate. Still, probably a good thing he would have had no idea how to get at the database (designer).

</comment><comment><USER24> Basically boils down to an 'honor code'. When you are going down imagine yourself as a great person and that history will remember every action you did. If you keep your respect and dignity people will respect you and you live to fight another day. If not no matter how successful you may or may not be, someone will someday say: "yeah its a great company but he fu*ked so so so over". You don't want to be that person. You want to be: "yeah he put 3 companies under but he always manages to pay his debt".

<comment><USER25> This isn't really true. AirBnB got to greatness by using a lot of shady tactics earlier on, and HN was split half-half on whether this was a good thing or not. History essentially forgot those shady tactics, and AirBnB is a gorilla now.

<comment><USER26> What were some of those shady tactics?

<comment><USER25> I can't remember the detail, just the arguments really. I recall things like misrepresenting themselves to people on craigslist and violating things like 'don't send me promotional material' settings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm not a fan of nascent bragging about killing your latest startup, leaving customers out in the cold without a good reason or advanced warning. Find a buyer or pivot, otherwise it's just flushing time, money and credibility down the drain.

For a first bootstrapped startup, a FNAC that doesn't require much overhead / support and can be built slowly for awhile is a starting point. It's not a proper startup, but it's something that puts founders and customers in less jeopardy.

(Startups proper are go big & fast or bust.)

</comment><comment><USER28> Right after reading the pg essays, any startup founder should read everything Jason has written. Cuts right to the points that many are too uncomfortable to talk about.

</comment><comment><USER29> Financial transparency FTW. I've worked for two companies that were extremely transparent. It's made me feel like a) the company knows I am a big kid and can take the good & the bad news, and b) views me as a partner in the work, not a cog in the machine. And if declining finances leads some people to leave, that's infinitely easier than having to let them go.

</comment><comment><USER30> Just curious, but how much would a list of 1-million targeted emails go for? High five figures? Low six figures?

I'm trying to put myself in perspective of his struggle -- was he potentially buying another year of runway? Another month?

<comment><USER31> Part of the question here is also, "What did you promise (implicitly or explicitly) when you got those email addresses?" That's really where it becomes an ethics issue. Our data gets sold every day.

Another question is, "Did everyone get paid?" He did the right thing and saw to it that everyone got made whole. If the business goes into bankruptcy and some creditors are not being made whole, it's much harder to not sell the email list if you can do so legally.

It's during tough times that you see what people's ethics really are. Great job by the OP addressing some of these.

<comment><USER13> OP here.

I can't remember what the exact figure was--but it was in the 5 figures. Which for me felt like a potential life-saver.

I don't think what I promised my users was actually that relevant. It would've been super easy to change our terms of service to include the ability to sell or rent user data. I could have written it in a way no one would have understand. Of course, no one would have ever seen the change anyways.

The real issue was that I knew it was wrong. Even if legal.

<comment><USER22> In this situation. Do you think your moral obligation to repay your debt outweight the moral obligation to your user's data?

Or compare this to the moral obligation to repay your investor vs that of the user's data.

<comment><USER31> Exactly. Could you be open for a lawsuit if you didn't pay your creditors in order to respect the privacy of the email holders?

It's a very fine point, against the backdrop of a very good article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> _Our entire team is made up of entrepreneurs that have at some point failed their own startup. There are hundreds of companies like us that are always looking to hire awesome entrepreneurs._

</comment><comment><USER33> Coral Cache link.

[http://blog.42floors.com.nyud.net/startups- die/#.UkHADudq0Qm](http://blog.42floors.com.nyud.net/startups- die/#.UkHADudq0Qm)

</comment><comment><USER34> I love the honesty that always shines through your posts, thank you.</comment>