Bitcoin solved a major technical problem, but not an economic one - <AUTHOR> http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/an-ubernerd-weighs-in/ <comment><USER2> Bitcoin is far more than "just" a solution to the Byzantine Generals problem.

Inside every Bitcoin transaction is a small program that contains no loops. If that program when executed returns true, the transaction is valid.

The simplest, most boring kind of transaction--but the one that most people assume " _is_ Bitcoin"\--is a transfer from address P to address Q. Where things get more interesting is in using those little programs in more creative ways; e.g., k-of-n escrow, attestation of ownership, etc.

A whole generation of kids is going to grow up soon routinely using small Bitcoin escrows to hedge everyday scenarios. They won't quite able to believe that their parents operated in a world based on centralized authority subject to rent-seeking corruption.

<comment><USER3> > Inside every Bitcoin transaction is a small program that contains no loops. > If that program when executed returns true, the transaction is valid.

I've read elsewhere that the official client no longer processes any such scripts except for ones that are whitelisted. That reduces the current protocol to a single feature set, instead of the promise of future extension without requiring further agreement from miners.

Can anybody verify this? Does today's client still process arbitrary scripts?

<comment><USER4> I stopped following bitcoin about 18 months ago so it's possible my information is out of date, but I think your assertion is only true in the sense that today's client does no mining.

It is miners which run these scripts, and when I was following bitcoin it was miners who decided which script features they would allow. There were some significant mining pools which allowed nonstandard script features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This analysis is true to a point, but overlooks that the 'decentralized cloud bank' innovation now allows a whole bunch of other technologies to be applied into an important economic domain without the old gatekeepers and limitations. Those other technologies are a bit more familiar to people:

• global always-on connectivity

• encryption constructs

• easy discovery/formation of communities-of-interest

• open source collaboration

• instant rich search and giant archives of past behavior

• delegation of policy to ever-improving software/automation

• cheap powerful handheld computer-phones

• ...etc

These may not seem to be similarly novel breakthroughs; we're getting used to them, over the last 5-20 years. But now they're being applied to a monetary domain, via Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies), where progress was formerly bottlenecked.

So while I'm wouldn't generally put a lot of weight on the cheap, shallow shot against Krugman – "he thought the net wouldn't have more impact than the fax machine" – there is a somewhat similar failing here. By looking at one aspect of Bitcoin in reductionist isolation, he (and his tech friend) are missing the combinatorial effect of all these new possibilities together.

<comment><USER6> Bitcoin to money is what app store is for mobile software, or the web is to newspapers etc. It's decentralization of power. There's no gatekeepers to prevent new innovative payment services. You need $100 to create a new payment service, not millions. You don't need to ask anyone permission to do what you want.

In practise, individuals will now have the power that only large corporations used to.

<comment><USER7> I'd disagree that Bitcoin is to money what the app store is for mobile software. If you are talking about the Apple App Store, they are the gatekeepers to what software you can load.

<comment><USER6> I agree that it's not a perfect analogy. App stores (I'm talking in general, not referring to Apple's store) are still centralized and act as gatekeepers, but the "gatekeeping level" is in another level to what it used to be. Before app stores it was practically impossible to for a lone developer to create an application and release it.

<comment><USER8> You do realize that software development existed before app stores, right? Lone developers created and released applications all the time. App stores are about convenience, and so they are _not_ like your other examples, which are about _decentralization_. They just don't fit.

<comment><USER6> >Lone developers created and released applications all the time.

The context was applications for mobile phones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Krugman has spent the past few months qualifying, trivializing and disclaiming his previous asinine and uninformed remarks about bitcoin. Does he have a single shred of dignity left? Insufferable.

Moreover, Krugman is blissfully unaware of the hundreds of millions of people that don't have access to stable or reliable banking. How does opening the markets to untold millions, via peer-to-peer transactions, not solve an economic problem?

<comment><USER10> How dare a guy change his opinions when he gets to know the facts better. Travesty I tell you.

We want that will think on Wednesday the same they thought on Monday, no matter what happens in the world on Tuesday. (Shamelessly stolen from colbert)

<comment><USER9> Eh, sorta missing the point there, brah. He's not changing his position that Bitcoin is a farcical experiment. He trivializes every argument that favors bitcoin, therefore allowing him to save face.

AKA he's justifying his dumb thoughts...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The success of bitcoin, in large part, relies on faith that people will support it _as a currency_. If its market cap and/or trade volume isn't high enough, then a secure mining network cannot be supported, and the entire system, including all of its extra features touted by techies, will collapse.

Bitcoin will succeed if enough people believe that it will succeed, and bitcoin will fail if enough people believe it will fail.

Krugman is attempting to damage the future prospects of the system by spreading asinine notions about how it's not "economically viable". This really hits a nerve, because it serves no purpose other than to gain readership and to make him feel better for not investing in it. There is a risk that he, and others, could destroy bitcoin's future by convincing enough people that it shouldn't be trusted.

No economic arguments (especially Krugman's) about it are valid. Bitcoin's success or failure is entirely a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Two factions will form (or have already formed) - supporters and haters. The system needs enough supporters (and their investments) for it to be viable. The hope is that the supporters will grow in number or at least remain unchanged. Krugman is trying to turn supporters into haters, reducing the viability of the system.

<comment><USER12> I don't think it will be viewed as a currency (I agree with Krugman), but I do think it could viably be viewed as an asset backing a currency. Here's my idea: There's nothing stopping cryptocurrencies from eventually becoming centralized. Successful alternative cryptocurrencies will pop up and will be backed by governments or businesses, giving them real value. There will be a market between all cryptocurrencies and centralized currencies will be built on top of that market. Inflation will happen whenever anyone creates a new currency and people want to buy it. So crypto-assets will serve as a base for viable (inflationary) currencies. It wouldn't matter if bitcoin or any other individual cryptocurrency succeeds or fails as long as that market remains, and it will due to all of the benefits of cryptocurrencies in general. I'd be happy to hear any flaws in this idea, I haven't talked about it with anyone yet.

<comment><USER11> It may be a mistake to assume that small alternative cryptocurrencies are automatically viable. 51% attacks may become a severe problem, especially for very small mining networks. We may eventually see enough 51% attacks on altcoins that most people revert to the few largest networks (Bitcoin, Litecoin, and maybe a couple more). Or maybe we won't, and each new altcoin inflates the system.

<comment><USER12> That's a good point, I'll have to think about that more. My initial thought is that at least exchanges wouldn't be limited to currencies with that vulnerability. Most small currencies would also have limited or no initial value and probably wouldn't be worth taking over unless it was a pump and dump scheme, but centralized exchanges might be able to mitigate that.. Interesting idea, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think transaction-fee-free money transfer is a pretty radical economic problem Bitcoin solves.

Unless we think banks taking 3% of all Internet transactions is a good thing.

<comment><USER8> The problem with that thinking is that Bitcoin is not transaction-fee-free. Transactions are subsidized by block rewards, but already today, your transactions might get stalled if you don't pay fees. And this is only going to get worse.

Taking a 3% cut of transactions (or even more in some of the walled garden ecosystems) is obviously too much for a service of _irreversible_ transactions. We'll see whether (a) reversible transactions and the related insurance problems can be solved more cheaply than today's credit cards and friends, and (b) whether irreversible electronic transactions will be accepted by people given the sorry state of computer security.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wouldn't go to Krugman for technology insights. This is the same guy who basically said the Internet has no future, and now he's repeating it for Bitcoin.

<comment><USER15> He came around on the Internet (and admitted his mistake), and now believes there will be large productivity gains from Big Data.

[http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/the-dynamo- and-b...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/the-dynamo-and-big- data/)

Edit: I realize I'm not addressing your larger point. He still may not be the guy to go to. But that being said I think his opinions are more nuanced.

Edit 2: Another post by him on the value of ICT: [http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/11/the-ict- revoluti...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/11/the-ict-revolution- isnt-over/)

<comment><USER16> No doubt that when bitcoin's success is obvious, he will also admit his mistake and go on to make another uninformed prediction.

<comment><USER15> I personally find that people who admit their mistakes more trustworthy because it shows they can at least learn from them. In this case, the jury is very much still out on whether BTC will succeed as a _currency_ , and not as a protocol that's useful for some other thing (or many other things), which seems to be the crux of Krugman's argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not true. Bitcoin did two things that I am aware of: 1) Create a universal currency which can be easily exchanged and that appreciates rather than depreciates (over the long run I mean, I am not referring to short term market fluctuations). 2) It created a mode where many underground (eg: gray or black market dealings) can take place without the need for laundering money. [Note: I don't condone, just pointing out the facts]

<comment><USER18> You're right. The black market gives Bitcoin a "floor" value, just like Gold or Silver. It is a very efficient means of currency for the black market, as proven by the Silk Road and others.

<comment><USER19> Gold and silver have industrial uses. Gold and silver are used in jewelry. Gold and silver have proven to be a store of value for thousands of years. Gold and silver are also, to a first approximation, truly anonymous.

Not one of those four characteristics is true for Bitcoin, so saying it's "just like" gold and silver is a bit of a stretch. This doesn't mean Bitcoin is awful, as Krugman's trollish column is titled, but just that it doesn't have the same intrinsic floor value as gold and silver.

<comment><USER18> I meant to say that Bitcoin - or something like it - will emerge to facilitate online transactions of the black market kind. Rightly so that Bitcoin doesn't inherently gain value from the black market, but I do believe the black market will use _something_ to do online transactions (as shown by the Silk Road and others). Thus far, that currency has been Bitcoin.

Gold and silver have industrial uses today. That may change tomorrow (albeit highly unlikely).

Bitcoin is the currency of cyber criminals today (hence giving it value today). That also may change tomorrow.

<comment><USER19> These are reasonable points. I don't know enough about modern-day black markets to say how much Bitcoin facilitates them.

If you're right that Bitcoin is a major factor, then yep, that could be an effective price floor (at least until a better rival comes along). It would be interesting to learn how much of Bitcoin purchasing is due to black market transactions. My intuition says it's mostly speculation, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

<comment><USER18> > The value of the transactions over this period are equivalent to "roughly > $1.2 billion in revenue and $79.8 million in commissions" and involved > 146,946 buyers and 3,877 vendors.[13]

That was the value transacted on the Silk Road. Quite impressive numbers, given that it was a single site and much of that growth occurring in Bitcoin's less user-friendly days.

<comment><USER20> The revenue was in bitcoins not in USD. How was it converted? (If at the end, then that overstates the volume quite a lot, given the rise of bitcoin's exchange rate.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Paul Krugman is a great economic thinker. These blog posts are no doubt just him eliciting feedback so that he, as a nontechnical person, can better understand a new technical phenomenon that has direct bearing on his work.

</comment><comment><USER22> The scenario with a large number of people wanting to cash out already assumes Bitcoin lost as a currency, so I'd say it could be a result, not the cause of Bitcoin's failure. Bitcoin succeeds or fails on whether you can buy useful stuff with it, buying other currencies is secondary.

<comment><USER6> The scenario with people cashing out because of regulation also assumes that most bitcoin users live under a single regulatory area, which is untrue. Banning bitcoin in the United States, for example, might decrease it's value, but not destroy it, as there's the rest of the world.

<comment><USER22> Not to disagree about the main point but US could do more to harm Bitcoin than just banning it internally, especially given that China seems already hostile to Bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm sure (or at least I hope), John Levine did not ask to be referred to as an "Ubernerd". Not to belittle Levine or his accomplishments or his nerd cred, but I think this article tells us much more about Krugman's ability to differentiate technical genius from mere competence than anything useful about Bitcoin. Given the high level of nerdery representd by the people developing Bitcoin, I'm unlikely to be convinced of a negative outlook for Bitcoin on the basis of an "expert opinion" from any ubernerd that Krugman chooses to trot out. The Bitcoin ecosystem has enough nerd cred to withstand pretty much any argument other than, "here's an exploit that I have figured out" with proof of said exploit.

I found Charles Stross' critique of Bitcoin far more convincing than anything I've read from Krugman. But, not on technical grounds; merely on ethical ones. I do actually worry that we may be replacing a horrible system that enforces and thrives on inequality with a possibly more extreme system that does the same thing (possibly with a few new players at the top).

Regardless, Krugman is in way over his head on the _technical_ aspects of Bitcoin and it shows. There has been much better technical criticism from actual nerds, including nerds who have worked on cryptocurrencies.

I believe we are seeing one of Krugman's famous bits of shortsightedness, and I believe he is falling prey to the very type of bias he claims to be trying to avoid. Bitcoin has a _lot_ going for it, whether you call it a "currency" or something else. I believe that it's impossible to predict how Bitcoin will play out, exactly, since we've never seen anything exactly like Bitcoin. I have some vague feelings, as well (like, I feel like it's likely Bitcoin will be replaced by some other cryptocurrency within a few years...for a variety of technical and social reasons). But, it's all just a hunch, and I'm unwilling to take the kind of stance Krugman is taking, which seems almost naive (certainly on technical issues, probably less so on economic issues) from my perspective.

</comment><comment><USER24> Krugman has said over and over again that bitcoin is bubble. He is right. But Krugman has failed to understand a crucial aspect about bitcoin - it is truly an international currency. Here is why this is so important. Krugman argues that someday news about bitcoin will come out that is so bad it will scare people away from bitcoin. This will certainly happen, as it has happened already. But bad news is localized. Just because China may ban bitcoins does not mean that people will stop using it elsewhere. The "bad news" would have to be truly world-wide for everyone to abandon bitcoin altogether. Anything short of that, and the bubble will continue onward.

<comment><USER4> A key foundation of a modern nation's power over its citizens is the ability to arbitrarily create and destroy the national currency, to legitimately demand that taxes be paid in that currency, and to thus be able to use it to purchase arbitrary goods and services. It seems quite likely that major national governments will band together to ban transfers between bitcoin and their national currencies once they realize what a threat a wholesale shift to bitcoin would pose to their power to tax and spend.

<comment><USER25> To any given government, Bitcoin looks like just another foreign currency. In many foreign countries, you can get dollar denominated bank accounts. How is Bitcoin any different than this status quo?

<comment><USER26> Governments work hand in glove with banks, they control and are controlled by the world banking system in turn, they can see what money goes where via the SWIFT system, they can approve or deny transfers based on AML/KYC laws which they can enforce if it comes down to it by applying pressure on the banks themselves, the entire system is old, well understood and thoroughly controlled.

The reserve bank of Bitcoin is completely immune to coercion, you can't freeze funds, you can't stop transactions, you can't do anything at all to the funds in one of those accounts without the consent of the account holder. If the account holder doesn't want you to, you can't even know who they are. Altogether, the entire system is the exact opposite of the global banking system, it is extremely poorly understood and almost entirely uncontrolled.

And that's just with the bank analogies, if you take it up a notch and compare fiat issuance to bitcoin issuance it gets even more frightening from their perspective. There's no nation they can apply diplomatic pressure to to change the fiscal policy of Bitcoin, that fiscal policy is linked to interests utterly alien to their own, even.

From their perspective it is indeed a dangerous thing, the only question to my mind is A) How long will it take them to figure this out and B) when they do figure it out, what kinds of actions will they take to try to destroy it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Gold has base value derived from its industrial, ornamental uses. But its trading value is much larger.

Similarly Bitcoin has a base value in the cost of mining 1 BTC. Right now it is around $800 or so.

Because of the competition in mining, asic chips development, and More's law. The cost of mining 1 BTC is going up exponentially.

<comment><USER28> While I think it's true that BTC won't fall below the cost of mining 1 BTC, that's not really saying anything.

If BTC falls below the cost of mining people will stop mining and the network will adjust to the reduced difficulty, making the cost of mining drop.

A problem is that if too few people mine, the network becomes easy to compromise. That's a problem that bitcoin has, and other currencies (and things like gold and silver) do not.

<comment><USER20> Bitcoin prices will eventually fall below the cost of mining. Guaranteed. (Because eventually there will be no new bitcoins left to mine. So mining new bitcoins becomes infinitely expensive.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Bitcoin does solve an economic problem: it sidesteps the usurious interchange fees of Visa and MasterCard, allowing low friction micro payments to become a reality on the web. One doesn't even need to hold any Bitcoins to make use of this feature; just convert on demand.</comment>


Stripe is down - <AUTHOR> https://status.stripe.com <comment><USER2> _" 99.925% uptime for the last 90 days"_

Measuring uptime over a 90 days period seems disingenuous.

</comment><comment><USER3> Statusgator.io picked up on this before status.stripe was updated.</comment>


Cola.js – Constraint-Based Layout in the Browser - <AUTHOR> http://marvl.infotech.monash.edu/webcola/#

<comment><USER2> HotDrink is a declarative, constraint-based UI system that models the flow of _data_ across the elements in the UI[1]. Trivially, it can repurposed for layout; although, most UI designers balk at the loss of control. The basic idea comes from a sizing dialog:

        height: [   ]
        width : [   ]
         area : [   ]

If the user enters a height & width, the form should update area [2]. If the user then updates area, then height is the free constraint (last recently updated). The whole system scales to work with incredibly large interfaces [3]. The experience section in [4] describes Adobe's experience porting chunks of Photoshop to using this system. (I did the figures for [4]; I'm quite proud of them.)

[1] [https://code.google.com/p/hotdrink/](https://code.google.com/p/hotdrink/)

[2] [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2371413](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2371413)

[3] [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2047892&CFID=690849385&CFT...](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2047892&CFID=690849385&CFTOKEN=46545378;) [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1449927&CFID=690849385&CFT...](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1449927&CFID=690849385&CFTOKEN=46545378;) [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1621630&CFID=690849385&CFT...](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1621630&CFID=690849385&CFTOKEN=46545378)

[4] [https://parasol.tamu.edu/~jarvi/papers/gpce08.pdf](https://parasol.tamu.edu/~jarvi/papers/gpce08.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice. But as with most of these libraries, I don't think it can handle large numbers of nodes/edges and show such graphs in a meaningful way. It really takes more than a force-directed algorithm to present data in an understandable way.

Here is a nice collection of large graphs: [1] Visualize that in a useful way, and I'm impressed.

[1] [https://snap.stanford.edu/data/](https://snap.stanford.edu/data/)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is interesting, but had hoped it would be something like iOS's Auto Layout for the browser.

<comment><USER5> Auto Layout is based on the University of Washington's Cassowary Constraint Solving Toolkit.

There's a JS version: [http://constraints.cs.washington.edu/cassowary/](http://constraints.cs.washington.edu/cassowary/)

<comment><USER6> Auto Layout and cola.js have a common lineage. Kim Marriott and Peter Stuckey are authors of the original Cassowary paper and are members of the MArVL research group at Monash University that publishes cola.js and related technologies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Offtopic - why does monash.edu.au redirect to monash.edu? This is an Australian university.

Edit: also, [http://nic.monash/](http://nic.monash/)

<comment><USER8> Because they are special snowflakes. They apparently aspire to seen as some sort of ivy league university and don't want the "stigma" of being mistaken for being in Australia. As an Australian this sort of cultural cringe makes me angry, but it is all too common :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow. How long did this take to build? This is pretty impressive.

</comment><comment><USER10> can anyone recommend more papers/algorithms/reading material on layout algorithms in general? I'm very interested in layout algorithms of smaller node/edge counts (less than 1000). most material I've found is geared towards "big data" and hundreds of thousands (or more) of nodes/edges.

<comment><USER11> Graph Drawing: Algorithms for the Visualization of Graphs by Tollis, Di Battista, Eades and Tamassia ([http://www.amazon.com/Graph-Drawing-Algorithms- Visualization...](http://www.amazon.com/Graph-Drawing-Algorithms- Visualization-Graphs/dp/0133016153)). The book is from 1998 but is a good basis for reading future papers and algorithms in this area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow, this is pretty cool.</comment>


Organizational debt is like technical debt, but worse - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2015/05/19/organizational-debt-is-like-technical-debt-but-worse/ <comment><USER2> This is why if you're joining a startup as an employee you should ask for either a competitive market salary or real equity (not the insultingly low amount that normally gets offered as equity -- an actual stake).

I think a lot of people join startups and take a bad deal because they think the company will take care of them when the company makes it. Or they think they'll have more opportunity for promotions in the startup because of its small size and their early stake. The problem is usually executive roles are filled from outside the company rather than from internal promotions, and as this article illustrates, the founders don't necessarily care about the people at the bottom until it's bluntly pointed out to them how mass departures could fuck up the business.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious for you to expand on what you mean by real equity? I was hired as the first backend developer at an enterprise startup last August. they told me they were securing next round of funding (all family money so far) by end sept/oct and at that point id get market salary (Ive been at ~40% less since hire). in november when it was clear we wouldn't have the funding or revenue to raise salaries, I negotiated another point in equity and higher six figure salary when we do get funding/or revenue. we agreed (me and CEO) that we would reevaluate things in April. now it's almost June and I still held off on having our next talk bc even though we launched a month ago, were still another 1-2 months away from realistically getting revenue. I am at 2% equity which he says is more than any other employer but I'm not sure what my next move is. I'm senior level full stack and do much more than I was hired for from client to backend to devops and helping lead. if I stay longer, how much equity should I go for? again I was told my salary would go to market by sept/oct last year prior to me starting... thanks!

<comment><USER4> Yeah... all those promises were what are technically known in the industry as "lies". You will _never_ see a market level salary or even a raise, and once that 2% equity has been through dilution it will be more like 0.2% at most. Sorry, but there's no way this situation will play out well for you. Another thing you probably don't want to hear is that you are not "senior level" if you lack the experience to have figured this out for yourself. Not even close.

You can learn from this and never be played like a sucker again, but many people it takes 2 or 3 goes around to realize. But it's fine for the CEO, there'll be another 22-year-old around to take this deal in a year.

<comment><USER5> > Another thing you probably don't want to hear is that you are not "senior > level" if you lack the experience to have figured this out for yourself.

There are many examples where I don't think there's a strong connection between the level of professional experience with the familiarity with the startup environment/lingo/negotiation.

<comment><USER4> There is nothing really startup-specific in the scenario. There are exploitative bosses in all industries and all sizes of company. Someone who's played knifey-spooney before would know this.

<comment><USER6> I know this post/comment is aging but I feel I have to add my disagreement. Depending on skill and perhaps more than a little luck, navigating your way up to a senior position in the "old school" corporate world can actually be relatively conflict-free. Certainly, exploitative bosses are as widespread as you suggest, but that doesn't mean that _every_ boss is exploitative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm at a startup where I found out a junior hire -- worse in every way than myself and several steps down in title -- is making at least 30% more than I am. It's a strange position. I've started polishing my resume as a result.

<comment><USER8> Curious to know how you found out, and why you don't bring it up with your manager.

This is why Spolksy has his tiered plans where everyone gets paid the same (hiring someone at a higher payrate means raising everyones pay)

[http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090401/how-hard-could-it-be- em...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090401/how-hard-could-it-be-employees- negotiate-pay-raises.html)

<comment><USER9> Honestly, I just found out, and I am trying to figure out when and how to bring this up. It feels like there are several good timings for bringing this up:

1\. When I've just delivered something of high business value

2\. When the company is really needs me to deliver something of high value

3\. Annual review

4\. Right before quarterly/annual budgets

5\. When I have a competing offer

I've asked for a raise, not too long ago, without any information in hand about competing salaries. That conversation did not lead to a pay increase. I found out -- not long after that conversation -- that the post-funding folks make substantially more than the pre-funding folks.

Salary aside, it is an excellent job. I enjoy working there, believe in the mission, and I am relatively unlikely to leave for a more lucrative offer. I think management knows that, which is why they don't feel the need to pay myself (or other early employees) market rates. Management pays the least an employee will work for.

<comment><USER10> Same thing happened to me.

I gave my company a choice: raise my salary/title to reflect the new hierarchy or lose me to a competitive offer. They fed me a line about how the company was making money, but not enough to raise everyone's salary (translation: we don't think you can get a competitive offer).

I took another job 3 weeks later for 25% more money + actual equity (not bullshit stock options).

Startups can be fun, but in terms of compensation, the early employees will get screwed over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Another reason why organizational debt can be worse than technical debt is that often in the case of technical debt, the engineers know what the proper solution is, but given time constrains, they opt for a solution that merely meets their current needs. But with organizational debt, often the immature company does not even know what the proper solution would be.

And then, of course, there are cases of both technical debt and organizational debt where the people in charge don't even realize that they've incurred debt. They think they _do_ have the optimal solution.

</comment><comment><USER12> Just like with technical debt, there is a risk of refactoring organizational debt wrong, or over-refactoring. I believe it happened where I once worked. It worked beautifully as a small company, but when the workforce started exceeding 100, the need for better HRM, more formal performance evaluation, better defined reporting hierarchies and career paths became evident. A lot of processes were introduced, but the way it was done induced culture shock in people who had been in the company a long time. I think we lost a few good brains as a result.

<comment><USER13> There's an argument to be made that those good brains that the company lost were necessary to lose; I know myself that a business can hit this point, I've been there myself as an employee when it happened. I'm one of those developers that isn't a fan of big formal-ish companies, so I leave when that happens -- that's not a bad thing, as keeping me there will frustrate me and the business long term. Those processes can be super necessary however, so I don't begrudge places the institute them, unless they do it far too soon of course.

<comment><USER14> Quote from OA "Some employees don't scale from "Search" to this new phase of "Build"."

Perhaps a 'film crew' mentality (and reward structure) is needed? The crew comes in, does the project, has the wrap party and goes onto the next project. The 'day staff' take over afterwards.

<comment><USER15> Sure, some people are attracted to the chaos of a startup who are just get on and build something. These are different people who are custodians and cherish the business and strengthen it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What areas of organizational technical debt are there? I counted the piece raised three: unmanaged compensation schemes, lack of systematic onboarding, lack of keeping tally on the most promising employèes and making them know they are valued.

I think there is also a typical pattern that perhaps is too trivial yet not that all too uncommon - lack of organizational restructuring as a company grows (the startup style where some people do everything can create bottlenecks and very high risk bus factors).

Are there any others?

<comment><USER17> I think a very important aspect of scaling is separating responsibilities. In most startups it's often the case that a single person takes on multiple tasks. Those make sense in the early stages, but as the company grows they become a limiting factor.

The problem is that some people get comfortable doing multiple roles. That however means that they can only invest a fraction of their time. This means that early on the company gets something, which is better than nothing, but as it grows it's only getting something and that's not enough.

This is applicable to most potosi on, but becomes org debt when the founder(s) don't "replace" themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Organizational debt can create technical debt and may be the single biggest cause.

Even if you make it with technical debt, somewhere in your org, someone's life is worse because of that technical debt, but the cause was probably organizational debt. The good employees see it sooner and suffer it longer or leave before others see it. A downward spiral in other words with entropy increasing.

<comment><USER19> > Organizational debt can create technical debt and may be the single biggest > cause.

I agree with this. E.g. an organisation without a clear and concrete vision (but with a lot of fantasy) is inherently creating technical debt since it's unclear to the developers what exactly needs to build and what the important parts are. It's usually that within these organisations every other week a new feature is dreamt up by management that HAS to be included asap or the company might miss out to the competition.

Usually management in these type of organisations also LOVE Agile which to them pretty much means; just make shit up as you go along.

<comment><USER20> Exactly on the vision and fantasy.

Worse on the consequence: lots of "new" features are TOP 1, and the last unfinished top 1 just been cancelled in its first week.

Agile though, those sprints are never called failed, but move on like nothing changed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is a great read and I recommend it to anyone in the 'build' phase of their company. The thing that always amazes me is how the organization of a company can enhance or limit what they can build in technology.

</comment><comment><USER22> Where is the evidence that technical debt, let alone organizational debt, is actually related to the economic indicators of success?

<comment><USER23> I will describe my understanding of "technical debt". It may well be different than your understanding of technical debt, but I think if you look at it this way you will be able to answer the question.

The idea behind a company acquiring debt is to increase the number of possible options now at the expense of increased constraints later. So, for example, you borrow $X today which means that you have the option to buy things that would have been impossible without the loan. Later you must repay the loan which means that you will be able to buy less things.

The hope is that you will be able to leverage the extra money to put yourself into a more advantageous position in the future. Having done so, you can handle the constraint of paying back the debt much more easily. For example, let's say that you borrow $100. You buy a lawnmower with the $100 and use it to mow lawns for $10 an hour. After 2 weeks (80 hours), you have made $800 mowing lawns which would have been impossible without the loan. Paying back the $100 is easy because you have $800 to play with.

As a side note, in early stages of a company growth is often constrained by capital, so it is considered irresponsible _not_ to borrow money by many analysts. You should borrow as much as you can get, up to the level of the constraint because that will maximize your growth.

Enter "technical debt". When doing development, there are often many choices to make. Some choices will result in opportunities now at the cost of constraints later on. For example, imagine that you have a meeting with a VC company. You need a demo that shows the vision of your software. You know that you can not build anything functional in the amount of time you have, so you simply write a throw away demo. None of the code can be used in the final product, but it is good enough to show what you mean and it can win the VC money.

In this case, we have the future constraint that we must completely rewrite all of the demo code after the VC meeting. But we were able to raise capital, and continue building the company due to our efforts.

That's a pretty extreme example, but another example might be something like this. We could do a usability study for your new UI to make sure that it works well for the user right from the beginning. Or we could just code up the simplest UI that we can think of. The second choice will cost less and allow use to get it into the hands of the user early. Possibly this is important because we need to beat our competitor to market with a feature. We will still have to do the usability study at some point, and refactor all of our code, but hopefully we will be in a better position to afford that extra work later on.

Just like real debt, there can be problems. For example, imagine that we borrow $100 and instead of buying a lawnmower, we buy beer and drink it. We've had a good time drinking the beer, but now we owe $100, have no way to pay it back and have a hangover to boot.

The technical equivalent happens far more often to companies than the money thing (although, I often wonder what happened to all those Aeron chairs that the dotcom companies bought up in the late 90s). You often get a naive CEO who thinks, "We should take on as much debt as people will give us because we can leverage it to build growth!". So they say, "Don't worry about the future, just give me code as fast as you possibly can". He isn't sitting there thinking, "I am taking on future constraints, but can I _actually_ use this to leverage my growth?".

You get in a situation where the coders are just hacking their fingers off, but to no actual benefit. You end up with no way of mitigating the bad code (repaying the debt) and you have the headache of dealing with all the grumpy programmers who leave to find a company where they can "do it right".

You asked, "Where is the evidence that technical debt, let alone organizational debt, is actually related to the economic indicators of success?" The answer is that it is not necessarily related. It depends on what you have done with that debt. If you have simply had an orgy of coding madness without leveraging the opportunities to increase growth (as many startups do), then there will be no relation.

My own personal view of this is: programmers should be in charge of the "technical debt bank". They should do their best not to incur debt, but if they are asked to do so they should ask a question of their own, "How are we going to spend this debt?" It is important that the programmers understand the business issues so that they can "loan" an appropriate amount of debt. If the business is basically saying, "Keep giving me debt. I don't care how much. And we're going to spend it on beer and Aeron chairs", then the responsible programmer/banker should perhaps have a serious chat with the business.

If you are with a good organization, though, the answer will usually be of the form, "We need to get features X,Y,Z done by this date so that we can bring in W revenue. Once we have accomplished that we will be in a better place to repay the debt".

<comment><USER22> We can theorize all day. Where is the data? The truth is we don't know how to guarantee business success, except via shotgun techniques (funding lots of random attempts). This strongly suggests that technical debt is not that important of a construct.

<comment><USER24> How is your position distinct from, "I don't understand X, ergo X can't be very important"? Because it looks pretty much the same to me.

If you think each business is a "random attempt", I hope you're never a founder. Modern businesses are highly non-random. It's true that investing in startups is in some sense gambling, but it's gambling on a highly filtered subset of all existing businesses, which is in turn a tiny fraction of all possible businesses.

The "where is the data" line is especially misleading here because no data just means no data. There are no high-n, double-blind studies validating the concept of technical debt. But there are also no studies demonstrating it's not a useful concept. And that's most of life: the decisions we have to make rarely can be solved by looking up journal studies. When that's the case, we have to apply other tools.

<comment><USER22> This is hand-waving.

<comment><USER24> Again, I see this as you mistaking "I don't understand" for "there is nothing there". I obviously don't think it's handwaving, and it has been a long time since I took unsupported accusations from Internet randoms very seriously.

Sure, you _could_ be a very special snowflake, so smart that the world really does always break down into "obvious to brobdignagian" and "dumb/meaningless". But if you're that smart then I'd suggest that either a) you should use your smarts to make your Olympian view comprehensible to us mortals, or b) you're wasting your time talking with the likes of us.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


NekoVM / Neko Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://nekovm.org/ <comment><USER2> When talking about mutable strings, he says that Lua's immutable strings make reading a file "quadratic and [...] prohibitively slow for even files of a few kilobytes.", which is demonstrably false. Sure, if you read a byte, nondestructively append a byte to what you've read, looping through anything, then you're screwed, in any language.* Large files should be read a line, a block, a megabyte, etc. at a time, anyway, though - the IO call overhead will dominate otherwise, no matter what you do.

* Joel Spolsky calls this "Shlemiel the painter" behavior. Difference lists are another direct solution for this, but not many languages have them.

He notes that, "Lua offers a facility, table.concat, to alleviate this problem; but it still bites programmers on occasion.", but using table.concat for large strings is both 1) one of the first things mentioned about working with strings in PiL (including explaining why doing appends naively is quadratic), and 2) incredibly common, so it's really not an issue in practice.

In my experience, having immutable and interned strings is usually a net win, even if they're a second data type (Lisp and K call them symbols, Erlang and Prolog call them atoms, etc.). Lua merges string, atoms, and raw byte arrays into the same type (albeit with a cute trick for large strings), but it also has the C API as an easy escape hatch.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why should I care?

(I'm not saying that I shouldn't care. It just isn't immediately apparent what the reason is for me to care.)

There are lots of non mainstream languages out there. I love to learn about them, but I must be told why it should interest me.

<comment><USER4> Neko -> Haxe -> Cool flash stuff

Related: <http://ncannasse.fr/blog/physaxe>

[edit: oops, I think Haxe doesn't need Neko if you're targetting Flash]

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> how is neko compared to lua today?

<comment><USER4> Totally different? IIRC, Neko is based on Ocaml, which is on the other side of the spectrum from dynamic languages like Lua...

So... what do you mean?

<comment><USER5> <http://nekovm.org/lua>

> Lua is maybe the Virtual Machine that is the most similar to Neko in terms > of goals, architecture and performances, it is interesting to compare the > choices that the two VM are doing.</comment></comment></comment>


Does this look familiar to anyone? - <AUTHOR> http://www.founderscoop.com/apply.php <comment><USER2> I would argue that if you're going to go the trouble of including a "Shout- outs" page, you should mention the company who's application you stole verbatim:

<http://www.founderscoop.com/shout-outs.php>

<comment><USER3> Brad Feld, whose blog appears on that page, also has a hand in TechStars (their application was copied from YC too).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's their apology:

[http://crashdev.blogspot.com/2008/04/sincere-apologies-to- pa...](http://crashdev.blogspot.com/2008/04/sincere-apologies-to-paul-graham- and-y.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Actually, I don't think YC should mind. If they're not smart enough, or dedicated enough to think of a few due diligence questions on their own, would a really good startup want them on board as investors?

</comment><comment><USER6> Another thing is trust -- would you trust a knock-off to have that much experience and insight, when you can verify via PG's essays the insight they'll bring to the table? Hard sell if you ask me.

<comment><USER7> Supposing you 1) dont' want to live in the Bay Area, or 2) weren't accepted to YC, or have some other issue with YC, having some other options isn't bad, even if they're not as good as the original.

I don't get the need people seem to have to put these YC clones down. Yes, copying the application is lame (we'll see if the guy responds), but having more options is a _good thing_. If your idea (YC) is any good, people will try and replicate it, and that's what we're seeing here. The early-stage-seed whatever area is not some kind of network-effect amped winner-takes-all market where PG needs to grow things at an insane pace to grab market share. Far from it, he does well by his funded companies to dedicate his time to them, and not worry if people copy his idea.

<comment><USER6> I'm not putting the idea itself down at all. In my other comment I saw the likelihood of these types of investment companies increasing since YC proved the concept viable. This one here was blatant plagiarism though, which make it look like they didn't put the time into starting it properly, which means they're not likely to put due diligence into the companies they investing in. Trust is a big factor in accepting someone's money in exchange for part of your creation, and that doesn't instill it. Looks like they did apologize now though (haven't read it yet).

Local is a definite plus, having to move to Boston or Cali can be a deal- breaker for some I'm sure. I'm waiting to hear when a Canadian equivalent pops up myself ;)

They also had one other interesting idea I haven't seen before, which is that they ask companies to put up 5% to a pool that's shared among all the startups from that funding round. They figure that will encourage more collaboration and help, since everyone wins a little when anyone in the group wins. That was in their FAQ. I wonder how that will turn out for people in practice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> hey guys, chill out. Is the application the same as YC? (It is not currently posted on YC, so I don't know).

Other than the unattributed copying of the YC application... This seems like a totally different deal. He's not just giving a tiny bit of money to fresh college grads and making you move to San Jose for 3 months, it looks like it is going to be an actual co-op where each group accepted gets part of the pie from everyone else, and its not only limited to 10k. I live in Seattle and have 2 little kids, so I can't exactly do the YC thing, so I'm actually kind of fired up about this idea. I've read about the two founders of this group so it seems legit.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, it's basically verbatim plagiarism. Check out, for example, [http://web.archive.org/web/20060825161615/ycombinator.com/w7...](http://web.archive.org/web/20060825161615/ycombinator.com/w7app.txt)

<comment><USER4> Here's their apology:

[http://crashdev.blogspot.com/2008/04/sincere-apologies-to- pa...](http://crashdev.blogspot.com/2008/04/sincere-apologies-to-paul-graham- and-y.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Calm down. This is precisely how industries standardize. No one thought it was "sickening" when search engines pages started to imitate each other's blue title + grey descr + green url design. It was just an obviously good idea.

<comment><USER10> My first reaction was also, "hey plagiarism". But then again, on second thought, it'd be nice to have one application form to fill out, and then you just send them to different programs.

Before the days of standardized applications forms for colleges, it was a pain in the ass to fill out the same types of questions. I think it's rather lazy of them. However, since they're all going for startups, it's rather likely they'd ask a set of basic questions. It might do to have some sort of standarized basic set of questions, and then tack on one or two specific questions for that particular program.

<comment><USER11> I think there's a lot to be said for standardization, as you say. Founders who are just getting started have little enough time as it is, without having to come up with just slightly different answers to just slightly different questions. If that's their reasoning, they probably should have mentioned it, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> what I don't understand is that why these people don't even try just changing around the wording at least just by a little bit... are they that uncreative and lazy? or at least (as brett mentions) give credit where it's due

<comment><USER13> becasue this is exactly what they intended to do. Have the entire YC community talk about it and cr8 some interest about their program. It seems to work.

<comment><USER14> I once had a philosophy professor who liked being provocative. He was a sort of evangelical atheist. He gave a talk entitled, "Is Belief In God Immoral Or Merely Irrational?"

That (unethical or merely incompetent?) is the sort of interesting debate they've created about themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These all seem so blatant at this point, but if the trend is moving towards early-stage/micro-investments like this, then most likely we'll be seeing lots more where this came from.

But when YC has all the cred which serves to give a nice profile boost to YC- funded startups, what can these others offer that amounts to the same thing? There's the community, experience and hookups with further funding opportunities, but these knock-offs just seem like they're lacking in comparison to the full value proposition YC offers. I wonder how they can compensate for that...

<comment><USER15> Local is a plus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Again, I don't understand the super-reactionary responses here every time that there's something based on YC. By the YC founders own assessments they can't accommodate all of the good ideas that they're receiving.

And what of this, "Well, they're going to suck..." Do you think YC was perfect right off of the bat? Really? Sure, the copy-cats will be rough at first, then they'll, like most ventures, find ways to differentiate themselves and do their thing or die.

Or is the big objection that they copy-and-pasted the form? Other than very minor copyright infringement, which I'm sure they'd rectify if asked, it's obvious that they just went live. I can think of dumber ideas than copying your role-model as a place-holder until you have time to rewrite the form.

<comment><USER17> It's not about copying the idea.

It's about making yourself look like a total asshat by copying someone else's writing verbatim and passing it off as your own.

> _which I'm sure they'd rectify if asked,_

"If you have to ask..."

> _then they'll, like most ventures, find ways to differentiate themselves and > do their thing or die._

There's a YC copycat in India that differentiates itself by posting armed guards to keep you in your office until midnight. And not let you sleep. Seriously.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=158049>

<comment><USER16> > It's about making yourself look like a total asshat by copying someone > else's writing verbatim and passing it off as your own.

There's a famous line by Igor Stravinsky. "Good composers borrow. Great composers steal."

If you're working on something, and you see someone else that's got part of it righ, by all means copy them!

I don't mean plagiarize them, but emulate what they're doing and figure out the parts that you're good at. If you read through what this co-op is about there's some interesting stuff there. They're trying to get people in Seattle for a year, are offering more funding and trying to build integration between the companies they're investing in. This is a good thing. Ask them to reword their questions if you must, but cheer these people on! Comparing this the Indian proposal from a little while back is just silly.

<comment><USER18> >"Good composers borrow. Great composers steal."

Interestingly, he probably stole that quote from T.S Eliot: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal"

<comment><USER17> It was Picasso and artists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The hackers they'd like to attract all know about YC. Most probably knew about it long before they did. A good many probably have the YC application memorized. To make a verbatim knock-off and pretend you didn't is just so... inept. Certainly ineptitude is among the leading qualities I look for in an investor, how about you?

To anyone who knows the first thing about hackers, it's obvious how to do this: give full credit to YC, praise YC to the skies, point out that not everyone is suited to YC and argue that there's room for more than one. Differentiate yourself by being Seattle-focused or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone else find this sickening? I'd be unable to plagarise in a professional setting even if I knew 100% that I wouldn't get caught. I'd feel way too slimy afterwards to even consider it. What ever happened to taking pride in your work?

Add in to that the absolute certainty of getting caught on the internet (hell, you can automate the process), I'm just amazed that people still do it. I just don't understand their thinking at all.

</comment><comment><USER20> Chris has responded to this issue on his blog: [http://crashdev.blogspot.com/2008/04/sincere-apologies-to- pa...](http://crashdev.blogspot.com/2008/04/sincere-apologies-to-paul-graham- and-y.html). Those of you throwing around uninformed, flaming commentary would benefit from a quick read followed by a few deep breaths.

<comment><USER21> He uses the phrase "modeled after", which is pretty light. They lifted most questions verbatim, removed the references to boston and News.YC (usernames, etc), and shuffled order on a question or two.

I'm a little iffy on whether I feel this is terribly unethical-- an application is not really a creative work. I do think it shows a lack of creativity! I can think of 2 or 3 questions that I'd add/adjust if I was spinning up an early stage outfit.

<comment><USER20> I agree it was a lapse in judgement - both the lifting and the lack of attribution. However, in the grand scheme of things it's not that huge a deal, and the important thing for me is that he is correcting the problem right away as soon as possible after being informed of the criticism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> We have built a search of their sites and blogs, whatever you want to know about Founder's co-op, just search for it here: [http://www.intelliverb.com/Search/?ul=en- us&six=src63343...](http://www.intelliverb.com/Search/?ul=en- us&six=src633439433255440000f)

</comment><comment><USER23> Look at how much you can learn about these people from this little bit of data:

1\. They are creatively challenged.

2\. They are professionally challenged.

3\. They are ethically challenged.

Suppose you get involved with them. What do you imagine would happen as soon as a difficult situation came up?

Personally, this tells me just enough to run, not walk, the other way.

<comment><USER7> Well, if by "learn", you mean "extrapolate", "surmise", "conjecture" or "speculate". I don't think you can make such sweeping statements without knowing more.

<comment><USER23> They copied someone else's intellectual property without giving credit.

What data could anyone possibly add that would change my thinking?

<comment><USER23> I sit here with egg on my face as I reply to myself. davidw, you were absolutely right and I never saw it.

When I wrote, "What data could anyone possibly add that would change my thinking?" I never expected an answer. I just read the Crash Dev apology, and that's the data.

My apologies. Now I understand the difference between "learn" and "infer".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> YC is a great idea, Founder's co-op is the proof. Honesty dictates that they mention YC as their source of idea. This is another opportunity for startups to get seed and backing. Coaching may not be as YCs, but hey why not try, apply!!!!

</comment><comment><USER24> I know this is off-topic, but isn't asking for the applicants' ages illegal, as it can be used as a basis for discrimination? -- in the same way that asking if the applicants have children would probably be illegal.

<comment><USER25> This isn't a housing application-- discrimination is completely legal.

In fact, the application is designed to discriminate against people who would be bad founders.

<comment><USER26> More relevant, this isn't a job application. Employers do have to avoid discrimination.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > 12\. Why would your project be hard for someone else to duplicate?

Heh

</comment><comment><USER17> I find it dubious not only for the massive plagiarism (even the word limit!) but in that they seem to lack the l33t skills needed to make an HTML form submission page.

I think having YC in your corner is a boost; these guys look like they'd HURT your chances. Why would you want people who are unoriginal and unscrupulous dragging you down?

<comment><USER28> saves you from writing two application forms?

<comment><USER29> I think that was the idea Techstars had. Since they got away with it outside of this community, I can see why other new microseed funds want to keep using the same application.</comment></comment></comment>


Where can I find freelance sysadmins and developers to assist me? - <AUTHOR>

I am a sysadmin and developer, but I am starting to get busy and need some help from time to time. I want to hire someone as a freelancer to assist me with my projects once in a while and also who can explain a few things I don't fully understand. I need a few shell scripts written for automation (Linux), some help setting up and configuring some software, and also just need help with a few other little odd job things here and there as they come up. I need someone who can do development and someone who can do sysadmin (CentOS  / RHEL). I would be ok hiring one person who can do both, or multiple people, but I can't seem to find a good resource to do so.
Ideally I'd like someone affordable, competent, and somewhat available.
Does anyone know of a good place to find such people? Or have a referral? <comment><USER2> At least two of us posted looking for sysadmin work on the HN freelancer thread! (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3914001>)

I'm big on automation using configuration management, although that's only really beneficial (cost-wise) once you have more than two-three servers/VMs.

Drop me an email if you want to discuss it a bit more: email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER3> Besides the aforementioned virtual worker websites, you could try the monthly freelancer thread on HN, but I don't think there's too many sysadmin types that lurk there. It's worth a shot.

I'd be more than willing to answer some of your questions if I can, and I'd be interested in hearing what type of work you have. My email is in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER4> _Ideally I'd like someone affordable, competent, and somewhat available_

I'm competent at general sysadmin with CentOS, and definitely so with general development. My freelancing doesn't leave with me huge amounts of free time, but there's often a few hours, or a couple of days in the month.

Drop me a line, I'd be happy to discuss your requirements with you further: firstname.lastname@example.com :)

</comment><comment><USER5> I second odesk is the way to go..But if what you need isn't too complicated I can be your guy,I run 3 vps(s) maintaining openvpn,a django website I developed and so on.Let me know,I have alot of time.

</comment><comment><USER6> I hear good things about <http://odesk.com/>.</comment>


How exercise boosts brain health - <AUTHOR> http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-exercise-boosts-brain-health <comment><USER2> Remember that the human body is adapted to frequent physical exercise. So the story would really be more accurate to say that lack of exercise impairs brain function due to less release of irisin.

Perhaps a small difference in wording, but I think the change in perspective is important.

<comment><USER3> Nearly everything about human physiology can be thought about what would have worked for hunter-gathers. We're specialised in some areas, most of which doesn't require a constant practise (e.g. a 60 year old can start training for a marathon). But the one of the basics of that life was daily exercise, it's a shame it appears avoidable to us now.

<comment><USER4> Of course, "daily exercise" may have simply included what amounts to a long walk, no? Not everything was heavily labor based. Certainly not year long.

More, if you go far enough back (not actually that far, frighteningly) and things like "respect for the life of others" drops out rather sharply.

So.... what, exactly, is the lesson here? My takeaway is that rose colored glasses can make even some of the most horrid of conditions (human history), somehow look good. Me? I'll take the present where I have a reasonable expectation that my kids will not die before me. By a long shot.

<comment><USER5> My understanding is that we're basically built to be walking ~8 hours most days. So yes, a long walk... but longer than most of us can fit in.

<comment><USER4> I would find that a little tough to believe. I could see long walks occasionally, but sustained walks of ~8 hours a day just doesn't make sense. Where would we have been walking? Just giant circles?

<comment><USER6> Wherever food seemed to be, I imagine.

Google "wolf run hours per day". Where do they run?

<comment><USER7> "... the Hadza, a population of traditional hunter-gatherers living in the open savannah of northern Tanzania. Despite spending their days trekking long distances to forage for wild plants and game, the Hadza burned no more calories each day than adults in the U.S. and Europe. The team ran several analyses accounting for the effects of body weight, body fat percentage, age, and gender. In all analyses, daily energy expenditure among the Hadza hunter- gatherers was indistinguishable from that of Westerners."

[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120725200304.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120725200304.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I did some research into when diminishing marginal returns to exercise kick in. I eventually found this excellent study [http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/40/5/1382.long](http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/40/5/1382.long)

which indicated to me that ~1000Cal/week expended in a vigorous fashion should be what I shoot for. This means that stuff that elevates post exercise oxygen consumption like resistance training and interval training for cardio are great bangs for your buck. This jives well with other research on the health benefits of these activities. I'm currently hitting the threshold with 2 days/wk of HIIT and resistance training each.

</comment><comment><USER9> There's no question about this personally.

It's why I started exercising about 18 months ago, because I realized my ability to concentrate had faded as my fitness had decreased. I couldn't stand it any more and had to fix it.

It's made a huge difference.

<comment><USER10> what do you do? What's your routine?

<comment><USER11> I am not the post to whom you replied, but to share my own routine (similar thing, started seriously pursuing fitness over the past 8 months or so and have noticed a lot of cognitive reward):

\- Every morning except Sunday I'll do some form of cardio; first I did C25K, then random biking, now I'm doing a sprint regimen (from half-awake to dead legs in like eight minutes; talk about bang for your buck)

\- Lift every other day doing a simple weights program (started off doing Starting Strength, moved to bodyweight stuff, now back on Starting Strength)

\- On weekends I do something fun: co-ed frisbee/soccer leagues are a dime a dozen and will give you quite the workout. The past few weekends I've been going to a climbing gym, which has been awesome.

I had this idea in my head that improving my level of fitness was this Herculean task that would take hours a day, but it's really not. I spend roughly thirty minutes a day working out.

<comment><USER12> I've found starting strength to be a lot of fun and very beginner friendly (apart from the overhead press anyway). I'd suggest anyone who wants to get into lifting follow it, nothing feels better than going from squatting 0 to 200 lbs in the course of a few months.

<comment><USER13> Ditto for SS, I have no idea how well it compares to other programs but for the sense of progress (weight increases every time) it cannot be beaten.

Good if you have tried and then quit the gym before. I also recommend fitocracy.com (or any other sites of that ilk) to "game-ify" exercise a bit and keep you motivated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does the underlying article, which is not linked to, specify quality and quantity of exercise necessary to experience the benefit?

<comment><USER15> The experiments were conducted on mice so probably have little applicability to humans. For what it's worth, the experiment used mice housed in cages with access to a running wheel for 30 days of voluntary excessive. The control group did not have running wheels.

<comment><USER16> As the husband of a neuroscience researcher who works with a mouse model, I believe you'd be surprised at the applicability of such research towards human analogues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> John Ratey ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ratey](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ratey)), the professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who wrote _Driven to Distration_ , recently published a book called _Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain_ ([http://www.amazon.com/Spark- Revolutionary-Science-Exercise-B...](http://www.amazon.com/Spark- Revolutionary-Science-Exercise-Brain/dp/0316113506)).

 _Spark_ details how high-intensity cardio (like sprints or interval training) put your brain chemicals in balance in part by generating BDNF ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain- derived_neurotrophic_fact...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain- derived_neurotrophic_factor)), which as Ratey describes, it's like "Miracle- gro" for the brain.

Last year my stress levels were getting out of control from working too much. At the time I was running at least two miles every day so it's not like I wasn't exercising. But then one day I changed from running a couple miles to running 50-yard sprints, as fast and as hard as I could push myself. The first day I only ran four sprints, but I felt euphoric the rest of the day -- the best I had felt in years. So I tried it again a couple days later, and sure enough it worked again -- I felt amazing.

So then I had to find out why this worked -- why a few sprints were so much more effective than running several miles. I started Googling and eventually found Ratey's book -- it explains the entire biochemical process of what's going on and why sprinting works.

It's an eye-opening read. Each chapter covers how high-intensity cardio affects things like stress, anxiety, depression, ADHD. I have ADHD but haven't taken anything for it in years (since I was in college), and I can attest that sprints not only fixed by stress levels, but my ADHD symptoms were almost non existent.

Here's a key point that Ratey makes throughout the book that completely changed my perspective on things -- he says that instead of thinking of exercise as something you should do to look good and build a healthy body, you should instead think of exercise as the key to building a healthy brain: "We all know that exercise makes us feel better, but most of us have no idea why. We assume it's because we're burning off stress or reducing muscle tension or boosting endorphins, and we leave it at that. But the real reason we feel so good when we get our blood pumping is that it makes the brain function at its best" ([http://www.sparkinglife.org](http://www.sparkinglife.org)).

In the book's introduction he goes on to say, "Building muscles and conditioning the heart and lungs are essentially side effects. I often tell my patients that the point of exercise is to build and condition the brain."

In fact the brain exercise routine he recommends is similar to a weight workout routine, in that you have to push yourself hard one day, and then take a day off to let your brain recover, just like in weight training. Another key is when you sprint, always put everything you have into it. Run as fast and as hard as you can so you are constantly pushing your body and your brain past their limitations -- this is the key to growth.

Reposted from: [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5323019](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5323019)

<comment><USER18> A bit pedantic, but I'd like to defend endurance running - comparing 2 mile runs to really pushing yourself with HIIT is unfair. At 5mph (a slow pace) that's only 24 minutes, which is usually not enough time to even experience a runner's high and about when you get settled into a rhythm as a distance runner.

If you only have 30 minutes you're indisputably better off sprinting.

<comment><USER14> As a practical matter, very few over 30s can keep up a regular sprinting habit without injuring themselves. HIIT running may be better in theory, but it doesn't work out that way in real life.

<comment><USER18> I find that even at 20 it's very easy for me to cause joint issues after several years of inactivity. If you do too much too fast it'll cause problems no matter your age - although I'm sure age is something that you should take into consideration.

If you're concerned, there are alternatives like swimming and biking that are lower impact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This has been absolutely true for me. Both lifting, olympic style compound lifts and cardio have made a measurable difference in my ability to concentrate and problem solve.

I've also measured a marked increase in retention when memorizing GRE words while jogging over memorizing them while sitting. That experiment inspired me to put together this website: [http://rungre.com](http://rungre.com) (shameless yet hopefully relevant plug)

Has anyone else tried to combine studying and exercise?

</comment><comment><USER20> One of my favorite quotes from growing up was from my martial arts class, we had this trainer who would come over a couple of times a year from Israel - and during one session where we were doing particularly interesting movement, he said: "These movements open up dormant brain circuitry" \-- it was a statement that always stood out to me.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm actually about to shift my workflow in a major way to include more movement. Already use an adjustable desk, standing in the morning and sitting in the evening. And when I'm on calls, I always use a headset and walk-n-talk.

<comment><USER22> This is very far from exercise but it might feel to you as exercise and an increase of movement because your perspective on the physical abilities of the average human is skewed. One astonishing thing I've learned while becoming more active is what a normal body is really capable of without going into the realm of professional athletes. Running a marathon with a slow pace is really feasible. So is lugging a 15-20kg backpack for 35-40km per day for about a month or rock climbing/bouldering in the lower difficulties. To achieve either of it you wont need a very hard exercise regimen either, rather persistence.

Please don't take this as personal criticism. I just find it important to point out that there is a huge gap between what people unfamiliar with sport perceive as achievements and what actually are achievements. Just put in 4 hours of running and 4 hours of climbing per week and you will see for yourself.

Edit: Or I just failed to see the sarcasm in your post. Entirely possible :)

<comment><USER21> See my comment above. I've actually been an entrepreneur, teacher, trainer and comptetitor in the health and fitness field for the better part of the last 15 years. But the last few have seen a lot more screen time, so I'm doing what I can to change that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> More and more scientific confirmation of "mense sane in corpore sano"

<comment><USER24> _often translated as, "A sound mind in a healthy body."_

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Distance runner here. This may may not seem medically sound, but I have this theory that mental exhaustion and physical exhaustion are inversely proportional to an extent.</comment>


CNN and CBC Sued for Pirating YouTube Video - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/cnn-cbc-sued-for-pirating-31-second-youtube-video-150813/

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately for them, CNN and CBC happened to steal exactly the wrong person's video - the guy who made the video is an IP lawyer. The caption under the video says:

" _A time-lapse view of Lake Erie during the lake-effect snow storm of November 18, 2014. This was taken from my office window in the Guaranty Building where I work as an intellectual property attorney at Hodgson Russ._ "

Interesting video, by the way.

</comment><comment><USER3> Would it kill news organizations to promote someone's personal brand? The public realizes it's a home video so why resort to white labeling and completely fucking over someone? I don't get it

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem is not the "white labeling" but the copyright infringement itself.

When someone uploads a video to Youtube with the "Standard YouTube License" [1] he grants Youtube (and Youtube only) "a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty- free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content in connection with the Service and YouTube's (and its successors' and affiliates') business" but all other rights (and exceptions) given by copyright laws are reserved to the owner of said copyright.

Licensing viral videos is an emerging market nowadays, with companies like storyful [2] and Jukin Media [3] serving as a clearing house of sorts, licensing videos from the copyright owners and sublicensing them to the media outlets.

TV shows like Science of Stupid [4] (from NatGeo) and World's Craziest Fools [5] (among many others) make extensive use of these licensed clips to have enough material for many seasons.

Using an Youtube Video on a TV Show or News without licensing it first (even if properly credited) is for profit copyright infringement, in every sense analogous to counterfeit bags using trademark brands in the flea market.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms&gl=US](https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms&gl=US)

[2] [http://storyful.com/](http://storyful.com/)

[3] [https://www.jukinmedia.com/media- partners](https://www.jukinmedia.com/media-partners)

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

[5] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_Craziest_Fools](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_Craziest_Fools)</comment></comment>


The PayPal mafia - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/13/magazines/fortune/paypal_mafia.fortune/index2.htm <comment><USER2> It was already submitted with exactly the same title.

I guess that it'd be good to expand the news.ycombinator's filter to check the URL's HTML title, too. (oh, yet another call for open sourcing the news.ycombinator)

</comment><comment><USER3> Sneaky way to get some karma, submit the 2nd page instead of the 1st page of the article to get past the URL filter. Maybe I will submit the "Print View" page a week from now.

<comment><AUTHOR> I honesty didn't realize I was on the 2nd page when I submitted it. I read the article and thought I was on the first page when I submitted it. I will be more careful, sorry.</comment></comment>


Equaldex – The Collaborative LGBT Knowledge Base - <AUTHOR> http://equaldex.com

<comment><USER2> Thanks so much for sharing, David!

<comment><AUTHOR> You're welcome — it's a great resource! I hope the success continues.</comment></comment>


What type of investment hits are you going for? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@trace_cohen/what-type-of-investment-hits-are-you-going-for-5867d5ccd5ab#.qhn7miph4 <comment><USER2> facebook.com - college student directory. too small a market.

AirBnb - share housing/couches for conferences. too small a market

UBER - extra business for limo companies. too small a market.

Microsoft - software for hobby computers. too small a market.

Apple - computer for hobbyist. too small a market.

grubhub - list of good places to eat around town. too small a market.

google - were going to treat hyper links like bibliographic citations and count them and use those to rank sites. - sounds like a good phd project.

good luck figuring out some hobby website from something real. If anyone of those people told me they were going to conquer the world, I'd tell them to get off the drugs and focus on something more productive.</comment>


Neuroimaging results altered by varying analysis pipelines - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01282-z <comment><USER2> I wish university PR teams will stop peddling "cutting edge" science to the masses. I know people in the field know that fmri is problematic, but when the masses don't. We need to stop confusing the public with PR pieces and silly Ted talks. The public are not idiots, they just end up not trusting science, and rightly so because they are exposed to it mainly through half assed puff pieces that peddles half baked science. This ends up as an incoherent and wrong narrative. Thus causing mistrust.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm friends with one of the labs that took part in this study, so to give a perspective of how this was received in the field.

For the most part it wasn't a radical finding, but really good to quantify and see the effects. It also demonstrated the importance of including and documenting the parameters of the analysis pipeline.

Something else to keep in mind, especially when thinking about cognitive neuroscience (where scanning is an important tool), is that analysis are not done in isolation. Every experiment is motivated by behavioural results, neurobiological results or both. The goal of fMRI is to gain insight into the activity of the brain, but its also not very precise (given the scale of the brain).

Basically this data is analyzed in the context of what has been shown before, and how it matches our current hypothesis. This doesn't mean such variation is acceptable (see first part of my comment), but it does mean that this doesn't cause all results on fMRI to be invalid.

</comment><comment><USER4> There have been large problems with fMRI studies for a long time, even leaving aside the potentially sketchy coupling between the BOLD signal and actual neural activity and the difficulties accounting for movement artifact.

This paper published in 2016 suggests that commonly used statistical packages for analysis of fMRI data can have a false discovery rate of up to 70%: [https://www.pnas.org/content/113/28/7900](https://www.pnas.org/content/113/28/7900)

More fun, this poster presents the results of fMRI in dead salmon given an open ended mentalising task: [https://www.psychology.mcmaster.ca/bennett/psy710/readings/B...](https://www.psychology.mcmaster.ca/bennett/psy710/readings/BennettDeadSalmon.pdf)

<comment><USER5> > _Subject: One mature Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) participated in the fMRI > study. The salmon was approximately 18 inches long, weighed 3.8 lbs, and was > not alive at the time of scanning._

> _Task: The task administered to the salmon involved completing an open-ended > mentalizing task. The salmon was shown a series of photographs depicting > human individuals in social situations with a specified emotional valence. > The salmon was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo > must have been experiencing._

This is just so, so good. Thank you to this salmon for participating in science.

<comment><USER6> The salmon experiment was ages ago, and just showed that the threshold for statistical significance was too liberal. At that time, when neuroimaging was quite new, it was common practice to just pick a threshold, say .001, and not do corrections for multiple tests. That proved to be too liberal. It wasn't a totally stupid guess though. Much of the brain's BOLD activity is correlated, so Bonferroni correction was stupidly conservative (not independent tests). It was only then that newer techniques (cluster-based correction) were adopted, which explicitly made an assumption about the spatial autocorrelation of the data. The one assumption of this technique was that this autocorrelation was the same throughout the brain, which ended up not being a good assumption, though computationally useful. Newer methods today try to model the autocorrelation in the data for cluster based correction, or have moved to other numerical techniques for correction of multiple comparisons re repeated resampling.

So, while the dead salmon experiment was eye opening to some when the neuroimaging field was very new, it is no longer relevant now.

Neuroimaging techniques are constantly improving, both from better analytical techniques and knowledge about the factors that can compromise the veracity of analyses, but they, including the present paper, show that neuroimgaging is bunk science or useless, which is most certainly incorrect.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for this, it was interesting and helpful. My comment was mostly appreciating the sardonic and dry humor in the poster (and the concept of the study itself).

It was my first time hearing about this, and it struck me as the type of funny anecdote that could be slipped into a talk/lecture (I find it takes quite a bit of finesse to keep non-technical people engaged when talking about statistics and data science, so humor and relatable examples always help). So, it's good to know the broader context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a big problem and not just in neuroscience. Reproducible science is inherently hard and there aren't a lot of great tools that make it easy. The key to solving it is having a way to track data lineage and a reproducible way to run the processing. I've been building a system that implements those ideas for the past several years called Pachyderm [0]. We've helped many scientists across different fields run their pipelines in a reproducible way. If you're suffering from this problem we'd love to chat with you.

[0] [https://www.pachyderm.com/](https://www.pachyderm.com/)

<comment><USER6> THis is why I am a big supporter of Configurable Pipeline for the Analysis of Connectomes (C-PAC) [https://fcp- indi.github.io/docs/latest/user/index.html](https://fcp- indi.github.io/docs/latest/user/index.html) for neuroimaging. This software facilitates both exact reproducibility and testing variability in results as a function of multiple preprocessing choices, the latter allowing one to be sure that your results is not idiosyncratic to specific choices in proprocessing (e.g., smoothing, nuisance correction methods, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't really see why standardized pipelines are the answer. That just makes things reproducible while ignoring the question of accuracy. Phrenology can be perfectly reproducible, but unless there's a real effect to measure it's just chasing ghosts. So few people actually understand what these calculations are doing. I don't think making things even more cook-by-numbers is really going to achieve anything other than empowering more people to not know what they're doing.

<comment><USER9> Actually the paper, which our lab participated in, though I wasn't personally involved, doesn't really support the idea of standardizing. What it really lends credence to is the idea of running multiple pipelines and averaging the results. Because the average of the results were really quite robust.

Put another way. If your effect of interest disappears with slight changes in your pipeline then the effect probably isn't that robust to begin with. That doesn't mean it isn't a true effect, but on average it probably isn't.

<comment><USER10> I brought this up in a grand-cousin thread, but to what degree does numerical analysis matter here? I mentioned [0], which is a must-read paper for folks doing numerical work, and the author brings up two examples (sections 9 and 11) where averaging over an ensemble of pipelines could not just fail to converge on the right answer, but actually mask systemic biases in the ecosystem.

If your effect of interest disappears with slight changes to your pipeline (perturbation), then maybe the effect is weak or chaotic or unstable, but also maybe there is a systemic bias in your pipeline!

[0] [https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/Mindless.pdf](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/Mindless.pdf)

<comment><USER9> Agree with fluidcraft here. I don't want to discount the importance of numerical analysis, but the different preprocessing and analysis packages that I am personally aware of make substantively different decisions about how to proceed. For example, a psycho-physiological analysis, a connectivity analysis that tries to show how connectivity with a seed region changes in response to task condition, done in SPM will deconvolve the BOLD signal in the seed region to get at a purported neural signal, while in FSL, the condition regressor is convolved with haemodynamic response function. Both are "correct" in that in an ideal world you should get similar results doing either thing, but in the real world you very well may not. Similarly, different packages may make different assumptions about smoothness of brain regions in calculating whether the size of a cluster is significantly above zero.

And even when you use the same software package, there are various things you might do differently, parameters you might set differently; even the order of certain operations maybe switched around. A classic example of that has to do with slice timing correction. Since fMRI slices are acquired at different times, a typical thing to do would be to interpolate the slices so that you can treat them as if they were acquired all at the same time. However, motion correction between volumes, in which subject motion is partially corrected by jiggling around each image until they maximally overlap each other, can be done before or after slice timing correction; but the consequences of that is that motion artifacts can propagate through volumes in different ways depending on the order you do it in; but neither order is definitely better, because it matters how much motion is a problem in the scans, and how long it takes to acquire a volume (e.g. tr 2 seconds), and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Unfortunate, this is big news because it means all the brain imaging science suffers from the reproducibility crisis.

This means that all the TED talks saying 'we know this because fmri' should be assumed incorrect until proven otherwise with multiple double blind studies (which is too expensive in the current era to actually reproduce all of these studies).

<comment><USER12> Yeah, but to be fair, fMRI has been problematic for years and years. When I was doing my PhD (2008-11), I read a bunch of neuroimaging studies, and was very sceptical about the results because of the small samples, and the undocumented pre-processing.

To be fair though, you shouldn't believe any science in most disciplines unless its been replicated by multiple labs/authors.

<comment><USER13> Is it common for labs to attempt replication?

From my limited understanding, replication does not have much prestige and can be difficult to get published. Is this a problem, and have research universities found a solution?

<comment><USER12> Yeah, this is a real problem. The incentive structure is such that people are encouraged to find "novel" things. This leads to lots of data-dredging for significant findings that are counter-intuitive.

And because of the bias towards novelty, replications are not regarded as worth publishing and so these results remain unchallenged.

It's a hard problem, and has been known to be a hard problem for at least the last forty years (within psychology, at least) and yet very little has been done.

Brian Nosek and the OSF are doing good work here though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> From the ingress:

 _This finding highlights the potential consequences of a lack of standardized pipelines for processing complex data._

Couldn't it at least well be concluded to 'highlight the potential consequences should standardized pipelines for processing complex data be introduced' ?

If they had all been doing the same thing, aren't odds the results would be just as fishy but it would have been even harder to notice? Seems to me the way you know something really is there is generally that it keeps showing up in analysis with a multitude of different appropriate methods.

</comment><comment> jacob-peacock It seems like building stats consensus on analysis pipelines for given study designs could be very worthwhile. Still surprised there's no declarative statistical programming language to analyze RCTs with code like "Maximize primary outcome, control age, account for attrition." Of course, written this way it sounds extremely naive—well _how_ do you account for attrition? But, of course, people analyze data this way all the time, just with more verbose code. And that's the point of declarative programming: focus on what you want rather than how to get it.

(Also, not sure what the HN norms are, but to avoiding self-plagarization, note this is cross-posted from my twitter account.)

</comment><comment><USER10> Some of us like to talk of numerical accuracy as an arcane and trivial detail, but there is no automated technique for always eliminating accuracy problems [0], and this article is showing us that there are real consequences to applied practices when our arithmetic isn't careful.

[0] [https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/Mindless.pdf](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/Mindless.pdf)

<comment><USER15> none of the problems reported here are because of numerical accuracy.</comment></comment>


Don't waste your time in crappy startup jobs - <AUTHOR> http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/dont-waste-your-time-in-crappy-startup-jobs/ <comment><USER2> Stock options expiry: One important point that was not mentioned by OP is the typical contract clause most startups use that changes the expiry of your vested options from something like 10 years while you're employed to 30 days if you leave the startup. You took a below-market salary in exchange for equity options and if you leave your job you can't keep those options because you have to exercise them, otherwise they'll expire worthless. Basically, once you leave the company, you have to pay the company to buy its stock, otherwise your options expire and you get nothing in exchange for your sacrifice!

See [http://gigaom.com/2011/06/05/5-mistakes-you-cant-afford- to-m...](http://gigaom.com/2011/06/05/5-mistakes-you-cant-afford-to-make-with- stock-options/)

</comment><comment><USER3> How isn't this on the frontpage with 42 points?

Everyone reading this coming from r/programming? Am I allowed to say "hello reddit" on hackernews?

<comment><USER4> An article is critical of something the HN crowd tends to like. Why must the people giving this points come from reddit?

Is anyone who questions the system not true enough of a Scotsman for you?

<comment><USER3> Just that I came here from reddit where this was at the top of r/programming at the time. Full of vibrant discussion and upvotes.

On HN ... it was 22 hours old and all evidence suggesting that it was never noticed here (no comments), but very popular elsewhere (a lot of upvotes/submissions)

edit: it still _is_ on top of r/programming with over a 1000 points.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 0 comments and 23 points? What's up with this? This seems like very compelling content to me.

<comment><USER4> >This seems like very compelling content to me.

Very compelling content, everyone knows here isn't the place to talk about it. You have to keep in mind, YC points to HN as the place to go show off for PG. It literally says that on the how to apply page. Even if you're not here to suck up, you can be shadow-banned for being too critical of YC or the startups they've funded.

edit: And thats just for me as a guy who doesn't post under a name connected to me or my online identity in any way. People for whom their comments can follow them around have even more reason to bite their tongue.

<comment><USER5> That thought had certainly crossed my mind, but I thought it was just paranoia, the continued disparity between /r/programming and here though does lend credence to the the theory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I agree with a bit of this but I think this is more about managing unreallistic expectations than about start-ups. I wrote a rebuttal to this here - <http://wp.me/s2ikdZ-startups>

<comment><USER7> An excellent reply, given that you only read about a third of Church's post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't waste your time reading crappy articles about crappy startup jobs.

Are all startups are the same? Yah Think?

In working startupland, you get one bet at a time. pick a winner, make sure you have a ride and stop whining.</comment>


The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads - <AUTHOR> http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/04/two-gloomy-views-on-consumer-tech.html

<comment><USER2> The amount of talent at Facebook always amazed me and depressed me at the same time. All that talent focusing on a service that I just don't care about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Some people make the case that tons of fresh talent has been wasted creating Wall Street's "financial engineering products" or whatever.

Does working at Facebook fall into the same tier of wasted talent and effort?</comment></comment>