Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution - <AUTHOR> http://meaningness.com/metablog/geeks-mops-sociopaths <comment><USER2> _" Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why?"_

His chart [1] indicates where the 1975 date came from. He distinguishes between 1960s "counterculture" and later "subcultures". That's somewhat artificial. The 1920s also had subcultures - the Jazz Age, flappers, etc. Prior to the 1920s, there wasn't enough mass disposable income for such frippery. The 1930s (depression) and 1940s (WWII) sucked so bad that there was no counterculture, subculture, or, indeed, much culture.

The more interesting question is "why did it stop"? Music stopped being an agent of rebellion around the time punk died. Now, it's just "content". When it became easy to distribute music, everybody started doing it. At peak, there were several million bands on Myspace. Subcultures became more fragmented and tinier. Once one could find kindred souls with similar narrow interests on line, the need to change to fit in was much reduced.

What the author calls "fluidity" is the endgame of that - subcultures have no lasting power in a world of tweets and Instagram.

Were any of these a creative force? Outside of music, the main legacy of the hippie movement is that everyone wears jeans. The values didn't stick. Much of the 1960s counterculture was just self-indulgence dressed up with pop philosophy. That's why hippies transitioned so smoothly to yuppies. The legacy of punk is industrial interior design, for which the endgame turned out to be open plan offices with exposed brick walls and ceilings with visible pipes and conduit.

[1] [http://meaningness.com/modes-chart](http://meaningness.com/modes-chart)

<comment><USER3> >Outside of music, the main legacy of the hippie movement is that everyone wears jeans.

Well - that and the environmental movement, including sustainable utilities. And some parts of feminism. And recycling. And organic food. And possibly Apple and even Google, if you don't think about it too hard.

>The legacy of punk is industrial interior design

I'm having a hard time getting from spitting in the mosh pit to Herman Miller cubicle dividers. Open plan offices have been around since at least Victorian times. The exposed piping aesthetic is more the fault of Richard Rogers and Norman Foster than Johnny Rotten.

>The more interesting question is "why did it stop"?

It didn't. What do you think HN and the current startup frenzy are?

Are VCs geeks, fans, MOPS or sociopaths?

<comment><USER4> > Are VCs geeks, fans, MOPS or sociopaths?

You really need to ask?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article was frustrating for me; I didn't find much disagreeable, but actual take aways were lacking.

> Specific strategies for sociopathy are outside the scope of this metablog > post—and the scope of this book.

How are they out of scope if that's what you're advocating?

A bit _TOO_ meta for me; with little actionable takeaway. But not a bad topic to chase down, i just wish there was more meat to it. Maybe I misunderstand it's context.

UPDATE: flipped through the rest of the site... where's the meat? It's all meta analysis and talk but really I am not seeing any useful take aways. Has anyone else found something actionable? I feel like the author would be a good chap to talk to and would have a lot of good things to say, but there's no clarity or purpose in his writings.

<comment><USER6> the writing has to be somewhat vague in order to get people talking about it, and the author succeeded as evidenced by it being here .

<comment><USER5> No, I think the author was on to something. They were close to hitting gold, but they stopped short. They presented a lot of what doesn't work, but little of what does.

And certainly being sociopathic, or "slightly evil" are hardly actionable things, and are short sighted solutions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is brilliant. I wish I had time to write more. A few points.

The time tested old school way to avoid this problem is to limit openness and impose internal structure. The long lasting subcultures of old, namely the ancient mystery schools and the fraternal orders that flourished from the Renaissance until roughly the post-WWII era, were initiatory orders with oaths, degrees, and governing bodies. Sometimes they were secret as well, or at least secretive. Most historians seem to say that this was to avoid political persecution, and that's undoubtedly true, but it was also perhaps a way to avoid the dumbing down and dissipation described here.

I'd adjust the author's dates. It's not 1975 until 2000. It's more accurately roughly 1950 until 2000. The subculture was the engine of cultural creation in the postwar era. It gave us rock, psychedelia, hippies, punks, disco, hip hop, hacker culture, goths, and ravers, and all the immense cultural, musical, technical, and artistic expressions that went with.

My personal sense is that rave was the last postwar subculture. I was there and watched it go through precisely what this author describes. There does not seem to have been another.

I don't think it's just a loss of faith. I personally blame the Internet a bit, especially social media. It's no longer possible for a subculture to stay underground long enough to build up any energy. The entire life cycle now occurs before the first song is over.

Who knows... Maybe we need another occult revival. I'll wear a funny hat and take a blood oath of secrecy if I get to hear really interesting new music that doesn't suck. Sign me up.

Finally, this quote stuck with me.

"A slogan of Rao's may point the way: Be slightly evil. Or: geeks need to learn and use some of the sociopaths' tricks. Then geeks can capture more of the value they create (and get better at ejecting true sociopaths)."

That's part of what I like about HN. To the extent that it focuses on helping hackers learn how to "operate" in the business world, it seems like it's helping teach some number of creators how to be just a little bit evil.

<comment><USER5> > The time tested old school way to avoid this problem is to limit openness > and impose internal structure. The long lasting subcultures of old, namely > the ancient mystery schools and the fraternal orders that flourished from > the Renaissance until roughly the post-WWII era, were initiatory orders with > oaths, degrees, and governing bodies.

A thoughtful and interesting observation. I wonder how much truth there is to it. It also makes me wonder if "flat structure" companies face any kind of similar problems.

<comment><USER7> I have heard that. Open organizations with no inner or outer boundaries tend to become pathocracies -- ruled by psychopaths and other pathological abusive personality types. Hierarchy can facilitate abuse, but it can also be a tool for limiting and mitigating abuse. In its formal absence, abusers are free to assert it using deception and intimidation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The conclusion of the piece seems to be a restatement of this: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/).

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a fair amount of overlap between David Chapman's views and the LW memeplex, though see his response[0] to what he calls "Pop Bayesianism" from a couple years ago. I remember getting a lot out of that essay, maybe even changing my mind a bit.

[0]: [http://meaningness.com/metablog/how-to- think](http://meaningness.com/metablog/how-to-think)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Now, I'm as much of a fan of elaborate, essay-length metaphors as the next guy, but I have to say that I do find it a bit tiresome when the author declines to inform the reader what exactly the metaphor is in reference to.

<comment><USER10> The author explains that in [http://meaningness.com/meaningness- history](http://meaningness.com/meaningness-history) which is poorly flagged. Examples: hippy, death metal, Twitter, etc.

Edit: [http://meaningness.com/modes-chart](http://meaningness.com/modes-chart) is also worth pondering.

<comment><USER9> Thanks!

I'm still not such a huge fan of the post given the lack of concrete examples. The whole "the author's opinions about what people do" genre can often be a bunch of non-falsifiable platitudes and generalizations that ultimately don't end up meaning much. Think about one of those dime-a-dozen blog posts about how those who succeed in business project confidence, listen to the client's needs, and have a great pitch that hooks people within seconds.

Okay, well enough. But that doesn't actually even mean anything. Instead of just having some boilerplate word salad, how about some examples? Provide actual examples of strategies real people actually used to project confidence in real life, real ways people listened to the clients needs, and real-life great pitches that hooked people in seconds. That way the blog post becomes interesting and useful to me, the reader. And without them "the author's opinions about what people do" is basically the sibling of the horoscope.

<comment><USER10> It is a rather abstract and nebulous article. Put more positively, it encourages introspection and contemplation. In any case, "geeks who are slightly evil" seems appropriate here :)

<comment><USER6> It's vague to encourage discussion , contemplation

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The process outlined in the article echoes the theory that capitalism always will take over and repurpose any opposition to it, and it echoes some of the ideas from the Situationists Society of the Spectacle.

The "Society of the Spectacle" is an awful term, but it basically means a consumerist society. A consumerist society is one where having the appearance of something is more important than the actual something.

The process is one from: being to having to appearing. For example being very wealthy (an upper class landed gentry family) to having wealth (middle class earning money) to appearing to have wealth (people wearing the same clothes as rich people, bling).

I'm thinking the same process is in effect with subcultures. The creators are the ones who are cool (being cool) - the fanatics are the ones who have cool (they have good taste, have the things the creators produce) and the masses afterwards buy the appearance of cool (the image of what is cool is able to be bought, authenticity is less important).

Another example: hippys being all hippy and being all free and socialist, later on other hippies having the music and then later on everyone else buying jeans to look like a hippy.

This leads me to thinking of today, and The Hipster. Is being a hipster about buying things, or appearing to have things? Is it mass marketable? (beards, haircuts, clothes) Is it a sub culture? Does it have any defining principles?

</comment><comment><USER12>
      "Eventually - around 2000 - everyone understood
       this, and gave up hoping some subculture could
       somehow escape this dynamic."

The whole article is really about music, and carries continuous undertones relating to the mechanics of music scenes.

So why 2000 as the magic year music died? The Internet.

That's the whole answer. The internet killed music. Not just because of peer- to-peer file sharing, but so many other aspects of pre-internet music economies simply didn't make sense anymore, from composition, to production, to distribution, to consumption, all aspects of recorded music were turned inside out and flipped upside down.

Sure, _performing_ music hadn't really changed all that much, but the controlled release of physical copies of music simply didn't work anymore, and so The New Thing wasn't permitted to steep in its own Newness, and fester and grow moldy and get weird anymore.

The transformation of distribution technologies from 1990 to 2000 was like taking a healthy adult St. Bernard, and replacing all of its internal organs with the organs of 50 kittens, and expecting it to come out healthier than before. Except the St. Bernard's brain doesn't know how to breathe with 100 kitten lungs, or pump 50 kitten hearts, or swallow food into 50 kitten stomachs and digest vital nutrients.

From a technology perspective, with music, where we are now, is like where music was in 1950. We're still figuring out the new capabilities of what can be done with this technology, the same way people back then were still figuring out amplifiers and feedback and taped distortion. In that respect 1990 is still 40 years away, culturally speaking. Longer still if more disruptive technology keeps getting introduced, and upsetting established skills.

There are no more geeks to create scenes, because geeks haven't had enough time to learn the vast depths of modern technology, to master it, and spawn new scenes.

</comment><comment><USER6> _Subcultures are dead. I plan to write a full obituary soon. Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why?_

Dead? I think not. What about the whole NRX Silicon Valley techno-libertarian sub-culture, which came into preeminence in 2008? How about selfie culture? Or STEM culture, or how STEM seems to have become the new 'cool' or celebrity status, especially with the show The Big Bang Theory being so popular? There will always be fads, sub-cultures, movements.

Also add: the Red Pill movement , PUA, MGTOW, manosphere, men's rights as new movements/subcultures

<comment><USER4> > the Red Pill movement , PUA, MGTOW, manosphere, men's rights as new > movements/subcultures

I would have a hard time qualifying re-brandings of misogyny as subcultures. Misogyny is traditional, normative and reactionary; subcultures are non- normative by definition.

<comment><USER13> _I would have a hard time qualifying re-brandings of misogyny as subcultures._

They're subcultures. Just because they're "normative and reactionary" doesn't make them less so. Sadly, they're cases of opposition to mainstream misogyny with extreme misogyny. (Not to say that all of MRA is misogyny. Gender injustice is such a complex topic that it's inaccurate to believe that it would fall entirely on one "side", or even that there are sides. That said, much that's under the MRA tent is pretty horrifying.)

The high school and college casual sex scene (and, perhaps, the young- professional one) is one where, as an emergent property, bad men ("chads") who objectify women get most of the sexual yield. This is an expression of the mainstream, traditional misogyny that lives in our society. Misogynist patterns (man as conqueror, woman as defeated "slut") have been absorbed by men and women both. In long-term romantic relationships, most of the misogyny has disappeared, but it's still quite prevalent on "the sexual marketplace".

What PUAs and "Red Pill" neo-misogynists miss is that they're extrapolating behaviors observed in small subcultures to _all women_ , which is unfair and wrong (both in the sense of being morally wrong, and in the sense of being incorrect). Take the PUA playbook, which is build on running exploits that work against damaged women. Men who pick that stuff up, learn that it actually works at its intended goal of high-frequency sexuality, and start deploying it on a regular basis... are going to conclude (falsely) that most women are damaged, sexually confused, and attracted to superficially charming but toxic "bad boy" types. Then when they get bored of the high-frequency sexuality (most long-term PUAs are clinical sex addicts) and try to have long-term relationships, they're going to fail at it (because PUA skills don't work on any woman you'd want to have a long-term relationship with) and blame _that_ on women too.

To make it more bizarre, the neo-misogynists blame the bad female behaviors resulting from traditional/mainstream misogyny on "feminism". To them, mainstream misogyny's superficial coddling and infantilization of women (and the female misbehavior-- flakiness, bad taste in men, disloyalty-- that results from it) is somehow lumped in with this "feminism" thing that they don't really understand but reflexively hate.

<comment><USER14> Why do you believe that sending signals of masculinity, social status and high value (the core elements of PUA) don't work in long term relationships? And why do you believe they only work on "damaged" women?

I think your nerd-shaming is unkind and you should check your privilege. I was born with privilege - genes that would make me super tall, give me a symmetric face, intelligence and a "devil may care" attitude. As long as I don't do stupid things (get fat, act dependent), I'll have more women than I know what to do with. Not everyone has those gifts, and it's really not cool to shame people simply for attempting to gain the privileges others were born with.

Similarly, to compare to a more mainstream example, I don't shame a black man who browses /r/malefashionadvice, dresses nicer than me and tries to mask his lower middle class accent - he's not trying to be a douche, he just needs to work harder to gain the same level of "respectability" that I get simply for being a white guy.

<comment><USER15> Because they're false signals. These are low status males faking high status, and you just can't fake your way through a long term relationship.

<comment><USER14> Status is, almost by definition, the epitome of something where "fake it til you make it" works. Once you are regarded by others as having high status, you then have high status.

If a man is spitting game, looks good, is banging an attractive woman and confident that if she moves on he can move on to the next one, it's pretty tough to describe him as anything other than high status.

The learnability of a signal doesn't make it false. A lot of people just find it threatening that becoming attractive _to them_ is simply a learnable technique, rather than a signal of what a special individual they are.

<comment><USER16> Teachings about "game" can be very effective at taking someone who is underachieving with the ladies based on their natural status level, and turning them into a slight overachiever. Much of "game" is simply counter- programming to prevailing myths. I got a lot of my romantic advice growing up from female friends. It turns out the advice was really, really bad advice, and it ended up sabotaging my efforts. Most advice from females is based on how they wish men they are already attracted to would act. It is not advice about how to build attraction.

But, there are also a number of schlubby, boring, low-status guys who read PUA material, play the "cocky comedy" and numbers game at a bar, and who end up bitter and rejected. They may even get a reputation as being that "creepy pick-up artist type." You can only fake being high-status so much.

The better "game" books will tell you how to raise your status. _Models_ by Mark Manson does this. They will talk about lifting weights, how to dress well, building a social group where you get invited to house parties, finding a status hierarchy where you can be a winner, cultivating interests that allow you to be a good conversationalist, etc, etc.

 _Status is, almost by definition, the epitome of something where "fake it til you make it" works. Once you are regarded by others as having high status, you then have high status._

Yes and no. Any status avenue that is too easy, gets overpopulated and becomes low status. It is not like it is easy to be regarded as having high status by other people. You have to find some edge and work at it, or else get very lucky. It's hard for me to think of someone who wasn't naturally good looking or athletic, who got their high-status through faking it rather than by working at it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The author of the book (of which this is a part) seems to have put a fair amount work into it: [http://meaningness.com/#contents](http://meaningness.com/#contents)

If the rest of the content is even half as good as this, it's well worth the read.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think that this story about Couchsurfing, featured almost at the same time here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9632928](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9632928) is very related.

All the elements of the movement evolution are there.

</comment><comment><USER19> Can we have these insights applied to the problem of keeping quality high in an online discussion group? I made rules but the sociopaths and MOPs keep finding ways around them.

<comment><USER20> Maybe you know about usenet. Of course, usenet is dead. However, one of the last groups to die was comp.lang.lisp, which is an instructive example in this context.

I submit that what, or rather who, kept comp.lang.lisp alive for so long beyond most of the rest of usenet was a guy named Eric Naggum. He may not have identified the sociopath aspect, but did have the entitled MOPs in his crosshairs and kept them out with (sometimes utterly brilliant, btw) flamage.

Sadly, comp.lang.lisp also points to something not mentioned in the linked post: Entitled MOPs and sociopaths will not just silently accept their exclusion.

When excluded, they attack, possibly indirectly through other venues. To this day, in an astonishing number of online discussions of Lisp culture, you're apt to find attacks on comp.lang.lisp in general, or Erik Naggum in particular, for the high crime of having once excluded (for example) an entitled MOP who wanted his homework done by comp.lang.lisp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have a few problems with this essay. The fundamental one is that it is purely an invention. The author regards specific social/cultural clustering patterns for a specific historical period as "subcultures"; this is part of a grand chart of world-historic social and cultural change.

Nothing that comes before that or after that is properly examined in terms of whether it might be a 'neotribal system of meaning' (from author's 2nd ibid link: the crux of his definition of a subculture is neotribalism and rejection of universalist [sic] systems of meaning).

No substantiation seems to be given for his assertion that subcultures "reached the limit of fragmentation and died" beyond the observation that the subcultures with which he was familiar from the preceding decades seem to have died about then.

It's curious, because in North America, rock music ceased to be subcultural at some time in the 1980s -- if it even had a clear subculture --- but metal continues to have strong subcultural connotations. Death Metal has not ceased to be a active genre of music, as far as I know.

So I am not sure what he means by subcultures "dying" even for those specific subcultures. He has a pseudo-physical model that suggest that this would basically be the point where the subculture ceased to generate a quantifiable essence called "cool" and became "uncool." But this is purely a metaphor.

Combined with his implicitly denigrating use of language -- "muggles," "mops" \--- to describe those who aren't really part of the real "scene," what this suggests to me is that his analysis is entirely based on his own value judgements and tastes, and that what he is really bemoaning is the death of the scenes in which he felt included, energized, and involved.

This isn't an author who has done any research or rigorous work whatsoever. His portrayal of the social dynamics of music/coolness subcultures participated in by people in their 20s is interesting, and would certainly ring true to anyone who has ever tried to put on a show or keep a scene alive. But the end of those music scenes with which he was familiar was not a world- historic death of subcultures.

There have been massive changes in technology over the past century, and especially the past twenty years, that have greatly impacted the production of music. There was a time before the 4-track recorder. There was a time before the audio card. There was a time before the internet. All of these things have had a massive impact on not only the _production_ of music, but also on our _awareness_ of music. Information now comes in a glut, and perhaps this has somehow ended the era of the local youth music scene, and the youth music subculture. It would be worth discussing with some youths.

But subcultures still exist. Subcultures are not merely neo-tribal identity/socialization networks for young adults.

The truth is that subcultures are inward-looking, and they are not going to come find him and tell him they exist. They're not going to come ask him if they're cool enough for him to be interested.

</comment><comment><USER22> i feel like 4chan has a good immune response to this disease.

<comment><USER4> Sociopaths stand away from it because it's too toxic to provide anything of value: rather, they build at its fringes (e.g. 9gag)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Trends bore me.</comment>


The Big Lie of Venture Capital - <AUTHOR> http://www.montrealintechnology.com/the-big-lie-of-venture-capital/ <comment><USER2> I got through this whole thing and I still can't figure out what "the big lie" is. That it's hard to get funded as a first-time founder? No shit. In the post-YC era it seems pretty close to impossible to close a round with a professional VC firm without first having done some kind of syndicated, social-proof-collecting round of angel investors --- so if that's seriously what you were playing with doing, I automatically have a hard time taking your experiences as guidance. And since hundreds of credible startups get introduced to angel investors through accelerator programs, it's hard to skip the accelerators and avoid signaling risk.

Is the big lie that you should be careful about trying to execute a funding- first startup plan? Hasn't every bootstrapper been saying that for over a decade?

"Nobody is going to invest in you unless your wealthy family plowed a bunch of money in already" is horseshit.

<comment><USER3> I think the "big lie" the article is talking about is that venture funding is largely meritocratic rather than largely class/pedigree based:

> unless you come from money, attended a prestigious university in the States > or sold your previous startups for a lot of money, you should assume that > you're never going to raise early-stage capital.

Not sure where the author got the idea that it's meritocratic, but that's what's printed.

<comment><USER4> Well, it is pretty meritocratic in the sense that if you have enough traction, everything else will be overlooked. Pitching/networking are also skills that can be learned and improved, so that's somewhat merit-based.

But yeah, if you don't have some combination of traction and pitching skills, you better have something else going for you. If you don't, you're definitely better off focusing on traction (merit) than trying to play the decidedly not merit-based game of pitching VCs on vaporware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reads like a rant out of frustration for not being able to raise money (and newsflash, if raising money is hard, no doubt raising in Montreal is near to impossible), but I think the author nailed it with this paragraph:

"The problem, with the Big Lie, is that it kills a lot of startups that end up building their strategy around a capital infusion that will never come, and end-up wasting a lot of time trying to fundraise. Some of those startups would have had a better shot had they focused on sales. It's still super hard, but the odds are better. The problem is that bootstrapping success stories often remain unknown, as the valuation of those startups is never announced in press releases."

This is so true. Most people I know that have founded startups that later failed were working towards having something decent to show to institutional investors instead of focusing on understanding their customers.

<comment><USER6> This is just another article that causes me to kick myself. I graduated from Stanford in 2010 but now am a pretty average, non-Silicon Valley programmer because I didn't want to do anything after graduating from college.

<comment><USER7> Why does this make you kick yourself? This is a guy writing an internet rant about how frustrated he is with the life you choose not to live.

<comment><USER8> I think the implication is that as a Stanford grad he had a pedigree that would have increased his chances of getting funded... but he didn't have any ideas, so now he's using his name-brand degree to do the type of work that a degree from any school would have been fine for.

<comment><USER9> If he or she does have some good ideas later, that real-world industry experience might come in handy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's a pretty extreme position to take. Sure it's _harder_ if you can't show some prior validation or backing, but it isn't impossible. Hook up with any one of the accelerators, sign up for some mentoring programs and you'll get your introductions sooner or later if that is what you desire, provided your start-up has some merit.

And then there is the dumb money, of which there is plenty floating around, and which keeps on surprising me with the stuff that gets funded. Really, if you want to get funding you _probably_ can, but it will come at a cost and it may not be a good fit in the longer term. Be careful of what you wish for.

</comment><comment><USER11> This article misses the fact that the "startup ecosystem" is different on the east coast vs. the west coast. And it's especially brutal when you compare the funding sources available to Canadian startups vs. US startups. See 2016 Analysis of 20,000 startups by Vancouver-based Yaletown Partners (here: www.yaletown.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/06/Canadas_Technology_Investment_Gap_Yaletown2016.pdf): "In 2015, U.S. companies raised three times as much on average compared to Canadian companies."

Just like the author, I tried to raise money from Montreal and Toronto VCs ~10 years ago _after_ having received substantial angel funding (~1.5M CAD). Contrary to what's asserted in the article, previous access to such funding didn't help us much. Albeit this was around the financial crisis, but still, there was no additional openness to listen to us. In fact it felt like a handicap. They wanted to see real sales, conversion ratios, etc. ... pencil- pushing sort of data in general. But I digress.

The more substantial issue that I found is that most VCs in Montreal/Toronto are extremely conservative. After we closed the startup I mentioned earlier I started travelling more actively. That was round 2010 where everyone was going to become a gazillionaire with a new "app". I was at a conference on the west coast and I stumbled on a startup that had raised 10M$ for an app. When I asked about their business model the answer was: "We're focusing on acquiring users for now. We'll figure out monetization later." THAT would never fly for raising capital in Montreal/Toronto. In fact I was recently talking to one of the VCs I had pitched to way back 10 years ago and I told him this story. His answer? "Oh boy, that's one I would've killed right away."

So the biggest mistake from my point of view east coast startups can make, especially if they're based in Montreal/Toronto is to believe what they read about "startup funding" on the Internet. What flies in the Valley doesn't necessarily fly anywhere else. There's a willingness/ability to suspend disbelief that is _unique_ to the Valley, both in terms of funding and in terms of recruiting top talent.

In short, if you're trying to build a startup on the east coast (and Montreal/Toronto specifically) then focus on making money from real, paying customers, not angels nor VCs. Or just pack your bags and head west.

<comment><USER12> > In short, if you're trying to build a startup on the east coast (and > Montreal/Toronto specifically) then focus on making money from real, paying > customers, not angels nor VCs. Or just pack your bags and head west.

This is true in Philly and to a lesser extent Boston as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "preparing our equity crowdfunding campaign. Yep, we'll raise money directly from our users" \- Unfortunately, crowdfunding is also probably a lie, by your definition. Here is a different concept, how about charge your users for your product?

</comment><comment><USER14> > So, unless you come from money, attended a prestigious university in the > States or sold your previous startups for a lot of money, you should assume > that you're never going to raise early-stage capital.

Most founders are none of those things. It's hard to raise money, of course, but the author makes it sound like it's impossible. I've seen plenty of crappy companies with not much to show raise an angel round on nothing but fairy dust.

OP also argues that less than 1% of companies raise money. Does that mean that less than 1% that try to raise money are successful? I highly doubt that. That might be about the percentage that get into YC or raise from a prestigious fund in their seed round _maybe_ , but it seems like what percentage of total businesses raise a seed round, which is a stupid thing to measure.

<comment><USER15> The whole article is just an I-fail-because-the-world-is-so-horribly-unjust whinge, and to make himself feel better, he wants you to believe that you will also fail if you try, because that's a much easier way for a person to digest failure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> While there is some truth when it comes to elitism etc, my own (hard learned) view regards this subject is, that there simply is somewhat of a "gut-feeling" if you should or should not be raising money. This is not the same as that you "feel a need", i mean everybody always need money. The "should" is usually there when you have sales flowing in and you just need to hire help etc. Many founders already know the answer deep down(and they are good at ignoring it), even before the pitch.

</comment><comment><USER17> VC is a con-job for the most part anyway. They've convinced first-time entrepreneurs that raising money (and thereby giving away a portion of your ownership) is a great signal that your business is a good idea. Naive founders dream of getting into YC or getting funded to prove to everyone that they're smart and talented.

In fact, making money is the only signal that matters. Try doing that instead.

</comment><comment><USER18> Getting to the early signs of success (product, revenue) is cheaper than it has ever been in this industry in most problem domains, and growth and customer acquisition is harder than ever. Before a VC invests in you to tackle the second, why wouldn't they expect to see the first?

</comment><comment><USER19> It's not a "lie"\- do people honestly expect VCs to just hand over money willy-nilly? Obviously, it is an _investment_ , and they expect to make a _return_ on their investment. I blame dumb Founders, not VCs, for thinking otherwise.

<comment><USER20> > It's not a "lie"\- do people honestly expect VCs to just hand over money > willy-nilly?

The article takes exception to the practice of funding people who disproportionately have friends and family wealthy enough to make a first- round investment, who are disproportionately white men, who disproportionately come from a handful of educational institutions, etc.

It's an odd dichotomy to assert that funding decisions that ignored those factors would be "willy-nilly."

<comment><USER2> It seems to me that the only observation being made here is that in the absence of any financial or meaningful social proof for your business, you're not going to get funded as a first-timer. There are marginal bits of financial and social proof that privileged people start with, sure, but who does that surprise? That's true of every competition in society.

The answer isn't to call out "the lie" (I mean, the market for funding is pretty dishonest, but calling it out isn't especially productive). It's to recognize how the modern startup financing market works and plan accordingly.

1\. Apply to reputable accelerators as a hail-mary.

2\. Execute a plan that works without external funding and accumulates the proof you need for financing.

3\. Repeat until accumulated proof suffices for talking to investors directly (by which point you may be on the Mailchimp trajectory anyways and won't care anymore).

The role of VCs as gatekeepers is, I think, pretty overrated, and gets more overrated every year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The real tension is that if you go out and focus on signing paid customers instead of growing at all cost (literally maxing out your credit cards), you'll be less attractive to many VCs.

They'll say you're a "mom-and-pop business" and not one that can achieve venture scale. Basically, they want to write big checks to companies that are swinging for the parking lot (not just the fences) — not companies that want to take as small a check as will get them to break-even.

<comment><USER2> I think this is just false. If you pitch a VC on a business that grows in a nice linear line to tens of millions of dollars in revenue, they're going to turn you down no matter what your go-to-market is, because the math of a venture capital firm simply doesn't work unless the few winners win so spectacularly that the gains swamp the losses from the losers who make up the majority. You have to commit to shoot the moon to get them interested, but you don't have to _start the business_ so committed.

But nothing stops you from building a stable business and then using it as a platform for a shoot-the-moon pitch.

<comment><USER21> I'm confused — what exactly do you think is false? It seems like you're agreeing that VCs aren't interested in a "stable business" — only the shoot- the-moon idea that might be built on top of that. But as you say, they're not going to fund the stable business since it would never become the unicorn that they seek.

<comment><USER22> You said "The real tension is that if you go out and focus on signing paid customers instead of growing at all cost (literally maxing out your credit cards), you'll be less attractive to many VCs.".

I think what @tptacek is saying is that you absolutely CAN go out and focus on signing paid customers instead of growing at all costs. You can 100% start/run your business that way for as long as you want. However, the moment you want to seek venture capital, you have to sell a different story. You can't sell the same linear growth story that got you to this point. That's the only difference between seeking VC and not seeking VC.

Your original quote implied that all businesses have to be started or be run in a particular way far before raising venture money, but that's not the case.

<comment><USER21> Huh, I thought it was clear that I was pointing out a tension between building the type of business that the author suggests and building the type of business that VCs fund. I don't think I indicated that if you build a stable business, you can't then build a venture-fundable business on top of that.

Regardless, I'd be curious to hear about businesses that started out stable and then raised VC money to build a moonshot!

<comment><USER2> What's the "big lie" of VC's not funding businesses that you literally can't finance with venture capital?

But that's not why I replied. I replied because you suggested that actually trying to build a business would make you less attractive to VCs. It will not. Even people who eventually hope to raise should still use common sense and basic good business planning to acquire customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think anyone familiar with how class dynamics works would have seen the writing on the wall for the startup ecosystem a long time ago. There's just no way that venture-capital funds are going to willingly march into a regime where their money goes into systematically making anyone else rich but their own.</comment>


10 Years of Community - <AUTHOR> https://press.atairbnb.com/10-years-of-community/ <comment><USER2> Is it a community though? Is it?

AirBnB is a behemoth international company. Referring to themselves as a community strikes me the same way as Starbucks calling themselves a community. While there are many touching stories to be had, the company's existence can make it more challenging for local communities to thrive. They can do the opposite as well, one could postulate, but they are merely a cost savings measure and communication platform.

P.S I've already expressed a negative attitude, but what an unsettling image to open this page to. If I wanted to be encouraged to scroll down the page, why not make it one of the photos of real people, rather than the photo of 3 tech dudes patting themselves on the back? Nothing against them personally, I don't know them, but if Facebook wanted to convince me that their platform is a community, they probably wouldn't show me a photo of Mark Zuckerberg's cold lifeless face the size of my entire laptop screen.

These stories are touching and these people who have opened their houses and helped people in need are saints. They'd be doing this with or without AirBnB. The image these men present is one of being at the farthest possible distance from the people in the stories they talk about. There is no character. There is no personality. The mountain called monkey had spoken.

<comment><USER3> Honestly, when I got my first Airbnb some six years ago it was much more lightweight than it is now. Now it's just a hotel but in someone's place. Even as late as six years ago I met people who I'd hang out with and add on Facebook.

Couch surfing always had the problem where people would use it as a hookup site so it ruined it for people who just want a place to stay.

<comment><USER4> Couchsurfing went downhill after Airbnb got popular. Many of the folks who wanted to hear a story in exchange for a spot on the couch started listing their space on Airbnb instead. I used to list my spare room on both sites. The ratio of enjoyable people to sleazy tipped a little too far and started a vicious cycle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Funny. The three founders in the header image are all Republicans or Libertarians yet they align themselves with the Democratic Party in the post.

<comment><USER6> Where have I seen that before?</comment></comment>


TNT Is Not TeX - <AUTHOR> http://bit-player.org/2011/tnt-is-not-tex <comment><USER2> I like the broader question this inspires: _Why_ are the technologies prevalent in the 60's still prominent today? The correct, standard answer is that they're good enough. Good enough often beats out better solutions. But that's only half of the story. Embrace that theory too much, and we'll find ourselves in a world of good enough solutions.

I don't know about you, but I don't want the world to be "good enough". I want it to be _better_. We could accept all of what we have today, and take it for granted, and we'd live with it forever. But that would suck.

Even the most entrenched technologies can be displaced, or even replaced, with enough ingenuity, effort, and a superior technology. Most changes are happening slowly, as they must when we have billions of "installs". Most won't replace their predecessor completely, but erode it slowly:

IPv4 to IPv6.

Windows to OS X.

SOAP to REST.

XML to JSON.

HTTP to SPDY.

IE to Chrome.

Flash to Canvas.

Those changes didn't happen automatically; people pushed to get those new ideas out there. Truly better software will make it, but it won't happen if you accept that the old guard is here forever.

Forever is a long time.

One more thing: Many things that are _really_ old — Unix, for instance — aren't the same as they were before. They've evolved, changed, and grown as developers evolve the software. Emacs today is tremendously different from its first release. Software evolves, and often dies when it doesn't.

<comment><USER3> I do wonder how

Windows to OS X.

made it on that otherwise agreeable list.

<comment><USER4> What do you mean? OS X is a POSIX-certified UNIX, with a damn fine UI, and tons of both proprietary and OSS for it.

I can understand people liking Linux/Solaris etc more, but are there people that really believe Windows is better?

<comment><USER3> Yes.

It confuses the hell out of me that I'm defending Windows here - I'm an OSS enthusiast and run Linux whenever I can.

Thing is: Operating systems are at this point just a more complex choice of preference and taste. Pick anything recent (I'm not going to stand for Win 95/98/ME/XP), use common sense and best practices for the platform and you're golden.

No, OS X is not by default a better system. It might attract you as a BSD with a UI that you consider damn fine. Other people are free to disagree and like their choice of platform better, be it Windows, Linux, *BSD or whatnot.

I repeat: There's _zero_ ground for calling OS X generally superior (nor inferior!) in a war of operating systems, neither technically nor in any other way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unix is still the same (in some ways) as before because Unix had a remarkably simple mental model, and the ways we try to replace them don't. Unix didn't last forever because it had features, good god! No, it's because it was so robust and flexible as to serve even a modern system. TeX, and Unix, and all these things, were hackable. (If you don't agree about TeX, read the TeXbook and some traditional TeX, not this LaTeX crap that's grown around it.) That doesn't mean it these systems are irreplaceable. (Hell, I'm working on a project to replace the Unix shell...) It just means you need to put more effort into devising a very good mental model. Something that actually captures all of the variation you want. So, don't replace TeX because you don't like TeX. Replace TeX because you have something better, something obviously better, something that you could explain to a five-year-old.

<comment><USER6> Strongly agree. The big problem is not TeX, it is LaTeX. We need a better layer on top of TeX that can reset all the LaTeX cruft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This would seem a problem that could be solved by a cloudish sort of solution, though -- have an iPad app which hands actual typesetting of a document off to a server somewhere, sending TeX sources, and receiving a PDF in return.

A simple starter implementation might require your TeX to be a single file, and could just run TeX in a mostly-readonly chroot jail (bearing in mind that TeX can shell out, read/write arbitrary files readable by the executing user, and so on), and serve up a PDF, all wrapped in a web service of some sort.

This wouldn't be terribly fast, but given TeX's performance, the actual typesetting is likely to be the bulk of the time spent, even considering the round trip.

</comment><comment><USER8> Okay, just for <USER4>
and

jakobe

and starting with my

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3334504>

I'll try again:

(1) Issue 1.

In that issue, the author had:

"It's comforting to think that all the TeX documents I've written over the years will still be readable a century hence. But Mind Two reminds me that in practice I have trouble maintaining TeX documents even for a few months, much less decades or centuries."

but here his concern is NOT about "TeX documents" but about LaTeX documents.

They are not the same.

(2) From dextorious.

About Issue 1, dextorious wrote:

"And that is just a pedantic excuse, that no one cares about. People don't use TeX itself (and, to prevent another pedantic detail, I mean the vast majority of people), people use LaTeX+TeX."

No. The claim:

"People don't use TeX itself".

is false: I use TeX itself, a lot; I'm a Ph.D. applied mathematician and, thus, use TeX for math. In fact, for math, I know of no reasonable substitute except for LaTeX which I don't like as well as just TeX.

Then, since I have TeX and know how to use it, it is also my main high quality word whacking software; I use it for letters, technical papers, foils, and even business cards. I essentially never use LaTeX. And I have a version of Word and nearly never use it either. E.g., even for just simple letters, I much prefer TeX to Word.

That I actually use TeX itself is not "another pedantic detail" because one of the main reasons I won't use LaTeX is JUST the objection of the author that LaTeX is not stable: I want the stability of TeX. E.g., I have over 100 macros in TeX. Nearly all of these were written in the 1990s. When I changed to Windows XP, I copied over all my TeX macros, and all of them have continued to work just as before just as Knuth guaranteed. GOOD.

(3) TeX Doesn't Slice Bread.

There is no one tool that can do everything, and it would be foolish to hope for such a tool.

Knuth was extraordinarily careful about saying just what TeX was, providing some exemplary documentation, and then essentially freezing everything for all time.

The author criticizes TeX for not being what the author wants. This is not fair or even reasonable.

It would be fair to criticize TeX for failing to do what Knuth promised. But it's not fair to criticize TeX for not being something it was not intended or promised to be.

It's not fair or even reasonable to criticize a Stradivarius violin because it is not a Steinway piano, French food because it is not Chinese food, a car because it is not a truck, etc.

As software goes, LaTeX is relatively stable, but the author criticizes LaTeX on stability. So, (A), the author wants stability, more than LaTeX has. But, (B) the author wants more in user interface and likely languages, alphabets, fonts, color, cross references, maybe rotations and other transformations, likely spell checking and hyphenation in many languages, graphics, maybe with sound and video, etc. And we have to assume the author also wants the ability to do well setting math. Then in practice (A) and (B) conflict: That is, trying to provide the much greater functionality of (B) will mean years and years of revisions that conflict with the stability of (A).

Well, I have good news for the author: It's been a secret and ABSOLUTELY not to be distributed beyond this thread. So far known by no more than a very few people, the UN has funded, starting some years ago, a unique software development effort in a monastery in Tibet to develop UniTeX, word whacking software that will handle all of the Unicode alphabets and their languages with spell checking and hyphenation along with 48 bit color, 3D, resolution from 600 pixels per line to tens of thousands, execution on super computers down to cloud servers, desktops, laptops, palmtops, tablets, mobile phones, wrist watches, and magic decoder rings, many thousands of fonts, Haskell, for at least 1000 cores, as the macro language, all of the functionality of Distiller, PhotoShop, Final Cut Pro, and AutoCad, output on paper, PDF, AVI, Flash, SilverLight, and MP3, and much more. Version 1.0 will be released when all the functionality has been implemented and is at least as stable as TeX. Then version 1.0 will be the last version. The project will be open source, but the name UniTeX will be reserved for the one, only, genuine, guaranteed authentic, dyed in the wool, UN UniTeX. The release date for version 1.0 is currently set at year 2100.

In the meanwhile, TeX is what it was intended to be. I believe that TeX, just as it is, is terrific for all my higher quality word whacking.

The main target audience for TeX is writers of the most serious work in subjects with a lot of mathematical notation in math, science, engineering, and technology. For such writing, TeX remains quite good. E.g., the emphasis on English, black and white for the fonts, the prominence of the TeX Computer Modern fonts and the AMS fonts, the stability, etc. are all reasonably appropriate. In particular, it will not be easy to get the relevant academic journals to give up TeX in order to get a lot more in color, fonts, alphabets, etc.

Information technology entrepreneurship is a very active field, especially in Silicon Valley. So, someone who wants more than TeX could do a startup. My view is that getting a good combination of product stability, product functionality, product development cost and time, user adoption, and revenue with the good features of TeX and much more, that is, getting what the author wants, would not be promising. Or, Knuth worked hard on TeX for what, over 10 years; doing a lot more would take much more, would take too darned much.

Finally, there is another point about TeX: Before TeX, getting math typed was just GRIM. Typically the typing was much more difficult than the math. TeX made it quite reasonable to get math typed. GREAT.

TeX is so good that now the challenge is the math and not the typing.

For the main intended users and uses of TeX, e.g., Knuth and his writing, TeX is fine, and changing to something else just is not worth the effort.

In particular, Unicode, color, a graphical user interface (GUI), etc. are from not worth the bother down to very much not welcome.

Net, there was a big problem. TeX provided an excellent solution to the problem. The problem has not much changed and remains solved. Done.

</comment><comment><USER8> The article has several issues of 'drama' regarding TeX. All of these issues are just contrived to have drama for the sake of drama; none of these issues is a serious comment about TeX.

I discuss six such issues:

Issue 1.

The article has:

"It's comforting to think that all the TeX documents I've written over the years will still be readable a century hence. But Mind Two reminds me that in practice I have trouble maintaining TeX documents even for a few months, much less decades or centuries. What about those presentations done with the foils class that stopped working after an upgrade and that I've never bothered to fix? Or the articles using the pstricks package that won't compile under pdflatex? TeX itself may be a fixed point in the software universe, but everything else spins dizzily around it."

So, here the author seems to have a 'dramatic issue' to grab the reader by the heart and/or the gut. Yes, 'writers' tend to do that.

Of course, strictly this "issue" is 100% total nonsense: The problems he listed are all about LaTeX which strictly just is NOT the same as TeX, that is, as in:

Donald E. Knuth, 'The TeX book', ISBN 0-201-13448-9, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1990.

with the macros there called Plain.

Or LaTeX is as in, say,

Helmut Kopka and Patrick W. Daly, 'Guide to LaTeX, Fourth Edition', ISBN 0-321-17385-6, Addison-Wesley, Boston, 2004.

and

Frank Mittlebach and Michel Goosens with Johannes Braams, David Carlisle, and Chris Rowley, with contributions by Christine Detig and Joachim Schrod, 'The LaTeX Companion, Second Edition', ISBN 0-201-36299-6, Pearson Education, Boston, 2004.

and in these two books we do not see Knuth's name.

So, can't blane the problems of LaTeX on Knuth or TeX.

So, his:

"It's comforting to think that all the TeX documents I've written over the years will still be readable a century hence."

Good. So, with TeX, just TeX, that is, just Knuth's TeX itself and not LaTeX, FakeTeX, JunkTeX, or NotTeX, the author of the article of this thread can remain comforted.

Issue 2.

Yes, the 'writer' seems to like drama more than rationality since he also has:

"The skeptical Mind Two has another argument as well: Under Knuth's edict it's not just the TeX markup language that can't change; it's also the architecture of the system. Knuth created his flawless soufflés and dæmon diarrhœa at an ASCII terminal wired to a PDP-10, and the only way he could see the product of his labors was to walk down the hall and retrieve hard copy from the AlphaType machine."

But the "architecture of the system" has nothing to do with "walk down the hall and retrieve hard copy from the AlphaType machine". Instead, part of the "architecture" is the guarantee:

"His intent in freezing TeX is to ensure that the same input should always yield the same output."

and that guarantee continues to hold without a "hall" or "AlphaType" machine. How? Because the guarantee was about the output of TeX which was just a file of type DVI (which abbreviates 'device-independent file'). The TeX I continue to use as my most important word whacking software continues to put out a DVI file and appears still to meet the guarantee.

Issue 3.

The author goes on with

"But the core programs still run in batch mode, as they did in the Dark Ages. To make even the smallest change in a document, you still need to throw away all the existing output and run a whole file (or set of files) through the compiler tool chain."

Of course. He should expect something else? I have two responses:

First, what's wrong with "batch mode"? What else is to be done? As any Web site designer knows, due heavily to the 'sessionless' model of the Web, the server code for a Web page in HTML and CSS (but not necessarily Ajax) runs essentially in 'batch mode'.

Second, even a little reading of Knuth's book above shows that it would not be easy to be given a change in the input and then to get significant computational savings by determining what fraction of the output can be saved and not calculated again. So, we calculate all the output again.

Issue 4.

Next, the author has:

"Sometimes you have to do it twice."

Not due just to using TeX! However, TeX does permit writing to a file and reading from a file. So if want to use such file writing/reading to generate, say, cross references, then will need to run TeX more than once. But the effects of such writing/reading are due to the user and not to TeX. In particular, we can notice that in Knuth's book, there are no cross references that would require running TeX more than once.

Or, as we can see from reading Knuth's book, it is not easy to know exactly where will be the break betwoen one page and the next. Then it will not be easy to do cross references accurate to the page number. So, in Knuth's book, he didn't.

Sure, in my usage of TeX, I have some macros for cross references to the page number, but my macros can occasionally make a mistake and, thus, are not up to the quality of TeX.

I am sure Knuth saw this issue but wanted the high quality page breaking more than some automated cross references.

Issue 5.

The article has:

"By then we'll just throw Moore's Law at it: Automatically rerun TeX n times for every keystroke in the editor."

Here the author is implicitly assuming that, of course, a word whacking system SHOULD be based on an 'interactive interface' with 'what you see is what you get', one keystroke at a time. That's a very specific assumption that would be quite questionable at any time and otherwise would tend to 'date' TeX.

For me, I would reject that assumption. That is, absolutely, positively I do NOT want TeX to have an 'interactive interface', to be 'what you see is what you get', or to do word whacking for each of my keystrokes. I do NOT want such things.

In particular, I want to be able to run TeX in a 'batch script' with, "Look, Ma, no hands.". That is, I want TeX to remain something that can do its work without my being there, that is, part of the future where computers do work without a human giving full attention at each keystroke.

In particular, a good response to 'what you see is what you get' (WYSIWYG) is that with such an 'interactive interface' 'what you see is all you've got' and that's not very much.

What can there be that is not seen? Sure, can have a 'conception' for the document and parts of it and have some macros that contribute to this conception. Or, the macros automate parts of the conception. E.g., want a macro for the page headers. Then all the page headers look as in the conception for the page headers. Strictly with WYSIWYG, would have to type in the header for each page individually and, then, struggle to get them all as in the conception. Similarly for how to number sections, subsections, figures, tables, and equations and much, much more.

Issue 6.

I would agree with the author that TeX does not bake bread, drive a car, vacuum the carpet, recognize human speech, do the calculations for computer generated scenes in movies, etc.

Instead, TeX was mostly just for what Knuth said it was for, "beautiful books", especially ones with quite a lot of mathematics. Moreover, implicit was that tbe books would be essentially in English. E.g., the hyphenation was for English, and no fonts were provided for text in Cryllic, Fraktur, Arabic, etc. In particular, the characters were to be from 7 bit ASCII and not 8 bit whatever or Unicode.

Consider his "books": TeX was looking backwards in time, that is, was intended to be a computer version of traditional, beautiful typesetting for BOOKS, just such BOOKS, and not something different, better, for the future, etc.

Knuth didn't say 'beautiful PDF files', 'beautiful Web pages', or 'striking foils with voice over, background music, and multi-touch gesture recognition', etc.

So, there is a lot that TeX is not. Right.

There's no 'drama' in saying that TeX won't sweep floors, and the article has nothing that says that TeX fails in any of its promises or guarantees.

In particular, the article's 'failures' of TeX are for, say, LaTeX or something contrived about some printer down the hall.

There is more on what TeX is and is not in

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2327490>

<comment><USER4> """So, here the author seems to have a 'dramatic issue' to grab the reader by the heart and/or the gut. Yes, 'writers' tend to do that."""

I find this line amusing. Are you supposed to be a robot, explaining to other robots what humans do? A writer wanting to grab the readers attention is a thing that needs to be explained?

"""Of course, strictly this "issue" is 100% total nonsense: The problems he listed are all about LaTeX which strictly just is NOT the same as TeX, that is, as in:"""

And that is just a pedantic excuse, that no one cares about. People don't use TeX itself (and, to prevent another pedantic detail, I mean the vast majority of people), people use LaTeX+TeX.

"""Because the guarantee was about the output of TeX which was just a file of type DVI (which abbreviates 'device-independent file'). The TeX I continue to use as my most important word whacking software continues to put out a DVI file and appears still to meet the guarantee."""

Yeah, "walk to the Alphatype" might no be part of the architecture, but assumptions about the computing era Knuth lived in were. Which is what the writer means. Assumptions like ASCII vs Unicode. B&W vs color printing/output. Font technology. Multicore processors not being available. And tons of other relevant stuff.

"""Second, even a little reading of Knuth's book above shows that it would not be easy to be given a change in the input and then to get significant computational savings by determining what fraction of the output can be saved and not calculated again. So, we calculate all the output again."""

Who talked about "easy"? The writer talks about BETTER.

Also, several typesetting programs do just that, i.e determine the fraction of the changed output to recalculate. InDesign does not process a 100 page file again to change the style of one word in a paragraph.

"""Not due just to using TeX! However, TeX does permit writing to a file and reading from a file. So if want to use such file writing/reading to generate, say, cross references, then will need to run TeX more than once. But the effects of such writing/reading are due to the user and not to TeX. In particular, we can notice that in Knuth's book, there are no cross references that would require running TeX more than once."""

And that's relevant how? We care about how WE USE TeX/LaTeX and what WE WANT from it, not how Knuth describes it/uses it in his book. And our use includes cross-references.

"""Or, as we can see from reading Knuth's book, it is not easy to know exactly where will be the break between one page and the next. Then it will not be easy to do cross references accurate to the page number. So, in Knuth's book, he didn't."""

Again fail to see the relevance of this. Are we supposed to be content with what Knuth DIDN'T DO?

You make it sound like "page number accurate references" are outside the spirit of TeX, and we shouldn't ask for them.

Well, we want them, some of us need 'em, and it's perfectly reasonable to consider a lack of them, or the need for a two-pass phase to have them, a lack of TeX/LaTeX.

You only prove the writer's point.

"""I am sure Knuth saw this issue but wanted the high quality page breaking more than some automated cross references."""

For all your "rationality", you just keep sounding like you worship Knuth as a god that couldn't be faulted, and there can be no real problem with TeX's design.

Well, Knuth was a major academic, a damn fine algorithm scholar, and a very good programmer. Infallible? Hardly.

"""For me, I would reject that assumption. That is, absolutely, positively I do NOT want TeX to have an 'interactive interface', to be 'what you see is what you get', or to do word whacking for each of my keystrokes. I do NOT want such things."""

Good for you. Others want such things, as seen by the popularity of "see your output as you save" editors, and software such as Lyx.

Because the batch workflow suits you, doesn't mean it has to suit everyone else.

"""I would agree with the author that TeX does not bake bread, drive a car, vacuum the carpet, recognize human speech, do the calculations for computer generated scenes in movies, etc."""

Oh, got you! Here you seem to use irony to grab the reader in your favor. Yes, 'writers' tend to do that, but I wouldn't expect it from you!

"""Instead, TeX was mostly just for what Knuth said it was for, "beautiful books", especially ones with quite a lot of mathematics. Moreover, implicit was that tbe books would be essentially in English."""

Yeah. And in 2011, some of us perceive those as inefficiencies, and want a better-TeX that is not "just for books", not just for "mathematics" and not "essentially in english".

Your "but it wasn't designed that way" is NOT a counter-argument to what the writer says.

<comment><USER9> I think Knuth originally envisioned a writer working with a book designer/TeX developer to build a new set of macros for each project, and once the book was written the macros would be left alone. Therefore it would be very important to avoid breaking old macros, meaning TeX's behaviour needed to be nailed down. Today we would more likely take a PDF-like approach, specifying the file formats and using multiple programs to generate and process them.</comment></comment></comment>


Space invaders on EOS blockchain with 500ms latency - <AUTHOR> https://eosauthority.com/space/ <comment><USER2> Less than a month to go for the EOS launch! Free & fast transactions sets EOS apart. Good for the whole blockchain space.</comment>


Show HN: TypeSchema – A JSON format to describe data models - <AUTHOR> https://typeschema.org/ <comment><USER2> Looks useful. One thing that I noticed is that the 'Model with inheritance' example uses extends instead of : for C#. AFAIK C# doesn't use extends.

Is there a way to contribute? I wouldn't mind peeking a look and potentially fixing the issue myself :).

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you seen [https://cuelang.org](https://cuelang.org) ?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I was not aware of this project but thanks for the info</comment></comment>


SoftBank's $100B fund is in a league of its own - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/09/how-softbanks-100b-fund-is-in-a-league-all-its-own/?utm_source=tcfbpage&sr_share=facebook <comment><USER2> There are some very rich people out there deciding to move their money into tech. I wonder what's prompting that decision.

Random theories:

1\. Big Oil is done. Battery prices have hit the tipping point and all cars will soon be electric. The traditional car companies are risky too, at least until the disruption ends and we can see who'll survive.

2\. Banks haven't fixed anything, so the smart money is avoiding them.

3\. They see no growth in consumer retail now that the cheap Chinese goods boom is over.

<comment><USER3> A couple more for you:

4\. Interest rates have been effectively zero for nearly a decade, making borrowing money cheap and also making getting a decent guaranteed return on your money hard. The net result is more speculation in riskier markets like tech VC.

5\. If you're looking for outsized returns, there are few industries outside tech where this is a real possibility these days, compared to in the past.

<comment><USER4> Also 5B - to the extent there is innovation outside "pure tech," it is probably being sold as a tech play. Ag-Tech, Fin-Tech, etc ... Consumer-tech is already just tech, as is enterprise-tech, industrial-tech. With the disintermediation of vertical supply chains, any supplier of technical innovation is a "tech" company. Tech companies operate in nearly all industries.

<comment><USER5> Personal Theory: The boom of tech in the "knowledge work" era has pretty much stagnated, but we're deep in the very promising world of merging digital and physical world via sensors, drones, self driving/autonomous vehicles, and AR/VR. A lot of the business that gets most effected by the physical world stuff has been the least touched by the knowledge worker focused stuff (Cloud, apps, etc.)

<comment><USER6> ...you mean the Internet of Things?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought that Masayoshi Son's Wikipedia intro was interesting:

> Masayoshi Son (Japanese: 孫 正義 Hepburn: Son Masayoshi, Korean: 손정의 Son Jeong- > ui; born August 11, 1957) is a Korean-descendant (Zainichi Korean) Japanese > businessman and the founder and current chief executive officer of SoftBank, > the chief executive officer of SoftBank Mobile, and current chairman of > Sprint Corporation. According to Forbes magazine, Son's estimated net worth > is US $20.4 billion and he is the richest man in Japan,[2] despite having > the distinction of losing the most money in history (approximately $70bn > during the dot com crash of 2000).[3]

<comment><USER8> > despite having the distinction of losing the most money in history > (approximately $70bn during the dot com crash of 2000).[3]

He didn't lose $70B. His net worth dropped $70B because of short term stock fluctuations during the dotcom collapse.

He never had $70B to lose. It was all paper wealth tied to the market valuations of his companies.

A subtle but important distinction.

<comment><USER9> > paper wealth

What wealth is not paper wealth?

<comment><USER10> Truck full of bananas

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _in the interest of furthering his 300-year plan to build the largest > company on the planet_

At least they are not just looking for short-term and short-sighted profits, but that's a looong time.

<comment><USER12> Read "Pioneering Portfolio Management" by David Swenson, the guy who runs the Yale endowment. Fascinating book on investing; one of his "super powers" as an investor is the fact that the Yale Endowment is immortal, and can invest on 100 year timelines. The rest of us who need to retire can't afford to think like that.

But if you can afford to think like that, new opportunities open up that no one else can compete with you on.

And that time perspective makes issues like the dot-com crash or the 2009 financial crisis look laughably irrelevant. If you zoom out the performance graph to the entire history of the US stock market, the great depression looks a bit more like a temporary downturn, whose total value is a small percentage relative to today's current level.

<comment><USER13> > new opportunities open up that no one else can compete with you on.

Would appreciate a couple of examples.

<comment><USER14> Not a particularly _safe_ example, but Venezuela recently released 100 year treasury bonds. I'd imagine this is not a retail investment vehicle; traditionally.

<comment><USER15> If they pay a coupon every year, and you can resell them on a market at any time, then the fact that they won't mature for a hundred years doesn't make them unsuitable for ordinary investors.

Now, a hundred year term deposit, with interest payable at maturity ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I find it amazing and absurd to see how so much money is invested in such a short amount of time.

Sadly from what I understand most of it will go towards later stages.

I would like to see this kind of money made available to early stage new ideas that need a lot of capital to get of the ground.

<comment><USER12> Later stage ideas always get more money, this is rational and should stay that way. Later stage companies are bigger and more complex, and having de-risked the basics, are more apt to build huge things like new factories. They'll have hundreds or thousands of employees, and the need to acquire much larger scale in order to continue growing.

By contrast, small companies can do really well with much less capital, because they're trying to do smaller things (hire 12 people, not 1,200) and they need to do more basic things to de-risk their ideas.

Consider: $100 million could more than adequately seed 100 early stage companies, but it wouldn't be enough to build a single factory in some places.

<comment><USER17> This is a good point, but I wonder if the parent wasn't talking specifically of making $100 million available to one startup, but $1 million per startup. One could fund a lot more ideas that way, and odds are that one of them would be a unicorn.

The only reason why that's not really happening seems to me that we either don't have that many ideas or that much people willing to work on those ideas.

<comment><USER18> I think a bigger reason is that the administrative burden of dealing with 100 startups is incredibly difficult and also would likely eat into returns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "It's neither soft nor, technically, a bank"

Jesus christ.

<comment><USER20> Author of the article here. I am legitimately surprised my editor let that one slide.

<comment><USER21> I thought it was cute and not-at-all distracting from the substance of the article.

Good work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> $60B of the $100B number is from countries (Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi) where human rights issues are still a big thing these days.

Maybe we can think about that whenever we see where SoftBanks new fund is invested in - it's 60% money from folks which do not care much about some basic human rights.

<comment><USER23> So?

You are aware that these are "issues" from your "point of reference".

Someone else consider that the US has a bad human rights record. Does that mean that he should boycott US companies/fund?

<comment><USER24> _USA has a bad human rights record_

Compared to which other huge countries?

<comment><USER23> Don't cut the phrase. That's not what I said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How does an entrepreneur get an introduction to SoftBank and pitch?</comment>


Ask HN: How do you deal with an extensive list of pet projects? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a full-time software developer with a constantly growing list of pet projects and an increasing inability to actually get any work on done of them.
At this very moment I have ten repositories on BitBucket that mostly have just READMEs with notes describing what the project is about, though some have a bit of actual code as well. One of these projects stands some theoretical chance of being worthy of a startup some day, but they're all mostly things I either have a use for or want to build to learn something.
The problem I have is something akin to paralysis of choice: I think about most of them here and there and sketch something out or jot down some notes, and sometimes even write some code, but I lose a fair bit of time I could spend being productive on deciding what to work on.
The net result is that I don't get much of anything done, and it's incredibly frustrating.
I imagine there must be others who can relate, and I'd love to hear about how you're dealing with this (and how successfully). <comment><USER3> I have wide interests, and my problem too for a long time was similar - <USER2> being able to decide what to work on, and end up not working on anything much at all. In other words, classic procrastination.

But from past couple of months, I've improved tremendously by "time slicing"...like a CPU. Meaning, I quickly pick a small list of 5-6 interests every morning from my Evernote notes. Rest of the day, I randomly pick one from this list and work for exactly 1 hour on it. Then I pick randomly again and work on that for 1 hour.

For me, the 1 hour time slicing takes motivation, decision and procrastination out of the picture, and replaces them with discipline. Drawing up the daily list of interests is still prone to motivation and mood, but now it's a one off decision, not something I've to do repeatedly rest of the day.

A single time slice results in only a little progress, but cumulatively over a period of a week or month, I've managed significant progress in every one of my interests, including revenue generating ones. I'm nowhere near as frustrated as I used to be.

It may or may not work for you, but even if it doesn't, I'd like to generalize the concept as follows: settle on a process that depends less on motivation and more on enforced discipline. Rather corny way of stating it is, motivation is only the ignition, but discipline is what keeps the engine running and takes one ahead.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm in the middle of the most productive streak I've ever had working on pet projects, using a combination of an IDEAS.md file and the GitHub contributions calendar.

IDEAS.md is always the leftmost tab in my Sublime workspace. Every project I have an idle though about, a concrete idea for starting, or a next thing to work on gets a heading. Most of these have just 2 or 3 lines under them. For larger projects, there may be a big bunch of ideas, with some picked out for the next release. Every time I edit what's under a heading, I move it to the top. This keeps a mix of bigger and smaller projects, big and small tasks, high-level and low-level ideas churning in the file, making it more likely to be able to find something I feel like doing right now.

(One of the ideas is to write a React app to automate this)

Above the first heading I keep a list of generic grunt work that needs done and high level things which could be tried with any project, like learning to use new tools. If I'm not feeling it on a particular day, a combination of these and not wanting to break the chain can get me started doing _something_ , which usually leads to other things, even if they're just more ideas.

At the end of every day, I "Close all to the right" on IDEAS.md so it's the first thing I read every morning.

I've found that actively doing at least a little bit of development every day, even when I don't feel like it, has made me more likely to feel like it over the last 4 months and more likely to have a go at something instead of mulling over it. An idea becomes a quick proof of concept. A quick proof of concept gets fleshed out and becomes a project. A project gives you ideas for new features and other, related projects and on it goes.

</comment><comment><USER5> >The problem I have is something akin to paralysis of choice

Yup, had exactly the same problem myself. What I did was to introduce a ranking score for each project I might want to do and then just do the top one. I constantly add to the list and only remove projects if I do them / have learned they are not going to work / get new information which pushes them down/up in the ranking.

Series of questions I use to evaluate the project: What problem does this solve?; How does the MVP look like?; What is potential monetary upside?; What is potential personal-brand upside?; What are the potential risks?; What is the required time / monetary / etc budget?; Who is this project targeted at most?; Will there be new skills-of-interest learned?; Will this project lead to bigger projects?.

Each question has a 1-5 score slide which I later sum up with custom weights to a "final score" which I then use to rank the projects.

</comment><comment><USER6> Break the project up into lots of little pieces. Attack the little pieces. Don't do little pieces from other projects until the little projects in your main project on the way to a major milestone are done. As someone who had your problem for a long time: Trust me, it's this simple.

Try using some issue-tracking service to keep things organized to help you plan. JIRA may be overkill, but there are other systems that help.

<comment><USER7> I have a similar problem and this sounds like a great way to combat it. I'm curious, do you write down the little pieces as a todo list or do you just make a mental note and go about it?

<comment><USER6> Some of it is mental, but ultimately it does get recorded into a record- keeping system of some sort. It's too hard to always pull out the record- keeping system and keep things in it. However, when the record keeping system looks like it's running on empty, I tend to brain dump into it.

Just tell yourself to have a one-track mind and make your list and record keeping system your life. Never deviate, and just always do little steps always. Every big picture should always be made of thousands of little pictures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hear you. There's a number between 1 and ~few that is perfect for you. For me, it's three - few enough that they all see progress, but many enough that I am always in a mood for one of them.

I like having long lists of projects, but if I'm not working on them, they're on a list that I know is non-committal, so I don't feel bad about it.

I find the challenge is not letting new ones creep into my free time once I table most of the old ones.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's important to remember that it's ok to have an idea and not act on it. You will have way more ideas than you can ever hope to have time for - what's important is that your mind is free to focus on whatever you choose to work on without being distracted.

What has helped me in the last year is to keep writing ideas down but be very selective on those I will work on properly. If I spent a week of free time on every current idea I have so far - that would add up to the next 5 years of my life. It's not sustainable. What I want is to just see some of my ideas come to life.

Also if you're not in the habit of launching products and tools going from 0 > startup is a huge task.

Why not commit 1 weekend to 1 tiny, achievable project (Fri eve to Sunday eve) see how far you can get when constrained by a deadline. No matter how basic, buggy, janky or simple it is - you have to show people on Sunday night & wake up to the response on Monday. You will end up with a project that has seen the light of day and then you can decide if it's worth continuing.

</comment><comment><USER10> List each project on a piece of paper.

Think "do I want to spend 100 hours making this into something?" Then toss a coin. Heads it dies, tails it lives. You may decide while the coin is in the air. Or when the coin lands you might say "best of three" \- these are both great if they're actual choices.

Go through the list and whittle it down to at most three.

Put all the dead projects in a single document / wiki / archive under a "things I want to do eventually" heading.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm doing this for money, so I prioritize based on that.

I put everything that I think would be cool to do in a doc. Then I add from 1 to 5 $ signs next to each task depending on how much money I think the task could make, or a ? mark if it has questionable financial value.

For example:

"Optimize documentation pages to rank better in Google - $$$$"

"Improve styling of download links table. - ?"

Then it's really easy for me to decide what to do.

</comment><comment><USER12> I like to make "prototypes". Projects that show an idea but arent fully implemented or featured.

For example I made a soundboard just today in a few hours. It has a few sound files that play when a user clicks on the image/div and I built some other functions relating to that. The sound boar is a prototype, just needs more fine tuning when I feel like its an idea that should be completed.

</comment><comment><USER13> As someone who keeps starting new projects, and also swapping which programming language I want to implement my projects in.

My new strategy is to just refuse to let myself start a new project until an old one is finished. Then I need to think more carefully about making the commitment to create the repo in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER14> By realizing that if I am not working on it, it's not a project but an idea. Like you, I have a very long list of ideas and quite a limited amount of time. So I tend to just pick one or two and ignore the rest until something makes me change my priorities.

</comment><comment><USER15> And here I am , sitting with no such ideas in my hand with lots and lots of time. Can you share them , if not even whole ideas but subparts for it. I would love to code them.

<comment><USER12> What are you passionate about? Is there software relating to that passion that could be improved? If so, there is your idea. Even if it's a derivative idea, it would still be a good learning experience.</comment></comment>