Time is ripe for fire detection satellite, say Berkeley scientists - <AUTHOR> http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2013/10/22/time-is-ripe-for-fire-detection-satellite/ <comment><USER2> While a satellite would provide continuous coverage over the area of interest, I'm curious to know if it's upfront cost of "several hundred million dollars" couldn't be better spent on continual coverage with UAVs during the summer months and daylight hours.

Just a thought, I could be totally off base here. I'm just not seeing the inherent advantage of a satellite, especially given the cost.

<comment><USER3> The other issue is repsonse times. Many of the responders are volunteers and the areas are inaccessible. The notion that there will be a 15 minute response time to something like the rim-fire is quite naive.

Second, the experience of the SD (Cedar) fires which I believe are still the worst in the state of CA [1] this system would likewise be irrelevant. That fire was well known for some time, but other decisions and resource constraints (including legal/policy directives) forced the fire to be triaged in a secondary rank.

I hate to be cynical, but this project really seems like a solution and a grant-money funnel looking for a problem and a pile of cash. The "several hundred millon dollar" pricetag would be better spend on prevention, education, and support of additiona fire-fighting infrastructure. Including preventive maintenace for things like controlled burns, etc.

The notion that we need 200-400 million dollars flying overhead to fight fires caused by trivial mis-behaviour is also astonishing. These fires are often set by _people_ doing things like spilling over an alcohol stove, setting an emergency signal, or doing some other trivial but mis-guided task.

That all being said, the amount of CA forest land that has burned throughout the state in the past 10 years is _absolutely insane_. I'd encourage people to actively work towards solutions to the general problem.

[1] [http://www.fire.ca.gov/communications/downloads/fact_sheets/...](http://www.fire.ca.gov/communications/downloads/fact_sheets/20LACRES.pdf)

<comment><USER4> We are probably close to the point of diminishing returns on education and prevention, given people's limited attention spans, the time dedicated to reading warning messages, already prominent notices when you go to campsites, and limitations on human intellect/awareness/abilities. "According to the Ad Council, Smokey Bear and his message are recognized by 95% of adults and 77% of children."[1]

The cost of fighting the Rim Fire was $127 million dollars[2], and that doesn't include some much smaller cost to repair the damages it caused (cited to be in the tens of millions by "experts"). The Cedar Fire cost $32 million in firefighting plus 15 lives and 2800 structures. The Zaca Fire cost $117 million to fight. From my perspective it's just a mathematical question whether it would be cheaper to put a satellite in the air vs. other mitigation strategies, and what the cost would be over the lifespan of the satellite for accelerated response vs. typical response. If we plug in the expected value of $200 million in additional funding to awareness I think we will be dissatisfied with the results.

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

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

3: [http://interwork.sdsu.edu/fire/resources/fire_facts.htm](http://interwork.sdsu.edu/fire/resources/fire_facts.htm)

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

<comment><USER3> I think the analytical approach is a good one, but I'm not sure the results are as simple as you imply, or have the result you may be led to believe. The damages of the Rim and Zaca fires were large, but the question is could the system actually prevent the ignition of the fire and decrease the costs of containment. In both of those cases, the answer to the former is <no> and to the latter is <unlikely>.

_________________

The Yosemite Rim Fire was man-made and had outsize damages because of inaccesibility and bad policy. Viz:

 _The fire was caused by a hunter 's illegal fire that went out of control_

 _The blaze was difficult to fight because of inaccessible terrain and erratic winds, forcing firefighters to be reactive_

 _Also contributing to the fire was a pre-1980s policy of suppressing small natural fires. The lack of those fires created nearly a century 's worth of fuel to burn, resulting in a massive forest fire killing virtually all plant life in its path._

 _A widespread heat wave and drought conditions helped to spread the fire and make it difficult to combat._

_________

It takes hours if not days to get men and supplies into some of these locations. On the flip side, the grow _very, very quickly_. Lets look at the Rim Fire:

 _Only 40 acres when it was discovered, it grew to 10,000 acres within 36 hours and 100,000 acres after four days._

The premise that a fire is like an ICBM launch that can be shot down before it explodes via star-wars is flawed. Its the sort of thing that people in Ivory towers believe to make themselves feel better. Which is fine, but its not clear at all that such a mindset correlates with reality.

Lets look at the Zaca Fire:

______________

 _The Zaca Fire was a wildfire which began burning northeast of Buellton, California, in Santa Barbara County, California. The fire started on July 4, 2007, and by August 31, it had burned over 240,207 acres (972.083 km2), making it California 's second largest fire in recorded history after the Cedar Fire of 2003.[1][2] The fire was 100% contained on September 2, 2007.[3] It was declared controlled on October 29, 2007.[4]

The fire was started as a result of sparks from a grinding machine on private property which was being used to repair a water pipe._

______________

Again, man made fire. People doing stupid things. Entirely preventable. On the flip side, would the Bird save any money by early warning? Highly unlikely. There was no delay in getting at this other than it being called in. So, you would not save any material amount on this.

The order of magnitude of cost savings would appear to be perhaps 1/10 of the actual cost, not 100/100\. So, in this case, perhaps you save $12MM on the Rim Fire ans $11MM on the Zaca fire. So, for these two events you save $20MM. At a cost of 200-400 million, you would need to incure 10x to 20x of these large scale fires. But this case would be devastating, if ever incurred. So using it as a rational backdrop seems off. If we are really expecting that, we should adopt strategies of prevention and fuel mitigation as much if not more-so than early warning.

<comment><USER5> Your dismissal of an earlier response to the rim fire sort of depends on how long it took to get to 40 acres. I imagine it wasn't that long, but it matters.

Also, there are thousands of wildfires each year. There is plenty of opportunity to scrape payback out a little at a time, no need for dozens of major incidents.

(I don't have strong feelings about whether such a satellite makes sense, but with early detection capability, maybe it makes sense to increase the capability to drop suppressant on short notice, and so on.)

<comment><USER3> Fair points, but I think the important takeaway is that $100mm per fire in <savings> is incredibly flawed. The flipside is if you save $1-2mm/per fire, you'd almost be encouraging fires (100-200?) in order to see a positive ROI. As a practical matter, many of these fires cannot be put out once started, they can only be contained. (You don't just drive in a truck and shoot water out of a hose). The methods of containment are not fast, and they don't work all that well in areas like the Yosemite backcountry. There are other political issues involved. For example, the inability to use machinery in a Wilderness Area. Without taking a position on the logic of that restriction, consider the practical effects. Removal of fuel, lack of fire roads, walk-in only access, etc.

Empirically, its common for fires that _start in very populated areas_ to still be incredibly damaging. Early warning in these areas does not seem it will materially alter the situation on the ground. Take for example the Powerhouse fire earlier this year in LA. [1] That was visible to the naked eye almost immediately. But the are is a dry, high-desert tinderbox. Ground zero was immediately next to the local San Francisquito <fire station>, yer it took 11 days to contain, and burned 30,000 acres despite its immediate alarm and proximity to roads and fire-fighting gear.

The Yosemite back-country is far more inaccessible and has far more fuel below tree level that the area around the powerhouse fire. I think the notion that once started it could have been contained in under 24 hours to be almost implausible. And once it reached 40 acres, we saw what happened next. Just as a sanity check, Assuming it was 20 miles in to start, it would take 2 days to walk to the area from the nearest road. You will not be dropping in smoke- jumpers like navy seals into this terrain in the middle of the night. Its steep, rugged, and when its not is densley forested. The nearest meadow may be in the next canyon.

In any event, it would be interesting to thing about what we would do with such a system if it were in place. Let's say that we got if for FREE. Then think about the next 200 million of infrastructre that would be required to actually put out the fires more quickly. My guess is that doing this logistical exercise would be more the bottleneck than the actual alert time. The prevelance of cell phones, sat-phones, epirb beacons, and Spot devices greatly increases the ability to comuunicate <SOS>. They do not make it very quick to get help, however. The benhcmark is 24-48 hours at a minimum if you are in a remote area, even with a Helo in many cases.

[1] [http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/06/the-terrible- beau...](http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/06/the-terrible-beauty-of- californias-powerhouse-fire/100527/)

[2] The fire station is on the road in the middle of this image of the fire:

[https://d2aoguav525b8o.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/re...](https://d2aoguav525b8o.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/resize/images/PowerHouse_Fire_Google_Maps-405x280.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lol their acronym is FUEGO for the project (Spanish for fire). I swear these people think up an acronym first and work backwards...

<comment><USER7> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backronym](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backronym)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A very similar system has been developed and deployed already (10 years ago), but not using a dedicated satellite: [http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2003-113](http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2003-113)

It's too bad the investigators are unaware of prior work.

<comment><USER9> I had the same thought, but apparently the resolution is 'only' 1000 meters [1]. Additionally, it revolves the Earth in ~2 days - making early warning kinda hard.

As for similar sensor packages - some 'Satellite-Derived Sea Surface Temperatures' [2] are collected hourly and could get around the time issue. Resolution ranges from 1 to 8km. Then there are things up there from the NRO, DoD, etc which likely aren't as friendly with data sharing...

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

[2] [http://www.opc.ncep.noaa.gov/sst/newSST/GOES_SST.shtml](http://www.opc.ncep.noaa.gov/sst/newSST/GOES_SST.shtml)

<comment><USER8> Its resolution is lower, but OTOH, it is an operational system ;-)

[http://sensorweb.nasa.gov/new/validationReport/IEEE- SMC-2005...](http://sensorweb.nasa.gov/new/validationReport/IEEE- SMC-2005-Sensorweb-v04.pdf) (section 4)

<comment><USER9> Agreed.

I wish the article was more clear what advances the Berkeley folks have come up with. They claim a theoretical 3 meter resolution compared to the 'next- gen' sensor package (VIIRS [1]) at 750 meters.

[1] [http://npp.gsfc.nasa.gov/viirs.html](http://npp.gsfc.nasa.gov/viirs.html) [http://collaboration.cmc.ec.gc.ca/science/rpn/SEM/dossiers/2...](http://collaboration.cmc.ec.gc.ca/science/rpn/SEM/dossiers/2012/seminaires/2012-11-23/Seminar_2012-11-23_Alexander_Trishchenko.pdf)

<comment><USER10> Is the resolution 3m or can they detect a 3m x 3m fire? That kind of resolution seems unlikely from such a high orbit.

<comment><USER8> I had the same question. From "Table 1" of the linked article, they have 72m X 72m pixels, and they are trying to detect a 3m X 3m fire (burning at 1100K) within that pixel.

To bring up a related matter, it seems like they are not proposing to do the detection on-board (see section 2.2.2, where they talk about a database of past images). If they are not, they have to transfer all the data to ground. The data rate can be very demanding (and the high orbit makes it more so). Accurate pointing will be another issue (high orbit, small pixels). They have a longer way to go than the press release indicates.

Notwithstanding all this griping, it's an interesting concept.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Are not fires natural? Sequoia trees need fires to reproduce. Highly efficient fire-fighting methods creates timing bomb, as more and more material accumulates.</comment>


What problems have you solved using genetic algorithms/genetic programming? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1538235/what-problems-have-you-solved-using-genetic-algorithms-genetic-programming <comment><USER2> Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1681186></comment>


German Protests Against U.S. Spying Draw Thousands - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-27/german-protests-against-u-s-spying-draw-thousands.html

<comment><USER2> 1000 here, 700 there. I'm surprised there were not more in a country that has experienced the dangers of an extreme government spying on its own people.</comment>


Deep neural networks can detect sexual orientation from faces [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/sites/gsb/files/publication-pdf/wang_kosinski.pdf <comment><USER2> >Consistent with the prenatal hormone theory of sexual 40 orientation, gay men and women tended to have gender-atypical facial morphology, expression, 41 and grooming styles

Only a matter of time before these conclusions are hand waved away as some sort of bias the same way that talk of ML showing race based trends is taboo without a dismissive disclaimer.

There is a massive dissonance growing between western society's utopian clean slate-ism and the reality that physical characteristics are strong statistical priors for a range of predictions at an individual and group level.

Now, whether or not it is ethical to make use of such priors is the real question - but the trend in tech seems to be focusing on the wrong discussion and potentially holding back beneficial research.

</comment><comment><USER3> (2017)

IIRC from the discussion when this was published, the problem is that they use the images from dating sites, that probably have a lot of additional cues according to what is more fashionable in each sexual orientation community.</comment>


HBO cuts the cord, brings streaming-only service to Europe - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/08/hbo-cuts-the-cord-brings-streaming-only-service-to-europe/ <comment><USER2> As someone from the UK (who now lives in the US) I look forward to the reversal of roles when US techies are forced to search out proxy connections that allow them to watch online content.

Welcome to the club.

<comment><USER3> Why do you want something unpleasant for people who weren't responsible for your own unpleasant experiences?

<comment><USER2> Awareness. I will often see someone post a link to Hulu and be genuinely unaware that no-one outside of the US can view it.

<comment><USER4> You want to hurt the innocent to build awareness for your cause? In America, we call that terrorism!

But then again, we call everything terrorism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow. I have to admit that I didn't expect to see anything like this from them for at least a couple more years.

We'll see how long it takes to bring it to the US though. I'd guess that their cable co ties are too strong here to do it anytime soon.

<comment><USER6> This might also be a technical reaearch project. test the weapons that are avail, etc. Go back and improve, before the real war.

<comment><USER7> _The real war?_ Couldn't the market for HBO be bigger in Europe than in the US? (given that there's more people here ;)

<comment><USER6> _The service, named HBO Nordic AB, will allow customers in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark to stream subtitled versions of the same content available in the US_

<comment><USER7> oh, ok :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Despite all the naysaying, I have a feeling this could show up in the US sooner than expected.

HBO GO is very good, surprisingly so. The quality of that effort in combination with moves like this suggest some very smart, visionary folks are at work there.

Anecdotally, I'm seeing rapidly growing interest in cord-cutting among non- technical folks.

As tablets and 4G phones proliferate I see people in general becoming increasingly frustrated with cable and desirous of having content when and where they want it.

<comment><USER9> If you have cable, HBO GO is free on your phone.

<comment><USER10> That's the problem. It shouldn't be tied to a cable carrier at all.

Also, it's not available with all cable carriers. If I subscribe to HBO with Time Warner Cable in Dallas, HBO Go is not available to me.

<comment><USER9> The cable carriers outbid you for access. If that was "wrong", they should naturally go out of business, right? Otherwise, what you're asking for is an artificial discount for being a cool Internet person.

I take your point about TW Dallas, but feel like that's going to resolve itself soon as HBO GO generates more demand.

I don't want to stick up for cable companies (they are terribly annoying to deal with) but at the same time, if everything cost what HN readers thought it should cost, they'd have to have filmed The Sopranos entirely using finger puppets.

I think the market is going to sort this out within the next 5 years as more and more serious, big-budget productions are going to be shot and produced for Internet venues. In the meantime, I have a hard time arguing that existing media companies should be forced to forgo market rates for their investments. We're only going to get our glorious Internet media future if the market works.

<comment><USER11> _The cable carriers outbid you for access_

I wasn't aware that I was in competition with a cable company. I guess I should read my own S-1 statement sometime...

<comment><USER9> You are in competition with the cable company when you ask to be able to pay HBO directly instead of paying the cable company, and in the sense that the cable company pays more to deliver HBO to you than you yourself would be willing to pay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I imagine that their market penetration in Europe in so tiny that they can experiment with new models without pissing in too many people's Wheaties. Don't expect this in the US anytime soon.

<comment><USER13> In Slovenia (small country in Central Europe - so quite far from the HBO Nord AB countries.) they're pretty known (and available everywhere - for money of- course). And the article is wrong - we got HBO Go some months ago too.

<comment><USER14> In Romania, cable companies have pirated HBO for years. They just offer it free to their customers. Recently, some have cleaned up their offers, but you can still bribe the cable tech for a trifle so he unblocks HBO, apparently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Paying more per-show, but only paying for the shows you want to watch, will likely encourage higher quality shows.

When you have, to steal some words from Pink Floyd, "500 channels of shit on the T.V. to choose from." Then the next channel of crap will always capture marginally more money, and will be profitable if costs are low enough. So what you get is in-your face lowest common denominator crap designed to draw the attention of bored channel surfers.

On the other hand, if shows need to generate buzz around the water cooler, such that people are proud to have discovered the show and announce to the world they're paying for it, the focus needs to be on quality.

</comment><comment><USER16> I love ArsTechnica too, but I think the link traffic should've gone to Variety mag:

<http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118058484>

</comment><comment><USER17> I had already grabbed my wallet, but then I noticed that it will be restricted to a very few countries.

Oh well, back to Pirate Bay.

<comment><USER18> Yeah it's too bad there's no other forms of culture and entertainment to consume.

<comment><USER17> Obviously there's lots of interesting entertainment. But I also happen to like some TV series, and they are usually not available here in any reasonable form (i.e., _if_ local broadcasters pick them up at some point, then they are dubbed). As far as watching TV series in original English goes, grabbing them via a torrent is _by far_ the most convenient and available method here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is probably the first cool thing ever to appear in Poland before the rest of Europe.

<comment><USER20> Vodka.

<comment><USER21> Wasn't Turkey there first?

<comment><USER20> I actually don't know, I always believed that Vodka was a Polish invention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Well, this looks like something that I'd be willing to pay for once it comes to the US. Not holding my breath, but it's definitely a good sign that it's coming to other markets.

</comment><comment><USER23> Europe as in: the 4% of Europeans that live in Scandinavia.

<comment><USER24> The 4% that live beyond the Wall. The wildlings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Let's get a P2P network started. Americans get BBC and HBO, we get Hulu and Netflix

<comment><USER26> We already have one of those, except everyone gets everything.

<comment><USER27> Letting people access content they want to see is killing the industry.

<comment> guard-of-terra Why would I care about industry? If something would be killing me, would "the industry" care?

They provide the product, I pay; they don't, I'm not paying; and the package never includes caring.

<comment><USER27> That's a fine attitude. My comment was mostly sarcastic: pirates already provide everything for free, yet the content creators refuse to let people pay for their product (country limitations, format limitations, drm, etc.) Then they whine about how they're losing money and blame the pirates, when it's really their fault for not selling their product at all.

<comment><USER28> They do let people pay to access their content - it's just done in a price discriminatory fashion. If they started offering content online they'd lose cable customers who pay more than casual web users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Any ideas whether it would be feasible to get a proxy connection up to watch it in the U.S. via this?

<comment><USER30> You could try a VPN with iPredator.

<https://www.ipredator.se/> <https://www.ipredator.se/page/faq#other_stream>

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> While it appears there are not that many sports fans here it is worth noting that for sport this is already happening.

The NBA and others have started online subscriptions for their content. For people in places like Australia where cable subscriptions with good sport cost $100 / month it's well worth it.

Setanta, an Irish concern, has a streaming service that allows you to pay $17 a month or $100 a year for live sport much of which is soccer. I watch the Bundesliga using this service and it is excellent.

It's a shame that you can't get Ligue 1, Serie A, La Liga and the EPL this way. Yet.

<comment><USER32> I have the MLB package. They still restrict the content to appease the cable companies, you can only watch the games that are outside of your market. Works well if you like an out of town team, but if you want to watch the local team it's worthless.

<comment><USER33> There are inexpensive VPNs you can use. Kind of perverse to watch a local team through a non-local proxy, but oh well.

<comment><USER34> So this is basically a fee on technical incompetence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Love it. I cancelled my Directv subscription last month for Hulu + Netflix. Haven't looked back. I'd like to see ShowTime go in this direction for US customers.

</comment><comment><USER36> One more crack in the dam.

</comment><comment><USER37> I wonder when more services like this will be released in northern Europe. The legal systems are more or less identical on copyright and intellectual property, which should make it a lot easier? Combined, scandinavia covers around 20 million people and have one of the worlds highest purchasing power.

</comment><comment><USER38> I hope for the US that HBO will make it an add-on for Hulu or Netflix, I really have enough streaming services.

</comment><comment><USER39> Nice one, giving it to the nordic countries first means that they can reduce the number of high-bandwidth seeders for their content on Bittorrent. At the same time profit from it.

</comment><comment><USER40> i will cancel my TWC cable subscription in a millisecond once I can get NFL and HBO streamed to my house via my TWC internet connection. cable is so 1950s.

</comment><comment><USER41> I feel like the price is a little steep. If all your networks did the exact same thing it would cost a fortune. Though HBO is nice...

<comment><USER42> How many shows do you actually watch? I'm not talking about the crap you let play while you walk around the house.

<comment><USER41> I watch quite a few shows across different networks. I guess this is a good start though. If they did follow with options similar to posted in the previous comments then I feel it would be superb... Though I feel like these days it rarely happens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Next VPS will be in Europe :-D

</comment><comment><USER44> "... will allow customers in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark..." Then call it HBO Nordic ffs.

<comment><USER45> Which is, in fact, precisely what they're doing?

<comment><USER46> I'm guessing his issue is that "nordic countries" is a well-defined geopolitical entity (it's even had a passport union since the mid-50s) composed of 5 nation-states (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden) and their associated territories.

Assuming that associated territories are included in the offer to their parent country that still leaves Iceland out of "Nordic HBO", assuming the worst case (that only the territories explicitly listed are in) that leaves out Greenland, the Faroe and Åland as well.

<comment><USER44> My issue is that a few selected countries from Europe do not justify such a headline. Even the article itself states that the service will be named "HBO Nordic AB" (in Sweden). The original source article from Variety has way more information anyway and does make a difference between some European countries and Europa as a whole - so why not link to Variety?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Muslim "registry" doesn't require a single registration, just data - <AUTHOR> http://jthess.com/blog/2016/11/17/and-i-did-not-speak-out.html <comment><USER2> This gets brought up every other thread on the subject of 'registries' for minority groups, but if you haven't you really should read _IBM And The Holocaust_ :

The upshot is that Germany used their census data to figure out who is and isn't a Jew, but they also used records from synagogues, surname analysis, and other pre-war 'big data' sources along with incredible amounts of IBM equipment to compile their list of undesirables.

[https://www.amazon.com/IBM-Holocaust-Strategic-Alliance- Corp...](https://www.amazon.com/IBM-Holocaust-Strategic-Alliance-Corporation- Expanded/dp/0914153277)

With the NSA, Donald Trump will have access to more information about the demographics of American populations and who comprises them than the Third Reich ever had about its own citizens. There will be no registries. And in the throes of a national security hysteria comparable to the fears of influence from anarchism in the early 20th century, there will be no internal will at these agencies to oppose him.

<comment><USER3> An interesting book, for sure.

The thing of it was, while they made some very interesting connections they didn't particularly make one that IBM (America) directly knew about the literal holocaust.

Now, IBM definitely knew their technology was being used to catalogue specific groups, and thus that that technology was being used to facilitate mass involuntary migrations of those people. What I don't recall (I read this book when it first came out in 2001), is if they knew (or should have reasonably known) that those people were being killed. When I think of the Holocaust, I associate that more with the deaths of those people and less with the forced migrations/etc. Both are terrible, of course, but one is obviously far worse.

In any event, that's a very good book to read, even if ultimately I find culpability for IBM to be somewhat tenuous.

I'm glad I don't live in a country/world where anyone is proposing registering anyone, Muslim or Jewish.

<comment><USER4> New documents came out after the book was published that showed that IBM had specific punch cards for each concentration camp, each reason (homosexual, Jew, antisocial, gypsy,etc.) and for manner of death (natural causes, suicide, death by gas chamber).

The SS had to be trained, the machines had to be maintained, and the cards had to be updated. IBM engineers were on site at each concentration camp throughout most of the war.

<comment><USER5> > New documents came out after the book was published... and for manner of > death (natural causes, suicide, death by gas chamber).

Do you have a citation for that?

<comment><USER4> The author of the 2001 book that OP was referring to wrote a new edition in 2012ish with the new docs. He wrote about it in HuffPo:

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/edwin-black/ibm- holocaust_b_13...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/edwin-black/ibm- holocaust_b_1301691.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a Muslim American, I am absolutely in awe, and simply shocked that something like this has come up at all. If this trend continues, I will definitely leave the US as soon as I finish up my degree.

Last week, my state Georgia tried to pass a bill that would effectively ban wearing the hijab (headscarf) in public. Thankfully, there was a huge amount of backlash and the bill was withdrawn.

<comment><USER7> FWIW, most other Americans support you and share your shock and outrage. Clinton won a majority, remember, despite being targeted by domestic and foreign security agencies, as well as by the Murdoch/Fox empire and the rest of the right-wing demonization machine. Obama is very popular. (EDIT: That's not meant to be partisan; it's just clear data that many people oppose religious hatred - many Republicans do too.)

I hope people get organized now. I hope bad things don't happen, but only by being organized can people act to protect their rights. As a simple example, look at the NRA.

<comment><USER8>
        > FWIW, most other Americans support you
        > and share your shock and outrage.

It's nice to have faith in humanity and everything, but "half" is more accurate than "most"

<comment><USER7> As far as I know, your comment is wrong. Many Republicans have openly repudiated Trump and racial/ethnic/religious discrimination. If you mean that Trump won nearly half the vote, remember that Trump is extraordinarily unpopular - IIRC around two-thirds of Americans strongly dislike him - and not every one who likes him will support all his policies. Also, about 40% of Americans don't vote.

Finally, I strongly believe the great majority would do the right thing, believe in the golden rule, and object to hurting others. They need to be manipulated into supporting oppression through fear and propaganda and through dehumanizing the victims.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We're not bystanders; our industry is the most important facilitator of this problem and we understand the causes, implications and solutions far better than anyone. We have a serious responsibility to our fellow citizens, just as the food industry has a responsibility not to poison everyone. What are you and your company doing about it? You have 2 months lead time before your competitor starts rolling out their products:

* Is your company minimizing and anonymizing user data? Is it implementing end-to-end encryption?

* If your product is hard for users to avoid (e.g., an ISP is hard to avoid, a casual game is not), do you provide a way for users to utilize it confidentially?

* Users need private alternatives, which means that FOSS projects need a lot of help making their products much more usable and reliable; can you help out?

If you are thinking, 'my little portion won't solve the problem', you're right. Nothing gets done in a democracy unless people all do their little portions, and unless they organize. The United States is the 'Land of the Free' only if its citizens make it that way.

....

Also see here: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/11/tech-companies-fix- the...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/11/tech-companies-fix-these- technical-issues-its-too-late)

</comment><comment><USER9> _The prospect even more terrifying than a show-up-and-be-recorded registry is that governments and private companies already have all they need to secretly create that registry overnight._

Facebook already has all of this data, for users and many non-users.

Start panicking.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Graph theory" of the sort that's used in social network analysis will become the lie detector test of the 21st century -- junk science based on a poor interpretation of elementary mathematics applied to dubious data sets.

</comment><comment><USER11> Good job everyone for letting the government gain so much power. I've said it before and I'll say it again: monolithic governments that have fingers into every aspect of your lives are dangerous.

<comment><USER12> And your alternative is?

<comment><USER11> My alternative is small federal government that leaves a lot more power to states.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Concerns about privacy were considered theoretical by so many for so long. At least now we know the theory, but we need to implement and deploy it ASAP.

</comment><comment><USER13> Not to be flip, but given what Snowden told us, I'm pretty sure this registry already exists.

</comment><comment><USER14> Unless the point of forcing a physical signature is to terrorize that group as much as to collect names.

For example, lynchings were not intended as genocide but to keep blacks in fear as much as being a source of psychological indulgence for the murders.</comment>


Node-canvas. Server side HTML5 canvas implementation in node.js - <AUTHOR> http://www.learnboost.com/introducing-node-canvas-server-side-html5-canvas-api/ <comment><USER2> I love this idea, but I'm almost always using canvas with a bunch of click/hover handlers. If I export as a PNG I lose the ability to make things interactive. Is there any way to couple the performance advantages of server- side processing canvas with the interactivity you get through the native implementations?

<comment><USER3> I get the feeling I'm missing something, but...

        var ctx = document.getElementById('canvas').getContext('2d');
        var img = new Image();
        img.onload = function(){ ctx.drawImage(img,0,0); }
        img.src = 'path/to/the/nodejs/generated/image.png';

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool. Could this replace image manipulation libraries like ImageMagick? You could handle your image manipulation using the canvas api and have node deliver the result.

<comment><USER5> ImageMagick doesn't have a very fast image processing implementation. Granted, I suspect that even the fastest canvas image manipulation implementation (such as Pixastic) cannot beat ImageMagick in speed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wouldn't it be better if Node.js was based on Webkit (not only the V8 engine) so they don't have to reinvent the wheel for every HTML5 spec? Is it to encourage the idea that Javascript doesn't have to be tied to a browser environment? Would it be too complex to maintain?

<comment><USER7> I don't think Node is necessarily _encouraging_ the idea that JavaScript doesn't need to be tied to a browser, but it does indeed demonstrate that very well. While I don't have a deep understanding of WebKit or the internals of how _any_ browser works, I'm pretty sure V8 and WebKit are entirely separate as they should be. For instance, I don't believe Safari uses V8 even though it's built on WebKit. WebKit is more about parsing and displaying HTML, handling CSS, and interacting with DOM events. V8 is about parsing and executing JavaScript, regardless of environment.

Node to mention, you can use Node to program servers that have nothing to do with HTML or a browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't know how hard it would be but I've been thinking it would be cool to have a WebGL implementation in node. Desktop gl apps using webgl would sorta cool but dunno about real use cases.

<comment> passerby-webgl It's been started: <https://github.com/pufuwozu/node-webgl>

And there's also a similar project, much further along, to put all of OpenGL in V8:

<https://github.com/philogb/v8-gl>

<comment><USER9> If anyone wants to help out, feel free to fork my node-webgl project. It'd be really good to update the WebGL arrays to the new specification.

The v8-gl project is fairly different. I'm trying to emulate the whole WebGL API rather than just provide OpenGL bindings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cool, combine this with canvg and render SVG for lame browsers on server. We can render YUI, jQuiery, canvas, SVG (possibly with some adjustments) in node.

</comment><comment><USER11> Cool. I've been accomplishing the same thing by using Jaxer in my application and it works pretty well. I have a canvas based drawing app on top of a background image and the composite image can be downloaded by the user. I transfer the drawing to the server side, render, composite, and return the output. Works on IE (with excanvas) as well.

</comment><comment><USER12> The title is a bit misleading. This is an implementation of the canvas 2d API that cairo for everything (the same graphics library that Firefox uses). It's not a pure JS implementation of all of the rasterization logic.

<comment><USER13> why would you expect it to be pure js?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not HTML5. HTML5 Canvas. Makes a little more sense when you put that back in the title.

<comment><AUTHOR> HN filtered out `<canvas>`

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This will be really fantastic when it gets freetype support to load ttf fonts.

<comment><USER11> typeface.js?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Visiting site consistently crashes safari ipad here (3.2.2).</comment>


Should you let a VC invest in your seed round? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.eladgil.com/2010/07/should-you-let-vc-invest-in-your-seed.html

<comment><USER2> I'd like to hear stories about companies that had a VC in an early round that _didn't_ have that VC in a successful follow-on round and that _weren't_ clearly, obviously, notably "killing it" in the market already.

You can say there are ways to navigate this problem, but it seems to me that negotiation timing and valuation are core skills VC's have that you don't have, and a VC that gets in on your seed round probably knows they have you over a barrel and can effortlessly make things hard for you. It's not just signalling; it's that it concedes a huge negotiation advantage to the participating VC, right?

(NB: I'm interested in this story not because I'm likely to go out for VC ever [again], but because it adds to the annals of "taking VC is hazardous to your company health").

<comment><AUTHOR> I know of one company in particular that raised $1 million for their entire seed from a VC. 1 year in the VC partnership decided things weren't going well enough to invest more, and they shut down when they couldn't raise money. I can't name specific names publicly here, but it was a clear situation where the VC was not acting maliciously - he literally told me friend (the entrepreneur) that the partnership decided the company was no longer worth partner time.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your greatest success story? - <AUTHOR>

Anything tech/startup related. It will be a great inspiration for other HN readers. <comment><USER2> In 1997, I had just started my consulting company (wasn't really a 'company'..it was just me). I was asked to provide technical project management help on a web site rewrite bmgmusicservice.com. Kind of a lame ecommerce site, written mostly in client side javascript (which now would be cool, but it was pretty hacked up then). Anyway, we worked with a company Boston (ATG), who had this new thing called a 'java application server' called 'Dynamo'. At that point, the category didn't even exist.. you had to pay for JDBC drivers from Weblogic (because that's what they made back then).. things like that. These guys from MIT invented this cool technology called a 'servlet', which was a completely different use of Java than most had seen before and incredibly useful for developing web applications. It was one of the coolest technologies I had ever used, written by some really brilliant guys that became very rich in the process. None of us really had any idea what we were doing, but we figured it out as we went along. We launched the site and it became the 6th most trafficked site on the Web within 6 months. It launched a category, an IPO, and has been the cornerstone of my career (still going over 15 years later).

ATG Dynamo, even now, is still one of the most brilliantly conceived, elegant pieces of software I've ever used.

</comment><comment><USER3> Summer before I started college last year-

I spent a straight week hacking together a website that organizes Starcraft 2 streams. Gets 25-50 hits a day. Not revolutionary, but it was/is a big deal to me.

I wrote it in PHP, now I'm re-writing it in Rails.

<comment><USER4> Mind sharing the link?

<comment><USER3> [http://streamcraft.tv/](http://streamcraft.tv/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I ran a website similar to TorrentButler, made a quick million from advertising revenue and affiliate revenue.

I've been trying to do it again for a few years, but it's not as easy to build an internet business when you stay clear of what I call "the easy 3" sex, drugs, and pirating. I've been driven to make it happen again, except in a legitimate industry. It would have been extremely hard to stay motivated all of these years without having tasted success early on.</comment>


GoPro cuts workforce, changes sales strategy - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-15/gopro-cuts-more-than-20-of-workforce-changes-sales-strategy <comment><USER2> I was gifted a Hero 2018 when I left my last job. I use it for recording my cycle commute because I guess my death at the hands of a homicidal taxi driver should at least be recorded.

It comes with a basic set of features. 1080p video and some simple time lapse options. Pretty barebones.

Anyway it occasionally freezes when disconnected from the charger so I went and checked if there was a firmware update and it turns out that the Hero 2018 is the previous year's high end Hero 5 Black crippled by software. Someone put together a tool to load that camera's firmware onto it and now I have a 4K camera with GPS, a wide range of time-lapse and high frame rate features, stabilisation, wind noise reduction...

[https://gethypoxic.com/blogs/technical/latest-gopro-hero- is-...](https://gethypoxic.com/blogs/technical/latest-gopro-hero-is-actually- a-gopro-hero5)

<comment><USER3> I won't ever buy a gopro if this is true. Why the hell would they do this?

<comment><USER4> Imagine you're the CEO of a hardware company that refreshes their products every year. Last year, you overestimated the demand for your premium product and end up with thousands of extra units.

Now, you're planning to launch this year's line of products. You have a brand new premium product that's slightly better than last year's, and it's priced $50 higher. What do you do with all your extra stock of last year's premium offering? You can't sell them side-by-side, otherwise everyone will just buy last year's stuff and you'll have the same problem next year. You can't throw them away because you can't afford the losses (GoPro was trading at $8 in 2017).

So you take last year's premium product, and install some software to turn it into this year's entry-level product. You have to sell it for way less, but hey — you might break even. Consumers are content because they're getting what they expect: entry-level features at a reasonable price.

It's not necessarily evil. Perhaps it was mismanagement. Ultimately, GoPro found out that the market for action cameras isn't as big as they hoped.

<comment> sudo-i I mean... this is what Tesla does? All their cars come crippled if you don't pay them more money?

Maybe the only difference is Tesla let's you pay to upgrade and not buy a new Tesla to get some feature?

<comment><USER5> How hard is it to jailbreak a Tesla?

<comment><USER6> Cars are expensive and have warranty. I wouldn't mess with that.

Besides, Tesla will know the moment you connect to the ethernet port.

<comment><USER7> It is a bit odd for a car though, you have to admit. Imagine buying an ICE car with a fuel tank that had an artificial limiter. Add 4 gallons to the tank for $x (120 miles). Would people accept that?

<comment><USER8> Having only one model would mean you can streamline everything since you're always doing the same.

The cost of every car is the same in terms of hardware and Human Resources. Easier to work with.

If you ever decide to upgrade, you'll just pay them. 0 effort on their part.

Repairs are also easier regardless of upgrades since there's only one model.

If the car is resold, they can enable more features too.

<comment><USER5> If the actual functionality is dependent upon Tesla's systems, sure. Otherwise you're just enabling a jailbreak market. There's even precedent for this with Malone tuning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Obviously the current situation is a big factor but I can't help but wonder to what degree things like GoPros and drones are something of a fad outside of a fairly niche market.

I suspect a fair number of people buy GoPros for their association with adventure sports and, after taking video of doing a few runs down some blues at the local ski area, come to the realization that they don't in fact base jump or kayak off waterfalls.

As for drones, I've thought about them from time to time. But after taking some video around my house, I'm honestly not sure what I would do with one. They're sort of obnoxious in wilderness settings and are often banned in any case.

<comment><USER10> I remember going snowboarding with a go pro. We were so excited to see the footage. The guy in the Chalet even offered to put it on the big screen so everyone could see. What followed was about 30 minutes of embarrassing slow and inordinately dull snowboarding. The jumps that seemed high were barely off the ground. The speed that seemed potentially deadly was a snails pace.

Recording yourself doing sport only makes sense if you are really good!

<comment><USER11> Making appealing video requires thought, knowledge of lighting and how cameras work, and creativity. "Just strap on a camera and go" is definitely not the way to do it, people make amazing videos with mediocre skill in the thing they're doing.

It's like any other complex tool, garbage in garbage out.

<comment><USER12> My best clip [0] is fastening the GoPro to a clothes hanger where I removed the middle pin, and added some cardboard on one side to make it not wobble. Then some fishing line and spinning it around my head while skiing. At 0:09 the shadow of the contraption can be seen.

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCXlwJYt0mg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCXlwJYt0mg)

<comment><USER13> That shot is really good. Do you have a photo of the contraption?

<comment><USER12> No, but some googling I found something looking very similar [1].

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV1qTigUkR8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV1qTigUkR8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> GoPro has long baffled me as a company.

1\. On the face of it, their main products in 2020 (i.e. action cameras) are barely innovative, and seem to have nothing to attract and lock customers in other than brand recognition built on expensive marketing campaigns. Essentially, they're selling commodity equipment at a large mark-up. Why haven't they been totally displaced by a manufacturer with a cheaper clone, also offering a _good enough_ brand and ecosystem to compete?

2\. Where they have innovated, they've hugely missed the target. In particular, their drone release was just an awful, awful misjudgement. Not just because it fell out of the sky. Not just because it came out at the same time as a superior competitor from DJI. But because it totally missed that GoPro is/was seen as a provider of _action_ cameras - things that can be _started and then forgotten about_ as they record your activities. They released a fairly generic drone, which required constant operator interaction. Had they released a drone with a tether, which could be _started and then forgotten about_ as you ride your MTB, or your snowboard, they'd have likely had a hit, aligned with their brand identity (assuming it didn't drop out of the sky).

<comment><USER15> > 1\. On the face of it, their main products in 2020 (i.e. action cameras) are > barely innovative, and seem to have nothing to attract and lock customers in > other than brand recognition built on expensive marketing campaigns. > Essentially, they're selling commodity equipment at a large mark-up. Why > haven't they been totally displaced by a manufacturer with a cheaper clone, > also offering a good enough brand and ecosystem to compete?

I think they were selling shovels during a gold rush.

With the popularity of YouTube growing, the demand from everyday people for better cameras and so-called "action cameras" increased significantly. It should have been pretty easy to see what would be profitable.

They were also taking advantage of the fact that most cameras are complicated, that most established camera manufacturers are slow to change and have a hard time valuing simplicity, and that the idea of an "action camera" was a new concept to average people. Having a relatively small product line also made it clear to people what they were about; it also made their products easily identifiable with their brand. Why buy an action camera from a company that makes a bunch of different things, when the action camera is what GoPro does?

To sum that up, I think they appeared on the scene at the right time and existing camera brands were too slow(at least for a while) and had poor marketing.

> 2\. Where they have innovated, they've hugely missed the target. In > particular, their drone release was just an awful, awful misjudgement.

Yeah, that seems like a huge misstep.

<comment><USER9> >camera manufacturers are slow to change and have a hard time valuing simplicity

I would never use simplicity and GoPro in the same sentence. At last the model I played with a while back had an absolutely terrible user interface which made it really hard to sure it was on if it was mounted on a helmet.

<comment><USER15> Funny you should say that because, compared to every other digital camera I've used, GoPros were pretty easy to use. But it's been many years since I've used one.

<comment><USER16> I'm disappointed with the Hero 8 Black. I prefer my old Garmin Virb XE.

I guess this isn't all "ease of use" stuff, but I do think it's all more generally usability:

\- The Virb XE has a much easier to find and actuate record switch (physical moving switch); the position of the switch will tell you if you're recording or not if you can't see the camera.

\- The Virb XE waterproofing isn't compromized by connecting it to power; the GoPro battery door has to be removed/opened to connect to power.

\- The GoPro won't let you connect a bluetooth headset/microphone, so you can't connect a mic and keep waterproofing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's a lot of negative comments here, so let me add my positive experience. I love my GoPro. I started with a "Hero3+" and have upgraded twice. I now have a Hero7 that I use a few times a week. I took five different GoPros on a rafting trip down the grand canyon and came out with some great footage.

The advantage of GoPros from the beginning is that they're a small durable camera that takes good footage. With the image stabilization that they have now, you can get smooth footage even when you're mountain biking down a rough trail.

The downsides are: they take a while to get used to using (although the newer ones have a much better interface), and you have to spend time editing the videos before sharing them. Also, it turns out a lot of what we do is pretty boring.

As to why no other camera manufacturer has taken the market from GoPro, it turns out it's hard to build a compact camera that's durable and produces good footage. The $150 knockoffs just don't have the same quality or durability. I still see a bunch of them on the slopes though (particularly on kids, which makes sense).

Still, it's a limited market, and phones have gotten better (and waterproof), so people don't feel like they need a dedicated camera, so it's going to suffer the same that most of the camera industry does.

<comment><USER18> Second that. I've taken excellent videos freediving with a GoPro HERO7. It is color corrected for underwater lighting and waterproof down to 10 meters/33 feet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> GoPro has been struggling for a while but like a lot of companies they will likely use the present situation as cover to make some changes.

It's a lot easier for executives to say "there was this terrible Coronavirus thing that forced us to downsize" vs "the business strategy I was in charge of wasn't performing well and we have to downsize." That's happening a lot at the moment.

<comment><USER20> This! Exactly this was done already in 2008 crisis and it is just so weak and simple for management to blame anything else than themselves. For me I think we moved toward of a more connected society in feedback we give on companies. A company that would let me go with such a ridiculous argument I would not join or give a very bad review online... and more and more I will join companies that treat their employees good. After corona - people will jump and consider companies that treated their employees right in crisis time...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm an owner of a GoPro and also of a nice digital camera (Sony Alpha 6000) and have done a decent deal of photography, so maybe I can comment on the appeal of GoPro: the interface and software on their device is excellent (far better than my Sony), and their app to interact with the camera is also excellent (far better than the barely functional one for my Sony), the form factor and built in smoothing makes it great for documenting outdoors stuff, AND their app has an excellent do-most-of-the-work for you video editor. For doing videos of hikes, vacations, etc (see eg this example [https://drive.google.com/open?id=1E7a5-yH01JCxJcf1-35YiRAcOH...](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1E7a5-yH01JCxJcf1-35YiRAcOHBS_lDC)) it's really a game changer, so I quite like it. But of course it's only really useful for people who like making videos in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER22> > 'We have a clear opportunity to super-serve consumers'... Chief Executive > Officer Nick Woodman said in the statement.

Anyone fluent in CEO-Speak able to translate?

<comment><USER23> I'm not 100% sure, but in this context I think he means direct to consumer sales. Woodman might be trying to pitch it as a way to keep customers happy, but I have a hard time believing that anyone had an issue buying a GoPro at BestBuy or REI. It's pretty clear that this is just a way for GoPro to make bigger profits by taking profits from the full retail price, rather than only taking profits from the wholesale price.

He might also be alluding to their subscription services, which make money for GoPro after a cameara sale, but that wasn't mentioned in the article. And honestly, they are doomed if they rely on their subscription services at all, because they suck. Anyone that wants to edit and share their videos is better served by other tools, and I don't think they make much money from subscriptions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I would guess their risk is similar to travel & sports industry's, they are mostly dependent on people being outdoors and recording things, you would probably use your phone or camera to record in doors.

</comment><comment><USER25> I bought a GoPro Hero 8 a month ago, and for what it is, it works well enough. But I've been really disappointed in GoPro's attitude towards openness. They've locked down the USB port, WiFi and the OS pretty much completely.

I think this is the type of company that would really benefit from an excited and engaged hacker community. The GoPro could be a camera-centric IoT device, used for a ton of things from webcams to 3D imaging to a bunch more. But there's no support at all for developers.

It seems like they were going in that direction early on, then changed their strategy and killed their SDK and dev program. It's too bad. This will definitely be my last GoPro as a result.

<comment><USER26> Before buying Hero 7, I watched a lot of reviews and tried to decide between older but still powerful Sony action camera. The quality was great, but sometimes GoPro decided to freeze. It is very annoying to find that your camera stopped recording 20 minutes ago. I thought that my model might be just a bit faulty. Then comes the GoPro 8, and the improvement noted by few tech reviewers was that it no longer freezes. Totally destroyed any trust in reviewers I had left. No one told a thing about freezes in Hero 7.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Back when gopro first introduced 4k video on their cameras, it was an impressive feat for the price compared with the many thousand+ dollar cameras available at the time.

Most midrange+ phones these days can do 4k video. Sure they don't have a wide angle lense, but that is something like a $30 purchase on your favorite eretailer.

The problem is that gopro is still selling the same midrange sony sensors, and expecting a premium. If they were doing 8k@60 FPS, then they would have something that could command the price premium vs the dozens of competitors that have discovered sony sensor+cheap SOC+battery = action cam.

Or for that matter, they could move into the mirrorless camera market, but they are only releasing gimicky UI upgrades and drones to attach your camera while wondering why a lot of people are just buying cellphone mounts for their bikes/etc.

So why exactly are the gopro's so darn expensive given its just using an off the shelf Sony IMX277 sensor ([https://gethypoxic.com/blogs/technical/gopro- hero7-teardown](https://gethypoxic.com/blogs/technical/gopro-hero7-teardown)) and a super low-end SOC?

<comment><USER28> This is a great comment if you switch out GoPro for Apple. Every market has it's people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> They've always made it hard to use their devices as webcams. If they had that feature, they would be selling like gangbusters now. Wyze did a firmware update and bam, you have a webcam. It hurts you in the long term to always upsell and partition your features into different levels. That complexity in your business, translates into your code and processes and makes it harder to pivot.

</comment><comment> kube-system They are so close to being a premium product but they're having trouble getting there. I prefer to drop premium dollars on equipment that "just works" but my experience with their products is that every one of them has some kind of annoying issue.

They need to figure out what kind of company they are. Are they producing cheap consumer toys, or are they making reliable prosumer equipment?

<comment> ratfaced-guy Exactly, I was expecting an Apple-like experience so I was very disappointed in that sense. The hardware was great (for me at least), but the UX was just too annoying that it soured the overall experience.

I wish now that Apple would build an action camera.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> GoPro is lacking innovation, each camera sounds identical to the previous one with only very small changes. They were still the market leader in action cams so for a while it was the only real viable option.

Nowadays there are a lot more companies that innovate in this field. DJI released the Osmo Action with dual screen and fantastic stabilization, Xoami has the Mi Action Camera for cheap, and just recently Insta360 released the modular "One R" that allows to quickly swap the camera module for 360, 1" or 4k action. I was in the market for a action cam and went for the Insta360.

GoPro created the market but nowadays I just don't see a reason to get a GoPro when there are arguably better options with more innovation out there.

<comment><USER31> well in fairness the hyperlapse feature they released a few years back was fairly innovative. and the stablisation was/is better than your find in some phones.

but yea apart from that, most models seem pretty much the same to me

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I heard that GoPro hasn't been doing well in the past couple years [1]. Did they ever transition out of their "badge re-engineering" approach to products ?

[1]. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qa1tGmi5g4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qa1tGmi5g4)

</comment><comment><USER33> A "personal dashcam" or bodycam product direction would be good for GoPro or some other companies.

</comment><comment><USER34> > GoPro Inc. said it will cut more than 200 jobs > The operational changes, > staff reductions of more than 20% and cuts to office space will save $100 > million in 2020

That must be a very high average salary considering the office space is probably the cheaper part of that.

<comment><USER35> Or "the operational changes" will save a fair chunk - but those aren't really gone into (other than "will direct serve consumers", I suppose.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I would love insider knowledge on their innovation tract. I'm sure they are licking wounds after the karma fiasco but it's like they went back to vanilla action cams, and that market is seeming nascent. What's happening?

</comment><comment><USER37> They should do a quick pivot to high-end webcams.

</comment><comment><USER38> [https://archive.md/mrDnY](https://archive.md/mrDnY)

</comment><comment><USER39> Here is a non-paywalled link: [https://www.benzinga.com/news/earnings/20/04/15814828/gopro-...](https://www.benzinga.com/news/earnings/20/04/15814828/gopro- to-lay-off-20-of-employees-and-shift-to-direct-sales-strategy)</comment>


Ask HN: How have you tracked iphone user behaviour for your app? - <AUTHOR>

are there any 3rd party stuff that work well? <comment><USER2> We have incorporated Pinchmedia analytics and have also tried medialytics in our iPhone apps. Pinchmedia is much better. But now we are incorporating our own analytics as we are looking for individual user behavior more than average.

<comment><USER3> your _own_ analytics? take a second look at 3rd party offerings, and make sure you that you _really_ can't customize any of them to your liking. there is more to analytics than click-stream, log analysis, or fancy graphs.

<comment><USER2> I understand, but none of the mobile analytics solutions provide the freedom we need in our products. We have hired developers who specialize in business intelligence and data mining to build us the analytics code.</comment></comment></comment>


StockStream - <AUTHOR> https://www.twitch.tv/stockstream <comment><USER2> Around 2 years ago I was joking about it ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10478267](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10478267)).

I guess it was a matter of time till it happened.

</comment><comment><USER3> Haha, good work. This is nuts!</comment>


Show HN: React-Redux-Sass Starter Kit - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Gigacore/React-Redux-Sass-Starter <comment><USER2> Thank you for this! I am still not fully on board with mixing my JS and CSS and when I dove into the source I was eager to see how you were handling it -- The webpack docs and tutorials are lacking when it comes to outputting separate CSS bundles and staying old-school.

This solved all my issues and is doing exactly what I want. Seriously, much appreciated!

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you found it helpful! Cheers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Genuine question, I'm actually interested in the answer and not just implying one way is better than another:

Why would you use Sass with React when styled-components, and to a lesser extent inline css-in-js exist?

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha! I saw this coming. There's still a lot of developers who don't like the idea of css-in-js. It is a bigger topic to debate on. I have personally tried styled-components and I like the way it works.

[https://medium.com/@gajus/stop-using-css-in-javascript- for-w...](https://medium.com/@gajus/stop-using-css-in-javascript-for-web- development-fa32fb873dcc)

[https://css-tricks.com/the-debate-around-do-we-even-need-css...](https://css- tricks.com/the-debate-around-do-we-even-need-css-anymore/)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I was mostly going after a direct comparison with styled-components.

I used to be quite happy with css-in-js because of its simplicity but found that it doesn't scale very well to large & complex apps.

About a year ago I was introduced to styled-components by a colleague and though initially sceptical (it took me a little while to grok its patterns) I've found it really nice, it solved basically all of the issues I found with scaling styles inside a React app, and I haven't looked back. The only concern I have with it is its not insignificant contribution to bundle size, but that's literally the only thing that would dissuade me from using it on any new project by default.

Since it obviously fits so well with the 'React way', and allows you to colocate styles within components with full access to the power of JS for building complex styles dynamically, I just wonder why you'd go for Sass, which is a great but much more general purpose tool, when it exists?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think you are missing just one thing to have the perfect starter kit: action types should be in constants that could be reused in your reducers. Otherwise it's to easy to misspell a type.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing that out. I have moved action types to constants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good stuff, can you say how it is different or better than [https://github.com/mozilla-neutrino/neutrino-dev](https://github.com/mozilla- neutrino/neutrino-dev) or [https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react- app](https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Sure. While create-react-app is undoubtedly better, this starter kit just let's us create apps using React, Redux and Sass right out of the bat. Though create-react-app can be used to do the same, it doesn't come with Sass pre- installed and to do that, you may have to "eject" the project. More on that here \- [https://medium.com/@Connorelsea/using-sass-with-create- react...](https://medium.com/@Connorelsea/using-sass-with-create-react- app-7125d6913760)

Neutrino looks great. Comes with an array of packages. I couldn't find Sass again. So that might require additional configuration.

It sure is not better than those two you are referring to, but is different for sure. Because, if all that someone's looking for is React + Redux + Sass to start writing their application without any initial configuration, then this could be their solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why doesn't it build on top of CRA --scripts-version ?

</comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for the starter kit- I'm always looking for new framework launch and go... Wondering if you could include babble with it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, comes with Babel included for transpiling ES6 to ES5.</comment></comment>


Drug traffickers hack shipping containers - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/how-traffickers-hack-shipping-containers-to-move-drugs

<comment><USER2> I met some interesting guy when having a coffee outside, who showed me some stuff he develops at his company.. holy shit, it was unlike anything I had ever imagined that shipping container technology was close to.

He sold something like google-glass, connected to remotely controlled electronic lock-systems for shipping containers. Those also allowed to visually track where a container is and if the lock is open/closed etc. A guy could run around, check containers and unlock containers, all by done by looking through the glasses and talking through radio.</comment>


Git VS SVN.... Bash It out - <AUTHOR>

I am setting up a new project. So what are the pro's and con's. What should I use? <comment><USER2> If you need to get non-programmers (Mathematicians, other engineering disciplines) to use the repository, and everybody is located on one geographic site, use SVN. (Because of TortoiseSVN).

If you have money, and everybody is located on one geographic site, and you are making something huge, then use Perforce.

If you have a distributed team, you need to use either Git or Hg.

If your team is composed of experienced developers who like to do their own thing ... then Git is the only choice.

If your team is composed of less-experienced developers, or you want something that just works & won't confuse & distract neophytes, then use Hg.

<comment><USER3> What's the difference in the usability of TortoiseSVN, TortoiseHg and TortoiseGit? I'm using the last two and they are roughly equivalent. I used TortoiseSVN a few years ago and iirc it was very similar.

<comment><USER2> I have used TortoiseSVN on Win32; TortoiseGit on Win32 and TortoiseHg on OSX. I found TortoiseSVN under Win32 to be the simplest & easiest to use of these three options.

TortoiseGit was a little difficult to use because it tried to map Git concepts onto the original TortoiseSVN concepts ... which confused us quite a lot as we were just trying to learn Git at the time, and the second set of concepts added to the confusion.

I can't quite remember what the issue with TortoiseHg on OSX was (It was 2 years ago that I tried) ... but it might have been something to do with the shell integration rather than the Hg-ness of it.

Disclaimer: I currently use command-line Git for everything, but that's mostly because I am currently operating in a very hardcore-software-developer- oriented environment rather than the non-software-developer-domain-expert- oriented environment that the TortoiseXXX tools suit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> SVN has a central repo with some clients. GIT has a central repo with some clients repo with some clients.

If you want to track your changes even when you don't have access to internet, GIT is the way to go.

Maybe this thread[1] could help you to choose one or another.

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/161541/should-i-use- svn-o...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/161541/should-i-use-svn-or-git)

</comment><comment><USER5> I would always go Git - once you're used to the flexibility and freedom, going back to SVN is like being hobbled.</comment>


Cardinal splines with JS (HTML5/Canvas) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/epistemex/cardinal-spline-js

<comment><USER2> Worth pointing out that canvas already supports Bézier curves,

[http://www.html5canvastutorials.com/tutorials/html5-canvas-b...](http://www.html5canvastutorials.com/tutorials/html5-canvas- bezier-curves/)

Is this different?</comment>


These two charts = Ipad in every class - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/87464/these-two-charts-make-the-case-for-ipads-in-every-classroom/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing this. Let us know if you have any questions!</comment>


Ask HN: Solved this problem with stochastic beam search. Any alternatives? - <AUTHOR>

I have the following problem:
Givens:
There are N types of item.
For each item type, M instances exist.
Each item instance has two integer attributes, A and B.
There is some subset S of item types (i.e. a set of up to N distinct item types)
Goal: For a given set S, choose the optimal set R of item instances corresponding to the set (i.e. one item instance in R for each item type in S).
Let SUM be the sum of all the values of A in R. Let MEAN be the mean of all the values of B in R.
The optimal set is one that meets one of the two following conditions (depending on which one we are looking for at the give moment)

  a) SUM is the minimum possible, and MEAN is within some range.

  b) MEAN is the maximum possible, and SUM is within some range.

 My approach:
 Two-part stochastic beam search. In the first part, the objective function is based on the distance from the center of the constraint space (i.e. the space where SUM or MEAN is within the acceptable range). This goes until we have k states within the constraint space. In the second part, the objective function is defined by the qualification for an "optimal set" defined in the paragraph above. At each step, only successor states within the constraint space are considered. Iteration continues until MAX_STEPS is exceeded.
What other approaches would you consider for solving this problem? One issue I have with the current approach is that, while it does generate results that satisfy the conditions, the results are not optimal, in the sense that I can run the algorithms several times and get different answers. <comment><AUTHOR> [Update] This can be seen as one variation of the knapsack problem.

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

</comment><comment><USER2> Since the count of items is known a priori (=sizeof(S)), doesn't that mean that the mean and the sum are related in a well defined way? Basically then both critera can be simplified to a single criterion on either sum or mean.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your response, skip! SUM is the sum of attributes A, but MEAN is the mean of attributes B, so I don't see how they can be simplified.

<comment><USER2> Oh, I missed this detail. In that case for a deterministic result I think you need to look at every possible combination. However, you can order them by the minimum criterion first, and start searching from the smallest to largest, so then the first group than meets the interval criteria is guaranteed optimal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is M a function of N or fixed?

<comment><AUTHOR> M and N are fixed and independent.</comment></comment>


How YC Has Changed - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-has-changed/ <comment><USER2> I've been going to Demo Day off and on since 2007, and one big thing I've noticed is a change in who gets accepted. I see a lot more "sure bets" and a lot fewer "long shots". When I go to demo day now, I see a lot of companies that are fairly interesting, founded by an amazing team with a lot of accolades and/or exits or previous experience, and most of the companies have already launched and have revenue.

What I don't see a lot of anymore are two people who just finished college (or maybe they didn't even finish yet) working on something that could be amazing or a spectacular failure, who haven't launched yet or have no revenue yet. Look at Dropbox, reddit, and even your own startup, JTV, which of course morphed into Twitch. All of them founded by guys just out of college, all of them now worth over a billion dollars (and unless I'm mistaken, all of them pre-revenue at demo day). And while AirBnB was started by guys who had a couple of years work experience, they didn't have much experience with running a company or anything other than a few years working in industry (and of course also worth well into the billions).

It feels like for the most part the risk analysis has shifted from "a couple of folks just out of college with an amazing idea" to "a couple of folks with a proven entrepreneurial track record and an amazing idea".

I'm not saying it's good or bad, but it's definitely different.

<comment><USER3> We still fund a lot of young early stage founders. I think there are two things that make them stand out less on Demo Day. First, batches are much larger and the average age of the batch has increased. Second, these founders are much less likely to be starting consumer startups and therefore they blend in better with the other startups.

Another important change over the past 10 years is that many talented young potential founders are being vacuumed up by the big tech companies once they graduate from college (or before in college internship programs). Essentially, the big companies are pre-hiring their future competition. The combination of these actions and the strangling of distribution channels (messaging, social networking, and email) is preventing consumer startups from getting a foothold. And by and large young founder tend to be attracted to consumer startups.

We are doing a number of things to counteract the recruiting efforts of big companies including YC Early Decision: [https://blog.ycombinator.com/early- decision/](https://blog.ycombinator.com/early-decision/) and YC Startup School: [https://www.startupschool.org](https://www.startupschool.org).

<comment><USER2> > And by and large young founder tend to be attracted to consumer startups.

This, and everything else you said related to it, are an excellent point I hadn't thought about, and maybe that's why it seems different. Thanks for pointing that out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Before YC, startup funding was truly wild west with too many term sheets with bad deals for founders. So kudos to YC for setting standards for founder- friendly term sheet and continuously pushing funding amount up. Some of the things I wish were different:

* Eliminating the whole "batch" concept. Ideas don't tend to born at YC deadlines. There should be a way to continuously accept applications as they arrive.

* Moving away from CA as center: Being in CA costs way too much for startups. I think startups should come to CA for hiring (may be) and then go away to places were things are dirt cheap, distractions are minimal and internet is fast. This alone can extend runway for many startups by an order of magnitude.

* Less discrimination against old veterans: PG had once mentioned that he typically doesn't prefer people who have worked for 10 years at BigCo because a true founder would have left long ago out of frustration. I think this is misguided line of thinking in many dimension. Even if it was somewhat true, it would be hard to rigidly generalize on entire population.

<comment><USER5> > * Less discrimination against old veterans: PG had once mentioned that he > typically doesn't prefer people who have worked for 10 years at BigCo > because a true founder would have left long ago out of frustration. I think > this is misguided line of thinking ...

Great point - I have thought of doing a startup. I am even "worse" in terms of experience, 20 years at big companies, in various leadership roles the last 10 years - no I'm not a vp or president.

But I could even self fund my company for a few years. Being in Seattle I probably have less connection with startups than in SF, but I have even worked for two! I did do some early stage funding for a friend's company that eventually failed. As an experienced person who has been fortunate, I could actually work for free for a few years, and could provide early funding for my company. I can actually tolerate risk - how come this isn't an area of attraction for vc funding?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Having been through YC in the second batch in 2006 - their first one in California, and again in 2011, the differences were indeed pretty stark. In 2006, there were 8 startups. We knew each other well and we met with PG at his house a few times which obviously was pretty cool. He was also the one actually doing the cooking at the dinners! There was also lots of interaction with Trevor and Jessica and (less so) Robert. In 2011 there was no such type of interaction as they were just trying to figure out how to scale with 64 startups in the batch, outside money being involved, etc.

The other big difference no one has mentioned is the speakers that came to the dinners. They get the highest profile speakers now, but in 2006, the speakers would meet with each startup after their talk. You could demo to them and they'd give you feedback and personal advice. I distinctly remember a talk by Ev Williams about his failures at Blogger for example. Very raw and emotional. Some of the lessons I carry with me today, 12 years later, were from a few of those talks and after dinner conversations. In 2011 (and on) you're not getting close to one of those speakers unless you just so happen to get to sit by them at dinner.

</comment><comment><USER7> > In 2007, if you had a B2B startup, you had to reach out cold to potential > customers. Now there are over 1000 YC companies you can sell your service to > and all of their contact information is in Bookface. As a result, YC alumni > companies are often over 50% of your new sales during YC.

This alone would be an interesting angle if you consider the equity given to YC purely marketing and sales spend.

<comment><USER8> Network Effects, cool!

I get this vibe of FB back when you could connect to people just in your classes. I mean, if corporations are people, then they should have their own version of FB, right? =P

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hey it's Friday and I always wanted to ask: what do the people at YC think about bringing back some kind of smaller-scale investment for a larger number of applicants?

There was a time in my life after I graduated in college in '99, after the dot bomb, before the housing bomb, before YC, when I could have made just about any app/website in 6 months for $10,000. I wasn't driven by money, I just needed basic living expenses for enough runway to get ahead before someone snagged me back into working another day job to make ends meet. To me, microlending to this vast pool of untapped potential was the basic premise of YC and what I found so revolutionary about it.

Would you consider breaking one of your $150,000 investments into 10 or 15 smaller investments? Why or why not? Thanks!

<comment><USER3> That is what we are doing in Startup School - [https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-startup- school-2018/](https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-startup-school-2018/)

<comment><USER10> I was half regretting doing last years startup school (as opposed to this one) -_-

At the same time, those AWS credits went a long way for me -- I'm sure that grant could go very far for others. Kudos for doing it!

Honestly, the most valuable aspect of startup school is the feedback from your peers. Half of my group I still stay in contact with (even intro'd them to a few customers). I guess, it's similar to YC; the networking effects.

I do think the money would be better upfront, as opposed to at the end. However, I guess there's no bar on entry and it's "free" so, I can see the reason to wait.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's the world that has changed. Launching into a relatively open world wide web is fundamentally different to breaking into the consolidated platforms of today. Startup culture was at its peak in the PG days today it's closer to a nadir.

<comment><USER12> > Startup culture was at its peak in the PG days today it's closer to a nadir.

Yes, totally. I became interested in startups in 2009. I was a CS major and there was a tiny group of other students who shared my interests - we had a weekly "internet entrepreneur society" meetup where we'd discuss Paul Graham, Eric Ries, "Getting Real" (37Signal's book), and so on, along with the various projects we were working on and ideas we had.

By the time I graduated in 2012 the field was already starting to change. In the first two years out of university I worked with 3 different co-founders on various ideas, none of which went anywhere (frustratingly). Two of those co- founders had no genuine interest in technology or innovation -- I believe that they only became interested in startups after they became the hot thing to do. They wanted prestige and they wanted to raise funding for the sake of it. They weren't excited by the potential of the new platforms that had just appeared.

(After that I ended up working for a medium-sized tech startup for a while, got disillusioned and burnt out, took some time off, and then spent the last 3 years building myself back up. I still want to take a real shot at starting a startup, but the industry has changed so much now. The fun and excitement has gone).

I think there were several factors that changed startup culture:

1\. The technology of the web matured. We are now in the Gartner cycle "plateau of productivity". Once upon a time you could upload some PHP scripts and a little bit of AJAX and have an interactive app that was admittedly crappy, but also genuinely novel and interesting. Now you need to know a complex backend framework, the modern JS ecosystem, automation/build tools, etc, just to compete. That's fine for a 10-man dev team, for 2 founders out of college it's a daunting amount of work.

2\. Startups became a much more popular and prestigious career path. "The Social Network" movie (2011) made startups much more glamorous. Tons of articles were boosting "disruptive innovation". By the time I graduated, suddenly all the kids who'd been polishing their IB/consulting applications decided they wanted to be entrepreneurs, maybe after 2 years at Goldman/Bain/etc. Some of these guys were genuinely talented and cool. Many were arrogant and douchey, had a shallow understanding of tech, and treated their technical cofounders as code monkeys (yes, I had a few bad experiences).

Many interesting startup ideas (Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google) came from young technologists working on ideas they thought were cool, yet were niche and weird at the time. Once the IB kids started entering tech _en masse_ the culture shifted. (Granted the Winklevoss twins tried to recruit Zuckerberg back in 2004. So this is not completely new. But I think the techie/suit ratio changed dramatically in the early 10s).

3\. Lots of cheap capital. This meant more ideas funded, ideas that got funded raising more money, and more market saturation in web, mobile, everywhere. In some ways this helped entrepreneurs, but it also made fundraising more necessary.

4\. A controversial one: all the "sexism in tech" controversies that kicked off a few years ago. I paid close attention and I remember that this exploded in 2013. You had things like a Github founder being ousted (along with Github apologising for their "meritocracy" carpet), people being fired for tweets, etc. Sexism is wrong and there were probably many invisible barriers to female founders. However the big social justice activists (Shanley Kane, etc) were not concerned with technology, they were motivated by ideology, and they created a very hostile atmosphere. Make an edgy joke on a blog post intended for about 100 friends to read? Suddenly 50,000 people on Twitter have read it and are calling for your head. PG made a poorly-worded comment during a long interview -- suddenly every media outlet quotes it out of context, takes it as proof of his sexism, and it becomes untenable for him to remain in charge of YC. (I know this wasn't the only reason he stepped down, but it was a factor).

5\. Regulation. GDPR is the biggest one, though there are others. It is not a startup killer, startups can still operate, but it makes it much harder. The idea of putting a prototype online, getting some early users, and rapidly iterating based on feedback is now much more dangerous. You need to invest heavily upfront to become compliant (even then your legal status will be unclear), and if you pivot, or make drastic changes, you bear the risk of becoming non-compliant. The EU legislators assume that everyone is a big company with a stable business model, not a 3-man team experimenting with various ideas. These regulatory changes went hand-in-hand with increasing political hostility to tech entrepreneurs. Say you manage to succeed despite all the obstacles put in the place of tech entrepreneurs in 2018, and become the next Mark Zuckerberg -- you can expect to be treated like the current Mark Zuckerberg, that is, have everyone hate you and try to get you fired.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Surprised Stripe didn't explicitly make the list of notable startups from over the years. Bigger than even Dropbox by valuation (obviously not apples to apples vs. public market cap) and arguably has had a bigger positive impact on the world than any other YC startup by actively increasing the GDP of the internet.

<comment><USER14> > YC startup by actively increasing the GDP of the internet

Sorry, but what does this actually mean? Before Stripe existed, you most certainly could process a payment online, so why would Stripe's existence increase the overall market for goods and services online?

<comment><USER15> I take it to mean that Stripe is easier to use than its competitors, which means new companies start that wouldn't have, resulting in revenue through Internet sales that wouldn't have happened online yet without those companies existing.

Obviously the premises can be debated, but developers do like Stripe's API and products, and it seems plausible that some of those developers have been successful.

<comment><USER16> While Stripe is extremely developer-friendly, the alternatives aren't _that_ bad. They're annoying to set up, but certainly not prohibitive to a determined founder starting out. Today, options like Braintree are comparable in terms of dev-friendliness.

<comment><USER15> Yes, but I'd credit Stripe for increasing the overall dev-friendliness of processors by introducing competition. And there were several companies started in the years before their competition caught up. I built two applications in 2012 using Stripe. One wouldn't have existed otherwise, and the other would have cost my client a lot more money.

I'd also credit Atlas with new revenue. I don't think that program has a peer yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'll be hanging out in the comments this morning if anyone would like to discuss.

</comment><comment><USER17> YC 2005-2014 = Doing things that don't scale

YC 2014+ = Making the magic of PG, Jessica, Sam et al scalable

<comment><USER18> That's the whole idea, right? "Do things that don't scale" means not letting future logistical concerns get in the way of discovering a viable market. But once you do find a good one, you scale the fuck out of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why don't you start a European subsidiary? That would be a really good way to scale without compromising on quality. The need is great for something like that.

</comment><comment><USER20> Interesting. Personalized rejections (one worded statements given the quantity of applications) would be great.

<comment><USER21> We're working on a way to do this.

<comment><USER22> Suggestion: when you folks send out that "You were in the top 10% of startups....please re-apply" email, would be great to receive it along with the rejection. Would be a much needed ray of hope at that point :-)

<comment><USER21> That's a good idea. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As you have scaled other things, can't you scale feedback for companies? Atleast, for what you consider top 10% or so?

We applied last batch and got a question around a competitor that had just gotten funding. Not sure if that was the reason of the reject.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately with over 8000 applicants each batch that is very very hard but I will talk to our admissions team to see if there is anything we can do to improve in this area. I apologize for how frustrating it is to get a YC rejection.

<comment><USER24> P.S I'll advise everyone to visit siebel's Molly page ([https://molly.com/michael/q/eyJpZCI6IDEwMTR9/what-are- some-o...](https://molly.com/michael/q/eyJpZCI6IDEwMTR9/what-are-some-of-your- favourite-questions-to-ask-founders\)there) are answers to most of your questions on there. It's a great guide for your application process and you would be able to deduce why you are accepted/rejected from the analytics of those answers. With +-8000 applications you'll need all the help you can get to make your application stand out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> When people compare how many companies get into YC vs how many of them become successful companies should understand that beyond what YC brings to startups which is a lot, the success also depends on the founding team execution and the ability to find a market fit, sell and grow the product. I am a first-time applicant and what makes me take the decision was all the great resources YC can bring to my company (advisors, network, knowledge) more than looking at how many big companies or brands went through the accelerator program which is also a way of effectiveness measurement, but for me not the most important.

</comment><comment><USER26> Michael how much of that early magic is lost now with PG not actively involved, with the bigger batches and the more industrialized machine?

Don't get me wrong, what YC has become is pretty amazing but boy what I wouldn't give to have been part of one of those first few batches or especially that first one with Aaron Swartz.

<comment><USER3> I talk about this specifically in my post... Having done YC in 2007, 2012, and helping to run it now. I think today YC founders are given many more tools and much more money to succeed.

<comment><USER26> Sure, no doubt today's founders are much better equipped for success no arguing that.

I guess I meant just from a pure experience perspective.

<comment><USER27> I think today's founders care about being equipped for success. The Y combinator in the lambda calculus is about what it enables you express, not itself.

<comment><USER26> I'm a "today's founder" (although I will admit I'm pretty old) but the history of PG, YC & the people that were in those first few batches I find incredibly interesting. In fact I find the whole evolution of this industry as a whole in Silicon Valley interesting & this is just the next evolution of that.

Sure, our focus is all about how to grow faster & I didn't mean to imply that today's YC is worse than it was when it started as it relates to achieving a founders actual goals, I didn't mean that at all.

My question to Michael was just based on this aspect of his post: "For me, there were two amazing things in the early days of YC that are different today. First, in 2007, batches were much smaller so it was easier to meet all of your batchmates. Today, you have to work harder to meet and become friends with all the talented people in your batch. We put companies into groups of about 30-40 in order to replicate the feeling of the past. Second, getting to work directly with PG was special."

From strictly an experience aspect since Michael is uniquely qualified to give a perspective on being a part of both then and now there had to be a certain magic in that 2007 batch that would be pretty tough to recreate today, or maybe not I guess, I don't know, it's why I asked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Im looking to get in but I have been stalking the hacker page trying to skim every single information I can and believe me...I'm a walking hacker news...lol. Seibel is doing a great Job in encouraging soon to be/ start-ups to apply to Yc...he's shown an uncommon belief in startups regardless of what they do or where they from. That to me is a great change to the psyche of yc. If a lot more people are open as you are we'll have more start-ups. I'm not trying to schmooze you incase I say less about yc community...I haven't had that experience yet.

</comment><comment><USER28> YC just announced YC China[1]. What will you say when they ask you to call it the "June Fourth Incident" instead of "Tienanmen Square Massacre"? You're not naive, you must see that moment in the future, or have some idea to dodge it somehow? Will you _kowtow_?

What's your attitude towards the Republic of China (Taiwan)?

[1] [https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-china-qi- lu/](https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-china-qi-lu/)

<comment><USER29> A fair question and one that might be influenced by the Google MD's response to a request for a chat: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/technology/google- pichai-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/technology/google-pichai- congress-testify.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> What's the average/median number of applications for startups who get in?

It's pretty awesome that you can actually apply 3 times within one year and did right that with [https://fulfilli.com](https://fulfilli.com). It's good to take a look back and see how we've progressed.

</comment><comment><USER31> What percentage of YC founders end up working for another YC company after their venture fails?

<comment><USER21> I don't know the percentage but it's definitely very common. Lots of YC companies look specifically to hire other former YC founders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Awesome!</comment>