YC Annual Letter 2017 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.samaltman.com/2017-yc-annual-letter <comment><USER3> > In future years, we also hope to explore how something like 'financial aid' > might work for people that need a small amount of capital to help get their > startup going.

Sounds interesting. I always kinda hated how people fresh out of high school with zero credit can have so much money handed to them for going to school. While if they wanted to get a business loan or buy a house they would be much more scrutinized.

I wonder with that money instead and right mentorship if they could come out ahead of their peers who used that money for college instead.

I know some people who just go to college because they feel like they have to, and get degrees they don't even use. Imagine one spending 4 years going into debt, the other coming out a head with a real world profitable startup. One thing I always hate about school work is I feel like I'm just doing stuff for the sake of being graded or being busy. I rather spend my time creating stuff that's more real instead, learn as I go. There's a bunch of free and even paid training on-demand on the internet to fill in your skill gap.

<comment><USER4> Thiel's Fellowship is somewhat based on that idea, a scholarship for NOT going to college.

I still think college has value, but the costs have been increasing much faster then inflation, while the value has been declining due to the systemic efficiencies of acquiring knowledge in the information age. Together these are making the value proposition worse and worse. I can't judge anyone for wanting to skip college.

There is a lot more we can be doing as a society to encourage entrepreneurship. It would be nice if in the future we could let our children use 429 college savings plans for angel/seed funding instead of educational expenses. Especially if tuition becomes free in the next 10-20 years anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft have powerful advantages that are still not fully understood by most founders and investors....This trend is unlikely to reverse without antitrust action, and I suggest people carefully consider its implications for startups._

I think the "startup community" needs to have a serious conversation about this [2]. If we agree that machine learning is going to be a major underlying technology moving forward and that as a result, data is the new Oil [1], then the top 5 technology companies serve as the new Oil Barons.

It goes further than that actually in my mind, as these firms are disrupting themselves and innovating as fast if not faster in many areas than small startups can. They are in every industry and if they can't move as fast, then they buy the talent or the whole team. Granted, a small team will always move faster, but I think that these mega corps know enough now to know that they can pivot on trends if needed.

I do worry about the likelihood of a startup that could beat google, facebook, microsoft etc... with humble roots. Maybe if a "startup" came in with 100M+ in funding, but more than likely at this point those companies would be funding that startup, if only for the intelligence value.

So while "we've seen this before - someone always comes out of nowhere" which gave rise to the current crop of major companies, it would have to be pretty left field at this point for a company to compete with the major players without investment from an arm of theirs. Considering Snapchat is the biggest IPO in the coming year, I don't have a lot of hope that there will be something coming through.

[1][http://fortune.com/2016/07/11/data-oil-brainstorm- tech/](http://fortune.com/2016/07/11/data-oil-brainstorm-tech/)

[2] [https://medium.com/@andrewkemendo/the-ai-revolution-will- be-...](https://medium.com/@andrewkemendo/the-ai-revolution-will-be-different- from-the-microprocessor-revolution-cb417d324203)

<comment><USER6> Reading between the lines, wasn't Sam complaining about a trend whereby many promising startups get acquired way too early ?

<comment><USER5> I can't speak for sam but in my mind that is a big piece of it.

If you don't sell, then the big companies don't get bigger. Unfortunately in that case if you do get big enough despite that, they will just target you and take a chunk of your market (Instagram Stories vs Snapchat) so that you can't dominate.

Look, it's brilliant and exactly what every firm should do. The question is really, if it's a net positive to have 5 companies run everything* in consumer technology. I don't know but history seems to not like that.

<comment><USER7> Oligopolization happens from time to time when productivity growth decreases. Firms are forced to downsize, merge, acquire and consolidate to shrink the levels of capital and labor they invested in when projecting forward into a future with the baseline assumption of higher productivity growth.

ML in its current form - efficiency optimization across a ton of different vertical industries - is also a reaction to decreasing productivity. If you can't grow your revenues, you need to shrink your costs, and ML/analytics do that well.

Once we see a new technology or infrastructure driver that jumpstarts productivity growth (distributed electricity, refrigeration, plumbing/running water, public roads, combustion engines, more recently the internet and mobile phones) startups will be able to once again flourish and will be able to return to the public markets with their own company/brand rather than look for acquihire exits as many do in the current climate.

Something that makes sense to me would be some form of basic human sleep/energy acquisition optimization. We spend 1/3 of our time asleep - <USER2> there a way to use VR/AR to enhance productivity during this time, or to avoid it altogether without killing us? It seems unnatural, but many facets of our current lifestyle would have seemed unnatural to someone 50, 100, 200 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Hacker News has 3.4 million users per month and 350,000 users per day, with 4 million pageviews a day. There are just under 1 million registered accounts, with several hundred added each day. Users post around 1,000 articles and 6,000 comments to the site per day."

First time I have seen those numbers, very impressive. I thought there were a lot less users.

<comment><USER9> I am sure there are many more lurkers than active participants

<comment><USER10> This is true of pretty much any Internet community, so not that surprising.

<comment><USER11> I think it's especially true here though due to HN's crowd sourced quality control. The rules are largely adhered to by the user base as well, and it's not just an agree/disagree button.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hi sama, great letter. The only thing I would suggest for the next round is to identify some misses. What are some RFPs that you tried to solve and didn't and what are your insights on this? The two annual letters I like the most are Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. From Bill Gates, I don't mind the endless optimism since it is a foundation. From Warren Buffet, I expect the ole hoe hum, we'd be trillionaires if we had seen this trend or we were totally wrong about this ...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Will add this in next time. Plenty of misses to write about!

<comment><USER13> I you're still reading, I was glad to see you mention the international funding successes and would like to learn more about the internationalization of the YC program. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Our mission is to enable the most innovation of any company in the world in order to make the future great for everyone." I know many people will read that and roll their eyes back and believe it is just a marketing gimmick for the gullible and like most investors YC just cares about the money. The thing is that they _do_ deeply care about founders and making things better in the world, as naive as that may sound to outsiders.

<comment><USER15> It's funny you say this—the first thing I did, even before reading the article, was search for "Thiel." It's going to be hard for me to take this sort of thing seriously, this telegraphing of benevolence which is so central to YC's branding, until they address the fact that one of their "partners" is such an obviously destructive force within society. They don't even have to do anything but say goodbye, and they won't.

<comment> purple-again While I disagree with many of Trumps beliefs and by proxy probably many of Thiels as well the fact that they refused to further the division of our country by excommunicating him for his beliefs is a huge pro in my book.

The founder of Rails saying he would fire any of his employees that supported Trump was sickening and that kind of attitude will never allow us to move from bloodshed and war to one people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _We are only about 30 years into the age of software, about 20 years into the age of the internet, and about 2 years into the age of artificial intelligence_

Which innovations over the last 2 years most indicate a new age of artificial intelligence?

I undertook some research, and noticed:

      3 Months Ago: Google Translate AI had a breakthrough
      5 Months Ago: Amazon/Facebook/Google/IBM/Microsoft launch an AI Partnership
      1 Year Ago: AlphaGo has a big win and OpenAI is founded
      2 Years Ago: Google (now Waymo) performs its first public driverless ride
      3 Years Ago: Google acquires DeepMind and interest in Deep Learning takes off
      6 Years Ago: IBM Watson wins Jeopardy

All indications suggest increased interest and investment in AI, but from an external perspective I'm interested to know whether quantitative changes (big data, cloud infrastructure, GPU processing speed etc.) and increased interest have genuinely spurred a qualitative new era of AI free of the pattern of "AI Winters" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter)).

<comment><USER17> We're about 2-3 years into the latest iteration of neural networks (aka deep learning), and the first one with practical application. IBM Watson didn't use neural networks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Re YC Research, please consider a project looking at the challenges surrounding climate change communications. To state the obvious, the science on climate change is settled, but many people are still skeptical/resistant or in outright denial. Heated arguments and throwing around citations to journal articles really doesn't change anyone's mind. There is a deeper, nuanced communications challenge at play, and it's the exact type of thing that YC would be great at addressing. There are some very interesting ways that technology (and the creativity of the YC community) could be used to tackle this issue.

Climate change may be the defining issue of the next century, and it would be a shame to be stymied by the communications challenges. I hope you'll consider it.

<comment><USER19> It's not about nuance. It's just echo chambers reinforced by the media those in support or denial consume:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_\(media\))

Consolidation of corporate media combined with algorithms of biggest, online providers have really cemented the effect in. Past few years, esp election, had strongest effects on isolation and reinforcement I've ever seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20>
        >> funded over ... 1,470 companies
        >> more than 50 of our companies are worth more than $100 million each.

3.4% is a remarkable ratio.

<comment><USER21> Especially given that those numbers are back-loaded, with somewhere around a third of all YC companies having been funded within the last two years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> >I expect that people will talk about software as one of our secret weapons.

can you give a broad overview of what software YC creates? What does it do? is it internal tracking and stats, or exclusive libraries that YC-funded companies get to use to build their products?

<comment><USER23> Bookface is one thing I know of: [https://bookface.ycombinator.com/](https://bookface.ycombinator.com/)

I think they developed it in-house.

<comment><USER24> I wrote it. It was needed because YC had funded larger batches and the hardest part of a community is knowing who is in it and who you can trust and ask for help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nice writeup sama, but the history is a bit revisionist:

 _> We are only about 30 years into the age of software, about 20 years into the age of the internet, and about 2 years into the age of artificial intelligence._

Software has been around--and actively making bank!--for over 40 years. The internet has been around longer in the form of academic institutions, email, and BBS than you mention.

And AI has, of course, been around at least as long as software.

I appreciate you have a message to send, but maybe don't ignore the path we took to get here.

<comment><USER26> Those time periods are what most tech people consider as when those technologies really took off. And therefore it makes sense to say that. If he was writing a history of computer science, I agree that it would have been inaccurate to say that.

<comment><USER19> An example to support your view might be the switch to the trend of paying to use server resources like a utility. Centralized resource managed by people other than users that ran many parties' workloads with metered CPU, RAM, etc usage. Then, the various devices access it through a standard UI instead of native apps recoded in many OS's. Quicker setup for new users than rolling their own. Increased flexibility with the virtualization. Better physical and online security due to the centralized monitoring.

On the software side, people found that safety, scalability, and maintenance were important. They needed high-level languages that did things like bounds- checks or stack protection. They needed the ability to freeze and inspect errant programs instead of crash them. They needed the software interfaces to check for right data being passed. They needed to scale on multiple CPU's. They preferred their OS's to come with source code for easier fixes or extensions.

Im sure you know all about those two mainframes from IBM (1963-1970's) and Burroughs (1961) that did those things. Then came to power most large business and government institutions critical apps to this day. Anyway, I hear people made incremental improvements doing similar things with x86, Linux, and vastly lower cost-per-resource. Incremental improvements on capabilities that took off in the 60's. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> On the HN front - I would like to see a discussion and then the implementation of measures to encourage meaningful discussion, discourage low-effort comments, but also to discourage "negative lurking". Like other users noticed, there are a lot of lurkers -- some of which downvote and move along. Because frequently I do not understand why a post has been downvoted (my own or otherwise), I am discouraged from contributing. A byproduct of both negative lurking and the fact that HN has concluded itself to be an intelligent community is that some readers, including myself, feel judged by the score next to our comments. There is someone out there reasonably asking "why do you care?" but it is also important to acknowledge that this phenomenon exists. Part of the longevity of a user's participation is the willingness of the community to accept it.

<comment><USER28> You're not given the ability to downvote without reaching a certain karma threshold, so there are already some thoughts in place there.

<comment><USER27> It actually seems worse to me that people who have been around to achieve that threshold (it's 500, right?) don't have exhibit the etiquette I'm asking for. They should know better, right?

<comment><USER29> I'm going to respectfully disagree. Part of why I like HN is that meta- discussion of the "why did you downvote me?" and "downvoting because ..." are actively discouraged. Better to silently downvote and move on, which I do frequently for all many of reasons. This has next to no impact unless multiple readers do the same thing, at which point greying out comments serves the intended purpose of conveying that the community as a whole doesn't think the comment is valuable.

<comment><USER19> "serves the intended purpose of conveying that the community as a whole doesn't think the comment is valuable."

No, it says that more people downvoted it than upvoted it by a certain number of votes. Says nothing about the community as a whole which may have never seen the comment due to the downvotes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'd love to know the 50 companies with >$100mm valuations. Anyone know of a list or can start one? I saw this was 32 companies last year and really curious which were added.

<comment><USER31> where is the list of 32 companies?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Aside from a throwaway line about a possible "macroeconomic meltdown", there seems to be little attention paid to big signs of an overall negative trend in tech jobs:

* "Bay Area: Tech job growth has rapidly decelerated" (from here: [http://www.siliconvalley.com/2017/02/10/tech-job-growth-slow...](http://www.siliconvalley.com/2017/02/10/tech-job-growth-slows-in-bay-area/))

* "Tech Jobs Took a Big Hit Last Year" (from here: [http://fortune.com/2017/02/16/tech-jobs-layoffs-microsoft-in...](http://fortune.com/2017/02/16/tech-jobs-layoffs-microsoft-intel/))

The first of those two articles has been submitted twice to HN with zero comments both times. The second has not been submitted at all as far as I can see.

Is it possible there is a bit of a collective head-in-the-sand phenomenon going on?

<comment><USER33> At the start of 2016 there was some consensus that things were cooling off. Markets were down, there were fewer seed stage investments and an all but dead tech IPO market for the first half of the year. Investors started to advise companies to lower their burn rates [[https://bothsidesofthetable.com/so-what- is-the-right-level-o...](https://bothsidesofthetable.com/so-what-is-the-right- level-of-burn-rate-for-a-startup-these-days-f514545e226b#.4dbbx7rxi)]. Arguably the market conditions were driven by the 2015 - 2016 Chinese market turbulence [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015%E2%80%9316_Chinese_stock_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015%E2%80%9316_Chinese_stock_market_turbulence)], but who really knows. Growth has picked back up this year and I'd expect job growth to bounce back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> @sama : Great write up. Regarding the admission process you had mentioned on Dalton Caldwell that he took "a process that used to be stressful and deeply imperfect and improved it by a huge amount."

Can you please elaborate on that?

</comment><comment><USER35> Hi sama,

I know you wrote that YC Research will likely not expand in the near future. If you do I think the most interesting topic would be the destruction of the journal industry and freeing information. At least in my opinion it would make a lot of sense for YC to try and free as much research as possible which entrepreneurs could build upon. I can only wonder how many more interesting startups we'd get if a random hacker in India or Ethiopia had access to the latest journals on medicine, biology etc. That would take a lot of commitment and being in active position to some powerful interests. This should be attacked from a legal, political and technological angle.

</comment><comment><USER36> > 4) Does this company have a clear and important mission?

> Without this, I usually get bored. More importantly, companies that don't > have this usually have a hard time recruiting enough great people to work > with them, and thus struggle to become very large.

I find this one interesting. When Google started, there were many incumbent search engines. Their mission was to provide better results than what existed, i.e. improve on an existing product.

Uber's "mission" was to get privileged people with smart phones and disposable income a sexy/cool ride home from the bar.

Facebook was a social networking site targeted at college students...what was it's mission? To allow people to see what that cute person in their Psych class was up to this weekend?

Snapchat...the clear and important mission to allow for safely sending risqué pictures?

While I believe Sam's belief that they WANT to work with companies with clear important missions, that doesn't seem to be a/the deciding factor in becoming "very large", or attracting great people. If anything, it seems like the "spaghetti at the wall" approach is what happens - some startups gain momentum, and then it's the high growth trajectory that attracts a ton of talent.

<comment><USER37> Perhaps the issue is you not understanding the companies' missions.

What you're describing is products, which represent a manifestation of one piece of the mission, and are a building block that helps construct a world in which the mission is possible.

Google, for example, is (and was) on a mission to do much more than build a really sweet search engine. Their goal from the beginning has been (though now refined): "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That's a little bit easier to get behind, isn't it?

Uber isn't about "getting privileged people with smart phones and disposable income a sexy/cool ride home from the bar;" its mission statement is, "make transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere, for everyone."

Facebook? From the beginning Zuck stated his goal was to "Make the world more open and connected."

Snapchat, according to Spiegel, is about making it easy to "communicate with the full range of human emotion."

It takes years and insane amounts of effort from large numbers of people to build even one tiny piece of each of these missions (which makes sense - they're enormous missions). But working for a very mission-driven company, I can attest that it's the mission that keeps me going, even when I'm only one tiny spoke in one of the many products that will contribute a tiny piece to making the mission eventually more achievable.

It seems you are viewing these products in a very negative light, and in doing so you're missing the forest for the trees. I would guess that all of the companies above will be wildly successful, and will have a wide range of products, all dedicated to achieving their stated mission. Rome wasn't built in a day.

<comment><USER38> > (though now refined)

That's exactly the point. Google didn't start with that mission, it had to be refined. And Google, meaning Larry and Sergey working on algo's prior to actually starting a commercial entity. The parent's point is that many of the most successful tech investments have come from businesses that are generally dismissed as toys in their initial phases. YC invests in companies at their earliest stage, so it seems odd that the mission statement needs to be so well refined. This invariably means there's a disconnect between what pg has traditionally said and what sama is dictating now.

> Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people > dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign. That's probably why everyone > else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed > as toys. And the first planes, and the first cars. At this point, when > someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could > envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to > invest.

[http://paulgraham.com/organic.html](http://paulgraham.com/organic.html)

Anyway, I think the reason that sama says this is because it is absolutely essentially for a company to get big, but that doesn't mean they need to have it right away. Also, let's be fair, determining something that is clear and important is very subjective.

<comment><USER17> Yes. I'll add that Google's initial goal of a search engine that is actually helpful (not just algorithmically, but without clutter and without paid- placement) was _plenty_ inspiring... especially for great developers. And, being more concrete than their general abstract corporate mission statement, it was actually more inspiring.

I want to add the mechanism of success-due-to-toy: incumbents dismiss you, not as incompetent, but as irrelevant to them. You're not stealing their customers, because you're meeting a different need, and are worse at what their customers want - further, the incubents couldn't fight you even if they wanted to, because they can't afford to desert their customers.

Then, over time, you improve til you are good enough for their customers - while stll meeting those other needs. The exodus begins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Hey Sam,

Here's a question for you (or other YC folks) on YC recommendations.

Give that I'm planning to apply for the next cycle, would it benefit me to ask for recommendations from 7 or 8 folks who I've worked with in the past and have strong relationships with?

It's not totally clear to me whether it would be kosher to ask for those or if it's something you'd rather that people do spontaneously. I'm also wondering if 7 or 8 is too many given how little time I know you have to spend on each applicant. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER40> I think it's a mistake to conceive of Reddit as a place to "waste time."

It's also the new platform for lots of important online communities to discuss and disseminate information.

<comment><USER41> While I think it was a joke, I'll just say that Reddit has become an important professional resource for me. I have found a couple high signal-to-noise subs with senior professionals from my industry. If I have a gnarly problem, there's a good chance someone there can help me out. This is huge because there isn't really a Stack Overflow type option for these sorts of problems generally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Is there a reason why this is published on Sam's blog and not on YC's blog?

Oh and a remark on the letter's typography: the double spaces after periods should be single spaces.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had emailed this out to the YC community over the weekend. I got word from a journalist it was about to leak, and I couldn't get in touch with the person that runs the YC blog (I don't yet know how to post on the new one, but I'm sure going to figure it out now). I didn't want to wait, so I just posted it where I could.

Also I happen to think documents are easier to read with double spaces after sentences. Surely there is something more important to complain about than that.

<comment><USER43> > Surely there is something more important to complain about than that.

[https://plus.google.com/+VicGundotra/posts/gcSStkKxXTw](https://plus.google.com/+VicGundotra/posts/gcSStkKxXTw)

Sam, it's meant with the love of the art. I was going to make the same complaint. For those of us who work in a particular field, certain things just stick out and it feels very natural to point that out and make the world perfect in a way we are confident it can be perfect if some things are changed (I review grants, I convert double-spaces to single-spaces so much that I can spot one from a mile away and change it right away... sadly, I don't have access to change your writings :)).

<comment><USER42> Exactly, typography is a subject that is very dear to my heart.

And while I agree that it may be a personal preference, there is a side effect to using double spaces: layout engines consider single spaces the default for their line breaking algorithm, and sometimes, when using double spacing, new sentences start at a new line with a space before the first letter which, in this very case, looks weird and therefore hinders readability.

<comment><AUTHOR> I love typography too! I really do. This is my one sin in the field...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I appreciate the letter. The following caught my eye, because I was sure we had all learned that the ends do not justify the means. Surely the Zenefits debacle was a lesson in ethics and not one about avoiding getting caught doing the wrong thing.

> we have to work harder to find people doing a startup for the right reason: > to bring an idea they're obsessed with to life, and willing to do something > unreasonable to see it happen

</comment><comment><USER45> Minor nitpick: _n^2_ isn't the correct factor to describe hyperscale networks. It's much slower, probably _n x log n_.

</comment><comment><USER46> So Sama is a 9gagger.

</comment><comment><USER47> "The percentage of women who apply to YC is roughly the same as the percentage of women who get funded. The same is true for Black and Latino founders."

I'm guessing what he means to say here is that if x% of the applicant pool is woman/black/latino, then x% of the accepted pool is woman/black/latino, right? The way it's phrased it sounds like every woman/black/latino who applies is accepted

<comment><USER48> Not to me.

 _percentage_ of women who apply ~= _percentage_ of women who get funded.

<comment><USER47> you're right - after rereading I realize that it's totally equivalent

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> > the fact that one of their "partners" is such an obviously destructive force > within society.

Can you expand on the "obvious" and "destructive" force? What exactly did Thiel do that is obviously destructive to our whole society? You mean Palantir? Wasn't that there for a while?

<comment><USER50> We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13662204](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13662204) and marked it off-topic.</comment></comment>


'BitLicense' Regulatory Regime Proposed by N.Y.'s Lawsky - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-17/-bitlicense-regulatory-regime-proposed-by-n-y-s-lawsky.html <comment><USER2> These regulations seem like a win for Bitcoin as a currency. Most of the clauses themselves don't seem so onerous for any company that intends on legally dealing in Bitcoin, the government gets its framework for dealing with fraud and money laundering, and the licensing itself should act as a signal to worried parties that dealing in Bitcoin with licensed operators is legal, and that the operator itself has taken sufficient measures to guarantee the safety of all funds being managed.</comment>


One Hundred Ideas for Computing - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/samsquire/ideas <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting it again. Always would enjoy more discussion so I've created issues for discussion threads.

There's a page 2 now (another 85+): [https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2](https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2) Which are even better IMHO. I'd suggest someone not familiar with the series to try ideas2 first.</comment>


Docker Image: Swift for TensorFlow REPL - <AUTHOR> I've created a Docker image to allow users on any OS to easily play around with Swift for TensorFlow without worrying about interfering with any existing Swift/Xcode installations or worrying about dependencies.
You can drop into the Swift + TensorFlow REPL with the following single command, provided you've got docker installed:
docker run  --privileged --cap-add sys_ptrace -it --rm zachgrayio/swift-tensorflow-repl
From here, you can begin entering swift code and import and use TensorFlow! There's usage guides in the official repo, as well as in the dockerfile repo - it's here if you're curious: https://github.com/zachgrayio/swift-tensorflow-repl <comment><USER2> Isn't running someone else's image as a privileged container a terrible security practice? Or do I misunderstand what the --privileged flag does?</comment>


How do you tell nicely tell someone their requests are not in scope? - <AUTHOR>

Okay, I swear I am not new to this but it gets me every time.
1. Client gives requirements for software, we quote a price (hourly, not fixed price) to complete it.
2. Client comes back with requirements that are not in scope (were listed nowhere nor mentioned anytime earlier) and only thought they would be done because ... well, he needs/wants them and assumed we'd know that because they are so important.
I know we are in the right, both contractually and ethically, but that all matters little if you have a really pissed off client. Okay, so what are your tips for dealing with this situation?
The best combat may be to just bloat your estimates - like A LOT - but technically we already do this just to handle give within KNOWN scope so this would be even more. Plus it's not always an option when other people are estimating/trying to be competitive. And I'm dealing with a situation now where he'd pretty much blow past any reasonable buffer anyways.
Anyways, maybe it's just always a sucky situation but I'd appreciate any tips/tricks/advice/support/encouragement my fellow HNers can share.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I suggest that your client's apparent anger is nothing more than a negotiation tactic - whether they are consciously aware of this or not.

If you have agreed a list of requirements and a price, and you have this written down and signed off by both parties, then you should stick to your guns. Giving in to your client's demands will most likely lead to them asking for more and more things not in the original list. They will simply stomp all over you.

When I worked freelance I included a clause that said something along the lines of: "Any additional work required that is not included in this document will be quoted for on a new project basis."

I made sure I charged at quite a higher rate than I had done for the original quote, due to the extra effort involved in ensuring that the new request(s) didn't break functionality elsewhere or result in me having to refactor significant portions of code.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is sort of what happened when they asked for the new features, we responded with estimates for that work and explained why it wasn't included ... they got pretty upset. Implied WE were the ones playing a game or something, when of course, from our end this is just totally straightforward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It is called managing expectations, and it requires communication, communication, communication.

You may have the contract on your side, but in the end, building a successful freelance practice depends heavily on repeat business, so it is up to you, the expert on the subject, to bring this issues up early enough and make sure they actually understand what you are talking about.

(I feel your pain)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a terribly common refrain. Perhaps all freelance developers in a given area should collaborate (read: collude) and come up with an agreed upon, open source scope of work document framework? That way, setting aside variables like price, feature requests, and time estimates, there can at least be a common structure that developers in a particular geography can rally around to at least attempt to minimize the impact of this type of problem.

This is the precise reason why I am trying my best to come up with my next start up idea, client work is a drain...

</comment><comment><USER5> You could increase your price or you could agree to get what was originally planned done first and then look at the new extra stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, the problem is that they insist on neither: that both the price stay the same and that the extra stuff is required. Rock - Me - Hard place.

BUT I do feel bad in these cases because I believe they thought it would be included. Plus it may truly be necessary for the final product to be useful for them. So I want to help them, plus, ya know, don't want them pissed at me :)

<comment><USER6> Personally, I'd say you just apologise for misunderstanding their intentions, politely inform them that the new feature is going to cost extra, and then suggest that, due to the misunderstanding, you're going to reduce your price for that implementation to $X, where $X is either the price you actually have in mind (if you don't mind being less than 100% truthful for the sake of fairness) or a slightly lower price (if you're willing to pay for their mistake so as to maintain more truthfulness). Yes, it can be hard to admit to mistakes you didn't actually make, but it's often necessary to not piss off some people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> i would try to cut scope on other items or at least compare the value of this item to other items. To do this you need a deep understanding of the core value of the app and how each feature contributes to the value.

Ultimately tell him your bid is based on hours and you are fine to switch things around.

</comment><comment><USER8> It depends on what the new stuff involves. If it's details on already-decided features, just tell them "well that's going to take some more hours than already estimated," and if it's for things that are out of scope (design is a common one), just say, "that'll be extra." Have a sense of the scope and don't be afraid to tell them that will cost more. You should be able to explain the scope as you understand it and why the request falls outside of it. If you treat the agreed-spec like a checklist, it makes it much easier to clarify the amount of work you'll be doing.

</comment><comment><USER9> You should reply to the clients when you provide the original quote with a very succinct summary/bullet list of what is being provided - SUPER SUCCINCT. and get them to sing-off on _that_

So if they come back with anything, and it is not boiled down into the bullet item list of features - its additional service request.

This might help them to further think about their product.

One thing that always pisses me off when getting a quote from a developer is when they say some large number of hours are required for some nebulous task.

"Setup development environment: 40 hours"

or something similar.

shouldn't your development environment be setup? or streamlined such to not require 40 hours?

so, make sure you reply to them with a super succinct understanding of what is to be delivered and this will be the go-to document for any discussion about scope.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is good advice, and I think that's what went wrong in this case. We were told to estimate based on what we had, even though we needed to go deeper. The rationale was that we couldn't put so much time into a proposal that was so small. And on a smaller project, more risk was acceptable, which is okay, I guess, but then this is what happens.

"Setup development environment: 40 hours"

This is ridiculous, though, well UNLESS you are hiring someone to pick up work on a large existing project, in which case they may actually need the time to get all the dependencies and get it running. To be clear, our items are always in chunks of actual functionality, because this makes the most sense to ... well, everyone. And it makes it easier for them to pick and choose/set priorities/etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You should take a class in project management.

Seriously. It will help a lot with this type of situation.</comment>


Alberta government gives green light to Calgary-Edmonton Hyperloop project - <AUTHOR> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/alberta/article-alberta-government-gives-green-light-to-hyperloop-project/ <comment><USER2> Let's look at the actual text of the article.

 _"Toronto-based startup TransPod has signed a memorandum of understanding with the government to study the potential of a high-speed hyperloop system and help it attract investors."_

And let's translate that from polite Canadian PR speak: this will never, ever, ever happen, but it sounds nice, so we'll put it out there.

<comment><USER2> And before you say "you're just a cynic, you have to believe in the power of disruption", I want you to study the vast cost overruns and cost-disease of every public transit project of note in Canada in recent memory, and then tell me how magic startup fairy dust will cut through sclerotic governments both municipal, provincial, and federal.

We barely made Presto cards work.

<comment><USER3> It took Ottawa 20 years to roll out first stage of light rail.

<comment><USER2> And of course, the Relief Line in Toronto. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relief_Line_(Toronto)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relief_Line_\(Toronto\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I live in Alberta. There is no way this will be economically viable in the short term.

Here's what this is competing with:

Driving from Edmonton to Calgary, downtown to downtown, takes about 3 hours. My car can do a round trip on a single tank of gas with enough left over to do a little running around. The cost is about $60 in fuel, an unknown amount of wear-and-tear on the car, and three hours of time. I've done this trip with four people, so that works out $25/person assuming $40 worth of wear-and-tear on the car. The depreciation and insurance costs are not a factor here since those happen regardless.

If you don't own a car, but have a driver's license, you can pick up a Communauto (our version of ZipCar/Car2Go/etc) and drive it down there. This would probably cost less than $100, and Communauto includes fuel, insurance, and maintenance, but the cars in their fleet aren't necessarily ones that I'd choose for a road trip.

The flight from Edmonton to Calgary takes about 45 minutes from takeoff to landing. You need to arrive at the airport 1.5-2 hours before takeoff. Plus you need to get to the airport at the start of your trip and to your destination at the end. The cost is between $100 and $300 depending on how far you plan ahead, plus three hours of time.

There is currently no passenger rail service between Edmonton and Calgary.

There is bus service between the two cities. Red Arrow runs between Edmonton and Calgary and isn't too bad. You still have to get to the bus terminal at the start and your destination at the end, but the terminals may be in walking distance if you're going downtown to downtown. The cost is $172 plus three hours of time.

To work, this needs to find the sweet spot of taking less time than driving, being less of an annoyance than air travel, and priced right to make up for its own set of shortcomings. $25 per person plus three hours is a really tough price to beat.

<comment><USER5> Most people drive alone, not in groups. With traffic it's more than 3 hours. That doesn't count insurance, cost of car, wear and tear. 3 hours is ugly, though 4-5 would be a sweeter spot.

If the tube works downtown to downtown in 45 minutes, people will pay $80 a ticket no problem.

Honestly the bigger problem is that Edmonton/Calgary 'downtown' is still 'nowhere' ... you need a _car_ when you get there, it ain't Paris or Munich.

What Calgary/Edmonton needs is a fast train that connects to other, more local fast trains and commuters and light rail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Saudi funded Hyperloop project should be a good litmus test for Hyperloops around the world. It's ideal: across flat land, no mountains / tunnels, lots of money behind it.

Not sure how far along they are in construction though.

[https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49096675](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49096675)

<comment><USER7> I don't think this project will happen, but it has some similar characteristics. Two cities with metro populations over 1 million that are separated by approximately 300kms of flat, sparsely populated land seems like a perfect test case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Note that TransPod is the maglev vactrain variant of hyperloop, distinct from the air bearing system in the original hyperloop white paper. This avoids new technology, and lets you use existing COTS maglev track, but... would be _more_ expensive per mile than air bearings. Curious choice for a train in Alberta.

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

As other commentors have noted, this is a pre-pre-pre announcement. They're not even talking about breaking ground for another 5 years.

</comment><comment><USER9> As an Albertan living in Edmonton and as per the feasibility study mentioned in the article, I don't think this is happening. That said, if by some miracle it does happen, that would be awesome!

<comment><USER10> Also Albertan. Maybe it's unrealistic but I agree it would be pretty awesome to see in my lifetime. Would also be cool to see Alberta get on the map for something other than oil.

<comment><USER11> Yet another Albertan. I would expect the AB government to not directly fund something like this. P3? Privately owned and operated?

Still unlikely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The new development appears to be that the province is allowing the test track to be built on crown land in a place where it could become a part of the full line, if actually built. Previously, the test track would need to be removed even if the line went ahead.

While it's still unlikely a full hyperloop line will be built, this agreement does goose the odds upwards slightly at little public cost, provided precautions are put in place to ensure the company building the test line does actually pay for its removal if the full line is not built.

</comment><comment><USER13> Typical drivers can do the trip in ~2.5hrs. Mind you that is door to door w/ your actual destination.

Depending on regulations (similar to preflight security), this could be a 1 hour trip. If you need to also take a taxi to and from the hyperloop, you're not looking at much time savings. IMO the real value of these options is that you can do something else in the mean time. You can read, you can make calls, you can sleep.

Also: Obligatory monorail comment for hyper loop: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI0cq6GZM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI0cq6GZM)

<comment><USER14> Not sure why you're getting downvoted, downvoting isn't for disagreement, it's for etiquette violations, etc.

I agree this is not the most sensible locale to test this. There used to be frequent VIA rail service between the two cities (I remember taking it as a kid, at least as far as Innisfail to visit my grandpa) and I believe that's gone, due to lack of demand.

The cities are close enough that driving isn't terrible.

Now, it does have rather flat and easy to deal with topography, so there's that.

Toronto to Montreal / Ottawa, that's a route where high speed rail is desperately needed. Even more so if it was extended to come from Detroit and/or Buffalo.

If we're sticking with Alberta, maybe Edmonton to Fort McMurray, to get oil workers to/from the north. That's a crappy drive, and long.

<comment><USER15> Well, it's factually incorrect. You can't go door to door from Edmonton to Calgary in 2.5 hours unless, perhaps, you are going from the outer edge of one city to the outer edge of the other, and only then, by exceeding the speed limit (which I grant is pretty standard on that highway).

<comment><USER13> Google maps says 300km / 3hrs center to center. I know many people do ~130 on that highway --> 2:20 ...

<comment><USER15> The speed limit drops drastically once you get into Edmonton, and congestion increases, and there are traffic lights, and so on. You can't maintain 130 km/h into the centre. You are making a pretty unrealistic calculation. And just because many people drive that fast, doesn't mean a "typical" driver does.

Other comments say 3 hours and 3-4 hours which is much more in line with my experience. Of course, it depends heavily on where you start, where you finish, time of day, and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The artist drawing doesn't seem to have enough support for the span between pillars. It looks nice but not realistic

</comment><comment><USER17> This isn't Elon's Hyperloop for those wondering. The term Hyperloop's been misappropriated and applied to different technology to piggyback on the hype Elon caused.

<comment><USER18> No, that's wrong. "Hyperloop" was never going to work, so Musk spun it off into this "competition" that still has people trying to figure out some way to make something that even resembles his original mutterings. Today, this almost always manifests itself as a maglev train in a tube.

This way, Musk saves face by not failing publically.

If the idea fails, he can just say "It was in your hands, I left the idea with you!"

Pretty clever exploit...

<comment><USER17> Quite the mental gymnastics you've done to put down an idea, while presenting no evidence as to why it won't work.

Go to boringcompany.com to see what they're currently up to + they've had competition for university teams to develop the skate that you're vehicle would be accelerated by in the Hyperloop.

Elon has the engineering team, along with himself, from SpaceX to reference and understand the physics of the tunnel transportation systems they are developing.

<comment><USER19> boring company is not building hyperloop. The urban loop or the boring company loops are just small tunnels. Nor is spacex building anything, but a small tunnel to do pod design competitions.

Many things are wrong with the hyperloop or loop proposals. The first is that they are unproven and wildly off cost estimate. Elon musk waived off hyperloop costs by declaring that they can be built along pylons on existing highways. But that's absurd, as existing highways are built to the standard of 70-80 mph, and for the proposed speeds of 400-500 mph, the curvatures of the road, and the twists and the turns are completely different. Hence, land acquisition costs do not go away. The same thing applies to boring company's loop. If you are going to zip at 150mph, the curvatures are steep, and any common tunnel will slow it down.

I watched a few videos doing a more thorough analysis. If you're interested, I'll try to find and share them.

<comment><USER17> They're doing tunnels, not pylons to avoid those frictions.

The Boring Company is moving forward at a good pace, including still doing competitions for last 4 years at universities for teams to create the best skate that will be used to accelerate vehicles in the Hyperloop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ah yes Alberta where even roads don't work thanks to freeze thaw cycles. What a perfect start.

<comment><USER13> I recall better roads in Alberta than San Francisco + hwy 101 in bay area.

<comment><USER21> The thing about pavement in the Bay Area: it breaks all at once.

I remember this striking me suddenly, shortly after I moved out from the Midwest. I was sitting on a patio, idly tracing the cracks with my eyes, when a question sort of bubbled up: where did they come from? The ground never freezes.

Then it hit me: in this case, they came from 1989.</comment></comment></comment>


In HTML emails, always set text and background colors in pair - <AUTHOR> https://www.kuon.ch/post/2020-06-07-dark-email/ <comment><USER2> This, and don't use transparent images without setting background either please! I've gotten emails from large companies that were completely white, because someone assumed a certain background color

<comment><AUTHOR> Transparent images can also be a problem outside emails, image viewers can have different background colors.

I had this issue when I was working on a embed project (similar to embed.ly), some websites had transparent image (in open graph or schema.org) and not all of them were expecting white background, so I have to crawl the page and try to detect the background color best suited for the image. This didn't work well (and required crawling the page) so I ended up doing edge detection on the image (easy with transparency) and average the resulting color to find the best background.</comment></comment>


Lyft says drivers tampering with surge pricing could be booted - <AUTHOR> https://abcnews.go.com/Business/lyft-drivers-tampering-surge-pricing-booted/story?id=63101962 <comment><USER2> I mean, they're literally gaming the system. I don't see anything wrong with punishing them for that.</comment>


Amazon's private label brands are taking over market share - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/03/amazons-private-label-brands-are-killing-it-says-new-report/ <comment><USER2> I've been impressed with Amazon Basics Lightning and HDMI cables for the most part. I've noticed more and more folks with the Amazon Basics Backpack. Consumers appreciate quality. See also Anker.</comment>


Myths of Weight Loss Are Plentiful, Researcher Says - <AUTHOR> http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/myths-of-weight-loss-are-plentiful-researcher-says/

<comment><USER2> > He replies that scientists have an ethical duty to make clear what is > established and what is speculation.

He is absolutely right!</comment>


Suspending Patrick McHardy as coreteam member - <AUTHOR> https://marc.info/?l=netfilter-devel&m=146887464512702 <comment><USER2> Closely related: [https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/jul/19/patrick- mchardy-g...](https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/jul/19/patrick-mchardy-gpl- enforcement/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Some context: Germany has a very special, unfriendly system called Abmahnungen. Basically, whenever you see someone violating a right, you can partner with a lawyer and send them a bill. That's the system with which in Germany the anti-copying industry and its lawyers are using file-sharing to make money.

Given the hints in the announcement and the linked explanation from sfconservancy.org, together with [http://www.ferner- alsdorf.de/rechtsanwalt/it-recht/urheberre...](http://www.ferner- alsdorf.de/rechtsanwalt/it-recht/urheberrecht/abmahnung-gpl-verstoss-linux- firmware-netfilter-initrd-harald-welte-jbb-rechtsanwaelte/10883/), what seems to have happened here is that Mchardy used that system to target distributors of linux systems to make money. If, as in the lawyer blog described, making the source code available online is not enough and you need some written offer, basically all linux vendors can be targeted from a right-holder. They'd have to cease the "violation", pay lawyer costs (normally inflated to make a profit) and often be susceptible to pay for damage as if they had no open source licence at all to distribute Linux. This might be very expensive, and even defending against overly broad claims will be expensive.

Uncertainty like this would be a great danger for linux distribution in that country. But note that I have no clear image of what really happened, I'm just combining some pieces. Still, given the danger of that broken juridical system, if someone is active in that space and even only not willing to clearly communicate his methods and goals, to block him is the least these organizations should do.

</comment><comment><USER4> This should be explicity explained or taken off the front page. Flagging.

<comment><USER3> It should be clearer now with the comments in this thread. It is quite important and the news itself should definitely be on the frontpage.

<comment><USER4> Too late, it made no sense without context and it's gone.</comment></comment></comment>


Htop - better top - <AUTHOR> http://htop.sourceforge.net/

<comment><USER2> This is definitely my favorite HTop screenshot: <http://htop.sourceforge.net/128.png>

<comment><USER3> Is that a NUMA box?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I always have a screen session open with htop in one terminal. I take it for granted so much the lack of htop bothers me if I need to do any form of process management.

<comment><USER5> htop and atop are my top two top tools

<http://www.atoptool.nl/downloadatop.php>

atop uses color to show when a subsystem goes over warn/critical threshold. it can be run in present time, or can be used to go back in time and "play back the tape"

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What are some other must-have applications you guys find useful?

<comment><USER7> ack

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://betterthangrep.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's the first thing I install on any server these days. I always have an SSH terminal open to htop to monitor my server at all times.

</comment><comment><USER9> htop is not a generic *nix tool. It depends on the Linux kernel (hard dependencies).

<comment><USER10> Macports version runs just fine on Snow leopard

<comment><USER9> you are right. It turns out OSX support is here now. Do I have to be binary compatible to Linux to use it on FreeBSD?

It's a great tool nonetheless.

<comment><USER11> Yes you do, and linprocfs must be mounted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> atop is another useful alternative to top, shows i/o and network activity in addition to all the usual details.

</comment><comment><USER13> Htop is really useful, you can hide or show userland threads, switch to a tree view, etc. I use it daily.

</comment><comment><USER14> Am I the only person here who hates htop? I just can't get used to it. The lack of labels and relying on color coding to convey information just obfuscates things for me. I still use top for that reason.

</comment><comment><USER15> Iam using it so much. I like the graphs which gives me on a first look a faster overview about cpu/ram.

If you got a SMP system every core got his one graph, which wasnt available in top.

At least, its the best alternative to top, in my opinion!

</comment><comment><USER16> Really, the best of breed ?

TTY & ncurses, what a sad state of affairs.

TTY is keeping you down : <http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Removing_The_Big_Kernel_Lock2>

Rob Pike was right in 1991 : "Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad."

Plan9 is now older than Unix was when Plan9 was started. Operating System research is dead.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best Date and Time library (in any language)? - <AUTHOR> Date and time and time zones are notoriously hard to handle correctly. What libraries handle time the best? Which ones make it the most difficult to shoot yourself in the foot? Which language has the best standard library date/time module?<p>Various dimensions for comparison include: - handling of timezones - handling of durations - handling of other date/time arithmetic - formatting and parsing - explicitness for handling time with timezones vs. UTC <comment><USER2> perl5's DateTime "is a class for the representation of date/time combinations"

Apart from the modules included in the DateTimeDistribution, there are many others as returned by [https://metacpan.org/search?q=DateTime](https://metacpan.org/search?q=DateTime)

My favorite use DateTime::Format::Baby;

my $Baby = DateTime::Format::Baby->new('en'); my $dt = $Baby->parse_datetime('The big hand is on the twelve and the little hand is on the six.');

</comment><comment><USER3> NodaTime is excellent, especially the way it differentiates between a calendar date and a point in time.

</comment><comment><USER4> .net DateTime class is reasonable out of the box.</comment>


Why YC - <AUTHOR> http://paulgraham.com/whyyc.html

<comment><USER2> My first reaction upon hearing the name "Y Combinator" was dismay; oh god, the geeks are trying to be bankers now. I had a vision in my head of paul et al. blowing out their retirement, funding LispOSes and smalltalk-on-chip type projects.

P.S. RPG, PG and PG. Any other Lispers with "PG" initials out there besides Gabriel, Greenspun and Paul?

<comment><USER3> Around the time I heard about PG's `Y Combinator' I had just rediscovered the Turing fixed-point combinator while playing around with Scheme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> the number of imitators that YC quickly spawned seems to indicate that this won't just tank (even if YC does itself). It solves a real market inefficiency.

<comment><USER5> It does solve a market inefficiency. To me, that highlights a different inefficiency - imagine what a couple of bright YC founders could do in the rechargeable battery market, or the solar cell market - if they only had enough money to enter industries with higher barriers to entry.

I can hold out the hope that successful founders will enter other industries with their _next_ startup.

<comment><USER6> As it says in our FAQ, we're happy to fund companies working on stuff that's too expensive to build on just our money. The goal of YC is to build a convincing case for later stage investors. That doesn't have to be a complete, launched product.

<comment><USER5> YC is great. But I would think with all the smart people here, if the market was efficient in fields with high barriers to entry, Tesla Motors would have a few more competitors.

<comment><USER7> Tesla and the car industry is a whole other beast. I think with software and internet companies, you can have many more clever hacks for barriers that competitors have set up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, I'm a student and I have some occasional queries which are answered pretty well here. I respect the opinion of YC community as their average geekness level is much higher than the crowd. Am not into startup or something but I still love the opinion of people here. Whenever I need to find a opinion about i go for searchyc. When I needed to buy a laptop or needed a suggestion regarding programming .. YC is always there with a wonderful solution. Plus I get to know the opinion of things happening in current scenario related with IT field. Thankyou YC :D

</comment><comment><USER9> I would be curious to see diffs of these revisions.

<comment><USER10> Ditto - especially for this one. I'd be curious as well to know how this compares to implementation. How many YC investees would have pursued their ideas without YC? Is this a core attribute for YC to invest in an idea?

It's interesting though... of all the potential reasons that could have motivated the creation of YC (e.g. alternatively, giving promising ideas a leap forward) the is the one that was chosen. That YC could be the small nudge that pushes smart people to start new businesses and that "we can spring on the world a stream of new startups that might otherwise not have existed."

<comment><USER11> For a lot of hackers, the biggest benefit they get from YC is confidence. It happens almost instantaneously. You're no longer working on a project - you're starting a company. Advice, support network, and introductions are incredibly helpful, but they're nothing compared to confidence. If you already have it, you can certainly succeed without YC (although getting in helps). Theoretically, you can just tell yourself "I will be confident", in which case you can succeed without YC too. But for most people it doesn't work this way.

YC gives people the determination to persist against all odds - probably the most useful quality of all. It turns the fear of failure from working against you, to working for you. It's an incredible energy source. I would be very surprised if most successful YC companies did half as well without YC. Not because of the help that YC offers, but because of confidence and determination.

<comment><USER2> Slava, you didn't need anybody's endorsement to feel competent my friend. You're a first rate hacker, Startup or not. Good luck with rethinkdb, get industry contacts, work on the "suit" image and you should be fine. You're destined to greatness.

<comment><USER12> Haha, Slava in a suit. _snort_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "We did it because it seems such a great hack."

</comment><comment><USER14> Im not a hacker, but I understand. And Im glad that YC is here to support and develop startups like my own. And I hope to have the opportunity to work with YC in the future. My startup is just that. A company that is a tweek or "hack" on various other web ideas that have been developed and maybe even successful, but that I feel have dropped the ball on various aspects of their site's service, and business model. And with the right tweek or hack (my startup, mindUNsigned.com), can capitalize on the competition's turnover, and deliver a game winning dunk at the other end of the court.

<comment><USER15> What does that mean?

<comment><USER14> It means that I've built my startup upon the faults of the competition. My professional experience and MBA education has allowed me to very easily identify opportunity costs. My startup has tweeked the competition's "so- called" attempts, and speaks directly to their opportunities in pricing, available features, usability, user interaction and activity, fun, and site purpose.

<comment><USER16> Ha ha, with talk like that it had to be a MBA.

<comment><USER17> (smiling in agreement)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


"My images are all upside down" - <AUTHOR> http://www.gigpeppers.com/my-images-are-all-upside-down/

<comment><USER2> _"Because your crop and scale function ignores and drops the EXIF orientation tag."_

</comment><comment><USER3> During the holiday break I spent some time learning about EXIF data and subsequently released Exif.in[0], a simple HTTP API for viewing EXIF data inside images and requesting EXIF-stripped copies as well.

If you're a developer who needs to occasionally inspect EXIF data from user uploads, please check it out. Contact me if you have additional questions, I'm happy to help.

[0] <http://exif.in>

<comment><USER4> Really useful! Thanks. Have you seen <http://regex.info/exif.cgi>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What puzzles me is that Windows XP up to Windows 7 built-in picture viewer does not support proper orientation of iPhone photos with the original EXIF metadata in place. Picasa (on Windows) handles that perfectly, as well as (obviously) all apps in OS X. What the hell Microsoft? Is this a political thing or is there a valid technical reason?

<comment><USER6> Here's my guess as to why it would work like that. Random software package either supports the EXIF orientation or it doesn't. If it doesn't, Joe User just sees the photo rotated wrong, and they want to fix it. Joe knows he can rotate photos in Windows Picture Viewer. So he opens the file in Windows Picture Viewer and it ignores the EXIF orientation too, so he just hits rotate then goes about his business. If Windows Picture Viewer respected the EXIF orientation, it would be much less useful for this task.

Given that, OS X Preview has a different approach. It respects the EXIF orientation when you open a file, but when you re-save a file, it silently rotates the file and resets the orientation. Not sure if that is better or worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are a lot of sites that throw away the EXIF orientation tag when resizing photos. It's very obvious now that you can upload directly from the iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER7> There's a lot of discussion of what's behind this issue in the Mozilla feature request at <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=298619>, and more at the corresponding webkit (<https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19688>) and chromium (<http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=56845>) bug trackers.

The concern is essentially that there may be many images on the web that have EXIF tags that don't match how those images are being used, specifically because the sites were tested in browsers that ignore the tags. So changing browser behavior now could suddenly break lots of sites that previously looked fine. It sounds like nobody has come up with a good solution yet.

</comment><comment><USER8> What is the case when the photos are taken from a vertically up position? What orientation does it take? For eg: [https://fbcdn-sphotos- f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/54392...](https://fbcdn-sphotos- f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/543929_10151252345763985_905957976_n.jpg)

Just curious. I'm sure many food photographers will try that position too.

<comment><USER2> The EXIF orientation tag encodes all orientations: <http://www.impulseadventure.com/photo/exif-orientation.html>

<comment><USER9> It only encodes orientations that result from rotation around the axis perpendicular to the line of sight (in other words, the rotations that can be reversed by display software). Parent was asking about the orientation with camera above the subject pointing directly down. I don't think EXIF can encode that -- there's no reason to, since display software has no way to reverse it.

<comment><USER2> Well, photographs are two dimensional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What the hell? Why is there an orientation tag at all? Why isn't the picture just rotated by the device that takes it?

<comment><USER2> Because lossless rotation is fairly expensive computationally so digital cameras have been leaving that job to a computer.

<comment><USER11> In this case the camera is a computer though. A computer that knows its orientation.

<comment><USER12> Not to mention that it's rotating by +-90 or 180 degrees, which is a whole lot faster than an arbitrary rotation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I ran into the exact same problem a few days ago. Luckily, ImageMagick, which I'm using for processing uploaded images, has an auto-orient [1] option that allows you to do this automatically.

Unfortunately, with JPEG this would cause some loss of quality, so we're probably going to have to keep the original quality image as well as the auto- orient'ed image to display on the site. Has anyone here worked on something similar? Any ideas on a better way to handle this would be extremely helpful.

[1] [http://www.imagemagick.org/script/command-line- options.php#a...](http://www.imagemagick.org/script/command-line- options.php#auto-orient)

<comment><USER6> Because of _math_ , the JPEG format does support lossless rotation, as long as the dimensions of the image are multiples of 16 pixels (or 8 depending on the file). But this requires working directly with the JPEG image data, so a package like ImageMagick that reads a formatted file into a pixel buffer, then transforms it and writes it from that buffer to a new formatted file can't support the feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Speaking of iPhones, this blog is pretty much unreadable on Mobile Safari. I side scroll to see the text; the paragraph disappears behind the left sidebar.

<comment><USER15> Showing up correctly on Mobile Safari on iPad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Had this same issue with a service that consumes pictures from iOS/Android/BlackBerry. They all seem to handle it in different ways. I added a similar EXIF check and a quick rotation when necessary. I should have written a blog post about it. :)

</comment><comment><USER17> This would be easier to fix in objective-c and a little custom camera wrapper application. I would expect a fix in a new OS release though. But if you need this little app let me know and I'll write it and put it on github.

<comment><USER18> If your app directly accesses the camera with AVFoundation, saving photos is a lot less automatic than you might expect. It's easy to save the raw image data but you have to generate and add just about any interesting metadata (EXIF, GPS, TIFF, etc.) explicitly. It's hard to do right--as the rather many discussions on StackOverflow suggest--and definitely a steep price to pay for a customized camera interface.

<comment><USER17> It's not that hard actually, it's just tedious. The easiest way to do it is use the CIImageProperties ([http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Graphi...](http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/GraphicsImaging/Reference/CGImageProperties_Reference/Reference/reference.html))

The better way though is to use a class like this: [https://github.com/gpambrozio/GusUtils/blob/master/GusUtils/...](https://github.com/gpambrozio/GusUtils/blob/master/GusUtils/NSMutableDictionary+ImageMetadata.m)

I see your point though - it's not trivial. I just happen to have a lot of experience in this area. I do a lot of video/imaging on the iphone.</comment></comment></comment>


Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie - <AUTHOR> http://www.develop-online.net/news/35973/Minecraft-creator-banks-350k-a-day <comment><USER2> The most refreshing part of this story is that it's not about the Apple / Google / etc App stores.

Shows that exceptional indie products can get huge traction on a traditional platform, sort of like Braid on XBOX / PC / etc.

That said, also excites me for the future when MSFT's & Apple's standard OS come with a servicable app store baked in.

<comment><USER3> On a similar note, Minecraft is written in...

get this

...

 _Java_

Which seems to be the dorkiest and most uncool language on the planet if you were to ask HN.

<comment><USER4> A plumber climbs out of a manhole, and his arms are covered with - guess what? - excrement! A beautiful little girl in a beautiful white dress happens to pass by. The plumber seizes the opportunity and quickly, but firmly sweeps his hands over the girl's white dress.

Little girl (appalled): AAAH!!

Plumber (outraged): Oh yeah? I bet you love to take a shit though.

[http://www.yosefk.com/blog/the-cardinal-programming- jokes.ht...](http://www.yosefk.com/blog/the-cardinal-programming-jokes.html)

So yeah, Java is dorky and uncool, but I bet we love to play Minecraft (I don't know, since I haven't played a video game in at least a decade).

<comment><USER5> The poop leaves my bottom and goes into the toilet. I never touch it. Do you?

<comment><USER6> Actually, you do touch it.

<comment><USER7> With your arms?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Amazing stuff. Honestly, when I saw this post I thought man I should have been a games programmer (and the desire to learn how to create games started to surface). Then, I went searching on Google and it seems that this guy has found his luck after working hard as a games programmer for around 10 years (<http://www.mojang.com/notch/>). After reading this, I smiled & felt happy for the programmer and went back working ;)

<comment><USER9> Behind nearly every "overnight success" story is a reality of years of practice and persistence.

<comment><USER10> <http://startupquote.com/post/1164724792>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The sales graphs are public:

<http://m00d.net/minecraft/sales/>

The best day (9/23) had 25663 sales, or about $255k. This came on top of the server being down (0 sales) for 3 previous days. The recent average is around 10k sales ($100k / day).

EDIT: As pointed out by bananaandapple below, the price is in euro not USD, which brings the best day to $347k. The recent average works out to about $136k / day.

<comment><USER12> according to that he sold 230,441 copies which comes out to €2,292,887.95 euros.

1 euro = $1.36 USD

so that comes out to

$3,118,327.612

After all the fees and costs, that's 3 mil before taxes,

<comment><USER13> His company (Mojang Specifications) is a sole proprietorship, so the tax situation is interesting (i.e. most of it is taxed as personal income, and Sweden has a progressive tax system, and he has to pay insurance contributions as well). I can understand why he's scrambling to establish a real company :)

<comment><USER14> Indeed, a quick glance at online calculators indicates it's pretty horrific, i.e. that he'd be lucky to see more than 35% of gross, assuming that sole props get whacked for employer taxes too, which I'd expect to avoid a simple loophole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Valve: "We heard you were making $350k/day, how would you like a job making $50k/year?"

<comment><USER16> 1) Health care, taxes, payment processing fees, development tools... There are a lot of expenses covered by an employer, especially when you're a game developer. 2) It's not $350k/day versus $50k/year, unless he can somehow sustain his current income indefinitely (he can't). 3) The value of games publishers and platform developers being willing to talk to you (and having access to development kits, etc) is hard to put monetary value on. Working at a studio like Valve gives you that, too.

<comment><USER17> "unless he can somehow sustain his current income indefinitely"

If he sustains it for 2 weeks he's pretty much set for life.

<comment><USER18> He's already sustained at least $250k/d for two weeks. These numbers are 100k bigger than the last ones I saw a few weeks ago.

Pretty sure he could BUY Valve at this point. :p

<comment><USER19> Considering he's made about 4mm, and Valve turned down a multi-billion dollar offer not too long ago, I think you might be a bit off-base. :)

<comment><USER18> Slight exaggeration. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Good news: Indie developers can still get rich doing what they love.

Bad news: You will probably not be one of them.

;-)

<comment><USER9> Best news: You probably can make a pretty good living, even if you don't get rich.

<comment><USER21> That's a great sentiment. I'm not interested in getting super rich, I'd just like to do interesting work and have some freedom in my life. Hopefully that's not too much to ask.

<comment><USER9> I can assure you it's not.

I'm not the most amazing software developer in the world, nor am I the most astute businessman, but after a little more than decade of work and persistence, I'm in a position where I can do pretty much everything I've always wanted to do. Part of that time was spent figuring out _what_ I actually always wanted to do (age brings clarity of focus, I think). I travel full-time (I'm in Bozeman, MT right now, on my way to Yellowstone), I run a company that builds stuff I'm really proud of and millions of people use, I work with two guys that I really enjoy working with, I occasionally get to meet up with our users and customers and they're awesome, and I make enough money to live on without having to think too much about money, and the revenues continue to grow at a modest but steady rate. I'm definitely not rich, and the subject of this story has made more in a couple months than I've made in four years of running Virtualmin, but I've got nothing to complain about.

Most importantly, I have as much freedom as anyone I know, including several millionaires and a few billionaires.

<comment><USER22> Your story is my goal. I don't need cars or giant houses, I just want the freedom to solve interesting problems and the responsibility of making the business decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie_

Thank _God_. Not that they haven't been successful, but I _really_ want this to stay _entirely_ in Notch's control, as that's _precisely_ why it's succeeding.

<comment><USER23> This may be a good thing ultimately, but if there was a gaming company I'd consider working for, it'd likely be Valve. They seem very community focused, and I imagine they'd give this guy the freedom to run the game how he likes, considering its his 'baby'. Plus, they'd give him some risk-free (to him) resources to build a second game if he needed it, and they probably have way more experience handling multiplayer side stuff that he could benefit from. But this is pure speculation. As it is, him keeping it is probably a good thing for the community.

<comment><USER24> Just look at the game that the team they purchased made: portal. The indie game was very ugly. The final game was polished, funny, and fun. If he were to bring his game to valve they could probably improve it a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Considering that he'd quit his job as a game developer to be able to develop indie games (<http://www.minecraft.net/about.jsp>) it's not so surprising that he turns down the job offers. And it also seems that he's in the beginning of starting his own company and hiring developers ([http://notch.tumblr.com/post/1205447916/im-sorry-about- the-l...](http://notch.tumblr.com/post/1205447916/im-sorry-about-the-lack-of- updates))

</comment><comment><USER26> Why would you work for a software company if you are making that much?

<comment><USER2> Think Hollywood director type job offer.

Use somebody else's money to build your dream product with a huge incredible staff.

Get gauranteed, huge up front salary to do so.

Take away a sizeable piece of the action on the success.

<comment><USER27> And being forced to justify every small thing and have to use outlook.

<comment><USER28> When you're eminent in your field those sorts of things may become negotiable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I don't know where this website pulled their numbers from, but I think they're incorrect.

According to Minecraft's stats[1], in the last 24 hours 12,025 people bought the game, times 9.95 Euro = 119,499.50 Euro, which is a bit less than $163k/day in American dollars.

[1] <http://www.minecraft.net/stats.jsp>

<comment><USER30> A week ago, he was selling up to 36000 copies a day.

<comment><USER11> Either give a reference, or you must be confusing sales and downloads.

<comment><USER30> <http://m00d.net/minecraft/sales/>

<comment><USER11> That shows the maximum as 25000, not 36000 sales per day.

<comment><USER6> The number of copies are in Euros, and there are 1.44 US copies per Euro copy, so the number sold is 36000 US copies per day.

<comment><USER13> That's not how currency exchange rates work...

<comment><USER31> I choose to interpret your parent as a joke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I bought it a few weeks ago but only played twice (no time). My first time playing the demo I immediately was struck by several opportunities

1) converting 2D images into 3D minecraft world for artists and lazy people

2) Connecting 26 adjacent worlds to have a fluid adaptive minecraft universe. As users move from one world to the next it pulls in the data from the next set of adjacent worlds (no crossing lag). Folks can host their own worlds and pay for virtual real estate (hosting) or lay claim to a parts of a big cube, Thematically clustered worlds would be fantastic (hell worlds, water worlds, sky citiies, shopping districts, space worlds.. etc).

There's something oddly beautiful about building your own game world.

<comment><USER33> _cough_ Second Life _cough_

<comment><USER34> _cough_ Worlds Chat _cough_

Seriously, we had that exact idea implemented around 1997 -- and it even supported multiple authentications (anonymous worlds, versus worlds with user accounts) all transparently. And it could even do VRML, crowd control, dynamic downloads (so you could link to new worlds), and a built-in world builder.

It seemed that we had thought of everything... And then management took over.

<comment><USER33> You should have let marketing take over and built up unsustainable hype and corporate endorsement instead ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> As someone who is quietly lurking on HN, and working on my own product nights and w/e, this gives me hope. I think the ISV model just feels right...at least for me. I've been wavering on quitting the day job. Kudos to this chap. Long live the ISV success stories.

</comment><comment><USER36> I wonder what the potential market size is for this game, and if he will reach a large part of that while the game is in alpha and on special.

Something tells me he is selling it for too cheap, especially with all the buzz it is getting. The license is also a lifetime license, so he has ongoing server costs for the next 5+ years that need to be covered with what he is bringing in atm (minus the huge tax bill he will be hit with).

He is selling what is a recurring service at a flat one-off rate, a subscription at $20 year may have sold just as well.

<comment><USER37> He's selling it at $10 while it's in a preview state. The full RRP will be $20.

<comment><USER38> It's 9.95€ and 20€, around $13 and $26...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Inspiring. I am going to work harder on my current personal project.

</comment><comment><USER40> Not surprised. What could a job at either Valve or Bungie give him that he doesn't get now?

<comment><USER16> Ask the Portal team? Or the guys who made Team Fortress? Or the guys who made Counter-Strike?

To be more precise: Working at a larger studio like Valve means you trade some creative control and (in notch's case) some short-term income for reliable long-term income and access to things you could never get in the short term as an individual, like access to devkits for consoles, access to well-trained, highly skilled QA/art/programming departments, decades of design and programming experience from leads and senior developers, etc.

<comment><USER41> The Portal team was scooped up from Digipen. If their game was netting them over $200k/day, something tells me they wouldn't have been so eager to join Valve.

Hey I f'ing love Valve, my all time favorite game company. No one is trying to suggest working for Valve is a bad thing. But a little perspective is needed here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I image he would make loads more if he used a simpler distribution platform like Steam.

<comment><USER43> PayPal is not exactly hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> their math is a little bit off, a copy sold every 3 seconds = 28,800 sales a day.

Or 10.5 million copies a year. To tell the truth its pretty shocking how minecraft has taken off...the guy will probably end up making 100 million off the game. And if he sticks to iterating it, it might end up making over a billion over it's lifetime(say 40-50 years).

Which may seem like a huge number, until you remember that World of Warcraft is making close to a billion a year.

The reason the number looks that shockingly high, is because he is a one man show.

My guess is that he is going to end up using his new found fame/resources to start his own game development company.

<comment><USER44> Speaking as a someone who has never played either, it's also shocking because World of Warcraft looks like this:

<http://www.sopheon.com/Portals/1/WoW%20Screenshot.jpg>

While Minecraft looks like this:

<http://www.indiegames.com/blog/images/timw/minecraft.jpg>

<comment><USER12> looks can be changed, my guess is that the first thing he'll do is update the graphics to give the game mainstream appeal.

right now people are playing for the gameplay...just like they do with WoW

<comment><USER18> The graphics are simple on purpose - because the game is essentially infinitely scalable (theoretical max map size is 3x surface of the Earth), simple graphics are super important for not lagging servers and clients to hell.

He's said in interviews that the improvements he wants to make are improvements that make the game more fun. He's not going to add features that won't somehow add fun, and if he finds that something isn't fun, it's out.

Because the graphics are purposely so simplistic, people are okay with that. As soon as you upgrade them and start to make them more modern, you start getting compared to other modern games like WoW, etc.

Keep it simple, people won't worry about the graphics.

<comment><USER45> I also think he avoids any issues with the 'uncanny valley' of near-realism in games. If something isn't going to look exactly like a pig wandering the mountain slopes, why not make it look like a Lego pig and be done with it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> The question is how long will it take major game developers to build a similar game and turn on the marketing faucet?

I don't know much about game development, but it sounds like it would be a pretty easy game to replicate, right?

<comment><USER47> If he's already sold hundreds of thousands of copies, it seems like he's made significant inroads into the market. Not sure how much more the marketing faucet could do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> His business model is very appealing to the customer: pay only once and receive all future versions. The "downside" is that, once market saturates, you have to come up with a completely new product.

<comment><USER49> That's basically how almost all games work tho (with a handful of exceptions) - most people eventually get tired of playing the same game and move on to something else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Notch's story proves what indie game developers have been praying for all along:

 _Gameplay is everything._

</comment><comment><USER51> Looks like that the site is down now :)

</comment><comment><USER52> that's... $127,750,000 a year!

<comment><USER53> He will earn...a billion dollars this decade!

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I get the impression that this game was built because he wanted to build something he himself would enjoy, not something he could become rich off. Maybe there's something to that philosophy ;)

<comment><USER55> Maybe. On the other hand, people do things every day for the love of it that get little traction in the market place. It seems more likely this confluence is just a coincidence.

<comment><USER7> I wonder if it might be a _requirement_ (or nearly) for run-away successes though, while obviously not _sufficient_ for it.

<comment><USER56> Careful, you never know if Malcolm Gladwell is lurking here.

<comment><USER7> I'm not aware of that reference... care to enlighten me? The wikipedia entry didn't really answer it for me.

<comment><USER57> Malcolm Gladwell writes books about "success" where he uses many anecdotal (albeit fascinating) stories to come to a very vague conclusion of how people can be "successful". GP was referring to "qualities of success" (passion, writing something for yourself), which don't necessarily cause success.

It was tongue-in-cheek.

<comment><USER56> Thanks, well put, just what I meant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> It's kinda sad that the Dwarf Fortress creator only earns about 2k a day. It shows what some business savvy will do for you.

Then ago, the DF creator is passionatr about his vision, so who knows.

<comment><USER59> Not sure if it's business savvy. While Dwarf Fortress is a great indie game I don't think it has the wide spread appeal of a game like mine craft. Mine craft's 3D world and game play is more intuitive to your average person. Not to mention Notch's luck with going viral certainly helps as well.

<comment><USER18> Agree. I played a bit of Dwarf Fortress, and there was definitely a learning curve. Minecraft has, essentially, no initial "how to play" learning curve.

<comment><USER60> Crafting is the biggest part of the learning curve right now, although Notch has some ideas about how to address it. One way might be by having the player unlock "recipes" as they gather resources and experiment.

Redstone is the other part of the game with an epic learning curve. It can be used to craft functional logic gates. Some guy on YouTube made a massive ALU using it...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mining 24 Hours a Day with Robots - happy-go-lucky https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603170/mining-24-hours-a-day-with-robots/ <comment><AUTHOR> Questions journalists should ask the new commerce secretary is: are coal jobs coming back? will these robots be used or made illegal to use in favor of human workers? what percentage of automation is legal or illegal? if the free market dictates 100% automation, will you support human worker protection laws?

A huge part of the rhetoric in the election was that coal workers were going to get their jobs back. Now, any thinking person knows that was a big fat lie. But I don't expect coal workers to be thinking people, I expect them to be wishful thinkers, because that's all they've ever known. But they voted on the basis of getting their jobs back, so I'm curious how everyone involved evaluates this in the context of what was not at all brought up in any meaningful way in the election: these mining robots.

<comment><USER2> Besides West Virginia, what rhetoric was there? A large portion of middle and rural America didn't vote republican because they thought coal would come back, it's because a large majority didn't like the Washington status-quo in which Clinton represented. However, Donald Trump was a wild card and not part of the "establishment".

If Sanders or a different republican was in the race it would be an entirely different story.

Now...if you are referring to West Virginia, then the issue revolved around bill Clinton initially making a lot of promises there and never following through, and as a result you had so much bent up friction from it that Hillary barely even campaigned there.

With your comment, it makes it sound like you are saying "look how trump hasn't helped you at all, I bet you wish you voted for Clinton now".

Ultimately the president was elected based upon how middle America felt they have been treated by the government over the last roughly 20 years. In other words, trump won because he gave people hope and was willing to speak against established parties (even his own).

On the flip side, Hillary is a conservative democrat (I would personally consider her more republic than democrat in terms of today's views). Along with this she would have had a republican house and congress. The out come by either would likely be the same no matter who won. The only difference is that since many news outlets are liberal leaning that the headlines would be friendlier.

<comment><AUTHOR> All jobs exported to other countries, e.g. China, where those same jobs are increasingly subject to automation.

Republicans historically don't support labor movements, they've supported breaking up unions. Democrats created a vacuum by supporting the environment over the worker.

It is way too soon to know whether Trump voters will experience buyer's remorse. The real question is hardly even Trump, it's whether Republicans will sign on to this new idea of defending the worker, defending their job, protectionism, and even a trade war in the form of tariffs as promised by the leader of the party. If it's true Trump represents non-establishment, and threatens its existence, we can expect at some point Democrats and Republicans will figure out a way to throw him under the bus. That he spends more time feeding his narcissism by punching down, and sending his press secretary to lie on TV on the level of 2+2 does not equal 4, he will squander any ability to form the political barriers he will need to survive 4 years let alone 8.

The 200 year history of parties getting the presidency 3 terms in a row shows how rare it is. I think that's a bigger factor in the election, that people were sufficiently less enthusiastic about Hillary rather than enthusiastic about Trump, and in fact the raw numbers support that. Likewise that 200 year history shows it's even more rare for a president who loses the popular vote, but wins the electoral college, to win a 2nd term.

Does Trump stop his TV show inspired pissing matches? Those are appealing to some degree by angry voters during a campaign, but broadly very distasteful and unbecoming of a president. To be a successful president he's going to have to stop getting hung up in minutiae of his own creation.

Do Republicans or Democrats (or both) have some sort of transformative realignment, necessarily demoting previous priorities in doing so, or do they collude together to make an outsider president, already acting like a nut case as he keeps stepping on his own dick, an unwitting scape goat and destroy him in favor of Pence, a stable predictable known quantity?</comment></comment></comment>


Replace Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://www.saashub.com/replace-facebook <comment><AUTHOR> The first 10 mates that upvote are getting a real post card from Australia if this hits the homepages :D</comment>