Show HN: Lucidpress -- Adobe InDesign meets Google Docs - <AUTHOR> https://www.lucidpress.com/

<comment><USER2> It's a bit disingenuous, perhaps even hyperbole re: the title.

\- I can't upload and place tiff/eps/pdf files, so I can't use this for print. I could convert to PNG, but there ain't no CMYK PNG afaik.

\- Export isn't PDFX/2000

\- No printer marks/registration, all the things you want when printing.

It's a neat web app, but to call it InDesign is pretty off the mark. Maybe more like Home Desktop Publisher 2000 meets Google Docs.

EDIT:

I publish a magazine in Vietnam. Even though it's primarily iPad, we do a print run of each issue. [http://facebook.com/emoimagazine](http://facebook.com/emoimagazine) (Bikinis, so NSFW sort of).

<comment><USER2> Also, the PDF export does some horrendous image crunching. I uploaded an 8.5x11 image @ 300 dpi, placed it in a document, downloaded the PDF and the compression artifacts are really noticeable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Some of you may know our first product, Lucidchart ([http://www.lucidchart.com](http://www.lucidchart.com)) which is a browser- based diagramming app.

We are excited to bring that same technology to the layout and publishing space. Please let us know if you have any feedback!

<comment><USER4> This looks great. I do layout design for an old-school technology magazine, [http://2600.com/](http://2600.com/). We've been using PageMaker/inDesign for decades. As a fan of LucidCharts, I'm looking forward to checking this new product of yours out.

Being able to import so we can retain some of the style our readers have become acustomed to would be AWESOME but I'm betting you all looked into inDesign's format and decided to pass that up?

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the compliments, and great question! For launch, we have not delved deeply into the bowels of InDesign's format so it's not definitively off the table -- just a prioritization of resources for now.

With Lucidchart, we are the only diagramming app that imports Microsoft Visio's native file format...so it's not unprecedented for us to tackle these types of things.

<comment><USER4> A "compromise" might be allowing uploading of a PDF doc and allow the user to specify text boxes, etc. and effectively convert the PDF into a LucidPress doc that can be used from then on.

Just an idea. Thanks for listening

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks promising</comment>


Ethics in Lethal Robots - <AUTHOR> http://lemonodor.com/archives/2008/02/ethics_in_lethal_robots.html <comment><USER2> Robots are tools, like land mines and cruise missiles are tools. There is nothing more complicated than that. They are amoral.

If you want to have the kurzweillian discussion about robots as smart as humans, then you can't program the ethics, just like humans are too smart to program ethics.

Papers like this are just completely premature. A discussion about practical & intelligent safety systems for robotics would be a better way to describe the intention.

<comment><USER3> I have just read the introduction, and it does seem that the author is looking far ahead, but I don't think it's too early to reflect on the ethical aspects of lethal robots.

Science moves faster than the field of ethics (e.g. cloning) and the US has already lethal robots on the battlefield. They are not autonomous yet, but we're certainly going there. When the robot 'assists' the decision by providing additional data (say an sensor detects a hidden weapon on an otherwise civilian-looking guy), it already skews the decision process. As the author mentions, there will be a point when the military will start to think that their robots are better at making the shoot/not shoot decisions...

<comment><USER2> That's not how the military works.

At least for the next decade, humans will always be making the decisions. I know. I've met with people in the military about weaponizing robots.

The real safety addition comes from software aided aiming and added situational awareness. Imaging trying to manipulate a gun remotely with lag, vs. just saying "fire" to an auto-tracking gun. It's a world of difference.

But this is why I call it a "safety system". It has nothing to do with ethics. It's like that IR beam that makes sure your garage door doesn't close on someone. Useful, important, and nothing to do with ethics.</comment></comment></comment>


You're Not Listening - <AUTHOR> http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2012/08/28/youre_not_listening.html <comment><USER2> Why do authors insult their listeners with "You're Doing It Wrong" titles like "You're Not Listening"? How does he know this about me? How can he possibly know this about every one of his readers?

I suppose they do it because it catches attention. A slap in the face catches attention too. For me the two work similarly. (At least I think they do; I can't remember being slapped in the face.)

Usually I just grin and bear it and feel like a schmuck for giving them their damn pageview, but this case is interesting. It's not only rude, it's incongruent in a post that ostensibly is about how to treat people decently. Evidently the author's highly developed empathy doesn't extend to his readers. Once you see that, the whole post appears coated in a thin slime of managerial manipulativeness.

<comment><USER3> Definitely agree. I'm not sure if the OP is the author, but if he is and if he's trying to draw attention, then the motive shifts from sharing insightful lessons to personal "winning" (getting the most karma points, getting the most page views, etc). This seems to be the recent trend, and I'd like to see less emotionally charged titles for better reader engagement, even if it comes at a cost of less overall views.

<comment><USER4> The OP is not the author (in case it helps).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While not on the topic of aggressive listening, I often find myself the 'target' of aggressive listeners (who listen a lot, ask a lot of questions and get me talking a lot).

I often go to meetups for people who like to travel and it seems like the majority of people don't create moments for them to be the receiver of a question (meaning it's hard to ask them a question). Perhaps it is a nervous thing where, instead of the possibility of there being 'uncomfortable silences', they just keep asking (me) questions. I never know how to handle this because after the conversation has gone on a bit, there's the feeling that it's time to excuse oneself in order to talk to someone else/new. If I use that 'closing' time to ask them questions then the conversation goes on and on and it becomes harder to meet a variety of people. What it seems to come down to is directing the conversation and creating openings where the end of any of my sentences should probably be immediately followed by the asking of a question. Basically, not allowing for the other person to ask their next question.

<comment><USER6> Just say "but enough about me, let's talk about YOUR experience" or something.

Seriously. Be explicit. People love talking about themselves. They are probably just being polite asking you all of those questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _> The longer you're a bad listener, the smaller your world gets and the narrower your mind becomes, because you're not exposing yourself to different ideas and perspective._

Sturgeon's Law. 90% of everything is _shite_. Most music is dreck: popular, alternative, classical, whatever. Most writing is dreck: genre, "literary," whatever. Most "listeners" -- aren't really.

 _> In what is one of the more advanced listening moves, my advice is: shut up._

This is very key. Underlying this move is the simple notion: You. Don't. Know. Everything. Sorry, but you don't. How many departments and companies have been run into the ground or miles down the paths of mediocrity by _well meaning people?_ Tons. Assume you don't know everything. Learn. If your mental models aren't significantly changing, you aren't really learning.

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/jx/we_change_our_minds_less_often_th...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/jx/we_change_our_minds_less_often_than_we_think/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Another excellent post by Rands. Much of his guidance on conducting 1:1s with developers I gleaned from his book Managing Humans. The note in this article on asserting "I will not be the next one to speak" is a great piece of advice though; something I'll have to start doing.

</comment><comment><USER9> I get the points, but being in that position - gosh, why do i bother?

I have 3 people reporting to me. Designing product. I have them cause this is how you grow.

Each design review is painful. They present. I shoot 500 holes in their designs by asking questions. Then I gently outline how design could solve the actual problem. Essentially I could design myself and be 10 times quicker. Create a pixel-perfect mockup? what the _fuck_ is taking you so long!? paint.net, gimp, my god pick a tool and do it.

if you are a manager, i have the following advice: hire only candidates that are smarter than you are. they will make up the greatest team ever. they will challenge, teach you a trick or two. if a candidate does not _challenge_ you in your authority, he or she is crap.

sounds easy, very hard to accomplish. but remember, one rock star has the output of 5 average people. take your time to hire. your first two picks are SHIT.

i'd like to have time to listen all day long. but there is shit to accomplish, life is short. if you don't have good arguments, right now, we're moving on. if you can't prove me wrong, I am right.

noticed how Linus acts? Steve Jobs? FUCK patience. FUCK feel good touchy feely discussions.

my CEO scares the crap out of me, that's how smart he is. I'll follow him, through fire, because he can prove me wrong, in 5 secs. not a lot of people can. this is how i treat my team.

<comment><USER10> _if you can't prove me wrong, I am right._

Unless you _are_ wrong, that is.

Good listening mitigates against information censorship, and improves coordination. Your reports might do better if they listened better, and they might listen better if anyone else at the company set a proper example.

<comment><USER11> Always intrigued when people view discussion as a way to win rather than to find truth. Don't get me wrong, I'm guilty sometimes too, but to unabashedly embrace this weakness . . .

I guess what I'm saying is I like my boss better than the hypothetical boss outlined by the grandparent poster. He is also sharp as a tack and quickly spots weaknesses in bad plans, but I would hardly describe his approach to communicating those flaws as "scaring the crap out of me." Too often people in software management (or really, any power relationship) think gentleness and efficiency are antithetical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> All this management bullshit might work if your reports were mindless and we didn't live in the age of the Internet; unfortunately in IT, they probably aren't and, well, we most certainly do.

Aping emotions, and playing psychological games (like playing dumb, and pretending to be a friend for the purposes of eliciting information) is a dangerous game in our industry because as soon as your reports detect you are behaving in this way the relationship will go south, fast (and permanently.)

Playing mind games like these will cause you to exhibit behaviors more typically associated with psychopathic individuals - and you will set yourself up for having them played back against you.

<comment><USER7> I don't think he's advocating faking these things. I think he's advocating actually being those things.

 _> Everything I just described can be faked. Anyone who has been pressured into buying something they did not need has been on the receiving end of faked listening skills, but there's a reason why, when you leave the car dealership, that you feel used. You slowly become aware that you were manipulated with a false sense of familiarity and connection. You realize that while they showed interest in you, they didn't really listen. They have no clue who you are. It was an empty conversation facilitated by manipulation cloaked as listening skills._

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great stuff, and always a good reminder to shut up and let the other person talk.

Lots of stuff here is based on visual queues and eye contact. Very hard for those of us that work remotely and spend our days on the phone.

</comment><comment><USER14> I hate the small talk opener. If you open with a fake question, which would I put any stock in your real question?

My advice to managers: if you use a formula, and some of Rands' are good formulas, tell your people what formula you use, so they understand what you are doing. This worms if your formula is honest. Management is not manipulation.

<comment><USER15> Why does small talk have to be fake?

I used to hate small talk, but it really does put people at ease. To avoid feeling fake, I pick things that really do interest me. E.g., when I'm asking about somebody's family, or their hunt to buy a house, or their art project, I really care about the answers.

Of course, it may feel fake to some people at first, but as long as you're consistent about it, I think it works.

<comment><USER2> It doesn't have to be fake, but in the article, it explicitly is. Personally, I would not like to be treated this way. There are better ways than bullshit to establish a "quiet safe place", and when someone (especially someone in authority) refuses to get to their obvious agenda, I feel more anxious, not less.

The way the OP talks about "innocuous preambles" reminds me of this guy:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9lK73KvDJ8#t=0m57s>

<comment><USER15> Where is it explicitly fake? I went back and looked again and still don't see it.

<comment><USER2> Everything in the paragraph "Open with innocuous preamble" strikes me as false and condescending. He uses the _language_ of respectfulness to advocate not being forthright. I find that incongruent. In fact, the more I look at the article, the more incongruent I find it. I say this as someone who cares a lot about respect for others, and I have the general impression that you do, too. So I'm surprised our perceptions are at such variance.

<comment><USER15> Sorry. I agree with your desire for respect; I'm just not seeing the falseness.

I read him as advocating patience and setting aside one's immediate personal desires to satisfy the needs of the person you're talking with. That is not perfectly forthright, but I don't think holding off saying the most difficult thing for a few minutes of warm-up is in any way false.

I think the alternative, which is to ask your urgent thing and then come around to asking how they are, can also work for some people. In particular, I can make that work with people who don't like small talk and with whom I have a solid relationship.

With most people, though, I definitely follow an escalation-of-intensity pattern, which lets me establish some rapport before getting to the heavy stuff. Key to me is being relatively chill about my own agenda. If I am too agitated about it, then asking how they're doing would indeed be false. Then I agree it's best to come out and say the big thing.

<comment><USER2> What you've written here seems far more humane and resonant than the OP, which seems gimmicky even as he decries gimmickry. My emotional receptors just don't believe him.

I believe it's important for people to treat each other as equals first, roles second. Any trace of personal identification with an authority role (or a subordinate role, for that matter) acts like a grain of sand in a place where a grain of sand shouldn't be. The trouble with management comes when a person's sense of self inflates to fill the role, something they don't deserve because no one does. This is marvelously illustrated by the experiment that showed that people designated "leader" for no reason whatsoever are significantly more likely to take an extra cookie for themselves. When one is captured by this self-inflation bias, it doesn't make things better to apply trust-building tricks to get people to "say shit"; that is condescension, and it confuses matters.

I'd be interested in reading an article by you on this topic, if you ever write one.

<comment><USER15> Thanks! That's very kind. Perhaps this stuff is easier for me to write about in that I took the summer off, so I'm not in charge of anyone right now.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Whats the coolest thing you've ever built in 24 hours? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> We ran short of paper in our Kniffel (well known dices game in germany) games in holiday. So i developed a digital version in around 8 hours. [https://diesunddas.arachno.de/knoffel.php](https://diesunddas.arachno.de/knoffel.php) Renamed it to "Knoffel" for Copyright issues.

</comment><comment><USER3> CRM dashboard for a client demo the next day. Kind of CRUDy application more or less. But I understood the business workflow and had critical displays all more or less working as a proof of concept.</comment>


Apple fixes MacBook Pro battery life by removing time estimate - <AUTHOR> https://marco.org/2016/12/13/apple-removes-battery-time-remaining <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13169060](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13169060)

</comment><comment><USER3> It almost feels like Apple is parodying itself at this point with this Macbook Pro trainwreck, is there really nobody in the room willing to stand up and point this out to whoever is making these decisions?

<comment><USER4> Parody is actually a good way to describe it. Except it's real which makes it depressing as a user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Excellent imagery choices.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is not a dupe, so far as I can tell.

</comment><comment><USER7> coconutbattery. fixed</comment>


Backbone on Rails: a ruby gem based on thoughtbot's 'Backbone.js on Rails' - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/meleyal/backbone-on-rails

<comment><USER2> How does this compare with backbone- rails?<https://github.com/codebrew/backbone-rails>

<comment><USER3> I think backbone-rails comes with the older 0.5.0 version of backbone.js, whereas this one has 0.5.3 version. But i haven't tried it so not sure of other differences.

<comment><USER4> No, backbone-rails comes with Backbonejs' latest version: [https://github.com/codebrew/backbone- rails/blob/master/vendo...](https://github.com/codebrew/backbone- rails/blob/master/vendor/assets/javascripts/backbone.js)

It seems like the difference boils down to directory structure and that backbone-rails includes tests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've never seen a $50 ebook before. Seems a bit excessive. Whatever, I'll pass or wait till they eventually come to their senses and offer it for $19

<comment><USER6> It's clearly targeted at people who bill more than $100/hour and who are completely willing to pay a premium for that.

I bought it and I can tell you they made a killing (I can see how many people bought it as they invite people to a private github repo).

<comment><USER5> That's great, but it seems to me like a stupid approach. 1% of rails devs make 100+ an hour. So they are limiting their target market.

But whatever I'm sure they're making money and are happy.</comment></comment></comment>


Location Based Services Dead? - <AUTHOR>

In recent events on foursquare most people are saying that location based services like foursquare are dying and it's time to move on. Any idea on This?
What about a location based service that makes discovering people? Like discovercircle.com?
Is there a future for location based services? What's are the current trends? <comment><USER2> Location based services like Foursquare require users to be successful. No user base = no service. I was pretty big on Foursquare for a while but the whole earning badges for checking in places thing became a chore more-so than it did fun and I eventually stopped using it.

The problem with location based services is they require effort and if you don't reward that effort or reward it half-assed then it will just get old and eventually people will stop using it. That's what happened to Foursquare I do believe.

As it has been pointed out, location aware is the future. Your phone does the work for you, you don't need to open an app the app alerts you when a predetermined action or event triggers an alert. "Alert me when a train that stops at my desired stop is in the area between 5.30pm and 6.30pm", etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sure... there are two different types, in my view, of software that uses location information. Stuff that requires knowing exactly where you are in real time, like gps navigation software, which is location based. When you log into 4 square and check in at a location, that's a real time transaction.

But there is also software that uses occasional location lookups, or data from other applications that use such lookups, and it's not necessarily in real time, and it does so in ways aren't necessarily user initated. It's data which can be gps but also wifi or even cell phone tower based, or even from other apps like navigation software) to do things like figure out generally where you are, give you dining suggestions, tell you about local events etc. When your weather app updates with the local weather, it's probably on some schedule, but it does a gps lookup every few hours. Same thing.

When Google Now figures out where you live and where you work using an occasional gps lookup/results from your google maps searches, etc, it's not a real time thing, but it is using location. I believe the iphone lets you set location based reminders. That's also location aware.

It's also rich interesting data. And since it isn't always on, it doesn't drain your battery.

Now either google, or someone with such data, is going to build an app that lets you opt in to sharing information about your general location, combined with data on your interests, to do some really cool things.

Also, It's not something I know too much about, but I understand that there are a lot of location based gay dating/hookup apps that are doing well. Better then some straight ones, especially if you take into account the smaller target audience.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think you are going to see less location based services, and more location aware services. Google Now, or programs that know when a friend is nearby.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you explain more about location aware services? You mean like apple's friends nearby, or discover circle type apps?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think LBS is not an independent service type. Google Maps or other maps/Geo- based services will be dominant.</comment>


Start-up culture is corrupting our youth and killing real entrepreneurship - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/11765609/Start-up-culture-is-corrupting-our-youth-and-killing-real-entrepreneurship.html <comment><USER3> Oh yawn, "kids these days".

Many people are doing startups or "startups" because that's what they are being told to do (as opposed to being encouraged to do). Nothing wrong with that. Many of these businesses are really just making a feature. So the seed investor who cashes out soon via an acquihire is really more of an agent. So what? And of course many businesses are just retail shops like people have always started; but when they are started online and not funded by a bank loan (which young people have trouble getting anyway) they are called "startups". But they are simply small businesses (hence my startup and "startup" distinction above).

Folks are still starting more traditional startups all the time, both bootstrapped and externally funded. Encouraging more people to do this is hardly bad news.

</comment><comment><USER4> There really is only one myth that needs to be busted for the universe to retain order.

"they rush out of university to start companies regardless of having no experience of working in the private sector, thus increasing the chances of failure."

These successful entrepreneurs never rushed out of university to become entrepreneurs. They were successful entrepreneurs already. When you're so successful, staying in school stops making sense. And if you're at that point, you aren't taking a risk by quitting school. The risk is with staying there.

Bill Microsoft, Steve Apple, Mark Facebook, Larry and Sergey Google, Elon Tesla. They all tried to stay in school. They were good students with no intentions of leaving.

So just like any other college student trying to balance school and work and play, replace the work and play with entrepreneurship, and when you are successful, do what makes the most sense. If you graduate, then get a job and do the same. Now replace school and play with entrepreneurship.

These kids who quit school just want to quit and are using entrepreneurship as an excuse. Good for them. No one can say if it's better or worse for them. But if anyone thinks they're mimicking successful entrepreneurship behavior, they're misinformed, be it the students dropping out or the media portraying it as such.

Good entrepreneurs quit their day job when they have to. Not when they want to. And they have to because they're successful already.

<comment><USER5> > Bill Microsoft, Steve Apple, Mark Facebook, Larry and Sergey Google, Elon > Tesla. They all tried to stay in school. They were good students with no > intentions of leaving.

This is false for Jobs and Musk. It wasn't until 4 years after Jobs dropped out from Reed that Woz showed him the Apple I, and Musk started Zip2 with $28K of his dad's money after dropping out of a Stanford physics PhD with no specific plans.

It's only semi-true for Gates (Gates and Allen had obtained a deal with MITS over the summer when he chose not to return to Harvard in the fall), but Harvard allows students to take indefinite leaves of absence, so he took a risk-free path.

It was only after the rise of the internet made exponential growth in the space of a few months a real possibility that you saw Page, Brin, and Zuckerberg leave college with very clear evidence of growth to point to.

<comment><USER4> Good points.

For Steve Jobs:

"If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."

Also I looked up Larry Oracle, and for him he quit school because of a family tragedy.

Elon also quit his phd at a new school after 2 days, which seems more like he changed his mind than "dropped out".

Of course, life is complex. But the point is, none of these people were anti- academic or anti-school. They were anti-wasting time and pro-opportunity, but they were never for dropping out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This isn't an article, it's an opinion piece with a bunch of anecdotal evidence and random quotes to support the author's case.

The caption "Nor are they Zuckerberg" is outrageously condescending and judgmental. "None of these people are smart enough to become successful entrepreneurs," judges the author, "and they shouldn't even bother trying."

Is it a surprise that lots of people have the wrong idea about what it takes to be successful with a startup? No, and it shouldn't be a surprise.

Just like any profession that pop culture heaps praise upon, there will be many who have an unrealistic view about what it takes to gain success. It's the same as starting a rock band - some people are going to be outrageously successful and most won't, but most who fail will gain experience and will not regret having tried.

For those who think that this is a problem, try to fix it - go give a talk to some young entrepreneurs about how hard it is. Let them know what the risks are and how much work it's going to take. Try to help them be better equipped for the challenges ahead.

<comment><USER7> If you replace entrepreneurs with journalist, you get the same picture. You have some top tier, and then you get every hack that writes a web column that "shouldn't even bother trying".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not worried about founders. It's the early stage employees, without the experience of how the game is played, who will be exploited.

<comment><USER9> I was a shitty startup founder in my 20s. Despite my failings all of my employees went on to be incredibly successful. The chaos and hustle is an invaluable education.

<comment><USER10> Have you written about your (and your employees's) experiences? I would certainly find that a very valuable read.

<comment><USER8> Twice, when I was much younger, I was suckered by the stock option scam, that's enough for me to know that it is systemic. I was immature then, relatively, and I experienced the downsides of believing that because you are young and everyone tells you you are talented, you are invincible and going to be rich...

Now I advise others, salary is THE most important thing, in fact working for a startup should carry a salary premium, because of the uncertainty and pressure. Crunch time happens but if it is always crunch time, something is going wrong, and you should look at what your hourly rate actually is. The VCs won't burn out or get carpal tunnel. The founders will swan into their next round of funding. No-one cares about you, so you have to care about yourself.

When people talk about a shortage of people in tech, they specifically mean, a shortage of people experienced enough to be useful but not so experienced that they understand the game...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's hard for me to criticize a business model that makes money. If VC is willing to fund Acqui-hires As a Saleable Service, and then pay top dollar for its figurative prom queens, then why _shouldn 't_ people create and pursue them?

Sure, it's more mating display/beauty contest than entrepeneurialism, but are we not entertained? In the meantime, how else is one supposed to get the cash to bootstrap their big idea in the first place?

It's kind of like how John Williams wrote the theme to _Lost in Space_ long before he wrote the soundtrack to _Star Wars_, no? Or, ya know, Paypal before Tesla and SpaceX.

<comment><USER12> While I agree with you there can still be externalities from this ecosystem. Only a very small percentage of people are able to succeed using this model and for the other 99.99% it would have been better if they built a business focused on something a little more long term.

This rip-and-flip startup model is really just a poorly disguised form of gambling. Sure every week someone wins a massive payout, but for society as a whole it is a negative.

<comment><USER11> In my experience, the success rate is a lot higher than 0.01%, I'd guess it to be more in the 5-10% range with a little due diligence applied to the idea and its founders. That's a pretty good bet/gamble for three-letter-title founders and anyone with equity north of 1% for the remainder of this boom cycle.

But I agree that startups are a terrible proposition for those with 0.5% or less, which is a matter of choice for the employee who could go get a higher expected return from any of the big tech companies for equivalent (and maybe even much less) time and work. This subject has been rehashed many times on HN.

As for society, um, the US (at least) is a "society" composed of many people who treat buying state lottery tickets as a retirement plan. MVP startups IMO are far less toxic than that. That said, when I made a little $$$, the most toxic thing I encountered was several supposed friends suddenly begging me to fund their ideas because VC wouldn't. @#%$ that, I have plenty of my own ideas to bootstrap with my hard-earned cash.

<comment><USER12> Is your 5-10% range based on VC funded startups? My number was more across the entire pool of wantrapenuers and on that basis I am probably being generous.

Yes it is amazing how people react once they realise you have money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It bothers me that nobody even tries to bootstrap anything anymore. A lot of companies would be fine not taking millions from VCs.

<comment><USER14> Step outside the echo chamber and you'll find tons of bootstrapped and non-vc backed companies.

<comment><USER15> My question is, do companies sometime receive backing from VCs to open doors, and not necessarily because they need funding?

<comment><USER16> Yes, very often. Just like people go to Harvard or Yale for the name and the network - not the education.

See Y Combinator now. Which people go to for the name and the network - <USER2> the money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This article assumes that companies do best when they are captained by their founders for as long as possible. I think what we are seeing here is a more economical solution. Innovators make new things, if the public wants or needs the new things larger companies with the resources to hire larger teams to maintain and expand the service acquire them.

Innovators are free to innovate and services eventually get the backing of established companies.

<comment><USER18> _" larger companies with the resources to hire larger teams to maintain and expand the service acquire them"_

But in many cases, the acquiring companies have no interest in the acquired product and shut it down immediately. They're only interested in acqui-hiring the people, who have demonstrated a certain degree of talent in creating a new product. (In some cases, they also buy the company to eliminate a potential competitor.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think this article vastly underestimates how hard many of the successful startups worked to get there. And arguably there are more startups nowadays with long term ambitious goals (nuclear fusion, energy storage, immunotherapy, drones/robotics) than we've had in the past. A decline in startup culture would also lead to less of these ambitious startups as well.

<comment><USER20> I sometimes wonder though if the pendulum has swung too far from the big corporate, big science model that dominated when Silicon Valley was born. I don't know if a decline in startup quantity or even quality would lead to fewer innovations. Maybe national or corporate labs could pick up the slack. I think the low rates of entrepreneurship among young people these days (it's true, startups are flashy but entrepreneurship is declining on the whole) speaks to something being broken with the current model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I for one am tired of the whole "startup culture", the term is over used.

I'm starting to think startups are a meme pushed by the VC industry.

<comment><USER22> The article really lost me with the line "Unsurprisingly, venture capital firms – an equal victim of this culture"

In what way is a VC firm a "victim" of investing millions in a startup to try to get in at the ground level of the next unicorn?

The whole thing is this weird self-fulfilling prophecy cycle. I don't blame either side of the equation, per se. But it sorta kills me how people think of this standardized rite of passage now for launching a startup, getting a ton of money before you've made any, and then exiting. I wouldn't take any of that for granted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am also surprised by the rise in the popularity of the term "serial entrepreneur". I find it amazing that people want to tell the world of all their previous business failures as though it is something to be proud about. I haven't failed with my first venture yet I am not proud of all the business mistakes I have made along the way.

</comment><comment><USER23> I see the author is attacking people for selling their startups. But I dont think he has considered that, people do have alot of ideas in their head. And when one idea gets traction does that mean you should forget all the other ideas you had and focus rest of your life on the one?

I think the world will benefit from people presenting their ideas rather than not.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think this shift towards early liquidity is really good for 2 reasons:

1) Society benefits when people work on what they love and do best. Founders, with rare exception, are best at innovating and building new things -- not running large organizations. If we allow founders to exit early, they can work on their next idea, which maximizes the amount of time they spend doing what they love (innovating). This is a net good.

2) Liquidity in the form of early exits attracts more founders, which leads to more overall innovation. I think there's a social judgement against trying to "make a quick buck" which should be discounted. Real value was created whenever an acquisition takes place, and this value isn't destroyed when founders sell -- it just exchanges hands (and sometimes gets transformed).

</comment><comment><USER25> Has this person completely forgotten about the .com era? All these "problems" are nothing new.

<comment> m-i-l I believe the article author is aged around 21, so the dot com boom would not have been within his living memory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > A whole generation is being trained to sell their companies as quickly as > possible - rather than doing any actual work to nurture them

Reads like a 'knee-jerk' reaction rant to a changing world. The (financial) rewards are going from 'build it to last' to 'work your connections to get funding and work your other connections to sell and exit ASAP'.

Neither approach is the 'right way' or 'wrong way', but I see this situation more as something in the lines of 'this is how the tech / startup landscape has turned into, so go with the flow or get burned'.

Thoughts anyone?

<comment><USER27> I see "build it to last" as better for society at large. Steve Jobs, for example, believed in the importance of putting things back into the stream of human consciousness and built Apple. They didn't build it to sell.

<comment><USER28> >They didn't build it to sell.

except they totally did

people and businesses had no intention of actually pulling paper-based systems into computational ones, and thus all Steve Jobs had to do was reproduce office-quality typography and document presentation on a screen, selling 1870s typewriter workflows as innovation well enough to convince the world they were revolutionary

<comment><USER29> In the timeless words of the great Bruce Tognazzini [1]:

MEVSGP MPIZ JBKQSI DBAPH TLUM XFEA HRBH CNUDNT PZIZDK VZOPZW DX. TO BE OR NOT TO BE THAT IS THE GZINCLE FLORTEN GLOFFLE.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

SO CLOSE.... SO VERY CLOSE....

PERHAPS WITH JUST A FEW MORE MONKEYS........

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfMDWhc_ohU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfMDWhc_ohU)

<comment><USER26> Love this. Just saw the video. So is it true that real monkeys in the jungle stepped on the typewriter keys and this genius quote came out of 1 of them??? Fascinating!!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Sounds like hedge funds a decade ago.

</comment><comment><USER31> 9 out 10 VC are in red, that's it

</comment><comment><USER32> UK is too expensive to start much of anything, anyway.

<comment><USER33> Lol true</comment></comment>


Google Glass has 16GB memory, 802.11/b/g only, Rated for 1 day of battery life. - <AUTHOR> http://support.google.com/glass/answer/3064128?hl=en&ref_topic=3063354

<comment><USER2> ... and the most interesting bit is that some features (SMS and GPS) require an Android phone.

<comment><USER3> With weight, power, and space constraints, you're of course going to offload as much as possible to the phone.

You could probably do Hangouts without a phone though; anything that can be done over IP should be fine not needing the phone.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What technical countermeasures are there for the UK's snooping agenda? - <AUTHOR>

The UK plans to intercept all electronic communication. They currently don't plan to snoop on content, but as noted elsewhere connection data is just as invasive.
To me this is both a civil liberties and business risk problem. I view my list of business contacts as confidential information and I don't trust the government not to leave this information on a train somewhere.
Legal solutions are one thing, but the snoops keep raising their heads, so my feeling is that we need to actually find a way to make this sort of thing technically impossible.
Content encryption is already largely solved, although for email we still need a critical mass of people using PGP or similar.
VPNs just seems to push the problem to another jurisdiction, and if this is an agenda all governments will one day pursue, this will become decreasingly useful.
What can an individual do to protect content and connection data? Onion routing for mail servers? Do technical solutions rely on everyone doing it and so are unlikely to get much traction? <comment><USER2> This is a tricky question.

People talk about "privacy" and "anonymity" but these two concepts can be contradictory. (Especially if you're using public key encryption. The key ties a message to an identity pretty solidly.) You're asking for message meta data (TO and FROM) to be private.

I suppose Chaffinch[1] could be adapted with some kind of anonymous re-mailing system such as Cypherpunk[2] anonymous remailers.

Note that the only thing the new law adds is "real time" monitoring of meta data. They already have permission to do retroactive monitoring of meta data.

There is a mailing list with many knowledgable people and they probably discuss this in depth. It's UKCRYPTO[3]. (They're the kind of people who should be on HN.)

[1] (<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/Chaffinch.pdf>)

[2] (<http://anonymous.to/tutorials/anonymous-remailers/>)

[3] (<http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/ukcrypto>)

</comment><comment><USER3> I suppose the same way citizens in other countries with 'authoritarian regimes' circumvent snooping - go with an outside country provider who wants to protect your civil liberties.

<comment><AUTHOR> To me it seems that all governments are following this agenda, whether for surveillance for its own sake or to counter "Piracy"... so I think the list of safe harbours will only decrease over time...</comment></comment>


Google engineers insist 20% time is not dead—it's just 120% time - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/116196/google-engineers-insist-20-time-is-not-dead-its-just-turned-into-120-time/ <comment><USER2> Then the Dilbert strip _is_ completelly accurate:

[http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-12-19/](http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-12-19/)

<comment><USER3> I was thinking of the same article. :-)

In their defense, most of the people that I know at Google work very hard. It's not a culture of 40 hour workweeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Its still dead then. You may have access to infrastructure to experiment on, but its on your time, not Google's.

You wind up investing personal time on company projects, with all of the usual ownership issues, thus no different than any other tech gig.</comment>


What advice can I give to a CS grad who can't program? - <AUTHOR>

IF you are aware the scenario of CS education in India, you know what I am talking about. I am with a CS grad who can't program. Yet he thinks he can, if he gets into a job. So far he has tried his best to go through interviews but has failed every time. Nothing is working for him and he is desperate.<p>Shall I tell him with a straight face that programming is not for everyone? If yes, how he should he get through his career. <comment><USER2> Design, documentation, database, networking, system operator, installation, project management, repair and tech support just off the top of my head. There's more to computers than just writing code.

</comment><comment> UK-AL He can't program? Or he can't do interviews?

Two completely different things. You can be the best programmer in the world and not pass interviews via scaring your interviewer or being awkward.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, he cant program any more than a newly learned English person can write novels. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd teach him to to do system administration and SQL, and get him programming with some sort of GUI interace on windows.</comment>


I'm a business guy, and it's about time I learned to code - <AUTHOR> http://coryliu.com/post/1107055739/im-a-business-guy-and-its-about-time-i-learned-to

<comment><USER7> Admirable, but note that JavaScript is quite different than Java. [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/245062/whats-the- differen...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/245062/whats-the-difference- between-javascript-and-java/245068#245068)

</comment><comment><USER8> I think it's a noble pursuit for a business guy to learn _about_ coding, but I doubt he'll learn enough to be able to build anything useful. That sounds like a record exec suddenly trying to learn how to play guitar after years of sitting behind a desk. Instead of learning how to code, he should learn enough about the process to know what goes into finding a competent programmer or outsourcing partner.

<comment><AUTHOR> So you don't think I'll learn enough to be able to build anything useful BECAUSE I'm a business guy? Or is there another reason you think I'll never be able to build anything useful?

Fuel to the fire, thank you.

<comment><USER9> The ability to write good, useful software does not come over night. A lot of people on this site have been programming for a long time.

It's not because you're a business guy that you'll probably never build anything useful, but because you haven't invested the time most programmers- of-useful-software have. Programming skill is mainly a function of time with an intelligence multiplier. The number of things within the world of programming that you don't know you don't know, is staggering. And you need to know a large amount of inter-related pieces of knowledge to build anything useful.

As an example, I recently built a 'web application' which will send a student an email when a college course that they want opens up at Virginia Tech (<http://hokienotify.me>). I haven't worked on it in a while, but it took me about three days to write from conception to what you see now.

Let me list the technologies/bodies of knowledge that are involved in this relatively simple application.

        - Front end
            - HTML/CSS/jQuery (Javascript)
            - <USER2>
            - Form validation and other data sanitation
            - UX/UI
        - Back end
            - <USER3>
            - Regular Expressions
            - <USER4>
            - Linux server administration
                - <USER5>
                - Bash scripting
                - <USER6>

It only took me three days to write, but in reality, it took me 10 years.

To reiterate, it's not because you're a business guy, but because it's a long journey from "Javascript is like Java but simpler" to a real, useful piece of software.

Edit: I hope I'm not being discouraging. Programming is fun, and you should definitely continue with it. As you work at it, you get better. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> I know building useful things is hard and I know it takes time. But I really don't know why that means I automatically have limited effective potential by factor X. It's as if your trying to intimidate me, and I don't know if you're smug or have a big ego or are being honestly truthful, or all the above. You already know I'm new to Java, why do you feel the need express the overwhelming complexities and difficulties in building software?

Maybe because of that one line, you assumed I was an idiot (only partially true!). Maybe its because you don't know I work in an MVC framework building web pages everyday, or that I admin our servers through SSH. Or that I've built MySQL tables, PHP contact forms, and even used PayPal's API once to forward customers to a download page where they could retrieve the product they paid for.

So yeah, you're pretty damned discouraging. That's how I feel unfortunately when I read some of these comments on HN.

<comment><USER8> _"As a startup enthusiast whose never learned how to code"_ seems to be the opposite of _"Maybe its because you don't know I work in an MVC framework building web pages everyday, or that I admin our servers through SSH. Or that I've built MySQL tables, PHP contact forms, and even used PayPal's API once to forward customers to a download page where they could retrieve the product they paid for."_

<comment><AUTHOR> These are technical skills and responsibilities I learned working alongside my programming partner. I still can't program anything functional on my own though. I have experiences relating to programming, but I still do not know how to code. Does this surprise you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's where he lost me and his credibility shattered:

 _To fully utilize HTML5, I'll need to know Javascript. And apparently, Javascript is similar and simpler than Java._

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, to be fair, I googled "Java vs Javascript" before I wrote that. Here's what I read: [http://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/javascript/article.php/347...](http://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/javascript/article.php/3470971/Java- vs-JavaScript.htm)

That's why I put "apparently" :D

<comment><USER11> Java and Javascript are completely unrelated as Bowls and Bowling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've seen a lot of this lately and I think it's an admirable idea. Even if you don't become a rockstar coder yourself overnight it'll earn you a lot more respect among coders, and you'll have better conversations (provided they're not 'so why isn't my code compiling?').

We all have to start somewhere.

It intrigues me, though, that pretty much _everyone_ I've seen come from a non-coding background who wants to enter this inner sanctum has chosen an entirely different platform and language. I know of people trying this via RoR, Processing, PHP, Python, C++, jQuery and now Java. Good reasons for all, bad reasons for some, and mostly down to who they know and what advice they gave.

I can't help but wonder if there is a Better Way. Even as a coder I find some languages/platforms require a lot of banging your head against incomprehensible documentation and Simon Says tutorials. I've been totally nostalgic lately for the BBC BASIC days, when stuff was so easy to just see working straight away without a day-long installation headache and platform wrangling and the doubt you picked the wrong one to learn. I'd love to bring this feeling of magic back.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think people want to learn modern languages because they want to be able to create things tomorrow if not today. It would probably be hugely valuable for me to go back and learn the languages I should have learned as a kid, but theres a sense of urgency and expiry. I have more commitments, so I have less time to learn. The time that I have to learn, I have to use productively. Oh how I yearn for those summers as a kid, where we had days and weeks to ourselves.

<comment><USER13> I think you may be overestimating the difference between one language and another. There are differences between the BASICs of the 80s and (say) the bash scripts of today, but they're not as big as surface syntax would initially seem to suggest. BASIC back then taught one thing well, unstructured imperative code, well enough that a BASIC programmer, believe it or not, wouldn't have felt it too big a jump to move straight to assembler programming, which would have been the next logical progression to eke out decent performance on the severely resource-constrained microcomputers of the day.

The biggest difference between programming then and now is the size of our problems, and consequently, the number of abstraction tools in our languages. But there is a relatively small set of abstractions known to work well, and a substantial subset of them crop up in almost all languages. Learning all of a Python or Ruby or Javascript, and knowing how to use it well and in a structured way, would cover a good, say, 60% of various concepts of imperative, functional and object-oriented programming, such that you could move to any of the others (in that set) without much trouble.

<comment><USER12> _Learning all of a Python or Ruby or Javascript, and knowing how to use it well and in a structured way, would cover a good, say, 60% of various concepts of imperative, functional and object-oriented programming_

Totally agree, and my issue is more that these languages are too linked to the environment in which they run - step 1 of learning to code shouldn't be wrestling with install files and stacks and tools (<http://tryruby.org> is a great exception). Secondly, a lot of the way they are taught does not actually teach you the abstractions but expects you to parrot code and infer the abstractions as you go along.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to bring back BASIC as a platform for today, though it'd be fun to see it happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> dot-sean I think he's thinking right. He's a business guy, but realizes that he needs to have some control over his product. Even if he gets someone else to write his app, he'll still be able to follow the code if he knows the language a bit. Who knows, maybe he'll like java and writing code that he'll become a coder who like business. There are too many languages out there, my philosophy is to pick one and get working. There are too many people who will pick faults in anything and everything you pick. Hard part is making a decision...now the next hard part is following thru with your commitment. I'm picking up Java right now, I find the Dietel Java: How to program 7e pretty good text. Very wordy, but that means it explains the concepts very well. Of course, I find myself skipping over the commentary unless I don't quite understand a concept. Either way, Good luck to you.

Sean

</comment><comment><USER14> Glad you took the decision to just do it! There will be lots of road blocks and you have to be strong to overcome those difficulties.

I too took the decision to learn to code earlier this year, it was actually a re-learning process as I've coded before(about 20 years ago). Nonetheless i still had to learn the new language.

Well, six months later i can build a fairly complex web app in about a month which i think it's great for my skills. Now I need to start doing some freelance work to pay the bills while building my personal projects.

Just don't give up when things don't seem to move. Ask questions, go to the forums, stackoverflow, etc.

Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER15> This is an admirable idea, but for most people, it's just not practical, and from reading your post, I think you would fall under the "most people" category.

I, and everyone else here, totally understand your goal, but what you're trying to do is epic. A better goal would be to find a person, who is experienced, cross platform, and honest, who can guide you through your issues.

The idea that you are going to handle these things on yourself is just a non- starter. Or, aka, how corporate north america runs, except this way, its _you_ , not the shareholders who have to pay for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think trying to learn Java is epic at all. Perhaps you misinterpreted my blog or took it for more than face value.

I'm learning Java because I want to learn how to code. I'm not going to continue to completely rely on others to build things for me.

<comment><USER16> I'll use the rather clichéd chess analogy: Learning the rules of chess is easy, you can do it quickly. Actually learning to play the game well takes a lot of effort, time and practice. Learning the rules of a language is easy, actually learning to program is hard and takes time.

I think any sufficiently intelligent and motivated person can learn to code at least at a modest level. Just remember that its going to be slow, frustrating and painful. Be sure not to be caught off guard. A frustrating problem that comes at you all of a sudden, can dry your enthusiasm really fast, be sure not to let that stop you. You are supposed to feel pain and frustration, you're brain would rather watch bad TV, or browse reddit or something. Just like when you exercise your muscles ache, because they'd rather you lie on your couch with a bag of chips and a can of soda. Pain is good, it means you are learning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think it's great that you're doing this. Personally, I'm not a big fan of Java (although there are many, many people who like it), but I will say that the one thing you can do that will give you the best odds of actually learning Java is to make an Android app. Even if you don't have an Android phone, you can build and test everything in the simulator.

I firmly believe that the best (and maybe only) way to learn programming by yourself (and get good at it) is to get yourself a good book or tutorial (like this one <http://pragprog.com/titles/eband3/hello-android>) and set aside an entire weekend Friday-Sunday to go through the entire book (and actually type out all of the code).

Next, come up with an idea of moderate complexity that you think would be fun/useful/maybe profitable (e.g. not a game, maybe a client for some web service like Twitter or Shopify) and spend a couple of weeks working on it until it works. Then you'll be a programmer!

P.S. This is the method I used to learn Ruby on Rails and iPhone development, and now I do both of them for a living :)

<comment><AUTHOR> That book looks awesome, will definitely look into it.

On the plus side, I'm in the market for an Android phone, and it would be perfect to be able to hack things onto it right away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What would everyone recommend as a first language for someone with a non- programming background?

I learnt BASIC at school a long time ago, and I know my way around html and very basic php.

I would want to make basic webapps that make use of databases

<comment><USER19> I always recommend mastering HTML first, then learn ColdFusion which will be very familiar because it is tag based.

Once you've learned the basic programming concepts you will be in a much better position to decide what to learn next. Or grab one of the two open source distributions of CF and build your company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm in the same position right now. I am working on a startup with a developer buddy, but I decided to take a bit longer to launch to learn how to code what we are building.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why Java? Although similar, C# is easier and more flexible now.

<comment><AUTHOR> I mentioned a few reasons at the bottom, notably the type of things one could make with Java.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to blog things I've learnt in graduate school? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
Currently, I'm pursuing a masters in Control systems. After looking for a couple of blogs by researchers and graduate students I've had some trouble understanding in how to document/write the things I'm learning in graduate school.
Ideally, I'd like to write to help understand how deep my understanding of the subject is but also be a way to contact people who are interested in the field of control systems & machine learning as two overlapping fields via a personal blog.
A few of my concerns involve:
1. How to maintain a technical blog without sounding like an academician i.e examples of other good blogs.
2. How to spread the knowledge from the courses I'm taking legally i.e. how much out of class homeworks/material is it okay to share?
Thanks for reading! <comment><USER2> Think about the standpoint from which you would speak. I suggest you NOT try to write from the standpoint of someone who understands the subject and wants to explain some point clearly and accurately.

Because, one, you aren't an expert yet, and you would feel a lot of responsibility to try to make sure you always got it right. That would impede your writing, make it more laborious, and greatly increase your chagrin when you (inevitably) get something wrong.

And two, "what I know about Control systems" is frankly not that interesting a topic.

What IS (or at least could be) an interesting theme is "my adventures and fuckups trying to learn Control systems". You take the standpoint of a learner, a way-farer, and you write about what goes wrong, and occasionally, your triumph when things go right.

This adds a human, emotional component. You'd be writing about your (intellectual) struggles and achievements, and that's always interesting -- as well as easy to write about.

You can get as technical as you want, in this role as struggling apprentice, dive really deep when you actually make a discovery. "Wow! I just actually got this concept for the first time!" That makes a great blog post. But so does, "Today I screwed up a whole lab experiment because..."

Human interest, with a technical slant.

<comment><USER3> > What IS (or at least could be) an interesting theme is "my adventures and > fuckups trying to learn Control systems". You take the standpoint of a > learner, a way-farer, and you write about what goes wrong, and occasionally, > your triumph when things go right.

This. I'm long out of college and after thinking about starting a small blog for years I finally started one on github pages. Not to post super sophisticated articles showing how cool I am, but posts about weird problems or pitfalls that couldn't be solved through some googling. I try to describe the problem and failed approaches too, so should anyone ever have the same problem I hope I dropped enough keywords to help them find it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1) Just write. You'll find your own voice. I'd worry less about whether you sound academic or not and more about whether you sound like yourself.

2) Don't write theory, write applied principles. I wouldn't share anything that was put together by one of your professors - that is their work. But if you apply their lessons to something in your own work/life, you absolutely can tell us about it, and outline the academic principles involved as you go.

<comment><USER5> I second this -- actually writing is critical to finding and refining your voice. That, and actively soliciting feedback. Submit your posts to the relevant subreddits and HN, and don't shy away from constructive negative feedback.

<comment><USER6> Or ask people you know to read drafts for tone and voice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not a blog, but this YouTube Channel called _Real Engineering_ might fit the criteria for your first question:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR1IuLEqb6UEA_zQ81kwXfg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR1IuLEqb6UEA_zQ81kwXfg)

I would be leery of writing too much about things I am studying this quarter or semester. For one thing, you probably don't understand it as well as you think you do. For another, you are much more likely to regurgitate stuff from courses that might get you in trouble for copyright violation or similar.

Maybe make stubs for things you find interesting, return to it later and flesh it out with public citations available online. If you can't find a public citation available online, then skip it.

Put things in your own words. Quote things judiciously and make sure to cite the source. This is easy if you stick to online sources where you can just link to it.

<comment><USER8> Also YT channel 3blue1brown

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> William Zinsser's _On Writing Well_ , about writing non-fiction articles, has a lot of examples of people (including scientists) writing beautifully about complex topics, and talks about style, audience, your voice etc. It's a very inspiring book.

re blogging, I've found Jeff Atwood's articles on blogging on his Coding Horror blog to be wise and very helpful. Also Julia Evans' blog is a great example of someone sharing what they're learning in an inspiring, energetic and fun way.

<comment><USER10> Yeah Julia Evans' is a great example of some who explores topics in a cool original way. Love her zines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The entire point of academia is to spread knowledge.

You can write about anything you learn. You can quote whomever you please. Reproducing small relevant quotes and commenting on them and explaining them is the most Fair Use thing in existence.

Don't copy whole pages of texts; always give proper attribution.

</comment><comment><USER12> When I was in grad school I made these to explain concepts from traffic theory:

[http://setosa.io/blog/2014/09/02/gridlock/](http://setosa.io/blog/2014/09/02/gridlock/) [http://setosa.io/bus/](http://setosa.io/bus/)

These were major efforts and I don't recommend building out anything similar while pursuing a master's. But control theory does lend itself to simulation well, so I would use jupyter notebooks to present little annotated simulations with code. Print out plots of the state space at intervals for example. I also highly recommend the graphing calculator desmos.com.

</comment><comment><USER13> You're asking the wrong question. The how is easy: build a blog (trivial) and write down the things you've learned. Maybe add some pictures, diagrams, or code.

You really are wondering _why_ you should blog. There's nothing wrong with sounding academic. In fact, being able to teach others is perhaps the best way to solidify your own understanding. At any point you use jargon, define the term! If something seems confusing or esoteric to others (via comments), answer the comments and use that to generate ideas for follow-up posts.

Can you talk about this stuff legally? Legally yes+, you're not plagiarizing any existing works since this is your own original writing. Better, you want to know what's in your school's code of conduct. It's probably not a good idea to list answers to homework problems (unless they are from a book and the book has the answers in the back). But it's good to explain the concepts as well as how you might go about solving it or thinking about it.

\+ = I say this not as a lawyer, and I am not giving you legal advice

</comment><comment><USER14> Matt Might does excellent academic blogging. So does RJ Lipton and, to some extent, Terence Tao (although his is for a specialist audience).

I would advise writing, writing, writing. I wouldn't worry _too_ much about #1; a cohesive set of explanatory references and definitions goes a long way.

For #2 - I would actually suggest for #2 to focus on "explaining the papers you work through for seminars". I.e., do a public expository discussion similar to the "Present a Paper" internal seminars labs often old. Practitioners often don't get access to papers in a fresh way.

</comment><comment><USER15> For #1, try to explain it to a friend, preferably in person, possibly via a chat app, but definitely not via email. Then base your writing on the way you explained that. (But like, with complete sentences.) This is the best method I know for shaking off the instinct to sound like other people's writing (i.e: like technical papers) instead of just explaining things.

Here's three examples of excellent explanations via very different techniques:

[1] [https://pomax.github.io/bezierinfo/](https://pomax.github.io/bezierinfo/) \- Bezier curves, exhaustively technical but well-indexed and just really well explained

[2] [https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/ceasefire- all...](https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/ceasefire-all-falls- down/) \- Advanced and unorthodox rendering techniques, narrative format, basically the opposite priorities of a paper (assumes you can fill in the gaps on how, details more what worked and why it's being used)

[3] [http://archive.is/XjbUy](http://archive.is/XjbUy) (supposed to be at qntm.org/gay, but apparently being rewritten) Database normalization principles via the lens of making a database handle gay marriage, humorous

Also, if you're explaining sequential bayesian filtering by any chance (my specialty), I'd really like it if someone actually wrote down the awful formal version with the point-wise Bayes Theorem and the giant integral convolving over your state transition function, then explained how particle filters / kalman filters / hidden markov models get around how awful that is. It's how I introduce the topic at work but I don't have my slides handy out here in the real world.

</comment><comment><USER16> I would highly recommend posting on somewhere like codementor. They provide the platform but publish your work under creative commons so you remain the owner.

I blogged for years, mainly for solidifying my own knowledge on some topics, but it was always rewarding when someone dropped a comment saying my post had helped them.

Since I started publishing on codementor, so many more people find my posts.

Re your specific questions:

1\. Aim for technical walkthroughs that assume limited/no prior knowledge. Find a small project that uses the theory, and then show step by step how to build it, explaining each step in as much detail as possible. This will fill gaps in your own knowledge and help others who will be missing context that you assume is general knowledge.

2\. As others have said, I wouldn't recommend copy/pasting anything, but I doubt any academic is going to come after you for plagiarising/popularising their work if you adapt and reference appropriately.

</comment><comment><USER17> An idea: Take a topic that catches your interest, and explain it to a non- specialist or even non-engineer. I happen to enjoy blogs like that when they are well written. If a simulation is possible, share some code.

There's the old quote, attributed to various people, that you should be able to explain your research to a barmaid if you actually understand it. Having to explain it at a basic level will actually improve your own grasp.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've been doing academic-type blogging since I was halfway through my PhD; it's been about 7 years now, and I continue as a non-academic scientist. My main advice is, as many others have said, to just write. Keep at it, and you'll figure out the rest as time comes. Try to bang out a post a week at minimum and things will fall in line.

I personally found that--in contrast to what many suggest here--I have almost no interest in explaining anything to non-specialists. Instead, my blog is mostly (or most successfully) a forum for me to work through ideas. Many times I will have a small nugget of a thought, and I will make a blog post where I model something in a Jupyter notebook. A couple of times, these have turned into papers, so that's been very helpful personally. I am also making an effort to write about topics that I don't understand, highlighting where I'm confused, as a way of getting my thoughts in order (and not all of these things may be understood by _any_ scientists).

One consequence of ignoring explanation is that I have no regular readers (as far as I can tell; I don't use tracking scripts), and posts aren't widely read unless I promote a post by emailing it to people that then put it on twitter or facebook or whatever; I don't use those myself. This isn't directly a huge problem for me (although more positive name recognition couldn't hurt), but it might not be what you're after.

If I was in grad school now, I would use the blog as a way of making high- quality, permanent notes of things that I learned, whether they're concepts, mathematical or computational techniques, literature reviews, etc. Give attribution where appropriate and don't share homework solutions (use your best judgement on exercises and maybe change the problem sufficiently if you really want to blog your homework. Or just ask your professor...). There is a lot that I've halfway forgotten over the years and my paper notebooks haven't all survived many moves, etc., and don't have the quality that I would have put into them if I were making them public. I am starting to do what I can to make good notes in emacs org-mode when I learn new stuff or need to revisit important things in my day to day work as a researcher, but it's tough. (The format of good digital note-taking isn't important; the practice is.) Grad school is basically about this, so making good notes (ideally with some illustrative, working code where appropriate) will pay dividends in your later work.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER19> I am a grad student and writing and maintaining a blog has done me wonders over the years. So:

1\. "I'd like to write to help understand how deep my understanding of the subject" \-- You need to find the frequency you need to tune in so that your readers find you interesting. Things that require a deep understanding might not make a good story and appeal to the mass, and vice versa.

What I learned is that despite me doing an advanced degree, I only know very little that others don't: [https://twitter.com/lolmythesis](https://twitter.com/lolmythesis)

To me, when I blog, I tell a story. When I write a paper, I tell how deep my understanding is on that subject. My knowledge of the subject matter is just a catalyst, not the cause, for me to tell my story.

Don't be shy about what you know, but I think the idea is you shouldn't assume that your readers are dumber than you unless you're Peter Norvig. But there are angles that you see things that are interesting to others.

2\. No person I know or follow ever publish their homework to their blog and be successful. You need to add a whole narrative on top of that to be interesting, so I doubt anyone will have a problem with it. If you're worried about the legality, you're counting the eggs before they hatch.

</comment><comment><USER20> Reading what you wrote is a great teacher. You don't need to publish to do that. Make a review queue, put the article online but don't publish it.

Every day review the article again. First review, you might find your expressions bland and enrich them. Second review you might end up realizing you skipped on an important point, etc.

When the article is ready, publish online and try not to change it afterwards. Not being able to touch the final product gives a sense of urgency and helps with focus.

</comment><comment><USER21> There is good advice here already, but here's another one: dive deep (or as deep as you have time for) in the existing control systems blogosphere, and try to fill the void/niche you see is lacking. Maybe there are techniques no- one is talking about (in an informal manner), maybe there are trade-secrets that are only mentioned amongst professionals but rarely in textbooks or in papers that you could share, or maybe you have a unique insight or intuition about concepts in the field.

Don't be afraid (in fact, I'd encourage it) to break away from the conventional way of explaining things in the area. Control theory is an area I think could gain a whole lot from contrarian pedagogs. (This is also a good test of your own understanding. If you're able to explain things you think you understand without using the conventional language and canonical examples, that's a good test that you've grokked it deeply.)

The best way to make a meaningful contribution is in response to what already exists, in a way that either contributes more information to the whole, or simplifies some piece high up the hill of research dept[1].

[1] [https://distill.pub/2017/research- debt/](https://distill.pub/2017/research-debt/)

</comment><comment><USER22> I wrote a book on Technical Blogging ([https://pragprog.com/book/actb/technical- blogging](https://pragprog.com/book/actb/technical-blogging)) specifically aimed at programmers and technical people like you. You might find it useful. Also, feel free to email me directly (email@example.com) if you'd like to discuss your blog specifically.

</comment><comment><USER23> ELI5 with simple examples. Something like that. If you can't ELI5 the material then pick a lowest level higher than that that you can. The best scientists can explain their work and why it is important to a wide range of audiences. So the key is to give the context and why it's important and then how what you've learnt applies.

<comment><USER24> VERY complex systems and concepts can be explained to anyone via analogies to things they already understand. Bang-bang logic is easy to explain and understand. PID is hard, but you can equate it to something like balancing on one foot and it gets easier. Break SCADA down into digestible chunks and it's not impossible to explain it to your 90-year-old grandmother.

This applies to your understanding of whatever you're teaching. If you can't ELI5 then you probably don't know enough about whatever concept you're trying to explain - that's your cue to keep learning until you can.

Caveat: For a blog or industry audience, you don't have to "dumb down" your answers if you're using technical jargon or even equations and the like. Being able to explain something in simple terms doesn't preclude talking about minutiae or nerdy technical details.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The best way to learn to write is to just write.

Your first post is going to be bad, the second one is going to be better and so on, by the time you get to post #100 you'll have discovered your voice and created something that is unique to your personality.

Reading, in general, will also help the process; read stuff that interests you and - most importantly - don't stop.

</comment><comment><USER26> 1\. Pick a topic you enjoy in your class and write about it. When you write about it choose a style you like to write in.

2\. I have summer project I do that's related to the class. I write about those project and the concept I'm using from the class.

</comment><comment><USER27> Hey. Apologies that this is off-topic. But I've been interested, broadly speaking, in the kinds of questions Control Theory has to ask. I want to do a masters in something, and there's a few Control Theory programs that have caught my eye. There are also a few 'Complex Systems' and 'Dynamical Systems' programs that seem interesting. Unfortunately, I don't have anyone I can reach out to figure out what's bogus and what's not. There's contact info in my bio, if you had a second to reach out and answer a few questions it would be greatly appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is one possible route - whichever topic or doubt you end up searching the internet for, make a small post about the solution. As you grow over time, start being more comprehensive about the solutions, and try to list information on the very niche topic till the periphery of human knowledge( from history of birth to bleeding edge tech in that area). Growing more over time you will start getting in-depth and at a zen blogger stage, cross-domain.

Or you could make the blog all about you. Your personal journey of how some attained knowledge in the past, you were able to apply.

</comment><comment><USER29> > document/write the things I'm learning

I do this whenever I learn something new. A new vocabulary, expression, API, programming language feature, etc. I think writing down your bite-sized microlessons is just as effective as blogging at length.

Currently I do it every day with a CLI and a browser extension that I keep close at all times.

Here is a previous Hacker News discussion about this method: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16357917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16357917)

</comment><comment><USER30> Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.

For your second question, it's a matter of plagiarism. So you'll want to avoid outright copy/pasting the homework and material into your blog. However, you can state similar types of questions and provide an analysis on your answer and the steps / thought process you took to reach it.

For example, if you were taking Calculus and were asked to solve for the derivative of 2x^5 in your homework, you can instead show how to solve 7x^3 which provides the same knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER31> Thank You so much for This question. I Want to start a blog about my grad school learnings as well. I found available online resources for some topics somewhat lacking and hoped I could fill the breach. But I never dared to pose as an expert on the topics, since most of my knowldege comes from the lectuters and associated materials. The awnsers to your question really helped me out!

</comment><comment><USER32> > 2\. How to spread the knowledge from the courses I'm taking legally i.e. how > much out of class homeworks/material is it okay to share?

I'd get this approved by somebody with authority at the university first (professor or above). Many professors re-use homework assignments, test questions, etc. You wouldn't want to get mixed up with accusations of helping other folks cheat.

</comment><comment><USER33> > without sounding like an academician

What's wrong with sounding like an academic? Do you not want examples of good blogs written by academics then?

</comment><comment><USER34> Hey jamesecurry! I'm actually just starting to do the EXACT same thing! Blogging about controls and ML, more specifically for autonomous aircraft/rotorcraft; I'm halfway into my M.S program. We should discuss more outside of HN!

</comment><comment><USER35> Regarding 2: Speak with your professors about that. If they already publish a lot of that material on their sites, you can at least link to it. Ask if they'll let you include it directly (images, quotes) and so on.

<comment><USER36> > Speak with your professors about that.

Or instead of linking to it, maybe you could recreate (instead of copying 1:1) the content (e.g. as a sketch in PowerPoint) and link/reference to your professors site/original source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> As others have recommended, wear a pair of Nikes and just do it. For some inspiration, here is a good technical writing blog (a Microsoft dev analyzing various algorithms, apparently as part of his phd preparation): [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devdev/](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devdev/)

Another with funny anecdotes from the Windows world [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/)

I also like Peter Norvig's blog [http://www.norvig.com/](http://www.norvig.com/)

</comment><comment><USER38> > 2\. How to spread the knowledge from the courses I'm taking legally i.e. how > much out of class homeworks/material is it okay to share?

Class material is subject to copyright unless explicitly licensed otherwise. Without a license, you need explicit permission to reproduce it except for normal academic use (critique, etc, accompanied by normal citation). This is in addition to any academic integrity agreement you signed up for by taking the class, which normally forbids sharing with others.

The knowledge in your head is yours. The words and pictures generated by your profs are theirs. Produce your own original material and you are all set.

I'm a professor. Rules may vary by jurisdiction.

<comment><USER39> This just makes me sad. When class material, which is supposed to be the antithesis of closed and proprietary is treated as property, then there is something very wrong with the educational system you are working in. Education is about spreading knowledge as far and wide as possible, not controlling it.

All of the course material we are developing for a new four year IT, information literacy and Big History program for a Cambodian university is licensed under a twin MIT/CC license for all media (there will be a lot of video), code and text and will be downloadable from GitHub. We hope this material can be used and adapted for use anywhere. We've done this to prevent anyone from trying to make make the material proprietary and ensure it stays free, not because we were worried about what students might do with it.

I had never heard of an "academic integrity agreement" before. I just googled it and found this:

      "Some schools have created an honor code -- a school-wide
      agreement about ethical behavior -- that parents sign in
      September and students sign each time they turn in an
      assignment, quiz or exam."
      -- https://www.edutopia.org/blog/academic-integrity-cheat-or-be-cheated-denise-pope

Sign a statement for every assignment, quiz or exam? WTF! An honor code that takes out the "honor" and replaces it with "legal" is no longer an honor code, it is a contract. This is the sign of a broken society.

To paraphrase Monty Python, "America is a silly place, let's not go there."

<comment><USER40> I think you're misinterpreting the point of the parent post. The point isn't to prevent free flow of information, it's to prevent plagiarism. Usually, at least in computer science, course materials, lecture notes, and research papers are freely available on webpages. The other side of the coin from making information widely available is that proper attribution and credit becomes very important culturally. There's no good purpose to be served by copying and pasting something that's freely available when you can just link to it instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> If you haven't already, I would read Strunk and White and apply those lessons to your writing.

I also highly recommend Steven King's book On Writing.

</comment><comment><USER42> For 1, take a look at this guy's blog: [http://colah.github.io](http://colah.github.io)

</comment><comment><USER43> Nobody ever got better at writing by not writing.

</comment><comment><USER44> I have graduate degrees in optimal control. Here's my two cents worth.

Since you're still learning, I'd say a StackExchange-like Q&A site or a forum might be a more appropriate venue. These typically allow you to type math and explain stuff in long-form. They also provide you a better feedback loop from peers and experts. You get to test out your ideas and integrate new ones.

I don't want to be a Debbie Downer, but I'm gonna go against the advice of most tech folks out there (and here on HN) by saying: _a blog might not be the best medium at this stage of your studies_.

The danger with a blog is that it stays on the Internet forever. When you're starting out on a subject, you're bound to say naive things and overestimate your own knowledge (source: been there done that).

Some of the things you say will range from the naive to the inaccurate [1]. And these will be indexed by a search engine and cached. People will stumble on your site, and if you're a good writer, your material might even get picked up and repeated. This is happening all over the data science world where every aspiring data scientist fancies having a blog, and the overall quality of data science articles in the blogosphere is abysmal at the moment. (witness the multitude of data-munging-with-Pandas and oh-look-I-just-discovered-logistic- regression articles). It's mostly just noise.

This doesn't mean I don't think there's value in writing -- on the contrary, writing helps crystallize your thoughts and forces you to grapple with gaps in your knowledge. You should definitely keep a single LaTeX file of ideas in gestation [2], without publishing them. When the time is right and when your semantic tree of the subject is more mature, you can review and release them, and chances are some of the ideas will be novel, or at the very least, thoughtful.

Many great works are created this way. Great authors don't show you how the sausage is made; they show you the polished end products. And these tend to stand out more.

TLDR; write, but don't publish until you've developed more maturity in the subject. Participate in Q&A sites/forums and test your ideas there.

[1] Unless you're careful to stay within the boundaries of established knowledge, in which case, your blog would be no different from a textbook.

[2] This is a variation of a Richard Feynman trick. Some of the most creative academics I know keep a list of their random ideas in a cache (mine's a Google Docs document named "Random Ideas"; I learned this from said academics), and mull over them (and develop them) from time to time. If one day the stars align and a missing piece of the puzzle shows up, they go back to this cache, put everything together and whip out a brilliant paper or article in no time. Everybody is impressed and thinks they're a genius, when in fact they've been thinking about the idea for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER45> Imagine your talking to a technologically knowledgeable friend from a different field, and write what you would say..

</comment><comment><USER46> Personally, I think much of what makes the best explanations great is not the writing as much as charts and illustrations and other supplementary materials that make it easier to understand how things go together. While not technical or a blog, I like The Book of Shiatsu by Paul Lundberg as a great example of this due to the art style really helping with the explanation (you can get an idea from the Amazon preview (towards the end)[0]). I've seen one or two CS blogs that are good like that too but I don't have any links handy. Exactly how that would look depends on what you would like to create, I'm just suggesting that giving some thought to the artistic style of presentation can really draw people in and clarify things. Even if you aren't an artist, picking what to put in charts and tables or what code snippets to include can make a huge difference in presentation and even minor stylistic touches can make your explanation easier to remember (also complete and accurate explanations of the supplementary materials are extremely valuable and often overlooked even when a helpful illustration is given). Even things like taking pictures of your notes on paper or screenshots of whatever tools you use can add a more personal touch and give your readers something not found in the textbook (sometimes really mundane stuff turns out to be the most helpful). Or since you are interested in machine learning, maybe put that to work to create a unique style. Of course, you also need to decide how much time to spend on it and I don't mean figure out the best thing right away, just give thought to things other than text as you go. Some dramatic text styles can be helpful and fun too (like up goerizing[1]).

Challenging yourself to explain things quite a bit differenty than the materials you are learning from is likely to be a better experience for both you and your reader (who may well be reading the same texbooks as you anyway).

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Book-Shiatsu-Complete-Pressure- Manipu...](https://www.amazon.com/Book-Shiatsu-Complete-Pressure- Manipulation/dp/074324608X)

[1] [https://xkcd.com/1133/](https://xkcd.com/1133/)

</comment><comment><USER47> Quora seems to be a popular venue lately.</comment>