An Average Guy Who Spent 6,000 Hours Trying to Be a Professional Golfer - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/08/the-dan-plan/536592/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Going pro shouldn't be the mark of success on this endeavor. There are a very limited number of seats and very likely pros have committed well more time.

The fact he got to a 2 handicap is evidence you can become a master. Especially since he suffered a physical limitation after about 6k hours.

Talent matters. Age matters. The ability to "get it" faster matters. Access makes you get it faster.

But to go from no game to a 2 handicap is proof extremely hard work pays off. To be in the top 5% of anything makes you elite even if it doesn't make you a pro in an extremely selective occupation. A top-5% engineer can work anywhere and make top money.

<comment><USER3> Folks who decide to do a 10,000-hour challenge are probably already in some kind of elite group, in terms of wealth and free time (nevermind patience and perseverance). The average person isn't able to spend ~7 hours a day, every day for 4 years, on a non-salaried activity.

<comment><USER4> >The average person isn't able to spend ~7 hours a day, every day for 4 years, on a non-salaried activity.

I basically did this over 6 years, 3-5 hours per day on a non-earning activity to eventually launch the business I now run. In the last 3 years I've averaged 60-70 hours per week at work, only recently earning close to my last salary (about 65% as of last check) as a Data Scientist.

It's doable enough. Just very hard. Can only really be done if it's your life's calling, which this was and I correctly identified it as such in year 2.

<comment><USER4> Also the "10,000" hour rule (which has obviously been debunked) isn't _really_ about 10,000 hours of focused practice on the task alone. Focused work and previous experience in other domains transfers into the activity/goal you chase.

Being a Data Scientist gave me a huge leg up about understanding data structures and statistical analysis, huge in my field.

Formerly a software developer, I was able to install, configure, and hack together a workable WooCommerce/WordPress PHP/MySQL CMS that generated content and still is our main shop, selling millions of dollars of merchandise per year.

I used to work retail and retail management when I was young and putting myself through high school and college. Lessons about stocking, shipping, marketing, sales, logistics - all transferred into my online retail business.

None transfer perfectly, but all make an impact. True, I knew nothing about "sports science" at the outset. But I had a big leg up from my limited college education and my extensive work history. That cut the "10,000" hours down significantly.

<comment><USER5> But 10000 hour rule isn't about being competent. It's about being an expert.

> Formerly a software developer, I was able to install, configure, and hack > together a workable WooCommerce/WordPress PHP/MySQL CMS that generated > content and still is our main shop, selling millions of dollars of > merchandise per year.

But anyone could really do that just following simple online guides/examples. CMS is child's play especially when you didn't even build one from scratch but just pieced ready made software together.

> I used to work retail and retail management when I was young and putting > myself through high school and college. Lessons about stocking, shipping, > marketing, sales, logistics - all transferred into my online retail > business.

Sure, but you aren't an expert in any of those.

Of course cross domain knowledge helps but I think you are missing the point of the 10000 hour rule. It was a rule to make you an expert, not a jack of all trades.

<comment><USER6> I think you are missing the point of the parent post.

He is not stating that the 10,000 rule will make you a jack of all trades. He is saying that he was able to cut down the "10,000" hours to less because of his transferable skills. S/he might not be an expert in these transferable skills, but s/he might be an expert in his business which is sports science.

<comment><USER5> > He is not stating that the 10,000 rule will make you a jack of all trades.

But that's not what he described.

> S/he might not be an expert in these transferable skills, but s/he might be > an expert in his business which is sports science.

Sure. We all have transferable skills. I don't think the 10000 hour rule meant that you start off with a blank slate and went from the basics of learning language, mathematics, etc.

The 10000 rule is part learning and part practice/muscle memory/etc.

In other words, it "includes" transferable knowledge.

If you know latin, you'll have an easier time getting competent in italian. But to become an expert in italian, you still need to go through the 10000 hours. That's the idea of 10000 hours. I don't believe in the 10000 hours mantra, but that's my understanding of it.

<comment><USER4> I am an expert in my field now. It is indisputable. It took me less than 10,000 hours _because_ of the other work I did.

You are indeed missing the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I remember when I found out that Gladwell was a journalist not a scientist. In science, cherry picking your data is malfeasance, and in journalism it is just good story telling. Which made me sad because I'd like to believe that you could 'practice your way' into some amazing profession.

I also followed Dan's progress for the first couple of years. Here was a guy who was putting things to the test in a way that had not been done before. I expect if he writes a book on the topic I would not be the only one who bought it.

So it is with some surprise that I read that Dan didn't know how to 'end it'. He did an amazing thing, and the results weren't what he expected or hoped but they were _authentic_ and that is important. I don't think anyone who followed his story would say "oh he just slacked off for years" or any of that. I would hope he could sit back and evaluate it not as someone who 'failed to make the PGA' but rather as someone who tested this hypothesis of 10K hours and found it wanting. That is an excellent achievement and I hope he can see it that way.

</comment><comment><USER8> I actually randomly looked this guy up months ago after thinking about him and wondering whatever became of his experiment. Sad to see how it ended.

Side note: the Atlantic's shit-tastic anti-ad blocker wouldn't let me in even though I'm a paying subscriber, AND I whitelisted them, so here's the AMP link: [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/536592/)

<comment><USER9> Funny, I did the same a few weeks ago. The idea is still fascinating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Absolutely true story: A friend of mine could make a golf ball do just about anything and was a wonder to watch. He was a scratch player or better (I don't recall his exact handicap). On paper, he was professional standard. He could sink 10 foot putts all day long (my hyperbole), but what he could not do was sink a 10-foot putt, _when it counted_. By his own admission, he just did not have the match temperament to perform when the pressure was really on.

Golf at professional level is not just about skill, but also mental preparedness, fitness and probably a lot of other factors.

<comment><USER11> While this is true, I think golf etiquette makes it easier to handle the mental side. No screaming fans and flashing lights to deal with during the game like in other sports.

<comment><USER12> That helps with the external distractions, but it doesn't help with the pressure you put on yourself - the internal mental pressure.

There's a reason everyone recommends "The Inner Game of Tennis" in this context.

<comment><USER13> Also, depending on how you handle pressure, a period of absolute silence when people concentrate on seeing whether you fail or not can be a lot more nerve- wracking than a colourful crowd of people relentlessly booing your team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "The Sports Gene" [1] is an excellent book on this topic backed up by not only research but entertaining stories as well. It has a section about Dan but also has stories about a world champion high jumper who dedicated his life to high jumping only to be surpassed by someone who wasn't really interested in it and had been practicing for less than a year.

I think the lesson to take away from Dan's experience and what the author of this book argues as well is that yes, practice can make you a lot better. But to be among the best in the world, you'll need to have some sort of genetic advantage.

[1] [https://www.amazon.ca/Sports-Gene-Extraordinary-Athletic- Per...](https://www.amazon.ca/Sports-Gene-Extraordinary-Athletic- Performance/dp/1591845114)

</comment><comment><USER4> I highly recommend people reading a similar story by Lyle McDonald, called No Regrets [0]. He drops everything to become a world-champion short-track speed skater, which is miles and miles less competitive than professional golf.

[0]: [http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/training/no-regrets- part-1....](http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/training/no-regrets-part-1.html/)

</comment><comment><USER15> I sort of did a similar experiment from 15-35 with boxing. Trained a lot and became pretty competent. But to get to the top hard work is not enough. You also need talent. There are people in the gym that had speed and strength without any training that I couldn't reach with daily hard training.

But I think doing this was probably still the best thing I did in my life. Doing something that seems out of reach and then becoming competent is great. Even without having success in the sense of winning.

<comment><USER16> I'm on the verge of attempting something like this in Tai Chi. I'm pretty sure I have only moderate (if any) talent, and age is against me as well, but I plan to give this an all out try.

Great comment. Directly spoke to me. Thanks for taking the time to post it.

<comment><USER17> I hope you do :) I hope you also get to practice the real deal, with the real Chi (and the Chuan) ;)

<comment><USER16> ha! I know exactly what you speak of (chi/chuan)

I practice a 'non fluff' variant, emphasizing lots of 'real world testing' against uncooperative opponents ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Would have been a different story and probably had a better chance if would have started at 20. You'll find kids in high school and younger that have 2 handicaps, alot of physical abilities but less mental aspects for the game.

Steph Curry (basketball star) carries a 2 handicap so just having athletic talent can really make a difference, give him <2000 hours of practice and I'd bet he could play on the web.com tour.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder how much the back problem mattered here. Because you see the same, in fighting sports. Every 3 years or so someone comes and starts intense practice, thinking they can just do this. And you can ...

But not if you practice hard enough to dislocate your knee in (the current record is) 2 months. Unless you're a kid, you need regular, long (as in a week minimum) breaks in practice. Every few months.

<comment><USER20> > Unless you're a kid, you need regular, long (as in a week minimum) breaks in > practice. Every few months.

Moreover, I wonder if he'd become "automatically" better after a downtime of say 2 months. I could imagine his brain still has a lot of processing to do from this extreme time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> After spending some time machine learning golf for daily fantasy wagering, I came to the conclusion that I will never take up the sport. As a social activity it has its positives, but on the sporting side consistency and improvement are hard to come by.

* Professionals miss the cut n times in a row, then win next tournament.

* The ridiculous "tips" videos with all the machinations and methods they put forth to help you with your game - I'd rather play Twister.

* Equipment - costs and technology changes. Drivers are getting closer to looking like a sawed-off bowling ball attached to a shaft.

However, I do enjoy watching the pros play and Spieth's 13th hole in the British Open and follow up was a memorable event.

The PGA has to be commended for making public a great amount of super-detailed data for use in analysis. I wish the bigger sports did this.

The book "Every Shot Counts" by Mark Broadie may help guide you to improve your game, if you are interested in a data analysis approach.

Cheers

<comment><USER22> How did you get on with the machine learning part of it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "There is golf, and then there is tournament golf." \- Bobby Jones. Dan picked one of the most ridiculously hard endeavors to 'master' and never even had a cup of coffee at a mini-tour event, let alone advancing in any of his state qualifiers or local invitationals. Even the pros who have their tour card but are not in the field for the next tournament sometimes play in a 1-round Monday qualifier, and they have to shoot in the mid to low 60s to top a field of 125-185 players to grab an open slot. Even then they likely will miss the cut at the event, as most tour players do week in week out - except the true superstars. A 2-handicap shows you can manage your way around a course, but it's miles away from tour-level. Tour players are in the +5 to +8 range at their home clubs, and those are all championship tracks they play from the tips - just for practice.

</comment><comment><USER24> I haven't read Gladwell's book, but I would imagine that time spent practicing is only one of several multipliers. Natural talent and the right coaching at the right time would be too others.

<comment><USER25> Outliers is a fun read, and short. Just as with all Gladwell it's long on idea consistency and short on numerical rigor.

But this is sort of a misinterpretation anyway. The point isn't that 10k hours is enough to make you a master in isolation, it's that masters don't get to be masters before 10k. At the top end of elite practitioners of any art, talent still matters.

<comment><USER26> And the studies he (Glad we'll) references are an average of 10000. Average. Sucks to be you if you are the 20k hours person.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/sports-gene-author- gladwell-1...](http://www.businessinsider.com/sports-gene-author- gladwell-10000-hour-rule-2013-8)

I read this book. It is well written and better researched than outliers by far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Since Malcolm Gladwell's book about 10,000 hours of practice, there must be dozens of stories that of people trying to reach that milestone in various pursuits (music, programming, arts). Would love to read a series of those (or maybe that's Gladwell's next book deal).

</comment><comment><USER27> I started learning golf a few years ago and to me it definitely seems like something most people can master with practice. Especially if you are good at putting your mind in the right place. It's really easy to become too stressed in golf or too careless or get too focused and overthink the shot. It is most mindful than any sport I've played. [1]

With that said, I think there are two hard requirements for golf:

\- Time

\- Money

The first one comes with the second as someone who has f* you money can make a lot of time. I know someone who "retired" at 40 for two years to exclusively practice golf. He eventually went back to work, not because he had to but because he was bored (serial entrepreneurs have to start companies... it's an addiction)

I unfortunately am in the middle. I have been able to spend hundreds of dollars on the sport not thousands like some people I know. I have a hitting net at home I can go in my yard so I don't need to go to the driving range and that helps (a few hundred dollars well spent) but if I went to the course every weekend I'd be broke in no time. And I most certainly can't go on "Golf Vacations" half way around the country (though if I happen to be on vacation near a course I will go).

[1] I found my shot improves ridiculously if I step back, breath, and stop thinking so hard about it. I've spent a long time thinking about shots only to slice it then gone up to the tee and swung without giving it a second thought and hit a perfect shot... repeatedly.

</comment><comment><USER28> It's the "Talent bound" vs "Effort bound" mindset.

I side with "Effort bound" as a life motto. To challenge myself, if not for correctness relatively to the reality.

<comment><USER29> Effort in any field has the property that if you are bloody-minded enough it can bring you up to the wall beyond which talent lies. I hit this wall as a result of over-practicing piano aged 28 which I had to give up due to repetitive strain injury. The good news is that a few years later, in a separate development, the wall suddenly and completely dissolved. I can't describe the experience without sounding mystical. Still less can I explain it. The closest psychological concept I've found is _Low Latent Inhibition_ and my guess is that this phenomenon lies behind _all_ talent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> We should be careful drwaing conclusions about the value of practice here.

The main problem with this endeavor is the definition of success. The outcome is strictly binary. That is either he makes a pro tour or not. Apart from publicity, there is not a whole lot that can be redeemed if Dan gets, say, only 90% there.

There are numerous ways one can challenge himself or herself and benefit enormously along the way to the top 6% in the respective field. For example, if it were finance, then he would have been very wealthy. If it were triathlon, then he'd be in great physical health. Etc.

In real life going for it is not the only thing that leads to success. It's also choosing wisely what you do.

</comment><comment><USER31> >"We [talked] about the idea of quitting everything to pursue something single-mindedly and whole-heartedly," McLaughlin recounts. "Did you need talent or was it all about hard work?"

Why not apply that mindset to commercial photography, the field he was already in?

<comment><USER32> The article said he felt indifferent about his previous and current careers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> If you like this story you may also be interested in the book "Paper Tiger" by Tom Coyne. Same idea of total dedication to making the PGA, but starting as a guy who played competitively in his youth, but had gotten rusty. He was shooting in the 80s, and decided to dedicate a year to it. Entertaining read I thought.

</comment><comment><USER34> 10,000 hours is taken from the book Outliers, but it's not even true mastery. It's said to be the level where Bill Gates entered Harvard. 10,000 hours is more journeyman level than mastery.

The book Mastery goes into much more detail, where it repeats that 10,000 hours is necessary, but there are other components to mastery. Among them is mentorship and creating some form of masterwork.

The pro athletes have gone far past the 10,000 hours mark, but chances are they also had mentors and they've also taken some risks and invented their own styles. Keep practicing.

<comment><USER35> I think there is a misconception with that number. It originally comes from a paper on deliberate practice from Anders Ericsson.

You could spend 10,000 hours playing golf but it's highly unlikely you have spent 10,000 hours in deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice is the relentless drill on areas you need to improve that sit outside your comfort zone. A game of golf, like anything, will include a variety of skills, some comfortable, some not so.

I can't speak for the validity of the research but it's not as simple as doing something for 10,000 hours. The idea is to breakdown everything that you need to do in a golf game, analyse objectively where you stand on each and relentlessly nail the weakest areas.

It's not fun, it's hard and I guess the key thing with talent is that it makes all of that a little bit easier plus a burning passion for the bigger picture (I wonder if that's the source of talent - a burning passion and some other innate advantages)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> He is not an average guy if he decides to do such a thing.

</comment><comment><USER37> Pure marketing and zero professionalism it seems. A real person attempting pro will have real trainers. They will help him make plans that don't overstress his body in a way that kills his back in 5 years. Then you set goals that are hard but reachable, not outright impossible. Of course some "impossible" goals can be reached, but not without first achieving some goals from the "possible" category.

<comment><USER38> What it seems is that you have read neither Dan's blog nor the article you're commenting on. He did hire real trainers.

<comment><USER37> Correction: He did pay people to train him. That's different from hiring real trainers. See the word "real" in "real trainers"? It's part of their job to protect your key body parts during training.

<comment><USER39> "real trainers" is a marketing concept, and their knowledge is far from scientifically valid.

<comment><USER37> Yeah there are like 100 who will claim that title and 2 who really earn it. You need to be a fanatic yourself (about anything, not necessarily the same topic) to understand who is a fanatic in his claimed area as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I feel like there is some confusion between being successful and being professional. You could deliberately practice a sport or music for ~10,000 and be really damn good, but that doesn't mean you will go pro. That part is about luck and connections. Just because you are very skilled doesn't necessarily mean you will be "spotted" or "discovered" for example.

<comment><USER41> golf has open tournaments. no need to be spotted

it's literally just up to your ability and nothing else

<comment><USER42> You need access to expertise, equipment, grounds, peer competition. These all require money and/or connections.

<comment><USER43> Golf is cheap. You could spend $1000 on equipment, get a yearly pass for $2300 right outside Google HQ. Spend $50 or is it $100 to join the men's club -- they'd love for you to join -- and get your NCGA handicap. Done.

Read the greatest kung fu manual ever written, "Five Lessons" by Ben Hogan, or use some other book. I met one kid that modeled his swing off of YouTube videos and with that got himself to a scratch handicap.

The real cost is time.

<comment><USER44> > _Golf is cheap. You could spend $1000 on equipment, get a yearly pass for > $2300 right outside Google HQ._

$3300 is not in any way "cheap" for the majority of Americans.

I like HN, but it's disheartening how many of my peers in tech seem to think that a West Coast programmer's salary is normal.

<comment><USER43> It's cheaper than smoking. Edit: Well, depends on the accounting. The median U.S. income is $51K so by all means it's affordable. The main cost is time.

<comment><USER45> Median household income is $50k. Median individual income is $30k, leaving the aforementioned year of golf taking about 10% of ones (median) income. That is a fairly large expense.

<comment><USER43> If you're trying to go pro, 10% of income is nothing compared to the time investment. Like, it's an amount. But plenty of people get by on $27K.

<comment><USER45> That's pre-tax income though. There will be some variation by location and situation, but if we say post-tax is $24k that does not even leave $21k.

That is not a lot to live on. And, since we're talking about the median, 50% of the earning population are going to be left with even less than that.

<comment><USER43> Even then you're talking a cost for something you'd be devoting most of your free time to doing. You don't have to do it in California.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> There's an episode of My Name is Earl based on this premise.

</comment><comment><USER47> Should've gotten a Meeseeks

</comment><comment><USER48> People seem to have a maximum skill level that they can attain, and hard training keeps them at that level, but can't get them any higher. If they quit hard training their skills drop quickly.

Children's sports is a process where you have a bunch of kids play and the coach looks to see which kids have an affinity for the sport. It is essentially a weed-out process that eliminates most kids.

</comment><comment><USER49> Natural Talent + Dedication = a chance to be great at something.

I was an over achieving 6'2" power forward in junior college. Led the team in rebounding and blocked shots, but was always matched against guys 6'5" and taller, and 20 or more pounds of muscle heavier.

So I don't care how much practice I did under what regime, I had already found my limits. 6'-2".

</comment><comment><USER50> Neat article, I wonder how much of that concept really belonging in the athletic arena, however. Also, Gretzky is spelled with a Z

</comment><comment><USER51> Kudos to him throwing caution to the wind and trying it. That took guts</comment>


Pitch HN: What do you think about my idea to combat the bad chargers "epidemic"? - <AUTHOR> In the process of converting an AC signal to DC, some USB wall adapters will leave a lot of noise, sometimes with an amplitude of up to half a volt (for 5V chargers) [1, 2]. This can damage devices and permanently decrease battery life. I'm thinking about designing a replacement charging cable that would test the signal and if it was harmful, would light up red, warning you to discontinue use of the charger. Otherwise it would function as a regular microUSB/USB-C/Lightning cable. What do you think about this? Is it something you/others would use?<p>[1] http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-apple-is.html<p>[2] http://www.lygte-info.dk/info/usbPowerSupplyTest%20UK.html <comment><USER2> Why build a half measure? Fix the problem, don't make it my problem. I'm not sitting around looking at the charging cable while I'm charging my phone.</comment>


Poor Cybersecurity in Health Devices a Life-threatening Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/technology/poor-cybersecurity-in-health-devices-a-life-threatening-problem-60411.html

<comment><USER2> The text of the article is a fair rehash on the topic and attempts to sound relatively measured, but the title sure doesn't.</comment>


Ask HN: Is Bing running on a non-MS stack? - <AUTHOR>

I'll preface this by saying that I make my living as ASP.NET programmer so I'm not trying to slight MS. I'm just curious.
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.bing.com
Sample microsoft.com HTTP Response Header:
Cache-Control: public Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8Content-Encoding: gzip Expires: Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:56:47 GMT Last-Modified: Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:24:31 GMT Vary: Accept-Encoding Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0 X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Date: Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:46:47 GMT Content-Length: 20017
Sample bing.com HTTP Response Header:
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0 Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Encoding: gzip Date: Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:49:51 GMT Content-Length: 9295 Connection: keep-alive <comment><USER2> From an MS employee: <http://twitter.com/shanselman/statuses/1951354013>

<comment><USER3> "That's a netcraft caching/CDN bug. I've confirmed that Bing is in the MSFT Data Centers, all Windows/IIS." - that's an odd bug............

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> MS bought Powerset in order to bring Bing to market (just like they bought QDOS to sell to IBM as MSDOS).

PowerSet uses:

Natural language parser from Xerox Parc <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13953_3-9940887-80.html>

Apache [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/hadoop-core- user/20...](http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/hadoop-core- firstname.lastname@example.com%3E)

Puppet server farm admin tools <http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/WhosUsingPuppet>

Dell servers running Linux [http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux- poweredge/2007-Sept...](http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux- poweredge/2007-September/032788.html)

Wikipedia entry (as indexed by PowerSet) : [http://www.powerset.com/explore/semhtml/Powerset_(company)?q...](http://www.powerset.com/explore/semhtml/Powerset_\(company\)?query=what+technologies+does+powerset+use)

I'm sure there are more smoking guns out there. I found the above with Bing !!! (cross-checked with Google)

So is SCO going to sue MS for purloining "their tech" ??? Should be enough dough to get them out of bankruptcy.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's about a 0.01% chance they would use a Linux architecture. If it came out that they didn't trust Windows to run Bing then it would be a big hit to their server market I think.

I imagine it's not a standard IIS setup though, so the response header is probably unique due to this.

</comment><comment><USER6> But the Kumo (the code name for bing) days were like this ...

[http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10235400-16.html?part=rss&...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10235400-16.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20)

</comment><comment><USER7> www.bing.com appears to me on Akamai and they are huge linux users so in some sense Bing is not on a MS stack.

<comment><USER8> Whatever their CDN is running on is irrelevant.</comment></comment>


Announcing the Stack Overflow Series A financing - <AUTHOR> http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/announcing-our-series-a/ <comment><USER2> "One of them, Brad Burnham, suggested that we don't hard code our revenue model too early. If the platform creates value for a lot of people, he told us, we'll have plenty of opportunites to make money that actually make the site better." This is just building a bubble that will eventually burst. Someone needs to read Rework.

<comment><USER3> Well,

"How would the people of 1999 solve this problem?"

Let's see what happens. I'm enthusiast...</comment></comment>


Show HN: Whobal – Buy and sell side projects for free - <AUTHOR> https://whobal.com <comment><USER2> Potential buyer here.

* Will you ever sell my name or email address?

* How do you/intend to monetize?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Your private data (name, email, etc.) is 100% secured. We will never ever sell it to anyone else.

2\. Right now, the focus is not on making money. We want to build a community of buyers and sellers while keeping the service completely free. The basic listing will remain free but we might charge sellers for optional upgrades (extra promotion, higher listing order, featured on homepage, etc.) in the future.

I hope it helps!

<comment><USER2> It does, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You need to team up with indiehackers</comment>


Amateur J.C. Penney Traders Beg Judge to Save Them from Wipeout - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-13/amateur-j-c-penney-traders-beg-judge-to-save-them-from-wipeout <comment><USER2> Caveat emptor. Buy a dead cat on the bounce? Don't complain when it starts to stink. If debts are greater than assets, there stock is worth $0.</comment>


The role of an Engineering Manager and management philosophies - <AUTHOR> https://developer.squareup.com/blog/engineering-management-philosophies-and-why-they-matter-even-if-you-are-not-a-manager/ <comment><USER2> In general I like this article, it's an ok introduction to the expectations of an EM.

> The incoming list of prioritized projects will not be the same difficulty. > That's why it's important to have a team of varied levels and differing > skills.

I'd argue that's not why you want people of varying levels. Having juniors on the team is a) building for the future b) energizing and c) important for seniors to develop their skills as mentors. They should be working together with seniors, not taking the easy stuff.

> With this understanding, I can match the incoming projects with the > appropriate individuals.

After a number of years as an EM, I tend to shy away from "matching" anything like this. I've a big believe in self selection with these things and try to avoid the role of task master at all costs. The only exception (I think) is when I need to take into account someone's development goals and actively encourage them to take on challenges that another team member would more naturally take. Example - if a team member really wants to learn iOS development, I'd actively encourage them to pair up with an experienced iOS dev on some tasks even though those are not things they'd normally be involved in.

<comment><USER3> I agree for the most part. That being said, I have noticed more senior engineers will grow resentful and bored if they are assigned very basic tasks, while a more junior engineer would be thrilled.

Senior engineers should be mentoring junior engineers, and the general talent and outlook of the team should match the problems being solved. A senior person at one company might seem more like a junior at another. It's important to be honest about those kinds of realities I think. Transparency leads to the longest lasting and most harmonious organizations.</comment></comment>


A good resource for financial advice to share with people in their twenties? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/sama/status/934583956019798017 <comment><USER2> There is a real problem with asking 'to be given financial advice'. Before any meaningful talk can be had about setting common financial levers to get a result, what people really need is someone to sit down with and have an in- depth conversation about what life goals.

You can't really receive meaningful financial advice without taking position on the following:

1) Are you comfortable committing to a lifetime of working?

2) Is there reasonable scope for a high risk high reward venture? Eg, entrepreneurship, acting.

3) Do you determine your personal comfort in terms of how other people perceive it (expensive & common option), or do you use your own metrics?

4) What is your personal understanding of retirement?

Without that orientation, there isn't really a generic position to take on debt (it might be good or bad). There isn't a generic position on investments (might be good or bad). If someone is really being taken to the cleaners maybe there is a quick change to be made, but really "personal finance" is more about expectations and habits than knowledge ad howto guides.

The fundamentals of personal finance intuitively easy to grasp, to the point of absurdity - if you consistently spend more than you earn, you will run out of money. End of the story. If you spend a lot less (10-20% of your earnings go into savings), you will weather surprises easily. If you earn a stupid amount less (40%+ pre-tax earnings saved) you will have a very easy later life.

That all only scratches the surface of orienting a strategy, let alone the details of how the myriad investment options and retirement mechanisms work.

<comment><USER3> I don't think that's true at all. I think the main thing for young people to learn is that being frugal, avoding luxuries, is probably more important to financial well being than earning a lot of money. Also that as your income rises you need to be aware of (and fight against) the natural urge to spend (and often waste) more money. Need to fight against the urge to "spend what you earn" and develop habit of saving money every paycheck.

Our society encourages outrageous consumption of unnecessary goods at ridiculous prices. It's not hard to live much more cheaply if you can get over (difficult) psychological hurdles of (1) disregarding marketing that we're bombarded with every day, and (2) getting out of the competition for social status. What's more, you will tend to lead a happier life if you can do this. A good book that I don't think was mentioned in the linked page is "Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes".

Also, my mind has been boggled by what people seem to take from even good books on finances. For example, _The Millionaire Next Door_ is a good book. But I have friends who have read it, claim to believe it and try to adopt some of its advice, but the life they lead is ridiculously extravagant, not at all consistent with the book. Self-awareness of bad psychological attitudes towards money is not always easy.

<comment><USER4> > Also that as your income rises you need to be aware of (and fight against) > the natural urge to spend (and often waste) more money.

This is probably the most important thing to remember. For many years every time I received a raise, I just upped my savings/retirement by the same amount. My take home never changed, so it was easy to stay at the lifestyle I had become accustomed to.

Perspective is also important. I did not have much growing up, so while what I have now is modest it is way more than I ever thought I would have. Another trick is to listen to old rap ;) In the 90s it _was_ extravagant to have 50" TVs and game systems.

<comment><USER5> Plus now when you pager beeps people think you are a on-call doctor rather than a drug dealer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The personal finance subreddit for the US is very good

[https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/young_adult](https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/young_adult)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/early_career](https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/early_career)

And the rest of the links [https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/about](https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/about)

Also the UK one [https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpersonalfinance/wiki/lumpsuminves...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpersonalfinance/wiki/lumpsuminvestment)

<comment><USER7> That subreddit (at least the US one) is pretty terrible. I think there's some active shilling for credit card companies going on there. They also give a lot of objectively terrible advice when it comes to transportation, mortgages, and student loans.

The number of participants, and the source of those participants (reddit main), pretty much guarantees that the advice there can't/won't be high- quality, and will only get worse over time.

<comment><USER8> Im curious, what objectively terrible advice have you seen? I want to make sure I didn't pick some up without knowing it.

<comment><USER9> I think the bottom line is that most of the contributors to that subreddit are young and don't have much life experience, so they parrot the same one-size- fits-all financial advice.

An example is telling everyone, no matter their circumstances, to always buy used cars and learn how to fix them themselves. They give this advice to rich doctors as well as poor single mothers.

It also seems that many of the contributors have had bad experiences with debt, and now treat it as something to be avoided like a cancer. Debt is a useful tool for people who understand money. I remember a thread characterized by total incomprehension in most of the comments when someone said he would rather take a low-interest loan to buy a car than sell some of his stock and pay cash, because selling the stock would have triggered capital gains taxes far greater than the interest he would have paid on the car loan.

It's also very common in that subreddit to recommend that people who are in debt should basically live like monks for years, when living in a modest amount of comfort would only prolong repayment by a few months. Giving up your $14.99 monthly Netflix account is not going to make a big dent in your student loans over time -- over a 10-year repayment, that savings will add up to less than $2k. But the commenters there will pile on you if you point that out.

The thing that annoys me the most is the way people who have succeeded in tackling their debts are criticized for having high incomes, as though having a high income was something that just happened to them because of luck, rather than being a result of hard work and skill development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here is the only advice a person in their twenties needs to follow:

1\. Never pay interest on your credit cards. Pay off your credit card balance every month.

2\. Save at least 20 cents of every dollar you earn.

3\. Buy an S&P 500 index fund.

4\. Contribute as much as possible to your 401(k), if you have one, and at least enough to get the full employer match.

<comment><USER11> This is good advice for someone with financial security and a good salary. Which is sadly a fairly small % of people in their 20s. I'd add two higher priorities for people who don't have financial security:

1\. Take stock of your finances. Track all your expenses and income for a month or two. If you find your debt is growing make changes to bring your costs down.

2\. Pay off high interest debts like credit cards. Once this is complete, build up a rainy day fund of at least 3 months of expenses in a savings account. Consider this money hands-off except in emergencies.

After all this is implemented the person's finances are "stable" and they have a budget, and I think your advice is solid (but should be modified depending on salary). I'd also blend in some safer investments with the s&p 500 - perhaps using a robo advisor to manage the risk for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I was younger I enjoyed reading about finance and investing. The investment strategy I settled on was the three fund portfolio from:

[https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Three- fund_portfolio](https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Three-fund_portfolio)

and I haven't seen any reason to change this in ~10 years.

I'd recommend poking around that site to learn about the philosophy of index investing. (You might still want to actively invest after reading that, but you should probably first understand some of the reasons not to.)

<comment><USER13> Just a note for OP or others reading that "Bogleheads" are those that follow a certain value investing philosophy from Vanguard founder John Bogle.

For some basic investment literacy, it would not hurt to read "The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing" ([https://www.amazon.com/Bogleheads-Guide-Investing- Taylor-Lar...](https://www.amazon.com/Bogleheads-Guide-Investing-Taylor- Larimore/dp/0470067365)). I've also heard good things about John Bogle's "Little Book of Common Sense Investing" but haven't read it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The financial industry is actually designed to fleece from those without much financial knowledge. I should know, I used to be one of those shaving the sheep. I've worked with many brokers at Morgan and Merrill and they are generally ignorant sales people. Often they are actually deceitful.

Basically everything taught about finance and economics is a half lie and the half that isn't true is very difficult to understand. In economics ,Consider that private debt has no role in economics but is critical for understanding bank flows. So why do we teach that private debt has no effect under islm? Or consider in finance traditional options strategies of selling covered calls, on etfs. In the past few days you'd notice you lost a ton of money due to the way tracking error is manipulated vs options on the etfs. I was just talking to a billionaire who actually understood black scholes and didn't understand why he lost so much money on a hedge. Or consider how much growth has gone solely into a few tech stocks while people are still advising you to buy s&p. Realistically smart exposure to the underlying is Generally so much better. Finally on tax advice, especially on crypto, which I believe should be somewhere between 2-5 % of any young persons portfolio, no one suggested a charitable remainder trust and it ended up saving me huge amounts of cash and avoiding long term capital gains while allowing me to do well.

The financial industry is a business dominated by sales people. The people you will talk to with less then a half million In savings hardly know shit about Shit. It's like anything else, if you took the time to understand these financial products you'd realize they are powerful cool abstractions worth learning about

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure why you're getting down voted. Your point about finance professionals being sales people looking to fleece their customers is spot on.

Maybe because you're suggesting that people"invest" in the crypto bubble but the overall advice ("take time to learn about your investments") is sound. Plenty of young people on HN understand the underlying mechanisms of crypto- tokens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> When it comes to financial advice, I tell people the following:

1\. Live within your means. Spend less than you earn. But it's okay to take a vacation and splurge a little, too. Or if you need to buy something like a suit that stretches you a bit think of it as an investment for your career.

2\. Use credit cards responsibly. They can be great for their rewards programs, but you can easily get into trouble with them. Be very careful.

3\. From a financial perspective, it's never too early to think about retirement. Take advantange of your employer's 401k program if it's offered. Additionally, setup and contribute to a Roth IRA retirement fund through Vanguard or Fidelity.

4\. Buying a house makes sense as a long-term investment. Location will primarily determine how good of an investment it will be (which sometimes is hard to predict into the future).

5\. In terms of what to invest in, buy a low-cost index fund from Vanguard or Fidelity (e.g. S&P 500) and make monthly or quarterly contributions to it. And don't touch it (i.e. sell), especially in a downturn.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm surprised that no one has mentioned this: [http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/02/22/getting-rich- from-...](http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/02/22/getting-rich-from-zero-to- hero-in-one-blog-post/)

<comment><USER18> Cause he's a very divisive figure who claims to be retired but in fact is a handyman and blogger?

<comment><USER19> He did achieved financial independence years before he was blogging. This what I think is important and his advice note worthy.

I don't really care what he did after this point. The fact that he multiplied his net worth many times thanks to blogging doesn't mean he is financial independent thanks to it.

<comment><USER20> _> >He did achieved financial independence years before he was blogging._

He is selling shovels and jeans to gold rush miners. "Financial independence" when supplemented by the $$ he makes while telling people how he got rich surely makes a huge difference.

<comment><USER7> That isn't an argument for why his advice is bad or why he's a bad person, though. That's just an explanation of why people are jealous of him and an argument that people can't reliably repeat the success he's had with financial blogging.

He's not saying people can, though. He's giving financial advice based on something he achieved following a plan when he was making $67k/year, years before he ever even had the blog.

Also, shovels and jeans to gold rush miners?? Pretty sure people can still make $67k/year. Pretty sure people can also still make simple investments, live frugally, pay off their mortgage and retire early. It's simple math. Comparing that to taking advantage of gold rush miners is quite a stretch.

<comment><USER20> "I'm retired" while you're blogging /making a lot of money by saying you're retired, is profitable but fishy. Like getting rich by writing a book about how you got rich.

Yeah, a Google /FB /x employee can sacrifice for 10 years and then retire, at least outside USA. Live like immigrants that send all their money back to their home country, do.

<comment><USER21> He does a breakdown of his household spending each year and it's around $30,000. His house had been paid for in full and he had ~$800,000 invested at the time of retirement. The math works out without income from blogging and handiwork.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The one advantage folks in their 20s have is time.

I actually don't think software engineering is the best career (in financial / lifestyle terms) for someone who might also excel in business, finance, law, or medicine. But there is one _hack_ to our industry:

You can make a good salary starting in your early to mid 20s, with only a bachelor's degree or less, while most of your peers will still be in school for years, then paying off loans, and finally beginning at the bottom of the corporate ladder.

Now unfortunately, by 35 or so, most of your smart friends will have caught up - paid off their loans, and now be earning similar high incomes. And software engineers tend to hit a glass ceiling, run into ageism, etc.

But having lived frugally while making over six figures for over a decade, you can have accumulated $500K - $1M, and if you forget about that money, can coast into early retirement by 50 or earlier, or take career risks that others can't afford. A million in net worth at 40 opens up a lot options.

</comment><comment><USER23> Spend less than you make. Max out your 401k and IRA. Invest in index funds.

<comment><USER24> What will be interesting to see is whether this actually stays good advice. Massive amounts of money (trillions) has been flowing into these passive ETFs and index funds -- I would assume this creates some distortions in the financial system.

<comment><USER7> Definitely interesting to think about.

My current take is that even if the tiniest minority of activity exists outside of low-turnover ETFs, continued advancements in automated algorithmic trading (whether it's ML or regression or something that hasn't been invented yet) will get us closer to the perfectly efficient market and the only impact to low-turnover ETFs will be reduced volatility.

Another possibility is that so much money gets parked in passive ETFs that the valuation of the indexed stocks becomes more tied to the influx of money than to the underlying enterprise value, then once the influx of money slows down the stocks revert to enterprise value and start to consistently depreciate, triggering a massive sell-off. If that happened it'd probably be bigger than the subprime mortgage crisis, right?

What's your take?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "The Automatic Millionaire" by David Bach, [https://m.barnesandnoble.com/w/automatic-millionaire- david-b...](https://m.barnesandnoble.com/w/automatic-millionaire-david- bach/1100304420)

Recommends automatically paying a share of your income each month into index funds, and gives recommendations on how to distribute this across risk categories according to your life situation.

<comment><USER26> This book really opened my eyes to the importance of savings. Really glad I picked it up when I was 18.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> /r/personalfinance's Prime Directive:

[https://i.imgur.com/lSoUQr2.png](https://i.imgur.com/lSoUQr2.png)

</comment><comment><USER28> Saving or investing is the only way to get rich.

I do both, since I'm a develop, investing is also trying out projects. I don't want to calculate my ROI om that part just yet. But the rest is fine, 16% on stocks last halve year, 200% on crypto currency ( wouldn't recommend though) and my own online shop which is a nice monthly extra on top of my full time wage.

PS. I never had to spend anything of my full time wage :)

<comment><USER28> I would like to add that I only invest 10% of my assets now. 2 weeks ago it was only 3%, then I realized the halve year test of investing was succeeded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Learning about finances in your twenties is a bit late, but better late than never.

What's worked for me and others I know is to get out of debt and stay out of debt. This guy has a reasonable program to do that: [https://www.daveramsey.com/get-started/debt](https://www.daveramsey.com/get- started/debt)

<comment><USER30> I agree, staying out of debt should be a priority, but how do you reconcile that with buying a house, which around here cost on average around £226k?

I would love to not need a mortgage and have to work more to pay the interest but what other choice is there?

<comment><USER29> Econ 101 says never borrow money on a depreciating investment. A house may appreciate, so it may make sense to buy one.

A house can be a blessing or a curse. You should first decide if you want to own one, regardless of the economic pros/cons. Owning a house means you always have a job to do. If that doesn't appeal to you, maybe get a condo?

In the US, the best approach is usually to get what's called a conventional mortgage. That means putting 20% down. There are some good reasons for going this route. First, it makes you prove to yourself you have the discipline to put money aside for a house, without actually having the responsibility of a house hanging over you. Secondly, its better financially as you can usually get a better rate and don't have to pay private mortgage insurance.

In addition to the 20%, you really need 6 months of money set aside in case something happens. The last thing you want is to default on a loan because something unexpected happened and you have no income for a few months.

One of the worst things that happens is someone goes and gets a house with 0% down and without the real financial wherewithal to weather a financial storm. The house quickly becomes a curse when the unexpected happens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> IMO most "personal finance advisors" miss the career progression thing.

\- on one hand, it's ridiculous to seriously recommend young professionals (in their 20s) to long-term save 20+% pretax income if they don't have substantial assets (e.g. their parents' house) or if they are not in the top 5% of their age group (think finance in London). I bet most millennials don't have the kind of income that allows that _and_ having a life quality comparable to their peers. In London and I suspect in SF it's very common to have 30% of your pre-tax income to go to rent; taxes will eat another 30%, groceries and eating out is another 10-20%. What's left is measly 20-30% of income that must be divided between shopping (clothing, hobbies, car, gadgets, whatever) and long-term saving. If we throw in absolute income numbers and property prices, it all comes to "question any expense, live in misery and MAYBE you'll be able to afford a downpayment in a decade".

\- on the other hand, a lot of people can expect to double, triple or quadruple their income in a decade of their career. If not, on the scale of a decade it's possible to change the career.

So maybe there is a point where one should focus on earning more instead of saving. Maybe it's more important to have that expensive hobby that reduces your stress levels and allows to work harder.

Maybe the only right kind of advice is "raise your income and don't get into debt".

</comment><comment><USER32> This:

[http://www.mymoneyblog.com/dilberts-one-page-guide-to- everyt...](http://www.mymoneyblog.com/dilberts-one-page-guide-to-everything- financial.html)

</comment><comment><USER33> I've seen the "invest in index funds" repeated over and over, but almost always coming from people in the US. I don't understand enough about investing to understand when the advice is useful globally, or only locally. I also don't really know where to get that knowledge, because most explanations don't say whether they apply outside of the US. What are some good source for someone based in Europe (Spain specifically, if it make any difference)?

<comment><USER34> "invest in index funds" is a heuristic for "own a tiny share of everything, at market price".

The mantra is "try to be average, at very low management fees", that way, your performance will always be average, and never _worse_ than average.

<comment><USER12> If you get average gains/losses with below average costs your performance would be above average.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Saving and Investing. Doing really good with both _should_ bring you to a very decent standard of living. Going being that to become wealthy? You need Luck.

Both million times easier said then done.

Learn about survivors bias. Basically all the things these successful people told you are only guide lines, not rules.

This is sounding rather a lot like Zen's thinking.

</comment><comment><USER36> Anecdotal, but some of the 20-somethings I work with exhibit a kind of helplessness or fatalism about finances. These are smart, well-educated people who still haven't signed up for the company's 401k program, and don't invest in the stock market because they "don't know how to buy stocks", even though I tell them they should be doing this at least once a month. These aren't people who are living paycheck to paycheck or spending profligately as far as I can tell.

</comment><comment><USER37> Searching "financial advice" on HN itself, you will get this item: This 4×6 index card has all the financial advice you'll ever need (washingtonpost.com) 155 points by bcn 1532 days ago| 249 comments [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6396352](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6396352)

</comment><comment><USER38> "The Richest Man in Babylon", which was recommended by a HNer (amongst other more advanced books) several years ago.

<comment><USER39> God please no. This book must be the most overrated piece of junk in the financial advice genre. There are literally only two things in the book that get repeated 50 times over 100 pages:

\- invest 10% of your income

\- invest only in things you understand or when you happen to know someone who understands them

There is zero more insightful content in this book. And even these two insights are totally lacking, because they won't tell you what investment makes sense these days.

<comment><USER40> Although the key lessons can be written in a few bullet points, the story helps the reader internalize the teachings.

I think we misunderstimate the impact a few fundamental lessons on finance can do to a person's life. Especially when the person is oblivious to it.

I've seen it first hand multiple times now. I give away this book all the time and and have seen nothing but good come from it.

<comment><USER41> It's rare to see the word misunderestimate in the wild. Mind if I ask was this a mistake, or intentional irony, or is this word has just made its way into the general vocabulary now?

And to be less irrelevant, I do agree with you that a simple rubric that can be internalized by compelling stories can be very powerful in a person's life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Just write a simple financial simulation in e.g. Python.

You can view saving as zero-risk investment, and then find the optimal distribution of income over a number of investments with different risks/returns.

<comment><USER43> > You can view saving as zero-risk investment

I wish I had bought index funds instead of keeping most of my savings in GBP before the Brexit referendum...

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Can I add, for AU, the Barefoot Investor: [https://barefootinvestor.com](https://barefootinvestor.com)

</comment><comment><USER45> Ramit Sethi's _I Will Teach You to be Rich_ is literally this book.

</comment><comment><USER46> There's one realisation I came to myself in my early twenties, which I think most people will when they're introduced to the time value of money, compound interest and savings over time. And you'll find a whole bunch of people talking about it in one form or another, e.g. buffett.

And it's quite silly, because the examples take things to the extreme, but there's also a lot of truth to it. It goes a little bit like this:

If you do a bit of toothpaste research, you'll find the active ingredients (i.e., the stuff that matters to your teeth) in a tube of $1 toothpaste and $6 toothpaste are pretty much similar. In fact, you can find toothpaste at $0.2 per oz and $2 per oz. Given you brush twice a day using 0.2 oz, that's an annual expenditure of $30 to $300, depending on the type you use. Let's be conservative and say you can save $200 if you buy cheap toothpaste in a little bit of bulk, instead of expensive toothpaste.

Average life expectancy is about 80 right now. If you're 20, that means you'll potentially save $200 for 60 years. That's 12 thousand dollars in toothpaste saved, simply by making a conscious decision at age 20 to spend 15 minutes looking up whether cheap toothpaste is effective, and which one to buy.

Related to this is the time value of money. i.e., if you look at the past 60 years of S&P500's return, include dividends (reinvested), and adjust for inflation, you'll find 6.5% returns. Let's be conservative and low-ball that at 4%, assuming taxes, other crap and potentially lower future returns. $1 invested today at 4% for 60 years would compound to 1.04^60 = $10.50. As that's inflation adjusted, it ought to mean your purchasing power has tenfolded.

If you combine the savings of toothpaste with long-term investments, you'll find your toothpaste purchasing behavior can easily be worth tens of thousands of dollars.

Now note, I chose toothpaste because there's no effort or quality-of-life choice to be made there. Buffett enjoys using coffee as an example as saving a $3 morning and evening cup is much more profound than saving 10 cents on toothpaste each day. But it does require you to skip coffee, or make it yourself. However trivial that may be to some, that requires respectively discipline and mental effort to others. But things like toothpaste should be a no-brainer.

It's up to anyone in their twenties to consider what actually matters to them, there's tons of such decisions to be made. The brand of toothpaste? Likely not. Brewing your own coffee? Probably not a big deal either. Skipping lunch with friends because it saves money? Probably not a great idea. But even there, being cognisant of the cost of such eating-out behaviour may spark you to invite a friend over for a self-made lunch. The point isn't to save as much money, the point is to allocate your money to where it's actually valuable. That's not toothpaste. It may be working less and spending more time on a hobby, with friends or family.

</comment><comment><USER47> bitcoins!!

<comment><USER28> Although the ROI is great now, I wouldn't ever suggest it to others. I had a ROI OF 16% in stocks. I still believe it's safer than BTC

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Fool.com , [https://www.fool.com/retirement/2016/12/19/the-perfect- retir...](https://www.fool.com/retirement/2016/12/19/the-perfect-retirement- strategy-for-20-somethings.aspx)</comment>


Animated ash cloud over Europe: Apr 14-18 - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/flMMU.gif

<comment><AUTHOR> While it's impressive, I wonder if this is visualization of a simulation, or if it reflects actual atmospheric measurements.</comment>


Ask HN: How do I fire someone who has sensitive data on their personal laptop? - <AUTHOR> I'm in a bit of pickle.
I need to let someone go from my startup (20 people, millions of users, funding) who was here since the very beginning.
He's been using his personal laptop and has at least one copy of our production database on it that he uses for analytics and data mining.
He won't take the firing well (I think) and I worry that he might leak some of that information. It could be company-killer.
How should I ensure the data is deleted and mitigate this risk? <comment><USER3> I had a similar issue; here's my recommended approach:

1) Tell everyone (don't single him out) that by the request of a client, you're double-downing on internal security and implementing a set of policies and procedures (P&P) for minimizing risk (I personally used HITRUST as the P&P standard).

2) Part of the P&P entails an audit by the designated Security Officer (in this case, me), in which I personally oversaw the deletion of all production data from every personal and non-personal machine. No one individual suspected I was singling him/her out, as I was doing this across the board, but admittedly, my intention was to go of one individual who had his hands on very sensitive data.

3) Make him and every employee sign-off on the P&P Handbook, in which there's a clear clause that in case any personally identifiable data is on his/her machine, he/she is fully liable for the implications of that data getting leaked. Any such employee will be complicit in any criminal proceedings.

4) Fire him.

<comment><USER4> This assumes he doesn't backup his laptop. Beware that there may be other copies of the data.

Also (assuming your soon-to-be-ex employee is smart) I doubt the threat of criminal proceedings will have much effect. If multiple people have access to the data you'd have difficulty proving which one of them leaked it.

<comment><USER5> If he's smart, he wouldn't even consider leaking any data he may have access too.

<comment><USER6> Right.

Because an individual defending himself against civil AND criminal proceedings will get very expensive very fast. In addition, any competitor would be very cautious about touching that data if the guy approaches them trying to sell it, because see figure (1).

So the only avenue remaining is selling the PII to spammers and identity thieves, which will still land him at figure (1) if they get caught and roll over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a "people problem" not a technology one.

Meaning even if they wipe the laptop right in front of you, that is meaningless, since they could have backups, a copy on their home machine, and so on. So really your goal here isn't about a single laptop, it is about trying to get a former potentially disgruntled employee to do what you want after they are terminated.

I'd argue a payoff is your only viable way. You put a bag of money in front of them, and then have them sign a contract that they will destroy all company data, and won't redistribute it, or they have to pay you XYZ.

Then just hope that the potential for getting sued for XYZ and the bag of money will keep them in line long enough for the data not to be as key to your business.

As others have suggested you could also "promote" them away from daily access to that data and then terminate them further down the line when the data expires. But that would likely be more costly in the medium to long term.

<comment><USER8> "have them sign a contract that they will destroy all company data" :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You know those complicated policies that big enterprises have, the ones startups love to mock? This is why they have them. :(

You have two classes of tools... carrot and stick. His stick is much bigger than yours. He can destroy your company, you can sue him for it with whatever you have left after the company is destroyed. So stick is a problem.

Carrots may work better... ongoing stock options, contingent on destruction of the data, certified by an expert and an oath? Basically bribe him.

Yet another alternative - do you _have_ to fire him? Why? Maybe do a Peter Principle thing, and "promote" him to a less responsible position, maybe something where he has no reason to touch production data anymore? Or start a new project, and put him in charge of it?

<comment><USER10> Yeah, this is the sort of thing that scares me about putting trust in signing up for a startup's service. Somewhere out there, there's a startup that has millions of user's personal information stored on a soon-to-be-disgruntled- former-employee's personal laptop.

That's terrifying.

<comment><USER11> I'm currently developing a side project that stores medical data, a big chunk of the design work I've done so far is how to work on systems where you never see production data (things like accurate faking of data, seeding correctly etc).

Just yanking a copy of production to a local machine is ridiculously and horrifically common at pretty much everywhere I've worked.

<comment><USER12> You don't have to fake data in order to analyze production data safely. It is possible to anonymize personal information, although it often requires a security expert to make sure you're doing it correctly.

<comment><USER9> Anonymizing PII is actually incredibly difficult. The problem is that the same things that create the valuable uniqueness you need to operate on the data are the things that are most sensitive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The bottom line is that you probably can't ensure it's deleted.

Consider this: I have at least two backup mechanisms I use regularly (Dropbox, Time Machine) and I don't even think about them at this point. Even if you watched him delete it, it's pretty likely that data already exists outside of his laptop, if he's even reasonably diligent about his machine.

So you're left with a few options:

* Trust

If you're firing him for a good reason, and can validate that reason in _his_ mind, you can choose to trust that he won't be a douche

* Trust with seeds

Before firing make sure the data has something uniquely traceable to him. Data that only his export gets; dummy users, dummy data, something steganographic so if your trust is violated you can identify the breach source.

Your options are limited, AFAICT. Once data exists in the wild it's essentially impossible to maintain any semblance of control. Your only real hope is that he's honorable. Even in the worst of circumstances I'd never breach trust in that way.

Especially when there are much more insidious, passive-aggressive, entertaining ways to bring down a company.

<comment><USER14> The options are not limited to trust, enforcing a ISO27001 in the company obligates the worker to give the data. And this implies that you can trace the flux of data, in and out, from the company. If the data ever leaks, you know where it came from.

<comment><USER13> Except that (a) "obligating" someone to do something is useless, because it doesn't mean they _will_ , and (b) OP already stated data integrity wasn't maintained.

<comment><USER14> You are right. It is a complex issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In the firm I work for, we deal with much secret information and many paranoid clients. Generally when someone is terminated we give them a severance contingent on signature of a pretty ironclad non-disparagement letter and a further reinforcement of existing NDA. You could extend this concept to this situation, crafting a letter such that if he _does_ ever leak that data, his liability is assured and his incentives are aligned with yours.

This is a time to spend a bit of money and speak to your external counsel. They will have a good solution for you.

<comment><USER13> NDA and non-disparagement are radically different things; I have zero issues with NDA, I'd take umbrage at not being able to say a place I used to work at sucks.

<comment><USER16> Eh, when they're dangling several months salary in front of you, signing a non-disparagement is a pretty hard thing to pass up.

Regardless it's pretty juvenile and self-destructive behavior to go around disparaging an employer for firing you to begin with. Getting a cash bonus for the self-censorship a rational adult should be exhibiting anyhow, is not such a bad thing

<comment><USER17> If you work in a terrible place but do your best and just don't fit it in you should have a right to say what you didn't like about the places culture, no?

It keeps you from posting honest glassdoor reviews (no cons/negatives and zero faith glassdoor wouldn't release your info on discovery), telling friends what it was like to work there, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The laptop is really a bit of a red herring. If the person is the sort that would be inclined to retaliate against the company, they could have taken a copy of the pii whether or not the laptop was in the picture.

You could offer them payment for signing a severance agreement. You would do this in recognition of their significant contributions to date. The agreement would reiterate that they are bound by their existing NDA, explicitly state that they have fully deleted any company info/files that they may have had in their possession, acknowledge that disclosure of any private company info could have significant negative impact on the company, and could possibly include non-disparagement wording.

</comment><comment><USER19> (sarcasm, but true story, afaik:) You could do what I understand a former employer of mine did: fire the employee, then call the state police and report that the employee "stole" company property by not wiping source code from a personal laptop as was demanded by the company at the time of firing. Police confiscated laptop, and employee was forced to hire counsel to get it back.

I imagine it was effective at encouraging the employee to delete the data, but at the great cost of advertising to all employees that we were all viewed as dirt.

If there's a lesson to take from this, it's that when you're in a position of power, you should use sticks carefully if at all. But I hope that many (including the OP) already learned that lesson as a child.

(Thankfully, I was able to leave the company myself not long after.)

<comment><USER20> This seems a very risky option, if he has a copy of the data and you are harassing him this way, there is a good chance the data is going to be released somehow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> First of all, I'd suggest addressing the issue company wide. Before firing, tell everyone pii outside of the office is unacceptable. Figure out a way you want to deal with that that lets people keep working, whatever it's work through a VPN, anonimizing data, or what not. Address it as the privacy issues it is, and ask all developers to acknowledge and agree to the policy change. It might smell funny to some, but it's not an unreasonable policy.

After that, offer increased severance as other posters have suggested.

</comment><comment><USER22> Have you confronted him about the fact that it's probably not a good idea that he has this data on his personal laptop? How did the data end up there in the first place? Why doesn't he have a work laptop?

How long have you known/how did you learn? Has it maybe been a "public secret" for a while, and you tacitly accepted it? If so, you probably can't fire him for it.

"Hey, dude, it struck me the other day that it's a pretty bad risk for the company that you have that database on your personal laptop -- do me a favour, pick out a top-of-the-line ThinkPad/MBP, expense it, and put the DB on an encrypted volume -- and make sure you delete the DB from your laptop and any backup you have. Thanks, man!"

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I should also note here that I know that the first mistake I made was allowing this situation to happen in the first place. We have policies now, but we didn't push this employee to adhere to them at the time he joined.

Help?

<comment><USER23> I have never been in your position, and I dont envy the pickle you're in - <USER2> I HAVE had customer data (possibly sanitized or partially sanitized, I never peeked) at various times and I always viewed it more as a liability than leverage!

If any of that data were ever to be released, it wouldnt be hard to point the finger at the few people who had access (and especially motive). It would be incredibly short-sighted of him to release anything.

This thread has some great advice, but in addition to that it sounded like hes a friend to you? Perhaps soon after he is let go you can have a word with him as a human instead of as a business and just say: "Look, thanks for your hard work, I really appreciate what you've brought to the table. Be aware that people here at the company will notice if you release or reuse anything you worked on here so you might want to make any copies of work stuff you still have disappear. I know its not good timing but youre sitting in a timebomb and I dont want it to blow up under you"

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What do you hope to achieve by firing him? Admittedly storing PII on a personal laptop is unacceptable in most places, but I'm curious:

(i) do you have a policy and associated training so that people know what they should and shouldn't do,

(ii) was this employee ever required to use his personal laptop for company work (e.g. pre-funding)?,

(iii) was there ever a time in your company's past when you and others would have considered this situation to be OK, at least temporarily?

If he's doing things the way your company always did things, and hasn't been informed that you need to apply a higher standard, then why move immediately to firing him? Why not just ask him why he's storing the data that way, and figure out together how he can do his job whilst accessing the data in a safe way?

It's not clear whether you're trying to

(a) set an example for other employees to help ensure compliance with an existing policy,

(b) ensure that this particular personal laptop does not become the cause of a leak, or

(c) something else?

</comment><comment><USER25> But, why doesn't this guy have a work laptop?

I have a work laptop my company provided. My wife has a work laptop her company provided. Everyone in both of our companies have work laptops provided by the employer.

Plus there are policies in place with this. We have agreements that all work is done on the work laptop and nothing personal. We signed saying we agreed. When we leave they take the laptop, in its entirety. It is also encrypted and automatically backed up. They also know if we have plugged in ANY external device like a flash drive and or external HD.

So not buying a work dedicated laptop for this guy, I think will cost you now that you care about what he might do with it.

<comment><USER26> Maybe the guy just wanted to use his personal laptop rather than set up a new one, and it wasn't a decision from OP to save money.

<comment><USER27> If a company gives you a laptop to work on, and says that you can't put company data on personal devices, then in no situation should the employee be able to say 'I don't wanna'. Because that's how you end up in this exact situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Possibly don't post to HN.

<comment><USER29> Right? These anonymous advice posts always worry me for the OPs. Surely, the third party(s) in question read HN to?

<comment><USER30> i would say this is fairly anonymous post, there is little if any identifying information and given that this is HN there are probably loads of readers who have this sort of info on their laptop.

<comment><USER31> Yeah.... Until the OP starts following any of the advice in this thread!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> An imperfect solution might be to buy his laptop for enough money to allow him get a new laptop and the licensed software on the laptop that he purchased. Doing this at the time of dismissal would make it more likely to regain control of the data. [Edit add] Also, give him opportunity to copy _his_ data off the hard drive. This would have to be supervised, obviously.

Addresses:

* A delete may not delete the PII because it could be in multiple places and deletes don't really delete unless you do a secure delete that truly overwrites the deleted data.

* Gives him a monetary incentive to cooperate.

Does not address:

* Any backups that he might have that are out of your control.

<comment><USER33> Secure delete has become quite difficult to achieve, if it is on a SSD then you may only be safe with an ATA command, but not all drives will even do that right[1]. It is even hard to be sure that you have over-written every block anyway, due to over-provisioning.

Filesystems can also make this quite difficult (and that is without considering snaphots), most journalling and log-structured filesystems break the old shred [2] program for instance.

[1] [https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/fast11/tech/full_papers/...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/fast11/tech/full_papers/Wei.pdf) [2] man shred

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This particular problem is quite common in this stage of your business. You have to cover legally all the data that might be leaked from some other places and when you are completely sure that there can't be any other source of leakage, ask him politely the return of that data to adhere to a higher standard of information security. This has to be a very delicate request. I have been both requested and requester, good luck dealing with this.

</comment><comment><USER34> Do the security p&p thing.

One other thing that I haven't hear yet is that you could do is introduce "identifying easter eggs" into the data if you can. Sorry, not sure what the right word is, but it's a proven technique in certain high level negotiations. You make it easy for this employee to obtain an ever so slightly modified recent version of the data. The modifications are minimal, but allow to identify him as the source of the leak.

Document the easter eggs in a registered letter to yourself. Wait until fairly sure the "custom" version of the data is on employee's machine. Then sue if he leaks.

</comment><comment><USER35> Work on the 'take the firing well' part. Letting someone go despite whatever issues are at hand should be a way to look for a win-win situation. A former staff member that feels let down or mistreated will talk about your company in negative terms, which for a company of 20 people is going to be a fairly significant risk even with the PII.

An ideal situation is that you're getting rid of a B player that isn't a good fit for your company's future. You want him to talk to A players he knows positively and suggest that they would work well at your company despite it not being right for him.

</comment><comment><USER36> In addition to all the other great advise here, look at things like source code, contracts, customer lists, etc.

All the trade secret, confidential information.

If you have an auditor (CPA firms do this as part of a due diligence) that can do a procedures and practices audit - that firm can act as the "bad guy" that flags things that need to be addressed.

You know of one problem, there probably are others.

For example, bank account information? What is the wire transfer procedure? Can someone break in to a computer, login to the company's bank account and wire the money to Romania?

</comment><comment><USER37> An improved severance package in exchange for NDA.

</comment><comment><USER38> Do you have "Bring Your Own Device" policies currently in place? Even though the work on the computer started before the policies may have been in place, you would be able to enforce a device wipe or clean-up with those procedures. Your next best option would be an NDA, since legally you could pursue action if they did use the system against you or for their own benefit. Technically, ignorance of policy doesn't excuse actions; that excuse flies like a lead balloon in court.

The other question might be, why are you letting go of a seasoned member of your team? If there is someone their junior then why not them, or check with the person you're looking at letting go and see if they'd be willing to take a pay cut to stay part of the team (assuming it's payroll related and not behavioural).

Lastly, if it's PII, the legal ramifications for the employee should be enough of a deterrent that they wouldn't go about disclosing the information in a manner that could be tied to them, and most people don't have and can't find the connections to "sell" the data.

</comment><comment><USER39> Has this been addressed directly with the employee? It hardly seems worth firing someone over.

<comment><USER40> It doesn't sound like he's being fired because he has the data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> You can only rely on his self interest. If he does something that harms the company, he will be ruining his own reputation. Most rational people won't want to do that.

If he's not a rational person, then it becomes a PR problem of how to handle the aftermath.

</comment><comment><USER42> If he violated company policy by moving PII to his laptop, then the company may punish and/or prosecute him. But if there was no consistent policy then one must be formulated and all employees brought to heel without recriminations.

If he demonstrably violated company policy then the company nonetheless may be responsible for his past and continuing actions. In this case I would also hire a knowledgeable private investigator to help determine what he might have done with the information.

If you are responsible for allowing the situation, or in allowing it to continue, then you may, in the end, be terminated or required to resign. Prepare yourself. Perhaps you should consult an attorney.

</comment><comment><USER43> Get an employment lawyer involved so you don't get sued for the termination or the exposure of PII. Answer is longer than appropriate to post here.

</comment><comment><USER44> How about you offer to buy them a new work laptop so they don't need to continue using their existing personal laptop for work.

Also do this for every other employee that is using a personal laptop for work.

Make it a nice laptop too.

In the grand scheme of things this will cost less than losing the company.

</comment><comment><USER45> It sounds like he's far more likely to delete the data if you simply ask him to do so. Why do you need to fire him? By firing him you're just losing any control over him that you may currently have.

</comment><comment><USER46> If he took it home with him, you can't ensure the data is deleted. Could be on an external drive at home.

</comment><comment><USER47> Talk to counsel. In my state, you'd be obliged to report this as a data breach.

</comment><comment><USER48> If he was there from the beginning, is he actually a part-owner of the business? Are you sure that you can legally fire him? Honestly does his analytics work provide more benefit to the company than your work output? Are you sure it wouldn't really be better for _you_ to resign?

</comment><comment><USER49> Generous severance.

</comment><comment><USER50> civilly?

</comment><comment><USER51> Why would they take the firing poorly? Why fire the person at all? If you trusted them enough to work on critical data and systems they must have been doing their job well.

If this person _wants_ to hurt you they will. There's nothing you can do to prevent it. All the legal protection and fake policies are not going to prevent this person from creating multiple copies of the data and releasing it a year later.

Your best bet is to make the person happy enough to let the betrayal go. Such as a huge severance package.

If the person is anything like me, they will have backups as well as documentation and copies of all conversations that have ever taken place in email, Slack etc.

If they want to hurt you they can and will and the data is probably not the only way they can do that. At the end of the day don't fuck people over or they will fuck you over.

Be as nice as you can and make sure you are justified in firing this person or else they are going to fuck you.

</comment><comment><USER52> Not the most honest route... but you could 'accidentally' damage it, buy him a nicer one as a loaner, and send the damaged one to the shredder.</comment>


Researchers trigger insulin production in diabetic mice - <AUTHOR> http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2008/01/08/protein_power_researchers_trigger_insulin_production_in_diabetic_mice.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This basically is a cure for diabetes. Basically, part of the protein acts as a recognition site for transporters into the cell and into the nucleus. I assume the protein itself is a transcription factor which will activate genes required for cell differentiation. This will trigger stem cells or partially differentiated cells into becoming insulin producing cells.

The effects of this treatment should be permanent. That is unless they get destroyed by the same mechanism that destroyed the original insulin producing cells. Even so, as the article states, an infrequent injection will cause more to be produced.

It's a very interesting approach. I hope more research goes into designing custom versions of these, as I imagine this can be used in other applications in place of gene therapy. Current transcription factors can probably be used with the addition of the signal peptide appended to the end to allow for transport.</comment>


Oral sex producing unstoppable bacteria - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-40520125 <comment><USER2> Title seems unclear, should probably read "antibiotics use causing antibiotic resistant bacteria". Guess that wouldn't get BBC as many clicks though, so I get why they chose that title.

TL;DR : gonorrhea develops antibiotic resistance. People using condoms less because the fear of HIV/AIDS has declined.

<comment><USER3> > People using condoms less because the fear of HIV/AIDS has declined.

I would really like to see actual data on this statement. HIV is unbelievably difficult to transmit via oral sex, and condom use for oral sex was always very rare, even among high-risk groups during the height of the HIV epidemic.

<comment><USER2> I agree I'd like to see the data as well, the statement seemed surprising to me in the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reality minus the garbage clicky headline: Antibiotic overuse and resistance is causing unstoppable bacteria.

Why there isn't a global effort to develop new antibiotics is somewhat shocking to me. It is already a major public health problem and will get worse if new antibiotics are not developed. Governments need to incentivize new antibiotic develop heavily, or invest in it heavily themselves.

<comment><USER5> "Governments need to incentivize new antibiotic develop heavily"... Governments overloaded by debts must invest billions just to allow people to enjoy their "rights" to free sex... U are deluded, wake up 'cause it's over: USE CONDOM!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _She said: "When you use antibiotics to treat infections like a normal sore throat, this mixes with the Neisseria species in your throat and this results in resistance."_

Tragedy of the commons.

Also who actually gets antibiotics for a sore throat? Apart from strep and other more serious infections I've never heard of such a thing.

<comment><USER7> It's not unheard of for doctors to prescribe antibiotics "in case it is strep" before the test comes back.

<comment><USER8> I get strep regularly (2-3 times per year). I've never once waited more than a few minutes for the swab test done in-office to confirm it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It should be well know that HIV is viral, gonorrhea & chlamydia are both bacterial diseases, so if hard times are coming defend yourself: USE CONDOM!

</comment><comment><USER9> Startup idea: A convenient way to test a new couple for STDs. Possibly in conjunction with an app like Tinder.

<comment><USER10> There are numerous home std tests

[https://mylabbox.com](https://mylabbox.com)

<comment><USER9> It's $500: [https://www.mylabbox.com/product/love-box-std-testing-for- co...](https://www.mylabbox.com/product/love-box-std-testing-for-couples/)

I wonder if it's possible to compete on price without sacrificing accuracy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well. That sucks.

<comment><USER12> Yes, but I think it's trying to say stop sucking.</comment></comment>


How we launched our website refresh in 5 days - <AUTHOR> http://blog.appblade.com/news/2012/03/the-making-of-a-microsite-in-5-days/

<comment><USER2> This was a really great experience in both creating an adaptive layout and using Bootstrap 2 as sensible defaults, rather than the typical reset stylesheets or Plain Jane Bootstrap sites.

We still have a lot of work to do and we have to pull the redesign into other parts of the application, but we wanted to stick to our timebox. Most users bounce off the homepage anyway, so we opted to just ship it. Aiming for perfection is an excellent way not to get anything done.</comment>


Show HN: 3D-Rendering Tool - <AUTHOR> http://colormass.com/app <comment><AUTHOR> In the last 2-3 years we (colormass) have developed a 3D-rendering tool that is geared towards photographers/interior designers or anyone who is interested in playing around with new rendering tools. Main difference compared to other solutions is that we put a lot of emphasize on 3D content (so you can create photorealistic 3D renderings without actually creating a 3D model or a 3D material yourself). The first, private version of the application is ready and would really appreciate if somebody would like to give it a try!

<comment><USER2> How is this different from "we have some artists and a couple of copies of maya/max/blender/whatever and we'll build and render product shots for you"?

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the main differences is that it is completely in the cloud (which required the most effort on the development side). The "we have some artists" approach has some serious limitations if you start growing the number of artists and number of 3D scenes that they are working on (and turns into a complete mess if you take versioning, continuous asset updates, and remote work into account). The other difference would be the content: that we are continuously uploading products and materials (which our users can access from the public library), and which you would have to build from scratch or source them from somewhere with the above approach.</comment></comment></comment>


Trying to solve Stripe the bank returned the decline code do_not_honor - <AUTHOR> Currently, we use Stripe Singapore and seeing lot of code do_not_honor errors(loss of 5% of revenue every month). This is happening for recurring accounts.<p>Anyone else ran in to similar issue? <comment><USER2> `do_not_honor` is a code that's returned by the bank—it's super annoying because banks don't provide insight into why they're declining. The best way to find out is for the customer to ask their bank.

If you need any help analyzing declines, feel free to get in touch with us at support.stripe.com/contact</comment>


NYTimes is keeping analytics on pay-wall hacks. - <AUTHOR> http://d.pr/I2OG

<comment><AUTHOR> It's interesting, they're even checking for what kind of hack is being used:

      function checkGateway(){
        var overlay = document.getElementById("overlay");
        if (typeof fulltext !== "undefined") {
          notify("NYTClean");
        } else if (!overlay || overlay.style.display == "none") {
          notify("PaywallSmasher");
        } else {
          setTimeout(checkGateway, 1000);
        }
      }

      function notify(typeOfHack){
        if (NYTD.UPTracker && typeof NYTD.UPTracker.track === "function") {
          NYTD.UPTracker.track({
            eventType : "domHack",
            baseUrl : "//up.nytimes.com/?",
            data : {
              type : typeOfHack
            }
          });
        }
      }

</comment><comment><USER2> The easiest hack: just clear your browser cache when you close your browser.

I've read way more than 20 articles in the past 2 days, all of them accessed from the NYT homepage itself. Whatever it is that they're "doing", it clearly can't overcome privacy settings that prevent permanent cookies.</comment>


John Colter - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Colter <comment><USER2> I grew up in Montana, not far from one of the routes Lewis and Clarke took through that state. The legend of John Colter is still alive there. Every year, Montanans hold the John Colter run to commemorate his escape.

[http://winddrinkers.org/trailhead/races/john- colter/](http://winddrinkers.org/trailhead/races/john-colter/)

<comment><USER3> I've done that race, it's awesome. Wading across the river when your legs are shot from the run is especially exciting...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Never heard of him or or story. But reading about his escape I immediately thought of the run in apocalypto.

</comment><comment><USER5> Flynn treasure. The poem basically says it's at some damn or waterfall. Would be cool if the spot was chosen from the tale of the 'original great American adventurers'

<comment><USER6> _Dam_</comment></comment>


What That Election Probability Means - <AUTHOR> http://flowingdata.com/2016/07/28/what-that-election-probability-means/ <comment><USER2> "Forecasts are kind of all over the place this far out from November. Plus, the numbers aren't especially accurate post-convention."

And Yet it still feels the need for displaying a giant, albeit inaccurate by their own admission, graphic showing made up stats. Very cool.</comment>


MENACE: the Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine - <AUTHOR> http://www.flickr.com/photos/stml/sets/72157622716067016/ <comment><AUTHOR> From this presentation: <http://shorttermmemoryloss.com/menace/>

A brief history of Matchbox Game-Learning Machines: [http://books.google.com/books?id=orz0SDEakpYC&pg=PA471&#...</a></comment>


Google's Strategic AdMob Misstep - <AUTHOR> http://www.homethinking.com/brontemedia/2009/11/11/googles-strategic-admob-mistep/ <comment><USER2> Here's what I know about AdMob. I went to their site on Monday and tried to advertise one of my iPhone apps.

AdMob failed to figure out my iTunes URL, so I could not post any ads.

I immediately posted to their forum and emailed their support. To date, I have received no response.

It seems like they will fit in very well at Google.

<comment><USER3> I've had great experiences advertising through AdWords, so I don't know how your bad experience with admob is going to fit in well at Google.

I've done some advertising through admob as well for an iphone app, and I got it to work fine, but I think the traffic was crap.

I'm still doing in app advertising but now through adwords, and I still don't think the quality of traffic is any good, but at an average of 4 cents per click I'm fine with it. I think they're going to make some big improvements in mobile advertising, and who knows what new possibilities will come of it.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I've had no problem with using AdWords. I was just joking because Google famously won't answer an email.

<comment><USER3> That is true, unless you spend enough to have a google team assigned to you. I have 3 reps I can call or email and they're extremely responsive.</comment></comment></comment></comment>