Show HN: Meet me, I'll buy you coffee - <AUTHOR> http://letstalkover.coffee <comment><USER2> I have to say, as someone twice your age, I'm humbled by how many projects you've put out there. Sure, a lot of them are small and simple, but there's something to be said for just _doing_ stuff. I spend too much time agonizing over whether my ideas are good enough, big enough, will make me money, etc. I'd probably learn more and have more fun if I allowed myself the freedom to do small interesting projects without any expectation of what they'll turn into.....

<comment><USER3> This is something that as someone in my early 20s is trying to fix. I know a lot of people who don't like to work on projects or open source them because they're afraid of being judged and a feeling that everyone is watching you (this is an emotion I had tackled for a while). Once you realize that there aren't many people looking at your projects (if any), and that those who are, will actually help you, is when you start doing more.

This reminds me of two quotes:

\- "Fail faster."

\- "If you're going to make a mistake, make it LOUD so we can hear it and correct it."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love it! It's interesting, inviting, and shows great initiative.

I don't live in the bay area, but next visit I'll make sure to put this on my schedule.

2 pieces of feedback:

"See more about me here." doesn't do you justice. I didn't even notice it, but I found your website from your hn profile. Once I visited your site, you went from "mildly interesting" to "must meet". Is there some way to make the link to your site more prominent, perhaps with a mini-graphic of your front page a little higher up.

I know this may sound controversial, but "Here's my offer: I buy you a coffee..." and "Free" actually turn me off a little. I've heard this so many times now, I'm practically immune to it. You obviously have much to offer without buying coffee. Anyone should be happy to spend time with you without that. You may actually want to reconsider that offer to stand out from the crowd of posers (who you are obviously not a part of) and allow yourself to stand on your own merits. Don't sell yourself short. You clearly don't need to pay to meet interesting people in the bay area. Something to think about.

Best wishes on this and on your move, Miles. Looking forward to hearing great things about you and hopefully having coffee (dutch treat) soon someday.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I stole the concept from tg3 who made this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6674987](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6674987)

Don't worry though, I got his blessing before making this site.

<comment><USER5> Never, ever say you stole the concept. Inspired, motivated, encouraged - perhaps?

Especially since you got his blessing!!

<comment><USER6> I didn't downvote, but one possible reason: you didn't explain why using the verb "steal" is such a big no-no.

<comment><USER5> Fair point.

\- (I think!!) you didn't steal it! My gut says to me you were inspired or motivated or something else. But didn't stolen

\- You said you got permission. To me, you don't steal & ask permission

\- But the biggest one for me is that you downplay / sell yourself short! Its deprecating and doesn't serve you. In my experience in software, there are plenty of jealous / insecure / destructive people willing to put you down. Don't play into that game!

What you've done is very clever. The concept, + website + the TLD (*.coffee - didn't know that existed)

It's well done!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> jack-r-abbit The form at the bottom is a little confusing for several reasons.

1) You say things like "Here's _my_ offer: _I_ buy _you_ a coffee" and "Tell _me_ about _your_..." but then the form is all " _I 'm_ ________ and _I 'll_ meet _you_ ______". Notice the change in who _I_ and _you_ refer to?

2) Adding to the confusing of #1, you have an email address placeholder that is not very obviously a placeholder. It is email@example.com but what if that is actually your gmail account. Perhaps using the classic email@example.com would make it a little more obvious that it is placeholder. It kind of looks like you have put your own email address since this _I 'm_ is you if they were all consistent in this section... but they aren't. This is a classic conundrum of web design. (ie, should a site use "your cart" or "my cart" in the nav?)

Having said that, I work in Berkeley and could probably meet up some day. I don't drink coffee though.

<comment> jack-r-abbit I _tried_ to offer a constructive critique for a "Show HN". I sincerely apologize to the offended party. :/

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate the feedback! You can shrug off those downvotes.

<comment> jack-r-abbit You're welcome. Welcome to Berkeley and good luck.

And I don't care about the downvote itself. There are plenty of cases where I know what I'm writing is going to be downvoted because that is what people do to other people with opposing opinions on certain topics. But I am baffled by them when I truly have absolutely no clue about why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a lot of folks in this thread that are posting "go to school" comments without knowing a whole lot about you. I'm sure that from their perspective it's the obvious best advice. I am commenting to say that people who have invested the most valuable years of their life in school tend to spend the rest of their lives hunting for evidence that they made a great decision.

The simple fact is that their answers are more about their own confirmation bias than giving actionable advice.

While it's true that lots of successful people went to college, the simple fact that you taught yourself to code and you're hanging out on Hacker News puts you into a completely different category than 99.9% of people that don't go to college.

I've seen people talk here about ROI on degrees and "the path" and what makes a good student. I've seen far less about how people are highly unlikely to know what they should be doing with the rest of their lives right out of high school. That there's so much focus on 18 year olds paying crazy tuition to get a piece of paper that proves they attended some generic lectures on a generic subject is criminal.

Anyhow, I'm ranting. I'm projecting. I didn't go to college and I have been very successful. It's because I decided early on to feed my intellectual curiosity and give myself permission to fall in love with things that themselves lead to other things. It's way more important that you learn about music and travel and optimize for interesting than push your square peg through a round hole.

That's not to say that you won't ever go. But if you don't think this is the right time, then you are the best person to know that. Just don't be idle; try to imagine that your life will be a series of well executed five year plans.

Don't let yourself get burnt out along the way, it sucks.

What I recommend is that you join a startup and work there for about a year. Then get the hell out of California for a year; I recommend that you go work at a startup in Berlin or Amsterdam for a year. Get a global perspective.

Hacker News is an incredible resource, but it's also really full of people that buy into a California tech ideology that can be self-limiting. It's just one of many lenses through which you can see the world.

Good luck; I'm really excited for you. Just remember: no person has ever been on their deathbed and thought, "man... I wish I'd made fewer interesting decisions".

</comment><comment><USER8> I thought this was like a match-making service which would pair up people quasi-randomly who lived in the same city.

<comment><USER9> Is there anything like this? Sets up blind meets / dates with people with similar passions?

<comment><USER8> I don't know. I'd definitely sign up for a "Meetup with 3-4 random people at coffeehouse in Seattle" thing.

<comment><USER10> Then you'll love Tea With Strangers ([http://teawithstrangers.com](http://teawithstrangers.com)) – we're coming to Seattle soon!

<comment><USER11> random note: because of the favicon I think that you mean the Earl Grey kind of tea, but mentioning a two hour commitment makes me not quite sure that you aren't a British guy saying Dinner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Just launched, similar idea for lunch: [http://colunchers.com](http://colunchers.com)

EDIT: whoa, take it easy, don't overload my VPS instance :-)

EDIT2: fine, I'll do my own Show HN here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8592812](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8592812)

</comment><comment><USER13> What does clicking "Let's meet" do? I clicked it to find out and it said "Message sent, thanks! I look forward to meeting you."

I, too, look forward to meeting you! But that probably won't happen. Good luck with your experiment, though.

Also, a few things to remember: You're much more valuable than your first employers would have you believe. Don't let that go to your head. Do go to university. I know how eager you are, having been in that position myself, but it's a mistake to drop out of one of the most effective social networks ever devised by humankind. Go for the social experience and the social doors it opens. If you're still not convinced, take a hard look at the background of all of the YC partners and realize that all of them seem to have attended some good schools. While you can make it without university, and you can lead a happy life and do whatever you want and be in the upper 1% of quality of life across all of humanity without attending university, you only get one chance to choose not to follow "The Path," which is high school -> good university (undergrad) -> better university (graduate student) -> learn how to be around rich people and convince them of your way of thinking. Normal people who don't attend university simply don't get this opportunity. Specifically, the opportunity to test out what works and what doesn't, socially, with wealthy people. Why is this important? Well, if you want to do something big, and you don't have any money, wealthy people are by definition the only ones who can help you. Even at absurdly high salaries, it's very hard to save up money to do something that involves hiring other people. Possible, but difficult. So where do you turn? Investors, of course. Except, crap, they're wealthy, and you have no idea how to be around them as equals. But wait, you attended university, and so maybe they have some shared ground with you... Hm, nope, you didn't. Well, of course, your website demonstrates traction, and traction is what matters to an investor. But what else do investors care about? Your team. Where (or whether) you went to university says a lot about you, fortunately or unfortunately.

Really, there's no reason not to go. Make some reasonably intelligent decisions and you'll have a great time while getting the debt paid off in a reasonable timeframe.

But if you don't go, you may find you'll want to later but never really get the opportunity. Not in the way you once had. Once you depart from The Path, you'll have to beat your way back onto it, surmounting bills and work and all kinds of annoying stuff that people fresh out of highschool don't really have to worry about just yet.

Speaking of bills and debt: whatever you do, don't get into credit card debt. Don't get into credit card debt! I can't emphasize this enough. It's so tempting, but just don't.

Do use a credit card though. Just pay it off every month. Otherwise you may not be able to get services (internet, phone, whatever) at a new apartment, or buy a car. Had it happen to me once, and it sucks. No credit history = unknown risk = "I'm sorry but we will never do business with you."

Kind of an awkward place to end a ramble, but whatever. Maybe some of the ideas might be useful.

Maybe consider leveraging this particular experiment to help you attend one of the local top-tier universities as an undergrad. Ask people if they have any advice on this, and maybe you'll find someone who could help with the admissions process. Who you know matters more than what your highschool history was like, so maybe some strings could be pulled somewhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> >What does clicking "Let's meet" do? I clicked it to find out and it said "Message sent, thanks! I look forward to meeting you."

Sorry about that. It's hypocritical of me to implement a system like this instead of just showing my email address. I actually wrote a blog post about why you shouldn't do what I did with this website:

[http://blog.milesokeefe.com/post/56981311556/dont-use- contac...](http://blog.milesokeefe.com/post/56981311556/dont-use-contact- forms)

>I, too, look forward to meeting you! But that probably won't happen.

There's a good chance that would've been true had you not made this comment :)

I hope to meet everyone I receive an email from but to be honest I did not expect this to get so much attention. I am used to my projects getting very little to no visitors.

>college...

I started typing a long response to this explaining the circumstances around my decision but I've decided against it.

The bottom line is that I've made the decision to not go to university and I'm perfectly happy with that. Not being in college doesn't mean I can't still learn, it just means I have to teach myself, which is what I've always done and will continue to do. People may judge me based on my lack of college degree, I am at peace with that.

Surprisingly, my father is a professor and my mother is a university director, and yet they both support me in what I'm doing. My mother wrote about her feelings on the matter here if you're curious: [http://www.csmonitor.com/The- Culture/Family/Modern-Parenthoo...](http://www.csmonitor.com/The- Culture/Family/Modern-Parenthood/2014/0619/Why-I-said-yes-when-my-son-said-no- to-college)

Thanks for taking the time to write out your thoughts, I'd love to go over the details with you in person.

>credit card...

The day I turned 18, I signed a lease for an apartment and got a secured credit card, which I use exactly the same as I would a debit card. I still need to get a second credit card to help continue building my credit but I definitely got started as soon as I could.

My credit could be better, but there's not much more than waiting that I can do at this point. Please correct me if I'm wrong about this.

<comment><USER13> Your mother's blog post is mostly about salary, which seems to be beside the point. There's more to life than money.

If your long-term goals include (or will ever include) "Start my own company," the odds are overwhelmingly not in your favor. First, when you're in university, you have a unique opportunity to become known as the smartest person in the class, and thus build a ridiculously valuable network. But you could do that at work too, right? Well, not really. There are legal issues at play: it's not so easy to just pack up with a coworker and start your own company. California makes this easier, but it's still hairy. Whereas you almost never have to worry about that as a student. Plus, your student network will be gigantic in comparison to a network you can build from work alone.

Someday you'll be old, and without a degree you'll be doubly vulnerable to ageism. If you're not a manager by then, you may be out of a job. While it's nice to think you'd be retired by then, reality has a funny way of making that unlikely. In particular, if you meet someone and fall in love, your finances and other ambitions tend to become affected.

You may be interested that I once interviewed at Justin TV, which eventually transformed into Twitch and was recently sold for a lot of money. Maybe I would've had an equity stake, maybe not. I didn't make the cut. Official reason for passing on me? Kan met with me and said that his investors recommended they not hire anyone without a degree when they were in such early stages. Now, that could have just been a convenient social excuse; at the time I remember not really demonstrating enough value during the interview stage, otherwise I'm sure that wouldn't have stopped them. On the other hand, if I was a borderline "hire" with a degree, then maybe that would have been enough to push me into the zone of "Let's try this person out and see how he does," which would have let me demonstrate my abilities directly, rather than by solving interview puzzles like "how would you implement a way to evaluate 2 + 3 = 5?" (At the time, being self-taught, I wasn't very versed in lexers, parsers, etc, so I had to flub my way through that particular question.)

You can have a wonderful life without a degree, but the vast majority of startups are started by people who went through universities. You know how Sam Altman has given a series of wonderful lectures at Stanford? Pg has also written at length about universities and startups:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=site:paulgraham.com+startups...](https://www.google.com/search?q=site:paulgraham.com+startups+college+OR+university)

 _I 've claimed that the recipe is a great university near a town smart people like. If you set up those conditions within the US, startups will form as inevitably as water droplets condense on a cold piece of metal._

I've been operating under the assumption that you moved out to SF to go live the startup dream. The fact is, that dream is much less likely when you haven't attended university. It's unlikely in terms of raw statistics (I'm personally aware of only a few people who have made a successful startup without having been through university, tptacek being one of the notable counterexamples) and in terms of your network. As a student, you're a potential founder. As an employee, usually you're going to remain an employee.

Isn't it interesting that Loopt was objectively not as big of a success as once was hoped, but Sam still succeeded brilliantly from it? I wonder if his network had anything to do with that, or the fact that he attended a top-tier university?

By the way, if you don't really care about starting a startup, please just disregard everything I've said, since your current path may in fact be optimal, as your parents noted. But if you're going the startup route... Well, "the rest of your life" is a long, long time, yet you only have a very narrow timeframe to reconsider. I hope I'm wrong, though!

One of the most important points that I don't think I stressed enough, which took me a long time to fully accept, is that university isn't really about learning. Not when it comes to software. Yes, your education will be well- rounded and you'll have a much deeper knowledge of architecture and theory and etc, but the primary value to you as a potential founder is the network and the social acceptance that comes from attending a top tier university. Prestige. It's lame to an extent, and maybe someday the world will be different, but that day likely won't be in the next decade, which is the timeframe you care about the most.

Also, consider this: All of the opportunities before you now will still be there, enhanced, after university. Ever play poker? It's probably best to follow the path of highest EV. There's almost no way that university is anything but the highest EV in this situation.

I wish you the best of luck. I apologize for coming across as negative.

<comment><AUTHOR> You make good, valid points.

My perspective is that as a student, I don't stand out. My grades/ECs/etc are not very exceptional. However, as a "rogue" (for lack of a better term) developer, I do stand out. I started making websites in 4th grade, I've worked professionally as a developer since a year after I was legally able to have a job at all, I have an entrepreneurial spirit, I have a history of shipping software, etc. Read that in the least egotistical tone you can (if at all possible) please; I'm walking imposter syndrome in reality.

I'd really like to continue this conversation right now but I think it'll stretch out too long, can we pick back up at this point in person? I'll email you right after I post this.

>I apologize for coming across as negative

I also struggle with wording what I say to sound positive, but you have nothing to worry about, your tone has been very neutral.

EDIT: I sent an email to the address in your profile, if that's not your current email, please tell me so I can send it to the right one.

<comment><USER14> I want to be clear up front that this isn't really a comment for you, but a more general comment for any students reading it. FWIW, I teach at a university, but this is just my own opinion and others might disagree.

> _My perspective is that as a student, I don 't stand out. My grades/ECs/etc > are not very exceptional. However, as a "rogue" (for lack of a better term) > developer, I do stand out._

It is easy to stand out as a student: attend lecture every day, show up early and sit in the front row, prepare for the lectures by reading the assigned and optional readings in advance, ask questions that help you deepen your understanding of the material (not questions that are designed to "show off," if your understanding of the material is much deeper than what the class covers, don't be an asshole, but do ask questions before and after lecture), and use the resources the class has made available to you to understand the subject as well as you can.

I've had students "stand out" despite getting Cs on all the tests, because they've clearly busted their ass to get a C and had a good attitude about it. I've also had completely anonymous students get As.

If you work hard at the class and are also any good at the subject, you'll stand out even more. And, just in case you need this advice later (this is actually for you, Miles), you can actually pull this off without being enrolled at the university and can probably hustle/charm your way into enrollment at Berkeley if you ever decide you need it. The same thing applies: take classes you're interested in (through UC's extension education program), show up, work hard, and engage with the Prof. Undergrad enrollment numbers can make that tricky, but that's literally how I got into grad school. (UC extension program and all...)

But Berkeley's great. Have fun!

<comment><USER15> Can Confirm that it is insanely easy to hustle your way into berkeley. I had a friend or two do while I was there.

In the meantime, there's no need to not follow along, and there's no need for enrollment through extension (and with no added work for the teaching staff).

the intro websites archives are at: 1) [http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/archives](http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/archives) 2) [http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61b/archives](http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61b/archives) 3) [http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61c/archives](http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61c/archives)

the current semester is at [http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/](http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/) and so on.

If you click through you should notice that all the readings and lecture notes and assignments are totally publicly viewable. the only thing standing between you and doing that whole class on your own (minus, the final) is your will power. At least one semester of the courses are at webcast.berkeley.edu or on youtube. Again, totally public.

If you really want to, you can even attend lecture since berkeley is an open campus and no one will check to see what you're doing there. Be warned, though, the classes are really impacted right now, so you might not even get a seat.

The only downside to doing it this way is that you don't get official credit. If you really want that, you could take it via extension, but I highly doubt they'll let you in since even declared majors are having all sorts of trouble signing up for classes (the intro series went from like 300 students to >1200 per semester in like 2 years, so they are having some growth issues :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How people feel about the "going to college" question is usually just a reflection of their own experiences and nothing more. You can't live life twice.

IF you want to be a doctor/lawyer/etc where a degree is required, then by all means you must go to school.

For anything where only results matter (for example, the open source software world) no one will care one way or the other what you do.

A lot of things will fall in between. Some doors will open, some will close. It's impossible for anyone to say which is a better choice.

Certainly, no matter what, there is no pressing need to go to school NOW. School will still be there in a year. Or two. Or even 20 if you find a reason to go later in your life.

The only thing you should avoid at all costs is wasting time. If you're skipping school to get high and play video games (doesn't sound like you!) then you are going to pay a heavy price as the years slip by. Be sure to make use of the time you "save"!

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER17> This guy is silicon valley's dream. Self re-locating, driven and talented, and young enough to pay peanuts in salary. You late twenty-somethings have an expiration date now.

<comment><USER18> you forgot to add: "and from a wealthy enough background to never have to worry about taking risks"

<comment><USER17> I didn't want to bring that up on HN for fear of facing some backlash, but my wife and I were having that very same discussion just now.

I won't dismiss whatever risks he took to get to where he is. That said, I am guessing he can still get that free education through his parents employment if he ever needed to and it must make things a lot less stressful knowing that the risk is not quite so great.

I always reflect back on my interviews. Whenever I went for an interview, but had a decent job that I could stay at, I KILLED. Then, those few times when I was dying to get out of my situation, I lost some of my confidence and charm and bravado and those were the times I didn't get the job. It honestly helps (me) to take risks when there is a cushy landing if you fail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hi Miles, I really like the page and the idea behind!

Do you know www.startuptravels.com? There's approximately 42 entrepreneurs at the moment of writing in the bay area who'd like to meet other entrepreneurs for a coffee and a chat.

Direct link to the SF search: [http://www.startuptravels.com/search?location=San%20Francisc...](http://www.startuptravels.com/search?location=San%20Francisco,%20CA,%20USA)

Edit: If anyone wants to show a little support. Show HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8592850](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8592850)

<comment><USER20> Very cool. I've been doing this for about 3 years in Las Vegas for the VegasTech community. It is definitely a great way to meet other people and it keeps you from getting too focused on your own thing and not getting other perspectives.

I've also signed up for startuptravels as it looks to be a great way to create conversations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd like to think i'm a relatively successful 20 year old.

I left high-school and jump straight into a front-end dev role at a branding agency.

Two years on I'm not building a creative agency, hireable anywhere and I have a business network that most people would kill for.

I think that what you're doing is great but you'll do better by getting some business cards made, going to events and networking with every single person you can. That relaxed environment usually yields for more exciting and organic business relationships. Simultaneously, work hard in places that are versatile in their offering. You'll get broader and ultimately more valuable experience rather than taking a higher paying job somewhere where you're not growing properly.

Also I recommend you jump into some fast-paced, crazy work at an agency before you move into a product focused team.

</comment><comment><USER22> Your page is way too tall for the amount of information you put. And the most important stuff is at the bottom.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

I was going for the "narrative" style design for this, I intentionally didn't put all the information "above the fold" like the original site did:

[http://coffee.tgriff3.com](http://coffee.tgriff3.com)

<comment><USER23> I prefer that original website. It makes it much clearer what's going on.

<comment><USER24> I prefer Miles' "narrative" style. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I know somebody who did something like this in St. Louis and was quite successful:

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

It helped build her network, find a new job, and meet people doing cool things.

</comment><comment><USER26> Seeing this website reminds me of myself. I too have been building computer stuff since I was a 5th grader. I was going to study CS in college. After I was rejected by my dream school, I went on to study economics and mathematics instead, because it was the one of the best program that my school offered.

I've seen your projects and they speak for your passion. I think it's amazing that you are doing what you are doing. I'm not going to lecture you about whether to go to college or not. College has its merits and demerits. All I can say is keep up the good work!

</comment><comment><USER27> This is an awesome networking hack! If you're looking to "meet" a bunch of employers, check out Hired - [http://join.hired.com/x/WF25Mp](http://join.hired.com/x/WF25Mp). We placed someone with a very similar background to you (18 years old, web dev) a while ago. Everyone loved him, they'd be excited to meet you too.

Side note, I'd be happy to chat over coffee and discuss the valley, opportunities, and how to not get screwed over, regardless of your interest in Hired.

<comment><USER28> I'm surprised, a couple of guys I know went on Hired in the bay area and it said there weren't enough jobs at this time.

<comment><USER17> They aged out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is a great idea.

I really wish we had half the community community you guys have, here in Aberdeen, Scotland. You could throw a rock and hit a tech guy in SF. Here, the only groups of any prominence are MS .Net groups.

I've been struggling to find or build such a network here. I'm an open source, Linux, Python type of guy and feel I don't fit in the myopic tech culture here. I'd emigrate to SF in a heartbeat.

Good luck networking, I reckon you'll do alright. If you ever visit Scotland, hit me up!

<comment><USER30> Have you tried [http://aberlug.org.uk/](http://aberlug.org.uk/) or [https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/group/](https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/group/) or [http://www.meetup.com/Aberdeen-Python- Meetup](http://www.meetup.com/Aberdeen-Python-Meetup)?

(not having a go, I have the same problem (sometimes) in Australia)

<comment><USER19> (Disclaimer: I'm cofounder)

I'd recommend also giving [http://www.startuptravels.com/](http://www.startuptravels.com/) a go, we're not a huge crowd yet, but we've got a few entrepreneurs in Australia, and the responsiveness and willingness to meet new people amongst our users has been overwhelmingly positive so far.

<comment><USER30> No one near me. Can I register as a non-startup tech?

Edit: Ah, I don't use LinkedIn.

<comment><USER19> @voltagex_ Definitely. We believe that entrepreneurial spirit is more a state of mind, than what you might be doing on a daily basis.

Edit: Ah, bummer. I believe that's a +1 for native signup! :) Also, which city are you living in?

<comment><USER30> Native / StackExchange / GitHub / Google might hit the other part of your target market.

I'm in Canberra.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I suspect this is just a ploy to get to the top post on HN which is surely of more value than this webpage in and of itself...so congrats I guess.

</comment><comment><USER32> Great idea. Just a heads up, the email validation in your index.js isn't functioning; it accepts any arbitrary string (or none at all).

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't bother with any validation client-side, I have the email validation happen on the back end only.

In retrospect, I should have placed the inputs in an actual <form> element so that Chrome's email validation would take effect.

<comment><USER32> No worries! As someone only a couple years older than you, I have to say, congrats on making the move out there. It seems like you've got a lot of passion and commitment; wish I was in the Berkeley to take you up on the coffee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Hey Miles, we have Mission Hackers meetup this Wednesday. Come join us tomorrow: [https://www.facebook.com/events/1549813885231948/](https://www.facebook.com/events/1549813885231948/)

Everyone else is welcome too! We are a group of hackers and entrepreneurs who get together in Mission District, work on our own projects and have fun.

</comment><comment><USER34> I tried this with burritos last year. The results were mixed. I got a lot of great people, but even with screening, I had a ton of very weird characters come through because I got some press on it.

I found a lot of people just wanted a free burrito. Not a problem, but not the community I hoped to build out of the experiment.

Needless to say I had put on about 20lbs in burritos.

[edit] sent you an email! :)

</comment><comment><USER35> You are gonna go far kid, _scratch that_ adult. Keep those hands firmly gripped on the wheel, noone else driving it but you.

</comment><comment><USER36> I've went more or less a similar route as you. I've met people who swear by going to university. Many who went and dropped out. Others like myself who didn't go.

We're all in roughly the same spots not far from some imaginary standard deviation.

Best of luck with this interesting idea. How do you vet the people you intend to meet? Do you get any spam or trolls?

</comment><comment><USER37> I _love_ that you have overandoverrickandmortyadventures.com! I just binge watched season 1 and checked every domain name; surprisingly there are a few mentioned in the show that are still unclaimed (I think one was mentioned by the fake door salesman in a later episode where they watch interdimensional television)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I really appreciate the praise, some of my friends didn't get it.

It was fun being able to register a domain and have the site for it done before the DNS finished propagating. Plus the whole site, favicon and all, is just one file which is 3kb unzipped:

[https://github.com/MilesOkeefe/overandoverrickandmortyadvent...](https://github.com/MilesOkeefe/overandoverrickandmortyadventures.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Good for you! I'm from the South and moved out here without knowing anyone before. I would love to meet you and hear how things are going. I would be happy to introduce you to people too. Included my email when I responded to your web app but my personal email is listed in my profile. Coffee is on me though ;P

</comment><comment><USER39> This would be cool as a generic tool, like a 1:1 version of Meetup. Which I guess is what dating websites are, but explicitly focused on just talking one time with an interesting person about stuff they are really excited about over coffee instead of dating.

I would like to have coffee with interesting people from time to time.

</comment><comment><USER40> You can basically ignore any life advice you're being given on this thread - you've got your head screwed on better than anyone here. Keep doing what you're doing; you're doing it all right.

I'm not in SF, but if you're ever in the UK (London/Cambridge) feel free to look me up.

</comment><comment><USER41> Pretty cool stuff, dude. I filled out the form (which, I assume, sent you an email). I'll be around Berkeley in January, so if you like chatting about science stuff, then that could be fun. You have really good initiative (especially normalized for age).

</comment><comment><USER42> The college experience for most Millenials can fit into 14 lines of JavaScript: [https://twitter.com/freecodecamp/status/531824655573602304](https://twitter.com/freecodecamp/status/531824655573602304)

</comment><comment><USER43> Many commented about the merits of college already. I'm just going to say college life was great. There's more to life than money and professional success. If you have the opportunity, go through college and experience the social benefits.

</comment><comment> V-2 While the main website is very aesthetic...

[http://miles.codes/](http://miles.codes/)

\- this is not a particularly good design. Project descriptions are hardly readable and it looks plain ugly, to be frank

</comment><comment><USER44> Might be too late, but would be cool to show off your dev schools by adding some sort of slot/budget feature that shows how many cups (or money left) you have open for people to "book."

</comment><comment><USER45> Your Meet me at "noon" placeholder got cut off (reads "no" right now). Had to pull up the trusty inspector to resize the input element to see the full word... Otherwise awesome!

</comment><comment><USER46> If you're one of those strange people who do social networking, this approach is really cool. I like it :) I'll let you know when I'm in the vicinity.

</comment><comment><USER30> Have you thought about letting other people put up subdirectories/subdomains on this site? It'd be really useful for a friend of mine (in Australia)

</comment><comment><USER47> F the haters, you're clearly doing something right.

</comment><comment><USER48> Very impressive Miles !

You should speak to Sahil [http://sahillavingia.com/](http://sahillavingia.com/)

Wish you all the very best !

</comment><comment><USER49> I like the .coffee domain. Nice get. Although, with 190+ points, "I'll buy you coffee" might get a bit expensive.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't doubt it will, but I think it'll fetch a pretty good ROI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I'd love to take you up on this, but I'm afraid I'm thousands of "Miles" away.

Sorry I had to.

Nice Rick and Morty site on your portfolio!

</comment><comment><USER51> [http://miles.codes/](http://miles.codes/) doesn't work well in Firefox, by the way.

<comment><AUTHOR> My bad, I need to get better at testing on environments that I don't use personally.

I take chrome for granted and know that that's a very bad thing (re: the IE6 era v2.0).

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Neat! Just remember that it's not just who you know--it's what you know! You'll go far.

</comment><comment><USER53> [http://imgur.com/DtAqDBU](http://imgur.com/DtAqDBU)

<comment><AUTHOR> This got a laugh out of me :)

Pretty impressed you make an account just for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Welcome to California.

</comment><comment><USER55> How are you marketing this page?

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted it here, then tweeted this HN post to my measly 134 followers.

I also have this site linked to on my personal site, [http://miles.codes](http://miles.codes). But my personal site doesn't get much traffic so I don't think that had any effect.

I've really done no marketing besides posting here and on Twitter. It's just luck and how you phrase the title I think. For example, I posted this link for the first time a few days ago with the the title "I'll buy you coffee" and it only got 2 upvotes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> go to college, dont miss your chance to have sex with human women

</comment><comment><USER57> beautiful website, by the way!</comment>


HashValue: an object for holding MD5 and SHA hashes - <AUTHOR> http://cocoawithlove.com/2009/07/hashvalue-object-for-holding-md5-and.html <comment><USER2> Wow. A wrapper class for MD5 and SHA functions? A non-standard library for a standard library? That's it?

I realize this is Objective-C and hence it even works on the iPhone which gives it some sort of pseudo-cool alibi and blah blah, but are we seriously having this kind of über-basic stuff on the HN frontpage?

<comment><USER3> Ya, I agree. There's a lot of cool stuff you can do with hashes. I started working on a library for Ruby a couple weeks ago for creating hashes and tracking history of objects.

        "kimmy".gibbler              # => c8027100ecc54945ab15ddac529230e38b1ba6a1
        :kimmy.gibbler               # => 52be7494a602d85ff5d8a8ab4ffe7f1b171587df

        a = { :magic => :original }
        a.gibbler_commit             # => d7049916ddb25e6cc438b1028fb957e5139f9910

        a[:magic] = :updated
        a.gibbler_commit             # => b668098e16d08898532bf3aa33ce2253a3a4150e

        a[:magic] = :changed
        a.gibbler_commit             # => 0b11c377fccd44554a601e5d2b135c46dc1c4cb1

        a.gibbler_history            # => d7049916, b668098e, 0b11c377

        a.gibbler_revert 'd7049916'  # Return to a specific commit
        a.gibbler                    # => d7049916ddb25e6cc438b1028fb957e5139f9910
        a                            # => { :magic => :original }

<comment><USER4> You seem to have a serious Full House problem, but an awesome library coming along. I'd expect gibbler_revert to be gibbler_revert!, plus a non-destructive version to fetch a specific commit. If I get some time, I may fork/hack a little.

(For the Google impaired: <http://github.com/delano/gibbler/tree/master>)

<comment><USER3> Haha, it's true. I do have a serious FH problem.

I also needed an obscure but familiar keyword so the method could be included in any object with low risk of collision. There is currently near-zero usage of the keyword "gibbler" in any project (Ruby or otherwise).

And thanks for the ! correction. I've updated the repo and docs.

<comment><USER5> When you say Full House problem, are you referring to collision of names? (All Google comes up with is info on the 90s TV show)

<comment><USER6> Gibbler was a character on the show. Seems the name was chosen because it's apparently unique in the ruby ecosystem.

I know this only because I was in love with her at the time .. guh</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Building your own deep learning computer is 10x cheaper than AWS - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-mission/why-building-your-own-deep-learning-computer-is-10x-cheaper-than-aws-b1c91b55ce8c <comment><USER2> You're forgetting the cost of fighting IT in a bureaucratic corporation to get them to let you buy/run non-standard hardware

Much easier to spend huge amounts of money of Azure/AWS and politely tell them it's their own fucking fault when they complain about the costs. (what me? no I'm not bitter, why do you ask?)

<comment><USER3> They seriously can't buy a graphics card and slap it in the PCIe slot?

<comment><USER4> When I worked at Google, I really missed the dual monitor setup I had had at my previous job. I asked my manager how to get a 2nd monitor. Apparently, since I had the larger monitor, I was not allowed to get a 2nd one without all kinds of hassle. I asked if I was allowed to just buy one from Amazon and plug it in, and I was told no. I finally just grabbed an older one that had been sitting in the hallway of the cube-farm next to us for a few days, waiting for to be picked up and re-used. I'm sure somebody's inventory sheet finally made sense 2 years later when I quit, and they collected that monitor along with the rest of my stuff.

<comment><USER5> When I started at Amazon they gave us dual 22" monitors. I bought dual 27" dells and a gfx card to back them and plugged it in. I also explained how much I was swapping with 8gb and a virt (45 minutes of lost productivity a day), and ram was $86. Manager happily expensed ram for me and the rest of the team . 2 years later that was the standard setup. Now I have 7 monitors and 3 PC's from multiple projects and oses and hardware reups and interns. None funded by me. The dells are happily on my quad tree at home.

Amazon also allows you to byoc and image it. Images are easily available. Bias for action gets u far.

<comment><USER6> TIL Bias for action.

<comment><USER7> As did I and the excellent rabbit hole that it led to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great post. From someone who's done a few of these, I'll make a few observations:

1\. Even if your DL model is running on GPUs, you'll run into things that are CPU bound. You'll even run into things that are not multithreaded and are CPU bound. It's valuable to get a CPU that has good single-core performance.

2\. For DL applications, NVMe is overkill. Your models are not going to be able to saturate a SATA SSD, and with the money you save, you can get a bigger one, and/or a spinning drive to go with it. You'll quickly find yourself running out of space with a 1TB drive.

3\. 64GB of RAM is overkill for a single GPU server. RAM has gone up a lot in price, and you can get by with 32 without issue, especially if you have less than 4 GPUs.

4\. The case, power supply, and motherboard, and RAM are all a lot more expensive for a properly configured 4 GPU system. It makes no sense to buy all of this supporting hardware and then only buy one GPU. Buy a smaller PSU, less RAM, a smaller case, and buy two GPUs from the outset.

5\. Get a fast internet connection. You'll be downloading big datasets, and it is frustrating to wait half a day while something downloads and you can get started.

6\. Don't underestimate the time it will take to get all of this working. Between the physical assembly, getting Linux installed, and the numerous inevitable problems you'll run into, budget several days to a week to be training a model.

<comment><USER9> In terms of number 6. The Linux Deep Learning framework installation can happen in one line with Lambda Stack:

[https://lambdalabs.com/lambda-stack-deep-learning- software](https://lambdalabs.com/lambda-stack-deep-learning-software)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I ran into this exact issue about 2 years ago about build vs rent. Ultimately I chose build.

Here's my thoughts/background:

Background: Doing small scale training/fine tuning on datasets. Small time commercial applications. I find renting top shelf VM/GPU combos on the cloud to be psychologically draining. Did I forget to shut off my $5 dollar an hour VM during my weekend camping trip? I hate it when I ask myself questions like that.

I would rather spend the $2k upfront and ride the depreciation curve, than have the "constant" VM stress. Keep in mind, this is for a single instance, personal/commercial use rig.

I feel that DL compute decisions aren't black/white and should be approached in stages.

Stage 0: If you do full time computer work at a constant location, you should try to own a fast computing rig. DL or not. Having a brutally quick computer makes doing work much less fatiguing.Plus it opens up the window to experimenting with CAD/CAE/VFX/Photogrammetry/video editing. (4.5ghz i7 8700k +32gb ram +SSD)

Stage 1: Get a single 11/12 gb GPU. 1080TI or TitanX (Some models straight up won't fit on smaller cards). Now you can go on Github and play with random models and not feel guilty about spending money on a VM for it.

Stage 2: Get a 2nd GPU. Makes for writing/debugging multi-gpu code much easier/smoother.

Stage 3: If you need more than 2 GPU's for compute, write/debug the code locally on your 2 GPU rig. Then beam it up to the cloud for 2+ gpu training. Use preemptible instances if possible for cost reasons.

Stage 4: You notice your cloud bill is getting pretty high($1k+ month) and you never need more than 8x GPUs for anything that your doing. Start the build for your DL runbox #2. SSH/Container workloads only. No GUI, no local dev. Basically server grade hardware with 8x GPUS.

Stage 5: I'm not sure, don't listen to me :)

<comment><USER11> I'm thinking of starting a prepaid cloud service -- once your $20 is gone it shuts everything off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> You can also get GPU instances at much cheaper rates from Hetzner and OVH.

[https://www.hetzner.de/dedicated-rootserver/ex51-ssd- gpu](https://www.hetzner.de/dedicated-rootserver/ex51-ssd-gpu)

[https://www.ovh.com/world/public- cloud/instances/prices/](https://www.ovh.com/world/public- cloud/instances/prices/)

<comment><USER13> Only in non-North American datacenters. In NA, Nvidia can enforce their driver license, which prohibits use of consumer GPUs in datacenters.

A nice advantage of non-consumer GPUs is their bigger RAM size. Consumer GPUs, even the newest 2080 Ti, has only 11 GB. Datacenter GPUs have 16GB or 32 GB (V100). This is important for very big models. Even if the model itself fits, small memory size forces you to reduce batch size. Small batch size forces you to use a smaller learning rate and acts as a regularizer.

<comment><USER14> _" Only in non-North American datacenters"_

OVH offers these in their Canadian data center.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Nvidia contractually prohibits the use of GeForce and Titan cards in > datacenters. So Amazon and other providers have to use the $8,500 datacenter > version of the GPUs, and they have to charge a lot for renting it.

<comment><USER16> Curious of the MTBF (mean time between failure) rate of a GefForce/Titan series GPU under continuous utilization in datacenter conditions vs a desktop computer with intermittent usage. I don't want to believe Nvidia is just out to stiff cloud providers. Maybe it's to protect themselves from warranty abuse?

<comment><USER17> It's market segmentation. It doesn't need to be more than that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> NVIDIA is attempting to separate enterprise/datacenter and consumer chips to justify the cost disparity. Specifically, they're introducing memory, precision etc. limits which have major performance implications to GeForce and there's also the EULA which was been mentioned here. That said, everything AWS comes at a premium as they're making the case that on-demand scale outweighs the pain of management/CapEx. This premium is especially noticeable with more expensive gear like GPUs. At Paperspace ([https://paperspace.com](https://paperspace.com)), we're doing everything we can to bring the cost down of cloud and in particular, the cost of delivering a GPU. Not all cloud providers are the same :)

Disclosure: I work on Paperspace

<comment><USER19> Paperspace is great for the price(especially for storage) and easy for deployment. However, the customer support is horrible. Turnaround time is around a week, and sometimes they seem to have billing issues. One time I got charged around $100 for trying out a GPU machine for 2 hours(which is the number of hours showed up on the invoice), and it took them three weeks to eventually issue a refund. That made me decide to switch. Hope you guys can hire more people for customer support or have better solution for issues like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> For me, one of the main reasons for building a personal deep learning box was to have fixed upfront cost instead of variable cost for each experiment. Not an entirely rational argument, but I find having fixed cost instead of variable cost promotes experimentation.

<comment><USER21> This is how I feel as well, especially in a work context. It's liberating to have hardware freely available for use. I'm dreading the day when our computing grid is made more efficient (smaller and tolled).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's been this way since day 1. NVLINK remains the only real Tesla differentiator (although mini NVLINK is available on the new Turing consumer GPUs so WTFever). But because none of the DL frameworks support intra-layer model parallelism, all of the networks we see tend to run efficiently in data parallel because doing anything else makes them communication-limited, which they aren't because data scientists end up building networks that aren't, chicken and the egg style.

I continue to be boggled that Alex Krizhevsky's One Weird Trick never made it to TensorFlow or anywhere else:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.5997](https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.5997)

I also suspect that's why so many thought leaders consider ImageNet to be solved, when what's really _solved_ is ImageNet-1K. That leaves ~21K more outputs on the softmax of the output layer for ImageNet-22K, which to my knowledge, is still not solved. A 22,000-wide output sourced by a 4096-wide embedding is 90K+ parameters (which is almost 4x as many parameters in the entire ResNet-50 network).

All that said, while it will always be cheaper to buy your ML peeps $10K quad- GPU workstations and upgrade their consumer GPUs whenever a brand new shiny becomes available, be aware NVIDIA is very passive aggressive about this following some strange magical thinking that this is OK for academics, but not OK for business. My own biased take is it's the right solution for anyone doing research, and the cloud is the right solution for scaling it up for production. Silly me.

<comment><USER8> I think that the reason no one implements Krizhevsky's OWT (at least in normal training scripts, there's nothing stopping you from doing this in TensorFlow) is that the model parallelism in OWT is only useful where you have more weights than inputs/outputs to a layer. This was true for the FC layers in AlexNet, but hardly anyone uses large FC layers anymore.

<comment><USER23> Model parallelism is also useful in situation where your model (and/or your inputs) is so large that even with batch_size=1 it does not fit in GPU memory (especially if you're still using 1080Ti). However other techniques might help here (e.g. gradient checkpointing, or dropping parts of your graph to INT8).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Own hardware is always cheaper to _buy_ than using a cloud service, but keeping it running 24/7 involves substantial costs. Sure, if you run a solo operation, you can just get up during the night to nurse your server, but at some point that no longer makes sense to do.

Somewhere along the way we forgot about this and it's now perfectly normal to run a blog on a GKE 3 VM kubernetes cluster, costing 140 EUR/month.

<comment><USER25> I used to manage hardware in several datacentres, and I'd usually visit the data centres a couple of times _a year_. Other than that we used a couple of hours of "remote hands" services from the datacentre operator. Overall our hosting costs were about 30% of what the same capacity would have cost on AWS. Once a year I'd get a "why aren't we using AWS" e-mail from my boss, update our costing spreadsheets and tell him I'd happily move if he was ok with the costs, as it would have been more _convenient_ for me personally, and every year the gap came out just too ridiculously huge to justify.

In the end we started migrating to Hetzner, as they finally got servers that got close enough to be worth offloading that work to someone else. Notably Hetzner reached _cost parity_ for us; AWS was still just as ridiculously overpriced.

There are certainly scenarios where using AWS is worth it for the convenience or functionality. I use AWS for my current work for the convenience, for example. And AWS can often be cheaper than buying hardware. But I've never seen a case where AWS was the cheapest option, or even one of the cheapest, even when factoring in everything, unless you can use the free tier.

AWS is great if you can justify the cost, though.

<comment><USER26> When you create the spreadsheet, do you price in running servers 24x7 or using elastic capacity?

<comment><USER25> We had too low variations in load over the day to make elastic usage cost effective for the most part, so it made very little difference. Indeed, one of the most cost effective ways of using AWS is to not use it, but be ready to use it to handle traffic spikes. Do that and you can load your dedicated servers much closer to capacity, while almost never having to spin any instances up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> There's also a great series on STH where they build a couple different configurations from budget versions (~$800) to more expensive version (~$16000)

[1] [https://www.servethehome.com/deeplearning02-sub-800-ai- machi...](https://www.servethehome.com/deeplearning02-sub-800-ai-machine- learning-cuda-starter-build/) [2] [https://www.servethehome.com/deeplearning11-10x-nvidia- gtx-1...](https://www.servethehome.com/deeplearning11-10x-nvidia-gtx-1080-ti- single-root-deep-learning-server-part-1/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Missing 1 important point: ML workflows are super chunky. Some days we want to train 10 models in parallel, each on a server with 8 or 16 GPUs. Most days we're building data sets or evaluating work, and need zero.

When it comes to inference, sometime you wanna ramp up thousands of boxes for a backfill, sometimes you need a few to keep up with streaming load.

Trying to do either of these on in-house hardware would require buying way too much hardware which would sit idle most of the time, or seriously hamper our workflow/productivity.

<comment><USER29> on the other hand, this comparison accounts for the full cost of the rig, while a realistic comparison should consider the marginal costs. Most of us need a pc anyways, and if you're a gamer the marginal cost is pretty close to zero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> >"Nvidia contractually prohibits the use of GeForce and Titan cards in datacenters. So Amazon and other providers have to use the $8,500 datacenter version of the GPUs, and they have to charge a lot for renting it."

I wonder if someone might provide some clarification on this. Is this to say only if a reseller buys directly from Nvidia they are compelled by some agreement they signed with Nvidia? How else would this legal for Nvidia to dictate how and where someone is allowed to use their product? Thanks.

<comment><USER31> Another comment in this thread said that it's due to the license on Nvidia's drivers. So technically you _can_ use the hardware in a datacenter, just not with the official drivers. Unfortunately it seems that the open-source drivers aren't usable for most datacenter purposes, so this effectively limits how you can use the hardware (at least in North America, where they can enforce it).

<comment><USER30> Wow so the drivers serve as a form of license key. I wonder how long before AWS develops its own GPUs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> While, in sheer dollar amount this post is probably correct, it doesn't really scale.

At scale, you need more than just hardware. It's maintenance, racks, cooling, security, fire suppression etc. Oh, and the cost of replacing the GPUs when they die.

At full price, yes, cloud GPUs on AWS aren't cheap, but at potentially a 90% saving in some regions/AZs, the price of spot instances by bidding on unused capacity for ML tasks that can be split over multiple machines make using cloud servers a much more attractive prospect.

I think this post is conflating one physical machine to a fleet of virtualised ones, and that's not really a fair comparison.

Also, the post refers to cloud storage at $0.10/GB/month which is incorrect. AWS HDD storage is $0.025/GB/month and S3 storage is $0.023 which is arguably more suited to storing large data sets.

<comment><USER33> And the same can be said about can in fact pretty much be said by any AWS service.

The equivalent of an i3 metal is probably around 30000 to 40000$ with Dell or HP, and probably half cheaper if self assembled (like a supermicro server). AWS i3.metal will cost 43000 annually, so even more than the acquisition cost of the server, server which will last probably around 5 year.

But if you start taking into account all the logistic, additional skills, people and processes needed to maintain a rack in a DC, plus the additional equipment (network gears, KVMs, etc). The cost win is far less evident and it also generally adds delays when product requirements changes.

Fronting the capital can be an issue for many companies, specially the smaller ones, and for the bigger ones, repurposing the hardware bought for a failed project/experiment is not always evident.

<comment><USER34> > But if you start taking into account all the logistic, additional skills, > people and processes needed to maintain a rack in a DC,

You've mostly described what one pays a datacenter provider, plus hiring someone who has experience working with one (and other own-hardware vendors, such as ISPs and VARs), which doesn't cost any more (and maybe less) than hiring someone with equivalent cloud vendor expertise.

> plus the additional equipment (network gears, KVMs, etc).

Although these are non-zero, they're a few hundred dollars (if that) per server, at scale, negligible compared to $20k.

> The cost win is far less evident

It still is, since the extra costs usually brought up are rarely quantified, and, when they are, turn out to be minor (nowhere near even doubling the cost of hardware plus electricity). AWS could multiply it by 10 (as in the very rough pricing example you provided).

> generally adds delays when product requirements changes.

This is cloud's biggest advantage, but it's not directly related to cost. This advantage can easily be mitigated by merely having spare hardware sitting idle, which is, essentially part of what one is paying for at a cloud provider.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I really want to believe this. Of course the numbers given depend on _very_ frequent use of your machine, but still. One would imagine that building a datacenter at scale and only renting when you actually are training a model to be _much_ cheaper, but the reality appears to be not so.

So where does the money go?

Three places:

\- AWS/Google/Whoever-you're-renting-from obviously get a cut

\- Inefficiencies in the process (there's lots of engineers and DB administrators and technicians and and and people who have to get paid in the middle.)

\- Thirdly, and this is what most surprised me, NVIDIA takes a big cut. Apparently the 1080Ti and similar cards are consumer only, whilst datacenters & cloud providers _have_ to buy their Tesla line of cards, with corresponding B-to-B support and price tag (3k-8k per card). [1]

So, given these three money-gobbling middlemen, it does seem to kinda make sense to shell out 3.000$ for your own machine, if you are serious about ML.

Some small additional upsides are that you get a blazing fast personal PC and can probably run Crysis 3 on it.

[1][https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/27/nvidia-limits-data-center- us...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/27/nvidia-limits-data-center-uses-for- geforce-titan-gpus.html)

<comment><USER36> I'm guessing the costs around NVIDIA cards is why Google are pushing there own TPU's and building custom chips and hardware?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> By coincidence I just posted [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18066472](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18066472) about the expense of AWS et al for NASA's HPC work. (Deep learning, "big data" et al are, or should be, basically using HPC and general research computing techniques, although the NASA load seems mostly engineering simulation.)

</comment><comment><USER38> > Even when you shut your machine down, you still have to pay storage for the > machine at $0.10 per GB per month, so I got charged a couple hundred dollars > / month just to keep my data around.

Curious how it relates to sticking only a single terabyte SSD in the machine. As a couple hundred dollars per month should relate to a couple terabytes.

<comment><USER39> Yeah, that didn't add up for me too. Storage for a single machine shouldn't add up to hundreds of dollars a month unlesa you're not really trying to manage your data (by culling datasets, using compression, etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I have seen sys admins stand-up a bunch of EC2's in AWS and install PostGres and Docker on them (because the dev's said they need a DB and a docker server). They don't get the services model (use RDS and ECS). Sys admins have to change. Orgs can't afford this cost nor be slowed down by this 1990s mindset.

Standing up a bunch of EC2's in AWS is just a horrible idea and an expensive one as well. It also moves all of the on-prem problems (patching, backups, access, sys admins as gatekeepers, etc.) to the cloud. It's the absolutely wrong way to use AWS.

So stop sys admins from doing that as soon as you notice. Teach them about the services and how, when used properly, the services are a real multiplier that frees everyone up to do other, more important things rather than baby sitting hundreds of servers.

<comment><USER41> Yeah that's nice and all, but then you have total and complete vendor lock-in.

I decided to do the EC2 thing when I built one of my products, knowing that I couldn't have vendor lock in - and that decision was _critical_ to the survival of my company when:

1) A customer wanted to run on azure. We would have lost a 2.5 million pound contract if we couldn't do that

2) Another customer wanted on-prem solution, we would have lost a 55 million USD contract if we were vendor locked to AWS

so sometimes it makes sense

<comment><USER40> The DB schema in RDS is identical to the DB schema on a Postgres server in your data center and the RDS data dumps can be loaded into your very own personal DB wherever you like.

The dockerfile used to build the containers in ECS can be pushed to any registry and the resulting containers can run on any docker service.

What vendor lock in? I just don't buy that argument.

Use the services Luke ;) it will cost much less and you can focus on other things!

<comment><USER41> I thought you meant use all of the services, like lambda, SQS instead of Kafka or Rabbit, S3 for blobs instead of HDFS or filesystem.

Sure RDS can be swapped out easily, but what if I'm using 10 or 20 services?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Reminds me of this post about how much of a gap there is between crypto mining and renting a box out to researchers:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16663689](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16663689)

We're way overdue for a p2p marketplace for cycles.

</comment><comment><USER43> > There's one 1080 Ti GPU to start (you can just as easily use the new 2080 Ti > for Machine Learning at $500 more — just be careful to get one with a blower > fan design)

I don't believe there are any blower-style 20-series cards. The reference cards use a dual-fan design.

<comment><USER44> The ASUS TURBO models are blower style, no idea how hot they'll run though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Try spot instances, you'll save a ton of money.

</comment><comment><USER46> So this is definitely an interesting article with some good ideas. But the main thrust isn't particularly interesting. It's always going to be true that building and operating your own is cheaper than using "the cloud"... so long as you are making use of it much of the time; and if you have the resources and facilities to build, operate, troubleshoot, and replace the hardware; and if you are sure about your long-term needs. But the decision isn't always that straightforward for most potential users.

Also, look into using S3 for long-term storage, instead of leaving your stuff cold in EBS volumes. It's quite a bit cheaper.

<comment><USER47> Except in this case, if you use it once a week, you're clearly coming out ahead.

That's getting pretty extreme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Purely on hardware yes it's no secret that AWS is more, quite a bit more, than just buying/building the machine and plugging it in. That's for any servers no just "deep learning" servers.

Of course you're also paying for everything else AWS brings and the ability to spin up/down on demand with nearly unlimited scalability which is hardly "free." AWS is also a very profitable business for Amazon so they're making good margin too on most of their pricing.

<comment> Const-me > AWS is more, quite a bit more, than just buying/building the machine and > plugging it in.

Last time I looked, for mid-range AWS instances, purchase price was about 6-12 months of the rent. That's assuming you buy comparable servers, i.e. Xeon, ECC RAM, etc…

For GPGPU servers however, purchase price is only 1-2 months of Amazon rent. Huge difference, despite 1080Ti is very comparable to P100, 1080Ti is slightly faster (10.6 TFlops versus 9.3), P100 has slightly more VRAM (12/16GB versus 11).

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> You know, all the negatives of building your own machine assumes you run it 24/7, and we sure as hell don't. We run these models maybe a couple of times a week, but we expect fast results when we do, and that's unchanged.

I will bring this up with the rest of my data engineering team, this might be a good idea.

<comment><USER50> > Assuming your 1 GPU machine depreciates to $0 in 3 years (very > conservative), the chart below shows that if you use it for up to 1 year, > it'll be 10x cheaper, including costs for electricity

You can invert that to 3 years of use at 33% utilization which would come out cheaper (or is my maths broken?). Still doesn't sound like it'd be a good match for your usage though.

That 3 years is extremely conservative though, in reality it would probably be much longer and there are some potential upgrade paths to factor in as well. Not to mention the potential to use it for other purposes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Every hardware can be cheaper than AWS if you build it yourself, that's not the point. The ongoing cost of maintaining and improving it, and the necessary knowledge might not. Also instead of building your own hardware, you can build the app instead. I thought these are obvious for anyone.

</comment><comment><USER52> Hardware is the easy part. Setting up and running the software stacks. Uptimes, etc are tricky.

<comment><USER53> Exactly. I recently had a discussion on the costs of an RDS setup on AWS. Yes, renting a dedicated server or buying a server and setting up replicated MySQL is much cheaper than the montly cost of two RDS instances. Until you add the labour cost of setting up, maintaining and monitoring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> This works if your machine learning is just for data analytics purposes.

The article somehow completely ignores integration with other services to query or update the model, which requires some API to be hosted on a static ip or domain, as well as the devops process.

<comment><USER55> Yeah the main use case here is training, which is much more of an offline process. For inference, you will probably want a cloud provider. Though the cost difference still holds, so maybe a startup idea.

<comment><USER56> Inference can usually be done on much cheaper hardware, or using lambda.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Can anybody fill me in on why people these days are spending almost the same money for a last-gen, medium-high end, 12 core, 24 thread CPU and a motherboard? What features would an almost $400 motherboard have that could justify that price?

<comment><USER58> Threadripper is actually not even that great here, it's NUMA (half of the lanes are attached to each die) and if you just want NUMA you can do a dual- socket E5-2650 system for like half the price. Same logic applies to TR here:

[https://www.servethehome.com/how-intel-skylake-sp-changes- im...](https://www.servethehome.com/how-intel-skylake-sp-changes-impacted- single-root-pcie-deep-learning-servers/)

You're not using the CPU for anything, there is no reason to have a beefy 12-core CPU there. If you really want Threadripper, the 8-core version is fine.

Again, personally I'd look at X79 boards, since they are pretty cheap and you can do up to 4 GPUs off a single root, depending on the board. There are new- production boards available from China on eBay, see ex: "Runing X79Z". Figure about $150 for the mobo, about $100 for the processor, and then you can stack in up to 128 GB of RAM, including ECC RDIMMs, which runs about $50 per 16 GB.

There are some Z170/Z270 boards like the "Supercarrier" from Asrock that include PLX chips to multiplex your x16 lanes up to 4 16x slots (does not increase bandwidth, just allows more GPUs to share it at full speed!). They also will not support ECC (you need a C-series chipset for that, which run >$200). So far most OEMs have been avoiding putting out high-end boards for Z370 because they know Z390 is right around the corner so there is currently no SuperCarrier available for the 8000 series.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Did the Stanford grad include that his and other grad students time is worth at least $100 an hour on the open market, i.e. what a Stanford CS grad would make in Silicon Valley (cest moi)?

<comment><USER34> This is only applicable if they can _actually_ sell very small increments of their time for that amount of money, which I strongly suspect they can't. There have been numerous threads here on HN about the difficulties of finding full-price work that isn't full time.

Even then, the $2k difference between the cheapest pre-built the article references and the DIY version would be 20 hours at $100/hr. Half a workweek to build one PC seems excessive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> seems logical.. i would argue the inflection point in the ubiquity of pooled compute services came as bandwidth needs increased due to more businesses interacting directly, remotely and in real time, with customers, be they consumers or other businesses

if compute needs were all internal, as they are with desktop apps.. namely, compilation.., and with the majority of computationally expensive machine learning demands.. namely, training.. then i'd argue the pooled compute model would have remained niche

</comment><comment><USER61> Does anybody know how Cloud ML on TPUs compares to BYO 2080?

</comment><comment><USER62> You only need such a machine for short time periods most of the time. So renting it is much more easy and cheaper.

<comment><USER55> Hi! Thank you for the comment, I'm the writer on the article. When we did our training we actually needed the computer for months at a time. It takes 1-2 months to tune a model and we were running exps almost 24/7\. So one project put us in the break even point to build.

<comment><USER63> Was it possible to paralelize the process? Seems like training on few dozen cloud GPUs and finishing much faster would save a lot of money in terms of engineer time

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> This analysis assumes 100% utilization: keeping the machine busy 24/7/265\. It also ignores AWS price drops and the value of being able to switch to new AWS GPU instance types as they become available.

TL;DR: Proposed machine costs $3k plus ~$100-200?/month for electricity, comparable AWS is currently $3/hr.

My conclusion: If you're going to do more than 1-2,000hrs of GPU computing in the next few years, start thinking about building a machine.

<comment><USER65> If you just run something for 3 days every 2 weeks using your numbers that comes out to $432 per month. Just one month! Still not including storage costs etc. So after 6 months you're even. And you can still sell those GPUs in 1/2 years for a decent chunk of money when you want to buy the next generation.

The cloud only really makes sense for the on-demand burst capability IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I feel this probably also assumes that your time is worthless.

</comment><comment><USER67> TLDR; Two month rental cost of GPU machine in AWS (and elsewhere) is same as purchase price of similarly powered hardware. Why? In fiersly competitive market no cloud provider wants to capture share here. One thing is that author is comparing high end GPU machine with V100s that cost way too much for the privilege of putting them in data center compared to consumer grade Ti1080.

</comment><comment><USER68> I don't see what's surprising here. This is the ski rental problem [0].

Would it surprise anyone to learn that renting a car is more expensive in the long run compared to buying one? This is the same thing, only the time scales are different.

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

<comment><USER69> Because the cloud has economies of scale and benefits from specialization (cheaper power, bulk buying prices, remote land prices, etc)

Hence, some of these saving should be passed on to consumers and it should be cheaper.

The counter argument is that the cloud is over-engineered (redundancy, backups, better software) for enterprise customers. You u are paying for all these benefits whether u want to or not.

<comment><USER70> I've seen just the opposite. A VPS from a cloud provider is often 2-3x the cost of an equivalent Linode.

<comment><USER71> I think your pricing information might be slightly out of date. AWS Lightsail's $5 plan is equivalent or better than Linode's $5 plan. Plus AWS Lightsail has an even more barebones plan at $3.5 per month.

Two years ago you would be perfectly correct. The cheapest AWS option back then would be a micro EC2 instance at around $20 per month IIRC.

<comment><USER72> Lightsail is basically a toy to compete with Vultr/DO/OVH/etc. You can't even rename a server or change its metadata. You can't resize a server (except for taking a snapshot and building a new server). Essentially, you can't make any changes to a server and there are zero tools for organizing, tagging, or even adding a description field. Of course, you cannot manage Lightsail instances using the AWS console (or even see them). All of the powerful AWS tools are invisible to you as well, and your entire Lightsail infrastructure is invisible from within AWS itself (except for the bill).

Lightsail is really great for personal sandbox servers, or for moving to AWS on the cheap, but it's not even as capable as its worst competitor (and certainly cuts out a _lot_ of features compared to real AWS.)

The worst part is probably the surprising and seemingly minor factor of being able to simply rename or resize a server. This makes using it in a team or production environment surprisingly difficult.

With that all said, I still find Lightsail very useful for small prototyping and other fast jobs (or a Lambda replacement -- it's _way_ cheaper than running any reasonably busy Lambda function), but I can't see using it for real production usage. Your best bet for real production usage, or something that will someday move into production, would be probably vultr/DO/linode. (OVH really wants to be great, and it should be because the hardware is really great, but the dashboard and billing are so bizarrely bad..)

AWS is good when you have a virtually unlimited budget or don't mind running up the bill while you're getting rolling, but getting locked into AWS will mean that you are stuck with it forever. It's very hard to migrate away if you start using a vendor-specific thing like DynamoDB (to be fair, Google Firebase has exactly the same issue; Instances are basically fungible, but proprietary data stores are not)

<comment><USER73> > getting locked into AWS will mean that you are stuck with it forever

I wonder why that's almost never discussed, like that obvious downside is non- existant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> d--b Of course building is cheaper than AWS...

It also means you need to build the computer, maintain it, upgrade it, store it somewhere, connect it to the internet, and so on.

And you can't just scale it if you need to.

I mean, the cloud's here for a reason...

<comment><USER74> > Of course building is cheaper than AWS...

Why "of course"? Last time I checked baking my own cookies is more expensive than just buying a bag at Walmart.

<comment><USER75> > Last time I checked baking my own cookies is more expensive than just buying > a bag at Walmart.

Yes, but most likely they aren't of comparable quality

<comment><USER76> Quite likely, the Walmart ones are better, at least if it comes to taste and looks. Unless you're an expert baker. And then your cookies probably still aren't better, you will just claim they are, and it's polite to agree with that assessment. In fact, it's _polite_ in our society to agree that any half- good DIY attempt has better quality than commercial equivalent, even though it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

<comment><USER73> Only with taste and looks. Maybe.

> Even Walmart's "Great Value 100% Whole Wheat Bread" contains seven > ingredients that Whole Foods considers "unacceptable": high fructose corn > syrup, sodium stearoyl lactylate, ethoxylated diglycerides, DATEM, > azodicarbonamide, ammonium chloride, and calcium propionate.

[http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2014/02/whole_...](http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2014/02/whole_foods_and_walmart_how_many_groceries_sold_at_walmart_would_be_banned.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> GPU accelerates training time considerably. For development it's very convenient to use a Linux laptop with nVidia Optimus. I was able to train a quite complex model on laptops's nVidia (optirun process) while continue working using Intel SOC's GPU. However GPU memory is crucial it's better to choose a laptop with 4GB or more video RAM.

<comment><USER78> I've found that many models require 8GB or more; the T1080 cards are "just about" good enough

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> Does this factor in the cost of lost productivity from having an awesome gaming pc always available?

</comment><comment><USER80> I have a hard time taking seriously any analysis that states x is n-times smaller than y, with neither being a negative number. That's not how math works.

<comment><USER81> It is if you define cheapness is 1/price. So $10 is 0.1 cheap, and $100 is 0.01 cheap. So $10 is 10x cheaper than $100.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> But not commercially viable due to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale)</comment>


Copper Prices Zigzagged Wildly When Almost No One Was Trading - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-22/copper-prices-zigzagged-wildly-when-almost-no-one-was-trading <comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR: one possible cause is that the algorithm that was trading on the London market failed to account for U.S. markets being closed for President's Day.</comment>


Online Collaboration Tools Review - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/motius-de/4-collaboration-tools-for-design-thinking-that-you-should-know-b1f28d0ab2cb <comment><USER2> If I can do 80% of this with the "whiteboard" in my chat program (Slack, Teams, Zoom) why on earth would I use a third-party?

More tools == more problems.</comment>