On The Fear Of Reading Code - <AUTHOR> http://coderoom.wordpress.com/2010/03/26/on-the-fear-of-reading-code/

<comment><USER2> This reminds me of an excellent quote I heard a while ago:

"As a programmer, your job is not to write code. Your job is to solve problems."

<comment><USER3> That sounds like the definition of any job.

As a janitor, your job is not to mop floors. Your job is to clean messy problems.

<comment><USER4> True. And, yet, if the floors are spotless, but the janitor seems to spend 90% of his day on the iPhone... How many managers are clueful enough to figure out that _the janitor is accomplishing the task_ and leave him to do so in his own way?

All kinds of people mistake work for a form of punishment: if you don't look like you're toiling you must be doing something wrong. This is especially true when evaluating someone _else's_ work.

<comment><USER5> trivia: the portuguese form of work (trabalho) is a derivative of tripalium - an ancient roman torturing tool.

So yeah, it kinda makes sense that some people take work as punishment... :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To me, this is a Big Deal. I work with a coder with 20+ years of experience who randomly re-implements parts of a massive legacy system to avoid reading and understanding. Refactoring is unthinkable. Predictable results, now we have two versions to maintain. :)

<comment><USER7> What's surprising is that the legacy system still works after the reimplementation. The guy might know what he's doing and this way he really understands the domain now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would like to add to the author's realization -- Frequently, if you look at code you were "going to do better", and compare it to the original code, you'll find you arrived at the same basic architecture, no actual improvements or major differences.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sometimes, as an effort to read someone else's code, I'll actually refactor and reformat it in an effort to understand it better.

<comment><USER10> Refactoring is almost always good (almost the key word.) Reformatting, unless the code follows no style what-so-ever, is bad.

<comment><USER11> Really? Reformatting will solve the "bracket should be on a new line" problem, anyway.

<comment><USER12> Promiscuous reformatting causes large, unreadable deltas for every commit to the version control system.

<comment><USER13> So keep it isolated in a separate branch? I do agree style wars are pointless.

Personally, while I can and sometimes do have to use the style mentioned in point #3 of the blog post, I curse under my breath every time. (It should be: "\n} else {\n"! Not "\n}\nelse\n{\n"!) Saving myself that frustration can be useful. But for a better example, I'll sometimes come across code indented inconsistently with spaces and tabs, and need to reformat with :retab and == in vim. Separating complex code into chunks makes it easier to parse for me, adding comments, etc. etc. etc. Remember, this is to understand the code, not necessarily to make a bugfix. If I'm going to muck with someone else's code, I'll usually follow their style even if it's not mine. But I might first solve it in mine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I had some similar lightbulb moments when I started investigating the psychology of reading code. When you have some idea of how people with different needs and different experience read and understand code, you start to think about those factors when you write code yourself.

If anyone else is interested, my write-up is here: <http://www.clarityincode.com/readability/> (I'm not sure about the etiquette of linking to your own site from HN, so apologies if this is inappropriate.)

</comment><comment><USER15> I've found that with _good_ code, you actually have to read relatively little, because comments explain what it does. You read a specific section if you want to figure out the detail of what the comment says, or find it surprising ("really, it just does that in 5 lines?"). I try to do this with my own code, because I don't even like reading _my own_ code.

Put differently, I 100% agree with Knuth's still-mostly-unheeded call for literate programming, as the real solution to making code readable.

</comment><comment><USER16> Couldn't agree more. Lately I've read through some code in a language that I never used before. But what I have learned from reading the code has had a significant impact on the way in which I write my own code.

In my case I was reading some Clojure code. Functional programming was something I had never really done much of. But after reading through code and programming in it, I can say that it has significantly impacted the way I both write and read Ruby code (not that I'll try to do functional in Ruby though :).

</comment><comment><USER17> Could anyone recommend particularly good Python code?

<comment><USER18> django, twisted

<comment><USER19> Well, some parts of Twisted. All code added and edited these days has to conform to style-guidelines and go through extensive code-review, so it winds up pretty polished by the time it gets committed. On the other hand, Twisted is a very old project and there's code in there that pre-dates the modern quality requirements; such code is often... idiosyncratic, or at least perplexing.

I'd recommend poking around well-tested things like twisted.internet.defer for starters, then start to explore further afield. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Code doesn't rust and it doesn't go off. Just read it, change it and use it."

I don't agree with this at all. In heterogeneous environments edge cases and little used segments of code are often overlooked as other, more frequently used, segments of a project are updated and their staleness is often only discovered long after the actual "rusting" happened.

<comment><USER14> I quite like the way Lehman put it in his Law of Continuing Change: "A program that is used and that as an implementation of its specification reflects some other reality, undergoes continual change or becomes progressively less useful."

Since reality typically changes, and software is typically a model of some part of reality, standing still in absolute terms can be going backwards in real terms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I agree that reading code is important. It follows from this that writing readable code is important. It is telling, I think, that proofreading is nigh- on ubiquitous with writing in prose, and nowhere near as popular with coding.</comment>


Software Should Be Free: The FSF's First Annual Report - <AUTHOR> http://u.fsf.org/fy15annualreport <comment><AUTHOR> Nice to see how efficient this non-profit is (8% overhead).

</comment><comment><USER2> Agreed, Yeah it should be....</comment>


Getting started with UX, where to begin? - <AUTHOR>

I want to develop amazing looking sites, I love the work of Dustin Curtis, and the sheer beauty of things with dribbble, and so on and so forth.
I understand that a majority of things done for/with UX are done for/with Photoshop.
Where on Earth do I begin to become as great as these guys at designing websites, and interfaces?
I'd appreciate it if I got some feedback, seeing as I never really do out here. <comment><USER2> Read "Don't make me think" by Steve Krug. It will give you a great foundation to build on.

[http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Think-Usability- ebook/dp/B00...](http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Think-Usability- ebook/dp/B000SEGQNS/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd say Smashing Magazine is a good start, and check the magazine rack of a local bookstore as well.</comment>


Bizur: A Key-Value Consensus Algorithm for Scalable File-Systems - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.04242v1 <comment><USER2> > Paxos-like algorithms which are used by existing distributed file systems, > can have artificial contention points due to their dependence on a > distributed log.

It's half true. Paxos is an ambiguous term. It includes Multi-Paxos and Single-Decree Paxos (aka Synod). The first one is a log based algorithm, while the second is a just a register. So your critic is valid only for the first part of the Paxos family.

Actually, Bizur is very similar (almost indistinguishable) to Single Decree Paxos - just compare it with the algorithm described in the video [1] by Heidi Howard or in my post "In search of a simple consensus algorithm" [2]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8JqcZtvnsM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8JqcZtvnsM)

[2] [http://rystsov.info/2017/02/15/simple- consensus.html](http://rystsov.info/2017/02/15/simple-consensus.html)

<comment><USER3> Single decree is a write-once algorithm. You can't use the same instance again, for another update of the associated value.

So just replacing bizur' should "register" implementation with a single decree paxos won't be sufficient. You'll need to do something more elaborate (creating more instances as you go along).

This kind of instance management isn't required in bizur.

I'm not sure what's the overhead off all that, w.r.t. memory foot print. Since this overhead is paid for each bucket, it might accumulate to quite a bit.

<comment><USER2> Not really :) Please follow the links. "Paxos Made Simple" describes the write once variant, but it's possible to choose a new value for the next ballot cycles to make it rewritable.

Proof of the algorithm: [http://rystsov.info/2015/09/16/how-paxos- works.html](http://rystsov.info/2015/09/16/how-paxos-works.html)

Moreover, I built a system on top of it and extensively tested it with fault injections: [https://github.com/gryadka/js](https://github.com/gryadka/js).

It seems that GoshawkDB[1] uses the similar idea, Treode[2] used it too.

[1] [https://goshawkdb.io/](https://goshawkdb.io/)

[2] [http://treode.github.io/design/](http://treode.github.io/design/)

<comment><USER3> Very nice work! Indeed we've done similar stuff :) I haven't read it all yet, I'll comment back once I do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> > We avoided reads (get operations) since the current version of etcd performs > reads directly from the leader, without contacting the cluster, which > doesn't preserve the same consistency level as Bizur and ZooKeeper do.

It's wrong. Etcd provides "?quorum=true" option which makes reads go through the Raft consensus algorithm archiving linearizability see [https://github.com/coreos/etcd/issues/741](https://github.com/coreos/etcd/issues/741)

<comment><USER4> etcd v3 read is linearizable by default.

Also I believe the authors of the paper tested against the old etcd v2 API/backend although they use etcd3.

The new API/backend has significant high performance.

I work on etcd.

<comment><USER2> I mean that without the ?quorum flag the stale reads are possible. I tested the etcd v3 (http api) and the reads were incredibly fast but when I set the flag, the read's latency became the same as write.

<comment><USER4> v3 does not have a native HTTP API. I suspect you still use v2 API. You need the gateway to make v3 works with HTTP: [https://github.com/coreos/etcd/blob/master/Documentation/dev...](https://github.com/coreos/etcd/blob/master/Documentation/dev- guide/api_grpc_gateway.md)

But that might impact performance quite bit depending on your workload.

<comment><USER2> I got it, I was using Etcd v3.1.0 but with v2 API.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unless I have missed something, I don't believe Bizur is "linearizable at the bucket level" (as the paper claims).

Suppose a server X was the leader, and subsequently a new leader was elected without X's knowledge. X does not learn of the new election unless it attempts a write. Until then, the read side may not detect the situation either since EnsureRecovery may return true (the bucket being read has the same elect_id as X.elect_id. Thus reads may return stale value. What we have here is "sequential consistency at the bucket level". which technically is cache consistency.

Separately, because the consistency claims are at a key/bucket level, and since there is no claim to global ordering (between different keys), a comparison to Zookeeper is not quite fair. Bizur cannot be used as a coordination service because it isn't sequentially consistent overall.

</comment><comment><USER6> Bizur in Hebrew mean distributing. I see all four authors[1] are Israelites, then, I guess, this is where the name comes from

[1]: Ezra N. Hoch, Yaniv Ben-Yehuda, Noam Lewis, Avi Vigder

</comment><comment><USER2> What do you call by "queue depth". Is it the number of concurrent clients?

If it's true then it looks very suspicious that avg. latency decreases as the number of concurrent clients goes up. How do you measure avg. latency?

Let me illustrate what the avg. latency usually means.

Imagine that we have two concurrent users: Alice and Bob. During the testing lasting one second, Alice managed to send 3 requests per second, the first request took 0.5 seconds while the rest were executed in a quarter of a second each. In the same time, Bob did only 2 requests, each of them took 0.5 seconds.

So the average latency is the sum of execution time taken by each request divided by the number of all requests, in our case it's (0.5+0.25+0.25+0.5+0.5) / 5 = 0.4

Did you use the same definition?

<comment><USER7> Latency does increase with concurrency. Latency decreases with the number of keys, as long as they are less than the concurrency. If the number of keys is more than the concurrency, there is no additional benefit and latency remains flat.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, I didn't notice that the clients operate over the same key set, so I didn't think about the contention. It makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am no academic, but I read a lot of papers and going to write one this year. I skimmed the paper without getting into details about the protocol itself, but made some observations about the paper in general. My personal very subjective opinion on how the paper might be reinforced is presented below.

1\. Add a system model description under which your protocol is expected to operate.

2\. Add description of fault-tolerant properties of the protocol.

3\. Do you plan to prove correctness of the algorithm more formally? Maybe you could model the algorithm before publishing. If you prove a safety property using model checking it could considerably reduce doubt about an algorithm correctness.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the feedback.

As for #3, unfortunately we don't currently have plans to publish a formal proof (we're building a product). Some of our internal documentation is more formal, but we decided on a more readable presentation for this paper.

<comment><USER9> You will probably find it valuable to write that proof. Sometimes an edge case pops up or you end up proving that it doesn't work as expected. I've done this a few times in my work.

Unless you already have it but don't plan to publish, which seems a little odd to me. I get that you want readable documentation, but at least you could link to it somewhere for people who go digging.

<comment><USER8> Well personally I would rather suggest to write a model, not a rigorous proof. A formal proof of any real protocol is both long and tedious journey; production guys will hardly find it useful thing to do.

On the other hand a logical model can be encoded in a rather short amount of time by someone who is doing it periodically.

This hypothetical guy could benefit from this activity by co-authoring the paper. Original authors would benefit from it by reinforcing both the protocol and the paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> After reading the paper, I felt disappointed that: 1) Bizur is used for building a scalable object storage rather than a filesystem, which does not even support atomic rename for single key (the hash of key will change, it will be moved to another bucket without any transactional guarantee) 2) Bizur itself looks like a sharded Raft group, which is already used in TiDB (one raft group per region).

Please correct me if read it wrongly.

<comment><USER4> This (like a sharded Raft group) is somewhat correct :P.

If you can sacrifice consistency (causal instead of external), you can get EPaxos. If you can sacrifice more, you can get Single Paxos. Both of them can increase concurrency to some degree, and can improve availability over a leader based RSM system like Muti-paxos or Raft.

I believe there are other ways to make the trade-off, even making the trade- off dynamically. Hopefully, I can talk about it more soon.

I work on etcd/raft, which is a shared Raft implementation by TiDB(TiKV), Cockroachdb, etcd and many more.

<comment><USER2> > If you can sacrifice more, you can get Single Paxos

What do you mean? Single Decree Paxos is linearizable so it's consistent. When the multi-key updates are necessary - they can be implemented with client-side transactions such as 2PC, RAMP or Percolator.

Even with Raft we in the same situation. Once the data overgrows the size of one machine we need to shard them. As a result some keys can live on different shards and we need cross shards transactions to do multi-key updates :)

<comment><USER4> Well... Why do you need 2PC if nothing is sacrificed? :)

If you choose things like Raft (or other RSM), you can get a consistent key space to do txn over keys.

For a metadata store like etcd, one RSM group is OK. Performance/availability is better than something requires 2PC.

For database systems, there are quite a few txns that can actually fall into one shard and can bypass 2PC.

Of course, it is highly depend on the workload and use cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> it seem that the performance gain of not having all update go to a single log could be also achieved by having one log per bucket. My understanding is that with Bizur all update for the same bucket also need to proceed sequentially.

Also with most system like Raft a failed machine trying to rejoin the cluster does not need to download the complete transaction log but can instead download a snapshot of the state machines then load log entry created after this snapshot.

Another aspect is that if the bucket contain a large number of key. From the Bizure paper it seem that the complete set of "key->value" need to be sent to replica each time the bucket is updated instead of only the entry that changed. This would produce much larger network traffic compared to Raft or Zab when all replica are mostly in sync

<comment><USER3> 1) Keeping a log mechanism per bucket would be expensive, since it is a heavy mechanism. It will cost memory & network traffic. The additional information needed by Bizur for a bucket is minimal, basically, just a version.

2) In Bizur, rejoining the cluster includes the equivalent of copying the snapshot. However, that node can start participating in the Bizur even before it finished reading the entire snapshot, because of the key-value data model. Once a bucket has been copied, it can start serving it, which is much faster than log-based algorithms.

3) You are correct about the size of a bucket. In our implementation we aim to have up to 8-10 keys in a bucket, to avoid the overhead you mentioned. That's why it's especially important to be very efficient pet-bucket (see point #1).

<comment><USER11> Thanks a lot for clarification.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Am I right that in a system implementing algorithm explained in the article there is no way to execute operations on two key-value pairs stored in different buckets atomically? For example, two CAS operations that will either both succeed or both fail?

<comment><USER13> Their application is file systems and no file systems offer that capability. In order to provide transactionality for multi-file operations, you have to have a file that represents "the transaction" and move it or create/delete it.

In most file systems, you can't even update a file atomically, actually -- what you can update atomically is a disk page, 4-16k. Database servers might then maintain a separate, small file that contains only a transaction token, which is atomically updated to contain the last transaction written to disk in full.

<comment><USER12> I don't judge them, I was confused by the choice of systems to compare with and thought that I didn't understand article. I think that comparison with MongoDB or RethinkDB would be more appropriate in this case.

<comment><USER7> Keep in mind that the Bizur is being used for services _internal_ to the file system. So the use case is more like etcd or ZooKeeper's, for example in one role it is a cluster configuration database (with high availablity, fault tolerance, consistency, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Have you published the software anywhere? Do you have an open source implementation? (The Elastifile Github account doesn't appear to have one.)

<comment><USER3> It is not an open-source project, but rather a proprietary implementation.</comment></comment>


Damn Right Amazon Runs a Fucking Deficit and So Should America - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@girlziplocked/why-amazon-isn-t-a-fucking-idiot-and-runs-a-deficit-f9d5734b68ec <comment><USER2> People get to invest in Amazon voluntarily. Taxpayers do not have a choice.

Our national debt comes out to about $150,000 per payer of federal taxes (almost 50% of wage earners do not pay federal taxes), which means we are burdening our children with this debt. They too are forced to pay for our choices.

Investors in Amazon are not requiring their neighbors or descendants to participate.

</comment><comment><USER3> Google is broke? That would surprise a lot of people if it were actually true.

[https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/profit_margin](https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/profit_margin)

Amazon is not broke either. It announced a profit on the full company for Q3. Also hidden underneath the results is AWS, which has a 25% profit margin [1] that appears to be growing. At the current rate AWS is going to float the entire company.

[1] [http://www.computerworld.com/article/2996288/cloud- computing...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/2996288/cloud- computing/aws-offers-a-lift-to-amazons-q3-profitability.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> The article starts out claiming that Amazon, Twitter, and Google run deficits, which is wrong. Amazon and Google recently reported profits.

The U.S. government runs a deficit because it has nowhere to store capital other than itself, and doing so creates additional paper debt (see: Social Security trust fund).

Amazon, however, has plenty of places it can invest its capital, including the U.S. government. That process also creates federal debt, BTW.

In short: the U.S. federal government is not a tech company and should not be run like one (and vice versa).

</comment><comment><USER5> even though this article seems to work out logically somewhat, one cannot shake the feeling that this is invariably propaganda nonsense, even if I cant put my finger on exactly why.

1/10 would not read again.

</comment><comment><USER6> No, it shouldn't</comment>


Chumby... it's finally here! - <AUTHOR> http://uk.intruders.tv/Andrew-bunny-Huang-and-Ken-Steele-show-off-Chumby_a239.html

<comment><USER2> Dont mean to rag, but I've seen this in person (Berkeley Play conference) and at first I thought it was a baby seat head-rest. Personally, I'd rather spend another $110 to get an iPod touch.</comment>


Ask HN: Audio of awe-inspiring and impressive people for an experiment? - <AUTHOR>

Have you ever noticed that after binging on some TV show or podcast or by some other means exposing yourself to hours of other peoples conversations and interaction, that it rubs off on you? Maybe I'm just very impressionable, or there's some kind of perception bias afoot, but I notice myself doing this often. Sometimes they are just mannerisms, other times it is the way I put together sentences. And then there are times where I start to pick up pieces of other people's accents without meaning to.
For a while now I have been thinking about this, and wondering if there was any way to measure this effect. I am attempting to find as much content as I can with characters or real people I aspire to be like for an experiment. I am ripping the audio from videos and talks, collecting podcasts and finding radio interviews. I am cutting out the useless parts and putting together a library of material for my mp3 player, with the hope that repeated exposure to it all might leave some kind of noticeable effect.
I have not told my friends/family or colleagues as the idea is to use their reactions or comments as my most reliable and non-biased source of feedback.
So that's what I'm planning, but I'm having trouble finding sources of audio. Does anyone have any suggestions? Preferably of people or characters you find impressive or awe-inspiring. (hey, if it works at all I might as well aim for something I'd like)
(note: the idea isn't to learn anything from what these people are saying, but just to see if I will pick up any aspects of their (for lack of a better word) 'style') <comment><USER2> The ted.com audio files are available on iTunes (and probably many other places). I find many of those speakers quite inspiring. Even better, although much longer, are the Long Now talks, which are available both on the Long Now website, and on iTunes.</comment>


Heuristic vs algorithmic approaches - <AUTHOR> http://dangoldin.com/2014/02/15/heuristic-vs-algorithmic-approaches/

<comment><USER2> Am I mistaken or does algorithmic in this case simply translate to actually formulating a model that accurately represents your problem? I agree that the heuristic approach might be quicker and is great for filling gaps in your formal models, but actually getting a good description of the problem does seem like the smart thing to do.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess I should have been clearer. I think having the right formulation of the problem helps both approaches. The algorithmic approach is one that tends to rely more on quantitative/statistical properties and less on a rule of thumb.

Thanks for the note - I'll update the post.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the feedback. I'm still a little confused, because in my understanding heuristics are also based on statistical properties; e.g. Is there a strong correlation between property x and y as measured by the amount of click-throughs for example.

Both approaches deal with quantitative properties. But one assumes that causes are too difficult to map out and will try to find the most useful correlations, the other will be frustrated by how hard it is to accurately model reality and will end up using heuristics to whatever degree necessary to patch up their incomplete model. I prefer the second, but I guess the author of the article is correct: Whatever works for you...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea it's a bit tough to figure out the precise language for my point so that's why I wanted to show an example but that wasn't that much better.

I guess it does translate into something more along the lines of having something that you can explain and back up vs something that feels right. Having some basic heuristics to adjust the algorithm would be the latter but modeling out the actual environment would be the former. There's a time and a place for both but the idea is that for longer term projects you want to take the more rigorous, more difficult approach.

I think the biggest value is framing the problem properly and understanding the space. Once that's done the approaches can be modified and switched around pretty easily.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Survivorship Bias - <AUTHOR> https://xkcd.com/1827/ <comment><USER2> I had a professor who had the class stand up and all start flipping coins. If you flipped tails you sat down and stopped. After several iterations he interviewed the last remaining standing person to ask him what hard work he did to become such a good coin flipper, and if he had any secrets about coin flipping success he wanted to share with the class. It was a pretty nice exercise and I think applicable generally to the hero-worship that often surrounds successful people.

<comment><USER3> That is a terrible example. That's implying that you can just sit on your ass all day and just watch TV and you have a 50% shot at success.

<comment><USER4> You still have to flip the coin

<comment><USER3> A much better example would be to have all students run around a 400 meter track with some students having 1 - 100 meter head start.

<comment><USER5> No, that would completely miss the point.

This isn't about inequality or privilege, this is about survivorship bias. The _entire point_ is to completely remove all those issues in a way that makes it obvious to everybody that the _only possible explanation_ in this made-up example is blind luck.

In the real world, it isn't all blind luck, but sometimes there are cases where the luck signal does in fact overwhelm everything else, lotteries being a great example.

<comment><USER3> Yes, and these are _extreme_ examples. Examples that try to make success appear to be just luck.

<comment><USER5> "The entire point is to completely remove all those issues in a way that _makes it obvious to everybody_ that the only possible explanation in this _made-up example_ is blind luck."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ux-app Most people are missing the point a bit here. Survivorship bias doesn't relate to people who worked hard, improved themselves and now earn 1-10MM/yr. There are loads of stories like that.

Survivorship bias is "Zuck did X, Y and Z, if I do the same then I'll be a multi-billionaire too!"

Following the playbook of those that made it into the top 0.001% is foolish and does not properly account for the large part luck played in their success.

There's no survivorship bias in going to med school, becoming a specialist and then earning 400k/yr.

<comment><USER6> > There are loads of stories like that.

Not compared with the loads of stories of people who worked hard, improved themselves, and still don't earn anywhere near $1M/yr. Otherwise thinking that those successes have some meaningful advice to offer wouldn't be survivorship bias, it'd actually be correct.

> Following the playbook of those that made it into the top 0.001% is foolish > and does not properly account for the large part luck played in their > success.

Exactly. As some guy once said, Taylor Swift telling you to put everything into your dreams of becoming a pop star is like a lotto winner telling you to spend your life savings on lotto tickets (a la the original comic).

<comment> ux-app >Not compared with the loads of stories of people who worked hard, improved themselves, and still don't earn anywhere near $1M/yr

The vast majority of single digit millionaires are doctors, lawyers, construction company owners. I've even personally met a factory worker who retired with > $1mm in savings due to prudent money management (no lottery wins, just basic financial management for 30+ years).

I live in a completely unremarkable town and there are loads of millionaires around. I bumped into one recently when I accidentally stumbled onto his property while hiking. Judging by the sprawling estate he's at least in $5mm+ net worth range. What does he do for a living? He owns an earth moving company. That's right, at the ripe age of about 45, he made tons of money moving dirt from one spot to another. Lovely guy too.

My friend from high school is also in the millionaire club. We're both from a public school background. Unremarkable back stories in just about every way possible. Now he runs a very successful web agency. He's super smart, hard working and I'm sure that accounts for the majority of his success.

My point is that there are _loads_ of millionaires around, even in my little backwater. Far, far more than there are lottery winners. Seems to imply that luck plays a far smaller role in the success of millionaire next door types than simple hard work.

<comment><USER2> It's not about whether they're single-digit millionaires or billionaires. It's about falsely attributing a causal relationship between the people's actions and their success. It's about ignoring the counterfactual cases.

What about the factory workers who also practiced prudent money management and did not end up millionaires?

What about the many other dirt movers who worked just as hard but did not end up being the one owning the company?

What about the other smart web professionals who worked just as hard as your high school friend yet do not currently run the show?

<comment><USER5> "What about the factory workers who also practiced prudent money management and did not end up millionaires?"

Then he at least ended up better off than he would have if he had _not_ practiced prudent money management. Anything else would require stretching the definition of "prudent" beyond anything that fits.

It is a fallacy to believe all of life's outcomes are purely due to skill, one that will harm anyone who acts on it. But it is also a fallacy to believe that all of life's outcomes are purely based on luck and privilege, and of the two, this one is far more harmful to anyone who acts on it than the first one.

It is also a fallacy to believe that all possibly skill improvements are equal, a fallacy that helps people over-attribute things to luck when they see "Well, these two people both worked on skills and look at their divergent outcomes!" But if one guy was carefully tuning the skills to things that the market wanted and would lead to success, and the other guy followed, say, a socially-approved educational outcome that produced a very shiny credential, even perhaps in the same field, but did not provide real things that anybody else wanted, you will get divergent outcomes. But that will be _less_ due to luck than someone who assumes that the skills obtained by both were the same would think.

<comment><USER7> I don't think what you're saying holds correct. You're just applying survivorship bias at a smaller and therefore less obvious scale.

We do not know the amount of luck based causality versus non luck based. What we do know is the probability of ending up a millionaire vs not.

So say it's 10% millionaire. I'm pulling this out of my ars. Now the question becomes what non luck based actions were performed by the 10% of millionaire and not by the 90% of non millionaire that caused them to become the ones to end up millionaires.

That's not a trivial thing to answer. First, it's possible there exist no non luck based actions. Maybe all actions had an element of luck. Second, it's possible no single action had a majority role. So it becomes a sum of small actions.

Now, even if we assume the best case scenario. That is, there exist a single action which is 100% responsible and has no luck involved. Well, how did the 10% knew to do that and the 90% didn't? That's also luck,or a just as complicated question to answer.

Now say the survivors, aka, the 10% came and said the secret guaranteed to work action is X. It does not mean it is repeatable once there is already 10% millionaires. What if the 90% now all do that magic action, there is not enough money for 100% millionaire. So you can see that this action would not anymore suffice and therefore starts to have an element of luck again.

<comment><USER5> We know I am correct that success is not entirely luck, because we can observe that no success comes to someone who just sits and waits for luck to strike them like a bolt of lightning. Even the lottery winner had to go out and buy the lottery ticket. Note I'm partially defining success as something like "a sustained and significant increase in wealth", so by my metric here even someone lucky enough to be born to the wealthiest person in the world and inherit more wealth than anyone else may still not experience "success" if they fritter away the wealth to no great effect. I don't think this is an unacceptable odd definition in this context, and those born into wealth so great that they literally have no responsibilities in life and can't manage to lose it no matter how hard they try are edge conditions anyhow.

This bounds luck's contributions to less than 100%. Mathematically that's a pretty weak bound, but it's not hard to see that it must be substantially less than that in the real world for the observed results to make sense, though. How substantially is hard to even put numbers on, so I'm not going to try, because the real point I'm trying to make here is that it is dreadfully dangerous to sell the idea that success is entirely luck based. It is far more dangerous to both individuals and the society they live in than to sell the idea that success is based on skill and effort. As I am a rather old fashioned person who still believes that truth is better than falsehood, the fact that telling people that success is based on skill and work works better than telling people that success is pure unadulterated luck suggests to me that the "skill and work" explanation, while still not Aristotelian truth, is likely _closer_ to the truth than the "pure luck" explanation. (I'm skipping over some connecting justification there because this is an HN comment and not a philosophy essay; if you agree truth is better than falsehood you can probably fill it in yourself, and if you do not, then why are you arguing anyhow since no argument will produce anything better than what you already have.)

<comment><USER7> It seems you don't really argue to know that luck is or isn't the only factor. Which is really what I'm against. I'm against someone claiming he has proof of an answer, and he believes it is the full truth.

So ya, I think the danger part you're also generalizing a little. There are some people who telling them that luck isn't a factor is doing them a disservice. Like people who have been unlucky. There are a lot of people who try and fail. Why is that? It is not enough to work hard and spend a lot of time chasing success, that's why. That's the essence of survivorship bias. You must also be talented, smart, strong, tall, healthy, handsome, connected, etc. These things I argue you have or don't pretty much based out of luck. Out of everyone who tries, those who succeed will have either because of pure luck, like imagine everyone trying did 100% exactly the same actions, and it still ends up that only a fraction of those succeed, that would be pure luck. Or, it is the luck of what has caused you to beat the others, to think of better actions, and execute them better, to end up being one of the successful ones.

I personally think if our society acknowledged this, maybe we'd start thinking about society differently. Maybe we'd be more inclined to accept social programs. Instead of seeing everyone who is not a millionaire as lazy, and like it is entirely their fault. Maybe we'd have to come up with an organisation structure where maybe we don't have a winner takes most model. Or we'd need to recognize people's individual strengths, and make sure we find a way to make them helpful in those ways.

I see your point, and I actually mostly agree. I think it just depends who the audience is. If you talk to youths, obviously you should try to motivate them and ingrain into them a sense of having to work for success, and try to give them the smarts to do so. Also have them believe the effort is not wasted, and will make a difference in their life. But if you talk to people struggling to succeed, even after putting in the effort, I think you should also recognize that they can't be blamed entirely, a big part of success is luck. In the end, our society must find the right balance between the two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Like fear, you should take Survivorship bias into account, but it should not dominate you. If you do you will do nothing in life.

When I created my first company my parents told me about how hard it was going to be, how few succeed... On the contrary I found it was way easier and natural than studying engineering was, for example, and hundreds or thousands of people could do it.

I found most serious people succeed in business. It is not that hard to become a millionaire, way easier than being a salaried person, tens of thousands of times easier than winning a lottery.

On the lottery you have absolutely no control about the outcome, on real life you can "cheat" and control anything.

For example, one of the great discoveries in my life is that in business if you don't know how to do something you can just hire the person to teach you or your team or just do it for you.

That felt like cheating because I had been trained all my years on school and job that you have to do all your job yourself, regardless you being good at it or not.

That control makes it extremely easy to do things. For example you could work with the people you want to work with, that makes your life way easier and enjoyable than if you are externally forced to work with people you don't want to work with.

In the startup world some people want to be billionaires, and that is probably akin to winning the lottery. But I know some billionaires and do not envy them. Traveling everywhere with armed escort because someone could kidnap your children, so you live in a bunker isolated from everyone. Everywhere you go someone wants something from you, a loan , to invest in them. Banks harassing you all the time. Not knowing if people is around you just for your money.

<comment><USER9> > I found most serious people succeed in business. It is not that hard to > become a millionaire, way easier than being a salaried person

This is the trouble with discussions on this topic. Everytome Survivorship bias comes up, someone provides "counter evidence" which happens to be a picture perfect example of survivorship bias.

Most serious people don't succeed in business. It is hard to become a millionaire. Way more people with the exact traits you'd describe as being what's needed for success have failed than succeeded.

<comment><USER10> _Way more people with the exact traits you 'd describe as being what's needed for success have failed than succeeded._

Do you have proof of that assertion?

I'd tend to largely agree with the OP, although I think he's overstating the point a bit. It's certainly not a great deal harder to get to the millionaire point as an entrepreneur than as a conventional salaried worker - assuming you have the appropriate character traits. If you're a self-starter with a fair amount of willpower and the ability to effectively learn, lifestyle businesses (as distinct from unicorns) are not massively tricky to grow. They're not _easy_ , and there's definitely a learning curve, but it's on the "doable" end of the scale.

(Background: I've built a few, and I teach other people to build them.)

 _Addendum: we should probably also start by defining "failed" here. If you mean "way more people's first businesses fail than succeed", I'd agree with you, absolutely. If you mean "way more people have started more than 8 businesses following best practice and have had zero successes than have had any success", I'm much more skeptical. It's an axiom - even in the talks by famous successful people mentioned in the comic - that you generally need a few attempts to get the hang of launching and running anything._

<comment> aaron-lebo Just take a look at the average YC batch. If anyone is set up to succeed, it is those guys with coaching, resources, and connections. Most of them don't become wildly successful and are only successful in any sense because of the ability to pivot, learn lessons, etc. (see Schwartz's Infogami -> Reddit transition). Or check out small business failure rates. More anecdotally and less scientifically, watch retail/food locations which have business after business after business open in them.

A successful lifestyle business takes a lot of learned knowledge, and by virtue of building a single one you've had more success than most. Just beating the odds on one was your survival, once you did that you had a lot of advantages.

Bigger serial entrepreneurs often have similar patterns. One success allow you to make another which allows you to make another, all with varying degrees of success and with failure effectively subsidized. See Mark Cuban, Ev Williams, Pewter Thiel.

<comment><USER10> YC companies are, to the best of my knowledge, mostly looking for unicorn- style plays. That's a very different game to a lifestyle business, and one where I would agree 100% that the failure rate is extremely high.

Small business failure rates: well, for starters, the usually-quoted numbers have been updated as of late. A quick Google shows that most sources are converging on around a 60% success rate for small businesses at the moment. (I think that's actually unrealistically high - I'd estimate more like 40% and guess they aren't accurately polling online businesses, but hey.)

Secondly, there's a significant difference between small business failure rates and small businessperson failure rates. As I mentioned above, most people's first businesses will fail. That will obviously skew the numbers in favour of failure: indeed, given that it's surprising the survival rates are as high as they are.

You're correct that it's (sometimes) easier to build a successful business after you've already built one. However, you don't mention the secondary point, which is that it's also much easier to build a successful business after you've already tried really hard and failed at one.

<comment><USER11> > there's a significant difference between small business failure rates and > small businessperson failure rates

Most people can not afford a failed business. If you are looking at repeated tries, you are taking a huge amount of survivorship bias already.

<comment><USER10> Depends on the business. Not everything requires huge or even significant initial outlay.

For example, infoproducts (or any kind of digital product) are very cheap to start up. They take time, but not necessarily a lot of money.

<comment><USER12> The thing is, time is money. Leisure time is one privilege of the rich, or lucky, which leads to unfair compounding advantages (like philosophy as well). "Normal" people (as in, if you selected them at random) don't have the time to learn the special skills required and also invest the time to develop the very specific type of product you are talking about. So, in order to start a business, you need to have a break. It can be getting lucky with your job, a windfall, or just gambling some precious savings or time onto your idea. And then, most of the time, it fails, and most people cannot afford to retry. Those that manage anyway are the exception, not the rule

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This one is also great:

[http://www.wisdomination.com/what-is-survivorship- bias/](http://www.wisdomination.com/what-is-survivorship-bias/)

By far, the best explanation I've ever seen !

<comment><USER14> That link turns into a download, at least in Chrome.

<comment><USER15> I just opened it, also in Chrome, and it took me to the website

<comment><USER14> Unclear what's going on but I get an application/octet-stream which hangs after the first ~23KB from both Chrome and Firefox. I'm assuming it's an issue with a proxy on the network I'm using but it's definitely unusual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Yes, working hard is not an absolute determiner of success. It may not even be a majority determiner, depending upon your personal experiences or philosophy as well as the domain in which you're trying to achieve success. Winning the lottery is an absurdly extreme example of one domain where luck is provably a majority determiner. It's funny as a comic, but that domain doesn't really map onto many other career domains where hard work is a lot more important.

One thing is pretty certain, though. Doing nothing at all leads nothing at all. If you don't get up out of bed, eat, do something - you die rather quickly.

If you barely get out of bed to eat, but don't take care of yourself, you limp along through life and probably die early from lack of proper nutrition, exercise, and mental stimulation.

Somewhere along the spectrum from doing absolutely nothing to killing yourself with work is a sweet spot for achieving success. My observation is that the people who succeed spend more time on the side of that spectrum toward working their tails off than on the side of doing nothing.

So yeah, it's a funny comic. It makes a point to remember, but it's definitely not the final word on the value of hard work.

<comment><USER17> "My observation is that the people who succeed spend more time on the side of that spectrum toward working their tails off than on the side of doing nothing."

My observation is those people are miserable, unhealthy and have poor relationships.

<comment><USER16> Not true at all on the health side. These days, most of those people have plenty of money for gym equipment at home, personal trainers, etc. and they have the motivation to actually do exercise.

Relationships are hit and miss, in my experience. Some hard workers work hard at their relationships too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is luck an important part of success? Yes, I think we all agree, and probably far more so than we give it credit for. But to hand wave it away is... frustrating.

I've spent enough time in running a business to know that what works for one person may or may not work for another. I too hate the hero worship that surrounds the ultra successful, the whole "follow XYZ steps and you can be a billionaire!" type stuff. You can extrapolate a lot of general guidelines to help you increase your "luck", but nothing is guaranteed. I've seen friends with good plans fail because they couldn't execute, due to things out of their control or things I perceived as in their control. We've weathered some storms through sheer luck and I'm thankful for that.

However, If you're already looking for excuses then you will most likely fail. Every ambition or goal has a cost. If X% of startups or Y% of people who pursue this succeed, there's obviously a luck component to it. But I bet that the vast majority of that subset worked hard anyway and knew what they were getting into. Failure was always a potential outcome.

I get frustrated by everyone who points to anyone who is finding success in something as handwaving away their hard work and pointing to luck and survivorship bias, as if they see through some illusion that nobody else is aware of. That's bullshit. So you know what survivorship bias is? Good for you, now what? Does this affect your life goals in any way? People just play the hand they are dealt and come out better or worse. Nothing more, nothing less.

<comment><USER19> The comic exaggerates to make a point, but this isn't about black and white; it's about shades of grey. It's about telling the story about what happened in the right way, acknowledging luck as well as hard work, as you just did. People complain when it's done in a simplistic way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Like Bo Burnham said: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q-JgG0ECp2U](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q-JgG0ECp2U)

<comment><USER21> When I saw the comic in my feeds this morning I immediately thought of Darius Kazemi's XOXO talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw)

<comment><USER22> I was reminded of that talk when I saw the comic, and surprised to see the comments debating the influence of luck and effort in life outcomes.

Both media are making the same joke, but I don't think anyone would feel a need to defend effort if they had seen the talk instead of the comic. The talk's beat-for-beat parody of the just-so success story paints a very clear and recognizable target.

<comment><USER21> Indeed, Darius makes this clear when he moves onto the more serious second half of his talk: "... beyond a certain threshold of work that you put into your projects, success is entirely out of your hands". You can substitute "projects" and "success" for whatever you feel applies for your situation.

If anyone doesn't want to watch the entire video then just watch the last 39 seconds, it ties in nicely with the comic as Darius argues that talking about "how to buy more lottery tickets" _is_ useful whereas "how to win the lottery" is not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's indeed worth to take survivorship bias into account.

But if you put too much emphasis on survivorship bias then you would think that everything is completely random and use "survivorship bias" argument as an excuse to do nothing.

I'm highly recommend to listen Peter Thiel's speech "You are not a lottery ticket":

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

<comment><USER24> Peter Thiel should be the last person on earth to argue against survivorship bias, being an excellent example of it himself.

<comment><USER25> Peter Thiel isn't arguing for startups here, but arguing against the idea that the world is just coin flips and some people randomly end up with 10 heads. So your comment is mostly ad hominem.

<comment><USER24> He can only argue for that with a platform _because_ he ended up with 10 heads. So no, it is not an ad hominem, it goes for anybody in that position, but _also_ for Peter Thiel.

What's the last time you met a poor person giving seminars on the world not just being coinflips?

You can improve the odds by hard work and trying to grasp whatever opportunities come your way. But it would be a terrible mistake to assume that that would lead to a specific outcome given the number of hidden variables.

<comment><USER26> Poor people, focusing on survival, don't have the time and wherewithal to give seminars.

<comment><USER24> I hear giving seminars pay really well.

Do those poor people have time enough to go to those seminars as audience?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Humans just seem to be wired for cargo cult. If I make the same mistakes as the one who got unreasonably lucky, I'll end up in the same improbable spot.

<comment><USER28> What if we humans had a predisposition to "Cargo-Cult" in order to strive to advance our race? Some sort of memetic gene. A sort of selfish gene if you will.

People would argue striving to be like a TED speaker or Kim Kardashian or (INSERT_CELEB_NAME_HERE) is superficial, dumb and shallow. Yet those people are better positioned to survive given our society doesn't change.

I would be interested to see if their was some sort of Event that drastically changed our world, would we worship hunter-gatherer style traits again?

I think yes.

<comment><USER29> Sounds like you're describing the distinction between Fiedler's _Task Oriented_ vs _Relationship Oriented_ Leader at a sociological level, but we can see these distinctions at organisational level already. Different orgs favour different styles of leadership personality depending on what kind of environment the org is operating in

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiedler_contingency_model

A yet more fine-grained model is provided by Vroom:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vroom–Yetton_decision_model

It's horses for courses. Its as much about the leader suiting the org and taking it where it needs to go, as it is about the org being led.

In your example, I'm taking "celebrities" as leaders; Kim Kardashian for instance being "Relationship Oriented" and perhaps reflecting the desire of her followers for maintaining stability and comfort.

The rougher, more "Hunter Gatherer" style traits, perhaps _channelled_ by modern political personalities perhaps reflect followers who are in more uncertain circumstances and who are looking for economic growth and an stabilisation of their situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is half the issue, the other half I see in the UK all the time is 'businessmen', who have been set up in a small business by their family money and the old boys network from their expensive school. Whenever you see business networking events they seem to be dominated by these people, or people in property.

I have had a lot of exposure to people 'in property'. People in property are people who had access to capital at the right time. Even worse are those who get to hear about government sell offs or developments which will increase values in an area before the rest of the populace. Then of course there are the money launderers. So I will add flexible morality to my list of traits that make a millionaire.

</comment><comment><USER31> If you like this comic, you'll appreciate Darius Kazemi's talk "How I Won The Lottery".

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw)

</comment><comment><USER32> To me, this seems mostly a very justified criticism of many startup advice articles, and the reason why I wrote [https://danieltenner.com/2017/03/16/how- to-write-good-startu...](https://danieltenner.com/2017/03/16/how-to-write- good-startup-advice-articles/) a good long while ago...

</comment><comment><USER33> I grew up relatively poor (I think my parents were on welfare at one point, but they would never tell me). I studied hard in college, got a good job afterwards, and now enjoy a very middle class life, which is rare considering my many friends + acquaintances from the same upbringing are struggling. Relatively speaking, I am "successful" all because I studied hard.

The details in between are important in the discourse of luck. Growing up poor, I engaged in a lot of unethical behavior to acquire money. By some miracle, I got admitted into college (albeit a state school), and realizing this miracle, I dedicated my 4 years to pure studying with the belief that good grades -> good job. At the end of junior year, I questioned this logic- I had a 4.0 GPA, yet after 20 interviews, wasn't able to land an internship (which falsely led me to believe I was relegated out of the realm of "success"). Then, I digressed to my former self, and got in trouble with the law. During senior year, after 20 more interviews, couldn't land a full-time offer. Again, by luck, I somehow ended up landing a "prestigious" job. Years later, it was revealed to me that the hiring committee all but unanimously disagreed on my qualifications. One member read my senior thesis in full and, for some inexplicable reason, fought for me, and I ended up receiving 1/40 slots reserved for Ivy League grads.

Whereas the first paragraph suggests hard work pays off, the second paragraph screams "luck." Sometimes, the details are too long, where the key events suffice when giving a description of someone's path. I don't think people are trying to dupe listeners and self inflate their hard work when they make statements like the first paragraph- people just spare the details because it's really not _directly_ relevant to the narrative.

Since my first job, I've interviewed for 70 different roles without success. While I get dejected at times, I understand the role of luck. I don't owe the details- I've earned my right to say I worked hard, but people can, and always do, aid in my luck. Without the awareness of this, I would've given up by now, but I just keep chopping. That's all there is to it when it comes to discussing luck.

<comment><USER34> I think luck is a bit overstated there.

Sure, sometimes an opportunity appears through some random chance which later on we might feel is lucky; if you were able to actually do that job, or deliver on whatever chance appeared then luck did little more than open the door.

If you're good enough, or hard working enough, a chance will usually appear. Don't dismiss an achievement as just being "luck" \-- it was earned (I sure did)..

You're lucky if you pick a winning lottery ticket. You do well on a job or a opportunity? That's because you worked to be able to exploit the chance, not because you got lucky to get offered it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I believe that success does largely depend on capitalizing on lucky breaks. However, I also believe that each and every one of us gets lucky breaks. What matters is can you spot lucky breaks,and when you do spot them, how do you react? I think it's very possible to train yourself to have the awareness to be able to analyze situations, recognize lucky breaks frequently and just run with them. In a word, you could call this approach "opportunism."

<comment><USER36> >However, I also believe that each and every one of us gets lucky breaks.

Why do you assume this?

<comment><USER37> Everyone experience change. Not all change is bad, _some_ change is good. This would be sufficient for "everyone experience lucky breaks" to be true.

Sometimes a change can be terrible and good. Whole family dead, house gone? Terrible. Being free to move to a new area, perhaps find new opportunity - could be (in a different sense) good.

Only a crazy person would _want_ such a disaster, but sometimes surviving something like that if one is able to shamble on through life - will in hindsight be the point were life changed, in some ways, for the better.

<comment><USER38> I don't doubt for a second that everybody gets lucky breaks.

There is an issue of magnitude of those breaks, though

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> What else would you do instead? More often than not I see this point abused by lazy or negative people to justify not doing anything useful.

Yes there's survivorship bias, you try to adjust for that, and draw inspiration from the positive parts of the better and more realistic examples.

Just because the system is rigged against you, doesn't mean you shouldn't try to achieve things. Not trying to achieve things is decidedly worse.

<comment><USER40> >What else would you do instead?

Acknowledge when luck was the major reason for your success. Don't stand in front of a room of people and tell them if they weren't so damn lazy, they could have hundreds of millions of dollars as well.

In other words, if luck played any major part in your success, you really have no justification in lecturing people on how to be good at something.

<comment><USER41> While luck will definitely have played a non-trivial role in any meaningful "made it" success story, it's equally disingenuous to ascribe success to luck _alone_. Never leaving your comfort zone, never taking a chance, never accepting that improving yourself will often require hard work and real sacrifice and never venturing out into the world all but guarantees that you will never get lucky. Casually explaining away all success as random luck is also pretty likely to ensure that it will never happen.

No, theres no silver bullet, especially not in small/easy/silly lifestyle variations (meditation, eating granola, not having furniture etc), but then that's far from what most inspirational business stories are about.

<comment><USER16> That's the same point I tried to make in another comment. Of course luck plays a role to some degree. But this obsession over luck as the key to the success of others seems unhealthy to me. Just from my position as a person approaching 50, it seems that it's an obsession that dominates more in the upcoming generations than in ones past where the mantra that "hard work leads to success" was a lot more common.

Once you take on the mindset that all success is luck, what's the motivation for trying at all?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> "Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years."

<comment><USER43> Most people end up with less money when they retire than before they started working?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> What this bias really tells us that knowledge about failures and how to prevent them is even more important that steps to success. Yes, the world is completely random, and suppose it's like dice throwing. So to maximise your profit, you need to stick to two simple rules: \- Make sure that next throw doesn't wipe your out of the game. \- Maximize number of attempts per unit of time.

The belief that success is completely luck-based is useless, unless there's a uniform distribution of 'success' over all types of people and their strategies. That is, even if I leave my job now without any verified product, I have the same chances to establish a profitable business, then a guy who already has paying customers.

</comment><comment><USER45> Just saw this similar comic! [http://smbc- comics.com/index.php?id=4283](http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=4283)

</comment><comment><USER46> The cartoon is good, but the alt text is better.

</comment><comment><USER47> To me, a lot of success is knowing when to give up and make a tangential change. Many failures I've come across were stubborn people who refused to let it go and try something different. But then again, you might let go and someone else will pick up the ball and make a million. You are back to gambling.

</comment><comment><USER48> That comic strip is similar to the talk Tiny Subversions by Darius Kazemi at the 2014 XOXO Festival: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw)

</comment><comment><USER49> There's a typo in mouseover caption - _defeatest_. Or is it an extra layer of juicy joke I'm not getting?

</comment><comment><USER50> For every major success story there will be thousands of failures you don't hear about.

</comment><comment><USER51> Does "not surviving" generate a Non-Survivorship Bias ?

</comment><comment><USER52> That's strange. Such a huge discussion here on HN, but very few explaination and discussion on ExplainXKCD:

[http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1827](http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1827)

Is this because people prefer discussion threads over collaborating in a wiki, or is this because ExplainXKCD is not as widely known as it should be?

<comment><USER53> ExplainXKCD has lost the plot, which is a shame it was quite good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Meta: I can't believe how often xkcd nails it.

<comment><USER27> I suspect that others could nail it just as often but lack the ability to present the conclusion in a way that's both succinct and palatable. Holding the mirror up to people and surviving the act is a delicate art.

<comment><USER24> Also, that niche appears to be taken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Survivorship? Is that the ship that survives? I just call it survivor bias. But then, that's just me. :D

<comment><USER56> > word-forming element meaning "quality, condition; act, power, skill; office, > position; relation between, [...] from Old English -sciepe" [1]

It seems like -ship is related to the German -schaft. e.g. Gemeinschaft <-> fellowship, Gesellschaft <-> companionship, Freundschaft <-> friendship ...

Thanks for letting me search for it. Now I learned something on a slow friday.

[1] [http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=-ship](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=-ship)

<comment><USER57> You are correct. It also gets more similar in Dutch: "-schap"

Gemeinschaft -> gemeenschap Freundschaft -> vriendschap Gesellschaft -> gezelschap

But in the case of "survivorship", the German equivalent doesn't include "-schaft". It sounds awkward. Probably in Dutch as well.</comment></comment></comment>


Very clever story telling using HTML and Javascript... - <AUTHOR> http://hobolobo.net/ <comment><USER2> Well, this is awkward. (Check u/n) I am unable to claim responsibility for this :)

</comment><comment><USER3> I am working on something similar to this, though I've implemented a renderer like that of a game, with all visible elements being rendered at 30 fps, foregoing DOM manipulation for writing HTML text directly to innerHTML[1], and culling non-visible elements. This avoids the slight jerkiness that exists when scrolling on the linked page.

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RRnyChxijA&t=22m56s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RRnyChxijA&t=22m56s)

<comment><USER4> Another reason for the flicker is that Hobo Lobo doesn't calculate a realtime scroll, it has a repeating 50ms timeout that listens to see if horizontal scroll has happened, and then recalculates all the positioning. I guess I could set it up to fire more often, but I felt 50ms was a good tradeoff of performance vs quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For each page, you must use the horizontal scrollbar to see see the animation and the rest of the images.

<comment><USER6> Totally didn't get this until I started poking around. Assumed the next page links up the top would take me forward, not scrolling right.

<comment><USER7> I wonder if it matters whether people are using their trackpad. I was using mine and immediately figured it out; maybe it's because scrolling horizontally is trivial with a trackpad?

<comment><USER8> I just wanted to confirm the same. Didn't even give it pause on my MBP.

<comment><USER9> But I will say that on my old HP G60 laptop, I wouldn't have had the same ability (it only had the up/down scroll via the touchpad), and I think alot of other laptops are similar. The scroll experience on my MBA is perfectly smooth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks really cool. This would be an amazing tablet app for children. +1 if there's a voice over option. Although it seems a LOT of work to put together.

<comment><USER11> If you read the story further, you will see it is not really the children version of the tale.

<comment><USER10> I'm referring to the technology/approach he used to present the story and not the actual story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow. This is fantastic. Clever story, clever execution, clever little surprises in the illustrations. Can't wait to see what else this guy comes up with.

</comment><comment><USER6> So, I've got a question... Whilst this is undeniably cool, can anyone actually anything beyond short children's literature being told this way?

As a more random note, what innovation have people seen/would people like to see in the literature space? How would you tell a novel online?

Discloser: am writing a novel, and reserve the right to totally take any ideas from this and incorporate them. If I do, you'll get a credit in the book.

<comment><USER13> You may want to take a look at eliterature.org, for some ideas. I think there is something to be said that visual and interactive novels make up about 70% of game titles released in Japan.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_novel>

An IF novel should do quite well as a mobile App. I've been taking a few stabs in the dark lately, adapting Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" into an IF piece, but haven't had much luck, really.

<comment><USER6> Interesting. I'll have a more thorough nose around that later. Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You know what this'd be great for? Narrative puzzles. Imagine if Planetarium (<http://www.beholder.co.uk/planetarium/>) had had access to this technology.

</comment><comment><USER15> Microsoft also made something similar to show off IE9's HTML5/CSS3 capabilities. I don't have a link handy, but it should be easy to find.

</comment><comment><USER16> I really enjoyed the experience!

</comment><comment><USER17> <http://hobolobo.net/what-is-this-thing> thinks I'm using Internet Explorer, when in reality I'm using Chrome 14.0.803.0 dev-m.</comment>


Memcomputing NP-complete problems in polynomial time - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.4798 <comment><USER3> Their "memprocessor" is a set of standard analog computing elements - <USER2> analog multipliers, two op amps, and a "controlled inverting differentiator". General purpose analog computers are rare today, but you could set this up on the patchboard of an analog computer from the 1950s or 1960s.

The idea that analog computers are in some sense more powerful than Turing- complete digital computers comes back now and then. Here's a paper on that from 1998:

[http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1138111](http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1138111)

"The neural network that represents the analog computer proves to be inherently richer than the standard Turing model."

The idea that having variables which can take on an infinite range of real- valued values fascinates some people. But you can't, not really. Resolution is limited by noise. Noise is inescapable, since electrons are discrete. Infinite resolution is impossible in a granular universe. Real numbers are a convenient fiction which cannot be realized in hardware. ("God created the integers; all else is the work of man." \- Kronecker)

The author of the paper almost gets this. They mention the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, so they know about Shannon. But they don't seem to be considering the problems of the noise floor. They also write "the multimeter of the hardware implementation analogically measures the integral over a continuous time interval, directly providing the result, thus avoiding the need of sampling the waveform and computing the integral". Amusingly, they're using a digital multimeter.

<comment><USER4> Just to expand: I think it's important to note that the resolution limits are not only a theoretical problem with analog computers, but a practical problem that strongly limits their power.

If your analog machinery can distinguish between a million different values in practice, that sounds like a lot! But it's equivalent to only twenty bits of a digital computer, and you can probably build the digital one much more easily, and it will probably be a lot more reliable.

Maybe you're going to go completely nuts and build a machine that can distinguish between a quadrillion different values. Much better, right? Well, that's still only about 50 bits.

Let's go really nuts. Let's say you had a machine that could represent numbers using the entire diameter of the observable universe (about 92 billion light years) with a resolution of one planck length (about 1.6e-35m, way smaller than any known particle or other object, and one of the smallest lengths related to any known physics). Even that is not so impressive. That's equivalent to about 205 bits of digital storage.

<comment><USER3> _resolution limits are not only a theoretical problem with analog computers, but a practical problem that strongly limits their power._

Um, yes. Distinguishing between 1000 signal levels is considered really good. 100 is more typical. There are 14-bit A/D converters, but they're really to give you some resolution on small signals and more dynamic range on signals where noise goes up with level.

<comment><USER4> Right. I know it sounds fairly obvious, but I have encountered real people who truly didn't understand that a couple dozen bits gets you beyond any practical ability to measure, and a couple hundred gets you even beyond theoretical limitations on analog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wrote Scott Aaronson about this and he showed me where he already addressed this on his blog:

[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2053#comment-269770](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2053#comment-269770)

Note the response from one of the authors of this paper:

[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2053#comment-270906](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2053#comment-270906)

And Scott's response to that:

[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2053#comment-271488](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2053#comment-271488)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for linking to this, Aaronson brings some good critiques (as did others on this thread). I do however think it is a bit disrespectful to the authors to use the word debunk,. Debunk implies a myth or a belief, or a completely unsupported theory, such as creationism. In contradistinction, this is peer reviewed science, and while there are undoubtedly probably faulty assumptions behind their work (or merely overstated significance), there may be some underlying validity and modest importance within the field of unconventional computing as well, so let us not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Also, just curious as a parallel example, Tononi and co had their day in the sun on Aaronson's blog a few months back, and there was a vigorous back and forth including a great response from Tononi ; would you say that now IIT has been 'debunked'? If so, how do you justify that? If not, why not wait for the authors of UMM theory and its hardware extension to have a chance to reply? This is how progress is made in science, deliberation & iteration, not instant victories.

<comment><USER6> This is not peer-reviewed science yet, it's a preprint on Arxiv. Anyone (more or less) can upload anything to Arxiv.

<comment><AUTHOR> The paper is submitted but not accepted (passed review yet), in this you're right, but I think its a growing practice for reputable scientists (as well as nobodies) to post to Arxiv immediately after they've submitted to a 'top' journal.

Anyways, here's the lead authors page, for the curious: [http://physics.ucsd.edu/~diventra/](http://physics.ucsd.edu/~diventra/)

<comment><USER6> I accept that Arxiv material is generally eventually published, and serves as a staging post for publishable material, however I was protesting to the idea that being on Arxiv in any way constitutes peer review.

I note that the lead author is a Physicist, which makes it even more suspect for me - Physics and Theoretical Computer Science share some of the same toolkit, but the tricks and corner cases in each case can be wildly different, meaning that even if someone is a world leader in one field, they can be a complete novice in another!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Uh huh. \derisive

I think this all comes down to the claim that their "memcomputing" architecture allows you to put exponential amounts of data into a polynomial number of things. My best guess for where they went wrong is something like measuring an exponentially small voltage difference.

A good rule of thumb: if a proposed thing violates well-known bounds, like say the Bekenstein bound [1], _and the authors don 't mention this at all_, that is not a good sign.

The paper would probably be fine if they took out everything implying that UMMs can be physically instantiated, but I dunno.

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

<comment><USER8> To me it looks like they have exponential growth in the number of connections between the memory elements. This would account for having exponential storage while still not violating any physical principles (also, it would not be nearly as useful as they imply).

<comment><USER9> That _would_ violate a physical principle (The Holographic Principle[1]), namely that the amount of information in any given volume of space is limited by the volume's _surface area_. At some point an exponentially growing number of connections is going to overtake the surface area of the volume of space occupied by the supposed physical device.

[1] I understand that this is largely theoretical, but it seems to be pretty much accepted by the Physics community AFAICT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> At best this is using the fact that computation of the real numbers is very powerful (and then pretending their electrical circuits at hand actually work over the real numbers). The point is none of our constructible devices implement ideal real number arithmetic, we only abstract them as nearly doing so. Likely their "figure 1 decoder" needs more and more accuracy (and becomes less and less possible to actually implement) as problem size goes up.

Idea analog computing is very powerful (in theory). Actual analog computing is also powerful. But one of the things digital avoids is: if each analog component is only faithful to a factor of (1-epsilon) then it is easy to run into problems where an n-stage analog system is off by (1-epsilon)^n ~ e^{-n episilon}. Which is exponentially bad in n (meaning if you assume epsilon=0 you may be assuming way an exponential amount of loss).

Also they are not ambitious enough. Assuming constant time arithmetic of the real numbers should get you more (like maybe even the halting problem).

<comment><USER11> That was my impression too. Real numbers are in fact very surreal [1][2]. Using higher and higher frequencies is somewhat equivalent to saying: first step will take us 1 second, second step will take us 0.5 seconds, and in less that 2 seconds we will have executed anything you want. Although I'm not quite sure I understand this paper.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox)

[2] "God made the integers; all else is the work of man", Leopold Kronecker

<comment><USER10> Yah- I got the impression they are running white or pink noise through a bunch of filters and looking to see if there is any spectrum remaining at the perfect balance condition that represents a successful bin-packing. The idea is they thus exploit the assumed linearity (and accuracy) of ideal circuits by claiming an independent calculation is happening at each frequency (and they trigger the calculations form the noise source). Not implementable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I still don't fully understand what they mean by a "memcomputer" here, but if you take a boring old real RAM computer + floor function you can even solve all of PSPACE in polynomial time:

[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=682381](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=682381)

Regarding models like FPGAs, etc., these can all be simulated on boring old Turing machines with at most a polynomial time overhead, so it probably isn't what they are talking about here. It seems like they have some mixed analog digital model of a computer here, but the details are a bit obtuse. It wouldn't really surprise me if they were solving NP-hard problems given that regular old real arithmetic + thresholding /rounding can lead to some crazy behaviors.

<comment><USER8> I'd agree except for this bit:"ndeed, a practical implementation of a UMM can already be accomplished by using memelements such as memristors, memcapacitors or meminductors, although the concept can be implemented with any system with memory, whether passive or active. For instance, in this work we have proposed a simple topologically-specific architecture that, if realized in hardware, can solve the subset-sum problem in just one step with a linear number of memprocessors" That seems to be pretty suspicious to me.

<comment><USER12> That's true. It might be that under some theoretical assumptions their model could actually solve an instance of an NP-hard problem, but it could also be that the physical realization doesn't scale.

They report solutions for a few small cases of subset sum, I would be more interested to see it run on something with say a few thousand variables.

(After all similar claims have been made about other analog systems, like soap bubbles, etc.)

<comment><USER13> If I understand correctly, that would be under the theoretical assumption that you can perform computations on numbers that require infinitely many bits (or at least, likely, exponentially many bits) to represent in constant time, which is an assumption that you are not just generally allowed to make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> From the conclusion of the paper:

> In conclusion we have demonstrated experimentally a deterministic > memcomputing machine that is able to solve an NP-complete problem in > polynomial time (actually in one step) using only polynomial resources. From > complexity theory we then know that we are able to solve any other NP- > complete problem in polynomial time. We stress again that this result does > not prove NP=P, which should be proved only within the Turing paradigm.

I'm very confused by this statement. If their Universal Memcomputing Machine is able to solve __any __NP problem in polynomial time, what is the relevance of whether NP=P in a Turing machine context?

Also, this seems like a very important result, but my skepticism is really high.

<comment><USER15> They are guarding themselves against charges that they have claimed something which they haven't (to have proven that NP = P in the standard Turing machine context, and thus earnt the accolades which would accompany the resolution of this longstanding mathematical problem).

<comment><USER14> Ok that makes sense. From a practical perspective, would this essentially make Turing machines obsolete in solving NP problems?

Essentially does this mean that NP=P, in a non-Turing machine context?

<comment><USER16> There are plenty of formalisms that can solve all of NP in polynomial time. Problem is, they are all theoretical and there is no compelling reason to believe any of them can be actually constructed given the laws of physics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The ability to solve NP-complete problems seems to be dependent on the concept of information overhead. It's explained a bit in the theory paper here: [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.0931.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.0931.pdf)

One concern I have is in section VI-A. The author refers to the ability to read out of a collection of memory elements the sum of their contents. Since the sums are totally defined by the other numbers it doesn't seem that you can count those bits as additional information. Maybe I'm missing something, though. The bit after on Exponential Information Overhead seems more robust.

<comment><USER8> Without Exponential Information Overhead I don't think any of it really works. I mean, that's the part that seems hard to believe. I think they get the sums based off each element being able to store data in relation to other elements but I don't get how that can physically work without effectively adding more elements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Given the hassles with getting electronic systems to respond cleanly all the way down to DC, I'd say this sounds more like a hardware-implementation of the known polynomial-time approximate method:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subset_sum_problem#Polynomial_t...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subset_sum_problem#Polynomial_time_approximate_algorithm)

</comment><comment><USER19> From the paper:

Sentence A: "unlike the latter, UMMs are fully deterministic machines and, as such, they can ac- tually be fabricated"

Sentence B: " no experimental realization of such a machine, (...), has ever been reported"

Do you think it might be possible, given sentence A? Such machine would own quantum computing, wouldn't it?

</comment><comment><USER8> Scott Aaronson looks at possible ways to solve NP-Complete problems using physics and argues that it isn't really possible. Link: [http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf](http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER20> Either I'm a complete idiot or this is bullshit - Just an analog computer. Are they simply confused by the fact that analog voltages can theoretically hold infinite information because they are real numbers? Which is actually false, because at some level everything is quantized and continuity went out in the 1900s

As far as I know, you cannot have non-Turing machines - quantum computing notwithstanding.

It seems like common sense. To solve a problem, you need to do something, and then something else. Sometimes if something is something you do something, else you do something else.

That's how the world works and that's all anything can do and that's how a Turing machine works, and there is no other way.

</comment><comment><USER21> For a grad class on future computing paradigms, I wrote a paper on computing with FPGAs that are capable of reflashing themselves every cycle, allowing a system to exchange memory for logic on a fairly arbitrary basis. As a total non-expert, it seemed to me like there was a lot of potential there. I wonder if this is a similar concept, or something totally different.

In any case this sounds truly revolutionary.

</comment><comment><USER8> We don't know if we can build UMM's. This does seem to strongly contradict a lot of ideas that no computational system in the physical world will be able to beat a Turing Machine exponentially. In a way UMM's right now are just saying "what if we can do this special computing thing" and proving that than P=NP. It only becomes surprising if we can actually build them.

</comment><comment><USER8> In many areas this paper seems to be over stating its findings. They imply heavily that memcomputing must exist and talk about the human brain and neurology in a manner that really has no place in this kind of paper.

</comment><comment><USER22> Not sure what to make of this. Is this as important as it sounds? Does this mean cryptography is broken?

<comment><USER8> Only if it can actually be made. It seems unlikely that it could be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> ... So have they released all the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_numbers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_numbers) yet? If not, it's a bunch of bs.

<comment><USER24> If you would have looked at two more Wikipedia articles you would have known the following:

Integer factorization is likely not an NP-complete problem at all. It is suspected (but not proven) _not_ to be in the class of NP-complete problems. There is no reason to believe that an NP-complete problem solver can factorize integers in polynomial time.

Contrary to this machine it has been shown that quantum computers can solve the integer factorization problem in polynomial time through Shor's algorithm. But quantum computers are not known to be able to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time.

Even quantum computers are far off factoring the RSA numbers because of the practicalities of the real world. The current world record Shor's algorithm computation is finding that 15 = 3 x 5.

<comment><USER25> > There is no reason to believe that an NP-complete problem solver can > factorize integers in polynomial time.

You're misunderstanding the relationship between NP and NP-complete.

Integer factorization is in NP, which by definition means that anything that can solve NP-complete problems efficiently can also solve factorization. The question that's currently unresolved is whether factorization is _easier_ than NP-complete, not harder.

<comment><USER24> Ah, my apologies. It's been some time since my courses on this.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dragon: A distributed graph query engine - <AUTHOR> https://code.facebook.com/posts/1737605303120405/ <comment><USER2> The article doesn't say, but presumably this hasn't (yet) been open sourced?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it hasn't yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How does this compare with Pregel? And weren't facebook using Giraph?

<comment><USER4> Pregel is for batch processing. Dragon is used for real time queries.</comment></comment>


Musk's SpaceX Plans a Spinoff, IPO for Starlink Business - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-06/spacex-likely-to-spin-off-starlink-business-and-pursue-an-ipo <comment><USER2> Can someone who knows more about the finance stuff explain why a company (especially one like SpaceX that prides itself on being super vertically integrated) would spin off a part of the business as a public company? Is it just to help employees whose equity is relatively illiquid? Is it to raise capital? Insulate the parent company from potential regulatory/legal issues?

Sidenote: SpaceX actually is sorta-kinda publicly traded. Alphabet and Fidelity bought ~10% of SpaceX. Fidelity has a few mutual funds that are partially invested in SpaceX (like 0.5% of the fund is SpaceX). I'm kinda surprised someone hasn't made a FauxSpaceX ETF that buys the Fidelity SpaceX fund and does some shorts/options to try and cancel out the non-SpaceX parts of the fund.

<comment><USER3> Speculation: SpaceX maintains control by selling less than 50% of Starlink. This is essentially just asking the public if they would like to invest in the Starlink business with no change to operations.

<comment><USER4> I think so.

Starlink is capital-intensive and untested as a business proposition. This keeps the risk walled off from SpaceX and lets them raise without diluting ownership of SpaceX. (It also means guaranteed profit for SpaceX from the pockets of new investors.)

Not sure why they'd go public instead of raising the capital privately, though.

<comment><USER5> Well, they need to raise around $10B to get it fully operational, so that might be hard to do privately.

Also, perhaps Musk thinks that having public retail investors is worth it. After all, even though they contribute approximately 0% to Tesla's funding, retail investors and owners generate approximately 100% of the hype, online content and general proselytizing. That is, someone will have to defend Starlink from accusations that it has ruined the sky, and Musk alone can't do it.

<comment><USER6> Retail investors contribute to Tesla's financing by offering interest free loans in the form of pre-order deposits.

<comment><USER7> Those are customers, not retail investors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> An announcement of an announcement is not substantive enough to be on topic for HN: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22announcement%20of%20an%20announcement%22&sort=byDate&type=comment)

Actually, this is an announcement of a possible future announcement. Since they'll announce the announcement itself at some point, that makes this article an announcement of an announcement of an announcement. We can call that a third-order announcement.

If anyone can find an example of a _fourth_ -order announcement, that would be interesting enough to be on-topic for HN again.

<comment><USER9> So does this mean the submission was administratively flagged?

Not criticising, just asking for clarification on what being judged as 'not substantive enough to be on topic for HN' entails.

<comment><USER8> Yes, I moderatorly downweighted it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> SpaceX & Starlink are symbiotic, but do look like distinctly separate businesses. Each wouldn't want to be subject to major problems of the other: if one suffers disasters, other isn't financially impacted. An "at cost" arrangement would greatly benefit both, former getting $ to cover launches (by which they can test & commoditize equipment/process), latter getting cheap transport.

</comment><comment><USER11> [https://outline.com/7jtePr](https://outline.com/7jtePr)

<comment><AUTHOR> Directly opening _about:reader?url= <...>_ in Firefox works as well by the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This makes a ton of sense for SpaceX. SpaceX is a high risk business with intermittent revenue and very long term goals. Avoiding the burdens of being public lets SpaceX do what they need to do without worrying about quarterly revenue targets and the scrutiny of Wall Street.

Starlink is a relatively low-risk service company with a clear business model, easily predicted and consistent revenue. Exactly the sort of business which Wall Street loves. By going public with Starlink, SpaceX can raise a lot of money on the public markets and give it's investors and employees a way to cash in on their investments without actually making SpaceX public. They can also retain controlling interest in Starlink and benefit from the success of their child company.

TLDR: It's a clever way for Musk and company to finance SpaceX and keep their investors happy while keeping SpaceX itself private.

</comment><comment><USER13> When Starlink has Class action lawsuits opened by Astronomers SpaceX doesn't want to be liable. _edited_

<comment><USER13> _Steps on Soapbox_

SpaceX and the ilk are openly planning to destroy the night sky. If allowed to continue it will literally be the greatest environmental disaster in generations. While the idea of Fast Internet access unilaterally across the globe would be a tremendous accomplishment I can not think it is the worth the cost.

<comment><USER14> If destroying terrestrial astronomy is what it takes to get astronomers to recognise indigenous rights, then I will be pouring my money into StarLink.

<comment><USER13> uhm, what?

<comment><USER14> The biggest telescopes in the world are built on land that is special or sacred to various indigenous people, or where the land was "leased" with no intention of paying the rent.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


DealBert – online deals, all in one place - <AUTHOR> http://dealbert.net <comment><USER2> Pretty awesome. Though mostly I use Fatwallet, I enjoy to see what popular deals from other sites like Slickdeals.</comment>