Rackspace Unlikely to Withstand Amazon, Google Onslaught - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2013/12/18/rackspace-ubs-starts-at-hold-unlikely-to-withstand-amazon-google-onslaught/ <comment><USER2> We use Rackspace, AWS, Pair networks and a local VPS provider.

Anecdotally, I would say Rackspace has the most intuitive interface and good telephone support. They've just released new performance instances which are cheaper than AWS: $0.08/hr for 2 vCPUs, 2GB RAM and plenty of SSD vs $0.12/hr for AWS 2 vCPU m1.medium.

Our local VPS has fantastic customer service and we know each other by name.

Amazon has the real truly global infrastructure (Rackspace UK is a separate entity to US, ASIA) and Route 53 Anycast is outstanding.

We'll be trialling out Google Compute Engine to see how it fares.

For now I see Amazon for global DNS infrastructure, but I can't see Rackspace going anywhere.

Seems like Gartner have previous with Rackspace: [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/20/gartner_openstack_cr...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/20/gartner_openstack_criticism/)

Also interesting reading: [http://gigaom.com/2013/12/20/backbreaking- openstack-migratio...](http://gigaom.com/2013/12/20/backbreaking-openstack- migrations-hinder-enterprise-upgrades/)

</comment><comment><USER3> While this may end up proving true, Rackspace has been counted out over and over again during its long, successful history.

Previously it was claimed that ever cheaper dedicated servers would wipe out their expensive offering. I think they're likely to retain a healthy business in 'cloud' for the same reason a nearly infinite supply of cheap dedicated server competitors didn't kill them previously - assuming they keep doing what got them this far, namely managed offerings and customer service. That's a value proposition Google, for one, will never even attempt to match.

<comment><USER4> Granted my experience was 5 years ago, but aside from initial setup, I would have no problem handing off daily sysadmin duties to them under a managed offering. I even gave them runbooks back then, which they were great at following in case of the often-out-of-control java app we had built for us. I still had midnight calls from them, but their services eliminated a lot of basics from my routine. Like you, I severely doubt Google and Amazon would ever offer these features and will always live in the shared-hosting tier of quality and performance for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Like you, I severely doubt Google and Amazon would ever offer these features and will always live in the shared-hosting tier of quality and performance for me."

But just think what would happen if Google or Amazon decided to go customer service friendly and charge for managing and hand holding. My feeling is that they could turn on that spigot at any time if they wanted to.

<comment><USER5> Amazon, perhaps. But AWS is already crazy expensive, adding silver spoon levels of managed hosting would price them right out of the market. The reason Amazon is competitive is because they can offer a different product than other folks. The value of that product comes from software development, not customer service staff.

As for google, they couldn't interface with a real customer if their life depended on it. And the idea that they could suddenly build out a massive managed hosting service on a whim is not reflective of reality. Your claim is basically saying that no company in the world has a competitive advantage because anyone else could just start doing what that company is doing on a moment's notice.

<comment><USER6> That's something I don't really understand about all these offerings. They're all crazily expensive. There's small differences, but not much. Rackspace is a tiny bit cheaper, with significant disadvantages, google and aws are roughly the same (I get the impression google is more expensive, but better for cpu workloads).

Compare it to any "standard" vps offering and they're insanely expensive. Compared to the vast majority of dedicated hosters they're insanely expensive. Plus you're the only one on your cpu/memory/disk.

Anybody with a monthly AWS spend of $100 or more could have 2 dedicated servers, one in .eu, one in the US, for 20-30% less dollars, 5-10x more cpu, 32 Gig of dedicated memory or more, 100x more bandwitdth (and no surprise overuse charges, finding hosters that just "limit" you to 10 mbit is easy), everything non-shared and good support. Hetzner ES40 is EUR 40/month, 32Gig ram, 2Tb disk, unlimited bandwidth, similar offerings are available in the US (e.g. www.ovh.com.ca ).

Total spend for effectively ~ m3.2xlarge instance, one in US, one in EU : $120.

AWS spend for a comparable config : 1 month of m3.2xlarge : $650 5/10 Tb of internet facing traffic: $600/$1200

I think this is being generous to AWS, because an m3/2xlarge does not match the specifications of the dedicated server offerings.

Granted, these services are not as flexible as AWS. At the prices they offer though, is there anyone who really argues AWS is better for anything but their free tier ? As for the "extras" amazon offers : since they're all proprietary businesses, every amazon extra you use (e.g. S3) is something you're betting the business on.

And since none of the aws/google/... offerings are anywhere near what I want (just set this .jar in my homedirectory live, ditto for go binaries, or move- tag-and-push git publishing), I have to script stuff to make that happen anyway (I love docker).

Why does AWS have customers at all ?

<comment> j-kidd Outside of US and EU, it is quite difficult to find a reputable _and_ affordable dedicated hosting provider. We use AWS extensively in ap- southeast-1, and their new C3 Compute Optimized instances are actually very competitive in price-performance ratio. Previously, we mostly used C1 instances, which were just okay. I never like the M1 / M3 instances.

Besides, in this region with messy peering agreement, AWS network also has the lowest ping time and the fewest hops.

<comment><USER6> So inside of EU/US you do use dedicated server providers ?

AWS is effectively (almost) a transit-only network. That has pros and cons. On the plus side, it should have decent connectivity anywhere. On the minus side, if (almost) any link at all on a network is congested, that will almost certainly congest AWS traffic too. They're relatively unlikely to have long- running issues. Also : they're REALLY expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a Rackspace customer, I can confidently say that you feel like a customer at Rackspace (vs. being the product at Google).

<comment><USER8> Google never has and probably never will do support right.

<comment><USER9> _> Google never has and probably never will do support._

FTFY

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We should stop taking such predictions seriously because it is more focused on investors rather than the company's actually ability to create value.

I have worked with Rackspace since the dot com boom, they were one of the rare companies which actually grew when the bubble burst [citation needed]. It is unlikely that Rackspace will beat AWS or Google in short term but I dont think it is a dooms day either. Any large company will not make the mistake of relying on just one cloud service provider such as AWS (and I dont see why anyone would chose Google for a serious business). I have used rackspace for many reasons and spending around 20% of my infra cost on Rackspace (20% softlayer 40% Aws 20% Mixpanel).

<comment><USER11> Here's a reason to take the prediction / analysis seriously: The analyst makes these statements, the market joins in, and then management begins to follow along. Not a happy model, nor one that is always followed, but certainly a component of publicly traded companies.

It would be fun to have an review of how insightful a given analyst has been. It would also be good to have a proper 'full disclosure' policy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> From the quarterly report in September, public cloud revenue is up $29M a quarter from last year to $108M for Q3/2013\. Dedicated hosting income is up $24M a quarter from last year to $280M for Q3/2013\. I hardly see how doing a competitive doom and gloom comparison on what is essentially 27% of a company's revenue is useful.

Making a point that AWS owns 80% of the IaaS market has little to do with existing dedicated hosting provider's revenue!

</comment><comment><USER13> The fact that this article is even choosing to focus on Rackspace as opposed to say linode, asmallorange, prgmr.com, etc. is already a sign that Rackspace has become big enough to be worth talking about. At least so far, apparently they're on the right track. I think they'll be around for a pretty long time even if they never completely crush the other cloud giants.

<comment><USER14> the problem now is that "merely profitable" companies need to be viciously attacked by companies like Google and Amazon that have flying STOCKS but post no PROFITS. Just "doing their job" and having happy customers isn't good enough if a Wall Street giant needs your business added to it's marketshare so they can avoid some taxes next year.

<comment><USER6> Ok, true, Amazon has no profits. But Google does. Quite a lot even.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ten bucks says this is how Oracle gets their foot in the door of the cloud space...by buying Rackspace.

<comment><USER16> ^ this, is very likely to happen

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A comparison that this article makes 'Ah yes Amazon has the best most excellent Virtual machines but Rackspace has the best most excellent public cloud'. I make the best tomato sauce, but my competing friend makes the best tomato sauce.

</comment><comment><USER18> I disagree because Rackspace is the most logical disaster recovery (DR) solution for companies that primarily use AWS. Even if you have DR backups in other AWS data centers, you're not protected from bugs that could affect all data centers. I've seen this happen with Windows Azure, and it could happen to any cloud provider. Therefor, very conservative enterprises will want a second cloud provider and Rackspace complements AWS nicely. Considering that the most conservative firms are the last to adopt the cloud, I think this kind of consideration will gain traction and drive business to Rackspace.

</comment><comment><USER19> > Rackspace has nine data centers on four continents and more than 100,000 > servers. For comparison, AWS also has nine data centers but on five > continents and virtual machines in the millions. We believe AWS has more > than 5x the IaaS capacity of the next 14 vendors combined.

"Servers" and "virtual machines" are two different things. You could easily run 10 VMs on a single server at the lower end of the VM price range. So without more precise measurements, these numbers mean nothing.

(What they say may still be true; you just can't tell from the numbers we're given here.)

</comment><comment><USER5> Traditional economies of scale don't carry over very easily to the digital age.

Google being a perfect example. They leverage many economies of scale, but they do so through efficiencies that are non-trivial to implement. The datacenter model that google pioneered more than a decade ago is only now seeing penetration in the industry as a whole, and nobody can approach google's capabilities on the same score yet.

But while that helps google's search app it doesn't necessarily give them an edge when it comes to hosting. There are so many other factors such as customer engagement which are important in the hosting business. Amazon gets this right but google is the poster child for aspergers on a corporate scale. There's little reason to imagine that rackspace will be incapable of keeping up as technology advances. There's little reason to imagine that even digitalocean won't be able to keep up either.

Personally I wouldn't think it a forgone conclusion that google's hosting (app engine and what-have-you) will ever mature into an industry leading product. The problem with google is that everything that isn't search or backbone ISP is a side show in terms of revenue, so there is an absence of a culture capable of developing, delivering, marketing, maturing, and monetizing products at google. And definitely an absence of a culture capable of acquiring and dealing with customers.

<comment><AUTHOR> "so there is an absence of a culture capable of developing, delivering, marketing, maturing, and monetizing products at google. And definitely an absence of a culture capable of acquiring and dealing with customers."

This really is the core of it. I'm remembering how long it took AT&T after divestiture (mid 80's) to turn into a company that instead of a monopoly and technology had to actually do marketing. The upper ranks of the company down to the guys on the street never had to do that. It took a long long time.

<comment><USER5> We're in a really weird state with technology right now and a lot of it has to do with the comparatively undeveloped level of models and terminology we have available.

Let me use an analogy. There are lots of different people who work in a "shop", but they use different tools and work on different things. There are wood workers who do carpentry, there are metal workers who work with metal, and so on. Even wood work can range from fine carpentry making use of a lathe to general contracting and building simple structures by nailing together pre- made pieces of lumber. While metal work can run the gamut from machining to iron mongery and forging to soldering and brazing and can include everything from a plumber on the one hand to someone who designs internal combustion engines on the other.

Fortunately we have the terminology to describe these different jobs reasonably well. It's not easy to confuse a plumber with a machinist. But that's not true when it comes to tech. We have very little terminology in that realm. It's non-trivial to explain the difference between a systems programmer, a DevOps automation guru, a mobile app dev, a web dev, etc. A lot of these jobs end up falling under the standard "software developer" heading. Even though that's about as silly as calling taxi drivers and truck drivers "automobile operators".

This problem of terminology extends into the tech industry as well. We have sufficiently developed mental models of things like restaurants to be able to understand the differences, and difficulties of changing, between sit-down, take out, delivery, and catering focused establishments. Yet when it comes to tech our brains go on vacation and suddenly the equivalent of a high-class sit-down restaurant switching to making pre-made meals to be sold in grocery stores seems trivial when it is anything but.

You get the same effect when people ruminate on how Apple should spend its huge cash reserves. With people throwing out crazy ideas of how Apple should buy into some completely different industry that would totally change the nature of the company, which is just as ridiculous as the idea they should switch to building rocket ships or submarines.

<comment><AUTHOR> What's interesting is that tech is very precise and yet plumbing is not (it's analog with some margin for error just like cooking as another example).

But both of those things have been around for much longer than tech so perhaps the roles are clearly defined for that reason. (You probably could find counter examples of course.)

Maybe this stems from the fact that the general public doesn't typically deal with "computer guys" [1] so they have no need to differentiate them. But they do need plumbers, carpenters and electricians and they know what they are. [2] (And those are also union jobs so that probably also makes titles necessary).

[1] How many times have you heard "he does something with computers?".

[2] Maybe this all stems from the fact that there was no central defining authority at any point that made any statement as to what the titles meant. Even in religion there are clearly defined titles, right? In tech (on the net at least) what do we have? RFC's a nice way of asking opinions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Which of the 3 allow you to reach an actual human, quickly, on the weekends, even if you are spending less than $5K per month?

Asking for real, my guess is RS does, but I don't know about the other 2.

<comment><USER21> Rackspace has a live chat which is 24/7 with knowledgeable support techs. Bugged them twice yesterday and they responded very quickly. My last rackspace bill was 60$.

</comment></comment><comment> ezequiel-garzon It seems to me that, in spite of the advent of "cloud-based" hosting providers such as AWS and GAE, the demand for more traditional hosting, ranging from RamNode to DigitalOcean to Hetzner, is not waning at all, though this is just a personal perception.

On the other hand, it baffles me that providers such as Hetzner have not had a greater impact on the price charged by Rackspace and others. It's also surprising to see most of the best prices for dedicated servers coming from Europe and not the US.

</comment><comment><USER22> Excellent service doesn't go out of style.

</comment><comment><USER23> I've used Pair, Linode, AWS, Rackspace and Bytemark.

Pair, Bytemark and Rackspace pick up the phone. Bytemark has the most chops by far, and is flexible to support custom stuff. If you just love *BSD, Pair of course.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Separately I'm wondering if "jnoller" is still working at Rackspace. Noting that there was a flurry of activity on HN from his comments that appeared to have stopped about a month ago.

<comment><USER24> He is; he's part of the Developer Relations Group. I know he's been on vacation recently, that's probably part of the reason he hasn't posted as often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Someone will still need to offer putting physical servers in a data center. Not all workloads are well served by cloud/VPS offerings.

<comment><USER26> But you've offered no particular evidence why that someone will be Rackspace.

<comment><USER27> Racksapce has offered this service since the late 90s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> But without Rackspace, where will Scoble work?</comment>


Introducing a bold nuclear energy initiative to win an election? - <AUTHOR> http://thoriummsr.com/2012/08/what-happened-to-the-idea-of-a-president-introducing-a-bold-initiative-to-win-an-election/

<comment><USER2> Wow. You guys must REALLY be desperate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Which guys? The democrats or the thorium and nuclear advocates? Would you care to elaborate?

<comment><USER3> The thorium and nuclear advocates. In the 1950s, during the 'Atomic Age', we heard over and over that nuclear power plants were safe, and the power source of the future. The Atomic Energy Commission said that nuclear power would soon be as cheap as power from other sources. We said 'go ahead!'

It's easy to be optimistic about thorium and nuclear energy. The problem is that our optimism has burned us before, and in big, easily obvious ways at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, but also in the difficulties of radioactive waste management. And we don't have practical evidence that thorium power really will be useful, only assurances from the same sorts of people that said, back in the 1950s, that fission power was safe and would soon be as cheap as that from conventional sources.

Reread the letter from the Telegraph. It doesn't want to deal with the decades of lying "self-serving opponents of anything nuclear science", and the "waste" that is the Blue Ribbon Commission on nuclear waste, nor the effort to "convince the anti-nuclear voters that their thinking has been wrong." Instead, the author wants to make an end-run around to entire system: bypass the legislative system and the popular vote, and appeal directly to the executive, almost as if the executive were tzar.

That's why the letter sounds desperate. It's thrown its hands up at democracy.

The obvious, and mentioned, analogy is to Kennedy and the moon program, but there was already popular support for the moon program; at the very least from pulp novels and TV shows. There was also no existing wide-spread concern about the public dangers of rockets. Therefore I don't see how they really are comparable.

<comment><AUTHOR> More than REALLY desperate. How about seriously concerned for the well being of the planet? I guess if I were to die knowing that I helped reverse a calamity that allowed future generations to enjoy their futures rather than dwindle from disease, extreme weather, economic collapse or even a Mad Max scenario which might be a best case scenario, then I'd feel it was worth this effort.

All I want to happen is that some form of energy that does not create green house gases to replace the coal plants and other polluting sources that are currently ruining the lives of many forms of animal and plant life on land and in the seas.

We can make very good educated guesses about Thorium molten salt reactors that can be made better than the already successful experiments that took place at Oak Ridge National Laboratory back in the 60's and 70's.

Scientists who actually study nuclear energy know that the damage caused by the fossil fuels has been far, far greater than that cause by nuclear energy.

If I were preaching to the President to lie to the public then that would be pathetic. It would be non-democratic to try to go with the whole mess without getting the people's approval but that is not what the article is saying. I wrote the article and I do believe that people want to know the truth and if someone like Obama were to suddenly start down that path there is a much better chance that he would get that message across than anyone else.

In case you had not noticed every election year is getting further and further from democracy because neither candidate is addressing the real problems in their campaigns. When they do get elected after a close election nothing much changes. They are criticized for false promises. Well I'm only asking that something valuable actual be part of the agenda.

The system does not work very well. The wealthy can damage an opponent anonymously by funding smear campaigns just because the opponents want to improve conditions for the majority of the population.

The four year cycle that every president has does not get enough time to implement his plans and he's blamed for the damages caused by previous regimes. The republicans successfully blocked most of Obama's ideas for change then they criticize him for not doing anything.

The fear factor has played a role in preventing technology from advancing. Besides the assassinations of the 60's and the terrorist attacks that keep killing people the irrational fear has been growing. Fear of things people don't understand is normal to some extent. What is beginning to be less normal is that people are willing to be fed information without investigating and seeking the truth.

The Chernobyl accident is the only truly serious nuclear accident that took place. It is well documented. Even a little research reveals that Chernobyl was unique because it had no containment. That is why people died. The other two you mention had far less radiation and no deaths occurred at Three Mile Island or are predicted by the well informed scientists and professionals at Fukushima.

The article is really just an exercise to make the reader think.

<comment><USER3> You asked why it sounded desperate. I gave you an answer. Now you're saying that you're "REALLY desperate." Then why did you ask the question when you already knew the answer? Ahh, but at the end you said it was "really just an exercise to make the reader think", so I take it it was not meant to be convincing.

I already addressed your point about "very good educated guesses." That is, the people in the 1950s said that they made "very good educated guesses" about the reactors then being designed, which in turn were based on "already successful experiments." It's the same sort of people making the predictions now - how do we know that their predictions are any more well grounded? Freeman Dyson, in "Disturbing the Universe", gave a reason which resonates with me. In short, you need multiple iterations to get a the technology working well, and the reactors which came online in the 1950s-1970s were too early in the evolution cycle. The exception was military reactors, which went through lots of iterations, but of course which aren't appropriate for utility power generation.

Which is exactly how the Moon missions worked - build plenty of rockets, watch them explode, figure out what went wrong, and do a new iteration. How many iterations of thorium power plants will we need to develop in order to make safe, efficient, economical thorium power plants? One, ten, one hundred? What practical experience justifies that estimate? So permit me to feel skeptical when I read echoes of the rose-colored promises from the Atomic Age which mention nothing about the practical matters learned the hard way.

You may say that all you want is "some form of energy that does not create green house gases" but the article barely mentions other non-greenhouse-gas systems, and mostly dismissively in the ambiguously written line "The newest reactors produce far less waste, run far more safely and are far more reliable than solar or wind." (It's ambiguous because it reads like 'the newest reactors run far more safely than solar or wind', when it's trying to say that they are safer than older reactors.) It also mentions nothing about improved energy conservation.

I never said anything about preaching to the President to lie. You (since you say you are the author) are the one who calls people liars, specifically the "self-serving opponents of anything nuclear science."

Your comments about the political system are only somewhat applicable. The US is not the only political system in the world. India has strong economic incentives to go towards thorium, and have a technological base at least equal to the 1960s US, yet they don't predict working thorium reactors for at least another few decades. BTW, your argument seems to be that everything's getting corrupted, and you just want things to go corrupt in the way you want it to be. I am morally opposed to that justification.

You mistake the lesson I took from TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, which is that people don't like reactors because dense power sources which can't trivially be shut off are suspect. Coal is 'safe' because its direct failure modes is to catch on fire, and that's easily handled. Solar is 'safe' because its direct failure mode is to stop generating electricity. Wind is 'safe' because its failure mode is to fall down. Hydro based on large reservoirs is less safe, because the history of dam breaks shows that they have some pretty nasty failure modes. All of these 'safe' systems have have hundreds of design iterations and improvements, and real-world failures. Note that by 'safe' I am not including environmental impact. The term "safe" has several different meaning, and I'm limiting it to just this one.

This article was supposed to make me think? It made me think that the author understands neither people nor politics nor history.

<comment><AUTHOR> I never wanted an argument. I think you are using my article to show off a few of your own personal pet peeves. You are trying to squeeze my article as an example of those but I think you are trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. The word desperate is really inappropriate since desperation implies that I have some sneaky agenda. Over 15 years of experiments and research is not guess work which took place in a real laboratory. The guesswork I was referring to was that which will take place to do even better reactors than have already been built. The Molten Salt Reactor was very easy to operate. When they finished a weeks work. They simply turned it off for the weekend and turned it back on the following Monday. That cannot be done with the reactors that became the dominant reactor Light Water Reactors.

<comment><USER3> You wanted comments else you wouldn't be here. I gave comments. I certainly gave some of my own peeves. I thought that was obvious.

Look, I'll say this again. You asked which of the two PythonDeveloper thought were desperate. It's pretty obvious that he meant the author of the essay about "the thorium and nuclear advocates." Now you completely agree that you are desperate. Why did you ask the question if you weren't looking for an argument? The non-argumentative one would be "yes, I am desperate; Desperate that we as a civilization won't be able to survive."

You think that desperate implies a sneaky agenda. It doesn't. Here are all the dictionary entries: "1. reckless or dangerous because of despair or urgency: a desperate killer. 2. having an urgent need, desire, etc.: desperate for attention. 3. leaving little or no hope; very serious or dangerous: a desperate illness. 4. extremely bad; intolerable or shocking: clothes in desperate taste. 5. extreme or excessive." Notice how none of those imply a sneaky agenda.

Nor am I against reactors. I'm explaining, the best I can, why anything associated with nuclear power is viewed with deep distrust. Referencing work from the 1960s doesn't help. That's from the same era of researchers which downplayed the negative consequences of Operation Plowshare. The problem is that the public reaction against decades of official optimism, which deliberately deemphasized the actual consequences, cannot be easily overcome just by more optimism.

The only way to do it is to set up pilot plants _now_ , redo the same sort of engineering project as the MSR but using the fixes suggested from that project (I believe KAMINI did that), and then develop a demonstration pilot plant which actually produces power, test out the entire lifecycle (including breeding U-233 from thorium), present all experienced problems with radioactive contamination, effect of fluorine on the pipes, etc. And above all, make that information available for public and expect rejection.

This work of convincing the public cannot be done in a single presidential term. It'll be at least 5 years just to get the full engineering data. Hence, I find the proposal that the President should use Roosevelt's bully pulpit to advocate the issues on a national scale at odds with what I think is the right way to actually do this.

Furthermore, you wrote "When they finished a weeks work. They simply turned it off for the weekend and turned it back on the following Monday." but based on <http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/NAT_MSREexperience.pdf> , they most certainly did _not_ have a weekly work schedule. It does not appear that you are working from the primary or even the secondary sources to make the above statement. Is you're above statement meant metaphorically? As it, I interpret it as truthiness.

In any case, you are confusing the issues. TRIGA is safe enough that it can be operated by undergraduates, and it can also be "turned off for the weekend." I think it can even be turned off for lunch. While power production reactors are a different scale entirely. Can you tell me how much decay heat will come from a thorium MSR which has been generating 300 MW use for 6 months? Can that sort of power reactor be so easily shut off and walked away from?

I read that the MSR decommissioning costs were higher than expected. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten- Salt_Reactor_Experiment#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten- Salt_Reactor_Experiment#Decommissioning) says "the MSRE cleanup project was estimated at about $130 million", including a possibility for a nuclear criticality accident caused by the U-233 remaining in the system. To say nothing of the "one atmosphere of fluorine" gas above the solid salt. Are those costs and problems amplified in a full-scale commercial power plant?

And if you want to talk about alternatives to light water reactors, then one should also look to pebble bed reactors. Wikipedia quotes Richard Muller as saying they are "in every way... safer than the present nuclear reactors, and arguably safer than the global-warming danger posed by fossil fuels." Now, where have I heard that argument before? Note that PBRs had problems which were only identified by building reactors, and more PBRs have been built then thorium ones. Why should I presume that thorium MSRs won't also have problems?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Python 2.7 still reigns supreme in pip installs - <AUTHOR> http://www.randalolson.com/2016/09/03/python-2-7-still-reigns-supreme-in-pip-installs/ <comment><USER2> It's required for binary modules in node... not going anywhere for a while at least. :-(</comment>


YC W15 emails are out - <AUTHOR> Don't give up! <comment><USER2> My team and I got rejected in 2010. We're still working together and we're generating mid 8 figure revenues now. So it's definitely not the end of the world and the silicon valley network is so vast these days that no one should let a YC rejection stop them from doing amazing things.

Keep on truckin!

<comment><USER3> Mid 8 figure revenues? Like, $50,000,000/yr? If you're still growing, it sounds like YC missed out.

<comment><USER4> YC will miss out on allot of companies. It not humanly possible for them to be that good.

I rather have a business that has that type of growth than get into YC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Got rejected. No big deal. Will continue as planned. Good luck to everyone who got selected and double of that to fellow rejectees.

Launched a medical tourism startup-- prepre-alpha. Just nothing to show on url really (OTOH I also wonder if radical honesty would be the path to take?)

If huge or uncertain costs, or the fear & uncertainty of fighting your insurance/Dr/hospital over surprise billings post-hospitalisation is holding you back from any, and I mean ANY, elective treatments - let's talk.

In most cases, for a fraction of cost of copay+deductibles, apples-to-apples less than 10% what it would cost you in USA, you can get yourself treated & pampered at top-class facilities in India. Including return airfares. We have docs/hospitals/nurses with solid repute.

Here to help you navigate and arrive at right choices.

Happy to answer any queries or concerns that a potential patient has. My email is in my profile. Can chat/Skype/Hangout whatever. No time-limit, no- obligation, no fake-guilt selling. Will keep answering queries as much as I can. At the end of it if you decide against it that's perfectly ok.

So yeah, email me?

</comment><comment><USER6> One positive data point here. We got invited for an interview [1]!

It's at least the 4th time I've applied, 2nd time with this company, and the 1st time I've been invited for an interview.

Good luck to everyone, and as I always tell myself: YC is not the goal, making something people want is not the goal, making something good that people want is the goal.

[1]: [https://www.openlistings.co/](https://www.openlistings.co/)

<comment><USER7> Your site looks great. As an objective 3rd party with experience in the real estate sector, I think you are on to something great. (Which is obvious since you got in!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the mindset to have here is that YC is so popular and the number of YC partners are so small, that you have a very small chance to get in the first place.

I wouldn't burn too many candles hoping to get in or trying to figure out a reason why you did not. There is a benefit to applying in that it makes your commitment to your startup even stronger.

Focus on what is important and that is your business. I truly believe building something sustainable is better for YOU, than trying to make the next Dropbox, Facebook etc. But if you already gaining Facebook like traction I am sure YC will already have heard of you.

Worry about your startup and just focus on making it sustainable. Becoming popular with customers and maintaining that relationship. has more benefits for more people than getting into YC. Focus on what is important.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an interesting point on the timeline for YC in that their apps increased 40%!

PG says they now have 3 silos, like 3 mini YC's reviewing. But if you have 1400 alums reviewing apps, by definition you are going to have scoring that is biased against finding black swans, regardless of how many silos you create.

As you say, the problem is too many apps and not enough time for a smaller amount of alums to review the apps.

One answer might be going to a rolling application process to avoid the washout that happens with a wave 40% bigger than you anticipated. And/or opening other offices, which is most likely in the works.

<comment><USER8> "PG says they now have 3 silos, like 3 mini YC's reviewing."

Can you point me to where PG said this?

"But if you have 1400 alums reviewing apps, by definition you are going to have scoring that is biased against finding black swans, regardless of how many silos you create."

Why do you think the scoring is biased against black swans?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it was in this video with Jcal [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMqgiXLjvRs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMqgiXLjvRs) . Not sure at what point in the video, but PG definitely gives up lots of great success tips, so worth watching it all.

As far as the black swans, I could be wrong on this, but my understanding is that YC has maybe 10 partners all giving a grade on the apps coming in (apparently started this after they missed SendGrid). Im not sure if the 1400 alums initially flag or what, but even with the 10 partners grading, their odds of finding black swans get worse because black swans don't look like winners to most people - they are essentially counter intuitive, crazy ideas that don't appeal to the majority in the beginning (or maybe the founders are not Stanford drop outs or ex Googlers, which further sways the majority to give higher grade to what is more obvious. Thus pushing down more potential black swans below the interview cut off line.

So the more partners you have grading a particular startup, the more partners you have trying to cover their asses and not fuck up. So the safer choices will get more interviews - and safe choices don't usually result in black swans.

Not sure if I'm making sense here, but maybe the proof is in the pudding in that some of their biggest wins are Dropbox, Reddit, and Airbnb...all relatively early in YC batches when there were fewer partners making choices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mck- Getting into YC is not the goal of a startup. The goal is to make something people want. YC certainly helps you achieve that goal, but it is by no means the only way!

</comment><comment><USER9> If you got rejected, mind sharing what you're working on? Reply below!

<comment><USER10> [http://cubic.fm](http://cubic.fm) connects different music sources in a single player and helps users build a globally accessible online music library. Launched the public beta a week ago.

we want users to be able to

-Create an online music library, independent of the source providing the content. -Build it further by collecting any track discovered anywhere on the web. -Access and interact with other users' libraries, no matter which service they use or subscribe to.

<comment><USER11> Hey, I tried this out. There are some solid playlists in there.

A couple things I found confusing:

\- I don't have flash installed in Safari (comes packaged in Chrome) and there was no explanation as to why music didn't play back when I was in Safari

\- initially Rdio playback was limited to 30s samples even though I had my Rdio account linked. I _think_ I fixed this by logging into Rdio in the same browser session, but not certain

<comment><USER10> Thank you for your feedback! This is unexpected, I'm checking it right now. I'll let you know when it is solved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mck- Here's a curious data point: we were invited for an interview last time, but we didn't get in. We had no paying customers yet. The feedback was that we should get 10 customers and apply again. So we did. But no interview this time :/

<comment><USER8> Hey, you have an interesting product. Curious why you priced it per vehicle. I am a potential user, but the per vehicle pricing makes it incredibly expensive for us to even consider it. What kind of customers do you have right now?

<comment> mck- We have customers delivering moving boxes, picking up laundry, lawn care, compost bins, etc...

What is your use-case? We can talk alternative pricing models if you find it valuable -- email me at email@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As expected. Single non-coding founder. Why do i bother? For a few weeks after the rejection I find myself very highly motivated.

<comment><USER13> Learn how to code. It's not impossible. You need to understand how to code if you want to run a IT company. Regards!

<comment><USER12> I'm sure I could learn but I'll never be at a level to be really productive, so I find it better to use my time on doing customer development, product management (which I can do), sales and finding ways to make money to pay the rent and the contractors I hire to design and code. This model, while often considered 'bad' by the experts, works for me- so just running with it. In case you are curious we're live at [http://www.oncontracting.com](http://www.oncontracting.com). A website that makes it easy to find onsite contract jobs at Fortune 1000 companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> \o/ for rejection!

Launched a turbo tax, but for PCI Compliance.

Managing PCI Compliance is an unsolved real (big) problem, even bigger than HIPAA. There's been headline breaches in the news (e.g. Target, Kmart, Staples) and companies fear PCI because of its vague language and cost. With my relevant domain expertise in the security field, I'm bringing new tech to an old-school market.

[http://www.ComplianceChimp.com](http://www.ComplianceChimp.com)

Instead of completing a PCI Requirement that looks like this: [http://i.imgur.com/ZW0PzBd.png](http://i.imgur.com/ZW0PzBd.png)

You can complete one that looks like this: [http://i.imgur.com/XdkrG4o.png](http://i.imgur.com/XdkrG4o.png)

</comment><comment><USER15> Got rejected, but we will keep working hard!

Our Startup is Cronus Audio Technology.

The main purpose of Cronus is to enable the musicians to extract the most from their performance, simple, elegant and versatile way, offering innovative tools that cover expressive artistic interactions, excellence in audio effects and social connectivity.

Our first product will be the Cronus-Z, an innovative proposal for equipment that mixes the functionality of a multi-effect pedal with the power and versatility of an audio workstation, in a compact and portable format. The Cronus-Z will have numerous resources, to effectively meet the demands of various user profiles.

More information can be found at: [http://www.cronus- audio.com](http://www.cronus-audio.com)

</comment><comment><USER16> Rejected. Sucks. The idea was very solid and the team was solid (between the 3 of us we have 2 artists, 2 computer science degrees, 2 computer engineering degrees, and an established viral content marketer). The only two issues were that

a) We are planning to build a hardware product and are at the mock- ups/renderings stage so we do not have a prototype, and b) One of the team members hasn't physically met the other two (although we've worked on projects before and have a ~4 year friendship).

I had some correspondence with some of the partners about the second point-- PG told me it would be a problem, but Garry Tan said its not really a deal breaker. So I'll put it off to the lack of prototype which is what killed us.

<comment><USER3> If the idea is solid, why are you letting YC's rejection get in the way of pursuing it?

Determination matters most.

<comment><USER16> We're not. It slows us down considerably, but we're still pursuing it.

<comment><USER17> Don't let it slow you down. Think about things practically. If you didn't get accepted now, that only means you won't receive money from them for now. You can still always get in touch and ask questions and hopefully get answers. The most important part of YC is that you have an intense drive to get work done without being distracted. You have a [petrifying] sense of accountability and a demo day to get ready for. If you can set these up for yourself, then it could be just as good. The only thing missing would be to get in touch with partners who'd otherwise have more time to speak with you and meet you in person. Email your questions. You may get answers and you may even build meaningful relationships eventually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Rejected.

Now my startup is gonna succeed...just a little more slowly.

</comment><comment><USER19> Got rejected. Will continue as planned. Getting into YC is not the goal, it is what it is - an accelerator. I am sure if I had gotten in, I would be able to take my company further faster, but with the slim chance of 3% interview invitation rate this definitely wasn't something to count on. I did have an extra glimpse of hope when I saw my founder introduction video had a view on ycombinator.com on oct-26th (amazing how google tell you these things). The company: infiniRoom - Never run out of storage space on your smartphone. sign up for beta [http://www.infiniroom.com](http://www.infiniroom.com)

</comment><comment><USER20> Yep... Just got ours. Time to get back to work.

</comment><comment><USER21> Just remember: "YC is an option. Not a barrier."

Real entrepreneurs might WANT to get into YC, but do not NEED to get into YC.

If you really "need" YC then I think you're doing it wrong. Usually the types of people who are devastated by their YC rejection (like me my first time) are the kind that have everything riding on YC. As if it's the only way to get anything built or started. It's a terrible mindset to have. Once I opened up my options and had a plan B, C, D, etc... my business improved, my startup ideas changed and got better, I built more things and got more experience.

</comment><comment><USER22> Got rejected. We are working on an Answering (Analytics) system that works with Natural Language and voice. [http://numahub.com](http://numahub.com). Our product is cool and we are very positively moving ahead. YC acceptance would have been great but not being accepted motivates us to push harder.

</comment><comment><USER23> Wow...there are some amazing companies out there. Kudos to those who got the interview, but for those who didn't, don't give up!

My team (www.stempaks.com) was really fortunate enough to get an interview. But like rgbrgb said, our goal isn't to get into YC; it's to create a good product that people will want.

</comment><comment><USER24> Also rejected but that's fine, our project is quite new ([http://stackeo.me](http://stackeo.me) \- A Product Hunt for developers) so we have a lot to go.

Good luck for those who got an interview!

</comment><comment><USER25> Back to work :)

</comment><comment><USER26> Can you share how many applications there were for this batch?

Might make some of us feel like all these years grinding on startups isn't for nothing and is just a simple matter of volume.

<comment><USER27> They had said they were expecting close to 5k

<comment><USER28> They said they were averaging 3 applications a minute on the last day, so that's around ~4300 applications right there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Maybe third time is the charm... and a successful kickstarter

</comment><comment><USER30> Didn't get in, no worries though. Good team, great product moving forward. It would have removed some obstacles, that's all.

Good luck to everyone, and keep at it; we are.

</comment><comment><USER31> Rejected. Working on a time tracking solution for google platform: [https://whathaveidone.today](https://whathaveidone.today).

<comment><USER32> I really wish I could see what it does without having to open a demo video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Also got rejected, but just applying was a valuable experience because of the sort of questions it forced us to tackle.

getpartake.com - Expense Sharing for Couples

</comment><comment><USER34> Btw, I haven't gotten a rejection email. I just know they sent out to they guys they accepted. I guess our application really sucked lol.

<comment><USER21> I think they're sent out in chunks. I sometimes get mine several hours later than what others report.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Our team got rejected.

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

We were creating a mobile payment system to be used in Myanmar.

<comment><USER5> Sounds interesting. Few more details? - email in my profile. And all the best. We got rejected too.

<comment><USER35> Hi Kamikazi, what project you guys working on? For me, I will still continue with the project but without financial backing it will just be slower.

<comment><USER5> Me too. In my case YC deadline just happened to coincide my decision to startup. More than the financial backing my startup would've benefited more by being in YC ecosystem and my feet on the ground presence in signing up those early customers. Might try in next batch. Good luck!

Can't see your email anywhere. Email me?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is there an argument for applying late (taking note of ~5k applications on last day or so)?

</comment><comment><USER37> Interesting that there's no feedback. If there's a process of online application, review and automated email with a standard response then surely some simple stock answer fitting to the application wouldn't be much effort. I guess if a certain number are just rejected because of sheer volume then I can understand.

<comment><USER20> If you read [http://ycombinator.com/whynot/](http://ycombinator.com/whynot/) it says that sheer volume is the issue.

<comment><USER37> Bit of luck necessary then eh.

<comment><USER34> The earlier you apply the better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Rejected. Will launch soon.

</comment><comment><USER39> Any nonprofit applicants out there? We'd love to hear about you!

<comment><USER40> I received an interview for Quill.org. The third time was the charm.

The only thing that really matters is your users. Other people, such as the judges who assess your app, the influential people whom you'd like to get their support - these are not necessarily your users, and they won't necessarily understand the problems you're solving.

Stay true to your users, and if they love what you are doing everything else will follow.

<comment><USER39> Good advice, Quill & cool service! At Instrumentl we're stopping at nothing to support our researchers, bottom line. Best of luck in interviews!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Dint make it. But appreciate feedback on www.snapkaro.com

</comment><comment><USER34> Won't give up. Feels like losing 10m.

<comment><USER3> Most people accepted into YC end up with nowhere near $10M. Not even $1M.

<comment><USER34> The network of people there matters. If they were investing 10k in my company I'd comply. Your network is your net worth.

<comment><USER3> The network is freely available. You could email sama with an honest question as a startup founder and you'll probably get a reply. He genuinely loves helping people.

I don't know what "Your network is your net worth" means, but it sounds like a worldview in which the people you know matter more than what you can do. That's sometimes true, but none of the major startups started off by networking. It didn't matter who the Google founders knew. It didn't matter who Zuck knew. What mattered was what they were doing.

The only reason investors might be interested in you is if you're starting the next Google or Facebook, because their entire business model depends on it. But there's an optimistic way to phrase that: If you're starting the next Google or Facebook, then who you know doesn't really matter.

<comment><USER13> It's depends where are you. We are in Latin America (invited), we are so far away to have any chance to create a great network from here, and moving to SF (or any place in USA) first without a network is almost impossible and very expensive for us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> do the co-founders also get the email?

<comment><USER42> Nope</comment></comment>


China and Russia conduct controversial heating experiments to modify atmosphere - <AUTHOR> https://beta.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/2178214/china-and-russia-band-together-controversial-heating-experiments <comment><USER2> > In theory, a butterfly flapping its wings might be amplified in a > sophisticated weather system and cause a storm in a distant location several > weeks later.

No, that's not what the butterfly effect means at all.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow. Is it safe? Hope it will no produce any by-product like not existing climate change(/rant).</comment>


A website for human-centered news using location verification - <AUTHOR> http://peoples-word.com <comment><AUTHOR> The People's Word is a project dedicated to bringing more human-centered news to the people. This means publishing news that is produced from the actual places where it's happening, by the people affected by those events. Check it out, more info at peoples-word.com/aboutus

<comment><USER2> Spoofing location is trivially easy, either using an app or submitting doctored HTTP requests to your API.

I would ask what you would do to stop this, but you just can't.</comment></comment>


Register-based VMs have a higher performance than stack-based VMs - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.00467 <comment><USER2> I would love to see the code used for some of these instructions. Their description of "swap" for the stack VM jumped out at me:

> pop 1 st and 2nd value out of local stack and swap them

You don't need to pop _at all_ for swap. The stack isn't actually changing size and can be modified in place. You also should only have one pop for 'add', etc. A lot of people don't seem to realise this.

Also, this article may be of interest:

[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ericlippert/2011/11/28/why-...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ericlippert/2011/11/28/why- have-a-stack/)

TL;DR - a stack machine is conceptually simpler than a register machine, and it doesn't matter if it's slower since you are JIT'ing it anyway.

<comment><USER3> It does matter even for jitting.

Pike and Winterbottom ([http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/papers/hotchips.html](http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/papers/hotchips.html)) used register-based VM for Plan9/Inferno because it's much faster and easier to write a high-quality jit from register-based VM to register-based CPU (and all of them are register based) than from byte-code VM to register-based CPU.

This is probably the same reason Android chose register-based VM design for their Java-based platform.

Jitting is not free - an increase in jit complexity is paid by lower performance of the code being jitted. Java's HotSpot does wonders but it takes much latency and high memory use to get the really high-quality results.

It makes sense to do as much work as possible where you have time and CPU cycles to spare (during compilation to VM instruction set) and not on the device when every millisecond and every byte matters.

Lower complexity of stack-based VM is a moot point - when you're jitting, you're doing the hard stuff anyway.

<comment><USER2> Well we are both just appealing to experts here (unless you are infact one. I am certainly not - just an enthusiast).

What did you think of the last part of Erik Lipperts post?

 _The code is much smaller and much easier to understand. A stack machine is a very simple way to describe a complex computation; by being able to write code for such a simple machine, it lowers the cost of making a compiler. And not only is it easier to write compilers and jitters that target simple stack machines, it is easier to write other code analysis tools as well. The IL verifier, for example, can quickly determine when there is a code path through a method that, say, misaligns the stack, or passes the wrong types of arguments to a method._

<comment><USER4> The stack machine may be conceptually simple, but here's the thing:

Either you have a way to address an offset into the stack, or you don't. If you do, the stack is conceptually equivalent to a register file where you can optionally swap out the entire content in one go (by changing the stack pointer).

If you don't, then registers will in most designs offer you a strict superset of operations: I've yet to see any register-based machines where you can't load things into registers, do the operation and push them back on the stack. In fact, on most machines that are not purist RISC designs, you will tend to be able to do many/most operations with one of the operands in memory.

That superset comes at a complexity cost in some areas, sure, but being able to address more different data items without having to manipulate the stack also turns out to be _very_ handy. If it wasn't, we'd just stick to mostly manipulating the stack even in register-based designs.

EDIT: In fact, you'll often see "naive" first code generators for register- based machines heavily rely on stack manipulation for expression evaluation because it massively reduces the need for register allocation complexity.

<comment><USER5> An even shorter way to say this is that stack-based VMs are more high-level. With a register-based VM, you shift some important questions (like register allocation, and handling temporaries) to the compilers. With a stack-based VM, the compiler can be simpler, but the JIT will need to be correspondingly more complicated.

Which one to choose depends on how it is all used. For .NET, multi-language targeting was seen as an important design goal, and so making the bytecode easier to target was prioritized, with all the complexity relegated to JIT.

Long-term, I think it was a right solution in general, because most platforms seem to be moving from JIT to AOT; and with AOT, having the complexity in the bytecode-to-native compiler still has the upside of DRY, and slower compile times stop being a downside.

<comment><USER6> However, if you leave register allocation to the source->VM compiler and don't do it in the VM->machine compiler (JIT), you cannot perform machine-specific register allocation (8 registers on IA-32, 16 on AMD64 and ARM, 32 on Aarch64). So register-based VMs typically work with large register sets, and JITs allocate them to the smaller register sets of real machines.

I have not read the present paper yet, but earlier papers I have read were about reducing interpretation overhead by performing fewer VM instructions (if VM instruction dispatch is expensive; dynamic superinstructions make it cheap, but not everyone implements them).

<comment><AUTHOR> Note that the JIT mechanism mentioned in the paper meant basically JIT from a program code to the bytecode executed in the VM, and directly executing it (very much like PHP), not necessarily directly to machine assembly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> white-flame Many stack systems boast about the large number of operations they can perform per second. However, a stack "operation" is not equivalent to a register machine operation.

Something like "reg1 = reg2 + 125" is a single instruction in almost every register ABI, while at they _very, very least_ , a stack machine would need two instructions: "push 125, add". If reg1 isn't immediately accessible as the stack head, and reg2 isn't consumed as the head, then you also need load/store/swap/roll/etc stuff wrapping the addition.

That's up to 6 (or even more) stack instructions to perform what a register machine can do in 1.

Also, when talking about interpreters, there is a not-insignificant overhead of fetching and dispatching the next instruction. That overhead is continually compounded when you need multiple instructions to perform what you could do in a single operation otherwise. The simpler the instructions are, the higher percentage of time is "wasted" performing instruction dispatch instead of carrying out core instruction processing. This can be parallelized in hardware instruction dispatch, but is pretty firmly stuck being serial in software interpreters.

Stack machines have very concise source code representations, and their individual instructions are simple and fast. But they can be very bloated in terms of the number of native instructions executed to carry out an overall program's work.

<comment><USER7> You seem to be confused with theoretical stack-based machines with their clear implementation, and their practical implementations. There's no reason why stack-based machine cannot have one instruction to add a constant, for example "addc 125" to add 125 to the top of the stack.

Similarly, there's no reason why register-based VMs wouldn't have push/pop instructions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The main result is hardly surprising. [https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/vee05/full_papers/p153-...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/vee05/full_papers/p153-yunhe.pdf) (2005) measured the speed difference at 26.5-32.3%. Given the subject, that's not significantly different from the 20.39% reported here (and why do they even report this with two decimals? I'm sure that last digit will change if they do so much as sneeze at their code)

<comment><USER9> Yup. Stack-based is great for high-level language VM interface ease-of-use (ie JVM languages) but generally sucks at the hardware level because most CPUs are register-based: the mapping doesn't scale as well because of the extra overhead of optimal scheduling. A good register-based VM would have a large number of registers/(pseudo)variables and support sequence points to allow actual instructions to be more optimally-scheduled. Atomics are also nice in certain edge-cases, but being mostly immutable / lock-free / branch-free is typically a better strategy to avoid contention and pipeline stalls.

<comment><USER10> >" Stack-based is great for high-level language VM interface ease-of-use (ie JVM languages) but generally sucks at the hardware level because most CPUs are register-based: the mapping doesn't scale as well because of the extra overhead of optimal scheduling"

Is this the graph coloring register allocation optimization problem?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I see few flaws in their approach:

The stack based virtual machine represents instructions as two field structs that are essentially predecoded (and larger in memory) while the register VM uses what boils down to array of words which are then presumably decoded at run time (the paper even contains some kind of argument why the code is represented as array of single-field structs, but completely neglects to mention what would happen if the structs contained some kind of pre-decoded instructions).

The function call mechanism of their stack based VM seems to be essentially modeled after how forth works, which is not how typical stack based VM used in implementation of languages that do not directly expose the VM semantics works. Typical stack based VM (eg. Smalltalk, JVM, CPython...) allocates new argument stack for each function invocation (often using alloca() or such, ie. on native control stack) and does not directly use the VM argument stack to pass parameters and results between functions.

<comment><USER10> Forth a register-based VM right?

Does it the VM stack as well instead of the native stack?

<comment><USER12> Some Forths compile to native machine instructions and no VM is involved. Sometimes they compile a list of threaded jump addresses with an "interpreter" that's basically just two instructions: JSR [nextaddress++]; LOOP. Sometimes they just compile literal sequences of JSR instructions and there's no interpreter at all.

<comment><USER10> Wow this is really interesting. I didn't realize there were different implementations.

Do you have a resources regarding these? I would love to learn more about this.

<comment><USER13> Moving Forth is pretty good: [http://www.bradrodriguez.com/papers/moving1.htm](http://www.bradrodriguez.com/papers/moving1.htm)

There are 8 parts to the series, you can look at all of them and other Forth writings by the author on his website: [http://www.bradrodriguez.com/papers/](http://www.bradrodriguez.com/papers/)

<comment><USER14> Seeing as you know something about Forth. Is it used somewhere in production outside of purely academic setting?

<comment><USER15> Yes, but its heyday was the 70s through mid-80s. The most recent use I'm familiar with was the OpenBoot firmware in OLPC laptops, though I've been out of it so long I wouldn't know what's current.

<comment><USER16> In addition to OLPC, Open Firmware was used on PowerPC Macs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Having implemented both a stack and a register-based VM I'd agree with the sentiment in the title. The register-based implementation (based partly off LUA 5 bytecode) was notably faster which I attributed to improved use of CPU cache combined with the instruction doing more work in per memory-fetch.

However I'd also point out the register-based VMs was far more difficult to debug, plus the compiler was much more long-winded to account for register allocation. Plus by the time you add on function dispatch overhead and real- world usage patterns, the gap where the register machine is technically better (i.e. besides just doing fibonacci) narrows somewhat.

</comment><comment><USER18> Not surprising. Register-based machines in general have higher performance than stack-based machines, because the register set can be addressed randomly like RAM whereas in a 'strict' stack machine this isn't possible.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_machine#Performance_disa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_machine#Performance_disadvantages_of_stack_machines)

Of course the advantages such as easy code generation and high code density make stack machines a good intermediate compilation target, which then gets compiled to a register machine for actual execution.

<comment><USER10> >"Of course the advantages such as easy code generation and high code density make stack machines a good intermediate compilation target, which then gets compiled to a register machine for actual execution"

Are you referring to a specific language here or are you saying all register machine always compile to stack machines first?

<comment><USER18> In general they do. The JVM and .NET CLR being the most prominent examples.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I should imagine implementing a register-based VM on a register-based CPU is going to have some advantages over a stack-based VM implemented on a register- based CPU. I wonder how well a register-based VM would fair on a stack-based CPU.

<comment><USER20> That's interesting. Are there any actual stack-based CPUs out there today?

<comment><USER21> [http://www.excamera.com/sphinx/fpga-j1.html](http://www.excamera.com/sphinx/fpga-j1.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's fascinating. Would love to see what performance such thing can actually perform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I remember reading a paper a while ago with similar conclusions.

It concluded that register was faster than stack based but stack based had better code density. The reason seemed to be due to the branch prediction cost per instruction. Fewer but more more powerful instructions reduced the number of times the instruction decode operation occurred.

</comment><comment><USER23> My feeling is that has more to do with memory traffic and the cache hierarchy than the difference between register and stack VMs. Stack VMs are going to generate more read-modify-write cycles than a register VM. Of course experiments are in order (or out of order, ha!).

<comment><USER24> I imagine you are right. But there should be plenty of scope for optimising this in the VM itself. Most stack operations are immediately preceded by a push, so hold the top of the stack in a register and the last push in another and you could avoid a high proportion of memory calls in the most common cases. Does anyone know if JVM implementations do this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> [http://fpgacpu.ca/stack/Second- Generation_Stack_Computer_Arc...](http://fpgacpu.ca/stack/Second- Generation_Stack_Computer_Architecture.pdf)

The article has detailed discussions about the topic.

</comment><comment><USER26> This reminds me a little of the "nosql is faster than sql" argument a few years back, or "Firefox is faster than Chrome". Let's just add a "now" and we're fine. Most programs we have now are so complex that none of them is really optimized to the max. Therefore the question is basically who spends more of his ressources on optimization.

<comment><USER27> But some problems are very tough to solve in some languages. Like in Java, it's very hard to avoid allocating everything on the heap. In C++/Rust it's trivial so you can get that performance boost without crude hacks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> To quote another post:

> generally sucks at the hardware level because most CPUs are register-based

Whoa, hold on there folks. This is not a _CPU_ register VM. It's a 'register- based VM' and it isn't even that.

      iconst 1    vs    set t3, t1
      iconst 2          set t4, t2
      iadd              add t3, t4, t5

t1 through t5 are allocated in the stack frame. They are NOT magically somehow mapped to x86_64 registers R8-12.

Actually, calling this a register-based VM is just wrong. It's lazy thinking but really it's just wrong. The value of t1 will be in memory.

Yes, it's standard terminology which easily lets people misunderstand what's happening under the hood, as in the above quoted case. The article doesn't even say _virtual registers_ which would have helped. It could. It should. It doesn't.

BTW, a good interpreter will cache the top of stack in a CPU register.

<comment><USER29> I believe this is a standard bit of terminology: it means that the virtual machine is implemented with _virtual_ registers. Google "lua registers", for instance.</comment></comment>


Instapaper Goes Social With Sharing, Likes, And Friends - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/10/instapaper-3/

<comment><USER2> Current discussion on this can be found at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2311296></comment>


Simple X hotkey daemon - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/baskerville/sxhkd/blob/master/README.md <comment><AUTHOR> I've found this tool indispensable on my Linux devices. The configuration is a simple but obvious language which makes it easy to get something working. I usually boot this with my .xinitrc.</comment>


Ask YC: Feedback on Web App/iPhone App Please - <AUTHOR>

Spotstart.com is a collection of popular searchable web resources. I had a prelimiary version over a year ago, but just coded it again. If you visit the site on an iPhone, you will see a customized version (http://www.apple.com/webapps/searchtools/spotstart.html). Somehow, I think the iPhone version will be more popular. There is a category for startups which includes Hacker News searched from google.<p>Please let me know what you guys think. Anything to be added or removed? Thanks. <comment><USER2> I think I must figure out how you made it scroll up to hide the URL bar after it loaded. Nice touch. It looks and feels right on the iPhone, but I'm not a candidate user. I keep everything like that in my synchronized bookmarks.

</comment><comment><USER3> You might want to put an About or What is this? link. I have no idea upon going to the site what this is.

It seems that this is a search directory, but your search doesn't work and I really don't need a directory.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you tell me what part of the search failed and what browser you are using? Thanks.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, Firefox (non-beta 3). The top portion of the search. It seemed to get hung up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have any of the commenters here used it on the iPhone? I just web-clipped it, works beautifully.

</comment><comment><USER5> the purpose of the radio buttons confuse me a bit

so it's basically an ajax web directory?

<comment><AUTHOR> the radio button shows which site that the search will be going to. it is a directory like site.

<comment><USER5> i hate to say this, but I feel that it's not very intuitive and it should be changed</comment></comment></comment>


Learning Advanced JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://ejohn.org/apps/learn/

<comment><USER3> This has already been posted once. You can read the comments from that time here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=823347>

</comment><comment><USER4> I look at <http://ejohn.org/apps/learn/#2> and think once again - <USER2> is a _disgusting_ language to read. Objective-J is nice and all, but what I really want is a self-like syntax for it (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_programming_language>). I've struggled to learn ometa and wish I found it easier.

</comment><comment><USER5> Slightly off-topic, but:

>> #2: Goal: To be able to understand this function:

idk, I find all the js library bind() functions to be a bit yucky. Closures aren't hard:

onclick = function(c){return function() { c.doSomething(stuff,theOtherStuff);}}(this);

Also, they're far more general when you write them like that, and you're not asking the runtime to constantly call array methods etc

Useful resource though, but don't use a js lib :)

<comment><USER6> They're much less readable when you write them like that, because when you get a few dozen lines down, _this_ is much clearer than _c_ , especially for people trying to read your code who are used to writing idiomatic JavaScript.

Also, I can live with defining such an argument on initial definition, as with Python's _self_ in method definitions, but having to add an extra argument to every function/method _invocation_ for the execution scope, that must be passed in every time explicitly or everything breaks, is really obnoxious. You could certainly make up a convention for the proper name, but just using _this_ is more straight-forward, and doesn't _really_ have any particularly significant downsides.

There's a reason that pretty much every JavaScript framework includes a _bind_ function/method, and that they're adding it to the official language spec: it's a convenient and effective pattern.

<comment><USER5> Sure, once it's in the language spec and doesn't use Array hacks.

<comment><USER6> What's an "array hack"? Using _Array.prototype.slice_ on the _arguments_ object? You're going to have to provide some evidence that language designers didn't intend that to be possible, before you criticize it. It works perfectly well in every JavaScript implementation. From my perspective, it's quite often the only reasonable way to deal with the _arguments_ object, and one of the most powerful and flexible ways of making functions with useful APIs in JavaScript.

<comment><USER5> Turning an object into an array isn't a nice way to do things IMHO. Maybe runtimes optimize for these cases, or maybe they create completely new objects every time and you get fantastic object churn.

Yes it works well, but it's not really necessary. It's inefficient wasted effort.

I guess it's fun to make lovely APIs, but that doesn't help people who just want their js to run fast.

<comment><USER6> > _Turning an object into an array isn't a nice way to do things_

This doesn't happen. The object is unchanged when you call array.slice.

> _Maybe runtimes optimize_

Only insofar as the built-in array methods are optimized anyway.

> _maybe they create completely new objects_

No, they don't. Or rather, yes, array.slice creates a new object to put the slice in, but only because that is part of its declared API.

> _Yes it works well, but it's not really necessary._

What's the alternative?

> _It's inefficient wasted effort._

Inefficient how? If you time it, it's faster other ways of accomplishing the same thing. Whose wasted effort? It certainly saves me time as a JavaScript developer.

* * *

To be honest, I think that _arguments_ should just _be_ an array (then we wouldn't have any of this trouble), but I assume that's not possible for the language at this point.

<comment><USER5> >> This doesn't happen. The object is unchanged when you call array.slice.

You're wrong. Why don't you check instead of reading API docs or saying what you think _should_ happen? It obviously is changed, and is a new object: Array.prototype.slice.call({0:"hello",1:"world",foo:"bar",length:2});

Results in ["hello","world"] - the result is a completely new object - inefficient wasted effort. Both in cpu and memory.

Offtopic again, but here's an interesting way to make a new N element array, initialized with undefineds...

Array.prototype.slice.call({length:100}) = [undefined, undefined, undefined........ undefined]

Array.prototype.slice.call({length:10000000}) takes almost 1 second to run on my MBP while it's creating that new array.

>> What's the alternative?

As I say, just write closures...

onclick = function(c){return function(){c.doSomething()}}(this);

It's not much more typing, and is more general. I agree arguments would be nicer if it was a true array though.

<comment><USER5> Instead of downmodding, why not explain why you disagree with the facts I present above?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Don't forget the Y combinator and the memoizing Y combinator:

[http://matt.might.net/articles/implementation-of- recursive-f...](http://matt.might.net/articles/implementation-of-recursive- fixed-point-y-combinator-in-javascript-for-memoization/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I really like his approach to teaching JS, but I wish he would finally finish his "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja" book. If I recall correct, I pre-ordered this book almost 2 years ago, when it had a release date of a few months later.</comment>


Ask HN: Did anyone's life ever gotten more comfortable after accepting funding? - <AUTHOR> We have an unfair advantage in a fast growing market and could now get outside capital for this. As an alternative we could just keep rolling with our little team, scale like we already do and make good money and don't blow this whole thing up like our investors would want us to do. We will be financially independent either way in a few months. We just want to be happy and don't have a more busy life. We don't have experience with outside investments. Is a scenario in which we use the funding to hire a great team that more or less replaces us unrealistic? Sure, its nice to see our project at the next level but only if this doesn't make life even more busy. <comment><USER2> Investor goals and founder goals are _rarely_ aligned. If you want to go for world domination and would rather risk everything to achieve that and possibly end up with nothing at all then go the investor route. That will increase your chances of ending up with nothing, but it will (perversely) _also_ increase your chances of success.

If you're already happy at your current level just grow it organically and don't look back.

Remember: happiness is the ability to be content with what you already have, not with what you could do.

I wrote about this years ago, shameless blog post plug:

[http://jacquesmattheij.com/three-roads-to-the-top-of-the- mou...](http://jacquesmattheij.com/three-roads-to-the-top-of-the-mountain)

Best of luck, whichever path you decide to take.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot! I also spoke with a friend who already received funding and we will simply keep growing our own way but also work with some lawyers who go out and find a buyer for the company.

<comment><USER2> > also work with some lawyers who go out and find a buyer for the company.

Hm. You realize that this may be a bit premature?

You're in the midst of your growth curve, I'd go a bit further before thinking about selling the company, _especially_ if you want to remain 'happy'. Selling a company usually means there will be some strings attached, for instance, you might end up working for the acquiring party for a set period (possibly years...), and you will lose autonomy, which is one surefire way of becoming less happy.

On top of all that you'll have to negotiate a deal (preferably one which does not leave you with a bunch of illiquid stock but with a nice pile of cash), and that too will take a lot of organization and knowledge.

I'd suggest you do everything you can to read up on your situation and what your options are before you commit to any moves.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes you are absolutely right. We just put things into place step by step to make it more sellable. We still have team members that can't be replaced but work on changing this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think you've answered your own question. Taking outside money will make life busier, increase pressure, and create investor expectations that may be different from your own.

Bringing in an investor that would be willing to replace you with a new management team is a Bad Idea(tm). It's also a bad idea to try to mislead your investors and replace yourselves.

Outside money can be great if you want to build a really big business and need the capital to win the market. But there are tons of businesses that are better off using revenue as funding.

One of the drawbacks of the tech media is how few people talk publicly about the businesses where the founders would have been much better off if they'd only avoided funding.

<comment><USER4> > But there are tons of businesses that are better off using revenue as > funding.

Any specific examples?

<comment><USER5> Fog Creek is an interesting example partly because it's written up and also because it's kind of a hybrid where they've remained self funded but spun off VC funded ventures in Trello and in some ways Stack Exchange [http://www.foundersatwork.com/joel- spolksy.html](http://www.foundersatwork.com/joel-spolksy.html)

<comment><USER6> Interesting how that page has misspelt Spolsky's last name in half the places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This mentality is not compatible with venture capital.

You want a life-style business. And that is absolutely fine. Investors want you to be very busy, scale the business and build a large company. Is the only way they can make their money back.

(I work for a venture fund in Dubai)

<comment><USER2> > You want a life-style business.

A non-funded company is not by definition a 'life-style business'. That's pretending there are only two choices whereas in fact there is a huge continuum ranging from mom-and-pop operations all the way to enormous privately held conglomerates.

If you work for a venture fund you should know that the choice is slightly more complicated than funded and life-style businesses.

Being 'happy' does not mean someone wants a 'life-style' business, it simply means they want a healthy work-life balance and that says nothing about the eventual size of the company.

<comment><USER8> I don't think he was commenting on the non-funded company nature making it a 'life-style business', but on the OP comment that he didn't want to be busier as a result of funding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm running a one-man show trying to reach profitability on a niche market so that I can later do some serious research in the area. As it is a very small niche, quite uninteresting for investors, it's good for me since I would never have the freedom to do independent research if I was to accept their money.. The downside is that I'm burning my own money, but I can do whatever I want and even quit if I get bored!

What I'm saying is that you should align your "strategy" with your own goals. If you guys are growing organically, are profitable and don't have crazy goals like trying to conquer the world, then welcome to the sane side of the equation! Leave the crazy working hours and unrealistic goals to those with the big egos.. If lots of money and being powerful is what matters to you (I think it should be considered a disease), then go for it as well..

</comment><comment><USER10> "Outside money is expensive" \- [http://nathanbarry.com/profit/](http://nathanbarry.com/profit/)

<comment><USER11> this is a great real life bootstrapping example. I personally think the best of both worlds is to take funding but still continue with the mindset of a bootstraped company, but you have to choose your VC's carefully.

<comment><USER11> looks like the article now as is own discussion thread

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12000311](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12000311)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why not just take a loan from a bank? That way you can spend that hiring and managers to let you off the hook of day to day operations.

<comment><USER13> > _Why not just take a loan from a bank?_

Precisely. Is the startup world so financially uneducated that they see taking venture capital as the only means of raising capital, or worst yet, some sort of _duty_?

The post practically says the company is awash in money, which would mean there are multiple ways to raise cash. The _real_ question is _why_ are you raising money?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> >We will be financially independent either way in a few months. We just want to be happy and don't have a more busy life.

I think you answered it yourself. Investor money is like a debt, and try to avoid it as much as you can.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been / I am in similar place right now. Since I don't have anything solid as an answer. Few comments. Please read this.

[http://www.aaronkharris.com/investors-and-their- incentives](http://www.aaronkharris.com/investors-and-their-incentives)

As few people noticed, The content of the question displays way of thinking that is incompatible with VC.

My approach right now is to find an angel investor who could spend reasonable amount of time with me. Effectively a mentor, to help me with answers for question like yours.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that was interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> In the scenario you've described, I would never take the funding.

Investors have an insatiable appetite for more money and they tend to push founders to work more even if they are exceeding expectations...

</comment><comment><USER17> tl;dr: Know what you're going to do with every dollar before you raise it (early). Also, VC investment isn't the only investment; if you won't have breakneck growth consider private equity.

I dislike having investors, as a general rule. They meddle. However, when you take investment it's important to do so intentionally and purposefully.

Good fundraising: "With X thousand dollars we can hire Y developers to build Z feature, which we project to generate a positive net return within N months."

Bad fundraising: "Who-hoo, we're funded! Let's buy some Aeron chairs and kitchen snacks and move to The Mission!"

In your situation: if you have an unfair advantage in a fast-growing market, and you can increase your edge and get more customers/revenue/value with investment quickly enough that the investment pays for itself, then consider it. If the features/hires/investments you could make with that money also fill you with excitement and anticipation, then do it.

If you don't want to be busier and you're happy with what you have, stay far away from investors for both of your sakes. They'll get frustrated by having a "zombie company", you'll get frustrated by their frustration.

Finally, consider pursuing alternative investors. There are many smaller-scale private equity firms (or individuals) which are more comfortable with making investments to generate steady, predictable & consistent cashflow. They might be better aligned with your personal goals.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. Everyone who seeks funding should probably understand this.

We are fine in terms of money, I just had this (misguided) idea that getting funding now helps me to be even less involved in the project but since my decisions made this a success I think we really look to sell the whole thing.

Before we do this we will keep growing it for a little longer and try to make everyone replaceable. It doesnt matter much for us anyway. We just want to get done with the making money part of our life and will get there regardless if we sell or not until the end of the year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sounds like you want to profit from your unfair advantage, but you are not interested/motivated (any more) in doing the work (eg. more interested in focusing on private life and/or other projects to be more happy).

So you need to find someone who is interested enough in your unfair advantage that he is willing to be responsible for investment AND operations (AND giving you some money now).

In case your unfair advantage is really that good, have you considered selling the company. Keeping some shares.

</comment><comment><USER19> Raising money will, without a doubt, make your lives more busy.

I've never heard of anyone successfully using investor money to hire people which replace them. Even so, hiring people is incredibly time consuming, and you will have to manage them.

If you're profitable and your goal is to reach financial independence, in this market I would not raise. If your goal is to make as much money as possible and lose all sense of work life balance, then raising money may be for you.

</comment><comment><USER20> If you're going to be financially independent in a few months -- ie, the founding members of the team will have a bank balance of >5 million us dollars, great! Don't take funding (or take it for very little dilution on your own terms).

If your definition means being able to afford some level of living expenses, you're in a different boat.

</comment><comment><USER21> If you take outside investment to grow faster and are coming from a $300-500k+ job, you'll be getting less cash compensation for years unless you're in the VP Sales role or a senior seller.

If you grow more slowly you can avoid most investment, especially VC, you can pay yourself whatever you/the team/the board approves, which will likely be more if you build a great business.

And if you're not coming from a higher-paying job, you should be able to pay yourself over $100k post A, then high $hundreds (to rough market/at least cost of living) and perhaps a little higher, depending on city, stage, health of business.

We decided on the VC path and have been thrilled with it so far. A number of us will be taking permanently lower liquid comp packages for the next 5-7 years but the upside is the equity and fun of building and dominating a stale but important space...

</comment><comment><USER22> Given this situation, you could potentially raise money from your users, which would be the best of both trade-offs you seem to have. They're not going to strong-arm you into work 120 hour weeks, can appreciate sane and modest returns, and you can do whatever you like. On the other hand, one thing they DON'T have is experience keeping companies from dying. Your institutional investors have that in spades. They've seen dozens of companies die, and they've seen why and exactly how. The reason they need to push you for an outsize return, at the expense of your comfort, is to make up for these. Your outcome and end game is good. Rather than ask if anyone's life ever became more comfortable, perhaps you should ask whether anyone regretted their exit, getting paid off after working hard and driven in part by an institutional investor?

As far as raising money from your users (which I don't recommend, but would unlock what you seem to see as the best of both worlds), I literally got an email about a service I use doing this today. When I got the email I didn't click the "Get shares today" button from the email (which wasn't spam and which I read carefully), but just now I did re-open that email and clicked the button to see where the "get shares now" went, as part of writing this comment.

Where they sent me was: [https://www.seedinvest.com](https://www.seedinvest.com) and which presumably you can find that coverage easily online (Forbes covered it, they claimed).

Personally, I don't know how I feel about having users invest. Regulation D and the idea of accredited investors had existed for very, very good reason. But there are examples for you to follow. I'm not sure if I can recommend it. It doesn't seem to be a good direction for most companies, and leads to poor outcomes for companies and for users. It also seems very ripe for scams, which a high level of transparency would help you prevent. At any rate it's an option. Personally, I recommend going with the institutional investor.

</comment><comment><USER23> If organic growth is working it says a lot about your startup and you are in a rare position. Plenty of startups can't even exist or run without outside capital. This includes the ones in news you read every day. But if you insist and like hyper growth I would recommend to try YC.

And, as a vendor witnessing a lot of startups for 14 years, I would also recommend to follow the organic route. You can see a lot of geniuses and killer products crash. Even one nine figure acquisition was not so great for the founders and they didn't get that much after working a few years as part of the retention.

If you want to be acquired in the future, follow the growth route too, since your valuation will be a multiplier of your revenue.

</comment><comment><USER24> You imply you want a lifestyle business ... Continue to bootstrap the company. Investors want a home run which means you'll work in at an insane pace for some period of time so the investor' goals don't line up with your own.

</comment><comment><USER25> We have great investors who have made the company stronger and allowed us to hire a bigger team faster. But they are more like angels, only gave a relatively small amount, and share our vision and especially our (long, indefinite) timeline for an exit. Very different from traditional VC.

</comment><comment><USER26> Similar boat as you.

I've decided to not take investment any time soon (if ever)

The very fact that you're having doubts about this says that you really don't want outside investors.

If you're making statements like this:

> We just want to be happy and don't have a more busy life

Outside investment will just make you utterly miserable.

</comment><comment><USER27> You sound like you're in a good position to begin with. Taking money is giving a bit of your soul for it. You'll end up infinitely more busy than you already are. Reach financial independence and keep at it as you are. It sounds like you are already making it.

</comment><comment><USER28> @DHH has the answer(s) and sounds like you already do as well.

Startup School Talk [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY)

</comment><comment><USER29> This question reminds me of a scene from Silicon Valley ;)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rmqJZCCFVI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rmqJZCCFVI)

</comment><comment><USER30> I have just recieved funding for my non IT startup. I think pressure to deliver has increased manifold.

</comment><comment><USER31> Fiscal pressure declines, investor pressure increases exponentially.

</comment><comment><USER32> When it is all over, please come back and tell us what company it is.

</comment><comment><USER33> What is your company? Is it a product we'd use here?</comment>