The Dense States of America (Map) - <AUTHOR> http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/450-the-united-states-of-brooklyn-nh/ <comment><USER2> Not that anyone cares, but I don't _want_ to live that way. I certainly understand how many love the urban life, I just prefer suburbia, thanks.

That being said, a more relevant question is what the societal effects would be. My first question is how this would affect crime rates. A quick search seems to indicate that crime rate may go up with population density, though other factors are, of course, more highly correlated (such as poverty).

Some of those other factors also correlate highly with high density areas. No clue what the causative links are ... could be that density has no effect, or even reduces crime rate, I suppose - I'm way to lazy to research it for ta quick hn comment!

I do know that being too close to too many other people makes _me_ think about perpetrating violent crime, though! ;)

<comment><USER3> Is that crime rate per capita?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To contrast with the current state of the, uh, State of New Hampshire, we are currently 83% covered in trees. And that's the way we like it :-)

</comment><comment><USER5> Let's just be sure to put the waste processing and power plants over in Maine, OK?

</comment><comment><USER6> I live in a dense part of NJ, around 7000 inh/mi2. But I've got a single family home with a nice yard, and many of my neighbors have even more space than I do. We've got lots of trees and open spaces too. At this density we'd need 5 New Hampshires, but that's still not much and it would provide a much higher quality of life than packing in at 35000 inh/mi2.

</comment><comment><USER7> Reminded me of that article by P.J. O'Rourke where he compared Santa Clara County (I think) to Bangladesh. Both have the same population density...

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm sure this is doable. Better still would be to create a few population centers of this density but slightly smaller. say 9 of them, 33x33. This would allow for redundancy of civilization (in case of disaster and whatnot). It also would allow better access to the appropriate resources (which is frequently a major motivator in which cities are successful). It still reduces the number of transport corridors, so trains an such become viable.

The problem comes for people like me: I enjoy my small city experience. I live a short walk from downtown, but have a house w/ yard (and a big garden), and a garage/workshop (mostly workshop as I don't actually have a car). Such space uses are unrealistic as density goes up.

</comment><comment><USER9> Somebody could nuke that small area and effectively kill of the entire country..

<comment><USER10> Screw the man-made disasters, just think of how fast diseases would spread. IIRC, dense population centers were one of the contributing factors to the bubonic plague.

<comment><USER11> Another contributing factor was the _lack of modern medicine_. Plenty of communicable diseases exist today, and residents of dense neighborhoods are doing fine. If a disease kills too fast for a treatment to be discovered in time to prevent many deaths, it will probably be killing too fast to spread effectively. Swine flu killed ~14,000 people worldwide, so I'd put dying from an outbreak of a deadly disease at the same level of probability as a man-made disaster like terrorism. In other words, not likely enough to be of much concern.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't _want_ to live in Brooklyn, though.

This ignores that a _larger_ area with similar population density would require much more robust transportation systems than currently exists in, oh, _the world_. Have a happy mental visualization:

Take every car in America on the road right now. Divide by, say, 100, assuming that most are driving ~ 1 hour, and the new density would make their trips within 6 minutes after such a change, and the transport system fits 10 people into the space of _one_ car.

Now, cram them into New Hampshire. And imagine rush-hour traffic.

<comment><USER13> I think you are missing the point. First, the article doesn't care what you want.

Second, it is using the current population density of Brooklyn, and that is with the current transportation infrastructure. If your foreseeable maximum travel distance was 100 miles, none of this would be necessary. It is very unlikely you or 99% of the people would need cars. Transportation would be optimized for mass transit/walking/biking. It would probably feel less crowded than current day brooklyn.

<comment><USER14> I think you'd need something of a revolution in transport infrastructure to serve a Brooklyn that was the size of New Hampshire. With the current Brooklyn, the longest public-transit trips, if you're very unlucky with where you're going to/from, are about 90 minutes, and most are around 30 mins. But if you just organically grew out the same infrastructure to a Brooklyn the size of New Hampshire, it would take 5+ hours to get from one side of New Brooklyn to another.

<comment><USER15> But why would you _need_ to get from one side of New Brooklyn to the other any more frequently than you need to get from one side of the US to the other today?

<comment><USER12> Shipping products. Daily, and _massive_ amounts.

Business travel (ie, flights, currently). Less than shipping, but still frequent.

Vacation travel. More frequent than business, but likely shorter distances (still often above 100 miles, though). Though I know of over a dozen people in my circle of friends who have travelled over 1000 miles to get to their spring / summer locations. And these are relatively poor college students.

The problem isn't based around an expected increase in frequency (though there would be, as things _are_ closer), it's that a large number of people _do_ need such large-scale transports, and shoving _more_ of everything together brings up new problems (look at Chicago, the roads & tracks are fairly nightmarish in many places).

<comment><USER6> It would require a massive infrastructure project to build up an area that big and dense, so let's assume transportation is part of the plan. A mesh of rail lines could be put in with high speed rail with a few stops at the coarsest level of the grid, moderate speed rail with more stops in the middle, and the equivalent of the NYC subway system at the finest level of the grid. The system could be planned out so that no two points are more than a few train changes and an hour or two apart. That's much better than our current national transportation system.

Shipping could have a parallel system at the high speed and moderate speed, using shipping containers and (while we're at it) automated transfer systems for the containers. Maybe the whole place could be rigged up like a giant FedEx shipping center, with hundred-mile-long conveyor belts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> another fun fact, the entire world population fits in Texas with the same population density as paris

<comment><USER17> Ah, but not the same amount of water. That would be horrendous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> As a current resident of NYC looking to move away, I think this proposal would have a negative impact on the mental health and well-being of many US citizens.

</comment><comment><USER19> For comparison, if Canada had a similar population density to England, you would fit its entire population onto the island of Newfoundland (not the province of Newfoundland and Labrador). Interestingly, Newfoundland was intended to be an independent country. This would leave the whole mainland of Canada (the worlds 2nd largest country) devoid of habitation.

</comment><comment><USER20> It'd be a lot of fun bringing in water, food, and oil, that's for sure.

<comment><USER21> Oil for sure indeed. It's not like you're getting it from your backyard now.

Pretty much the same goes for most of your food too.

Water is the only thing that would get tricky. But large chunks of the northern hemisphere have A LOT of water. Think Seatle, or for that matter, ALL of New England, especially northern New England.

<comment><USER22> Or Old England..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Imagine trying to drive a truck load of food/supplies to the center of it. Driving a big rig (or would it be too small for the demand?) through 50 miles of Brooklyn sounds incredibly tedious.

<comment><USER24> With this sort of density you can use more efficient distribution systems than driving a truck down the street -- dedicated transport tunnels/tubes and a handful of distribution centers would eliminate most surface shipping.

<comment><USER22> Just lay some rails.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If we filled the entire area of the United States with that population density, we could fit 132.8 billion people!

</comment><comment><USER26> I call not having to live atop one of the mountains in the Presidential Range.

</comment><comment><USER27> Remember in Civ 2 when you'd build two cities right next to each other?

<comment><USER22> Not very advisable. Though a lot of Cities on a grid with one square between them horizontally and vertically was a viable strategy in Civilization (the first part, of course).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This would be ruinous. Yes, it'd be great if we could compact and leave most of America pristine, but that's not what would happen. Leave all that open space and people will expand into it again, except likely as much more dense populations.

This would result in mind bogglingly large population growth, which Earth can't take right now. We need LESS dense populous, not more.

<comment><USER28> Are you saying that we would have _increased_ population growth if the population was all packed together? By packing together we could do things such as use less electricity by being more efficient (less power loss due to transmission distances, less power used to pump water all over the place, less fuel spent moving all over the place, etc).

<comment><USER3> If we concentrated the population, we would not grow as fast. But that all depends on concentrating the population and then not allowing it to expand beyond some set borders, which doesn't seem like it'd go over well. Just look at the little countries running out of land, looking to their neighboor's turf as prospective expansion.

You'd need government or fences or armed forces preventing people from expanding- it is natural for people to expand.

Maybe I am incorrect in thinking so, but my idea was that while the birth rate may be lower, we'd (in the end) approach a higher net population density if we slowly sprawled from a single super-dense hub.</comment></comment></comment>


Thiel Fellowship Round 2 Open - <AUTHOR> http://www.thielfellowship.org/applicant-login/

<comment><AUTHOR> They recently opened up this program again. $100k for 2 years of leaving school/college. Not sure if it holds up to the likes of YC (lots of the recipients have no tech backgrounds in the first batch), but a few of the recipients from the first class are pretty stellar (the Yale kids and Andrew Hsu for example).</comment>


Great developers are raised, not hired - <AUTHOR> http://sizovs.net/2019/04/10/the-best-developers-are-raised-not-hired/?2019-14 <comment><USER2> See also discussion from 4 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19642722](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19642722) (328 comments)</comment>


Roadmap to Alpha Centauri - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/3/in-transit/roadmap-to-alpha-centauri?utm_source=tss&utm_medium=desktop&utm_campaign=linkfrom_feature <comment><USER2> Read Charlie Stross's "High Frontier Redux". It's simply not that easy (and a. cent. is the wrong target).

And no, it's not a simple matter after budget priorities either. Physics, bitch.

[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2007/06/the_high...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html)

<comment><USER3> What would the "right" target be?

<comment><USER2> Stross answers that.

My response is "under your feet".

<comment><USER4> Stross says Gliese 581c on the grounds that it's the closest currently known vaguely-habitable exoplanet. Most likely there are others closer and we haven't found them yet.

Probably not Alpha Centauri since it's a binary system.

<comment><USER2> A habitable plainet would require a vaguely Sun-like star. Odds of one hiding between us and a. Centauri are low. Gleise or a neighbor are best bets, and near exoolanets are also generally easier to spot.

<comment><USER4> Not one hiding between us and Alpha Centauri (which is unlikely), but one of the hundred or so stars between us and Gliese 581.

Closer exoplanets aren't necessarily easier to spot, we've spotted those around Gliese 581 because they have a nice short period of a few days.

<comment><USER2> Ease of finding an exoplanet, among other things, increases with proximity.

A close and attentive reader of my original comment might possibly note that my argument wasn't _for_ Gliese but _against a. centauri._ The salient point being that you'll need to schedule and budget for markedly more than 4.6 light years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's sad that the biggest barrier to space travel remains the inability to mobilize large amounts of money to fund ambitious projects. We have no difficulty funding the most nugatory military operations at ten times the cost of a manned mission to Mars. But peaceful projects, whether on Earth or in space, run out of political support at a fraction of that price.

It's a lot more fun to focus on the technology because the technical obstacles to space flight are potentially tractable. The human obstacles seem to resist any solution.

<comment><USER6> Uneducated guess:

Military spending hits a sweet spot of being a tried-and-true generator of middle-class jobs, responding to a perceived urgent national need, and also functioning as a sort of insurance policy, in the sense that we're often paying for something _not_ to happen, making it hard to assess value.

A space program doesn't necessarily hit any of these notes. It requires specialized talent, responds to no immediate need, and, perhaps perversely, because you can measure the success of a space program, it's too easy to foresee things going wrong.

I think you could make a similar case for why we don't plow $500bn into curing cancer, which is a manifestly better idea (even just from an actuarial perspective) than spending 10x more than the rest of the word on defense.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure what you would _do_ with billions of dollars thrown at cancer. At least with guns and rockets there's hardware to build. I suspect breast cancer research, for example, can't usefully absorb more money.

I think you're overlooking an emotional component to military service. For a lot of people it ties into issues of heritage, national and personal identity. For many Americans it's synonymous with the idea of national service.

If our grandfathers' Space Corps had stood strong and unbending in the face of the Martian landing pods, we would likely not have any trouble getting the cool missions funded now.

<comment><USER7> >I'm not sure what you would do with billions of dollars thrown at cancer.

Giving every cancer research on earth the freedom to actually research instead of preparing grant submissions would probably be enough to substantially decrease the amount of time before significant strides are made. Especially if the money would pay for research assistants, statisticians, and quants to parse the data being collected. Outfitting labs with the latest in high throughput robotics, microfluidics, sequencers, etc. would amplify their efforts.

<comment><USER8> I doubt all that would take more than a billion or two. For the entire world. And giving more liberty to researchers will probably lead to savings, not expenses.

It's both sad and great that we probably can not spend those $500B in cancer research, yet there is so much to improve.

<comment><USER9> "Cancer" is also simultaneously a narrow and broad field. Computer technology improvements has probably done more to advance modern biology and microbiology then other single advance - but would receive no funding at all under the banner of cancer research.

Broad funding for scientific research is important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The biggest barrier to space travel is our biology. We must create non- biological humans that can shut off and wait for the entire trip.

<comment><USER11> Or cyrogenics.

It's all starting to come together guys!

<comment><USER10> It's about more than just shutting down though. Biological complexity makes it infeasible to significantly engineer our biological bodies to e.g. make them smaller to reduce fuel costs, or make backups so that we can easily do potentially dangerous experiments involving ourselves (also reproducible experiments).

My prediction: humans will have to be 100% human technology to free ourselves from the Earth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Missing: Project Valkyrie

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

[http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/slowerlight.php](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/slowerlight.php)

</comment><comment><USER13> (not original with me): "The fastest way to travel to the nearest star is to wait 100 years and _then_ go."

That's kind of depressing. But it's a lo-o-o-ng way to Alpha Centauri . . .

<comment><USER14> I've wondered about that, and how the break even point would be calculated. The soonest date that someone could get to Alpha Centauri wouldn't be on the same trip for the soonest date someone could leave for Alpha Centauri (and get there successfully).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A little closer, I wonder how far we are from making something a little more mundane like a Babylon 5 spinning habitat, or even a 2001 spinning wheel station. Are these just a matter of money, or is there some other fundamental technology challenges to getting those things built?

I bet future Asteroid miners wouldn't mind a cheap place (relative to going down then up a planetary gravity well) to R&R between digs.

<comment><USER4> Depends what you mean by "just a matter of money".

If you could enslave the entire population of Earth to work full-time on the project for a couple of decades or so then, yeah, you could do it easily. In a world of free will and competing priorities I don't think it'll be possible until we reduce our cost-to-orbit. Certainly there are no big technological show-stoppers though.

As a vague guesstimate, I've read 1km proposed as a minimum viable radius for one of these things. So you'll need a rim about 6km long. The International Space Station is about 100m long, so if you staple sixty of those end-to-end you'd have a minimum-viable 1g station, at a cost of about six trillion bucks. But of course it would basically just be a thin tube, not much living space.

As for asteroid miners: I can't possibly imagine that this is the sort of thing that we're ever going to send humans rather than robots to do.

<comment><USER15> Well in an age of $19billion chat app acquisitions, $6 trillion ain't what it used to be. That's only a one time cost of 8% of the Gross World Product. Spread that over a 20 year construction time-frame and that's $300billion per year _globally_.

Something of that scale could reasonably be covered if the U.S., Europe and China/Korea/Japan all agree to Iraq War level spending each for that time period.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you're going to use a warp drive (or any other means of FTL travel), you'd better hope that Novikov's self-consistency principle [1] holds, or else be prepared to deal with the ensuing causality violations [2].

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self- consistency_princi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self- consistency_principle)

[2] [http://www.askamathematician.com/2011/09/q-hyperspace- warp-d...](http://www.askamathematician.com/2011/09/q-hyperspace-warp-drives- and-faster-than-light-travel-why-not/)

[Edited to add second link.]

</comment><comment><USER17> "(The stars) remind us of the puny distances we men travel; the nearest one, Alpha Centauri, is four light-years away, far beyond our capability to visit today or in our lifetime, yet beckoning, mocking us and our dreams." \- Mike Collins (Apollo 11 astronaut)

</comment><comment><USER18> "What is more, the ship would be impossible to steer, since control signals, which are restricted to the speed of light, wouldn't be fast enough to get from the ship's bridge to the propulsion system located on the vessel's perimeter."

Would someone mind elaborating on what the author is saying here. I would have supposed the warp field would surround the entire craft. If this weren't the case the ship would be torn apart, no? Everything I think about warp drive is so coloured by Star Trek I observe myself having difficulty imagining it could be any other way.

<comment><USER19> Imagine a ship travels at 1.5x the speed of light. Now imagine the signal from the "steering wheel" travels to the ruder with light speed. You turn the wheel. Before the ruder gets the signal and turns (and let's ignore human reaction time) the ship has already traveled however much distance you cover when traveling at half the speed of light. You would have an enormous lag basically.

Something like that :) I'm rubbish at physics :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It is extremely sad that we have not traveled beyond Earth orbit since the end of the Apollo program in 1972. Space exploration inspired many of us to study math and CS and fostered innovation. The majority of the most relevant people in tech in the last 30 years (Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, etc.) have repeatedly commented how the Apollo missions were inspiration for the their studies and careers.

<comment><USER2> Correction: humans haven't travelled beyond _low_ Earth orbit since 1972.

No human has _ever_ travelled beyond Earth orbit. I believe the Apollo missions _may_ have achieved Earth escape velocity, though their destination was Lunar orbit, which remains within Earth's.

<comment><USER21> It's a marvellous fact that the Apollo missions achieved escape velocity, or close enough that they could have done so with small design modifications.

The calculation is fun:

The kinetic energy required to escape Earth's orbit entirely is: G M / R, where G is Newton's constant, M is the mass of the Earth, and R is the radius of the Earth.

The kinetic energy required to get to the Moon is: G M / R - G M / r, where r is the distance to the moon.

To compute the ratio of the second quantity to the first, note that the GM factors cancel. So the ratio is:

(1/R-1/r) / (1/R) = 1 - R / r

The distance to the moon is about 60 times the radius of the Earth. So:

Kinetic energy required to get to moon / Kinetic energy required to escape Earth's orbit entirely = 1 - 1/60 ~ 98 %.

In other words, the Apollo missions had at least 98% the kinetic energy required to escape Earth orbit's entirely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why can't Orion take off with conventional rockets and then switch to nuclear drive once in space? Wouldn't that address the main drawback?

</comment><comment><USER23> Lets hope this doesn't start like Sid Meiers Story ...

</comment><comment><USER24> Interesting there is no mention to EmDrive or Q-Trusters.

</comment><comment><USER25> It was calculated that 2 people would die from exposure every time Orion spaceship takes of. It is hardly 'nuking the earth' as article suggest. Millions of people die every year from background exposure.

</comment><comment><USER26> > _Load your starship with 300,000 nuclear bombs, detonate one every three > seconds, and ride the blast waves._

Ooops! I cannot find the words "stop", "brake", "decelerate", or "slow down" in the article. I guess it is to be understood that you carry 300,000 more nuclear bombs with you and blast them in front so that you don't blow right by Alpha Centauri when you reach it.

<comment><USER27> Although the article doesn't mention it, the original idea, having been worked on by a host of scientists and not a random person on the internet, does take that into account: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propul...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29)</comment></comment>


Nonsense math effect: quality of research perceived higher when unintelligible - <AUTHOR> http://journal.sjdm.org/12/12810/jdm12810.pdf

<comment><USER2> His categorization of "Area of degree" is funny. Education is part of social sciences. Since you ruled out education from social sciences, how come you combined humanities with social sciences? This does not make sense.</comment>


VC Funding Drying Up For Facebook Apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/7/vc-funding-drying-up-for-facebook-apps-don-t-blame-facebook <comment><USER2> I'm still clueless as to how anyone ever thought they'd be able to make any money writing annoying apps for a free platform targeted at kids and young adults with no money...

<comment><USER3> You would be surprised how many page views some of these apps get. Many of the apps were specially designed to promote page views and force the user to change page to do simple tasks. Anyways, I think the article is about right and that the buzz of the launch is long gone.. Unless you build something kick ass I don't think you can reach to top of the food chain anymore.

<comment><USER2> My apologies for being a brickhead, but how do page views turn into money for a Facebook app author?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There was VC funding for Facebook apps?

<comment><USER5> <http://www.rockyou.com>

<http://www.slide.com>

<http://www.seriousbusiness.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In my mind, a facebook app would be part of a wider strategy, such as integrating your external service into facebook to drive additional use of the core service. It didn't seem like many facebook apps on their own made that much sense, especially for VCs. I mean, they basically allow you to spread your ads across a small portion of facebook's site. As a business model for a couple dudes, fine, but as a model to throw millions of bucks on, not so sure there. Unless VCs were hoping facebook would acquire them, which it doesn't need to to benefit from them, so why would it?

</comment><comment><USER7> The deeper realization may be that simply plugging holes in Facebook's existing functionality is a short term place to be.

But I think that there's probably more sustainability in bringing things to Facebook that they won't themselves.</comment>


Virginia Tech Professor Spent $147k to Help Uncover the Flint Water Scandal - <AUTHOR> http://www.attn.com/stories/5314/virginia-tech-flint-water-crisis <comment><USER2> Is anyone else saddened that it takes a personal mortgage by a passionate professor and his team to figure this out? And that even after they proved it, a GoFundMe campaign is the only way to recoup the funds?

With the agencies involved dragging their feet, was there no other way to get someone else involved? Is there a whistleblower fund like the SEC has: [https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower](https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower) that gives them a portion of the impact they had (10-30% for amounts over $1 MM in the SEC's case)?

<comment><USER3> This is the GoFundMe page, [https://www.gofundme.com/flintstudyvt](https://www.gofundme.com/flintstudyvt)

<comment><USER4> Thanks. I chipped in a tenner and I'm from Europe. But the passion that this team shows, is awe-inspiring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, I was under the impression that the Flint situation was primarily driven by bad policy put in place by people who didn't really know what they were doing, but it seems like there was a lot more nefarious action than that.

<comment><USER6> That's the common spin of the moment.

What they aren't saying is _why_ Flint switched its supply: the Detroit system _drastically_ raised its fees to Flint (the switch saved $19 million over the first 8 years alone), and Flint was broke as it is. The city council vote to switch was 7-1, with 6 Democrats voting "yes".

[http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2013/03/flint_city...](http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2013/03/flint_city_council_approves_re.html)

Many articles try to imply that the lead came from the new water supplier; in fact, it leached from lead pipes the existing system used as its water mains.

Yes, despite all these years of knowing the dangers of lead, neither Flint nor Detroit made any attempt to clear lead from their water delivery systems, and EPA rules allowed testing to be based on long periods of letting taps run to clear as many contaminants as possible first.

And switching back to Detroit water doesn't solve the lead problem in the mains, although it may be less acute.

<comment><USER7> "And switching back to Detroit water doesn't solve the lead problem in the mains, although it may be less acute."

It does solve it. The Detroit water has lower chloride levels than the Flint River sourced water, so the lead in the service lines and solder won't leach above acceptable limits. There's lead in old mains and service lines _everywhere_ in the country, particularly in lines put in place before the mid 20th century. And the cost to remove them in places like Flint is high because the frost line is so deep.

<comment><USER8> Reverting to the old water source doesn't just revert the corrosion process that has already been started

<comment><USER9> I read somewhere that they're putting chemicals in (phosphates?) to try to help fix things in that regard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I met Marc Edwards in 2010. when I did a summer program at Virginia Tech. One of the most passionate people you'll ever meet. The big news then was water contamination in D.C. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_contamination_in_Washingt...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_contamination_in_Washington,_D.C._drinking_water)), another project that Edwards spent much of his personal funds on. Fortunately then, his work earned him a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2007, helping him to pay back his debt.

<comment><USER11> I hope he wins something similar for his work here. It's outrageous that he had to take out a mortgage on his home in order to be able to complete this project. I don't know the man but I have much respect for him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting couple of Reddit comments on the relevant water chemistry in this situation. [1]

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/comments/41gqfe/is_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/comments/41gqfe/is_gov_rick_snyder_actually_to_blame_for_the/cz2nsho)

</comment><comment><USER13> This situation is horrifying. And if we're thinking of costs - those have only begun. I shudder to think the longterm health effects this will have for years to come.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've heard from my colleagues that there are leaked emails around on how they chose to switch suppliers. Even though they knew the lead contamination.

Anyone have a link of the said email dump? Other links are broken

</comment><comment><USER15> Related reading about Flint: [http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/01/22/flint- water...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/01/22/flint-water-lead- poison-michigan-health-column/79019134/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Side question: how expensive is it to get your water tested? I live in an older house, and all this talk has made me concerned about what's coming from my pipes, since they are > 100 yrs old.

<comment><USER17> Simple kits for testing both water and painted surfaces go for $10 and up at Home Depot. The less expensive ones have two tests. You should test at least a couple of fixtures because older fixtures often contain lead. Getting a positive may mean that you need only replace that fixture. Testing the paint isnt a bad idea either. If you get a positive then you need to have the water tested by a lab. It isnt very expensive to get a kit and mail a sample back to the lab. Your city or county water department should be able to help you find a reliable lab.

I am not an expert in the area, but I did serve on the board of a small mutual water company in the hills above Silicon Valley. We were required to do daily tests for things like coliform bacteria and monthly tests for other possible contaminates. Every few years we handed out lead testing kits to a few households on the various branches of the system to make sure lead wasnt leaching into the water. All of our samples had to be tested at county approved labs. A county inspector also took samples during the year. The testing for larger water systems were even stricter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was in Scranton Pennsylvania in 1999 and was horrified at the water there, the water was yellowish orange.

My guess is many former industrial regions in the US will have heavily contaminated water.

<comment><USER8> The yellowish orange color is not produced by industry though, so I'm not sure why you think that

<comment><USER18> Lots of coal and steel industries so who knows I thought there may be a link since it's similar in a region near me where coal and steel were common.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Seems like a hundred dollars should have been sufficient. It's a simple lab test. Lead in the water == bad news.

</comment><comment><USER20> Remember they switched to flint river to save a "whopping" $1 Million per year.

They are probably costing $1 Million per week now in bottled water.

Imagine what the special needs kids caused by this will cost taxpayers for the next several decades.

Even without the lead leeching issues, everyone knows the Flint river was an industrial dumping ground for decades and was very toxic - no amount of filtering would have made it safe for constant consumption.

<comment><USER21> > Remember they switched to flint river to save a "whopping" $1 Million per > year.

It's starting to look like they were offered a deal from their previous water source that would have come in under the price of switching to Flint, so the decision making process was especially weird.

> Even without the lead leeching issues, everyone knows the Flint river was an > industrial dumping ground for decades and was very toxic - no amount of > filtering would have made it safe for constant consumption.

As I understand it, the science is that it would have been fine if they hadn't failed to add an anti-corrosive agent, against normal best practice. The lead did not come from the river; the lead came from water pipes being corroded by the water.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Weird that nobody has mentioned this yet: The article claims that Prof. Edwards spent $147k from his _discretionary research funds_ and personal funds. He's still a good guy and has probably used a non-trivial amount of his own money, but it's not like he had to pull all of it out of his bank account. Discretionary research funds are given to researchers as money for them to spend on whatever research they find interesting. It's kind of like 3M's 20% time. The article doesn't mention how much of the $147k came from his research money and how much came from his pocket book. Why? Because it's not as sensational to find out that this guy (who is a tenured professor at a big school) put up $125k of research money and $22k of his own. I don't know what the actual numbers are but I wouldn't be surprised if he put up less than $50k of his own money and had the vast majority come from research funds, considering his history (wikipedia claims he received a $450k grant in 2011 from the EPA to study lead and copper in the water).

Again, I'm not saying he's a fraud. He probably still put up a decent chunk himself. He did take out a mortgage on his house, but it doesn't mean that he put 100% of the value of his house towards this crisis. All I'm saying is don't get caught up in all the sensationalism.

<comment><USER23> Several replies to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962782](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962782) mentioned it about 1 hour before you posted.

(inaccurate + convenient characterizations of existing comments are a pet peeve, sorry)

<comment><USER22> Several replies? Only one person addresses discretionary research funds. Every other commenter quotes the article but is focused on the subject of that thread (mistaking volunteer hours for money spent). MaggieL wrote: > So...how much research money was within his discretionary budget?

I wasn't going to reply, but couldn't pass this one up. Inaccurate characterizations might be a pet peeve of yours, but apparently that doesn't prevent hypocrisy.

<comment><USER23> I think directly quoting those few words meets the bar set by 'mentioned'.

If it was lost in a longer quote maybe not, but when there are 2 sentences quoted and 1 of them is the statement in question...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> City of Detroit's FAULT. The attempted gouging of Flint for their water supply is the cause, who was that person that allowed that attempt ?

That is the cockroach that needs the light shown upon them.

follow the money. <USER24>
</comment><comment><USER25> They claim the professor and his students did 6000 hrs of work testing samples (that's an especially round number), which they valued at an average of $27.74/hr even though everyone was a volunteer and no one was asking to be paid. This is how they came up with an estimate of a labor value of $166,487 for this voluntary work for which no students who did the work were paid or asked to be paid.

It is extremely misleading and deceptive here to say that the professor spent $147,000 because he did not spend $147,000 at all. He spent 11200+3180+50 = $14,430 and he received 32843+200+500+200 = $33,743 in grants and fees he charged for speaking, for a surplus of $19,313.

Furthermore, the money being raised is going into an account supervised by the lead. It is not being used to pay the people who did the work for their time. This is especially outrageous that he is collecting money for their volunteer work and keeping it for his own use.

<comment><USER26> Headline: "Professor Marc Edwards Spent $147,000..." fine print: "...a net deficit of $147,174, which Edwards covered with his own discretionary research and personal funds..."

So...how much research money was within his discretionary budget? It's a bit of a stretch to call that "his own funds".

<comment><USER27> He is essentially using his own money to do what the local and state governments should have done. His discretionary funds could have been used to buy equipment for his lab in order to help him get research grants. Instead, they were spent to do water testing in a different city and in a different state. He isn't going to receive any research grants or meaningful scientific publications out of this, which is essentially the job of a university professor. That's why it is portrayed as such a sacrifice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> erin brokovich II, directed by michael moore, a netflix special to raise money.

</comment><comment><USER29> The problem is, in a world, where profits are the most important thing and everything else is secondary, human life does not count -- even when human health is destroyed, it can be good -- to increase the profit margins of some corporations.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is sickening. How this could occur in 2016 needs to be studied and eliminated with prejudice. To think that government officials look at that orange water and think that's normal. It reminds of the Monsanto lobbyist that claimed that RoundUp is perfectly safe to drink, but then instantly refused to drink it when offered. I wish there was a special place in hell for people like that.

<comment><USER31> The guy you're thinking of wasn't a Monsanto lobbyist.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2015/03/27/no- its-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2015/03/27/no-its-not-safe- to-drink-weed-killer-on-camera-but-who-cares/#397a8d9c718e)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> >"[It's a] trivial cost compared to the damage we prevented," Edwards said in an email to ATTN:. "Best investment we could have made into society."

In the world we live in, people only invest in themselves and society may or may not benefit as a consequence. This type of selflessness is rare and unsustainable.

<comment><USER33> Oh really, people only invest into themselves? In the case of the US, Americans pay $6.1 trillion annually in taxes between local + state + federal. Equal to one third of GDP. Those same Americans give vast sums to charity, with the US having practically invented modern philanthropy. Your premise doesn't hold up under any scrutiny.

<comment><USER32> Let me rephrase. In a capitalist society where given the choice people and corporations in general function as self interested entities.</comment></comment></comment>


But what if they steal my idea? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.findthetechguy.com/but-what-if-they-steal-my-idea/

<comment><USER2> This is a remarkably common meme. Let me share a bit of Battlebots history - perhaps it will help.

Back when Battlebots was a going thing, they would have a competition which started on Tuesday (preliminaries) and ran through Sunday (finals). One could generalize about the teams as two types, people who shared information and people who didn't.

A common theme amongst the people who didn't share information was that they didn't want competitors "stealing their ideas, or developing counter measures before the match." They would go to great lengths to "hide" things (covering their robots, not talking about them, etc) and they would invariably lose. (in the 3 years we went I don't think a single "secret" team moved into the finals)

Information sharers on the other hand were communicative almost to a fault, they would tell you EVERYTHING about their creation, how long it took to build, why they think it could win, what they thought was key in various fights, etc, etc. Curiously, they often won their matches.

Spotting this trend early in my Battlebots 'career' I sought to understand the mechanism behind it.

The answer turned out to be ideas in a vacuum suck. (pun intended) Basically any idea, no matter how great, when it comes from an individual without anyone else thinking about it, there are going to be all sorts of problems with it. Because everyone thinks about things a bit differently, by saying "Hey, I've got this idea, what do you think?" you gather alternative points of view which always shed more light on the idea than you had originally. Can that douse your passion? Sure. But it can inflame it too.

I wondered about 'stealing' as well, if these folks are giving away their ideas why aren't they being stolen left and right? The insight there was that people who _can_ execute on ideas, well they have a bazillion already, more often than not their problem is choosing rather than coming up with something. They don't steal ideas because if they did they wouldn't have time to get to it for a while and by then you probably already did it. The folks who don't have any ideas of their own, they generally can't execute for squat, further, not being someone who could develop the idea in the first place, and thus not being able to 'grow' it as you would be sharing it and listening to the feedback, they can't pull it off either.

So where does that leave us? The old saw that ideas are a dime a dozen?

Ideas are seeds, they are not process. For all the ideas I've seen go from conception to production, the actual idea part was not a statistically significant part of executing on it. Some didn't emerge as recognizable from the original concept. So generally, worrying about someone stealing your idea is overrated, worrying that you aren't up to the task of executing on your own idea, _that_ is worth worrying about.

<comment><USER3> On a (kind of) related note, there's the story of Freddie Keppard.

Freddie was, by most accounts, paranoid - he was an incredibly talented musician but he was always afraid someone was trying to steal his material. People say he even played with a handkerchief over his fingers to conceal the notes he was playing. Because of this, the people that do remember him remember him as the guy who turned down the offer to be the first ever recorded jazz artist.

The Victor Talking Machine Company (makers of the Victrola) then made the offer to The Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

The record sold a million copies... in 1917.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're really passionate about your idea, you just want it to exist. It's almost a chore to be the one to create it yourself. For years I tried to get people to steal the idea for Stack Overflow and just build the damn thing so I didn't have to see Experts Exchange in the search results ever again.

If your whole attitude towards the idea is "this thing can make me rich" then you may not be passionate enough to be an entrepreneur.

<comment><USER5> I agree, the concern over 'idea-theft' shouldn't be a real issue. If it is, I find it unlikely that the person with the idea will end up executing it anyway.

<comment><USER6> The way I think about it is that if the idea is so good then you should rather go implement it. There are many advantages here. First, by implementing you can validate a lot of assumptions you made. Second you got some experience in the area and likely know a bit more and your idea is more refined.

Because what's worse than someone stealing your idea: to see someone who had a similar idea as yours and they have already implemented it. It happened to me a couple of times and since then I just start thinking about how I am going to execute on my idea the moment I feel striongly about something.

<comment><USER7> Its really nice to see so many people agreeing on putting your idea out there. I am in the process of building a web portal (<http://friendvestment.com>) that allows people to share their ideas/startups looking for financial/technical partners. While building, one of my main fears was that most of the new people will worry about sharing their "big" idea and ask for security, etc for their ideas. But the fact that an idea has zero value if it is just an idea, seems to be resonating a lot these days through people...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats." -Howard Aiken (the original conceptual designer behind IBM's Harvard Mark I computer)

<comment><USER9> That's true for absolute blockbuster ideas. Ideas that are merely good, slightly novel or clever yet are good enough to form the basis of a lucrative business probably don't have to be fought for as much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Two things:

First, some one else who overhears your idea may not exactly share your enthusiasm, even a competitor. It all depends on whether they see it as being equally groundbreaking as you do. Which may be good or bad, considering how informed you are.

Secondly, even if they do steal your idea, the end result could be quite different. Just like two people hearing a story and taking away two different interpretations of it, so shall two people who start with an idea, arrive at two totally different implementations of it.

Ideas are inherently cheap. The determination to bring it to the people, the team behind the idea and some amount of luck all play a more important part than the idea itself. Which is why YC looks more at the team dynamic and your perseverance than the idea itself (which is not to say that they dont).

<comment><USER11> > the end result could be quite different

Exactly. Notch (of Minecraft fame) recently expressed a desire to make a game that's something like a fantasy RPG version of Football Manager. I'm really, really tempted to steal the idea and make something with it.

Because I know that whatever I make with that simple core idea will be utterly unlike someone else's creation with the same idea. It's just a germ of inspiration; all the important details still need to be worked out and actually implemented. It's probably not true for every market, but similar games can happily coexist unless they're really identical clones.

<comment><USER12> That idea already exists too:

<http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2008/03/wiiware-impre-6/>

It's incredibly addictive, but after playing it for a while you start to run into the limitations of the game. If you could make it better and play up the indie cred you'd have a hit on your hands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The field of invention attracts a lot of paranoid kooks who will die in obscurity because they won't connect with people to validate and develop their ideas.

I know a guy who's invented a cat toilet and thinks that he invented the white LED and got cheated of the discovery because somebody stole a suitcase out of his car in Manhattan.

If somebody's got an idea and they don't want to talk about it, I start to suspect that there are mental health problems involved, and I'll make sure to steer clear.

<comment><USER14> Mental health problems is a bit presumptuous I think! Keeping an idea under wraps is pretty standard behaviour, albeit misguided in many cases

<comment><USER13> There's stuff I don't talk about, but it's operational stuff, not basic concepts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A decent metaphor for an NDA at startup might be asking someone to sign a prenup on your first date.

</comment><comment><USER16> The question isn't what if they steal my idea, it's 'what if they're better at _____ than I am?'.

<comment><USER17> Then if you have any honor as a maker of things and a doer of stuff, you'll appreciate that your new thinkstuff was given a chance to become greater then you could ever make it.

I think you're exactly right that a number of people think this. It certainly crosses my mind before I bully myself into not being so pathetic... Lots of people are better at stuff then me, and the reverse is also true.

<comment><USER16> I agree that worrying whether people are smarter or more naturally gifted than you might be is fruitless.

There's something quite magical involved in making things - pure aptitude isn't a good measure for success.

But I do think it's worth worrying about covering bases and thinking ahead. Have a plan - make sure that you'll be progressing faster than your competitor, that you'll be working harder than your competitor.

If you have the initial idea - you also potentially have the spark that makes it magical. A copycat won't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have been exactly in this situation. I had an idea a few months ago, which has a great potential. My problems were the same, I don't have the necessary coding skills to turn it into reality. I needed a cofounder, and I too, had a chance of getting my idea stolen.

But I managed to overcome this. I knew I simply couldn't approach and pitch every coder I knew, because after all, it is just an idea, I had to bring something else to the table. Instead, after I pitched a few people (risking the idea, I know, but I had to) and after I thought I was ready, I went after an angel. I was lucky that the first angel I pitched the idea offered me help. He didn't try to find me a cofounder or incentivate me to code, his help was much different.

At first, his help was actually questioning the idea itself. I had to think and address the questions he raised. He also pointed me towards a couple books (The 4 Steps to Epyphany and Business Model Generation), which have been helping me alot (this is my first entrepreneurship). After those first steps, he asked for a market research that should show if the market had potential or not. I didn't even know how to do that, took me a while, but the result was very positive, he was surprised by the quality of it.

Anyway, there is a limit how far one can go without having coding skills, and I knew my limit was close, I needed a cofounder soon, so after that research, I went to pitch a friend of mine, giving him a copy of the presentation I did. He was surprised by the research, and the fact I already had an angel interested and one that was actually investing time on me (we had 4 meetings at that time already, and I think I can say that time is more expensive than money for them). I guess that this, and the fact that the idea grew alot from the first time I pitched him (he was one of those first few people that I trained my pitching) convinced him to join me in this entrepreneurship.

We are currently assembling our beta team and just started development. We are also applying to YC!

If you are thinking that I actually pitched a friend of mine, so I didn't had the whole "trust issue", I am actually living in Brazil, and my friend is in the US. We never actually met face to face before this. We used to play a game together, over 4 years ago, and kept in touch since then. All I knew about him was that he was an excellent person and coder. We just had some interesting values and other interests in common.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is why YC looks at the team dynamic and the individuals to determine which teams to fund and help. All good ideas are worthless without proper execution and superior knowledge in the subject matter.

</comment><comment><USER20> After reading this article, I reread the relevant portion of Jim Collins' "Good to Great". His point (proven by many, many examples) is that being first out of the gate is rarely a sustainable advantage. The key is being the best - learning from not only your mistakes, but the mistakes of those before you.

I found a summarized version of this chapter on his website...

[http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/best- beats...](http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/best-beats- first.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> Execution is what matters. You can turn the greatest idea into the stupidest product in the world if you're not careful.

<comment><USER22> It's all about the execution not NDAs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is how I judge whether someone is an experienced entrepreneur or not. New entrepreneurs keep ideas to themselves. Experienced ones are much more open about them. I used to keep my ideas to myself, but learned that it does more harm than good. If you can trust people, they won't trust you.

</comment><comment><USER24> There's also the option to file a patent application or otherwise build intellectual property protection where appropriate, as a supplement to trying to execute as well and as rapidly as possible.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's not a what if, when you're idea hits the market people who want to will "steal" it.

The better question is: how do I survive when my idea is public?

<comment><USER26> Yes, that's in the article:

> _If your idea is good enough, competitors will pop and try to crush you._</comment></comment>


Dayworks , on demand Dayworker APP - <AUTHOR>

Now you can find skilled dayworker on demand . Each by skill , language , price , have ride or need ride , cash or cash and check <comment><AUTHOR> dayworks.net</comment>


Yahoo webmail sucks - <AUTHOR>

This is outrageous. Hilarious. Idiotic. Unbelievable. <comment><USER2> And what's your point here? I can see that they have borrowed much of their design from Gmail. But there is no use complaining here.

<comment><AUTHOR> The point is in the amount of users (~400M) that use it and the developers that make it. Yahoo's webmail isn't really a rocket science and any decent developer could make it work at least. The point is in the company that doesn't care.</comment></comment>


Jobs in Chicagoland Region - <AUTHOR> http://metropulsechicago.org/jobs

<comment><USER2> Is this a governmental agency? It's pretty impressive if it is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha, thanks. It's a public agency with federal funding. Website: <http://www.cmap.illinois.gov/></comment></comment>


Bootstrapping a Type System - <AUTHOR> http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2010/10/29/bootstrapping-a-type-system/

<comment><USER2> Note that this post is from October 2010, and it appears that the magpie repo[0] hasn't been committed to in over two years. In addition, the static type system was ripped out of the language about six months after this blog post was written[1].

This is understandable, given that the approach to typing seemed pretty ad- hoc, really unsafe, and somewhat incoherent. The whole point of a type system is to say something about the runtime behavior of a program before you actually run it. To actually execute fragments of your program as part of the type checking step, then, sortof defeats the purpose. Not only that, but typing can fail while producing side effects in your system, some of which may be harmful (launching the nukes, etc.) There are some systems that do _abstract_ interpretation at this point, but that is a model of an execution, not an actual execution, and is therefore sound in the sense that it will not perform random mutations in this strange running/not running superposition.

[0]: [https://github.com/munificent/magpie](https://github.com/munificent/magpie) [1]: [https://github.com/munificent/magpie/commit/58742b0e7f3431c1...](https://github.com/munificent/magpie/commit/58742b0e7f3431c14d29a62c843ed332ed465fbd)

<comment><USER3> There are plenty of languages which evaluate fragments of your program as part of the checking step. Simple ones are not even that difficult to write.

[http://www.andres-loeh.de/LambdaPi/LambdaPi.pdf](http://www.andres- loeh.de/LambdaPi/LambdaPi.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I always find munificent's essays super insightful and entertaining. Perfect weekend reading material.

Somewhat (un)related: check out his book on Game Programming Patterns ([http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/](http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/)). Great read of software design and patterns (not only for game developers).

</comment><comment><USER4> It seems to try to use the same language for the "normal" expression as well as type expression. Is this an implementation of dependent types, or something different?

<comment><USER3> This is a big part of what DT folks love, although only a part. Essentially the argue that we've already written one great language (supposedly), so why bolt a weak language atop it? Why not just use the same one twice?

Of course, now we need a type language and checker for the type language, a higher order type language, and so on and so forth infinitely. You end up with a rammified hierarchy of types (just like we had back in 1910).

So that's all fine and good and doesn't actually require dependent types yet. In this case, Magpie appears to do something called "Type in Type" which is to compress the whole rammified hierarchy into one layer by just asserting that this is the case. It turns out that this is unsound---you can craft ridiculous things like Girard's Paradox to break it---but for "pragmatic" types that's probably not a huge problem. We're already inconsistent because I assume Magpie is Turing complete.

In order to get dependent types you need what's called the "dependent function space" which lets you accept an argument and then have the return type "depend" on both the type of the argument and the value of the argument

        A : Type
        B : Type -> A -> Type
        depend : (x : A) -> B A x

which I don't think is expressed in Magpie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It would be interesting to compare to Lux [[https://github.com/LuxLang/lux/](https://github.com/LuxLang/lux/)]

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd love to see the Hindley Milner type system bootstrapped in this language.

</comment><comment><USER7> Pretty cool.</comment>


Text of Steve Jobs' Commencement Address at Stanford (June 12, 2005) - <AUTHOR> http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

<comment><USER2> The video is on Youtube: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc>

It is an extraordinarily well-crafted speech.

<comment><USER3> Why read the transcript of one of the world's greatest presenters?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle."

Kinda sad, when you think about how many of the people in the audience would go on to become investment bankers...

</comment><comment><USER5> Its such a wonderful speech. One of the best speech i have ever heard. I have seen this video so many times and never get bored seeing it again and again. It just brings the energy in me back.

</comment><comment><USER6> Every time I see this video I get conflicting emotions - on the one hand I get depressed as it keeps reminding me that there's only one Steve Jobs and a mortal one at that, makes me wish we made more of him. But then on the other hand I realize a Steve Jobs born in this day and age would have cleaned out every last smidgen of privacy we enjoy, the business model of today, in typical Jobsian fashion - careful, calculated, precise and unstoppable. Then I'm just glad we aren't making more of him.

</comment><comment><USER7> I was really lucky to be there to hear this in person. Listening to it again still blows me away. I'm from Singapore and I think one of the problems of my generation is that too few of us follow our hearts. Some might blame the education system, some might even blame the government.

I'm just extremely fortunate to experience life in the Valley and it opened up my mind. When doing a startup, its like a roller coaster ride with many ups and downs. Success is not overnight and probably might not even get there on the first attempt. But its speeches like this that kept the fire burning.

<comment><USER8> Whenever I want to feel good about the world, I look at things from the perspective of the entire history of the human race.

Thousands of years ago, most of our ancestors were more likely than not subsistence farming or, if they were doing anything historically interesting at all, laboring on gigantic walls or pyramids or other largely useless monuments for various kings and tyrants. There was no choice as to what one did with one's life, it was dictated by the circumstances of birth.

Even having dreams, much less the ability to follow them, is a rare thing for humans. We're each blessed to have this ability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What I like the most is: "You can only connect the dots looking backwards". It is a very good perspective when things don't make much sense in the present, and also gives an insight about the Jobs-Woz relationship. Woz was definitely the hacker, and Jobs, after his two years at Reeds College (and the calligraphy stuff), sedimented his experience as a designer (the "pony-tail guy").

Looking at the role that design plays in Apple nowadays, I wouldn't be surprised at all to see Jonathan Ive filling Jobs's shoes in the future, and that would be an excellent choice IMHO.

Of course, I also wonder how the young Steve Jobs would evaluate some of the current Apple's policies...

</comment><comment><USER10> I was really moved the first time I heard him talk about his and Apple's commitment to beautiful typography, it was really evident in early projects. But lately (with the exception of Retina display) Apple has ignored great typography and made lots of n00b errors that aren't even sen on other mobile platforms. If Steve isn't keeping an eye on that sort of thing, who will after he's gone? In a company with such a strong focus on minimalist design, screwing around with something as essential as text has a very big effect on the visual bottom line.

<comment><USER11> Don't bring up marker felt don't bring up marker felt.

<comment><USER10> One of these days the Apple.com homepage will be in Comic Sans and the transformation will be complete.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The "heaviness" speech, an oldie but a goodie.

For some reason it reminds me of that quote from Annie Hall. Woody Allen trying to cop some hippie jargon... "Did it achieve total heaviosity?"

</comment><comment><USER13> Jobs at his best.

</comment><comment><USER14> How many times did you post this. It must be a joke at this point. HN getting... Well...</comment>


Swiss Cat Ladders: Documenting and Deconstructing Feline-Friendly Infrastructure - <AUTHOR> https://99percentinvisible.org/article/swiss-cat-ladders-documenting-deconstructing-feline-friendly-infrastructure/ <comment><USER2> When we first moved to a Gemeinde just outside of Zürich, my wife and I were amazed to see these cat ladders coming down from balconies. We pass by cats on our walks occasionally, so they definitely use them. It probably helps that we're on the edge of the Gemeinde on a rolling hillside next to cow fields, fields used by sheep, and forest. Very little car traffic. On the other hand, in Zürich city proper I have not seen these ladders as I imagine it is not safe for a cat to be outdoors there.

<comment><USER3> I haven't seen outside cat ladders in Zürich, but I've definitely seen them in the gardens at the back of buildings. Perhaps "public" cat ladders are not allowed?

<comment><USER4> I've seen some in the outskirts of Zürich, e.g. in Affoltern. I'm not Swiss so it took me a while to figure out what they were for ..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I often visit the cat sanctuary in Metro Vancouver and they have lots of very weird and funny 'cat architecture' pieces. [https://catsanctuary.ca/](https://catsanctuary.ca/)

Usually these seem to come out of small little fix ups to make it easier for cats to do what they're trying to do anyway.

Plenty of ladders, catwalks and holes out to allow semi-feral cats the ability to dart of when someone walks into the room.

For example they have the 'dryer gang' of cats that like to sit on the dryer, and I've seen photos where there's like six of them trying to snuggle in there and not fall off, so of course the sanctuary responded by adding in a shelf above the dryer so more cats can linger around it.

My favourite bizarre piece of cat furniture is in a washroom where someone bolted a small skateboard right over top an electric baseboard heater, allowing a single cat to snooze there and take in all that heat.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm a crazy cat person who also lives in a neighborhood of a major city (Jamaica Plain, Boston). I have 3 cats. I have often dreamed of building them something like this, but the insane drivers around here have discouraged me.

My neighbor let's his cat in and out through a small door he made into a back window, and she is the fattest laziest cat I've ever seen, and has never been run over. But I just can't get over the car issue.

<comment><USER7> Given all the dangers to an outdoor cat, not to mention all the dangers __from __an outdoor cat (there was a recent story on HN about how domestic cats decimate local wildlife), there 's really no reason for a cat to live anywhere but safely indoors. Keep your cats inside.

<comment><USER8> Sorry to be blunt but this is BS. Keeping a cat indoors is simply cruel. Cats need space.

A house cat has a hunting ground around their home with a radius of 500m average. Male house cats can have up three times that even.

If you absolutely want to have a cat and live in the inner city either get an old cat that (unfortunately) grew up indoors already or don't get a cat at all.

<comment><USER9> Cats that go outdoors get maimed. Lost. Stolen. Attacked. Run over. Are obese from eating their home food, hunted preys, and fed by neighbors. Live on average 7 years.

Cats who stay indoors are much healthier, live 15-20 years, and are just as happy. Of course you need to play with them more so they don't get bored, they need to have access to windows to look at interesting things all day. But it's really only cruel if you expect your cat to live its own life without ever going outdoors. Otherwise they really don't care.

Ask any vet what they think of letting cats outdoors, you'd be surprised.

And in the case of declawed cats: the pain can be so strong for the rest of their lives that it can drive them nuts causing all sorts of behavior problems. It's illegal in a lot of places because _that_ is cruel.

<comment><USER10> My last cat was an outside cat and was never stolen, only attacked once by another cat, got lost once (found by a kind stranger who rang the number on his collar), was never run over despite his habit of sunning himself in the middle of public car parking spaces (people used to wait for him to get out of the way), eventually got a bit plump when he _stopped_ hunting as he got older and finally died aged sixteen.

So, who's anecdote is worth more? Or should we just agree that not all cats are alike, not all environments are alike

<comment><USER9> Yours is an anecdote alright. I'm glad your cat was fine outdoors. If you don't believe me, ask your vet what they think they probably are much more knowledgeable than you or me on the question.

See also [https://www.americanhumane.org/fact-sheet/indoor-cats-vs- out...](https://www.americanhumane.org/fact-sheet/indoor-cats-vs-outdoor- cats/), [http://www.thehumanesociety.org/wp- content/uploads/2013/04/i...](http://www.thehumanesociety.org/wp- content/uploads/2013/04/indoors_outdoors.pdf) (PDF warning)

<comment><USER10> No vet I have ever spoken to has volunteered any opinion on my cat going outside. Perhaps this is common in the US but it certainly isn't in the UK and Norway.

Here is the UK Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals advice regarding cats: [https://www.rspca.org.uk/adviceandwelfare/pets/cats](https://www.rspca.org.uk/adviceandwelfare/pets/cats)

Notice how it has a link to another page titled "Help keep your cat safe outside"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is fun survey. I'd never heard of anything like this before on a larger scale, but a friend in small city in New York has some ramps set up to let his cat out the window and down a story from the roof to let his cat roam. I'd love something like this for my cat but think I'd end up with a fox or a skunk wandering in uninvited.

<comment><USER12> i put up about 20 cat stairs/platforms on the _inside_ of my apartment, along a whole wall and wrapping around my breakfast nook, comprised of 4 main paths and 3 different entry points. there are 2 cat beds, a cat grass planter, and 2 sunning platforms incorporated. it was a fun project and my cat (and former cats) loves it! when she gets the zoomies, she'll do laps up and down the stairs out to the other room and back.

i should note that these swiss cat ladders were a partial inspiration, having run across a similar article a few years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Once an outdoor cat, always an outdoor cat." That is true in many cases, but there are exceptions. One of my cats is a rescued feral -- he spent the first six months of his life outside, but has been an indoor cat (as all of mine are) ever since, some 13 years on, and has never shown any sign of wanting to go outside.

<comment><USER14> I think "outdoor cat" in this context means a cat that lives inside with a human but is allowed outside, i.e. a cat that spends time outside but still has a safe place to call home. A feral cat is quite a bit different, and I'm not surprised that a previously feral cat would greatly value the safety and security of an all-indoor life.

<comment><USER15> There are mid-ways.

We have 1 cat that is "internal" i.e. can enter the house (and is normally given food inside) but of course is free to go outside in the garden and 3 cats that are "outdoor" cats, meaning they won't enter the house but are always around the house and are fed as well (outside).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article seems to be 90% a rip-off of the source: [https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cat- ladders](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cat-ladders)

<comment><USER17> Seems strange to me that you've named it as a rip-off of atlasobscura when both articles clearly credit the book "Swiss Cat Ladders" [1] as the source of both the information and the images.

[1] [https://brigitteschuster.com/swiss-cat- ladders](https://brigitteschuster.com/swiss-cat-ladders)

<comment><USER18> Yeah and it's a pretty common podcast pattern. Find a book about an interesting/obscure topic of some sort and build a podcast around it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Probably not many songbirds in Bern

<comment> Y-bar Does your cat catch birds? I have had cat(s) for most of my life, currently two. They are proficient hunters, they can catch rodents and lizards and wasps, even a hare once. But never have any one of my current or previous cats caught a single bird.

I wonder, if the "common wisdom" of cats really catching and killing so many birds really is true?

<comment><USER20> [https://www.npr.org/2020/04/18/820953617/the-killer-at- home-...](https://www.npr.org/2020/04/18/820953617/the-killer-at-home-house- cats-have-more-impact-on-local-wildlife-than-wild-preda)

<comment> Y-bar I know it is a scientific study published in Nature that the NPR article is based on. Cats kill birds, I have zero doubts, cats kill lots of birds, that's likely. Cats kill as much as that estimate says, I have significant doubts. For multiple reasons:

Whenever a predator kills a bird there will be traces such as a bunch of feathers and inedible parts at the location of the kill and/or consumption. Never seen a single one of those.

It is a single estimate, never replicated.

There are hundreds of starlings, tits, and other small birds in my neighbourhood. It's not like birds are a scarce resource. Nether do they seem especially held back by the local cats.

<comment><USER21> Animals must die all the time with minimal evidence left for humans to see. The lack of bodies is just indicates that the animal was rapidly consumed. Whenever I have seen dead birds outside they never last long.

<comment> Y-bar My cats aren't/weren't subtle when they catch and eat prey. Neither are birds of prey or other vultures, when devouring another bird.

The cats I own and had over the past decades have gifted me hundreds of dead of half dead animals. Some of those cats were prolific killers.

I never witnessed a successful bird hunt, never received a bird as a gift. And most importantly: If there is any single animal which can easily leave traces of inedible stuff like feathers, down, beaks, claws — it's birds. I never even have found traces of a killed bird, on the ground or in scat.

Despite this, I have no doubt cats kill a lot of birds. It's just that a lone study with p<0.1 (rather than the classic p<0.05) is so far removed the reality I actually observe I can't help but to have my doubts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I bought this book for my wife (who is swiss). It's quite well produced and has a good deal of photographs. Recommended!

</comment><comment><USER23> The first week of quarantine we built a "catio" as we'd wanted one for a long while. Great family project as I got to teach the kids the basics of construction. Basically a large, three-tired chicken coop style structure the cats can access via a window. Cats as definitely happier to have the outdoor time. We have also used a cat stroller in the past (we aren't crazy cat people, honestly ;-)) but this is a better solution so the cats can choose how much time to spend outside.

</comment><comment><USER24> That's great for the cats. But it looks a bit over engineered. Nailing a curved piece of wood to the wall would also do the trick. Cats are very good at climbing trees.

<comment><USER4> >> But it looks a bit over engineered.

Welcome to Switzerland, the origin of the Swiss army knife :)

<comment><USER25> And the home of hand-crafted mechanical watches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> We had something like this inside of the house. From the cellar to slightly above the floor so the cad door could be installed in a way totally unvisible from outside. The cat could duck under the outer skirt of the house and use the door and then the inside infrastructure to go eat and do private buissness.</comment>


Twitter Trademark and Content Display Policy - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/logo

<comment><USER2> Is Twitter out of their mind?

Someone requires _permission_ to publish a screensnap of a tweet that's an ad or someone else's Twitter webpage?</comment>


Snowden journalist to publish UK secrets - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/19/us-usa-security-snowden-brazil-idUSBRE97I0LZ20130819 <comment><USER2> Greenwald's response...

"Reuters is the absolute worst at tearing comments out of context for sensationalizing headlines. The paraphrase:

Q: Will the UK's detention of your partner deter your future reporting?

A: Absolutely not. If anything, it will do the opposite. It will embolden me: I have many more documents to report on, including ones about the UK, where I'll now focus more. I will be more aggressive, not less, in reporting.

Q: What effect do you think they'll be of the UK's detention of your partner?

A: When they do things like this, they show the world their real character. It'll backfire. I think they'll come to regret it.

REUTERS: HE VOWS TO PUBLISH DOCUMENTS ABOUT UK AFTER DETENTION, SAYS THEY WILL BE SORRY!!!"

[http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1rm09tf](http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1rm09tf)

<comment><USER3> The problem is going to be that the UK tabloids will pick up the Reuters feed and then make it sound like some barmy American is threatening Our Brave Lads. Guardian readers + other 'broadsheet' readers are not the voters who elect governments over here...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's the pessimistic view: the authorities intentionally did this (detained Miranda) to provoke GG into releasing classified documents in a way that the popular press would interpret as "in retaliation"... thus setting up the perception in the public's eyes that GG is acting in a non-journalistic way, in a personal way, perhaps as a personal crusade "against the state"... thus making it easier for the public to swallow the idea that GG is an enemy of the state, not a journalist

<comment><USER5> That's a particularly pessimistic view of the authorities' grasp of media relations: the British mainstream public are far more likely to be interested in "how's the journalist the government tried to silence going to respond" than "what's that occasional contributor to a newspaper far too left-wing and longwinded for me to actually read got to say for himself"

If the UK government wanted the right wing media to smear GG they were best off letting them get on with it

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2350153/Journalist-h...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2350153/Journalist- helped-Edward-Snowden-expose-NSA-scandal-previously-sued-business-partner- running-Hairy-Jocks-porn-business.html)

rather than encouraging them to change their tune

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2396745/Edward- Snowd...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2396745/Edward-Snowden- journalist-Glenn-Greenwalds-partner-David-Miranda-detained-Heathrow- airport.html)

<comment><USER4> I agree with what you say... but I meant the media more generally not just the right-wing media

I can see the headlines on the nightly news: "journalist GG retaliates against UK government's detention of his gay lover by publicly releasing classified documents"

and then all of a sudden it's about GG vs the government instead of what it should be, the govt vs the public interest

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's pretty horrible that airports are now used as weapons by countries against their citizens, not even for crimes but just to see what they can find. I mean somewhere, someone in charge picked up the phone or typed into a computer "hold him", there was no miscommunication or misunderstanding here. It was clear abuse of power, just because they could.

By the way, they can do the same thing to you if you live within 100 miles of a US border, you do not have to be crossing it, they can just do a border stop 100 miles in regardless where or how you are traveling. You don't have any rights at that point because of anti-terrorism laws and they can seize things and clone your phone. This is not even remotely an exaggeration.

[http://news.yahoo.com/does-constitution-free-zone-really- exi...](http://news.yahoo.com/does-constitution-free-zone-really-exist- america-195813138.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> This article makes it seem like Greenwald would be releasing the 'secrets' in a retaliatory manner, rather than (what I believe to be) his original intentions to release them anyway, to show that he is undeterred.

Does this seem disingenuous to anyone else? Why play up the (potentially non- existent) retaliatory angle?

<comment><USER8> The governments and intelligence communities are desperate to turn the tide against a person rather than the agencies involved, and delegitimize Greenwald as a journalist. The story is out of control as far as the governments are concerned, and their bluntest weapons are violence (not yet) and character assassination.

<comment><USER9> I'm not surprised they are scared. Mr. Greenwald has written a New York Times bestselling book on executive authority, broken multiple storoes on his blog about wiretapping that each led to front-page stories on most major newspapers in the country, and Russ Feingold read from my blog during the censure hearings.

I don't think there has ever been a journalist as brave.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some people may be concerned that these secrets are only going to be published because they attacked him personally. I think this is misguided.

I am more concerned by the idea that they might have otherwise gone unpublished. Hopefully he is just changing the planned release date.

<comment><USER9> I would be the first to say his style can be bombastic and he can be overly aggressive. But nobody denies that he's very smart, and among liberal bloggers at least, very moderate and rational in his view, and unusually willing to engage debate. So it is hard to figure out what there could be about the guy that generates such strong emotions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Releasing information as revenge for illegal detention is the wrong decision, why make it personal? Confront the illegal detention if it was illegal but don't make it reactionary and petty like this.

<comment><USER12> he's been taken way out of context. see other comments here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think a better headline would be:

 _Guardian to publish about UK 's espionage equivalent of NSA program_.

This headline paints it as a Britain vs. Greenwald in sort of revenge tone which, though possible, is incorrect. Besides revelations about 100% espionage is not about a tussle between two fighting children right?</comment>


A Re-Birth for Enterprise Software? [video] - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/05/andreessen-enterprise-software/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is really encouraging. I caught this small bit when I was listening to the interview on the treadmill this morning. I was actually going to email Mike and ask if he could go into the topic more. I'm glad this post was created. The explosion of SaaS apps is absolutely mind blowing. We're cataloging 300+ apps already on Cloudomatic. Some things I've noticed, since I've spent time looking at each app we list:

\- Most of these companies did not exist 18 months ago. The ones that did, were definitely much smaller. This is mind blowing.

\- A LOT of the apps are of high quality. The design, value prop, pricing, etc. seems spot on. I haven't tested them all, but from first glance, I'm impressed by most apps.

\- I spend a lot of time in the SaaS sector specifically, and even more so in the web app space as a whole. I've never heard of most of these apps, and it stuns me how many are out there. We're just hitting the tip of the iceberg. There are a ton of underserved niches waiting to take your credit cards.

\- I used to run a SaaS startup back in 2008. There were no recurring billing solutions for small SaaS startups. Seriously, you had to build this shit yourself. Now there are FOUR players. <http://cloudomatic.com/?s=recurring+billing> . Something is clearly going on here, if four companies have sprung up in under 18 months to meet this exact need.

\- There are big market numbers being thrown around. I think they're overestimating for the near term, but underestimating for the long term. Google Apps is only doing 50 million this year, but that's irrelevant. The fact that it's some number that's growing + goog apps is being used as a bargaining chip by companies is what matters. Who knows if GOOG will win with G Apps long term, but the SaaS market certainly is/will.

\- I can't comment on Enterprise adoption ie- very very large companies with red tape laden IT departments. They will be the last to adopt and that's fine. Small and medium sized businesses are adopting this stuff right now. The Enterprise will follow down the road, probably with their own stipulations.

\- Build HTML 5 offline access into your SaaS app. SaaS right now does a poor job of passing the "can I use it on a plane" test. This also helps the "what if my net goes down?" problem.

\- The hardest part for SaaS startups is getting distribution and customer acquisition. You don't get the viral mechanics of a consumer web app and you don't get the distribution that packaged software got in the 80s+90s with catalogs, resellers, retail stores,etc. We're hoping to solve the latter with Cloudomatic.

(I just wrote these points off the cuff. I hope to gather some more concreate and in-depth points over the next couple of weeks.)

<comment><USER2> The last bullet point matters most to me and predictably many others. If you figure it out in a big way, you'll have a winner on your hands.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Enriching books with personal experiences - <AUTHOR> https://booxia.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN, founder here. Would appreciate any thoughts you have on the project, and how to make it more interesting/useful. Thank you!</comment>


The Mouse Is Dead. I Just Killed It. Now Can We Move On? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/27/the-mouse-is-dead/

<comment><USER2> The argument that mice are dead because they're a fifty year old technology is bunk (how old are keyboards again?). But that doesn't mean mice will be mainstream forever.

<comment><USER3> The keyboard originated with the first typewriters, end of the 19th century (100+ years). Nothing much changed with them, not even the layout.

And you are right, the mouse won't leave us any time soon. It's very ergonomic. You can use it while your arm is mostly at rest (reinforced by the table).

These kind of pads are nice for short time playing, but they are not useful for actual work where you sit 8/5 in front of a screen.

But it will have it's niche market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The mouse is definitely dead. I killed it and replaced it with a thumb-track ball ages ago. It's absurdly bulky, but it is almost always in my laptop bag.

The trackpads on the Mac laptops are indeed nice to use, but it's still nicer to have a dedicated device for manipulating the mouse. And if I'm going to carry around a dedicated device, I want something with tangible feedback.

</comment><comment><USER5> Siegler's earlier article was complete unprofessional flamebait and also acting as if Apple is the first company to ever produce an input device that's an alternative to the mouse. This article is just some lame attempt at backtracking without going back on what he said. I'm done with Techcrunch.

</comment><comment><USER6> The arguments that college students all use their mouse's trackpad is not because they prefer it over the mouse, but because they don't either have a mouse (don't think of buying one) and/or they do not want to be bothered taking it with them everywhere.

I'm sure there are students out there that prefer the trackpad, but everybody I've ever met prefers using a mouse over a trackpad any day.

Maybe the reason for the trackpad not being more popular/comfortable as a pointing device stems from the fact that the current trackpads out there are not good enough and the apple trackpad might change all that, but as things stand now, the trackpad is not replacing the mouse.

<comment><USER7> When I was attending university there was the added issue of not having anywhere to use the mouse in the first place. Sure I could maybe use it on top of the laptop case itself but at that point it's so restrictive the track pad is easier. Had there not been as many people as possible packed into a lecture hall, or the classes built with tiny desktops designed for a notepad and pen then it may not have been an issue but other than the newest buildings on campus the facilities really didn't support a laptop/mouse combo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I do not get why a keyboard is not needed. How do you write on an iPad?

<comment><USER9> If you're only/mostly consuming media, you don't really need a keyboard. For small amounts of typing, on screen keyboards will suffice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You can kill the mouse when your laptop comes with a built in trackpoint and not a moment before.

Trackpads are third rate input devices at best, and should be faced out.

</comment><comment><USER11> Apple's Trackpad, the ultimate Mouse trap?</comment>


Only one founder taking salary -- should it impact equity? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a co-founder in a two-person startup. We each have equity (60/40). We both work full-time on the startup. The other founder has worked on the project longer (thus the additional equity).
We have started positive cash flow and I need to start drawing a survival salary. The other founder does not.
To be fair, should I give back some of my equity in exchange for the salary that I draw out of the company? Should the exchange be dollar for dollar, based on some estimated valuation and percentage calculation? <comment><USER2> The equity question really only matters if you are 50/50 and it would be an issue of control. You're already a minority holder. Is there a big difference between 40% and 39.5% ownership?

You should have a talk with your cofounder about at what point it makes sense for both of you to draw something. Trading equity for cash isn't a bad idea in the sense it forces you to come up with a valuation for the business. But it also forces your partner to carry more risk and encourages you to approach the business as an ATM instead of an investment. It may be fairer to split what you would consider a "survival salary" two ways.

If you have revenue and growth, these problems will seem quaint in a couple of months or a year.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a tricky one. If you need a salary and he doesn't, it isn't fair to you as you are in a position of need and he/she isn't. I would be reluctant to give any equity back, try to negotiate with your partner. Perhaps you should both take a salary? Your co-founder needs to be empathetic to your needs, regardless of his or her own lack of need. This is a good test of your relationship.

Obviously if the other founder doesn't need money then they are either financially well off (you should get paid) or they don't have any overhead or personal expenses, as in they live at home with parents (you should get paid).</comment>


Ask HN: Got talent overflow - <AUTHOR>

So, I keep reading posts telling us there is a huge shortage of talent in the valley and everywhere. And then I look around, and I got at least a dozen super talented people unable to get the work they want.
CONTEXT: Been developing for 10 years now, from army days, where I built a large network of great developers *. Many of them worked in the big names here (MS/Intel/Google/Nice/etc) and/or got offers of either to work or relocate with others. But they went the startup way and now slowly trickle back to the market looking for freelance and project work.
And while amazon gladly offered my friend $120K to relocate to the states, no one is willing to give him a freelance project if he wants above $50/hour (unless he sits full time in their office and becomes de-facto employee).
Can someone explain how this can be ?
(o) To be clear, these are Java / C# / Rails, areas that should be super hot (even had an Android dev who couldn't find a decent project). <comment><USER2> Because you're talking about two different markets, when you're talking about applying for a job as a full-time in-office employee you're basically competing with the limited pool of people in the local area.

If you're applying for a remote freelancer role, you're competing against people all around the world. Not only are there more of them but many of them will live in areas where their cost of living is an order of magnitude lower than yours.

That's the fundamental reason remote freelancers earn less than in-house employees.

If remote-freelancers were equivalent to local employees then arbitrage would drive down the price of local employees, but they're not. Companies place a premium on local employees (less overhead, better team dynamics, long term investment, stronger IP protection, etc.) and that's why local employee salaries haven't been driven down.

</comment><comment><USER3> Contrary to what people here tell you, its not so easy getting pad anything above $50/hour as a freelancer. Its possible (I charge more than that and have a healthy stream of customers), but it takes a lot of marketing in your part. If you can't market yourself, then you are better off charging less. In fact, I've been thinking about lowering my prices in order to have more time for other projects (most notably Nuuton).

<comment><USER4> I don't really think this is true. I'm in a small market full of stingy clients, and most developers sell their time to each other at $50 an hour and bill clients at $80-150 an hour.

It really depends on your goal. If your goal is to work with good clients and spend a bit more time on sales (maybe a 40/60 split), then a higher rate is what you want. If you want to spend more time developing and less time on sales (say, 20/80), then your rate will probably be half of what it could have been.

If you don't want to do sales at all, and just focus on development, you're not going to be able to make it as a freelancer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Where are you based? You mentioned you do not want to work in-house and become a de-facto employee, but are you in a position to do a face to face to kick off a relationship?

I run a startup called Dragonfly (<http://dragonflylist.com>) and we've found that creative and digital agencies are always looking to take on freelancers (at well above $50 per hour). The only barrier with remote work is trust, which is why most jobs on Dragonfly start with a face to face, meet and greet, and then become remote. Bigger clients, like agencies, just want to know they can depend on the freelancer. The risk for them is that the project isn't delivered and their client leaves (which could be 100k or even a million dollar loss, the development side is not necessarily the biggest part of the brief)

Keen to hear more about your story, this is exactly the problem we're aiming to solve. Email me: email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER6> Always felt like a price / market issue to me.

They see everyone around them hire full time developers at $100+K/year And they see everyone getting freelancers at $40/hour

So they assume this is how things are.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've noticed it depends on the type of company too. For example, startups tend to be comfortable with remote working arrangements and paying a better rate, while traditional big companies and/or agencies of many sizes want your ass in their seat and paying you as little as possible.

We recently opened up the beta of matchist (<http://matchist.com>) to help those freelancer web/mobile developers out there looking for quality work (at quality wages) find it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Just a side note but talent isn't just in coding ability. All else being equal, what ig1 said.</comment>


Ask HN:  How should I handle this weird situation with angel investors? - <AUTHOR>

Let's assume I get angel funding for a Travel Site.  Neither I nor the Angels knew if the site would be successful or what kind of products we would launch in the future.  Angels take 10% of the company, the site grows and eventually launches additional sites that target a similar audience - perhaps Luggage Buyers.  Angels now own 10% of the Travel Site plus all the other sites that were created.  This is all good so far.
Now let's assume I get angel funding for the same Travel Site, but this time, I have a complete strategy in place that outlines all the future sites we're going to launch once this becomes successful.
Is it better to let the Angels know what the plans are for the future sites, so that they are more eager to invest?  Or should you keep it to yourself in case the Travel Site fails, in which case you can still go after those opportunities yourself without worrying about legal issues from the Angels?
Also, if you do let the Angels know about the future sites, is it possible to stipulate that they will not be automatically invested in those sites? <comment><USER2> I think you need to get it established early on whether your other ideas are included in the deal. Ideally, you and your investors would be aligned fully, and you could bring them along for the ride... my 2 cents

</comment><comment><USER3> If you can create a hit travel site, the pennies don't matter.</comment>


Reddit AMA about North Korea - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18g7z1/i_have_been_to_north_korea_over_100_times_ama/

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought I'd post this since discussion about North Korea has been so popular in the recent past. :)</comment>