Game Theory: Open Access textbook - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.06808 <comment><USER2> There are many sources to develop an understanding of game theory. To build mastery in game theory, check out Osborne and Rubinstein's text. The authors offer it as a free download ([http://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il/books.html](http://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il/books.html)).

This is the text used by advanced graduate students, the material is explained precisely.

<comment><USER3> It's a pretty intro level book, but a great one.

I'd say its suitable for maybe junior level undergraduates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a shame that he released it under a no-deriv's CC license. The actual cost of textbooks is small compared to the penalty we all pay from not having our textbooks iteratively refined. [http://blog.jessriedel.com/all- posts/2015/04/16/beyond-paper...](http://blog.jessriedel.com/all- posts/2015/04/16/beyond-papers-gitwikxiv/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Has anyone here applied Game Theory to a real-world productionized problem? I'm curious.

There are many hypothetical situations where game theory is said to be useful, but I've never seen an application of it in real life.

<comment><USER6> Most corporate strategy/competitive strategy problems use game theory on a daily basis. Market entry, retaliation, oligopoly, monopoly, etc. are good examples.

Game theory-heavy industries are the ones in a competitive balance. Think Coke/Pepsi, telecom, etc.

Another way game theory helps is in building the right mindset: you assume that your opponent is just as rational and smart as you, and will be trying to predict how you will react just as you're doing with him/her.

This helps to avoid the failures that result from underestimating your competitors ("we're smarter than them" or "we're better than them").

Disclaimer: I work in strategy.

<comment><USER7> Any chance of elaborating? I'm curious if GT is a 'real tool' (compared to, for example, SWOT analysis), or a high-level mindset?

<comment><USER6> More of a high-level mindset, since GT is more of an academic topic.

A lot of the effects described in GT can be learned by practice and observation of human competitive behavior, but studying it gives you a much better understanding of why certain situations happen, or how competitors will react.

The market entry game (retaliate/accommodate) is usually the best example:

[https://books.google.com/books?id=xhAACwAAQBAJ&pg=PA77&lpg=P...](https://books.google.com/books?id=xhAACwAAQBAJ&pg=PA77&lpg=PA77&dq=market+entry+retaliate+vs+accommodate&source=bl&ots=7Rnu5vHxkp&sig=FeuTp81X0iW3ScNk3jFKKIENx_4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiekJezoIjYAhUB1GMKHenRBFcQ6AEIPDAC#v=onepage&q=market%20entry%20retaliate%20vs%20accommodate&f=false)

Another example is signaling: when you publicly declare that you will match prices aggressively and will never be undercut, that's not actually a threat to your competitors, but a signal that if they keep prices high, you will as well, avoiding a price war.

<comment><USER5> It sounds like in your examples, ideas and conclusions from GT were used to inform practice (sort of like mental models), but GT models themselves were not explicitly deployed.

Game Theory is first and foremost a quantitative, mathematical theory, and I was wondering in what situations one would actually use the mathematics in production systems or in a mathematical analysis. There are a few replies on this thread that alluded to some applications.

<comment><USER6> > in what situations one would actually use the mathematics in production > systems or in a mathematical analysis. There are a few replies on this > thread that alluded to some applications.

I never worked directly with this, but auctions, resource allocation, etc. all use the mathematical tools from Game Theory.

Corporate strategy is too complex and nuanced to build hard mathematical models, so you need higher-level abstractions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm looking to learn Game Theory. Anyone with knowledge in this space have good additional recommendations?

<comment><USER9> I had a professor once classify GT as a sub set of statistical decision theory. Might be worth picking up a SDT text.

Does anyone ever read Theory of Games by von Neumann?

<comment><USER10> This is backwards. Decision theory, which is the foundation of inference in statistics today (Bayesian, minimax, etc. are all special cases of it) is formulated as a one player game. Certain things mesh nicely when you realize this. For example, we know that there is a Nash equilibrium for large classes of games if we allow random strategies. Likewise, for decision theory with nonconvex loss functions, optimal procedures are almost always random.

But: game theory of two or more players is qualitatively different. For a one player game, we speak of optimal strategies. For multiplayer, noncooperative games, Nash equilibria take what would seem to be the obvious generalization of that and twist it in a whole new direction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks like there are more format options here: [https://archive.org/details/1512.06808v1](https://archive.org/details/1512.06808v1)

</comment><comment><USER12> Aside: I misinterpreted the title as saying "applying game theory to OER textbooks" and imagined a paper discussing the incentives/payouts for creators of educational content like textbooks.

Some possible moves:

         - Write for a mainstream publisher (payout: ~5% royalties, reach: medium)
         - Self publish commercially (payout: 45%+ royalties from createspace/lulu, reach: small)
         - Release for free as OER under public domain / CC0 (no payout, reach: broad)

I'm fascinated by the interplay between the for-money publishing business and the idea of open source content, and would really love to see a paper studying this subject. Some concrete questions: 1\. If an author is interested in maximizing total payout, should she write for a mainstream publisher or self- publish? 2\. If an author is interested in most educational impact (maximize the number of readers), should she pursue a one of the commercial routes (publish or self-publish) or release the book as public domain?

The answer to 2. is not obvious: some of the best textbooks I know are free (GFDL, CC *, or public domain because old), but somehow they don't get the respect they deserve because people have the perception of "free" as being somehow inferior quality. People think, if the book really was any good, surely you'd have to pay for it?

Even more interesting is to consider the game theoretic aspects of multiple authors/contributors. Why are software projects on githun with hundreds of collaborators the norm, but textbooks project limited to one or few main authors?

</comment><comment><USER13> I use Game Theory in pretty much everything (academic) Here are some thoughts on the literature.

There are several different strands and evolutions of Game Theory.

1\. Game Theory (non-cooperative):

The basis was Neumann/Morgenstern Theory of Games. It has been suggested in this thread, however its focus is a bit obscure today. Still useful for repeated games, for example. Both authors are also important for Decision Theory, see below. Afterwards came Nash, defining the what the basic solution concept would be up until maybe 1990. Simple Nash equilibria are used primarily where rational agents choose in mathematically nice spaces where uncertainty is not a major factor.

Following Nash, the Game Theory literature developed to produce equilibrium refinements. These, usually subsets of Nash equilibria, were created because Nash often predicts very little - the space of equilibria is often so large that nothing can be learned, or uncertainty requires the incorporation of different information sets of agents. The first developments came while incorporating uncertainty and multi-stage games (where people move in sequence). Harsanyi was able to show that most configurations of uncertainty situations can be represented as a Bayesian Game (the issue was the recursion of "he knows, that I know, that he knows that I know..."). The problem became, that these often produced unintuitive and large sets of equilibria. So we have refinements. Some target robustness, like Selten's Trembling Hand. Others target "natural behavior", empty threats and so on. Almost all of those refinements are a subset of a Nash concept. The development of refinements was en vogue prior to the 90's, when it stopped for reasons I will detail below. Basic Nash has survived, however, and is still the go-to tool to understand multi-agent decision problems (at least initially).

1.a Cooperative Game Theory:

Largely in parallel, mathematicians like Shapely and later economists like Roth also tried to think about cooperative games. Here, we don't look directly at what individual people do in isolation, but rather what groups are stable and plausible and what they can achieve. If for example a smaller group can "break" a coalition, then such a large coalition can not be considered a plausible solution. Matching theory comes from here, for example, so you will find it in most problems of assignment (say, students). Much as non- cooperative Game Theory, it is applied widely.

2\. Decision Theory:

Decision theory developed in parallel and is a wide field. It is, however, critically important to Game Theory because it sets the stage for information, constraints and decisions that agents take. Expected utility, by Neumann and Morgenstern, was and is the basic instrument to understand how agents incorporate their knowledge. This was based on objective probabilities, so in parallel the Bayesian stream also developed. With a monumental and beautiful proof, Savage then developed Bayesian Decision Theory (based on works by de Finetti and others). This is critical to many, many fields in maths, statistics and science in general, and was then the basis for Game Theory. Aumann is associated with latter refinements of decision theory. Later on, the idea of uncertainty (Knightean uncertainy) became important. This is when you can not assign a probability to an outcome. Paradoxes by Elsberg and Allais have shown that this is actually an important decision problem in real life. Multiple approaches exist to generalize Decision Theory, such as Prospect Theory, MinMax Preferences, integration by capacities as opposed to measures. Schmeidler, Gilboa and Wakker are some names. Game Theory exists in this space as well.

3\. Evolutionary Game Theory:

The idea came from Biology and is important because it is a way to justify Game Theoretic outcomes without even requiring purposeful action by agents. It had a huge impact on many problems, especially dynamic ones and "top down" models, but did not surplant traditional Nash in general. Some scientists believe it should. Other's think it's just one more tool. There are those who believe the whole of social sciences should be based on it... Let's say it did not achieve that yet.

4\. Economic applications:

Economics was historically the discipline to apply Game Theory most. Initial concepts like Nash justified many early models of Markets. Earlier concepts of non-perfect competition were formalized with Game Theory. Things really started to take off when asymmetric information were introduced. Think Moral Hazard, Signaling Games, Contract Theory and so forth. What we know about economics, organizations, business, competition and many social phenomena today has largely been developed by applying Game Theory. There are too many great names to mention: Akerlof, Tirole, Spence, Hart, Homström, Myerson, Stiglitz.

5\. Mechanism Design and Auction Theory

In the 70's and 80's, from the above applications, economists like Hurwitz, Myerson and Maskin developed mechanism design. The idea is simple and genius: If agents play games, what if we can choose the game they play? Which game do we choose without them walking away, but with us getting the desireable outcome? What is, in other words, the optimal mechanism inducing the agents to play a game? Initial examples and todays shining example of econ in action is Auction design. Which sort of auction mechanism is best to sell ads, be ebay or assign broadband licences? Mechanism design leads to very complex problems, which is why until the early 90's many simplified assumptions were used. While mechanism design has been very useful, this also lead to two developments. In econ, papers started to get more and more complex to accomodate real life issues like non-monetary transfers, dynamics, complex type sets and so forth. Computer scientists trying to implement mechanisms quickly discovered that many were simply to complex, so they started Algorithmic MD.

6\. Experimental and behavioral games:

So earlier, I said that a whole cataloque of equilibrium refinement basically died out. Why is that? Well, with behavioral econ we were introduced to more realistic approaches to decisionmaking. Then questions arose, such as "what if I can not count on rationality of my competitor". As it turns out, this may actually break the inference of Nash equilibria pretty handily.

At the same time, economists and psychologists put people in experiments to play games. In some situations, Nash worked well. In other situations, one could accomodate much by using more complex Decision Theory. But in many instances, people would just not play Nash. In other words, they couldn't even figure out the most basic solution concept. Indeed one can do all sorts of experiments in a Game Theory 101 class showing that people often choose much too heuristically. Equilibrium refinements make Nash more complex, it was clear they had to be abandoned. Currently, research joint in decision theory and game theory works on finding better ways to model behavior when Nash is not reached.

Books:

Osborne/Rubinstein has been mentioned. Contrary to what was said, this is an undergrad book and a solid intro. There are two classic works. The major one is by Tirole and Fudenberg, the other is by Myerson. The former is more standard, the latter is better. Now there is a new book by Maschler, Solan and Zamir with like 900 pages. It's really good, and I would definitly get it as a second book after an intro.

For Mechanism Design, the best book is by Tilman Boergers. It's also free to download. Auction Theory specifically has a standard volume by Krishna. Both of those are math heavy. This is true in general, but Game Theory concepts can often be explained by intuition. For Mechanism Design, I fear that a solid math background would be required, because the space of "choosing a game" is mathematically not so nice. However solid means you should have a good grounding in analysis and optimization, perhaps dynamic systems. Basically, a math heavy undergrad education will be fine.

hope this helps

</comment><comment><USER14> Explanation of Part V in the introduction is interesting and might be a property which sets this book apart from the fold.

</comment><comment><USER14> Anyone know of any sources for game theory applications to ethics?</comment>


Lessons Learned After Two Years as a Startup Founder - <AUTHOR> http://thederek.com/post/48350468025/lessons-learned-two-years-startup-founder

<comment><USER2> Fire people who aren't 10x unicorns as fast as you can? You need a Rictus Director, not a Smiles Director.

<comment><AUTHOR> Less catchy of a title?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> IMO you don't need a team of only unicorns. In fact, ego management will be very difficult if you miraculously manage to build such a seemingly perfect team. You need a good balance between leaders and "followers", who can be great people, but not superstars.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't disagree, really. Some positions obviously aren't made for "unicorns" but, that said, have found that just because someone is brilliant doesn't mean they're necessarily a pain in the ass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> i constantly wonder whether it's worth entering the startup world after finishing my phd, hearing of 'hire fast/fire fast', looking for 'unicorns'....is this rat race even worth it? What's wrong with just wanting to solve problems, why do you need to build fast as opposed to building something that's awesome and works well - find a niche and grow from there. I can almost feel the 'pressure of the job' for those engineering the system when reading posts from founders/ceos with regards to recruiting - here's a hint "it's always about finding the right employees" (well no shit sherlock).

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're wondering whether it's worth it, definitely sounds like it probably isn't for you. Like all fulfilling things in life (I imagine like getting a PhD, eg.), it's freakin' hard-- so you better go after the things that you think will be worth it & more, IMHO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great openness and willingness to be transparent about the fact you don't always feel in control (as much as you would want your investors, team, and users to think so 24/7).

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks Jonathan!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great post, from the heart. And a beautifully designed website. Great to see someone using their exit money to spread good in the world.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Not sure what you mean by "exit money," but hey-- I'll take it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Awesome post! I loved the part about building up the long-term network to reach out to later.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally-- hard when you're starting out, but definitely starts to click over time... thanks Cole!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> this was great, thank you for taking the time to pull your thoughts together.

<comment><AUTHOR> sure thing, Jacob-- appreciate this.</comment></comment>


A Beginner's Guide to Restricted Boltzmann Machines - <AUTHOR> http://deeplearning4j.org/restrictedboltzmannmachine.html

<comment><USER2> Asking here because I don't really know of a better place. Does anybody involved in deep learning have any use cases _other than image-based use cases_ where deep learning has been a measurably better option than other techniqes?

I don't do any image-related tasks, but I use machine learning extensively and have never been able to successfully break away from my big three of Naive- Bayes, SVMs, and Random Forests. I've tried some of the more established deep learning techniques (LeNet,RBM,etc), but can't seem to find anything that works better than one of those three. Is deep learning an exclusively image- related technique?

<comment><USER3> You can think of deep learning as a way to automate feature extraction on very high-dimensional data, where the features are complex enough that they're difficult or impossible to specify by hand. This includes things like:

\- objects in an image/video

\- phonemes in raw audio

\- events in multidimensional time series

\- grammatical/semantic structures in unstructured text

\- strategic features in a board game position (e.g. Go)

These kinds of inputs are difficult to handle with traditional ML techniques. But if your data already looks more like rows in a table, with simple, semantically meaningful features, deep learning isn't likely to buy you that much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel like this guide comes about 5 years too late - RBMs as density models have been shown to be relatively weak, except in the case of binary data. For continuous data, you can often do better even with a simple Gaussian mixture model. Other than that they are cumbersome to train (the gradient needs to be approximated), and the for continuous variants training can be unstable unless you use very low learning rates.

They were very popular for unsupervised pre-training a while ago, but the utility of pre-training has greatly diminished. Unless you have a ton of unlabeled data and very few labels, it's not worth the effort. And if it is, you are better off using autoencoders for pre-training anyway. They are conceptually much simpler and easier to understand, and you'll get roughly the same results.

If you want to get started with deep learning, focus on feed-forward and recurrent neural nets instead, you'll get much more useful knowledge out of that. For most of the common deep learning use cases there is no need to bother with RBMs anymore.

</comment><comment><USER5> The recent work at Berkeley using deep nets for domestic robot control is interesting.

Deep nets turn camera pixels into motor torques.

The robots are quickly trained to a new task and once trained the solutions are robust to changes - no camera calibration is required.

[http://rll.berkeley.edu/deeplearningrobotics/](http://rll.berkeley.edu/deeplearningrobotics/)</comment>


Seagate to Double HDD Speed with Multi-Actuator Technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomshardware.com/news/hdd-multi-actuator-heads-seagate,36132.html <comment> Const-me It's gonna be a difficult task to develop a firmware for the drive to benefit from this advanced hardware design.

In the current-generation spinning HDDs, the firmware has no idea about a file system. It doesn't even know which sectors are holding data and which ones are empty. The firmware maintains a simple mapping between logical blocks and physical sectors, just a linear mapping + small lookup table for relocated sectors.

For performance reasons, you'd want to balance the data between two halves of the drive, and maintain that balance.

Current-gen SSDs solve somewhat similar problem because they do wear leveling. They do that with custom-designed chips. Just reusing the chip will ruin the performance of this dual-head spinning HDD, because SSDs don't account for slow head movement latency, flash memory access speed is almost independent of the physical location of the block being accessed.

Technically, it might be easier to solve the problem on the higher level of the stack, i.e. in the file system implementation. But Seagate is not in a position to offer a solution on that level, they sell hard drives, not computers or operating systems.

</comment><comment><USER2> Maybe can somebody enlighten why didn't do two actuators on same plates, even second only reading the hdd performance could be easily increased? Because current solution looks like put two hard drives in single enclosure and connected like raid0.</comment>


The Deletion Review page for Nemerle - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review/Log/2011_February_14#Nemerle

<comment><AUTHOR> A note here: Please keep it classy, and focus on sources and _why_ Nemerle is notable. I'm not going to cross-post this on reddit, given the poor behaviour that resulted from the initial post, but I think there's a good opportunity here to rectify a wrong, and I'm sure some HNers would like the chance to help do so.

</comment><comment><USER2> The whole of the deleted article read "Nemerle a statically-typed, high-level programming language targeting the .NET platform. It has Lisp-like metaprogramming capabilities."

<comment><AUTHOR> No it didn't.

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:S2-nrKf...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:S2-nrKf5u7AJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemerle+nemerle&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&source=www.google.com)

<comment><USER2> Funny. I cut and paste that text from Google's cache when I posted the parent post. I note that the article has been recreated and deleted twice since the original deletion.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't be surprised if the AfD nomination spurred some people to add more info to the article, and Google's cache was updated after that but before it was deleted.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Start Web development? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, so I am a high school student. I have background mostly in electronics. Most of my programming so far has been at the embedded system level with C, assembly, or any AVR, PIC microcontroller.
Now I want to learn real web development to design websites with dynamic content. I know html, so that is not enough. I am thinking of starting with ruby on rails. To my understanding ruby can handle databases and scripting (correct me if I am wrong). I chose ruby over javascript,php,or MySQL, because I could get a website going much faster with less time invested in learning so many languages.
so would this be a good choice? or should I try something else?
-Thanks in advance for your responses <comment><USER2> I would be more than happy to sling e-mails back and forth with you on this, as I was in your same place a few years back. If you're interested in connecting, take a look at my Hacker News profile and go to the "stalky links" page, and you can get my e-mail.

Anyway, I'd strongly recommend that you do three things.

1) Check out Meetup.com or various Ruby forums to find out if there's a Ruby / Rails Group in your geographic area. Go to the meetings, meet the people there, and begin to build a local network of support. 2) Try to find out if there are any web dev shops in your area. Even with your limited experience, you might still be able to score a gofer position that just lets you be in the office. As you're there, you could begin sitting in on coding (observing a pair programming session, or even riding shotgun in the session), and eventually taking on small projects with a code review from someone who knows what they're doing. 3) Start a blog, where you document the issues you run into, the solutions you develop, the resources you find useful, and the discoveries you make.

To the specifics you asked about, yes, Ruby does handle databases. It allows you to connect with various types of databases and make various calls to put stuff into the database and get stuff out of the database. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "scripting", but if you mean simply writing small bits of code (methods) that can be called from other methods and that can take input, process it, and give you output, then, yes, Ruby does that.

As nudge mentioned (and as you probably know?), Ruby is the programming language, Rails is a library of pre-written Ruby code that shortens development time. With your background, you _might_ prefer learning Ruby first, but a lot of web programmers (like me) were attracted to Ruby because Rails let them get going quickly with projects. A lot of the database connections and other fiddly bits are taken care of for you. I'd encourage you to focus on learning Rails first, in the same way that I'll encourage you in a minute to become familiar with jQuery, rather than learning javascript. More on that in a sec.

Rails does have some danger zones, though. First, you have to learn some Rails-specific code (the names of helper methods and so on), which might not work outside of Rails, and which might confuse you if you try other Ruby frameworks (Sinatra is another framework). Second, because Rails abstracts a lot of the code, you won't necessarily know what's going on behind the scenes. If your goal is to become a master programmer, that could be bad. If your goal is to _make stuff_ , it's not a bad thing at all, as you'll have time to learn what's in the black box down the road. Third, Rails evolves quickly, and if you're getting started now, you'll find a lot of old Rails tutorials that simply won't make sense, and that won't work with new-ish versions of Rails code. Be wary of any Rails tutorial older than about 6 months. Ruby-heavy tutorials are safer, as Ruby doesn't change a lot. But if the tutorial doesn't specifically mention Rails 2.3.x or Rails 3.0, it might be a bit of a gamble. This is exponentially true for books about learning Rails. Unless the book says "Rails 3.0" on the cover (and I doubt any of them do, as Rails 3.0 isn't even out in its final form yet), don't buy them. Borrow them from the library or a friend. Oh ... one book would be <http://railstutorial.org/>, although I haven't actually read it.

You also mentioned that you won't need to learn javascript. Your best bet here is to become familiar with jQuery. jQuery is like Rails, in that it's a bunch of pre-written code that lets you do stuff quickly. Want to set up tabs that hide/display info? Want to play with dynamic updates to your site without reloading the entire page? Want a pop-over box to fade into place when the user clicks on a link? jQuery's your huckleberry.

A few really good resources (and I'm sure others can add to this): \- Ryan Bates's Railscasts series of tutorials \- StackOverflow (holy cats is this site useful) \- <http://guides.rubyonrails.org> \- <http://github.com> (if you're using Rails, you'll need to know about Github soon enough, whether you post projects there or simply read others' code)

There are a few e-books online that teach Rails and Ruby. For Rails, check out <http://railstutorial.org/>. For Ruby, go to <http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/>.

In terms of hosting your projects online, you'll probably be fine with a basic account at DreamHost (who I love). I also host at MediaTemple (who I can't recommend) and SliceHost (who I can). I've also heard a lot about Linode. But with SliceHost and Linode, you'll also be getting into server management and super-basic sysadmin stuff. Since your goal is to learn web programming, I wouldn't worry about that stuff just yet. I'd steer you towards DreamHost. I don't get a kickback for that, although I do have some kind of referral code thingy that I can give you if you'd _like_ to use it. :)

As I mentioned above, if you want to e-mail me for help getting started, or for other random advice, just go to my "stalky links" page from my profile and you'll find my e-mail. I'd be happy to chat more.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for the comment is ultra useful, so I am starting rails. I hopefully can put something together by the end of summer

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ruby is a good choice, but be aware that Ruby is the language and Rails is a web framework for Ruby (and by no means the only one, but probably the most popular and perhaps beginner-friendly).

An alternative would be Python, which is a more or less similar language to Ruby (in the grand scheme of things), and which has its own web frameworks, such as Django, which is also very beginner-friendly.

I've tried both, and found Django much easier to get into than Rails (Django's documentation is famously excellent), but other people have the exact opposite experience.

Certainly in either case you should spend some time learning the language - ruby or python - before even starting with the web framework. Otherwise you'll find things very difficult. Just get to the level where you can create some simple programs to do what you want to do. Project Euler is a good collection of puzzles you can work through (you don't have to do all of them) to become literate.

Start with a language tutorial. For Python this would be Dive Into Python or the official Python tutorial. For Ruby there are tutorials such as Try Ruby.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ruby on Rails is indeed a good choice. So is Django, although I prefer Rails myself. You'll eventually have to figure out some SQL, so let Rails help you, but don't be afraid to dive in and figure out what's happening underneath. Oh, and Postgres is a nicer DB system.

Javascript is something else you'll eventually want to learn, but Rails is once again, a reasonable starting point.

<comment><USER5> > Javascript is something else you'll eventually want to learn, but Rails is > once again, a reasonable starting point.

How about JavaScript for both the client and the server?

<comment><USER4> I think that node.js is still likely a bit immature for that. Rails, at this point in time, is just going to give you a much larger array of possibilities.</comment></comment></comment>


UK funder rejects 4% of applicants over font transgressions - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/grant-application-rejected-over-choice-of-font-1.18686?WT.mc_id=GPL_NatureNews <comment><USER2> 1- I fail to see how that optimize taxpayer's money usage.

2- I long for the time when you'd just send an ASCII file and they'd use whatever fucking font they wanted to print it out.

The only objective thing they're selecting by having such rules, is whether the "researcher" asking for a grant will be docile and cooperative enough to, eg. participate in scams such as IPCC or vaccines, if not worse.

<comment><USER3> How many seconds of taxpayer money would be wasted just changing the font themselves? They might need to ask for a Word document instead of a pdf but so what? I agree this sounds petty considering how much work apparently goes into such an application. If they're trying to screen out spammers, the way employers do with CVs, then maybe this is a practical test though.

<comment><USER4> This is all about the page limits on grants and making it so everyone has the same room to describe their projects.

It is petty to reject over a font, especially when it seems they had a vague description of requirements, but changing the font has nothing to do with why the grant applications were rejected; it was that if the font was changed, the grant would be over the page limit allowed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sort of reminds me of the bands that wouldn't play a venue if the crazy rider demands weren't adhered to. So the logic goes - if the venue haven't put the effort in to source the bizarre requests on the rider, they probably haven't met all the requirements for sound, electrics, stage weight etc. And thus the show will be terrible or dangerous.

If you can't follow the initial instructions regarding the font, what chances do you have further down the line?

(That said, passing on Calibri before explicitly banning it seems a tad harsh.)

<comment><USER6> If anyone is wondering about some specifics and doesn't already know the story, this was a (now well-known) trick by Van Halen. Their rider included a provision where backstage needed to have a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed. It was explicitly done as a safety measure. More details: [http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp](http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I regularly discard resumes and applications because of font and typographic transgressions. Why?

Because I have a hard time reading the resume with a script font or some other equally hard to read font.

<comment><USER8> Calibri is not hard to read. Your point is correct but it does not apply here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Comic Sans means no money!

<comment><USER10> That's why I switched from Comic Sans to Ariana Grande.

<comment><USER11> Preferred font of the Huffington Post.

<comment><USER10> Well played sir, well played indeed.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Makers Laws – Buddhist Active Thinking to Create Software Products - <AUTHOR> https://gumroad.com/l/gHrTr <comment><AUTHOR> Active thinking is being aware of a thought and trying to dissect the thought into its constituent parts. It's a lot like "Active Listening," except you are the only participant.

My book is called - Makers Laws - Convert Thoughts to Profitable Products.

There are three sources of my book:

My learnings from two profitable products I created (and 8+ failed ones). One of these (HandyTrain) is used by biggest enterprises in India to train their field forces - over 150K MAUs. Another one (GuitarStreet) was India's most popular online guitar store. We sold it in 2018.

Buddhist Texts - Mostly the exploration of "mindfulness of the self" (incorrectly interpreted as "mindfulness of the breath").

Term Logic of Aristotle - The methods involved in the dissection of the thoughts are inspired by this.

\---

Here's an excerpt:

Reality vs Imagination The hardest thing about creating products is distinguishing Reality from Imagination. We create an imaginary problem and fall in love with it. And we refuse to believe that it is not real.

As an example, read the following:

"I invented a model of the world that didn't correspond to reality and worked from that. I didn't notice my model was wrong until I tried to convince users to pay for what we'd built. Even then I took embarrassingly long to catch on. I was attached to my model of the world _, and I 'd spent a lot of time on the software. They had to want it!"_

This hapless young founder, so attached to his "model of the world" is Paul Graham of YCombinator.

Yes, Paul Graham.

It is an excerpt from his blog - How to Get Startup Ideas

We are wired to believe that our version of the world is the real one. And it's super hard to get rid of this.

But there is a trick.

Classify as everything you know, as imaginary.

Really.

This sounds a bit like ancient, religious texts convincing you that nothing is real. But that's not my suggestion here.

My suggestion simply is - _assume_ that everything you know, is not real, but instead, is a theory. It is an exercise that will help you question everything.

We will later explore how to tie this up with Active Thinking and start to see things that you never would have thought existed.

Let us look at some of the most commonly held beliefs, and try to argue that they do not represent reality.

Instead of the word "imaginary", I will use the word Theory. A theory is a plausible explanation of a pattern, and by definition, does not claim that it is real.

Here we go.

People hate it when you lie to them - Theory. What if they are in denial, and lies feed the denial.

People hate being sold to - Theory. What if they are looking for the product you are selling

Wars are bad - Theory. Wars may reorganize the human race, sometimes for the better.

And so on...

Finding the Axioms of your Thought I am not arguing that all the above statements are false.

I am arguing that anything, when seen as a theory, becomes "conditional". The moment you call something a theory, you think about exceptions - <USER2> when that statement could be false.

Every time you do this, you discover the conditions needed for the statement to be true.

In the language of Mathematics, you discover the Axioms of the theory.</comment><comment></comment><comment>---

Do let me know if you liked the topic and the excerpt.

I am not sure if people need this. So as an experiment, I have written the first 4 chapters only.

And I have opened it up for Pre-orders, to gauge whether this book should exist.

EDIT:

if you want to pre-order, use the discount code "showhn" (without the quotes) - created specifically for this community </comment>


78% of Y Combinator Startups Have No Female Founders – And That's Progress - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/78-percent-of-y-combinator-startups-have-no-female-founders-and-thats-progress/ <comment><USER2> Interesting use of statistical framing in the headline: 78% of YC startups have no female founder vs. 22% of YC startups have atleast one female founder, as mentioned in the article.

<comment><USER3> I'ld say 7 out of ten programmers are men. Seems like they are keeping with the probability.

<comment><USER2> The point is that the statistics are the _exact same_ , but one makes a much more baity headline.</comment></comment></comment>


DigitalOcean's Engineering Code of Conduct - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/digitalocean/engineering-code-of-conduct/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER2> _No feigning surprise_

 _No condescending well-actually's_

Egads - I thought this was going to be about serious matters (like the climate of toxic sexual behavior that pervades our industry). But no - it's about thought control and enforcing a culture of fake niceness.

Because -- or "well, actually" \-- sometimes surprise is a perfectly normal human emotion. And "well actually" is just... a fill phrase that pops out of your mouth.

Nothing more.

On the more nuanced side -- I get the point about how these behaviors can seem out of tune, or rub some people the wrong way. So I welcome helpful discourse about them. It's when you feel you have to make a "code of conduct" to regulate them is where it starts to seem controlling and, basically, unhuman.

And very corporate.

<comment><USER3> Interesting and somewhat paranoid reaction. To me these codes discourage behaviours which aren't conducive to a healthy and productive working environment.

<comment><USER4> You just did a microaggression by calling them paranoid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wish more companies would post theirs. Makes it easy to spot places I wouldn't be caught dead working at.

</comment><comment><USER6> Are these codes of conduct for engineers, by engineers? They seem like someone is stereotyping engineers as having no social graces whatsoever and making rules in a heavy-handed fashion.</comment>


Basho Mesos Framework for Riak - <AUTHOR> http://basho-labs.github.io/riak-mesos/

<comment><USER2> [https://github.com/basho-labs/riak-mesos](https://github.com/basho-labs/riak- mesos) is the source link that the site doesn't appear to include.

 _If there are more nodes requested than there are agents available, the scheduler will then start adding more Riak KV nodes to existing agents._

It seems to me like this tends to violate the promises you expect from Riak, in that you could end up with data replicated to three nodes that all happen to be on the same underlying hardware. Maybe set safer defaults?

I'm excited to see new work coming out of Basho.</comment>


Languages and IDEs you can try online - <AUTHOR> http://www.tutorialspoint.com/codingground.htm <comment><USER2> Clojure REPL at [http://www.tryclj.com/](http://www.tryclj.com/) which has link to Github source code.

Clojure(Script) REPL at [http://clojurescript.io](http://clojurescript.io) with source code at [https://github.com/ScalaConsultants/replumb](https://github.com/ScalaConsultants/replumb)

</comment><comment><USER3> Myrddin has an online playground [http://eigenstate.org/myrddin/](http://eigenstate.org/myrddin/)

If you haven't heard of myrddin (from the site):

Myrddin is designed to be a simple language that runs close to the metal, giving the programmer predictable and transparent behavior and mental model. It also does strong type checking, generics, type inference, closures, and traits.

</comment><comment><USER4> A few more classic and esoteric languages are available in [https://repl.it/](https://repl.it/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Something we did, includes Swift and shell: [https://codepad.remoteinterview.io](https://codepad.remoteinterview.io)

Also, for making your own such service: [https://github.com/remoteinterview/compilebox](https://github.com/remoteinterview/compilebox)

</comment><comment><USER6> tmpnb launches temporary Jupyter notebook servers using Docker containers:

[https://tmpnb.org](https://tmpnb.org) [https://github.com/jupyter/tmpnb](https://github.com/jupyter/tmpnb)

</comment><comment><USER7> swi-prolog has a very-nice web IDE:

[http://swish.swi-prolog.org/example/clpfd_sudoku.pl](http://swish.swi- prolog.org/example/clpfd_sudoku.pl)

</comment><comment><USER8> MBED.org

C++ for embedded devices</comment>


China Turns to the Sea for Fresh Water - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-09/china-embraces-desalination-to-ease-water-shortages <comment><USER2> Why not look at something like nuclear? Since the need is both electricity and heat, a nuclear reactor seems ideal since you don't have to convert power back in to heat - you can just use it directly.

With modern recycling techniques and reactor designs the chance of meltdown and wastes are limited, but that seems better than more coal.

Not an expert on reactor design vs desal design by any means - would love an opinion on the challenges here outside the standard nuclear ones.

<comment><USER3> Many places with water shortage are sunny and hot. In my mind it is the perfect use case for solar thermal power plants. I just love how simple they are. If we build coal or nuclear power plants, we just ditch one problem for another.

It is also a great way to smoothen the varying production of renewal energy.

<comment><USER2> That's an interesting idea as well. A molten salt reactor or something similar would have the same benefits as nuclear, you just trade reliability for cleanliness. I would imagine that a molten salt set up would be significantly cheaper to build as well, but I could be wrong on that.

<comment><USER4> A good thing is that you don't care about normalizing usage: if the plant happens to only work during the day, it's fine, you can make fresh water during the day and use your storage tanks at night. Unlike with batteries, there's basically no waste in storing water overnight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Israel (obv a different scale than china) has recently also experienced a big push toward desal. What's interesting is there's a moore's law type of effect at play here, desal keeps getting cheaper and cheaper to the point where it's actually a practical alternative to ground water, filtering etc.

I think water will be another great Malthusian disappointment, ocean water is basically unlimited (correct me if I'm mistaken), and on a 20-50 year time horizon it seems that the world should be able to alleviate all water scarcity by tapping it.

<comment><USER6> What will you do with the salts and various impurities?

<comment><USER7> Dump it on the roads in the North during the winter.

Or, more seriously, if it is salt that was extracted from the sea, there shouldn't be much harm in putting it back. The fresh water that was extracted will end up back in the sea also, so overall there should be no increase in salinity (except locally where the salt is dumped).

<comment><USER8> Why can't we just eat the salt?

<comment><USER9> A liter of seawater has 35 grams of salts in it (I looked it up: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawater](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawater) ). Compare that to the recommended daily intake of several grams of salt.

It's also the case that most of the desalination methods produce concentrated brine instead of dry, clean salt (so extracting the salt would require further energy), but not needing that much of it is the bigger reason.

<comment><USER8> I didn't mean to drink it, I meant to turn it into table salt.

Seems like there ought to be some kind of further usage of it.. industrial or otherwise.

<comment><USER9> I got that. For every liter of seawater that is desalinated, there would be ~35 grams of table salt. On a given day a person might use 4 grams of salt.

Given typical water usage, you quickly have salt for an awful lot of people (salt for hundreds of people per person consuming the water).

I guess other users would be welcome, even if they just take it for free that probably saves the desal plant on disposal costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How crazy would it be to (Mostly to help the American Southwest, though if it worked, it could be used anywhere that uses river basins as a major source of freshwater for extremely large areas) create a large pipeline to feed an inland desal plant that's located along the shortest, lowest, least populated path to the headwaters of multiple major freshwater sources, like the Colorado and Rio Grande and the pump desal water into the existing water distribution network?

While it's a major geoengineering project (musk-scale!), it would allow for usage of current legal and physical water distribution to be reused.

Also, while CA desal cites briny outflow disposal as a major impediment to desal, why not pump the outflow to existing salt flats?

(Edited for clarity)

</comment><comment><USER11> Maybe they can export their excess freshwater in giant tankers to CA to solve their drought problem. They already produce most of the electronics we consume.

<comment><USER12> If that were reasonable then we would tank water in from Alaska. Or China would buy AK water.

If you want to dream big, in the 1980s there were pipe dreams of bringing in water from the Copper or the Stikine through a large off-shore pipeline to California.

<comment><USER9> There have been serious proposals to ship Great Lakes water to Asia. This article mentions one:

[http://www.wbez.org/frontandcenter/2011-06-21/great-lakes- fa...](http://www.wbez.org/frontandcenter/2011-06-21/great-lakes-face- increasing-pressure-water-world-own-backyard-88159)

There is now an agreement placing tight limits on what happens to the water:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes%E2%80%93Saint_Lawre...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes%E2%80%93Saint_Lawrence_River_Basin_Sustainable_Water_Resources_Agreement)

<comment><USER12> There's serious and then there's serious.

Fiji exports water to the US. I've heard of a bagel company in London which imports its water from New York City. People buy ice that comes from Alaskan glaciers. (Minor note: If you use under 20 tons/year of tidewater glacier ice then you don't need a permit.) So people are willing to pay a lot of money for provenance.

Fiji Water is a good comparison. According to its Wikipedia page, it was exporting over 15 million liters/month. According to others, it was a least 3.5 million liters per month. According to [http://www.alternet.org/story/101207/the_true_price_of_fiji_...](http://www.alternet.org/story/101207/the_true_price_of_fiji_water) it was 130 million liters in a year. I'll say it was 5 million L/month or 60 million L/year.

According to the Wikipedia page for "Water export", the Great Lakes -> Asia deal was for 600 million liters, or about 10x of what a single well in Fiji can provide.

Oil shipping costs something like $1.20/barrel from Qatar to Rotterdam, says [https://books.google.com/books?id=cUHAAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA232&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=cUHAAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA232&lpg=PA232&dq=supertanker+cost+per+barrel&source=bl&ots=wujrW689cS&sig=XSED9PyMmfzcxmwxP0JKv3g-xWw&hl=sv&sa=X&ei=C7UqVeWCFoLmyQPvxoCQAg&ved=0CB8Q6AEwADgK#v=onepage&q=supertanker%20cost%20per%20barrel&f=false) . A barrel is 120 liters, or 1 cent per liter shipping costs.

That's about $12 thousand per acre-foot. The price of desal water is under $3,000 an acre-foot.

If the goal was to market provenance - the Fiji Water of Asia - then it might be profitable. It otherwise doesn't seem like a serious proposal.

If there were a were serious need, then I would expect to see water exports from Alaska, which allows bulk water exports (again, according to the "Water export" page at Wikipedia) and is a lot closer to Asia.

Since there isn't, I have difficulties understanding how there's a serious proposal.

<comment><USER9> There certainly isn't a serious existing proposal, there is a series of agreements making sure it isn't done.

I was just saying that someone had thought about doing it, enough so that they went ahead and got a permit.

I wonder what the prices for shipping and desal were in 1997...

<comment><USER12> Oh, I agree. I was just saying that there's "serious" and there's "serious"

[http://www.greatlakeswaterwars.com/chapter11.htm](http://www.greatlakeswaterwars.com/chapter11.htm) says that it was a for-profit "humanitarian effort on behalf of the world's poor that was also designed to make money".

I can't figure out how it was supposed to work. It looks like it comes down to person who wanted to do it was in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and thought of the tons of water in the backyard [paraphrasing]. So he and his partners could have been serious about, but there's no real chance it would work out.

It doesn't really matter what the prices were in 1997. Alaska water is closer to Asia than the Great Lakes. If it made sense for Lake Superior, it would make even more sense for water from the Sitka.

[http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/ind...](http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=3723&method=full) says that around the same time :

> A company called Global Water Corp. has announced plans to ship up to 5 > billion gallons a year of glacier water by tanker from Alaska, near the port > city of Sitka, to the Middle East. The company said on its Internet web site > that it has reached agreements with buyers in China, and that it plans to > negotiate with interested parties in the southwest U.S.

There's a lot of people who talk, in the hopes that someone else will front the money. It's not really a con, because it might actually work. But if things are borderline, it can help to sound serious and express no doubts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _" the facility will remove salt from 120,000 tons of seawater each day. The result will be 50,000 tons of potable water"_

Huh? What happens to the other 70,000 tons of water? Or do they mean it will take in 120,000 tons, use something (e.g. distillation, filtering) to move almost all the salt in it to about half of it, and get 50,000 tons of potable water and 70,000 tons of about twice as salty as the input water?

<comment><USER14> You are correct. The energy cost to desalinate increases as the salt content increases, eventually you have to let it go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This has been mentioned elsewhere, but I wonder if we could use the super large tankers that are currently being built for transporting oil and gas for transporting water instead? There is tons of fresh water in the great lakes and the polar ice caps.

These ships don't need all the advanced machinery that they currently have for making sure there is no leaks: if there are minor leaks, its water anyways. So its likely to be much cheaper.

I'm concerned about the amount of fossil fuels they would consume though.

<comment><USER16> Wouldn't be worth it.

The largest super tankers have a deadweight tonnage of approximately half a million tons, which is worth ~$500MM of crude oil.

But water is super cheap by comparison. Assuming $0.0015/L (which is what I pay for my tap water in California), half a million tons of water is worth only $750k.

Another way to see it: the transport cost per super tanker is about $0.02 per gallon [1] but tap water is ~$0.006 per gallon (again, my tap water cost). So you would be tripling its cost to transport it by sea...

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_tanker](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_tanker)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> California has big plans for desalination too

[http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_25859513/nations- large...](http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_25859513/nations-largest- ocean-desalination-plant-goes-up-near)

</comment><comment><USER18> Desalination uses TONS of electricity. Where does that electricity come from? Fossil fuels. So this "solution" to water shortage actually increases global warming, which will worsen water shortages. And what happens with all the extracted salt? You guessed it - it goes right back, increasing the salinity of the oceans.

Ah, humans.

But hey, technology solves all problems, right YC?</comment>


Ask HN: Use Gitlab vs. GitHub in production? - <AUTHOR> Hi all,
I just saw Git web based UI management today. I wonder if someone can share their experience using either on of them so I can compare the benefit and drawback of those 2 options. Anyone can share?
Thanks <comment><USER2> I would use neither in production. Internal repos stay in our development environment where the dev / qa / testing work is done and the artifacts are built. The artifacts are version named and replicated to our data-centers and public clouds.

Our dev environment have several different technologies for git repositories, based on what each service team prefer. The build systems reference their code repos.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like gitlab because of in house installation and much better continous integration and deployment support. Free version is extremely generous with features as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> But from what I understand, even if you're using github [https://about.gitlab.com/features/github/](https://about.gitlab.com/features/github/), you can have the CI/CD of gitlab feature.

Also, I wonder what's the benefit of in house installation in your case?</comment></comment>


Procrastination and Stress: Exploring the Role of Self-Compassion - <AUTHOR> https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15298868.2013.763404#.U8WXw41dWnC <comment><USER2> Is there any alternative way to access these papers? I'm interested but $43 seems too steep.

<comment><USER3> [http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/91791/1/ProcrastinationFINAL....](http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/91791/1/ProcrastinationFINAL.pdf)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the best service to capture customer feedback? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Looks like a duplicate of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15566939](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15566939) where the submitter added a lot more background and link to his/her startup in that area.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry. The client seemed not to have posted the first Ask. Just after I thought the thread got dead because of the link, so I posted this, and it turns out both have been published :(</comment></comment>


To this day I have trouble starting a sentence with anything other than "maybe". - <AUTHOR> http://blog.eisele.net/2012/02/heroes-of-java-ward-cunningham.html

<comment><USER2> The title quote hits home for me today -- reading through my sent mails, I kept wincing when I made some confident assertion that ended up being totally off-base. It sucks to be the one appending IMOs to every sentence (especially in the startup scene, with its focus on brilliance / cojones / whatever), but otherwise you're just wasting people's time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Other people think I'm being evasive because I have a hard time giving answers in absolute terms. I know how it feels.</comment>


How we failed our YC interview - <AUTHOR> http://mr-mariusz.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-we-failed-our-yc-interview.html <comment><USER2> Honestly, I wouldn't take it seriously at all. Find a paying customer. Make them happy. Find another. If you can't find any, try something else.

We got rejected from YC several times and we are doing quite well despite it.

It really means little, unless you make it a big deal. Just move on. The magic you need to succeed is inside of you, not anyone else.

<comment><USER3> Exactly, we launched three months ago, have revenues(4 digits monthly), a healthy 100% monthly growth rate.

We just left the interview really confused about the reasons why they wanted to interview us in the first place. Since all they really did was arguing our market had 0 potential and our app was not useful, which in itself is totally fine. But why interview us, in the first place, if you don't believe in it?

The fact is, we will never know why they interviewed us and subsequently rejected us. We just need to carry on.

Our goal now is to get ramen profitable(we are really close) and prove them wrong ;)

<comment><USER4> The interview from their perspective is probably an opportunity to learn more about it and see if you can ease any concerns they have. Another possibility is that they may have liked the team and wanted to see if you would consider working on something else.

<comment><USER3> Totally agree with this. And it is where we probably dropped the ball.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Explicit demand and no competition (cancer treatment) — demonstrate feasibility

Explicit demand and existing competition (fashion ecommerce) — differentiate and show competitive advantages

Implicit demand (farmville-like games) — demonstrate early traction and prove that your product is delivering high-order values (entertainment, happiness, inspiration, meaning...)

No demand — delusion

<comment><USER6> I wonder how this would work for something like the first guy trying to sell chewing gum...

<comment><USER7> Chewing gum (as in, a chewy substance you chew for the sake of chewing) was discovered/invented a long time ago, probably before money. It was a naturally-occurring part of the tree. If you mean modern chewing gum, it had to differentiate itself from the previous iteration of chewing gum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How is it better than Octave (<http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/>), which runs most M-files and is free?

EDIT: Okay, someone posted the website, and it IS Octave (<http://www.vectera.com/howitworks>). So, all the advantages are from the cloud part. I guess it might be nice for people who have to use multiple machines or want to check a simulation's progress on their phone?

</comment><comment><USER9> My main experience of MATLAB is fixing pathetic spaghetti code from non- programmers (think of complex "scientific models" with no concept of DRY principles), and wasting hours trying to adjust their MATLAB scripts to do things that are trivial in just about any other high-level language out there. The "Abandon MATLAB" [1] blog has several articles that really resonate with me; it's a great read if you enjoy a good rant.

That said, the problem with MATLAB is not a lack of learning resources. On the contrary, in my experience the MATLAB docs are nearly unsurpassed; all that money pays for something! The problem with MATLAB is that it is primarily used by those with no general programming knowledge or broader experience, who are therefore tolerant of insane defects and defaults out of ignorance that there is a better way to do things. If it were any other way, they would not have added a gigantic Microsoft-esque ribbon interface to the latest iteration of MATLAB 2013.

If I were a Christian, I would thank God daily that MATLAB has a ridiculously high price. The expensive enterprise licensing means its use is limited mainly to a few demographics of deep-pocketed non-programmers (e.g. scientists at large universities), and I can continue to rely on the choice of MATLAB as a major code smell.

[1]: <http://abandonmatlab.wordpress.com/>

Also amusing: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lBeungEnx4>

</comment><comment><USER10> "A solution is a something. But a something isn't always a solution."

I like this quote a lot: you failed to get into YC but I think you passed on this. You can build a better mouse trap, but its only helpful in places where there are mice.

Take it as a learning experiance, either adjust what you are doing or now you can approach your next idea with improved perspective and experiance. From what I recall the acceptance rate of companies offered an interview is still only about 25%. I expect there are a few viable companies that don't make it in each batch.

(From someone who interviewed in S12, was rejected, and took considerably longer that you to reach similar conclusions to those you have).

Some unsolicited thoughts:

I do use MATLAB a fair bit in my work (PhD student now). I like it quite a bit and to be honest I haven't really had any big pain points with it, at least compared to some other packages that cost even more than MATLAB does (but probably have fewer users).

I think you'll have to find a new swing on what matlab does. Academics get discounted licenses and seem to be fine to pay for them, and I'm not sure if a $2K license is a big deal for corporate users. Without those two groups, I'm not sure how many people are left. Likewise, I don't think a service to learn how to use MATLAB would have that big of market.

Maybe an interesting and disruptive swing would be to enable the power of matlab-functionality to be abstracted to allow less sophisticated users to use it? Wolfram Alpha is in some ways this, but it could be tied into other services better.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ehhh, I am not sure that this is truly the issue with your presentation.

If it is truly "we can do X just like FamousApplication(tm), except we are in the browser and we can be profitable charging 10% as much as FamousApplication(tm)", that is pretty compelling. That is not something that is really difficult to sell if you can truly deliver and be profitable at that price point.

I am not sure how it is possible you can replace a computationally expensive client side application like MatLAB with something that runs in the cloud, without discovering order of magnitude more efficient solutions for a wide array of well know mathematical algorithms. If you have discovered such then you can pretty much write your own check, if not there is no way you can scale as a service. Thats what I would think you have to convince potential investors about.

<comment><USER12> "I am not sure how it is possible you can replace a computationally expensive client side application like MatLAB with something that runs in the cloud, without discovering order of magnitude more efficient solutions for a wide array of well know mathematical algorithms. If you have discovered such then you can pretty much write your own check, if not there is no way you can scale as a service. Thats what I would think you have to convince potential investors about."

I am an engineer (not CE/CS) who uses Matlab, so I am probably missing something fundamental. However, I am curious why you think server side Matlab requires order of magnitude more efficient solutions to current Matlab. Even as a poor college student I used to SSH into my personal desktop running Matlab and it ran acceptably.

At work I will remote into another system running Matlab without issue. Sure if you are doing heavy plot manipulation it may get a bit laggy depending on the situation, but why would mathematical algorithms need to be rewritten unless you mean graphical?

<comment><USER11> I am basing it on the assumption that you cant pragmatically do 100 matlab sessions on a single server or VM. While a single Matlab session may run great on a server you are SSHed into, i dont think you can run 100 matlab sessions on a single VM or server without problems. Maybe you can in which case great!

If you cant though, then there is some kinda balancing act that the OP has to optimize, how many matlab sessions can simultaneously be hosted on one of the OPs VMs in the cloud at what cost? Since most of the cloud infrastructure providers seem to charge an arm and a leg for CPU, and I am assuming (maybe incorrectly) that this service will be CPU heavy, as an investor I would have to be convinced that this team has some technique for bringing down these costs...

either they would have to have better algorithms, or perhaps some interesting grid architecture that drastically reduces CPU time and hence costs, or something.

I am making assumptions here, but I think these are standard assumptions, these are the kind of assumptions you have to convince a investor you have a solution for. It may be as simple as saying, we can service 10,000 simultaneous users on 10 VMs, I have no clue what the numbers work out to, but they would have to at least show how this can scale profitably.

<comment><USER12> "I am basing it on the assumption that you cant pragmatically do 100 matlab sessions on a single server or VM. While a single Matlab session may run great on a server you are SSHed into, i dont think you can run 100 matlab sessions on a single VM or server without problems. Maybe you can in which case great!" "10,000 simultaneous users on 10 VMs"

Thank you for the response. I appreciate the insights but I do not agree with the premise that 100 or 1,000 Matlab sessions per server or VM is crucial to the economics of the business.

I know many engineering firms who are perfectly happy and profitable to buy a $2,000+ workstation, $2,000 Matlab license, and X*$Y,000 toolboxes for a single engineer. That engineer might be in meetings all day. They might be on vacation, they might not be working on a task that requires Matlab. Larger firms sometimes get floating licenses that may be 10X or more that cost and still have less 100% software utilization.

I see utilization economies both in software and hardware by licensing out this resource to small and mid-size firms who do not have constant large demand and even large firms who need a surge in computation.

<comment><USER11> Hey man, just wanted to put it out there, I am sure you have a much better understanding of the space than I do. I dont even think these are 'deal breakers' i just think they are questions that you have to be able to clearly answer when looking for investors... you may have covered them in depth during your interview, just seemed like your original article was trying to divine a mysterious missing puzzle piece that caused you to miss acceptance at ycombinator... from the little info we had to go on seemed to be some basic normal questions that weren't resolved before worrying about the philosophical something or solution arguement

I sincerely wish you great luck and success!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For what it's worth, I need your product and know other people that do too. I would pay for it, providing I didn't have to pay much.

Increasingly, we have big data sets, and want to work with them collaboratively. Because they are so big, the problem of how to proccess the data is added to the old problem of what to do with it. I think that centralizing the 'how' would be a great selling point too.

Maybe I explained that badly - in Amazon AWS are a bunch of datasets.If I want to play with them, I have to create an AWS instance, with the right tools, go find the data, and spend time figuring out how to read it. If your online Matlab also helped me handle data, then for opensource data someone would only need to solve that problem once (ingest), and for closed source data, at least I'd have a common platform with my team.

Anyway, my imagination of what your product could be, and all the problems it could solve, has me excited. I encourage you not to give up or lose faith in the concept.

This is entirely putting aside that yes, Matlab is expensive, and for occasional / home users, it would be nice to have something subscription based rather than couching up for a perpetual license.

<comment><USER14> There was a startup featured on HN a few days ago (forget the name) that aims to do similar things. Essentially, they wanted to provide native linear algebra and associated data analysis tools for large data sets by providing the user with a Matlab/R like interface, and running appropriate Hadoop/MapReduce code in the backend. They are backed up by some of the biggest names in the machine learning community, including Tibshirani of EOSL fame.

<comment><USER13> Good tip. I'll look out for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> To the people who say this is an online Matlab replacement, I do not think the website, <http://www.vectera.com/>, presents itself that way. First it says "Learn Matlab", to me this presents itself as another online programming class. I am not saying this is a bad thing, I personally use Matlab every day and see the value. However, I could not find anywhere it talked about online Matlab collaboration.

Also even though the word Matlab is all over the front page, when I went to the about section it said it was powered by Octave. Again, this is not an inherently bad thing. However, I thought this was an online time-sharing license of genuine Matlab. I would pay $9/month for that; I would not pay $9/month for Octave which I have installed on my notebook.

Also you can generally get a student version of Matlab for around $100 so if the only purpose is learning and not "production" Matlab, I do not think it is fair to compare to the $2,000 version.

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the comment. However, our issue was how we pitched our big vision, not what we are now (as you see on the homepage, a Matlab learning platform).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "we focused on replacing Matlab"

Replacement should never be the main goal. Rather, making Matlab IRRELEVANT should have been/be prioritized.

</comment><comment><USER16> trying to improve matlab by building something on top of octave is putting lipstick on a pig. matlab/octave is a great language for writing quick algorithms but it's biggest flaw is it is not designed for productization of those algorithms.

in other words, focus on the real problem with matlab, it's poor interoperability, deployability, and overall ignorance of good programming language design patterns, not it's lack of being in the cloud or having good tutorials. If you really need matlab, you will suffer through whatever god awful things you need to in order to get it to work because it's the only tool that will accomplish your goal. .m files have the tendency to be both the worst and best code you've ever written: algorithmically brilliant, stylistically abhorrent. The fact that I feel dirty after writing one is a sign there is something missing, and it's not tutorials.

</comment><comment><USER17> As a recently graduated student... ohmygod I wish I had this in college (only because I don't use matlab daily). The tutorials are lovely and I don't have to haul myself to a lab to run it.

I would have paid out of my own pocket in college to have that convenience.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why is it hard to see the value in making a product that competes in an existing profitable and developed market space, but does so better/cheaper/more conveniently? Isn't that a significant portion of the startups in YC? E.G. Hipmunk - simply a more user friendly flight search and hotel booking? Mariusz shouldn't have to spell it out for YC in this case.

If the issue is as Mariusz describes, he shouldn't be blaming himself, but rather YC instead for not seeing the obvious market potential in fairer pricing. Either YC missed something obvious or the reason YC turned Mariusz down was for a different reason than stated.

<comment><USER19> If the problem you are trying to solve is inaccessibility due to prohibitive cost, you'd have to at least show that there is market at that lower price point.

With regards to matlab, I don't believe the cost to be prohibitive. In most situations where you'd even require what matlab provides, $2k is not that much money. There is also already a very good product that competes with matlab on price - Octave, and its free.

Creating value isn't as simple as just making something cheaper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "MATLAB in the cloud" sounds a lot like IPython + PiCloud: [http://blog.picloud.com/2012/12/23/introducing-the- picloud-n...](http://blog.picloud.com/2012/12/23/introducing-the-picloud- notebook/)

<comment><USER21> Exactly, there is definitely a market in further improving Python as the go-to language for scientific computing. Matlab shines with its toolboxes and Python has a long way to go in that respect but as a language is much better thought trough. When I read "Matlab in the cloud" I also figured they simply meant a Python in the Cloud toolset with the appropriate environments/libraries/IDEs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Citing Writely/Google Drive as a "successful" example is a fundamental misunderstanding of what success is.

A loss leader does not a business make.

<comment><USER23> The creator made (presumably) a couple of million, and has changed the way we collaborate on documents, I'd love to have that kind of success.

<comment><USER22> Your understanding of success is a bit skewed as well.

Wealth creation for a single founder based on the _huge_ edge case that a massive company came and scooped you up is extreme LUCK more than anything else.

Writely was, and Google Drive continues to be, a cost center. Is this thing making money, or losing money? That is the sole indicator of business success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What gets me annoyed is that we also submitted, didn't get an interview and could have answered those questions easily. We've got some good early validation of the fact that we are filling a need (or would once releasing a V1)...

</comment><comment><USER25> Hah, I was actually trying to pitch a friend on a Matlab-as-a-Service concept a month or two ago--to say that they were skeptical would be an understatement. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER26> Well, Adobe offering their toolkit as a cheaper, monthly cloud offering. That is because lots of people cannot shell out $2k upfront for their tools. You are doing similar thing with Matlab. How does it and why do you think you failed?

YC failed to see the future potential of your business because they are looking for the quickest and best bang for the buck obviously.

If you're passionate about your business model, keep going and ignore naysayers who cannot assist you.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think there is something to be done with an online mat lab product. Google has it right with Chrome OS, computer software won't be around in a few more decades. Everything will be in the cloud. So will matlab, but maybe it won't be matlab, maybe it will be you guys.

There are plenty of examples of companies that didn't get into YC and still succeeded. Kingmaking can only get you so far.

</comment><comment><USER28> _1\. A solution (something that solves a problem) 2\. A something (something that you think should exist in this world)_

Isn't 1. the same as 2.?

<comment><USER29> If only the author would elaborate on that point. Oh wait, they did.

TL;DR: A something can exist without being a solution. That's not a bad thing, it's just harder to build a business on.

<comment><USER30> Snarky!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> today, same failure happened to my team. we created a solution about cloud gis which takes geomatics engineering concerns into account. some of the investors asked us "what is the difference between google earth and our project". before the presentation, we were joking about what if they ask us about google earth. it wasn't funny.

</comment><comment><USER32> Fred Wilson wrote a similar experience with Airbnb [1], he's more sincere about it, detail is very thorough. Regard to this article, I only find personal remorse and popular startup names.

[1] <http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/03/airbnb.html>

</comment><comment><USER33> Whenever I hear someone talk about having a "solution," I want to ask "what is the _problem_ you are solving"?

Too often people cannot describe the problem, or who has the problem. This does not inspire confidence in their solution.

</comment><comment><USER34> I found it cool when you guys pitched it to us, I still find it cool today!

<comment><USER35> Would you pay money for it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> good thing there are plenty of accelerators in the sea!

</comment><comment><USER37> Awesome job, Mariusz</comment>


RSS Reader for Developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.rssheap.com/?utm_source=syndicate&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=css-tricks <comment><USER2> I like how the front page has a developer with his RSS reader full-screened not doing any actual work.</comment>


Ask HN: Any one making a living selling WP themes? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Yes, there are people making a living selling WP themes. I sold over $200k in licenses to a plugin/theme combo in 18 months a few years back before selling rights to the product on Flippa. That paid off the last of my student loans, a new car, and was the downpayment on a house.

<comment><USER3> Didn't you used to post on the SitePoint forums a few years ago? I remember someone showing off a review plugin for WordPress on there. Was that you by any chance?

<comment><USER2> That was probably me. I haven't been around in a few years, but I'm still the 6th most prolific poster on that forum.

[http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/memberlist.php?order=desc&so...](http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/memberlist.php?order=desc&sort=posts&pp=30)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There sure are people making enough money to live of selling themes and templates. I myself created a couple of WP themes almost two years ago and can still live from the revenue. I am however enrolled in university so my costs are significantly lower than they would be as a regular freelancer. The costs of living are always relative as to where you are in your life, your lifestyle and of course where you live. Someone living in a country where the dollar is much stronger than the local currency has a big advantage. What is also often forgotten about are taxes and insurance. You always have to have a little something saved up if a problem should arise.

If you have a solid code base, a few creative ideas and good graphic skills you can still make quite a bit of money. Of course it is always important to find a niche in the market that is not as over-saturated as others. But that basically applies to any other business.

<comment><USER5> Do you sell your themes from your own site?

<comment><USER4> No, I am selling through a very well known marketplace which will get a cut for each sale. In my opinion it is much easier to start with due to the high reach of potential customers you will get. As soon as you built a customer base you could probably consider selling the themes on your own site.

<comment><USER6> what marketplace did you choose if you don't mind me asking... I tried themeforest and had no luck. I just don't know what these cats want.

<comment><USER4> Well, it's Themeforest. I agree that their rejection reasons often seem generic and somewhat random but with the amount of submissions they receive it is understandable. As I said, if the quality is right and you somehow stand out from the crowd chances are pretty high it'll get accepted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are some people that make a nice living from selling themes, but it's not easy money that for sure. It's a jungle out there.. I have found this article: [http://www.premiumwp.com/the-1-million-dollar-themeforest- pr...](http://www.premiumwp.com/the-1-million-dollar-themeforest-premium- wordpress-theme-developer/)</comment>


Why Being a Jack of All Trades Is Better - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-being-jack-all-trades-better-karan-goel

<comment><USER2> That makes no sense. Experts aren't limited to being knowledgeable about one specific topic. It's possible to be an expert on one topic _and_ "just good enough" in many other subjects.

(Compare Stephen Jay Gould, who was a leading evolutionary biologist and writer of popular science, with broad non-expert interests ranging from baseball and Gilbert and Sullivan operas to the size of chocolate bars, to Paul Dirac, who was a leading physicist with almost no interests outside of physics.)

"Steve Jobs is not a better marketer than any of the best marketers in the world."

Being an "expert" at something doesn't mean that one is the best in the world. Quoting Wikitionary, an expert is "a person with extensive knowledge or ability in a given subject." This is also why we use the term "top expert" to distinguish between someone who is an expert, and the best of those who are experts.

If Jobs is as competent at marketing as the best marketers in the world, that makes Jobs an expert marketer almost by definition.

"Barack Obama is not a better lawyer than, say, the Attorney General"

Obama was a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago. I find it hard to believe that U. Chicago would hire non-experts as professors. While I also find it hard to believe that Loretta Lynch, the current Attorney General, would have been hired as a professor of constitutional law given her background. These are different skills.</comment>