An 'Investor' Destroyed My Startup - <AUTHOR> Let my experience serve as a valuable lesson to entrepreneurs - do your due diligence on investors.
I spent a little over a year and $20,000 of my own capital building a FinTech software. It demonstrated a lot of interest and potential (E.g. a $5 B company was reviewing our product prior to launch to be a client) , but rather wrapping it up and getting revenue to raise money from Tier 1/2 VCs, I had an offer from an investor to put in $1 M at an unattractive valuation.
Myself thinking, 'I don't care about the valuation, I just want to get the money in to accelerate', I accepted - despite being in various stages of due diligence with three investors. After several months of negotiations and many calls a legal agreement was formed... The important lesson here is the 'hidden valuation', that is, in the value of the quality of your investor.
Usually when an investor signs a term sheet, the money comes through relatively quickly and things accelerate, but week after week, and excuse after excuse the money never came in. During this period, having expected the money to come in, I hired my top developers full-time and am now stuck with those expenses - unable to comfortably afford it.
Now, I'm stuck with a rouge 'investor' owning 50% of my company without putting in any a dime, close to $10,000 in bills, and a software I poured a year of my life into and made many sacrifices for. At this point, if I were to raise more money, I would have less than 20% of my company on the first fundraising round (assuming giving a real investor 20 - 25%).
Despite this, the people you have on your cap table and relationships between them can send most top investors 'running for the hills', they don't like drama and founders with little equity - as it decreases motivation and means they can't negotiate attractive valuations for themselves. As much as I would like to admit - this is almost certainly game over.
Had I conducted even slight due diligence, this could have been solved. If I had held out longer and got a little traction, I could have appealed to Tier 1/2 VCs, rather than risk doing business with an unknown entity.
I should also note, I have a background in PE/VC myself, I'm not a fresh entrepreneur either. It's easy to be blinded by logic when someone offers you capital for investment. As a note to all people intending to raise capital - don't be blinded low hanging fruit because it's often, but not always - toxic. <comment><USER2> Thank you for sharing your story! If the investor didn't put in the money, then surely that's terms for breach of contract, you should be able to kick him out of the cap table. And if your best developers still believe in your vision, maybe they'll be willing to take a pay cut in return for equity if they understand the situation and want to help you work it out? I guess a lesson here is that its not done till it's done and theres money in the bank, but in that same vein, it's not done until theres money in the bank, and if there isnt, then you might still have a path forward to salvage it and return it to it's rue potential.

<comment><AUTHOR> Traditionally, yes, but the investor insisted on clauses that were structured in a way for them to retain equity without being obligated to put in money.

<comment><USER3> Might get a lawyer to kick the tires on the contract language. I mean, ianal, but that cant be legitimate, can it?

<comment><USER4> Contract: Investor gets 50% of company. Company might get money someday but no guarantees.

OP's lawyer: Sounds legit to me.

<comment><USER5> Get a better lawyer. Doesn't sound like an enforceable contract.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Okay, so the guy didn't give you any money, yet he now owns 50% of your company. You basically gave it away for nothing. How is that possible? Did a lawyer review this agreement?

Form a new company, transfer the IP, forget this guy.

<comment><USER7> How is it possible to transfer the IP if there is another partner who won't agree to that? A lawyer would be needed on that one but surely it's cleaner to void the contract.

<comment><USER6> It depends on his agreement. He may have the authority to do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I question whether or not you have actual, valid VC/PE experience if you signed over 50% of your company (at seed stage, with other investors potentially available) without having that equity actually paid for.

Sorry for the tough situation, but this is your fault; the investor didn't destroy your company - you did.

<comment><AUTHOR> I take fault for letting a bad actor in, which is why I'm sharing my case with everyone.

<comment><USER8> Understood, but you shouldn't blame the Investor - you failed to do proper due diligence and also accepted poor terms when there were multiple, other investors potentially willing to fund the company. You shouldn't blame the Investor

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Did you have an attorney ? One of the most valuable lessons I learn is that lawyers are really important for founders -- perhaps even more important than co-founders.

My advise would be to fire the developer and hire the best attorney you can afford.

</comment><comment><USER5> As others have said, if the investor didn't perform his obligations under the contract, he is in breach of the agreement, and you can argue that shares were never validly conveyed to him. Get a lawyer, have them review the documents and send a letter demanding the money or the contact will be terminated.

</comment><comment><USER10> WOW. Why on $DEITY's good earth would you give away 50% of your company to a seed investor. Let's assume the money comes in. You'll still be unable to raise a future round. You say you've worked in VC before?

You're done, wrap it up. Lesson learned. (and thanks for sharing)

</comment><comment><USER11> He offered you money. There was no clause in your contract _about_ the deadline for the delivery of the money? And the investor had put in weird clauses in there..

That makes you less than smart, and that makes the investor closer to a mafia - and these two parties make a deal!!

</comment><comment><USER12> Close the company? If he's not working in good faith, why should you? Of course consult a lawyer before you go that route.

</comment><comment><USER13> Just tell the investor: give us the money within the next 5 days or you are out. you broke the contract, so I can kick you out easily and undo it. you back own 100% of the company and can continue with a serious investor.

</comment><comment><USER14> Anything posted here is suitable during discovery. The risk/reward of posting on HN... doesn't seem worth it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Ouch. So sorry to hear. What are you planning on doing at this stage? If the contract you signed is airtight, what next?

<comment><USER16> I'm going to speak with people he mentioned working with to see if he does this regularly, or if some circumstances came up that made him unable to make the investment. If the second, transfer the IP and create a new shell company. If the first, repurpose the business slightly and move it offshore.</comment></comment>


Stanford CS 522: AI in Healthcare Seminar, Andrew Ng Notes - <AUTHOR> http://cs522.stanford.edu <comment><USER2> We need a major policy transformation before any of this gains traction.

Health systems, unless they're also an insurance provider, have no incentive whatsoever to use make sure you're healthy. For as long as we live in a fee- for-service world, the system doesn't care if you get sick repeatedly for as long as you have to pay.

Want to start a successful health IT company? Optimize billing, minimize some penalty from Medicare and Medicate, or identify some population that needs services that can be charged for. Almost no one on the business side of medicine gives a damn to prevention and early-stage disease detection, since it will heavily cut into their bottom line.

Frankly, we don't even need AI to make a lot of progress in this space. There are a lot of simple regression models for preventative care that we could use today to make a decent step forward, but no one cares to implement them in part because implementing the money costs some money and in the end hurts the hospitals bottom line. The only projects with traction are the ones where some federal penalty or reward at stake (e.g. readmissions, sepsis, Obamacare's Accountable Care Organizations.)

I've even seen the head of a surgery department mock a startup pitch with the following: "you realize we make money from those operations you're trying to prevent?"

Frankly, someone needs to start a new hospital system to compete with the entrenched providers, because I doubt incentives for existing providers will change for a looong time. A Kaiser or "health membership" model would seem to be the best fit.

Source: 4 years working in Health IT with a stint in VC.</comment>


It's OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty - <AUTHOR> http://www.drmaciver.com/2015/04/its-ok-for-your-open-source-library-to-be-a-bit-shitty/

<comment><USER2> Great post. Only thing I would like to add: It's nice if people are honest about the state of code and make info about its status and (non-)maintenance easy to find.

On github & co many people seem to judge projects by activity, but that isn't necessarily a good metric.</comment>


Lisp implementation in sed - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/shinh/sedlisp <comment><USER2> Ahahah. Awesome. There is even an 'awk' version: [https://github.com/darius/awklisp](https://github.com/darius/awklisp)

<comment><USER3> I wrote that, and I gotta say sed is a much crazier target.

More sed fun: [http://aurelio.net/projects/sedsokoban/](http://aurelio.net/projects/sedsokoban/)

<comment><USER4> Kudos, there was also this one: [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/Web/Groups/AI/lang/lisp/impl/aw...](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/Web/Groups/AI/lang/lisp/impl/awk/0.html) Possibly based on the same newsgroup post?

<comment><USER3> That one's a cooler hack because it runs in old awk, from before they supported user-defined functions. The whole read-eval-print composition is a straight-line series of loops, with the recursions unrolled into explicit stack manipulation. If you want to see how to write fairly readable code within those restrictions, it's instructive. It even has a cooler name. (I said so when bringing it up in my documentation.)

On the other hand, awklisp has some value as a readable Lisp interpreter in a lower-level but still reasonable language, in between the usual Lisp-in-Lisp and Lisp-in-C tutorials.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Would someone mind giving a quick explanation of how this works? I have only used sed to replace text in files and directories. How do people write interpreters and game loops with this unix utility?

<comment><USER6> With difficulty.

I started playing with the idea of making a programming language out of sed at one point, but then I decided that, even if I succeeded, it would be a waste of time.

I didn't take into account Hacker News.

<comment><USER7> woah woah woah. we don't just throw around "waste of time" like that :)

<comment><USER6> I was wrong, obviously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wouldn't the opposite - stream editor (programmable) in Lisp - be more useful?

<comment><USER9> Well, if you count Emacs in batch mode, such a thing already exists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well, OK: I'm curious, can I use the sed to Perl utility, to then make a Lisp implementation in Perl?

<comment><USER10> Trying this myself, it returns an error:

        s2p: expression #1: extra characters after command (d)

Thankfully, I've never had the job of porting a sed script to Perl, so I'm not exactly sure what that's all about. The docs mention this error, but don't explain what it means,

[http://perldoc.perl.org/s2p.html](http://perldoc.perl.org/s2p.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is amazing. Just reading the code makes my head hurt, but you implemented a language with it.

<comment><USER12> Here, for example, is the implementation of `atom` (I think):

      /(atom /{
        /\[\S\+\]/{
          s/.*/[]/
          bpop_context
        }
        s/.*/t/
        bpop_context
      }

<comment><USER13> If this was (the only available) programming, I'd quit.

Kudos, I think, to the author. His pain tolerance exceeds mine by a vast amount.

<comment><USER14> > If this was (the only available) programming, I'd quit.

We started with nothing, remember? Just the bare metal. If this were the only available programming, I'd write an interpreter for a better language.

Never imagine that your current suite of tools is all there is.

<comment><USER15> It will be a challenge to make an interpreter for a better language faster than dead slow.

I would bet on a compiler for a better language instead. That way, only one person would have to wait ages and ages. I doubt the result would be fast, but it wouldn't be insanely, insanely, insanely slow, either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So I guess if all languages are eventually converging on Lisp, are all Lisps eventually converging on sed? Is sed the bottom turtle or are there more?

</comment><comment><USER17> Now you have three problems.

<comment><USER18> Oh come on. They took an unreadable language and implemented a slightly less unreadable language in it. That's at least two problems and one solution.

To what, I don't know.

<comment><USER6> Having a Lisp will make it a little easier to write the Javascript interpreter. Baby steps.

<comment><USER19> Oh, excellent. Once I have JS I'll be able to run Clojure code on it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Ballparq – a small PaaS for Godot games - <AUTHOR> https://ballparq.games <comment><USER2> Really interested in the multiplayer functionality, since Unity seems to have made zero progress on the problem in the last 5 years.

<comment><USER3> Do you know where I could read more about the problems with Unity multiplayer? My brother is investing a lot of time into building a game with Unity and he fully intends it to be multiplayer. I need to warn him if there's something horrible there.

<comment><USER4> The creator of Garry's Mod and Rust had a relevant blog post on this recently. There's a section specific to the multiplayer issues.

[https://garry.tv/unity-2020](https://garry.tv/unity-2020)

<comment><USER5> It sounds to me like they are sacrificing backwards compatibility. If you have an existing customer base this is one of the worst decisions you can make. When you release incompatible products you split your customer base along these products and if your newer product isn't sufficiently convincing then instead of gaining customers you will lose your existing ones.

<comment><USER4> Yeah I don't know the whole story but my understanding is that they originally made Unity work pretty well for mobile and 2d single player games so their 3d rendering and multiplayer support sucked. Now they're branching into the AA and AAA realm and they had to forego compatibility with their earlier rendering pipeline and multiplayer library in order to make it work for those use cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is awesome, and could actually be a really cool competitor to itch.io if you play it right.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Another guy made a good point about a listing as well, I'll look into that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks cool, but the market around godot is rather very small now and all the games made on Godot tend to very small, hobby-ish, not very monetization ready, thus make your potential customers are a very minority.

Of course someone may want to show case his games and host them on the platform, all in all a cool project and hope one day it takes off!

<comment><AUTHOR> True, it's mostly a passion project as well. I've worked with Godot so much and thought this was a missing feature for most non-developer hobbyist that want to make games. My plan was maybe to sponsor some game-jams to get more known.

Thanks for the kind words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm interested. When I click "Submit" to sign up for the beta, my browser gets a 500 error submitting a post request.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh shucks, I'll look into that, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks really interesting! Tried to sign up for the beta, but the form didn't submit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixing it right now, gonna add a quick alert when the data submitted!

Thanks for letting me know!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> not a game developer, but big-up for the launch. great product. & yeah, the browser distribution mechanism is neat. my advice, have a listing portal - where published games are listed

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea! Thanks for the kind words!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Use the high-level Godot Multiplayer API in combination with Websockets and > ballparq automatically sets up a multiplayer server in seconds!

I doubt this works very well.

<comment><USER5> Well, it's still in beta so how would you know?

Also, Websockets are a pretty good time saver. They are basically a thin layer on top of TCP that allows you to send packets of arbitrary size whereas TCP only allows you to send a single stream of bytes and you have to do everything yourself.</comment></comment>


Analysis of SPDY and TCP Initcwnd (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-white-httpbis-spdy-analysis-00

<comment><USER2> > SPDY worked well for Page A (many smaller images) ... For Page B (many > images more typical size), the results were a bit more hit-or-miss, with > SPDY not always resulting in improved performance. ... Page C (small number > of large images), on the other hand, resulted in almost universally worse > performance with SPDY than with HTTPS.

> [SPDY] showed worse average performance than HTTPS when packet loss was 1% > ... With a typical HTTPS download of a web page, the browser will open a > large number of simultaneous TCP connections. In this case, a random packet > loss will cause the one affected connection to temporarily reduce its > congestion window (and hence the effective data rate) ...

In other words, there's a new, much more complicated protocol with layer violations to squeeze everything into one pipe, that's going to end up being used over several connections anyway because of how TCP works. And the main performance benefit is for many small resources.

> Google ... report a 15.4% improvement in page load time

Vs _non-pipelined_ HTTP. Pipelined HTTP also can send many small resources efficiently, where SPDY (now HTTP/2) gets most of its performance benefit from.

Google could have just made a pipelining implementation only work over SSL (so no proxies/antivirus in the middle) that only worked when the server signaled it and achieved almost all of the performance benefit of SPDY and HTTP/2 without needing a new protocol at all. Without having to guess and test for problematic pipelining, it could have spammed requests from the start and would have been slightly slower and slightly less robust, but still the lion's share of the benefit.

Google certainly understand fractional performance improvements. I just wish they didn't make it so complicated.</comment>


Decoding old Nibs: A sad tale of vendor lock-in and abandonment - <AUTHOR> http://www.mulle-kybernetik.com/weblog/2015/decoding_nibs_into_objective_.html <comment><USER2> I think an introductory paragraph for those unfamiliar with Nibs would help this article.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Via Wikipedia, "Nib, the generic name assigned to .nib and .xib files, short for NeXT Interface Builder, the default file format for Apple's Interface Builder." More: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Builder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Builder)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If ibtool still allows you to convert your nibs to xibs, then you can try to play around with this:

[https://github.com/robiculous/scxib](https://github.com/robiculous/scxib)

It converts XIB files to a custom json format for a dead javascript application. You could modify the json to suit your needs and would then have the UI structure you desired at the end of the post.

<comment><USER3> I think OP had the same idea, but ibtool seems to report, "EOAspectConnector connections are not supported by Interface Builder 3.0."</comment></comment>


Looking for feedback from iPad users on our app - <AUTHOR>

We are looking for some users to beta test our ipad app that gives one touch access and sync to desktop documents. Any idea on best way to find users interested in giving feedback email@example.com <comment><USER2> How is this different from and/or better than Dropbox?

Also, from a marketing perspective, I'm sorry but the synthesized "actor" voices in your promo video are disturbing and off-putting, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER3> Try creating a betalist profile: <http://betali.st/>.

Before you do that, scrap your current marketing video.</comment>


30-year-old black hole discovered by  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/nov/HQ_10-299_CHANDRA.html <comment><USER2> So if this is 50 million light years away, shouldn't it be a 50,000,030 year old black hole?

<comment><USER3> Depends on your frame of reference.

No, really: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity>

There's not really such a thing as "right now, over there". To use the obvious example, from the perspective of the light, no time has passed since it was emitted at the object and our observing it.

<comment><USER4> I think the point is that if we were able to instantaneously transport ourselves there we would be observing a 50 million + 30 year old black hole. Nobody talks about things from the the perspective of a photon (in casual conversation, at least).

<comment><USER5> That's false, or rather, undefined. To "instantaneously transport ourselves" implies that there is an _absolute_ time frame shared by us and the black hole, i.e. if it's 3:00 PM our time when we transport ourselves, we'll appear at 3:00 PM "black hole time."

There simply is no such concept in relativity. For two events A and B separated in space, some observers will see them happening simultaneously, some will see A occur before B, and still other will see B occur before A.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, we hear that a lot. But we also know to the millisecond "how long" it took the light to get here etc. Yes, they are different frames of reference. But if we crawled over there we know exactly how much time had passed there, and how old the black hole would be when we got there.

<comment><USER7> You said "instantaneously". That usually would imply traveling outside of your lightcone. That really is undefined; an "instantaneous" transport from here can end up anywhere outside of your lightcone, which are all equally well(/poorly) defined in relativity. You can't distinguish those points in either time or space without creating a preferred reference frame.

This is the same reason FTL drives are also, fundamentally, time machines. It's really a very profound thing; there's no "yeah, but really we know there's an absolute time frame underneath it all"... there really, _really_ isn't an absolute time frame, and you really, _really_ can't say how old the black hole would be if you "instantaneously" transported there; it is just as valid to instantaneously appear when it is 31 years old as it would be to appear when it is 100,000,029 years old (taking of course the estimated age as its true age). Or, IMHO, just as invalid because FTL and instantaneous truly don't exist.

Yes, if you change your claim to be sublight and non-instantaneous we can compute how old it would be, but that's a profound goal post shift.

The Minkowski metric is a mindbender, the moreso once you realize that it is not some weird mathematical abstraction with no connection to reality, it _is_ reality, or at least a much better approximation than the one we instinctively use. The "weird mathematical abstraction with no connection to reality" is the implicitly Euclidean/Galilean metric that exists in our heads. (Which can actually be demonstrated to contain fundamental contradictions if you poke them hard enough.)

<comment><USER6> Yet we know

The age of the universe

The age of all the stars we see in the sky

How long ago that supernova occurred

On and on.

I get it. There is a disconnect between my timeframe and that of a different acceleration frame. But they are related in a precise calculatable and empirically-confirmed way that lets me set a clock in one and know exactly what the clock in the other will read.

<comment><USER5> Knowing the age of something at a given time in its own reference point isn't contradictory, thus we can know the age of the Earth, etc. It's __is __contradictory to say that __now, in our reference frame __, the [supernova, black hole, star, etc.] is _x_ years old. The only thing that makes sense is to judge how old the object appears to us, judging from the information (light) that's reaching us now from the given object.

<comment><USER6> Then does it make sense to say "that light took 50,000,000 years to get here"? Or is the black hole 'truly' 30 years old?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They wait until the end to say that it could be just a neutron star.

 _Although the evidence points to a newly formed black hole in SN 1979C, another intriguing possibility is that a young, rapidly spinning neutron star with a powerful wind of high energy particles could be responsible for the X-ray emission_

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice human-readable summary here, too: [http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/11/15/as...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/11/15/astronomers- may-have-found-youngest-black-hole)

<comment><USER10> I think every space article I have read on HN has had a better write up by Phil linked in the comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> 50 million light-years away? They called that our "neighborhood" a couple days ago...

I think a lesson on expectations management is due.

<comment><USER12> I believe "neighborhood" has a formal definition here.

<comment><USER13> Blame realtors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is it possible to even notice 30 years in 50M-year frame?

<comment><USER15> It is when time zero begins with an explosion that outshines the whole galaxy.</comment></comment>


Looking for a cool functional spec template - <AUTHOR> I am looking for a cool functional specification template.
I have an idea for a smaller web app, that I would like to spec out, so others can build it for me. But I cant seem to find an (open source) standard for this?
Snooping around I found an old one that NASA share online: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20160011412.pdf - might be a bit overkill. They also share the 2003 version of their engineering handbook: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/nasa_systems_engineering_handbook_0.pdf - looks cool, but it would be large.
Found this at Stanford: https://uit.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/2017/08/30/Functional%20Specification%20Document%20Template.docx
Is there a good standard one can employ? - or What would you use if you had to specify a smaller project to be developed by a 4-5 man team?
(I'm new to this forum, so apologies for breaking any unwritten (or written) rules). <comment><USER2> I'd probably just start with a blank Word doc, write an introduction and mock up some diagrams using the inbuilt tools Word has. I don't think a template is required for a small web app. Hire someone to build it who doesn't just blindly follow specs to the letter. You'd get a better outcome. And you can spend less time on making the spec a contract and more a simple communication tool that is the beginning of a dialogue.</comment>


Snap values itself at nearly $24B with its IPO pricing - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/01/snap-values-itself-at-nearly-24b-with-its-ipo-pricing/ <comment><USER2> Over the past years(as a new grad) I thought that I would've killed to work at Snapchat, Fitbit, Uber, or Twitter. Now, I wouldn't touch any of those companies with a 50 foot pole. I've grown extremely cynical about startups and the extreme hype that surrounds them.

That being said, at Internapalooza this year, the longest line there was for SnapChat and every young person seemed enamored with them. And I remember a time where everyone was screaming that Facebook would fail because of it's lack of profit or that Twitter was the next Facebook/Google.

This is all a long way of saying that no one knows what the hell they are talking about when they discuss these companies. Whether that's posters on HN, financial talking heads, or even successful people in Silicon Valley. If you have some advantage on the market, and can predict the correct valuation of Snapchat, then:

1\. Put your money where your mouth is. Buy or short the IPO.

2\. It's probably wise to not share your take as it relinquishes the advantage you think you have on the market.

3\. Hope you stay solvent longer than the market stays irrational.

Just remember, these same "experts" said that no one needed DropBox when they had wGet.

<comment><USER3> I definitely don't get snapchat. Too old, not playing.

That said, if you don't understand a company, man, you should stay far, far away from investing in it.

And I _don 't_ use DropBox. I use Google Drive. For free.

Where's that Dropbox IPO at anyways?

<comment><USER4> I downloaded Snapchat when they first busted onto the scene to see what it was all about. I was constantly being told by a close friend to download it so that she could snap with me.

I thought it was a poor means of communicating and though the snaps were just noise that I didnt need.

I jumped onto Facebook's IPO but snapchat I definitely wouldn't touch.

<comment><USER5> I use snapchat every single day. Not a Facebook user anymore. They've got a really stronghold on 18-25 year old market.

Facebook sees snap as a threat and they literally ripped snapchat in whatsapp "status".

I can't say that it will beat Facebook but I'm willing to bet it will be more valuable than twitter. I will buy if it's share price is not too hyped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> People are asking if Snap is more Twitter or Facebook. From my (light) exposure, it doesn't seem like either. It's more like a lifestyle-aware replacement for Apple Messages + Camera -- two of the most heavily used apps on any phone. (For Android, replace Apple Messages with whatever Google calls their text chat app this week.)

The closest comparison could be WhatsApp, and that was valued at $19 billion. So I'm not sure that Snap's valuation is as outrageous as it seems based on traditional metrics.

Also, I've been really impressed by the design of the Spectacles. The yellow charging case is a brilliant way to make the glasses lighter. Snap is the only major tech company that understands anything about playful design -- Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft are all treading the same safe paths of post- Jobsian blandness.

<comment><USER7> I think when people say is Snap a Twitter or Facebook they are wondering if it will +350% or -60% in the first few years after IPO.

<comment><USER8> Snap's data has real value, like Facebook's. For most of their users, they have a large portion of their phone's contacts (whether you opt in or not is irrelevant due to your contacts opting into this + a network effect.) They also have media preferences based on what articles you're watching/reading. They also know who you're most interested in (who's stories you're watching most, and who you send/receive snaps from the most) and what their interests are, so they can potentially infer interests from that too, even if you don't read articles. They have location data turned on for most of their users thanks to geo filters, and if they've been "good" data miners, they're sending your facial mapping home when you do a face filter effect. I'd be surprised if Snap doesn't have the most comprehensive faces database out there with all the angles they get from selfies (though they may not have the most unique faces.)

Oh yeah, and they also have the perceived privacy that Facebook doesn't have. Deleting messages doesn't actually delete them, but it just feels better when they're gone, so people are more candid on Snapchat.

Not to mention they've also done an excellent job monetizing their features thus far, with very little intrusion that I've noticed as a user. You get the occasional ad when you're looking through stories, but most of the money is coming from things like sponsored content and geo filters, which users don't complain about.

<comment><USER9> For what it's worth, I talked to a Snapchat engineer at a job fair, and he told me that Snapchat is trying to focus on new products and features (like Spectacles) more so than trying to monetize their data.

<comment><USER10> I've heard that. Snap considers itself akin to a camera company. Will be interesting to see where things go, but I don't like the valuation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you have a large amount of money you don't mind gambling with and can afford to stay solvent longer than the market can stay irrational, I feel like this is the best short ever.

My 5 year target on SNAP would be roughly one can of Pringles. When the next market meltdown happens, Michael Lewis will write a great book about people buying non-voting shares of a fad company at a $24b valuation that says in its prospectus that it has no plans to make money and maybe never will.

Or I'm wrong and they won't be a fad and will figure out how to monetize, but I feel like the multiplied probabilities of both make it as clear a bet as you ever get.

<comment><USER12> > My 5 year target on SNAP would be roughly one can of Pringles.

What does this sentence mean?

<comment><USER13> "Pringles" is a "pack of chips" (more or less), so basically he means, "a pack of chips" is what the company will become. (this is what i understand :p )

<comment><USER14> What does this clarify? "A pack of chips" isn't a common idiom.

<comment><USER15> A pack of chips is generally really cheap in any region/country, so I think in the context, the idiom is explanatory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They are pricing right at the top of their range with this if the rumors are true. I don't think they are announcing hte actual price until after the close.

One one hand raising as much as possible is very nice for the company but to temper that sentiment I think it was Robin Li, the Baidu founder, who made the comment that while he was very happy with the first day pop his stock had, it was an actual curse.

he was prepared to run an XX Billion dollar business and hit his targets but with the opening day pop he was now running a 2X Billion dollar business and that made things significantly harder than if the stock had risen gently over the course of 4-8 quarters.

I wish the Snap team well, but they'll have a few hiccups coming.

They've been private long enough that a deluge of shares will come free trading this year and they'll at some point have to do the tight rope walk of switching from telling wall street to look at user growth to looking at profits.

If you want to invest I'll quote someone sitting beside me. "The problem with Snap is determining if they are more Twitter or Facebook."

From a wall street perspective this IPO was a bit different. It was about 10x oversubscribed, which is alot but not uncommon. What was interesting was that alot of mutual funds got almost full allocations and hedge funds were shut out compared to what they would normally get.

Maybe this is a good thing?

</comment><comment><USER17> Anyone knows their growth numbers since the introduction of Instagram Stories? For influencers with a following in the 18+ age range this was the day a lot quit Snapchat (including myself).

<comment><USER12> This techcrunch article has what you're after: [https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/02/slowchat/](https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/02/slowchat/).

They say growth slowed from 7% QOQ to 3.2% QOQ. Having only 3.2% Q4 QOQ growth is pretty worrying considering they had ~14% QOQ growth in every prior Q4.

<comment><USER18> Serious question: are the growth numbers scrutinized? How exactly are they calculated? It seems like down-playing growth numbers pre-IPO could leave more room for "awesome growth" in the first few post-IPO years. Maybe switch the way the numbers are calculated at the appropriate times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > "$59 million in revenue in 2015 to nearly $400 million in 2016"

Valuation at 60x 2016 revenue with no profit? Oh boy.

Aside from that, who uses Snapchat?

<comment><USER20> Every single student in the high school I teach at uses Snapchat. All day. Every day.

<comment><USER21> > _Every single student in the high school I teach at uses Snapchat. All day. > Every day._

Are high-school students a lucrative market (and I'm not talking the mobile ad ponzi)? I was pretty poor at that age.

<comment><USER22> High school students have a lot of influence on what their parents spend on them for certain things like consumer electronics, restaurants, family vacations, clothes, etc. "Mom please buy me an Xbox for Christmas!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't use Snap products, but from my totally uninformed, unengaged vantage point it seems to me that Snap is valuable because they present a different set of values to their users then Facebook, Google, etc.

Their first product wanted to challenge the permanence of our digital stuff. (Forget the underlying technology.)

The glasses are about challenging this kind of Google/Apple model of the person as some elegant cyborg from the Jetsons. They offered a toy for, like, just goofing off.

I imagine users like it because it's not crammed with ads and spam yet.

$24B is about half of what it costs to build high speed rail from LA to SF, or a third of what it might cost for a manned mission to Mars.

Compared to what it probably costs to operate and develop, $24B sounds redonkulous. Compared to those other projects, it's hard to see what Snap has that's so rare.

Maybe the better comparisons are Nike (market cap $95B) and Coca-Cola ($182B). Snap is using near-commodity economic inputs and outputs to express a point of view and build a brand.

All of this is speculation from my deep crater of ignorance.

</comment><comment><USER24> Somehow I've managed to see exactly zero comments about Whatsapp stories in this thread, which really surprises me. I think that's a hell of a lot more scary to Snapchat than Instagram stories. Most people with Instagram have Snapchat, but most people with Whatsapp do not have Snapchat.

For those who don't know (and I don't know much) Whatsapp just launched a stories feature, similar to Instagram or Snapchat.

<comment><USER25> > I think that's a hell of a lot more scary to Snapchat than Instagram > stories. Most people with Instagram have Snapchat, but most people with > Whatsapp do not have Snapchat.

Neither of these sentences is accurate.

<comment><USER24> The first one's an opinion. In the second one, 'most people with Whatsapp do not have Snapchat' is just simple math - there are more than twice as many Whatsapp users compared to Snapchat. 'Most people with Instagram have Snapchat' is anecdotal, sure, but do you think that more than 50% of Instagram active users do not actively use Snapchat? I only know a handful of people that have Instagram that do not have Snapchat, and only two of those people are active Instagram users.

From your profile I can see you're a reporter, so if you have any access to hard data about this I'd love to hear what the real numbers are. Thanks!

<comment><USER25> Instagram has ~400 million DAUs whereas Snapchat has ~160 million. Even if 100% of Snapchat users have Instagram accounts, it's still not most Instagram users. Maybe you're indexing on a different number, rather than DAUs?

Wasn't objecting to the part about Whatsapp, you're right there!

<comment><USER24> Oh shoot, you're right! I only bothered to google Instagram DAUs and didn't even bother for Snapchat, assuming they'd be pretty far past 200MM. I stand corrected.

Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> SNAP will be the best short once it crossed $50B market cap.

</comment><comment><USER27> What I find really interesting in that number is that according to Matt Levine the IPO has been already oversubscribed 10 times.[0]

This kind of number strongly implies that one can expect the immediate post- IPO valuation to be quite a bit higher. However, once the aggressive stock flippers are done, there's no telling where the stock price finds its equilibrium.

0: [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-03-01/snapchat-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-03-01/snapchat- indexes-and-free-research)

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't see that snapchat has the lock-in to make it worth the risk. Sure you can leave other social networks and it's always a risk but Snapchat's ephemeral nature seems to make that risk much much worse. That said I only used it for a week before I got annoyed by it so maybe I don't have the best perspective.

</comment><comment><USER29> Robinhood has bids starting at $16 on the IPO... I have no clue if it's a smart buy. Anyone care to chime in?

<comment><USER30> this valuation expert from NYU puts the value at $13.3B (dramatically lower than the stated IPO price)

[http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2017/02/a-snap-story- val...](http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2017/02/a-snap-story-valuing-snap- ahead-of-its.html)

<comment><USER31> He's quite often wrong: [http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2012/02/ipo-of- decade-my...](http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2012/02/ipo-of-decade-my- valuation-of-facebook.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> What I don't understand about this is if I'm using Instagram Stories, just because I happen to be an active instagram user....why would I ever switch to Snapchat other than audience? I can get alot of the same audience on Instagram already. Stories does the trick mostly

</comment><comment><USER33> People my age (22) just use Snapchat to flirt or post pictures of parties. No one - and I mean no one - ever checks out the articles in the Stories section of Snapchat. I really don't see any way for them to make money at this point.

<comment><USER34> People my age drive down the road and listen to music. No one - and i mean no one - ever checks out the advertisements on the side of the road. I really don't see anyway for them to make money at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> That's a number that makes the $3B Facebook offered them look quite small.

</comment><comment><USER36> Snapchat is Comcast for your face, without the need for pipes. They want to own the distribution of video content on mobile (and eventually AR), whether it comes from your friend or from NatGeo. Right now, it's hard to get started on Snapchat for small vendors. It makes a lot more sense for large companies. This differentiates its strategy from Google and Facebook in a big way -- it's more demand generation (which FB also serves) than end-of-pipeline marketing. I am not sure how this limitation affects its growth potential. Thoughts? Will they open it up to smaller clients? How will the limitations of the format affect ads?

<comment><USER37> I'm sure they will open it up more broadly at some point. Right now they can ensure that the big brands create more compelling ads and have control over it. We'll definitely see more portrait video content moving forward.

Do you know if the ads they started running are forced viewing? Are they injected like interstitials before you can digest your friends' content?

If so, that's compelling for an advertiser but likely to kill the service IMO, as young people will easily defect.

<comment><USER36> Yes, there are now interstitials. They are not mandatory though -- you can swipe past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> My take:

The most important thing is the non voting shares. Big money will be staying away from that IPO.

<comment><USER39> Completely untrue. The IPO is already 10 times oversubscribed. [0]

[0] [http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000597530](http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000597530)

<comment><USER38> As I say, that was my assessment. I just wanted to be friendly and share my views.

But, people are free to do whatever they want with their money. Just keep in mind that Snap isn't AMD, and snapchat CEO+board inspire opposite of confidence with their public statements. I won't even go into their financial predictions, aspirations and what they plan to do with the money. Just because the capital is oversaturating lately, doesn't mean all IPOs will go up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I see 0 value in Snapchat. Besides, how is it even being monetized?

Edit: I meant 0 value as in 0 _added_ value. See mrweasel's comment below for more details on the second point.

<comment><USER41> You don't see value in an engaged audience of nearly 300 million people using a product regularly? Really? Zero? I think that's an incredibly unfair and naive thing to suggest to be honest.

<comment><USER42> Well maybe not zero, but certainly not anywhere near $24B. There is no clear way of injecting ads into Snapchat, and in many markeds users could just revert back to SMS at no cost, so charging for the service will only work in some markeds. Assuming that engaged users equal profit is more or less the reasoning that brought us the .com bubble.

I won't suggest that that one could'nt turn a profit on Snapchat, but one false step and those 300 million users will leave faster than they came. They've already been taught that Snapchat is a free service, that will be hard to change. And VCs are ready to fund the next Snapchat the minute that the IPO hits, so the users won't have to wait long for their new free alternative.

Snapchat is a fun opportunity, if the price where $10-20 million.

<comment><USER43> Sorry, but this is nonsense. Snapchat already has 2 forms of ads (paid filters and sponsored stories), and $400m in revenue on "only" $450m in costs. Saying SMS will replace snapchat is like saying horses will replace airplanes; anyone under 30 with a smartphone is way past that. For me, only a little older than the main snapchat demographic, it's replaced most of my use of Hangouts (which replaced SMS, but is basically interchangeable with whatsapp/whatever as far as I'm concerned), and completely replaced Facebook. If I used twitter, it probably would have replaced that too. I have several snapchat friends that I literally don't even have their phone number.

Get a few big celebrities using the snapchat glasses courtside at an NBA game or from backstage at a concert or something and watch snapchat explode. I was at a wedding with those glasses and you should have seen how much everyone of all ages loved the glasses.

If their valuation was <$10B I'd be all over this IPO, just $24B seems way too high to me (I also think the whatsapp $19B was ridiculous). Their only risk is being replaced the way I think snapchat will replace Facebook (although I don't think Facebook will completely die), which as the evolution of websites and smartphone apps has shown no one can predict.

<comment><USER44> Their expenses were over $900m, I don't know where you got $450m from.

<comment><USER43> You're right, the linked article says "cost of revenue" was $450m which I assumed was a non-technical term by a writer trying to pad the article out, but the S-1 has it all broken out including that. With everything else it was over $900m. The S-1 has it defined as things like their infrastructure costs (bandwidth and such?).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Inside cpyext: Why emulating CPython C API is so Hard - <AUTHOR> https://morepypy.blogspot.com/2018/09/inside-cpyext-why-emulating-cpython-c.html <comment><USER2> There is a lot of detail here, but the higher-level takeaway is this: the Python C API is a very "wide" API. It exposes lots of details of CPython: the good, the bad, and the ugly. You get direct access to pointers to the underlying objects. You manually manage reference counts.

For the polar opposite of this, consider the Lua API. You don't get pointers to any VM data structures except a single pointer to the "Lua state". You do not perform any manual memory management.

Lua's approach has yielded amazing results. LuaJIT is not only source- compatible with pre-existing Lua 5.1 extensions, it is _binary compatible_ with them. You can take a .so that you built before LuaJIT ever existed and it will work with LuaJIT _without recompiling_. This is astounding to me.

Moral of the story: keep your interfaces as narrow and encapsulated as possible!

<comment><USER3> Worth noting that the PyPy article links to a whole site devoted to the troubles and rehabilitation of the CPython API: [https://pythoncapi.readthedocs.io/](https://pythoncapi.readthedocs.io/) . It's really exciting to see these backend concerns being addressed with depth and care, especially against the backdrop of syntactic sugar PEPs blowing up uglily.

<comment><USER4> PyPy is one of the few projects that are doing good work, communicating their work well and making the right strategic decisions. At his rate I won't be surprised if python4 is just PyPy.

<comment><USER5> If the PyPy team made something that was compatible with both Python2 and Python3, that Python would be _that_ Python.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > for a total 2-3 person-months of work.

In a year. In a project which could put Python next to JS, for the last pain- point that prevents it.

Python - one of the top 10 most popular languages - community and all its industrial user, including some of the most successful companies on the planet, can afford to put 3 person-months of work for that feature.

There has to be something else at play here that I'm missing. Well, other than missing that "donate" button for a tad too long...

<comment><USER7> There are very few commercial sponsors for Python and related projects. Django has enough resources for basically one full-time paid contributor, but that's it. Huge amounts of Python infra is maintained in people's free time, despite powering so much

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Right. It's exactly this sort of coupling between the runtime and extension modules that prompted me to adopt a very conservative design for the Emacs extension module interface, which tries as hard as possible to isolate extension modules and abstract over VM implementation details.

I didn't quite get as far as I wanted, since the module system still relies on conservative stack scanning to find C-extension GC tools (because everyone else wasn't sold on JNI-like explicit local references), but it's still much more tightly specified than the Python API.

The Python extension API has another problem: it relies on FILE* and other assorted bits of the C runtime. That's mostly okay on POSIX-y systems where it's common for a whole process to share one C runtime, but on Windows, where different modules can come with different C runtime versions, this kind of leaking of objects across an interface boundary really hurts.

</comment><comment><USER9> It seems like it would be easier and more performant (begin heresy and likely vast oversimplification) for PyPy to have a mostly complete implementation of CPython that it interacts with at the object level such that each object in PyPy could be a PyPy GC object descended from W_root or a CPython RefCount object implemented on PyObject*. There would be many points where you would still have to convert to make operations work. Either way, running under the assumption of "objects from CPython or objects that are passed to CPython are more likely to interact with other CPython objects, so lets not convert them back until we have to" might result in closer to CPython performance for code with a lot of CPython extensions.

Does this seem reasonable? Is this even possible? I don't know much about the internals of PyPy...

<comment><USER4> PyPy in general has much better performance than CPython.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As contrast, calling C from Python, even using callbacks, it is very easy and incredibly useful, thanks to the "ctypes" [1]

[1] [https://docs.python.org/2/library/ctypes.html](https://docs.python.org/2/library/ctypes.html)

<comment><USER11> True but that's not particularly impressive, most non-sandboxed scripting languages have a straightforward way to call C. It's just a lot simpler that way: C doesn't have much of a runtime, you don't have to worry about corrupting C's state too much. There's no garbage collector in C for instance.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Would be nice if funding comes through to make c extensions fast on PyPy, then we could try out many what if scenarios descibed in other comments:

What if we wrote that in pure python instead? What if we moved the computation to a GPU c extension? What if we use a diffent GC strategy?

</comment><comment><USER5> I have been saying this for 8+ years, maybe longer. The CPython "Python.h" should be viewed as deprecated and folks should be using cffi [1] for all of their native code gluing needs. By targeting cffi, one gets futured proofed multi-runtime extensions for free. "Python.h" ties one to a specific implementation.

[1] [https://cffi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://cffi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

</comment><comment><USER12> I started making PyPy the default interpreter for my projects, and you should too!

Maybe I'm a sucker for the underdog, but in my mind, PyPy could save the Python ecosystem from irrelevance. People are looking at Rust and Go with the excuse of performance, and they are now the new Hip language. Even Ruby is catching up.

Without an answer, Python could be side-tracked for a increasing number of scenarios.

</comment><comment><USER13> Seriously, this surface area should've been closed off when they broke backwards-compatibility with the Python 2 to Python 3 jump.

</comment><comment><USER14> Can anyone point to an introduction to CPython internals? My goal is to write a Python extension in C that manipulates Python objects.

<comment><USER15> Try boost-python, SWIG or cython instead. They give you a nicer c++ api and automatically handles ref-counting, exception handling and other things that are easy to forget.

[https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_61_0/libs/python/doc/html/t...](https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_61_0/libs/python/doc/html/tutorial/index.html#tutorial.quickstart)

<comment><USER16> How is the Boost/PyPy integration? Sure, there's cpyext, so in principle a Boost-generated extension can be used by pypy.

Are there any changes which would make Boost-based extensions better integrated/supported by PyPy?

The linked-to document only talks about Cython and cffi.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is cppyy, which is cffi for c++. Boost python is not being maintained, in the cpython world pybind11 is more popular but cppyy is pypy freindly

<comment><USER16> Boost isn't being maintained? I did not know that. One of the project I use often - F/OSS but I'm a user, not core developer - uses Boost for C++/Python integration. They chose it many years ago. This topic has never come up on the mailing list or user group meetings. I suspect that since Boost "just works", no one has care to re-evaluate that decision.

Thanks for the pointers to what's going on in the C++/python integration layer. I'll experiment with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For the healthy improvement of programming language, it is vital to have a multiple independent and competing implementations. Python doesn't allow that.

For this, I think the Python will follow the same fate as Perl did.</comment>


More Than a Trillion Exoplanets Could Exist Beyond Our Galaxy - <AUTHOR> https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/exoplanets-discovery-milky-way-galaxy-spd/ <comment><USER2> Weak writing, and bad title.

I _think_ what they mean to say is that: in addition to an estimated 1 trillion exoplanets orbiting the (250 billion, ± 150) stars of the Milky Way, they estimate that there is another trillion "starless" exoplanets wandering "near" our galaxy.

Apart from all the exoplanets in and around all the other galaxies in the universe.

Edit: having read the related WaPo article, I don't know what the astronomers are trying to say about exoplanets "beyond" our galaxy. _Shrugs_.</comment>


Why are there so few black people in STEM? - <AUTHOR> https://www.labroots.com/trending/chemistry-and-physics/17877/black-people-stem <comment><USER2> I'd like to see how many poorer men in general. I'm a black engineer and I couldn't count how many of my classmates would have graduated if they were in my shoes.

There were 4-5 weeks at different where I just ran out money and sat on bed instead of eating thinking I couldn't be hungry is I was sleep. I usually found enough money to collect to buy a bag of rice for the month. But regardless of race this is hard. Given there no attempt to help anyone with anything as simple as a food shelter on college campus why would they stay.

It's kind of un-nerving watching some engineers friends discuss this. It's kind of arrogant and presumptuous. I'm not even close to the smart person I grew up with. When they discuss that maybe black people may not have the intellect, that I know a guy who was forced to work a meat packing plant that could run circles around you in any STEM subject, but wasn't given the opportunity or was willing to starve himself for the chance.

I think the US leaves a lot of talent on the cutting room floor especially those interested in subject we deem essential. It's pretty saddening.

<comment><USER3> If I can provide an interesting data point, I had access to a survey given to students at one college that asked a few questions to cross it with the student's results.

Guess which was the undeniably most common issue among people failing two classes or more? Financial insecurity.

It's hard figuring out a solution there as that was in a country with cheap (not free but still) education.

<comment><USER4> Anecdotally, of my friend group in college (at a large state school in the US) everyone who was financially stable eventually graduated with a bachelors degree. 3 out of 4 of my friends who were paying themselves through college dropped out. Having a part time job and trying to go to school full time took a huge toll on them.

<comment><USER5> > Having a part time job and trying to go to school full time took a huge toll > on them.

Would it have been better to part time both job and college? Instead of 3-4 yrs for a degree, it takes 6-8 years, but you also work part time during.

This route exists for many colleges - why not do this?

<comment><USER6> My wife and I personally did this. I took 6 years, she took 8 (we had a baby and she got a teaching credential, which is why hers took longer).

Graduated without any debt, but it was rediculously hard, especially in years 4-5.5 when I lost my job (2008 recession) and survived solely off rice, turkey hotdogs, and whitebread (leaving barely enough to cover diapers/medical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For the same reason there are so few poor whites in STEM. America's dysfunctional education funding.

Make education funding federal, and have a nationwide push to have small classes and well funded schools for everybody, and this would be fixed in 10 years. As it is, rich districts pay more taxes and get better schools. Funny that.

<comment><USER8> Why is that the first thing people think of when it comes to explaining black behavior is that they must be poor? Not all black people are poor. Stop it with the stereotypes.

<comment><USER9> It's not about stereotypes. I am sure that everyone on HN knows that not all Black people are poor. I am Black by the way.

But, we also have to look at statistics and think longitudinally instead of anecdotally.

I came from a middle class family in a small town in the south. But my mom being a well connected high school math teacher did give me some advantages.

When I graduated from college, I had a choice between taking a job in a slightly larger city where I could have afforded to take care of myself or move to Atlanta where I could get a job as a computer operator based on a previous internship. But the pay was crap.

I wanted to move to Atlanta because I knew I would have more opportunities. My parents had already bought me car, they subsidized me for the first year, and the rest is history - I was able to network my way into getting a software development position. This was in the late 90s.

My classmate couldn't afford to make those choices. He was stuck taking a COBOL programming job in the 90s - the same job I turned down and still is doing that to this day in the same city.

<comment><USER10> Nice story. COBOL programmers started making some serious money with Y2K. At least, the contractors started billing advanced hourly rates. And were making more than they ever did.

And from what I've been seeing, COBOL just isn't going anywhere. Those mainframes really are built to last. So he should probably have a job for the rest of his life. I hope he's got a nice pension.

<comment><USER9> I hope so. I posted on Facebook that I found my old FORTRAN, Pascal and COBOL textbooks from college when I went home to visit my parents and tagged him and few other classmates.

We graduated in the mid 90s. The book was last updated in 1985. He told me he was still programming in COBOL. I just got quiet. I didn't know. I didn't mean to insult him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder how many people on HN have experienced being the only person of their race in the room. In my case I was put into a French public school where I was the only Asian student. It took me a bit to realize why I found that experience so shitty. The language and culture barrier was definitely a factor. But also it just sucks standing out. Sometimes this difference manifests as racism. Sometimes it manifests as simpering. Either way the manifestation reinforces your otherness, your difference.

There are certainly people who can surmount these obstacles and fit in. Who have the charm and charisma to ingratiate themselves into any group in any place. I'm not one of those people. I'm not obligated to be one of those people. Those people are quite rare.

Another point: Perhaps there are fewer Black people in STEM because Black people have more pressing issues. If I were Black and intelligent, I'd probably be interesting in combating larger social issues and not biochemistry. But that's just me.

<comment><USER9> _Another point: Perhaps there are fewer Black people in STEM because Black people have more pressing issues. If I were Black and intelligent, I 'd probably be interesting in combating larger social issues and not biochemistry. But that's just me._

No. Most Black people don't feel any more of a calling to "combat larger social issues" than anyone else.

Yes, I worked at one company where I was the only Black person out of maybe 200 people until another one of my friends got hired based on my referral. They constantly mixed up our names when talking to us.

We were on a conference call once and my friend "John" was talking and one of our coworkers in another state mixed us up and said we "sound a like". My friend was from up north and had a Boston accent. I have a southern accent. We sound nothing a like.

I am not saying that the company didn't have any Black peoples because it was racist. The company was based in another state that was about a two hour drive. I would go there and not see any other Black people. We worked in a satellite office.

I was also in the awkward position of being in the city of the main office during Election Day 2016. As the only minority it seemed like in the entire city where people were driving around in their pickup trucks with their confederate flags and MAGA bumper stickers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been in the industry since the late 90's, right before the H1B volumes really spiked. I worked with a number of black people, and my hiring class consisted of a number of black engineers from historically black colleges. Fast forward 10 years, and cost savings forced a deep round of layoffs and offshoring. The black engineers were hit disproportionately. The current team's makeup consists heavily of H1Bs. Those black engineers haven't all returned to STEM.

I've transitioned through many roles in my careers, and remained very interested in this topic, so I notice the black makeup of each company. In St Louis, a city with about 50% black population, I consulted on a few projects. These companies employed a few African Americans, as security guards, but the engineers were about 50% white and 50% Indian.

In Florida, I consulted on another project. Every black engineer had the accent of a Caribbean native or African native. Judging by the accents, there were no American born black engineers.

I keep wondering if the H1Bs have out competed the black new college graduates, or if they're simply not being given a chance at the jobs being filled by H1Bs.

Other companies have huge Infosys, TCS consulting presence, and those new engineering roles are filled without true competition from American workers, but doled out to new H1Bs.

I continue to think that an additional yearly salary tax should be levied on any H1B. This forces the employers to be financially aligned with employing US citizens. Ideally those taxes should for for STEM scholarships for the poor, increasing the US pool of these supposedly in demand engineers.

<comment><USER13> Infosys is in court again for racist discrimination against non-Indian applicants:

[https://www.deccanherald.com/business/business- news/another-...](https://www.deccanherald.com/business/business-news/another- race-discrimination-case-against-infosys-in-us-court-848921.html)

Black unemployment hit an all-time low this year:

[https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/irUjPx0BNBh...](https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/irUjPx0BNBh4/v1/-1x-1.png)

Which is partly thanks to tougher enforcement action against illegal immigrants:

[https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/410/cpsprodpb/A67A/production/...](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/410/cpsprodpb/A67A/production/_108981624_optimised- border4-nc.png)

If you want to help Americans, particularly Black Americans, the H1B visa needs to be ended, the refugee intake reduced to <10,000/year, the wall built, birth citizenship ended, and mass deportations of illegal immigrants to take place across the USA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This video from Neil deGrasse Tyson comes to mind. He describes his experience growing up wanting to be a scientist and all of the resistance he received. [https://rewire.news/videos/2014/05/01/neil-degrasse-tyson- ra...](https://rewire.news/videos/2014/05/01/neil-degrasse-tyson-racism- sexism-science-field/)

</comment><comment><USER15> At least 3 reasons: stereotype threat (related to race), financial aid and socio-economic pragmatics.

Stereotype threat makes people less likely to engage in psychologically risky feedback loops (bad grades, seeking feedback,...), and many higher STEM courses are riskier in this regard.

Many students are forced to engage in work-study programs or work part-time to get through college. STEM curricula (especially engineering) require dedication and ample time.

Pragmatics, higher education is the most expedient path to escaping poverty for the underserved. So pursuing more vocational fields like nursing, professional stuff over a risky long career in academia seems more fruitful.

If my anecdote adds any value: I went to a somewhat rigorous college where most of my STEM classes were mostly Asian or White and I was the usually the only black student. I experienced the stressors mentioned above, the financial one was especially painful.

12 years later, I wish I had chosen a less time consuming field like liberal arts instead of CS/Eng and had a somewhat enjoyable experience.

One of my close Asian friends (with comparable ability) is now a Math professor. His upper middle class background enabled him to pay for his college, and living expenses in grad school. It's inconceivable that I could have taken a similar track given the reality constraints of my particular situation.

</comment><comment><USER16> They sure love that 13% figure. Why are so many nigerians in america so well educated [1] ? Not doubting any other assertions but my theory is that historically, STEM has not been a well reputed path to success,recognition and respect for black americans both in their communities and nationally. Segregation is only half a century ago,but even these days being STEM educated and black is associated with negative stereotypes (although that is changing). Another factor: STEM just isn't well famed/influential enough in american society to where holding a STEM job would help the black community solve significant social problems.

I hope you forgive me for the candor,but, at the home parenting level even in early life, kids have to be raised to pursue such fields or at least see others like them do well and succeed so they can draw inspiration. In other words, an asian american(or nigerian!) person pursuing STEM would not feel like they're swimming upstream and against the flow while america born black americans and many rural european americans would feel that way.

I don't presume that's all there is to it, but plenty of immigrants with terrible education spending in their 3rd world countries get full ride scholarships in STEM in the US. I am certain, it's not something solvable by throwing money at lower education. uni's in america are a cash grab scheme, so you are asking people to get into a lifetime of debt right now. Instead of depending on foreign workers, the US government on it's part should conditionally subsidize higher education for americans with the condition being they pursue in demand acadameic goals.

[1] [https://www.chron.com/news/article/Data-show-Nigerians- the-m...](https://www.chron.com/news/article/Data-show-Nigerians-the-most- educated-in-the-U-S-1600808.php)

<comment><USER17> Are these ideal Nigerians you're referring to from poor families? Or are their parents upper-middle class?

<comment><USER16> I don't really know any nigerians and I haven't ready any research that breaks this down by income.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Research has pointed out that students are more likely to regard teachers of > the same race and ethnicity as role models, and due to proximity to them, > put more effort into education and have higher college ambitions.

Is this claiming that students in homogeneous societies are at an advantage, because they are more likely to share their teacher's ethnicity?

<comment><USER19> There is some evidence for that being an important factor in the performance of the highest ranked education systems.

Another perspective is that in a country with an ethnically homogeneous population, it becomes politically easier to push through reforms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Presumably for the same reason no one else is interested: [https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/New-Research-Shows- De...](https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/New-Research-Shows-Declining- Interest-in-STEM.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> People insinuate this is some sort of racism, but it actually has more to do with the incentive.

People tend to be heavily influenced by their environment as they grow up. And if the majority of your peers see X as being "cool", that's what a lot of people will try to achieve.

For example, during high school years, the "popular kids" are the jocks who play sports, not a geek who plays with code all day (although this has shifted a lot lately). If you look at it this way, the guys who go on to play an the NBA do it not because they are "underprivileged" and racially profiled to be kicked out of studying, but because that IS the valuable route they want to choose. Likewise, the current state of the music industry is heavily influenced by black culture. You could say pretty much everything is black culture influenced, from rap to r&b to Jazz to dance music. So a lot of black kids look up to those artists and creative people, and they strive to excel in those areas. I think that's great.

There's a reason why fighting arcade games and strategy games like Starcraft, WoW, etc. are dominated by Korean pro gamers. Nobody said blacks shouldn't play Starcraft or Tekken, nobody told white guys to stop playing. Koreans were simply heavily socially incentivized to be good at it.

Same goes for football (soccer). Nobody said Brazilians are the only privileged race on earth who are allowed to play football. They were just heavily socially incentivized to do so because that's what's considered of value.

Once you stop thinking as a victim and start thinking more positively, there are many explanations to the "mystery" you just can't seem to figure out.

p.s.

Just to be clear, I am not denying that racism exists. I would however like to point out that the people who keep blaming everything to racism are the ones who are actually subliminally racists.

<comment><USER22> In computer science, access to computers and being able to freely use, modify and program them is critical. Many Black adults had no or limited computer access as children. Even kids that did need to know that's it's possible to create software , which might require an adult that knows it also, and importantly be allowed to actually do so. Computers are expensive enough that many Black families would keep kids from using them for fear of breaking them. People do overcome this and go onto become software engineers or take other jobs in tech, but common stories of Black people in tech include early computer access, many had parents that are software engineers even. I fear that the popularity of mobile means many more kids have a computing device, but it's not readily available for programming. This is probably offset by a bigger educational emphasis on learning how to code.

<comment><USER23> I disagree - many inner-city youths are into super-expensive sneakers ($300 and up), golden chains and other status symbols dictated by the social environment they grow up in. Computers are just not cool enough. Yes, there are exceptions, but the stereotype - unfortunately - mostly holds..

More money helps to a point, but what these young people need more than anything is appropriate role models (engineers, scientists, etc). Yes, I know, easier said than done...

<comment><USER24> Obviously, kids are all going to want to emulate their role models. Whether the role models are Lance Armstrong or Lebron James, they will be influenced in one direction or another because of that.

But there is a very real fact that certain peoples don't have access to computers. My wife grew up in a poor area, and they did not have a computer in their home until she was 16 when got a laptop as a gift.

I grew up poor, but as a foreigner with no real contact with others so I stayed mostly at home. My father used to love buying old cheap computers at garage sales, so I would mix and match hardware from the old computers and I managed to learn a lot.

Both of us grew up poor, but I grew up to be a programmer because I had plenty of access to computers while growing up. It was always natural to me, and it was hard for her.

Neither of us idolized gold chains or expensive shoes. I think what you're saying is a harmful and frankly, racist stereotype. Just because a family buys a $200 pair of shoes for their child on Christmas, doesn't mean that means the child shouldn't have access to computers. Rich families will give their kids expensive things _as well_ as give access to computers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This article says white people are underrepresented in earning science and engineering bachelor degrees. Lol.

<comment><USER26> The stats on black/white/Asian college achievement makes for an uncomfortable discussion. It's okay to suggest that systemic racism is why black people don't participate in college as much as you'd expect based on their prevalence in society, but it's also okay to say that the reason Asians are over- represented is because culturally they've made it a huge priority to attain as much education as possible.

Maybe we should focus less on trying to identify and somehow solve systemic racism and more about making it culturally acceptable and desirable for black people to enter the STEM fields. Highlight the superstars in STEM who are kicking ass (e.g. Neil deGrasse Tyson) and encouraging people to identify with him and motivate them to work even harder.

<comment><USER18> Would it also be okay to suggest Asians are over-represented because of unearned Asian privilege?

What about suggesting whites are (hypothetically) over-represented because they've made attaining education a priority?

Forgive me for noticing, but "one-sided" doesn't even begin to describe this debate.

<comment><USER27> >Would it also be okay to suggest Asians are over-represented because of unearned Asian privilege?

That would be an incredibly stupid and unequivocally false thing to suggest because the odds are actually stacked against Asians, and they must work harder than most other people to achieve the same thing. Asians have earned everything they've attained in this country. They deserve whatever success they've gotten, and for that, they receive undeserved discrimination and disrespect.

<comment><USER28> > " _That would be an incredibly stupid and unequivocally false thing to > suggest because the odds are actually stacked against Asians, and they must > work harder than most other people to achieve the same thing._ "

As an Asian, I don't agree with that. Many Asians emigrated from Asia with very little possessions and started their lives in Western countries in conditions as bad or worse than the poorest native born, including a significant language barrier and, yes, racism in their newly adopted homelands. Yet, by and large, they have built successful lives.

I'd describe the statement as incredibly accurate and unequivocally true.

<comment><USER27> I think you are misreading something. I am arguing against the suggestion that Asians have unearned privilege which allowed them to become successful in America.

<comment><USER28> Ah, sorry. I did indeed misread your comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is it just me or is 13% of the population getting 9% of bachelors degrees - and then the 9% going on to get 7% of PhDs not such an outrageous stat?

I thought the numbers were a lot more worrying.

</comment><comment><USER30> Why are there so few white people in pro basketball?

<comment><USER8> Maybe because there were 300 years of systemic natural selection in this country called "slavery" where black Americans were bought/sold and bred based solely on their physical attributes?

<comment><USER20> The Jews must have transcendent superhuman athleticism then. Basketball used to be dominated by immigrant Jews before World War 2.

<comment><USER31> Not sure about their athleticism, but it's true that they have been awarded Nobel prizes between 5000% and 20000% of their population share (depending on the discipline), and it's time to put an end to this blatant systemic racism. /s

<comment><USER20> Much like the basketball dominance was caused by Jews playing the sport in large numbers, the dominance of scientific prizes was largely a result of them going into scientific fields in large numbers.

Any decent sized ethnic group could dominate a profession if they wanted to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> In "Raj Chetty: The Fading of the American Dream | Amanpour and Company" ([https://youtu.be/_rffAhR4mSs](https://youtu.be/_rffAhR4mSs)) (summary below), Chetty makes the case that __doing what works __is essential. The discussion ) ultimately turns to race and black boys in particular. Turns out that black boys (versus white boys or black girls) need their father present.

What spoke to me the most was Chetty's statement that race always mattered no matter income, education, family, neighborhood. Go to 18:15 to learn more. Basically, while system and program improvements could result in lifting black boys/men up the ladder, the system was pushing against them. This is a profoundly difficult thing to labor against even in a systematic, data- informed, policy- and practice-driven way. But the failure to take a piecemeal approach may result in so few black people in STEM.

\---

Summary: Raj Chetty believes he may have found a way to reignite the American Dream. Using "Big Data," Chetty says we can offer equality of opportunity to kids of disadvantaged backgrounds. The renowned Harvard Professor has received plaudits for his work in harnessing data to propose solutions to economic inequality. He sits down with Hari to explain his work.

</comment><comment><USER33> Who is getting the rest of the undergrad science degrees if Asians, Blacks, and Whites only account for 74% of them?

<comment><USER34> Possibly Native Americans/First Peoples, Pacific Islanders, or individuals who self-identify by ethnicity rather than race on these types of reports.

<comment> crooked-v Also people of Indian descent, for whom it can sometimes be pretty annoying to get dumped into the 'Asian' bucket.

<comment><USER35> That was my first thought. Probably (maybe wrong, just IME) most 'people from the Western portion of continental Asia' don't see themselves (I suppose we say 'self-identify' now) as 'Asian'.

Similarly to we Britons speaking of 'Europe' and particularly 'Europeans' with the 'continental' implied - and even that phrase not really making sense, not meaning the same as 'mainland'!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Note: I'm an African-American man who works in Silicon Valley as a researcher in an AI lab.

I believe there are a number of reasons why there are so few African-Americans in STEM.

1\. Many of us grew up in low-income households that don't have the same amount of resources to devote to education that higher-income households do. Many of us also grew up in households where the parents don't have college degrees. Roughly 70% of African-Americans are born to unmarried parents, and many African-Americans live in single-parent homes; being a single parent is very challenging. Many low-income housing areas are unfortunately crime- ridden. It takes a lot of determination for parents to raise their children under such circumstances.

2\. Having a successful STEM career means being able to master technical subjects that require a considerable amount of time and focus to study, such as mathematics. Consider the type of mathematics and science preparation needed to enter a top-tier undergraduate STEM program. Now compare that to the education opportunities that are available at most American high schools, especially those located in the low-income neighborhoods that many African- American high schoolers attend. Without the influence of a really good teacher or mentor, or without the influence of a parent who has earned a college degree, how would a student learn the study skills that are necessary for obtaining a STEM degree? I'll give a personal anecdote: despite my perfect high school GPA (4.0 unweighted), my history of being in gifted programs, and having taken seven community college courses (including three computer science courses), the transition to attending Cal Poly San Luis Obispo as a computer science major was a rough one for me because I didn't know how to study for rigorous university-level STEM courses. I basically skated through my entire pre-university experiences; I didn't know what it was like to actually have to sit down and truly study something that I wasn't already passionate about (I was able to teach myself programming and Japanese, but I found it difficult going through my physics textbooks). Despite this, I stuck with it at Cal Poly and ended up eking out a 3.0 GPA, which was just enough for me to enter a PhD program, though not my dream school of Carnegie Mellon. Unfortunately I knew of many students who either dropped out or switched to less demanding majors.

3\. So, despite the odds, you end up with a freshly-minted STEM degree and it's time to take on the world! Well, the challenges aren't over yet. Imagine being the first in your family to have a white-collar job, as was the case with me. Who is going to give you advice about how corporate America works and how to succeed under that environment? Imagine being the only black person in your office, or sometimes at the company? Thankfully I grew up with a lot of immersion in various cultures and so I'm comfortable with being the only black person around, but that doesn't always mean that the people I work with are comfortable around me. I personally haven't experienced discrimination at the workplace, but I know other people who have. There are also non-work stresses; there's taking care of other family members, there's dealing with the police, there's dealing with dating, which I've found difficult in Silicon Valley. These challenges could mount up and have people think of alternatives.

I believe that any solution to addressing the shortage of black people in STEM will involve addressing all three issues above. Starting from #3 and working my way up to #1:

\- We need to retain the black professionals in STEM that we already have by providing mentorship opportunities that will help us navigate our careers and our personal lives.

\- For university students, we need to teach them how to study STEM and what it means to truly master a topic. Mastery of the foundations is important for research and developing technologies.

\- Our high schools need to be more rigorous. By the time a high school student graduates, the student should know how to study at the college level, and the student should be able to be competent in a wide field of subjects, not only STEM, but also English, history, economics, government, and a foreign language. Middle school and elementary school should also be made more rigorous in order to prepare students for high school. Ideally the level of competence of a high school graduate should be equivalent to an associate's degree. Alan Kay once quoted an English woman who said, "[y]ou Americans have the best high school education in the world -- what a pity you have to go to college to get it!"

\- Finally, we need to address the social problems mentioned in #1, though unfortunately I don't have specific solutions regarding these problems.

<comment><USER37> Interestingly, you should read up on Thomas Sowell's work and books. There are also plenty of videos on Youtube where you can get some distillation of his work.

Here are some of his "controversial" views:

1\. Reduce the incentive to destroy the family unit by providing large benefits to single parents

2\. School choice

For the first one, even the leftist economists don't dispute the distortions caused by these transfers. As for point 2, they'll always shriek about things even though it makes sense to tie the child to the money and not the money to the school. Parents will always suss out the better option and will send their child to a better school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Because sometimes some people choose not to go into STEM. It's an individual's choice.

</comment><comment><USER39> It seems like since he wasn't really clearly specifying a region, I should be a little suspicious of the premise. I mean, if you go to a country with mostly black people in good economic standing and find a major university, it seems unlikely that generalization would hold.

</comment><comment><USER40> I could venture a guess, and its probably why i'll never go from my current job as a diesel mechanic to junior python programmer no matter how badly i want to:

criminal record.

in the US you can discriminate against employees who have any sort of criminal record. I've served jailtime for possession of cannabis, so that automatically rules me out for a lot of white-collar jobs. Black people tend to get the brunt of policing, and hold disproportionately high rates of misdemeanor and felony charges and longer sentences. I got 3 years for my conviction, but i know a black machinist who served 8 and a parole for an almost identical charge.

We call them "correctional facilities" but continue to discriminate in housing and employment for anyone who's been 'corrected' in one...sort of a standing biblical retribution.

<comment><USER41> So your premise is all Black people have criminal records and that is why they aren't in STEM?

<comment><USER9> No, but there are plenty of statistics showing that every step of the criminal justice system is biased against minorities from stop and frisk , to traffic stops, to tickets vs warnings, to the "War on Drugs".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> If you come from a demographic making the lowest amount of money e.g. 41k/yr per the article would it not make sense to do a career with a more immediate reward? PhD is for people with trust funds who can afford to take a 50-60k postdoctoral position in a vhcol city due to a trust fund paying out at least 50-60k per year.

<comment><USER33> I know dozens of PhDs.

Literally not a single one of them has a trust fund.

I know probably about a dozen people with trust funds. None of them got anything past a Masters (but most did actually go for the masters).

Obviously this is anecdotal, but in my experience your assertion is not true. If you have stats to back it up though I'd be happy to see them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Occam's Razor says that they aren't a lot of black people in STEM positions because companies aren't hiring black people in STEM positions. There are plenty of black candidates applying to FAANG companies only to be rejected because "they don't fit in with the culture" or they "weren't Google-y enough", or "they couldn't write a depth-first-search algorithm in less than 2 seconds in front of a whiteboard ("white board" pun fully intended) so they must not be smart." Over enough time, those parents go on to have kids who then encourage those kids to go elsewhere and invest their study time in other areas where they know they can be successful.

<comment><USER43> I disagree. Most companies are actually trying to INCREASE diversity, be it based on skin colour or gender. So it may actually be much EASIER to get accepted in this companies if you are black.

I know in some STEM fields (not all in STEM is CS), you have MUCH MUCH higher chances to land a good job at a big company if you are female. But being female in medicine or law buys you nothing since there is no imbalance.

<comment><USER2> Yeh you'd think that but if the interviewer doesn't like you doesn't even matter. When I graduated a few years ago I made a spreadsheet to see why. The strongest predictor wasn't how well I think I did out of 10, or hours of prep I did before hand. There were certain people regardless of what I need gave me 100% rejection. I'm not saying it was prejudice, but it was a very clear pattern.

<comment><USER43> Dude, nobody is worse in getting a job than me. But let me tell you a few things:

1\. Mostly it is how much people like you and how much they share with you.

2\. 1st class people hire 1st class people, 2nd class people hire 3rd class people

3\. Being rejected tells nothing about you. The guy they hired tells a lot about the company.</comment></comment></comment></comment>