It's Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio] - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/its-surprising-how-much-small-teams-can-get-done-sam-chaudhary-of-classdojo/ <comment><USER2> I used to work in small teams/companies or alone and got a lot done that way. Now I am in a big corporation and I am still stunned by the overhead there . Between coordinating with other teams, dealing with offshore teams and reporting to management you barely get any work done. And if you get anything done it's usually mediocre because there is no room for experimentation or rapid change if something doesn't work. I am just finishing a project that took 2 years. I am thoroughly convinced that the 2 developers who did most of the work could easily have done it in half the time if they didn't have to work with other teams who didn't deliver and stakeholders who couldn't make up their mind. We could just have worked through each issue but instead we had to wait for other teams and deal with their mediocre output which was incredibly frustrating and demoralizing.

It seems the bigger a company gets the more they favor predictability over excellence.

<comment><USER3> I went from a big company to a small (<30 person) company and back to a big company, and I'd put my personal productivity drain for working at a big company at close to 20%.

The biggest contributors to that 20% are (1) extra admin overhead like time consuming performance appraisals and more red tape for purchases, reimbursements, time off, etc., (2) getting blocked sitting around waiting for some person/team whose priorities are not my priorities to respond to requests for info/support, and (3) additional reporting requirements in the form of meetings and extra emails/paperwork to keep other groups/managers updated on what I/my team am/is doing.

There is also a subtle productivity drain caused by the feeling of "why should I put in an extra hour today to finish this feature when release is probably going to be blocked by [some thing I cannot control]". So, I leave the work til tomorrow, but I lose all the mental context I have for the work and need to recapture that to get back to where I was, so what would have taken an hour yesterday takes 90 minutes today.

When I was on a 4 person team in a 25 person company, it absolutely felt like every extra effort I made had an impact and was noticed and appreciated, which inspired me to make extra efforts.

Now I feel like any extra energy I have should go into making sure I don't forget to get some form to HR by some important (but arbitrary) deadline or attending the latest mandatory training session my manager or IT has required me to go to or getting legal to approve use of that open source library we need.

<comment><USER4> On the flip side, when I worked at a small company, I felt like I had waaayyy to much power over the success/failure of the business. Yes, I can make an impact, but that impact could be negative; "If I fail, so does the whole company" was a common thought I had, it kept me up at night.

At a larger company, I can fail repeatedly and _the machine_ will have my back. I find I am taking more risks at a larger company because of that.

I have some personal gripes with small companies too. Taking vacation was always an intense negotiation ("But jbob, we planned to do this work 6 months ago, if you take a vacation, the project is delayed and the client is unhappy!"). Cleanliness was a problem, irregular cleaning or I'd have to do it myself, the multinational I'm at now has the bathrooms cleaned 3 times a day and the floors and desks are cleaned every night. It was difficult to be critical of the smaller companies because I felt like I was insulting my "friends", whereas at the multinational, we guard our personal lives fiercely and have no problems criticizing business direction.

My job is not the place to do interesting things (though I am stimulated by the problems we have, even though they aren't always technical), that's what hobbies and free time are for.

<comment><USER2> "My job is not the place to do interesting things (though I am stimulated by the problems we have, even though they aren't always technical), that's what hobbies and free time are for. "

In my current job the workload is high but the work is often not very interesting or challenging. If I spend my whole day on boring stuff I am exhausted in the evening.

<comment><USER5> Me too. Kinda envy GP, I had that for 4 months before the machine decided I was broken and ejected me. Now I only have energy between ShittySmallCo jobs because of the time and mind games they play for that moolah. Livin' the dream!

<comment><USER6> What does GP mean?

<comment><USER7> Grandparent. The parent is the comment that is replied to. The comment the parent replied to is the grandparent. So in this case GP is @jbob2000.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Say the cost in time/money/resources of coordinating between any two individuals is on average _x_ dollars. Let's call this figure pair coordination cost.

The pair coordination cost between 3 individuals, ignoring overhead, is _3x_ dollars, as there are three possible pairs that need to coordinate, i.e., there are three connections in a network with three nodes.

The pair coordination cost between 4 individuals, ignoring overhead, is _6x_ dollars. At 5 people, the pair coordination cost is _10x_ dollars.

At _n_ people, the pair coordination cost is _(n(n-1) /2)x_ dollars, which is asymptotically proportional to _n²x_ as _n_ grows.[a]

When coordination costs are high, as with software development, it's not surprising that small teams outperform large teams.

Large software development teams generally cannot accomplish much -- unless they break into smaller, highly autonomous teams with well-separated responsibilities.

This applies to other high-coordination-cost endeavors, such as building a successful company from scratch.

\--

[a] This is Metcalfe's law, but for a network's pair coordination cost instead of value: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law)

<comment><USER9> It's sometimes interesting to pose a little thought experiment to somebody about what they think they could get done if they had 10 world class developers and practically unlimited resources - certainly the ability to hire or acquired almost anybody or anything within some degree of reason. What could they get done in 10 years?

Now multiply that by ~2,000. That's, roughly, the sort of resources Google has had. Kind of makes you wonder. Do we dramatically overestimate our abilities, or does the efficiency of companies like Google truly diminish as much as this little thought experiment would seem to suggest?

<comment><USER10> That thought experiment was why I joined Google after 4 years of working in startups. The communication cost overhead the grandparent mentioned is why I left Google after 5 years.

While there, I observed a lot of projects where I was literally working with a room full of world-class people - folks who had given TED talks, folks who had started major open-source projects, folks who had written the "Bible" of their particular subfield of computing - and the final design we came up with was worse than what any one person in the room, working on their own, could've come up with. Good designs tend to be both controversial and coherent: they take a position, not everyone agrees with the position, but they do it anyway because self-consistency has its own benefits that are often intangible but highly valued by users. When you design by compromise, you end up sanding off all the most innovative (= hard to communicate) parts of the design, and end up with only the bare minimum that everyone can agree on.

It's interesting that when you put a bunch of average people in a group, have them _independently_ make a prediction, and then average the predictions, you end up with a result more accurate than any one participant's prediction. When you put a bunch of _really smart_ people in a group, have them _cooperate_ to make a _design_ , and look at the design, you end up with a design that's _worse_ than any one expert's original design.

<comment><USER11> Yes, the joy of a great design is in the delicate balance it strikes between simplicity and conflicting needs. There's plenty of anguish in finding the balance even in the head of a single person.

The space of solutions to a design problem is really high dimensional and the quality of the design has many local maxima. So from that point of view it's not too surprising that averaging the features of several designs puts you at a point in the space which is not a local maximum. For a more apples to apples comparison with the averaging of predictions, it might be useful to consider predicting the value of a random variable drawn from a multimodal distribution. In this case it's highly likely that different people will focus their predictions on different modes and averaging several predictions will be worse than taking a single one in isolation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm part of a 3-man company, Glare Technologies, and we develop and market two products: a high end 3D renderer with plugins for several 3D modelling apps, and a fractal art application. We do basically everything, from the online store and website to the coding and support emails. We've been fully independent since the beginning, around 2010.

When I hear about the development world out there, especially in America, where everyone has these crazy offices and there's just money flying everywhere and it's all growth growth growth with loads of people joining all the time, I can't help but feel it's an entirely different universe.

We could probably do better with some investment and growth, but it's great to just be a small team.

<comment><USER13> I know you're prudently avoiding spamming your product here but I hope you don't mind if I link to your renderer's gallery? It looks amazing.

[https://www.indigorenderer.com/image](https://www.indigorenderer.com/image)

I'm super impressed by stuff like the accurate light refraction from the lenses and prisms.

<comment><USER14> That is amazing indeed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I run a small company of 4 people and we're currently at a $2.3M annualized run-rate. Fully remote keeps our opex very low: only about $125k excluding salaries.

I do feel we've hit a wall though, as our revenue has been ~$2M/yr for the past three years with a fairly consistent team size. We have had difficulty finding the right people who can incrementally grow revenue.

That said our primary competitor has ~80 employees and has to keeps raising more VC (we're 100% revenue funded) while their customers keep churning and showing up on our doorstep.

<comment><USER16> You mention a few things I'd love for you to unpack further if you feel willing.

[1] You mention you have your competitor's customers churning onto your doorstep, yet your revenue is flat. Is your flat revenue then related to price cuts, or do you have churn of your own that offsets those gains?

[2] You imply that you think your team size may be the reason for having hit a wall. Care to elaborate on these thoughts?

[3] What is the current team structure (how many eng, marketing, biz, etc.)? You mention finding the right people to incrementally grow revenue.

Just another entrepreneur curious to learn from your experience growing a bootstrapped company. My co-founder and I raised a round last summer, and we're currently at 3 headcount (two of us, plus one hire that started in October in an area we have zero expertise in, but is critical to our business and credibility). We discuss what the inflection points are that will drive additional headcount, and for now that's almost exclusively revenue growth.

<comment><USER15> [1] We actually closed 2017 at $1.9M but we're already at $2.3M ARR heavily due to those recent inbound. It's been a fairly consistent and frustrating ebb and flow. We'll often get a new product launched and see uptake just about the time we lose a different product.

[2] I feel like we have a pretty solid model at this point in terms the steps to create a new successful product, but I tend to do all those steps and I've definitely hit the wall on not having enough hours in the day. In the past I think our failure was trying to hire people to replicate that process across new people. It's been tough finding capable people. I very often have the crippling thought of "This is taking so long, and so much of my time, I should just do it myself". This year we're switching things up to instead try and delegate my existing responsibilities as much as possible and free up my own time for new product development instead.

[3] 3 engineering (me + 2 eng) and 1 biz/sales (co-founder). Engineering/Data side is absolutely our bottleneck. I've had a lot of difficulty (I'm a poor people manager and terrible at hiring) in finding the right people. Generally speaking I think generalists with a keen eye for the bottom-line would be the most helpful (e.g. tech entrepreneurs) but those people tend all have their own startups or golden handcuffs.

My advice would absolutely to keep things small as possible as long as possible. Identify areas you can automate to free up your time, and prioritize work based upon revenue-potential. Avoid doing stuff that engineers love (let's rewrite our stack in Go and React!) and stick to your core proficiencies. Clients rarely care what technology you use, they care about whether or not it solves their problems. If you have any control over it at this point, go for clients that have a lot of money. It's a hell of a lot easier to manage one big client paying $250k a year than it is to manage 2,500 small-business clients very upset your $10/mo product doesn't precisely meet their specific needs.

<comment><USER17> curious as to specifics of your team/what you guys are solving? My contact info is in my profile if you don't mind connecting.

<comment><USER18> I'd be interested to hear, too, if OP is comfortable sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I believe this is why Jeff Bezos has the two pizzas rule [0].

Anecdotally, to this day we get surprised reactions (mostly by investors) when they learn that our massive service [1] was built by 6 engineers. More people requires more synchronizing, which leads to more meetings and results to more time waste.

[0] [https://lifehacker.com/follow-jeff-bezos-two-pizza-rule- for-...](https://lifehacker.com/follow-jeff-bezos-two-pizza-rule-for-more- productive-1797824738)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13726224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13726224)

<comment><USER20> At my last company two pizzas would be eaten by any two people, myself included.

At my current company, they'd have to order 2 vegetarian, 2 gluten free, 2 plain cheese, 2 pepperoni and then for some reason 1 anchovy pizza that nobody would even touch. And it would take a meeting just to figure out the pizza order for the other meeting. Then another meeting to discuss who needs to go to that meeting.

<comment><USER19> You nailed it. We have so many diets within our company that there is no way we can go out together and everyone to be happy. Even ordering snack is a torture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If I may interject a small, shameless self-promotion, we recently published a paper looking at exactly this using GitHub data [0]. Lots of caveats, academic limitations abound of course, but it may be of interest to some.

[0] R Soc Open Sci. 2016 Apr; 3(4): 160007 [https://dx.doi.org/10.1098%2Frsos.160007](https://dx.doi.org/10.1098%2Frsos.160007)

<comment><USER22> tldr?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Medium teems seem worse than both large and small teams.

With non-small teams, you need formal communications channels, which adds significant overhead. With a medium team, this eats up most, if not all, of the extra productivity you get by having more people than a large team.

There are some things that you just can't get done with a small team, and then a large team is needed, but at a much higher cost.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, I agree that there is definitely a productivity dip as a team grows in size.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Actually, it's surprising how much less bigger companies with much more manpower and funds can get done. As a freelancer i've come to the point where especially enterprise projects and their various productivity limiting factos bore me to death and i avoid them regardless good pay. I simply have no joy being unable to achieve anything and surrounded and/or managed by people who seem not to care that a 100 heads team gets done 1/10 of what a 5 heads team can achieve in terms of functionality in software...

<comment><USER26> I wonder the same about pharmaceuticals too. And even in a way.. spacex did a similar thing.

Big ventures become superstitious, too many agents know a bit, nobody understands enough to move things. That's how it is in space or airplane. They live on a fragile thread, they can't afford to change things, the knowledge is in the product somehow, not in the employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have a mild critique of this: Small teams can get a lot done, and there certainly is a diminishing return per extra developer on any team, but most development isn't slow because it has too many people but rather the problem being solved has become large enough that a small group can't keep all of it in its head.

Eventually, those three programmers have built so much that even with their productivity, their entire time is spent on maintenance. Replace 3 with N programmers, especially understanding the diminishing returns.

Then take into account that if one experienced programmer leaves a small group, picking up that domain knowledge takes a significant amount of time. While having a team of 50 makes each engineer slower, it means that losing one or two isn't a company-altering event.

<comment><USER28> In my experience, "the problem being solved" can very easily be "how can we have 120 developers committing to this code base without going insane" _and that 's the only hard part_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Smaller teams have easier communication.

In computer science there is something called "Amdahl's law"[1] which shows how processing throughput slows as you add more CPU's mostly due to communications overhead. I suspect that large teams with low productivity are influenced by a similar effect. The great book, "The mythical man month" touched on this.

There are probably other human-related causes (like freeloaders and legal issues) too.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law)

</comment><comment><USER30> One thing to keep an eye on as your team grows is process. It's very typical for processes/systems to evolve as teams grow and people have new opinions and decide new pieces need to get added. It's almost never the case that process gets removed. Over time, you can build a decent slowdown into your work just as a series of small increases in process cost.

</comment><comment><USER31> It is. But you're not developing a lasting institution which survives any one individual's bus. Further, a team kept artificially small tends to produce crap due to understaffing. Large companies can also fund work on particularly interesting problems with a long-term pay off, something that many small companies don't do because they need profits now.

There are also substantial personnel issues with smaller companies: lack of HR, legal, finance. Nepotism, lack of accountability, etc all tend to be factors in smaller companies. Of course, benefits tend to be less too. (I've seen all of the above).

I _would_ work for the right startup. But most don't meaningfully compete on the "adult" factor until they are distinctly larger than a small team.

I've never been yanked by big companies as a worker[1]; the smaller the company, the more yanking I've had to deal with. I attribute this to a present and functional Legal and HR team, along with money to hire adequately competent people.

</comment><comment><USER32> Don't forget that it often comes at the cost of the team's sanity. Don't ride your people too hard.

</comment><comment><USER33> It should be flipped. The surprise isn't in the small team but how large teams destroy productivity and velocity. Some things require lots of torque, and large teams, if someone can figure out how to give even a modest productivity boost to larger teams, that is where the revolution will occur.

</comment><comment><USER34> In all my experience Im a firm believer that all you need is 7 talented people and you can accomplish anything.

<comment><USER35> Yeah, the title befuddles me. I don't find it surprising at all. Scaling is hard and the overhead grows exponentially. Another thing that small teams have going for them is that it forces focus. You can't afford to waste time having 20 people investigate something or chase one customer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Small teams can get a lot done but they can do a lot of damage too. I work in a small company now after leaving a large one. If I screwed up bad enough at the large company I'd get fired and maybe a few others would get fired too but that's about it. Screw up at a small company and it's lights out for the whole show. They key, big or small, is managing what you have to meet your goals. You can muddle your way through with brilliant engineers and mediocre management or mediocre engineers and brilliant management but to really make things sing you need brilliant managers and brilliant engineers.

</comment><comment><USER37> Hot startups in Silicon Valleys should take notice. You know who hired hundreds to thousands of engineers in a year or two, when there were really not that many significant engineering challenges. Productivity and morale dropped after certain threshold. Chaos and unhealthy dose of politics ensued. Yeah, really fun stuff.

If we look back, Google made really good decisions in its early days. Founder's bill is a brilliant invention, thanks to Eric Schmidt

<comment><USER38> What is founder's bill?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Yes, that's why small startups can be disruptive.

But ... big companies have figured this out too, so the good days may be numbered.

<comment><USER40> Not sure what you are alluding to, but I'm not sure pseudo-startups within a larger corporation have proven to be successful. Are there any examples?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Big teams gives the inexperienced product person an impression that more features can be done which can lead to design changes when things go jive, and you get stuck more and more

</comment><comment><USER42> I think the problem with bigger groups is the policies that formalize processes. They're all mental baggage and inefficiency.

</comment><comment><USER43> Aside, I just read that guy's LinkedIn:

"ClassDojo is one of the fastest growing education technology companies of all time, used and loved by 35 million+ teachers, parents and students in over 90% of US schools"

90% of US schools? Why aren't they a $10b company?

<comment><USER44> > 90% of US schools? Why aren't they a $10b company?

From looking at Class dojo,, I would guess because supporting large number of users is a _cost_ ; now, in a perfect company, there's a monetization strategy that creates value from that user base, but ClassDojo's user base is neither ad-friendly nor likely to pay out-of-pocket.

They _implicitly_ (from the "always free for teachers" line) are open to trying to get students, parents, or "school leaders" to pay, but any of those might prevent teachers from using it (or even being allowed to) even if it was free for the teacher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> It's Surprising How Little Big Teams Can Get Done

<comment><USER46> That could almost be a corollary to Brooke's Law[0] (aka the mythical man month).

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law)</comment></comment>


Management "genius" opens food bank for underpaid employees - <AUTHOR> http://www.pghcitypaper.com/Blogh/archives/2012/12/11/upmc-opens-food-bank-for-struggling-employees-misses-point-completely

<comment><AUTHOR> While I have worked at several companies where management was completely out of touch with their employees, this one takes the cake! And surprisingly enough, in the healthcare industry!</comment>


Ask HN: Can CS background be helpful in learning a foreign language? - <AUTHOR> I recently started learning Japanese and came to the the idea that learning a foreign language and learning computer programming would be pretty different but with certain points overlaps. Do you find any similarities between learning new programming language and a foreign language? <comment><USER2> There are some similarities. The most obvious mapping is parser theory. For example, Chomsky - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky#Transformational-...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky#Transformational- generative_grammar) .

There are also times when I feel like I'm using a peephole optimizer, as I change certain constructs in English to a foreign language.

Bear in mind that expertise in other fields may also transfer into learning a new language. For example, my English classes taught some linguistics (tenses, prepositions, etc. as well as the Latin and Greek origins of some words) and that can help learn related foreign languages.</comment>


2011: The year your mobile phone becomes your wallet - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2011/01/19/technology/mobile_payments/index.htm <comment><USER2> How secure is this? Waving a device near something to complete a money transaction seems too easy.

At Defcon 18, there was a presentation on how to access RFID from long range (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEBrslz0Xf4>). It makes me nervous that other people can also do this stuff.

There are already cards that do NFC, such as MBTA (public transportation) Charlie cards and American Express credit cards. However once NFC becomes even more common, will this invite the bad kind of hackers to bump up their efforts to steal your money?

So, how secure is this?

<comment><USER3> a phone can show you a "confirm this payment" prompt though, which i imagine puts it a step above paypass/oyster card type pieces of plastic.

<comment><USER2> A phone can also have a virus or trojan horse app on it. Even easier to take your money if you can get access directly on the phone. Forget radio waves, just get the user to install an app on there that will transfer funds over.

I think all of the smart phone operating systems have had a trojan horse app on them at some point. Most of them probably just did simple things before like a backdoor, making phone calls or stealing info. If your phone also controls your money...

<comment><USER4> Considering that traditional credit card security is based on just knowledge of simple shared secret - (card number, name, expiry date, cvv2) 4-tuple, and considering this secret is shared with everyone you do business with, this is still certainly more secure.

Also, trojans still have to compromise the OS security. It's not the same deal as with non-secure information (like spyware games accessing the contacts list, just because users don't care about app permissions) - the certificate store will be certainly guarded way more carefully.

<comment><USER2> With more users 'jailbreaking' or 'rooting' their phones, it's not as 'secure' as before. The point of doing those things is to break the phone's security and allow you to do more things. What if the creator decided to put in a little extra code.. or it introduced more vulnerabilities..

* I'm not trying to make you guys paranoid. Just wondering about the possibilities and playing devil advocate.

<comment><USER4> Well, not exactly, "jailbreaking" is about user gaining access to a phone, not applications. I don't know the details (I don't own iPhone or Android device, and N900 comes with root access almost out-of-box), but I believe pure jailbreaking shouldn't hurt OS security mechanisms too much. I may be wrong, though.

However, you have a point: classic "dancing bunnies" problem[1] is certainly out there. Promise average user nice things, ask him to do some cryptic actions, and he'll happily follow your instructions without really understanding any consequences.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_bunnies>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For the past five years, I have been paying parking in my city with my mobile phone using a simple SMS without any transaction fee. A small city of 20000 inhabitants lost in the former East Germany.

I suppose 2011 is more the year where you will pay $5 for your Latte with your mobile phone on the condition to have an account with an organization charging you a percentage when loading your account, plus a small transaction fee and doing the same to the shop using this system.

I am sarcastic, maybe the effect of going through a PCI DSS compliance extortion scheme yesterday. Out of topic technical bonus point, the SSL ciphers allowed for your server to be "compliant": !EXPORT:!eNULL:!MEDIUM:!LOW:TLSv1:SSLv3.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's never going to be as entertaining as when your wallet becomes your mobile phone:

<http://www.merlinmann.com/phoneguy/>

</comment><comment><USER7> 2011 may be a big year for changes in the way we bank, with BankSimple releasing and this technology finally making its way to the US.

It's no secret that the banking industry is screwed up. It will be interesting to follow how this industry changes as new startups and technologies are applied to traditional banking models. Hopefully somehow I end up with more money in the process :)

</comment><comment><USER8> My understanding of mobile phone security is that it's somewhere between abysmal and non-existent.

</comment><comment><USER9> Almost 10 years ago: <http://press.nokia.com/PR/200109/834842_5.html>

Is 2011 also the year of Linux on desktop?

<comment><USER10> Soon there will be more smart phones than desktops, and most of those run Linux, so the desktop has become irrelevant :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The thing is how secure is any of our payment methods today? Can't credit cards be replicated as well?

<comment><USER12> Yeah, but the attacker needs access to the magnetic sensor in order to install a ripping device. Physical security prevents it in most cases. In the case of a phone, how could you prevent playback attacks? Say I walk up to a Coke machine and authorize a $1.00 payment, and someone nearby is able to capture that protocol stream. All they'd have to do is play it back to the Coke machine after I leave, and at that point they are welcome to unlimited corn syrup swill. I'm no cryptographer, but I can't think of any way to mitigate it. Something like SecurID, whereby you are given a new token code every minute, might work, but the intervals for new codes would have to be tighter, unless you plan to stand around and monitor everyone else's purchases for the entire interval. This is one for the _really smart_ guys to figure out, and I expect that someday, it will become reality. Can't wait.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Unfortunately we'll still have to carry our wallets until our ID is on our phone as well.

</comment><comment><USER14> No thank you.

</comment><comment><USER15> I use Venmo - I love Venmo - I can't wait for it to become bigger.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use as your home server? - <AUTHOR> I've gotten into the habit of writing lots of little web apps for myself. I have one which is a little personal finance software. Another which is a fulfillment dashboard for my side-business selling notebooks. And a pi-hole ad blocker. And bitwarden. The list goes on.
I'm hesitant to put some of this software, such as my finance software, on a VPS, because it has my bank account credentials to download data. I also haven't had much luck with my raspberry pi: it often loses ethernet connectivity, or the filesystem goes into "read-only" mode, and it's incredibly slow.
Years ago I used to just keep an unused computer running, sitting under my desk. But today, now that I'm paying for my own rent and electricity, I don't have any unused hardware lying around, and if possible I'd like something a little less power-hungry.
What do you all use? Old laptops or desktops? Raspberry pi alternatives (preferably something with storage built-in?) Do you put your projects on VPS boxes? What would be inexpensive and easy for me to get up and running with shell access? <comment><USER2> I'm surprised you've been having trouble with Raspberry Pi. I have a RPi2 running OpenHAB for some home automation stuff (with a Z-Wave USB stick), and a few other things on it, and it's been running rock-solid for a good two years so far with no issues. I keep meaning to install Pi-Hole on it, but haven't gotten around to it.

I have a RPi3 with WiFi connected to my very-old-school door buzzer so I can let people into my building without going to the door, and it also have it set up so it can be opened remotely via SMS code for guests.

I have another RPi3 up in my bedroom, connected to an old set of powered speakers, running Shairport (an Airplay server) and Roc (an efficient network audio streamer with PulseAudio support), and Bluetooth so I can play music from my laptop or phone, as well as have better audio if I'm in bed watching a movie or TV on my laptop.

I also have an old ReadyNAS NV+ for storage, that I'll occasionally run some lightweight things on (like a torrent or USENET NZB client), but it's mainly just for storage (4x 4TB in RAID5).

I've been debating building my own NAS[0], which might let me reduce my footprint to just one machine, but haven't really been able to justify the effort since the current setup works really well.

[0] [https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/02/19/4x-sata-hat- nanopi-n...](https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/02/19/4x-sata-hat-nanopi- neo-m4-nas/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hm, so after looking at it, I think my raspberry Pis are version 1 - I got them more than 5 years ago! I just don't know how to ascertain how much of the issues are due to using older hardware versus limitations of, for example, using SD as the primary storage.

<comment><USER2> Hard to say, of course. It _is_ important to buy a good quality SD card; there's definitely flakiness to be expected if you don't. The other thing is a high-quality power supply that actually provides the current the Pi needs. If you don't, that can cause all manner of problems as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> An Mac Mini works perfectly for your use case, either older or newer. It has a really small profile, and runs Ubuntu well, and runs headless super quiet. You could pickup a pretty decent one for a few hundred bucks and attach an external USB drive and you'd be set for your use case.

</comment><comment><USER4> A Mac Mini that I picked up used for super cheap. My use case is different from yours though since I'm using mine primarily as a media server.

</comment><comment><USER5> an old thinkpad. cheap, reliable and well supported across the board, i know many people using them for such purposes</comment>


Facebook charm offensive just turns into being offensive - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/28/facebook-charm-offensive-just-turns-into-being-offensive.html <comment><USER2> > The visibly uncomfortable Zuckerberg continued his trip

And there is your answer on why the charm offensive is just an offensive - Zuckerberg is as charming as a dead slug. One might think that he has taken some CEO coaching classes to come across as more understanding and convincing but it seems unlikely. Most of his appearances in front of lawmakers are just painful to watch.

<comment><USER3> I think the biggest reason Zuck is so lifeless is that his honest opinions are extremely polarizing. When your market segment is "everyone on the planet", anything you do other than the most bland, boring things, will alienate some part of your potential user base. Combine that with Zuck's general "Users are pretty fucking dumb" attitude early on, and I bet not only are his real opinions polarizing, they're also probably pretty damn misanthropic. Hard to sell a product to "everyone" when you come out as generally anti-"everyone".

If there is still even a "real" Zuck left under there, I bet he's completely unlike what we see in the public eye. Not exactly a huge revelation, but people forget sometimes the dynamics at play when Zuck decides to say something, and what FB stock will do as a result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Once the session had begun and much to everyone's bemusement, it quickly dawned on viewers that the format of the Q&A session was very unorthodox. Lawmakers went round in turns asking questions directed at Zuckerberg and it was only after a full 75 minutes of one-sided questioning that Zuckerberg had the opportunity to respond, leaving his total response time to fifteen minutes"

And they wonder why people voted for Brexit.</comment>


Why, mathematically, startups make more sense than ever today  - <AUTHOR> http://chrisyeh.blogspot.com/2013/06/why-mathematically-startups-make-more.html

<comment><USER2> > Thus lower startup costs have a double impact. First, they lower the price > of the option, making them more attractive. Second, the crowded startup > market that results is more volatile, increasing the value of the option.

I see what the author is going for but this seems like a pretty weak argument. But this line:

> Second, the crowded startup market that results is more volatile, increasing > the value of the option.

doesn't seem to hold. More startups doesn't necessarily increase the volatility at all. Its entirely possible to have more start ups and less volatility. Whether or not that's true I'm not sure.

Furthermore, even if you subscribe to the market being more volatile, Black scholes isn't interested in the volatility for the market, but just for the individual stock/company. Which isn't guarenteed to go up at all either:)

And then there is this "cover my ass" tidbit...

> According to Black-Scholes, all other things being equal, increasing > volatility increases the price of the option.

This is basically saying, there are many factors that affect the outcome of a startup, I'm only going to chose one of them and assume the others stay the same. Furthermore I"m going to assume that the one variable I'm going to chance will move in a direction that supports my claim and not in any other direction.

This claim strikes me as being a bit dubious.

I do think this is an interesting thought experiment though:)

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, there are a lot of unstated premises here.

Volatility is important to option valuation but the mechanics of real option valuation (what we are talking about) are materially different from black/scholes. In fact, black scholes is more descriptive of option trading than predictive of option valuation. Since there needs to be an active market for this to be relevant, I wouldn't use it for thinking about startups.

That said, these highfalutin financial concepts are definitely applicable to startups, but really the question is "what do you think the terminal value of your startup is?"

If you think you have a shot at owning a big chunk of a billion dollar company, the value of that shot is:

(Probability of success) * (Terminal value)

If the undertaking has a 1% chance of being worth 1,000,000,000 and 99% chance of being worth nothing, then the whole opportunity is worth about ten million dollars.

So, yeah. Volatility doesn't matter all that much. Also if you are doing a Startup because of a black scholes model you are probably insane.

</comment><comment><USER4> This argument is flawed. Yes startups have payoff akin to out of the money options, but that is obvious. However, the number of other startups would not affect the volatility. If anything it would be analogous to increasing the interest rate, since it increases the opportunity cost or cost of capital of investing in one particular startup vs other ones and decrease the value of the call option marginally. What would be analogous to "high vol" would be the speed of the startup to iterate and get to a real business model.</comment>


More Money for Better Open-Source Software - <AUTHOR> http://marijnhaverbeke.nl/blog/sustainable-maintenance.html <comment><USER3> It is not to hard to make living off open source for a solo or very small team of developers. There are many revenue models around open source and they have been documented elsewhere. They include providing services like hosting (Wordpress.com) to support (RedHat), plugins (SugarCRM) and "Enterprise" editions (GitLab)

But each of the approaches requires that you get serious traction.

The key here is to stay independent of revenue for the longest time as you can. This is only possible if you are willing to work as a solo developer, working part-time till you hit certain traction numbers.

Open source is a hard and long game as a business. On the plus side, it is very satisfying and if you are able to sustain. There are many domains where open source is already winning big (OS, infrastructure, databases, web) and as new areas "fall" to open source, the risk on the closed-source side will also keep on increasing.

<comment><USER4> > But each of the approaches requires that you get serious traction.

Which is part of what makes proprietary software so much easier: you don't _have_ to have "serious traction". You could even do something like bingo cards and make some money at it, growing the business a bit at a time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, long story short, if you want people to pay you, they need incentive to do so. And unfortunately, the MIT license provides no incentive to do so.

Those with the cash to spare and the desire to do so will donate, just as they always have. Those without either, will not donate, just as _they_ always have.

It reads like a plee to a user's conscience, but lacks any teeth to have any more effect than any other permissively licensed donationware.

Best of luck, though.

<comment><USER6> _if you want people to pay you, they need incentive to do so. And unfortunately, the MIT license provides no incentive to do so._

Software is free. Experience is what counts.

You can make money by writing broken software then charging for fixes. MongoDB has their bananas valuation because they released hype-driven broken software, got it deployed globally, then everybody realized "this doesn't work! we need support!"

If your software is free and works flawlessly, average users are less inclined to pay for it. If users have money riding on top of your software, they will happily pay for commercial guarantees and support.

These days you have to release everything as open source, hope it gets wildly adopted, start getting it deployed bottom-up in large organizations, then offer large organizations support and SLAs on the software they bought.

(This is for _software_ though. The other approach is obviously just make everything as-a-Service so everybody is paying based on their usage.)

<comment><USER7> This doesn't seem to work very well for non-business-critical software.

<comment><USER6> Yes, that is a limitation. Nobody is ever going to pay millions of dollars for _vim_. But for database software? Totes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is already a solved problem. It's the author's Option 3, but without the silly guilt and donation pieces.

Dual license your thing so that it can be used commercially for a specified monthly fee, with a mechanism for paying that fee (and that fee being actually spelled out rather than handwaved at as in the article). You've written useful software. Charge for it.

Asking for donations physically can't work, as the commercial organizations you'd want to donate often don't have the legal ability to do so. They can buy things. They can't give money away.

Again, it's solved. The author just seems to feel bad about the solution, so he's trying to implement it while apologizing for every step. Seems a bit silly.

<comment><USER9> > They can buy things. They can't give money away.

Can someone explain this to me? Many corporations support the Red Cross, the American Cancer Society, youth basketball clubs, etc. in various ways.

Why is contributing to the advancement of science and public goods any different? It seems like that should be _easier_ to justify if certain technology is critical to your business model.

<comment><USER10> That money is usually budgeted for charity, and probably can only go to "legal" charities (at least in the US there are tax benefits to this)

It is probably much harder to compete for a piece of that budget, and also there are a lot of hoops to jump through to become a "legal" charity (in the US, I don't know about other places). Since companies are already used to purchasing software, that is probably a much simpler way to go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Option 4: sell support contracts. As @jasonkester mentioned, it's a lot easier for many companies to buy something than it is for them to donate. Red Hat became a billion dollar company doing this.

Support contracts put a lot of obligation on you, so should be priced accordingly (aka high). Combine it with #3 to give an out to those who can't afford and/or don't want the support contract.

<comment><USER12> I've been doing this for years with CodeMirror, but it has been A) a lot of bureaucracy to start and renew such contracts, and B) still not really a big enough source of income to cover the maintenance work.

<comment><USER11> Sure, but you've only been selling them to people who actually need the support. The key is to also sell them to companies who _don 't_ need the support. In other words, include your imprecations against free-loaders.

And substantially raise your rates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One thing I'd recommend: have a way to invoice companies monthly who have agreed to pay you monthly.

For us: No invoice? No payment. (I'm not arguing whether that should or should not be a fact; I'm just stating that it is a fact for us and I doubt we're alone.)

<comment><USER14> Could you say something about why you require invoices?

Would you pay extra to be able to get invoices from organisations you want to donate to?

I'm sensing an invoices as a service opportunity here :)

<comment><USER7> Every non-trivial business will have accounting controls such that they won't pay out anything other than payroll without an invoice. And possibly a purchase order as well. Not doing this leaves you open to internal fraud.

(There's still a risk of external fraud, some big companies will pay invoices without checking ...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The economic motivations that drive FOSS development haven't really been done justice in the peer-reviewed literature on the subject. We used to say "Money, Glory, and Fun" were the reasons, and to some extent that was and remains true. However, I think there's always been quite a lot more to it. After the collapse of the dot-com bubble, there were a LOT of developers, particularly junior level developers, who couldn't find the kind of work they wanted and hoped to find after college, and committing to Open Source projects was a great way to get a kind of apprenticeship with some of the best development teams in the world. Participating in those efforts exposed new developers to new ideas, new ways of building software with distributed development teams, and more often than not exposure to world-class software. The monetary value of that sort of software engineering apprenticeship is hard to gauge, as you typically can't get its equivalent in a corporate internship, and many university CS programs rightly prioritize computer science over software engineering skills.

</comment><comment><USER16> Crowdfunding open-source projects can work and has worked to get them going, but the "big bang" model of crowdfunding -- a single large payment at the beginning -- has two problems. First, you have to persuade people of the usefulness of your product before they actually have a chance to try it out. This is sometimes possible, but often difficult. Secondly, as anyone in the software business knows, most of the cost of a mature software product is in the maintenance, which can stretch on for years, not the initial development.

For these reasons I think a different approach to crowdfunding is needed: one that is finer-grained, collecting smaller amounts of money for smaller units of work, and that is designed to work on an ongoing basis.

The reason I think this could work is that the developers of a successful open-source product actually do have something to sell: their time. There are always bugs to fix and new features to implement, and crowdfunding contributions can be a way for users to vote on what they want done next.

</comment><comment><USER17> I am really, really struggling to understand how someone can make a voluntary and conscious decision to release software for free, under a license that permits unlimited redistribution, and then call the people who follow the terms of the license they explicitly chose "freeloaders."

<comment><USER18> Isn't "freeloading" mostly defined by using resources that you aren't required to compensate someone for? Else it would just be called stealing.

<comment><USER17> What resources are they using, though? Marginal cost of copying the code is close enough to zero to practically be zero. The project consumes the same amount of resources regardless of whether or not any one user decides to use the software. In other words, where's the "load" in freeload when someone uses open source software under the terms of its license?

<comment><USER19> Someone using the "cost of copying the code" argument has nothing worthwhile to say, as they haven't actually thought about what goes into the code. Here's a hint: The GitHub fairy didn't magically add that code to the repo.

<comment><USER17> Trying to guilt-trip people into paying your absolute costs after you've already given them everything for free is a losing strategy. You either need to charge for complements yourself (support, dual licensing, something) or you need to get money-hatted by someone else who can do those things, like Red Hat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I like the idea of running crowd funding campaigns to release software as open source. This could be done for certain milestones (like feature X or platform Y) in a longer running or bigger project. I would even think it's fair if the developer included a maintenance cost into the amount he wants to gather before releasing the software.

It's clear to users what they are giving money for. Also the incentive is bigger to contribute because before the amount is reached, the code isn't released. And for the developer, it's more predictable than donations.

Of course, this still wouldn't work so well for maintenance heavy projects that don't gain a lot of features, like security sensitive infrastructure like openssl.

<comment><USER21> Krita does this quite well.

<comment><USER20> Indeed: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-free- paint-...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-free-paint-app- lets-make-it-faster-than-phot/description)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think it might be an interesting approach to run a kickstarter-style campaign for each major software release, and once the goal is reached, release the software with a normal open source license. Nothing would stop other developers from forking the software, but if the author was providing enough value, I believe people would contribute.

<comment><USER21> Example: Krita [https://krita.org/item/weve-done- it/](https://krita.org/item/weve-done-it/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have one particular open source project that I started back in college that's actually paid off a little bit over the years as it's become more mature. In total, I've probably received ~$20k between custom development and commercial licenses (it's AGPL, so option #2 in the article). However, given the amount of time I've put into it, it still pays less than my current job, and probably even most of the jobs I had in college.

Most of my other open source work gets released as MIT and I have zero expectation of getting any _direct_ money from it. (Although, my open source work has undoubtedly helped me get my current and most of my recent jobs, so there is a fair argument that it's earning me money _indirectly_.)

</comment><comment><USER24> I have a kickstarter project that's surpassed it's funding goal to support the development of a not-yet-existing open source project. Im 99% sure it succeeded because I'm already entrenched in the community it is targeted at, which doesn't help the diversity angle. It is encouraging for me because it allows me to dedicate myself exclusively to open source for the remainder of the year.

I wont link to the campaign but the repo is here: [https://github.com/enjalot/building- blocks](https://github.com/enjalot/building-blocks)

</comment><comment><USER25> The best way to monetize open source it to sell optional plugins and services around your core open source product. This isn't always possible though - <USER2> depends heavily on what your project does and how it's designed.

Generally; open source platforms, frameworks and operating systems are easy to monetize because they are at the base of the software stack - They own the environment in which people build apps.

Libraries and modules, on the other hand, are difficult to monetize because they are only small parts of an environment over which they have no control.

</comment><comment><USER26> _Fitting copyable things into the capitalist market economy is something of an unsolved problem._

No it's not, it's the same problem that market economies have been dealing with since the invention of the printing press... the solution was a legal and financial concept known as "copyright".

I remember the battle in the 90s. Slashdot vs. the MPAA/RIAA. The "good guys" who were for "freedom of information" and the "bad guys" who wanted to limit what we could do with our technology and make it illegal to circumvent copyright protections...

...and then the "good guys" won! DVD John, Napster... information must be free!

It's quite clear that anti-circumvention laws were not the best approach (they should have put those resources in to things like SoundExchange much earlier), these negative aspects of copyright have unfortunately dominated the conversation since.

Fast forward a decade, and what do we have... well, we're starting to see what happens when you get rid of treating intellectual property as something that can exist as something to be bought and sold in a market economy.

It's not like the whole concept of private property or ownership went away. For the people who own stocks in Google, Apple, Facebook and the other billion dollar companies who deal in distributing and organizing digital media, they've made plenty of money.

Open-source software is funded by corporate coffers. The people who make the software don't get to own anything while the corporations get to use these freely created tools to increase their share values. The vast majority of open-source developers are on corporate payrolls.

Not only are developers giving away their intellectual property, but so are the majority of individuals who the create digital media that drives the eyeballs to the advertisements. The "creative commons", where everyone freely distributes their creations in exchange for comments and clicks...

It is quite clear that digital media does have value. If Google had nothing to index, or if Facebook had nothing to share, there would be no one using these services, and therefor no one to sell any advertisements to.

Yet we have no way to price how much this media is worth. It never enters a marketplace. It is never bought and sold. I'm not sure what kind of creative accounting they have at places like Twitter but I'm sure they don't have a good idea of their actual business inputs and outputs. There's a giant air-gap between users creating content and advertisers buying space next to it.

Because of the fundamental economics of refusing to considering digital media as intellectual property in a market economy, the only profit model is to make the services free and then degrade the products through adding noise to the channel. Now product designers have to actively fight with their organizations profit structures. The result? Crappy and bloated products with crappy content, a plague that has been sweeping web publishing that seems to be increasing by the day if the tech blogosphere is used as a thermometer.

Advertisements do not pay for content. They pay for hosting, distribution and employee salaries. They pay to keep the lights on in Mountain View.

All sorts of hair-brained schemes are dreamt up to try and deal with it, but none actually treat digital media as property. Kickstarter is about the project. The people who support a project are not investors. They don't get equity or ownership, they get t-shirts. Patreon is about the artist. The people who support the artists don't get equity or ownership, just a "worthless" digital media file. Artists are told to sell merchandise and tickets and in-home performances and anything and everything under the sun other than what they are best at making, an absurdity that defines the early 21st century media landscape, as if somehow we can fix this problem if we just convince enough people that they need a closet filled with hundreds of "I supported an artist" t-shirts.

The only place where intellectual property is still honored is with the old giants of the 20th century, the book, music and moving pictures industries. These industries were built on top of the foundations of copyright. Artists create, own, and put their property on an actual marketplace. Companies who own IP and treat it as such on their books have a clearly defined view of their "content creation" accounts as being profit-makers. Speculative investment through publishers creates an incentive structure that aligns itself with the rest of our market economy.

The digital music industry has already ceded the battle to IT. When Sony negotiated with Spotify to put their back-catalog on this new service, they had the presence of mind to know that what really mattered was equity in Spotify. Their recordings and publishing rights were "worthless". A rival service named Tidal offered it's artists ownership in the corporation as opposed to contracts related to their IP for the same reason. Seemingly out of nowhere we're seeing a drastic increase in vinyl records, but I would argue this is less a hipster trend than a return to an economics model where the music itself is given value.

What I find interesting and ironic is that an industry built on information has not only conceded that information is worthless but celebrates this fact. Then we dream up things like "basic income" in order to create a world where the 99% who don't own anything can survive. We're all well aware of the relationship that labor has to capital. We're all well aware of the economic reality of scarce physical resources. In the real world, not everyone can own something. However, anyone has the ability to create intellectual property out of thin air and benefit from owning it like any other capital.

Somehow we blindly believe that things like basic income seem easier to implement on a societal level than accounting for ownership of digital media. We'd rather throw private property out the window then deal with it's complexities. Haven't we been here before?

\---

I'd love some feedback on this stuff and I know some of these ideas are half- baked, but everywhere I look I'm seeing the same root issue... we've decided to give up on hundreds of years of treating intellectual creations as property that can be bought and sold in a marketplace, and doing so we've made it very hard for people who make digital media, be it a software library or a song, to survive in a world built on top of private physical property.

<comment><USER27> It is amusing that you are getting down voted on a forum supposedly populated by start-ups and entrepreneurs.</comment></comment>


Why Elephants Don't Explode: How Nature Solves Bigness - <AUTHOR> http://noticing.co/on-size-and-metabolism/ <comment><USER2> This reminds me of an old (1928) piece titled "On Being The Right Size" by JBS Haldane [0], which lightly touches on many different concerns related to sizing:

> Of course tall land animals have other difficulties. They have to pump their > blood to greater heights than a man, and, therefore, require a larger blood > pressure and tougher blood-vessels. A great many men die from burst > arteries, greater for an elephant or a giraffe.

[https://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right- size.html](https://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm confused by the slider task. The explanation simply says that voles eat much more than elephants _per unit of body mass_ , but the sliders suggest that voles literally eat more food per day than elephants.

Are the grass pictures supposed to be interpreted relative to the size of the animals next to them?

<comment><USER4> Yes, the article seems to be mostly a roundabout restatement of Kleiber's Law [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber%27s_law)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > 402

> Plot twist!

> Payment required...

> This embedded plot has reached the maximum allowable views given the owner's > current subscription.

> Please visit the subscriptions page to learn more about upgrading.

Don't see many 402s!

Also, D3 is awesome. Don't pay to show a graph, either draw it in any visualization tool and take a screenshot for the article, or use locally hosted D3.

</comment><comment><USER6> Here's another fun read on why sizes matter as it relates to monster movies

[http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/2/21701757/](http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/2/21701757/)

<comment><USER7> This is a great link -- thanks for posting!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I visited San Diego Zoo a few months ago. In SDZ's Safari park, they host one of the biggest elephant park in North America. I remember the tour guide mentioned Elephants are so huge that if you lay down for more than 4 hours, there are pretty high chance they won't stand up and eventually leading to death due to the size of their body.

<comment><USER9> "Elephants in zoos sleep for four to six hours a day, but in their natural surroundings the elephants rested for only two hours, mainly at night." [1]

[1] [http://www.bbc.com/news/science- environment-39126993](http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39126993)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article is interesting, but all it talks about is why big animals have a lower metabolic rate than small ones. I wish it would have also addressed the question of why small animals have a higher metabolic rate than big ones. If elephants can get away with having such a low metabolic rate, why can't voles?

<comment><USER11> That's what the article is all about. It's temperature management. Smaller warm-blooded animals have less mass to generate heat and higher surface area to volume ratio to dissipate it faster. They need a much higher metabolic rate to maintain body temperature, especially when the environment is very cold. They would freeze if they had the same rate as the elephant.

Large warm-blooded animals have more mass generating more heat and less surface area to dissipate it. They need a much lower rate or they would overheat. Not to mention the objectively huge amount of food and air circulation that would be required to maintain that rate.

If either animal had the other's metabolic rate, it would be dead within hours, if not minutes.

<comment><USER10> Couldn't smaller animals just evolve better insulation instead? Surely it would be easier to survive if they didn't have to eat so much.

<comment><USER12> Evolution doesn't pick the optimal solution, it just weeds out the solutions ones that aren't good enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I thought this would be about allometric scaling of organs. But if we're on the topic of metabolism, I wonder what the rate of cancer is for shrews vs. elephants, once the metabolism and lifespan are somehow accounted for.

<comment><USER14> What does metabolism have to do with cancer?

<comment><USER15> Quite possibly, a lot:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/magazine/warburg- effect-a...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/magazine/warburg-effect-an- old-idea-revived-starve-cancer-to-death.html)

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That was hard to read. Would have been much easier if they just got to the point.

</comment><comment><USER17> Geoffrey West's book Scale gets into this -- good read.

[https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation- Sustainabi...](https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation- Sustainability-Organisms/dp/1594205582/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Also, at the cell level, large animals should have a better self-protecting mechanism against cancer, because more cells means a higher probability of cell-divisions going awry.

</comment><comment><USER19> The difference in metabolic rates between large and small animals is directly linked to why large animals typically have longer lifespans the smaller ones.

</comment><comment><USER10> Since the embedded plot isn't showing up, you can see it at [https://plot.ly/~aatish/115/an-ounce-of-a-smaller- creature-g...](https://plot.ly/~aatish/115/an-ounce-of-a-smaller-creature- gulps-more-air-than-an-ounce-of-a-bigger-creature/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Knut Schmidt-Nielsen wrote a couple of books on this topic. Googling Bonner and Schmidt-Nielsen together seems to bring up some surveys of the literature.

</comment><comment><USER21> Volume vs area, basically.</comment>


Need More Self-Control? Try a Simple Ritual - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/need-more-self-control-try-a-simple-ritual/ <comment><USER2> Let's look at the first experiment.

[http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/Enacting%20Ri...](http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/Enacting%20Rituals%20to%20Improve%20Self- Control_a1680de9-d84b-44c6-8db0-01d05f77c2c3.pdf)

Voluntary enrollment, knowing in advance that they have to do this stupid ritual. ~10% dropped out, and another ~20% didn't fill out their food diaries properly. That's selecting for discipline.

Relied on self-reported food diaries ie opening room for placebo effect and/or guilt-motivated lying.

Only lasted 5 days. Pretty much every dietary intervention works for short periods of time.

Relies on calorie-counting, which is wildly inaccurate.

Finally:

> Despite the effectiveness of rituals, participants tended to think the > ritual was not very helpful and reported being unlikely to continue it.

I think it's pretty plausible that rituals can have useful effects on behavior, but I don't think experiments like this tell us anything about it, especially once you add in the effects of publication bias etc.

Comes back to [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.392...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.392.6447&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

> Null hypothesis testing of correlational predictions from weak substantive > theories in soft psychology is subject to the influence of ten obfuscating > factors whose effects are usually (1) sizeable, (2) opposed, (3) variable, > and (4) unknown. The net epistemic effect of these ten obfuscating > influences is that the usual research literature review is well-nigh > uninterpretable.

<comment><USER3> > Relies on calorie-counting, which is wildly inaccurate.

Some sources on this? (not that I doubt you, it's just that you probably have better references than a quick search might bring up)

Also, if it's inaccurate, what's the alternative?

<comment><USER2> People are really bad at estimating portion sizes - [https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article- abstract/35/4/727/4812...](https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article- abstract/35/4/727/4812565)

Calories in food vary depending on how it is prepared - [https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/5283945/Carmody_...](https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/5283945/Carmody_Wrangham_JHE.pdf?sequence=2&origin=publication_detail)

Calories reported on food labels are often incorrect, because we digest some foods poorly and (because food companies are allowed to use multiple methods and report whichever result suits them best) - [http://www2.centralcatholichs.com/copied%20articles%20to%20r...](http://www2.centralcatholichs.com/copied%20articles%20to%20review/physiology/calorie%20science%20SA%20sep%2013.pdf)

Individual calorie absorption varies between people depending on gut biome - [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Steven_Heymsfield/publi...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Steven_Heymsfield/publication/51818090_Individual_differences_in_apparent_energy_digestibility_are_larger_than_generally_recognized/links/0c96053065a203c368000000/Individual- differences-in-apparent-energy-digestibility-are-larger-than-generally- recognized.pdf)

> Also, if it's inaccurate, what's the alternative?

Depends on what you're doing with it. For dieting, counting calories is probably better than not counting calories [citation needed].

For a non-preregistered non-blinded experiment testing an intervention with small effect sizes on a measure where people are known to be bad at self- reporting, well, you're already screwed. There are more direct methods of measurement (eg [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK233774/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK233774/)) but they are costly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > So, we reasoned, when we see ourselves engaging in a ritual, we code that > behavior as a sign that we are people with self-control. And thanks to that > self-control, we choose the apple (or carrot) over the chocolate and thus > reduce our caloric intake.

This is interesting. If I'm understanding the article, the path to _applying_ self-control is to first start _viewing_ ourselves as someone who has self- control. The ritual is merely a trigger to remind ourselves of the _identity_ we've chosen, and then subconsciously we tend to line up our actions with how we view ourselves.

<comment><USER5> Or maybe it just makes you more aware that you're about to eat something, and instead of mindlessly swallowing that snack you engage the decision-making part of the brain, which leads to actually making the eating a decision, rather than an impulse.

<comment><USER6> That seems to be part of it since the random gestures group also exhibited better self control than the control "no requirements" group. But the group with an established ritual exhibited even more self control indicating that having a fixed ritual adds something beyond what can be achieved through actions that are random.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In a Philosophize This! podcast on Kant I learned that he was extremely consistent in his routines. Every day he would walk at the same time, eat at the same time, etc. Not exactly the same as rituals, but it finally got me to consider that perhaps consistent routines every day would help me essentially slip into other creative, productive habits via auto-pilot.

<comment><USER8> If you approach life as a physical system, regular rhythm is the most efficient way to save energy and avoid wearing. Predictable flow is probably very nice on your mind, body and ultimately everything else. And it seems biology tuned us to a lot of external rhythms too. Sun, seasons. I think using every period the best : day to move and work, night to sleep. It seems stupid but I think you end up leveraging a lot of builtins subsystems in you.

<comment><USER9> As a counterpoint, biological systems grow stronger when stressed then allowed to recover.

Routines are great when interspersed with periods of non-breaking stress. Growth is dependent on stress _.

_ I refer to a more general term of stress, not necessarily psychological. Although the latter can make you a stronger/more empathetic person; the danger is in not being able to let go of them for the restoration/growth period.

<comment><USER8> totally, and I recently learned biology has a name for it: hormesis. I use to borrow Taleb's coined antifragile term.

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

We all know that we need stress/efforts to stay in shape (the weak bones of astronauts being a nice example). And it's indeed baked in us.

And by rhythm I didn't mean stress free. I meant having clear periods of a certain kind of stress (or the opposite). Basically, stress your system with all the subsystems ready for it, then allow them to rest in an appropriate context.

As a young adult (remains of teen spirit I guess) I prefered to attack everything at once in parallel. But when things get too complex I realized the value of going depth rather than breadth first. It's related, you do one thing fully, then stop entirely, instead of constantly feeding small amount of stress and never large enough amount of rest.

<comment><USER9> Agreed, what you say reflects my own growth as I've gotten older. I'm hesitant to call it wisdom, but it's served me better than the outlook from my youth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My first thought on reading this, was to revisit the idea of praying before eating. It would be hard to get an experiment on this past the review board, perhaps, but one wonders if praying before eating would work differently for atheist vs. religious dieters.

Also, I note that even though the (intentionally senseless) ritual helped reduce calories eaten, the people who used it did not think it helped and said they were unlikely to continue it. If it was part of your religious belief, one assumes you would be more likely to think it was important to continue.

<comment><USER4> For me the praying before a meal instills not only a sense of gratitude (disclaimer: Catholic here) but also appreciation and respect of the food itself. Even if it's something bland or otherwise uninteresting, I try to appreciate it for what it is, and savor it as much as possible instead of gobbling it up as fast as possible.

I think this would still be applicable outside of a religious context. You don't necessarily need to pray if that's not how your belief works, but you can still have this savoring appreciation of food, and codify that as a conscious moment where you briefly reflect on it before diving into it.

<comment><USER11> > respect of the food itself

why? It's fuel. I don't take a moment to respect the water I drink, or the bed that lets me sleep. Irrespective of belief it's not obvious why I'd want to try and be appreciative of food regardless of whether it's actually tasty

<comment><USER12> Is it so bewildering to you that someone could be thankful for the food they're about to eat? Not everyone in the world has stable access to food.

<comment><USER13> I guess it's a sign of human progress that the basic idea of being grateful for having food, as opposed to NOT having food, wouldn't occur to some people.

<comment><USER14> I'd say it's a sign of the progress of access to food - but not necessarily of human progress (e.g. humans becoming better).

Plentiful access or not, respect for what we get to have, has many other benefits, and goes beyond the mere satisfaction of our needs/desires.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > In order to be in the study, you must do the three steps of this ritual each > time you eat.

So the study is selecting for people that have good self control already?

</comment><comment><USER16> Why aren't more scientific studies written like this one--with straightforward, simple, and clear language? It's a joy to read.

<comment><USER17> Are you reading the actual study? Because what's linked here isn't a study, it's an article about a study. In other words, it's written by a journalist, not a scientist that worked on the study.

<comment><USER18> No, it's a popular article by one of the study authors. Researchers can and do write in both modes sometimes.

<comment><USER19> Research can, and do, and SHOULD. By writing popular pieces, scientists are basically using the Feynman technique and increasing their own understanding of whatever it is they're learning about

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've found that behavior that isn't quite a ritual, but unique to that activity can be highly motivating and beneficial to focus as well. Whenever I want to get deeply focused on code writing, I'll start speaking to myself under my breath. A bit like the intention behind vocalizing your thoughts during a coding interview, it's been very helpful for keeping my mind on track.

</comment><comment><USER21> Those sound like rituals someone with OCD might perform. I wonder if the common thread is that they reduce anxiety in both healthy and unhealthy, and that this reduction leads to increased agency.

Also it would be good to seem other groups replicate this.

</comment><comment><USER22> My ritual is checking hacker news. I practice it often.

</comment><comment><USER23> I believe mundane daily routines, when ritualized, can be a great way to get focused and in cognitive flow: [https://medium.com/@jasoncomely/the-secret- ceremony-46000940...](https://medium.com/@jasoncomely/the-secret- ceremony-460009407c43)

</comment><comment><USER24> TLDR; They encouraged people to make random gestures or perform meaningless tasks before eating and they found a ~10% reduction in calories (self- reported) and ~20% difference in people choosing vegetables over cake.

I wonder if breathing and presencing would have the same effect or stronger. I think our initial urge for sugar / instant gratification comes from our monkey brain and is overpowering but brief. Slowing down allows our rational brain to catch up and make a better long term decision.

This probably applies to more in life than just eating.

</comment><comment><USER25> tldr; adding bureaucracy makes people give up on everything.........even eating

</comment><comment><USER26> I am skeptical of the conclusion because of the imprecise language. For example, concluding ritual may be more effective than stringent dieting. 1. What is the documented efficacy of dieting over the same limited time period? 2. Are dieting and ritual mutually exclusive?

Is eating a carrot instead of chocolate necessarily a demonstration of will power? At least with the other studies, the subjects had a stated goal of weight loss.

How many subjects participated? Were the trials run more than once? The scholarly articles are paywalled, so all we are left with is this article. And this article seems more fitting for a grocery store checkout line rag than for Scientific American.

<comment><USER18> It's a popular article, not a formal report. It contains links as references to the papers.

SciAm never publishes formal scientific articles as far as I know. It is a popular magazine about science, not a primary source journal.

<comment><USER26> As noted, the papers are paywalled.

My criticism is actually less about the language that the quality of the study. However, without reading the actually papers, I cannot be sure it is the study that is flawed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why is this scientific publication using such magical language?

<comment><USER28> Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

<comment><USER27> I don't get why you think comments that generate conversation are "unsubstantive".

<comment><USER28> On HN the idea is to value quality above quantity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Here it is: "First, cut your food into pieces before you eat it. Second, rearrange the pieces so that they are perfectly symmetric on your plate. Finally, press your eating utensil against the top of your food three times."

<comment><USER30> No... That's not really the point of the article. The secret sauce is that /that/ ritual, its /any/ ritual. The premise is that by doing the ritual, you are more liking to do the "correct" thing. Probably (and this is my speculation here) because thus far the "correct" thing was tied to the ritual, and as humans, we like the sense of completion, so once we start the "random" part of the ritual, we want to finish the process, which involves doing the thing.

<comment><USER29> You're right.</comment></comment></comment>


Rust and the Three Laws of Informatics - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@schemouil/rust-and-the-three-laws-of-informatics-4324062b322b <comment><USER2> Excellent overview of the language, ecosystem and community. Thank you for writing it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your kind words, and kudos to you for finding that buried submission ;-)</comment></comment>


Parcel v1.5.0 Released: Source Maps, WebAssembly, Rust, and More - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@devongovett/parcel-v1-5-0-released-source-maps-webassembly-rust-and-more-3a6385e43b95 <comment><USER2> rust->wasm out of the box is bananas. any chance C next? or is that really hard because of makefiles?</comment>


A reactive framework for embedded systmes - felipe-lavratti https://github.com/felipe-lavratti/reacto <comment> felipe-lavratti It is a open source framework where you design your code with the reactive paradigm (queue/handler). Nice to have a look.</comment>


Chris Lattner, the young developer who made a revolution in the C++ world - <AUTHOR> http://cppdepend.com/blog/?p=1005 <comment><USER2> I see various articles about "young wonderchilds" programming in their teens despite their age suggesting that they are perfectly capable to do that once they have chosen to spend their free time learning programming instead of playing soccer, but wondering "how it's possible" when the person is 25yo, when in some fields you can already be a senior developer at this age, is just a whole next level.

</comment><comment><USER3> The article inconsistently uses Latner and the correct spelling, Lattner. Does no one proof-read these things?

<comment><USER4> 2nd sentence of the article - "Chris Latner is their creator when he has only 25 years old". Should be he was. I know what you mean.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would you participate in a weeklong Hackathon for 2 hrs each morning? - <AUTHOR>

I haven't attended a hackathon in years. I feel like a loser saying that, but I have a wife and a daughter now.
I love hacking, but weekends (when hackathons are typically held) are when I get to spend large blocks of uninterrupted time with my family. As much as I love hacking, I simply cannot justify the trade off (especially since my daughter is under 2 years old and grows an insane amount every day).
I came to the realization that the only "free time" I have starts about 4am and ends at about 7am. If I am going to engage a side project or do general purpose hacking, this is the only time I have available for it.
This got me to thinking: What about a weeklong hackathon? What if instead of missing the majority of a weekend with my family, the hacking happened over the course of several days in the wee hours of the morning? There have to be a ton of people who, like me, find that this is the only free time they have.
What do you think? Is this something you would try? Why or why not?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I'd try it out. My hesitation would be that things come up in the morning, but an interesting thesis and I frequently find that the weekend is overloaded.</comment>


Create An Interactive Metro Style Grid Dashboard - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulund.co.uk/create-interactive-grid-dashboard

<comment><USER2> a more evolved fork: <https://github.com/dustmoo/gridster.js></comment>