Twitter IDs to roll past 53 bits in a couple days (may break javascript apps) - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/6a16efa375532182?pli=1

<comment><USER2> For those wondering where 53 bits comes from, it's the size of the mantissa (significand, fraction) in a 64bit IEEE float.

You can use 64bit floats (double) to store exact integers up to 53 bits.

This works in a lot of languages on non 64bit hardware, php for example.

</comment><comment><USER3> My rule of thumb is to use strings for all IDs that belong to external systems. A bunch of people got burned in the same way a few years ago when Flickr photo IDs rolled past 32 bits.

<comment><USER4> Still surprised people use incrementing ints for ids over uuids for web apis that may become immense.

<http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4122.txt>

uuids are made just for this purpose, string based, never bigger than 40 characters (with dashes and curly braces).

Most products use uuids or Microsoft's name for them guids.

<comment><USER5> I prefer my ID's universally unique. I worry that globally unique ID's won't scale as we begin to colonize other planets. (yes, its a joke.)

<comment><USER6> Stating it is a joke kind of ruined the joke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When the first 32-bit troubles occurred, they should have just switched to a string-based ID, IMO.

<comment><USER8> That was my first thought... who on earth thought that a number (albeit 64-bit) would be enough for Twitter? Who even thought that a 32bit int would have been enough?

I didn't know that Javascript couldn't handle numbers bigger than 53-bits, but honestly, these should have been strings from the beginning.

<comment><USER9> 64 bits is enough to have everyone on Earth send over a billion Tweets and still have enough room to find a new solution. That sounds like more than enough to me.

<comment><USER10> The problem is they added a timestamp and people assumed they would not need the full 64 bit ID.

IMO, it's not a bad idea on their part. A 32 bit UNIX timestamp * 2 ^ 32 + a 32 bit sequential id let's them track up to 4.2 billion tweets a second and should work just find up to the year 2106.

Edit: As to why it's a good idea, you can have different systems handing out ID's without stepping on each other's toes or even talking to each other. _The full ID is composed of a timestamp, a worker number, and a sequence number._ Granted, I would probably put the sequence number ahead of the worker number so sub second tweets are better ordered vs. being ordered strictly based on the system that generated them.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I guess this is why I didn't understand how they could use 64 bit numbers to begin with... I couldn't see how they were going to be able to generate them all without leaving huge gaps in the number-space. If you used 64bit ints you'd be unable to have one machine do the generating, so you'd have to have some sort of offset for the worker who generated the ID at the very least.

And once you've done that, why not just go all out and use UUIDs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> JavaScript apps have been broken for a couple weeks now with links to things like:

<http://twitter.com/mattyglesias/statuses/7.1157195777E+15>

</comment><comment><USER12> Being in that majority of people who haven't built Twitter-scale systems in the past, could someone explain to me why Twitter is moving to a new form of twitter ID in the first place? What is wrong with their current system?

Also, it seems strange that they would include the new ID in string AND integer form in their JSON. I realize that they don't want to break existing javascript apps, but isn't there a significant bandwidth cost in adding that sort of kludge to the API when you're serving a quadrillion of these api requests every day?

<comment><USER13> How do you generate sequential IDs a quadrillion times a day if they're coming from 100 different computers? Lots of very fast coordination.

In the new system, they don't have to coordinate every server just to make sure IDs are sequential. They just use the time stamp and some machine- specific information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm going to take the opposite position of most commenters here and decry the fact that almost all programming languages get arithmetic wrong.

Adding two positive numbers should never result in a negative number. Adding a one to an integer should result in the next largest integer.

There are new languages created all the time that don't have built-in support for arbitrary precision integers or rational numbers. They might have some neat ideas, but if your language can't even get arithmetic right, it's garbage.

<comment><USER15> Arithmetic is a relatively self-contained part of a language. The problem isn't that JavaScript's arithmetic is lame, it's that they didn't leave any way for the programmer to fix it—even if you make rational bignums out of arrays of doubles (or whatever), you can't make them drop-in replacements by overloading operators. It's a strange oversight for a language which lets _instances_ override methods.

<comment><USER16> >It's a strange oversight for a language which lets instances override methods.

That's only because everything is an instance in Javascript. There are no classes, it's prototype OO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> That's truly, truly dumb on twitter's behalf. They should have started with using the whole numeric range and/or switched to string ids long ago.

As I have suggested in a post 9 months ago, and as I would have designed this system at any date since 2002 or so, the twit ID would be composed of userid bits + time bits. In the post below I suggested 32+32, but other divisions are acceptable depending on your "bot user" policy. Such an ID would at the same time be sufficient (up to 4G users, up to 5 tweets/sec/user AVERAGE, up until 2030). You can have two times as many users for just "2 tweets/sec average". Facebook only has 500M, so 4G should be sufficient.

Such a construct makes the entire system significantly simpler and more robust to "meaningful" failure. I haven't seen a single thing tweeter has done right in the technical sense.

They do deserve marketing and bizdev credit.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/b2u6t/twitter_o...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/b2u6t/twitter_opensource_a_list_of_all_open_source/c0kq7wr)

<comment><USER18> -1. With hindsight it's easy to make a comment like yours, but many clients rely on the status_id to be monotonic.

You would be changing behavior in a way that breaks apps. Twitter doesn't want to do that.

<comment><USER17> -1 all you like. It's engineering, not hindsight -- when building a system, I always ask myself "how does this scale" which usually translates to "on what attribute does this shard".

Look at e.g. YouTube and many other sites around the same time. They knew what they were doing; Twitter didn't.

I _have_ actually designed such a system in 1999, that used 48 bits, and it worked perfectly well. (Only had 28 bits for the user-id, which would have been broken at the 250M users -- alas the system never had more than than 5M; This was in the years 1999-2003).

The only way you can shard absolutely monotonic is (effectively) randomly, which is an option however you assign ids; but other assignments let you build a much cheaper, much more robust system.

<comment><USER18> I don't see how your comparison is remotely fair to Twitter. Youtube is just a website, if they wanted to change how they allocate video numbers, nobody except for rogue bots will notice.

Twitter is an API. Even if they have the knowledge of how to fix past mistakes, they need to ask for feedback, give plenty of notice, and set a deadline of when the old version is cut off.

Maybe they didn't do everything perfect day one, but I don't think there are any APIs the size of Twitter. Cut them some slack, they're not morons.

<comment><USER17> The point was exactly that YouTube, which had a simpler problem to solve at around the same time (or earlier) did it properly.

There do exist independent youtube clients (though not as many as Twitters's), but using the encoding they did, youtube has made it so that it is never going to be an issue, whereas for twitter it has already been a significant issue twice (that I'm aware of).

It's very easy to dismiss sound engineering in retrospect as luck or as "how could anyone have known".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development- talk/brow...](http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development- talk/browse_thread/thread/71c25e20ddd3e3f0)

</comment><comment><USER19> They have been doing the same thing for next page string that you have to pass back to get the next page on an API request. Assuming this has been since the new API come about at least.</comment>


Microsoft Releases Open Source ML Library for Distributed Search Engine Creation - <AUTHOR> https://aka.ms/spark <comment><AUTHOR> MMLSpark is Microsoft's open source initiative for advancing distributed computing in Apache Spark. MMLSpark provides deep-learning, intelligent microservices, model deployment, model interpretability, image-processing, and many other tools to help you build scalable and production quality machine learning applications. MMLSpark is usable from Python, Scala, Java, and R and can be used on any Spark cluster. For more information and setup instructions, see our github page:

[https://github.com/Azure/mmlspark](https://github.com/Azure/mmlspark)

Thank you!

<comment><USER2> Having evaluated Spark extensively for my company's ML use cases, I came away deeply disappointed.

One thing that bugs me in particular is that it essentially presumes all workflows involve huge, distributed datasets. But most model development work, especially for projects that will eventually be trained for production using huge, distributed data sets, must begin their life cycle as small data prototypes with extremely low-overhead development cycles. I've never found a way to organize Spark so that it can handle both tiny WIP prototyping and also production ML workloads. Inevitably you end up with two separated tool stacks and lots of kludgy processes to migrate from a successful prototype over to a Spark implementation, because the repeated overhead of Spark in the small prototype phase is far too costly and limiting.

Other gripes include "bring your own container" solutions for controling the surrounding runtime details of different models on a project-by-project basis, and for Python at least, how to entirely bypass py4j and eliminate all JVM overhead, especially when working in cases that heavily rely on custom Python extension modules and extension types.

To boot, for use cases when you have to write your own likelihood functions for models that don't already exist in Spark libraries, and potentially you need to get down to the level of tuning the actual optimizer you'll use to train, Spark is extremely opaque and full of incomprehensible errors and debugging issues. Not to mention that ideally you'd like to write those routines once and be able to use them across any development environments (whether executing via Spark or not), it leads to incentives towards "vendor lock in" effects where you don't even try things at all unless they are out of the box in Spark.

All this is to say, I wish that initiatives moving towards the very generous goal of open-sourcing ML tools to the community would view the idea of portability across different runtime environment / cluster computing / backend storage models to be a first-class requirement.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks for your interesting point of view on Spark. I do a lot of my small data prototyping in Spark in single machine mode and it has worked for me thus far :).

For the likelihood functions comment, I would totally agree. Autograd libraries are easier to build custom likelihood models in, which is why we created CNTK on Spark, and databricks created Tensorflow on Spark. These give you the flexibility of modern deep learning stacks with the elasticity of spark

But in the end Spark is a single tool in a collection of tools and might not be right for your project, but it's been good for a lot of our work here at MSFT :)!

<comment><USER2> On the point about autograd tools, it's unfortunately not always helpful for types of models that are not amenable to that type of framework, like gradient-free methods, custom Bayesian inference models, or modified versions of some traditional models (like bias-corrected logistic regression).

Here again, if you tie machine learning to a big system like Spark, which is typically a huge IT cost in a lot of companies, and if they commit to having an underlying data model suitable for Spark, it necessitates orienting everything around Spark (someone with the scale of Microsoft might not suffer this problem like everybody else)... all together it just renders Spark to be usually such a limiting choice as to make it totally impractical to standardize on it and give up all the other types of models or data storage and cluster computing techniques you might need on a project-by-project basis.

<comment><AUTHOR> I definitely would agree that you should pick the best tool for the job and not limit yourself to one ecosystem if it's too difficult.

One way to make Spark a bit easier to work with is through kubernetes or a tool like databricks that provides it as a service. Kubernetes, in particular, provides you a really nice amount of flexibility and composability when designing systems. One thing that we created to try to fill the gap of having to integrate System X with Spark was HTTP on Spark. This makes it easy to integrate Spark with other tools in a microservice architecture. When you couple this with containers, you can do a lot very quickly.

For datatypes I would look into different Spark connectors, these days there one for almost every database/streaming service/ cloud store under the sun.

This being said, Spark is a large piece of software that uses many different programming concepts which can be daunting. Our goal is to try to listen to feedback like this so we can try to make the Spark ecosystem a bit easier to use for everyone.

<comment><USER2> This is actually the part I most disagree with. The overhead of connectors to Spark, particularly _any_ use of py4j, is far too limiting except in cases when the data workload is so large that it effectively amortizes the overhead. For small scale prototypes, it's a disaster, and then separate there are concerns for data type marshaling through the JVM when you may have a Python- only data model.

At the time of evaluation for me, I also found Databricks had extremely limited support for runtime environments defined by arbitrary containers. You have to select cluster nodes according to their prescribed images and choices.

Say you need Tensorflow or CUDA compiled with a weird set of optimization flags, or you need other special provisions in the runtime environment. In fact, variations of the runtime environment may even be part of some reproducible experiments, so you need to execute across a variety of parameters that govern _how the runtime is built_.

Anything that can't support this type of stuff out of the box is just not worth it. Anybody can hook a notebook environment up to analyze data from some data warehouse or distributed file system.

The hard part is always how to make that setup configurable and parameterizable across the needs of different projects, especially arbitrary runtime environments.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Workout Regimen for in shape hackers - <AUTHOR>

I've been working out for the past 3 months now and have made some progress but want to gain more muscle. My current regimen is 120 crunches, 100 push ups, and 40 chin ups 5 times a week as well as 50 body squats 3 times a week for legs. Can any one suggest any improvements for my regimen? I've also been thinking of using creatine what do you guys think? Thanks! <comment><USER2> you won't gain muscle doing crunches and pushups. your two best options are either joining a gym and doing a proper routine, or find ways to add weight to bodyweight exercises. creatine won't do much for you. make sure to eat a lot of calories and get your protein.</comment>


An Untold Startup Story - <AUTHOR> http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/an-untold-startup-story <comment><USER2> This is a pretty awful story--I'm very saddened that the author went through it. An interesting observation she makes:

 _" I know companies are recognised as separate entities, but they are established by people and shaped by people's decisions and those decisions have an impact on people; therefore business is never just business. (And, if you reverse engineer that equation, ultimately what's best for the people will be what's best for the company)."_

~

Startups, because they blur so heavily the line between personal and business, present a place that can be very exciting and very strange. Combine this with the somewhat young folks that seem to be trying to get in on things, and things can get really rough really quickly.

I was at coffee the other day with a friend and we kicked around the idea of "startups and startup ecosystems as liminal spaces"\--places where normal cultural mores and standards do not apply. I think there's something to that.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't really understand why she didn't take the guy up on his offer to resign. She did seem incapable of working with him or at his incubator after that. It was a good offer on his part, especially considering they didn't even have sex, just sleeping together on the same couch and him touching her breasts.

I don't think that result was even strange. They were both very drunk, staying the same place, she didn't go back to her room at the end, and she told the similarly drunk guy she was cold - a standard hookup line to initiate hugging, which is all that happened.

I've gotten clothed hugs from friends regularly who would never sleep with me. I've gotten hands under clothes both other people's under mine touching genitals and mine under theirs in bars and at pools and beaches and the like with people I had only met that one time. I think it is wrong that it happened in this case where she didn't want it, but it just doesn't seem the world ending thing to me like she treated it.

<comment><USER4> > she told the similarly drunk guy she was cold - a standard hookup line to > initiate hugging, which is all that happened

"I woke up with my pants undone and down (but not completely removed). My top and bra around my neck, and to my horror, Matt behind me. Holding me."

Sure doesn't sound like just hugging. Also her post doesn't say she simply told the guy she was cold, it says she directly asked him to turn on the heater. Either way, what's said to have happened next would be a very clear indication that she didn't mean anything romantic of it:

"I got stronger and stronger – ending in forcibly pushing him away"

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's terrible that shame is used as a mechanism to prevent victims from bringing justice (in whatever form) to their victimizer. The power you have is in the truth, all of it - names included. I'm glad you spoke up.

<comment><USER6> As you can see from the comments on the current HN thread about Github's second statement (which I think is a significant improvement on their first one), making specific statements typically only makes this worse for women in tech: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7662190](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7662190)

<comment><USER5> I don't know that the two situations make for a good comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Which accelerator was this?

<comment> throwaway04-29 Unfortunately the article is really short on identifying details. I'm assuming the names in the article are fake.

However, the fact that she gave up control of the company to the accelerator is unusual.

Lightbank Start, which doesn't have a website anymore (defunct?) took 50% equity. And it was founded by two men. Could that be it?</comment></comment>


Facebook to release first-party cookie option for ads, pull Safari analytics - <AUTHOR> https://marketingland.com/facebook-to-release-first-party-pixel-for-ads-web-analytics-from-browsers-like-safari-249478 <comment><USER2> I guess in theory this should be good because third party scripts are a big part of the security issue with ad tracking, but do we have any reason to believe people won't use this _in addition_ to third party scripts?

Every company I have worked at lets tracking/analytics be handled by the marketing team, who's default is to dump every script they can find into each page.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you work at home with at-home children? - <AUTHOR> As a side-effect of the current coronavirus precautions, I was recently faced with a one week stretch of working from home while taking care alone of a young child who found themself unexpectedly on holiday/homeschooled.
This is a situation in which no grandparent or nanny could intervene and getting out of the house is severely limited by the current situationn. Needless to say, my productivity was suboptimal and the week was quite stressful for both parent (trying to work) and child (parent is here, but won't play).
Does anyone have experience that could help? I'd very much like to avoid putting my kid in front of the TV or a game console for one entire week. <comment><USER2> Stuck at home alone with your kids during COVID-19 Don't freak out.. [https://medium.com/@manisharoses/schools-kids-and- covid-19-3...](https://medium.com/@manisharoses/schools-kids-and- covid-19-3c8c96272090?fbclid=IwAR1EE_ou71-bssOpKsvoasP3Jm50seaWrlExUE3EhTh4ivIFwPHak2_cvDY)

<comment><AUTHOR> Your links (including [https://www.modulo.app/covid19](https://www.modulo.app/covid19)) look very useful, thanks.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, they cover only half of the problem: I'm not a stay-at-home parent, I'm a work-from-home parent, which means that I have to spend slots of at least one hour concentrating on my work if I want to have any chance of getting anything done!

<comment><USER2> I'm working on a new open-sourced doc of activities kids can do that require zero parent involvement and can keep them engaged and learning for hours. View here. [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KCFnWreu4v7VoO3NbgP-...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KCFnWreu4v7VoO3NbgP- Qcq2LyE1FvliYSoiTLRY7Qg/edit#gid=1594403014)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> How old is the kid? Only one? How big is the home? Does it has a background to play?

Some painting books may help. There are versions for different levels, from small kids to the Brain/Neuroscience painting book.

There are also some nice educative apps. (But many are boring, with bright color to compensate.) Perhaps you can program one.

Can you lock yourself in a room for a "teleconference"? Perhaps your kid can understand that.

Can the grandparents play with the kid by Skype?

Expect to have less working hours than usual. Can your S.O. help here? Can you take turns to care the kid and work?

It will be a long "week" anyway, get a Netflix subscription.

<comment><AUTHOR> Small home, no garden, no room for an office.

Precocious kid, needs to be stimulated permanently.

No S.O. in the picture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Hi Yoric, a big box with crayons inside, Legos, papers and markers, Forts, khan app kids, cosmic yoga and feel free to reach out to me: manisha[at]modulo.app I'm happy to talk and also connected to a large network of parents and teachers who educate their kids from home and have loads of expertise in this area.</comment>


Show HN: Building a Robot Journalist - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/bakken-b%C3%A6ck/building-a-robot-journalist-171554a68fa8#.z61umhuw1 <comment><USER2> "a digital football reporter that writes articles like a human."

What? Are you crazy? I thought you had written a program that removed journalist filler text from articles and presented just the data, but you did the opposite! You're making the world worse!</comment>


Python – programming is fun again - <AUTHOR> http://knivets.com/blog/python-programming-is-fun-again/ <comment><USER2> I like dynamic languages for small fun projects as much as the next person however I never found them to fit for large projects. I'm always impressed/curious how people deliver large software on a dynamic language. I guess you just have to unit test twice as much (to compensate for the compiler's checks?)

<comment><USER3> _I guess you just have to unit test twice as much (to compensate for the compiler 's checks?)_

I still personally just aim for a combination of auto-verified 100% coverage, and an intuitive sense of whether it's real testing or "call this to get it in the coverage report" testing; I also try to keep functions/methods short enough, and overall systems simple enough, to be able to think about the various code paths and ensure I have tests to cover them all.

I don't and never have worried about whether I'm appropriately type-checking everything, and in fact that idea is antithetical to why I work in Python (i.e., Python is a "care about the interfaces, not about the types" language). I have seen people coming from Java-land who write tons of "if not isinstance(some_var, some_type)" checks, but sooner or later they get over it and learn that these things are rarely if ever actually necessary.</comment></comment>


419 scam: Purporting Paul Graham - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/firstwatergatesltd.html <comment><USER2> Let us hope no literate people ever get into the 419 racket.

<comment><USER3> But then we wouldn't have cool new words like "Contactus"

<comment><USER4> If you've never seen a Contactus, you're missing out. They're really cool. They grow in the badlands of the internet, surviving for weeks without water or human interaction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Umm, shouldn't the link to the company be set up as rel="nofollow"? Having an inbound link from paulgraham.com has got to boost your pagerank massively.

EDIT: oops, I missed the

      <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">

tag, which will hopefully take care of it, although I'm not sure about its placement inside a HTML comment. Will that work?

<comment><USER6> NOODP != nofollow.

[http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35264)

 _One source we use to generate snippets is the Open Directory Project. You can direct us not to use this as a source by adding a meta tag to your pages.

To prevent all search engines (that support the meta tag) from using this information for the page's description, use the following:

<meta name="robots" content="NOODP">_

<comment><USER7> This information is correct, I'm not sure why you have been downvoted...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You know you've made it when... :-)

<comment><USER9> Is it actually an attempt to impersonate pg qua pg, or just a random scam sent with a plausible-sounding combination of first and second names? Has it been targeted at founders, or is it just that founders are the only folks likely to forward the email back to pg?

<comment><USER10> >Is it actually an attempt to impersonate pg qua pg, or just a random scam sent with a plausible-sounding combination of first and second names?

The same thought crossed my mind. Believe it or not, I used to know someone named Paul Graham BEFORE I ever heard of pg... :p

<comment><USER11> So did I. Well the first and last names are common enough that its likely ;)

But that scam looks reasonably targeted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> you have to wonder. if these poorly written engrish 419 scams have been successful enough to warrant the flood of them as well as all the media attention, how much damage could one do setting up a truly legitimate sounding one?

<comment><USER13> More damage, probably. But the thing is one would have to be well schooled in English to write a truly legitimate sounding one, and that would probably mean growing up in an English speaking country. That probably means that you live in an English speaking country (or other developed country) so you _hopefully_ have some better options than being a scamster, and there is probably more local law enforcement to stop you. That's the universe balancing things out - not that I'm defending it _at all_. All that said, I'm sure some better written scams do exist.

I wonder what the most convincing scams are (the ones for which some HN folks would maybe fall)...

<comment><USER14> Lots of english speaking countries are not developed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _Sigh_...here we go again. You do have to hand it to these people for doing a little bit of research and going as far as to set up a website for their "venture"

<comment><USER16> Yeah, you have to hand them 40% equity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> why are these things always so far fetched? If you are going to use Paul Graham name, why not use YCombinator as your company?

</comment><comment><USER18> Definitely targeting pg and not some random Paul Graham; they're even using the "Y!" favicon on their site!

</comment><comment><USER19> Lol, you know you have "geek street cred" when people are using your name to try and con other people. While this kind of sucks, I wish I have your problem someday.

</comment><comment><USER20> The grammar! Please, blind me now before I read more.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are random people getting these emails, or YC applicants? If the latter, how are they obtaining applicants email addresses?</comment>


Ask HN: Why Does the European Tech Industry Have Such a B2B Focus? - <AUTHOR> Compared to say, offering a product or service directly to customers/users? Because from what I've seen over here, the vast majority of tech companies  seem to be obssessed with delivering work for corporate clients or attempting to be the next Moz rather than offering a service for average Joes. You don't see many Uber/Airbnb/Facebook/Twitter/Apple/whatever type deals aimed at normal people.
So why is this? I did hear at one startup event (from a VC) that UK investors were hesitant to back user facing companies like their US counterparts, but that can't be all the reason, right?
Why are European tech companies so much more interested in being B2B businesses? <comment><USER4> I'd suggest that the vast bulk of software is written for inhouse use and B2B use, not consumer use. The impression you have would boil down to sample bias.

This is simply a reflection of the "structure of production": for any given consumer product, there is a _vast_ graph of exchanges and transformations that lead to it. Most of the inventory and money is not passing between consumers and consumer companies. It is in the structure of production.

Consider: manufacturing is not instantaneous. Primary resource production is not instantaneous. Transportation is not instantaneous. Tertiary services are not instantaneous. Per Little's Law, average items in a system = average throughput * average item latency. The consumer market is the throughput. The structure of production represents a _multiple_ of the consumer market.

The reason we overweight consumer brands is because they are consumer brands. Within each industry and niche, everyone knows who the leading firms are. But outside the niche, nobody knows that a) the firms exist or b) that _the niche_ exists.

But _all_ of us are in the consumer market, so we _all_ know about consumer brands (they literally make it their business to ensure this is so).

 _Every_ journalist can write about a consumer brand. _Every_ reader can read about the consumer brand. So on sheer volume, consumer brands are vastly overrepresented in the media relative to their total share of the economy.

So even a relatively small lead in consumer-facing firms will seem much larger than it actually is. B2B is a _massive_ segment in the US software market. But it's the invisible dark matter of our industry: it constitutes almost all of the mass in the software universe, but few folks realise it's there unless it's pointed out.

<comment><USER5> > So even a relatively small lead in consumer-facing firms will seem much > larger than it actually is.

No? Leading consumer brands _are_ a lot bigger than B2B brands for the most part because B2C in the aggregate economy has to be bigger than B2B (in $) and because B2B is a more fragmented and specialized market than B2C (i.e. harder to gain large market share). Just look at the biggest tech companies by market cap/valuation: Apple (B2C), Amazon (mixed, debatable), Google (B2C-designed products), Microsoft (mixed, more B2B), Facebook (B2C-designed products), Alibaba (B2C), Tencent (B2C), Oracle (B2B), IBM (B2B), Netflix (B2C), Uber (B2C), Baidu (B2C). You don't find a pure B2B company until Oracle, which is ~20% the size of the Apple.

This makes sense as well. The ultimate source of private sector profit comes from selling to the consumer. There's no point of a B2B company if there are no businesses selling to consumers (ignoring governments). If the B2B space is bigger than B2C, businesses would, on aggregate, be buying more from other businesses that they would be selling to consumers. In other words, they'd be losing money and such a system wouldn't sustainable for long. Of course, we're focusing on tech, and tech is a subsegment of the overall economy, etc., so it's possible that tech as a sector is more B2B than B2C... but this a question that will have to answered with data, not assertions.

<comment><USER6> > Just look at the biggest tech companies by market cap/valuation: Apple > (B2C), Amazon (mixed, debatable), Google (B2C-designed products), Microsoft > (mixed, more B2B), Facebook (B2C-designed products), Alibaba (B2C), Tencent > (B2C), Oracle (B2B), IBM (B2B), Netflix (B2C), Uber (B2C), Baidu (B2C). You > don't find a pure B2B company until Oracle, which is ~20% the size of the > Apple.

Google and Facebook are advertising companies - literally b2b?

<comment><USER7> Not quite. They just monetise in the manner. The core value-proposition is very much b2c in both above cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Family businesses since markets inception 2k years ago and small-to-medium businesses in the late 20th century were the norm everywhere in Europe, that's also why the EU started well as a common market. It is going tits up right now exactly because surrendering its roots to the US neo-liberist approach has killed the middle class. Many thousand businesses moving €500k/year and using money locally is much better for local communities than 5 unicorns moving €50b/year, draining that money out to fiscal havens and employing a few elite thousands people with millions left unemployed and getting more and more angry.

<comment><USER9> This comment is out of touch with the current economic reality in the US. Unemployment is the lowest it has been in decades and _real_ wages are rising. Meanwhile emerging markets all around the world are crumbling.

Is there always a segment of the population that believe the economic apocalypse is about to happen (or in this case happening)? If you want me to believe your doom and gloom try providing actual statistics that back up your assertions instead of vague hand wavings.

> Many thousand businesses moving €500k/year and using money locally is much > better for local communities than 5 unicorns moving €50b/year

Do you have a citation for this claim? Also why should we be helping "local communities" and not simply helping people?

<comment><USER10> > _This comment is out of touch with the current economic reality in the US. > Unemployment is the lowest it has been in decades and real wages are > rising._

That's because those things are increasingly more creatively measured to paint a nice picture.

For example today any crap job regardless of quality/wages/precariousness etc is measured as "unemployment", whereas in the past you could have the same number of jobs but they would be much more solid (the "company man" and so on. Heck, a GM factory worker in the 50s could buy a house and raise 2 kids earning the only income in his family).

People who given up looking for work, because they can't find any, are also not counted, while still unemployed and struggling to make ends meet.

"The stock market, for example, has completely recovered from the financial crisis, and then some. Stocks are now worth almost 60 percent more than when the crisis began in 2007, according to a inflation-adjusted measure from Moody's Analytics. But wealthy households own the bulk of stocks. Most Americans are much more dependent on their houses. That's why the net worth of the median household is still about 20 percent lower than it was in early 2007. When television commentators drone on about the Dow, they're not talking about a good measure of most people's wealth.

The unemployment rate has also become less meaningful than it once was. In recent decades, the number of idle working-age adults has surged. They are not working, not looking for work, not going to school and not taking care of children. Many of them would like to work, but they can't find a decent-paying job and have given up looking. They are not counted in the official unemployment rate."

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/opinion/columnists/great-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/opinion/columnists/great- recession-economy-gdp.html)

> _Do you have a citation for this claim? Also why should we be helping "local > communities" and not simply helping people?_

For one, because tax havens (where that money go instead of local communities, e.g. Apple's Ireland's cash stock) aren't "people".

Second because those local communities where the business is located are what should thrive first and foremost. You can't help "people" without first helping yourself.

<comment><USER9> >That's because those things are increasingly more creatively measured to paint a nice picture.

They are measured the same way they always have been

>For example today any crap job regardless of quality/wages/precariousness etc is measured as "unemployment", whereas in the past you could have the same number of jobs but they would be much more solid (the "company man" and so on. Heck, a GM factory worker in the 50s could buy a house and raise 2 kids earning the only income in his family).

Oh this talking point again. Never mind the two world wars that made it all possible

>People who given up looking for work, because they can't find any, are also not counted, while still unemployed and struggling to make ends meet.

You are aware that there are multiple unemployment statistics that are tracked and that discouraged workers are included in some of them? Nobody is purposefully ignoring discouraged workers they are just not relevant to the market because they aren't participating in it.

>For one, because tax havens (where that money go instead of local communities, e.g. Apple's Ireland's cash stock) aren't "people".

What do you think happens to money in those tax havens? Do you think they convert it all into gold coins and lock it into a scrooge mcduck style vault? It's reinvested, they purchase treasuries with it, they do research and development with it. Governments then use that money to build roads and pay employees. Those employees then go and eat out and buy cars.

<comment><USER10> > _They are measured the same way they always have been_

As I explained in the very next paragraph the creativity is in determining which people are in the workforce and which are not. Measuring the "same way they always have been" when work today is unlike it has "always has been" is like measuring inflation by the cost of commonly bought 1940s items.

> _Oh this talking point again. Never mind the two world wars that made it all > possible_

A fact doesn't change based on what made it possible.

> _You are aware that there are multiple unemployment statistics that are > tracked and that discouraged workers are included in some of them? Nobody is > purposefully ignoring discouraged workers they are just not relevant to the > market because they aren 't participating in it._

You're aware that the officially circulating numbers (U3 et all) don't show the impact of the problem by a very large margin? And that those people who "are just not relevant to the market" still need to put food on the table, pay rents, and pay medical bills...

> _What do you think happens to money in those tax havens?_

It gets further removed from the communities that fostered the companies that made it and their control, and on to the company's (or private owner's) discretion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Europe is also a lot more fractured than the USA in terms of culture and languages and laws. Something that works in Germany is much harder to make work in France as opposed to Texas/Cali.

<comment><USER12> This. In addition, an American startup has a starting potential consumer market of 300mil people speaking the same language, facing the same laws, government, customs.

That's an easier starting point, while the average European country has less than 60. (Germany has 80)

<comment><USER13> > Facing the same laws, government, customs

Except the US is a federal system, so one can argue that rather than facing the same law, you actually have 51 legal systems (states + federal government) and 51 different legislatures - most certainly not universally the "same government".

As another commenter pointed out, this rears it's head for US startups all the time, with many different sales tax implementations, drug policy (marijuana legaliszation) etc etc. Even while at work the law varies enormously - <USER2> paternity leave rights as a father in California are vastly different than many other states.

The US isn't as obviously simpler than the EU than one might expect in this regard, ~28 legal systems (if we ignore pseudo-federal arrangements like the U.K. etc) with a common core of business law established via EU statute, not 100 miles away from the common body of federal legislation found throughout the 50 states.

Cultural, language and custom differences can certainly be argued to be simpler in the US though.

<comment><USER14> > one can argue that rather than facing the same law, you actually have 51 > legal systems (states + federal government) and 51 different legislatures - > most certainly not universally the "same government".

That's not remotely close to being accurate.

If I start an image sharing service, an Instagram, and I'm based in Ohio, I have extremely few considerations about the state governments of Alabama, Florida, Maine or Arizona as it pertains to launching and operating the service.

For most Internet businesses, you can tilt up a start-up tomorrow morning and access all 50 states and never give a single thought to the individual states. If there's a regulatory issue, it's usually only going to be an issue later with scale.

It's radically easier to launch across the whole of the US than it is the four dozen countries in Europe, or 28 countries of the EU. It's not close to comparable. You do not deal with 51 legal systems to launch start-ups in the US, unless you're operating in a very narrow set of industries with very high amounts of regulations (and even in that case, you're still not dealing with 51 different legal systems, there's overlap and commonality in regulations state to state).

<comment><USER13> > that's not remotely close to being accurate

I'd argue it's damn close to a statement of fact rather than an opinion; there are 51 legal systems and legislatures at work here whether one likes the fact or not - that one State's statute is not enforceable in another is prima facie evidence of this. Whilst the impact of this is of course variable, there are concrete examples of the issues that can arise. Heck even the income tax we pay as citizens isn't the same accross all states.

<comment><USER15> However, you don't have 25+ different languages

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm not tu sure regarding the start up scene in particular, and thus can only provide my 5 cents on European business culture in general.

First, Europe is not, historically, the center of consumerism. Most smaller companies, the famous Gean Mittelstand for example, which is usually run by the founder focuses on corporate customers (apart from small electrician and construction companies and the like). So the whole infrastructure and financing through banks is comfortable with these companies. I could imagine this spreads even to VCs to a certain degree.

Second, at least in Germany, we don't have a great failure culture. Esentially, you fail once and you are burned. Unless you are well conected in the corporate and political spheres. Which again makes launching B2B endevours less risky.

In the end that means that B2B become somewhat a strength of European companies. But that is juat my opinion.

As one counter example to the above, Germans did come up with Flixbus.

<comment><USER17> Not _quite_ on topic but I would like to share it because I'm curious (not sure what to expect, just testing the global mind):

When I lived in the US I was employed so I can't compare, but when I founded a small business together with a friend banks (yes, plural) were only willing to "Lend" us exactly the money we already had, and that is a general policy for them when "lending" to small new businesses. It means, we had about 100k - <USER3> if we gave them the 100k and put it into a no-withdrawals account they would lend us 100k. Okay.

Yes, I get it, "tax reasons". This is just silly. First, you have plenty to write off at the start anyway, second, if you are worrid about paying a lot of taxes it means you are making a lot of money. I actually don't mind paying taxes at all (I _do_ mind the many fees many organizations want from my new company, from GEZ for public TV to IHK - none of which do anything for me, unlike the state as a whole, plus taxes are coupled with income, those many fees are not). The _main point_ is that you only get the money that you already have anyway.

<comment><USER16> Welcome to Germany... I thought for the majority of last year to try it and found my own company.

Financing was the main reason I didn't, besides the fact that I reallsy suck at sales. Banks wanted basically everything I had to cover the initial purchasing of goods with the goods itself not being sufficient. Public funding, in the scope of increasing the number of young comapnies, fell short because my idea was not inovative enougj. Never mind the a start-up selling locally sourced vegetables via app was inovative enough for them... And I didn't want CV founding to gwt the initial cash flow issues solved. So here I am, employed again.

<comment><USER18> If you suck at sales then financing is not your problem. There are plenty of successful companies in Germany.

<comment><USER16> Well, let's put that way. If I would have gotten some positive signs regarding financing I would have looked for some one for the sales part. I know, kind of backwarsa thinking. So being employed in the end turned out to be not such bad idea. At least I can say I tried, so no regrets from my side.

<comment><USER18> I am in the same position. I have tried entrepreneurship a few times but in the end it came down to me not being good at sales. I think hiring someone for sales doesn't work. Either do it yourself or partner with someone who can sell.

<comment><USER16> Partnering woupd have been the preferred way solution. Throwing your whole professional future in the ring requires a real level of trust, I just didn't trust the potential candidate enough...

It feels good to be not alone in that situation, so!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There just isn't much innovation going on in Europe. Consumer goods are hyper global - the best wins. B2B is more nuanced, locality matters. Plus so many playing the grant game (which only works for B2B).

That said there are enough success stories to know that you absolutely can do it in Europe. It's really more about how few are even trying rather than how impossible it is.

<comment><USER20> > There just isn't much innovation going on in Europe.

Wow.

I'd argue the opposite is true. There's a lot of innovation going on in Europe - but a) it takes a long time for 'innovation' to filter through to the consumer, and b) successful consumer companies tend to win on brand, not tech.

The big problem in Europe (vs US) IMO is the risk tolerance of VCs, capital available, valuations, and large market size.

I personally know quite a few founders who started consumer tech companies in Europe and quickly moved at least part of their operations to the US as soon as they were ready to scale.

<comment><USER21> I'm not opposed to this view, since I don't really know the European tech market very well, but can you give me some examples to understand better? I'm sure in some absolute sense there is "a lot" of innovation in the European tech industry, but my uninformed impression was that, in the context of US tech innovation, it's fairly minimal.

<comment><USER20> Check out Barrin92's answer (above/below my original comment) for some examples.

I'm no expert on how you'd measure tech innovation. Perhaps patents - but US patents are much easier to get and much more easily awarded than in the EU, so probably not a great indicator of innovation (especially considering that more patent applications were filed in China in 2016 than the rest of the world combined).

Elite research universities might be a good indicator. I haven't got the rankings to hand, but am willing to stand corrected that the EU is _at least_ on a par with the US in that regard.

Consumer banking is probably one area where 'tech innovation' has been much more widely embraced in Europe than in the US. Is that the kind of thing you meant?

If not, perhaps you could give me some examples of technical innovation which is common in the US and rare/lacking in Europe?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> European tech industry is B2B focused, because it has no single consumer market, like the US. By the time a startup becomes a success in Spain, its copies will be already launched by somebody in France and Germany. In consumer fintech, for instance, UK has Monzo, Germany has N26, and Poland has mBank. Currenly, Flixbus is a major exception to this rule, because it managed to conquer almost the entire EEA long-distance bus market in 5 years, and has just entered the US. Revolut is trying to do the same in fintech.

<comment><USER23> National economies are very hermetic and their regulations are foreign-hostile (xenophobic?), it's impossible to enter and smoothly operate without some high level "green light", e.g. Polish/Czech direct banks like Fio, mBank, Inteligo couple of years ago were much ahead of what banks in e.g. Germany, UK, or Italy were offering to their individual consumers but had zero chance of launching in these countries. Furniture production in Poland is significant but to sell internationally they're basically submitted to IKEA. Screw those who were selling the "capital has no nationality" mantra in post-Communist countries during the 90s-00s. Flixbus? They spread all over EU with no new value created - the coaches are driving the same as they have always been, quality unchanged, if anything they look like some predatory business sucking in everything into their franchising model.

<comment><USER22> > Flixbus? They spread all over EU with no added value created

That's not true. The added value to the passenger is that he can now travel across the entire Europe using a single ticketing system and a unified bus standard, saving a lot of time and hassle. But I agree, that it made a competition almost impossible. Flixbus competes not with other bus companies, but with trains and flights: in terms of price, time, and comfort. Sometimes in wins, sometimes it loses.

<comment><USER24> _Flixbus competes not with other bus companies_

I guess that depends a lot on the market. Because certainly in Sweden Flixbus absolutely competes with the existing bus companies.

<comment><USER22> I was talking about international routes in Europe[1]. But at least in Germany and Poland (after acquiring Polskibus), Flixbus also controls above 90% market share for bus routes within the country.

[1] [https://global.flixbus.com/bus-routes](https://global.flixbus.com/bus- routes)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think it's primarily due to mindset.

With a B2B business, you see more revenue earlier. That revenue then goes on to fund the next stage, product, market, whatever. In B2C businesses, it takes quite a bit more effort to become profitable and you're likely to scale long before that point.

If you're in an ecosystem that is used to making bets on B2C companies (not just investors but founders, leadership, and employees), you know and have lived this difference and plan accordingly. If your ecosystem has less venture capital and less people who have lived that, you need cashflow sooner and something resembling profitability earlier.

* I worked for a London-based startup that moved to the US midway through it's life.

(While this thread is about Europe, the same distinction applies for SF vs US Midwest ecosystems.)

</comment><comment><USER26> The US has two advantages:

\- Access to huge amounts of capital that can support businesses that focus on consumers for a good period of time before they start worrying about profit.

\- A large domestic consumer market. Europe is fragmented.

<comment><USER27> I have no idea one way or the other, but I wonder how less fragmented the US market is? For some things, sure, an extremely common language and some other things etc etc.

However, having traveled around a lot of the US, and a good portion of EU, my instinct is that the US is pretty fragmented too when it comes to a whole lot of things.

Regional cultural differences in the US can be really strong. Though maybe that doesn't affect markets as much as EU with probably more diverse cultures and certainly more diversity of languages.

Anyway, really interesting to think about! Maybe I'll research it sometime.

<comment><USER26> > but I wonder how less fragmented the US market is?

Far far less. Different languages mean the large majority of a countries population is largely culturally isolated from its neighbors. No one watches a pan-european news channel, read a pan-european newspaper or browse a pan- european website. They don't exist.

Different way of doing business, different mindsets, different world view, different media systems, different politics and different economic markets and conditions.

<comment><USER28> This.

Netflix is a good example of how it's very different.

The price of Netflix may be totally different in every country in Europe, because the cost of living etc. is different.

In the US the price of Netflix is the same regardless of what state you live in.

That's just a small example.

Yes each state has different regulations, taxing etc. too, but overall they're mostly the same.

In Europe everything is different, the cost of living, the language, the culture etc. and thus you cannot have a product with the same price in every European country (Well you can, but most likely you wouldn't!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> One difference is that US regulation (on intrmediary liability, privacy, and copyright) has been much more favorable to consumer platforms than has EU regulation over the last few decades. [http://law.emory.edu/elj/_documents/volumes/63/3/articles/ch...](http://law.emory.edu/elj/_documents/volumes/63/3/articles/chander.pdf) is a good summary.

</comment><comment><USER30> It's simple. Fragmentation of the consumer market (languages, habits, economic values) leads to a rough ride up for B2C unicorns. Look at Spotify and Soundcloud, Skype, UStream... Whereas the current state in business due to the family owned businesses is one of fear. They don't have the resources to innovate internally, and the prevaling technical sophistication of the available labor force along with the disincentivised compensation plans for engineers means its hard for them to build solutions on their own. Building a B2B in europe just makes more sense from a founder perspective. Consider that in Berlin a couple years ago a pretty popular recruiting firm found that 85% of startup CTO's or VP Engineering's were Americans. I myself am a US expat, currently founding my second B2B business in Europe. A common truism is that european (german) investors say: do not tell me how much you will make. Tell me how much you will spend.

</comment><comment><USER31> You were given many great answers. Largely it boils down to aversion risk, and a lack of access to cheap VC money. Also, the market is not big enough. You really can't replicate most things that work in Sweden in France, or Germany- Ireland. As such, focusing on B2B just makes much more sense. Don't mind that Europe is not a heavy consumerist society. Actually, as of the past decade or two, a huge chunk of Europe entered the post-money era, where people tend to own less, spend on personal growth, and live more frugal. Ad revenue (that keeps many B2C businesses afloat) in Europe is not nearly as high. Even AdWords in Europe compared to the States are cents to dollars.

</comment><comment><USER32> Because in Europe no one has made money from consumer facing businesses.

European investors are all ex-banking / private equity spread sheet modelling morons who do not understand risk capital and are looking for risk free bets.

When you have this lens u eschew anything that can harm you holding onto your career. That is why.

B2B businesses have a very clear path to revenue / margin / profit.

A B2C business is effectively a punt, yes a punt, US VCs arent some sort of fucking oracles. If you look at the analysis Social Capital did for who backed the biggest co's at the series a level its effectively spread evenly so there is no "science" here.

<comment><USER33> What a load of crap.

There are tens of thousands of money making consumer facing businesses, the division - in my practice - between b2b and b2c is roughly 50/50.

What the USA has that Europe does not have is a huge advantage in terms of one language and currency to be able to address 300M+ people, and if you just look at the language you can add another 45M or so. That's impossible to compete with for anything with network effects or a market to launch a product in.

<comment><USER34> I think at its core this is basically it. We can argue all day about the differences in culture and mindset, but the most significant advantage the USA has that the EU cannot effectively replicate (yet) is the access to a large, homogeneous single language single currency market from the get go.

The more interesting question would be why are Google and Facebook American and not Chinese or Indian.

<comment><USER35> In addttion to the other reasons mentioned, the US higher education system churns out talent sourced here and abroad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> developing countries - there are no clients, potential clients have no money, there are only global outsourcing corporations who are looking over here for "cheap"

developed countries - dealing with individual consumers is a pain in the neck - documentation, guarantees, consumer rights, complaints, multiple languages, requirements research, various app stores which are entirely US based and controlled, certain transparency as the services portfolio is available publicly. Why bother with these when one can just sell something to German/French/British industries or telecoms, relax, hire some engineers, and implement whatever the minimal acceptable form is? There isn't a problem which cannot be solved during a "conference" of lawyers and sales people somewhere on Balearic Islands or in Swiss Alps, or by a brand new BMW discreetly shipped to a certain address - try solving product/service-related problems in a similar way when thousands or even millions of customers are looking at your hands.

Individual consumers are pariahs in Europe.

</comment><comment><USER36> Access to venture capital and/or the effort to get it in the first place. To European businesses it often seems like it is much easier to raise funds in the US. Investors also tend to be more conservative here.

B2C businesses traditionally need more funding to scale. Less funding, fewer B2C businesses. Bootstrapping a B2C business is even harder. B2B just makes more sense economically.

</comment><comment><USER37> It's been my observation that more businesses are B2B than B2C. Is just you don't hear about the B2B ones as much.

And in software, the B2B market is just bigger. Consumers buy/use off the shelf software, businesses can pay you to create custom software. The margins are lower but the to risks are also lower. It's just nobody talks about the latter.

<comment><USER38> From my experience B2C has lower margins. Basically you have to give all for free to get consumer users on board. No one is buying software as a consumer, consumers buy services mostly. Like ordering pizza, and Takeaway.com is going big in Europe. They don't sell app, probably they hire some shop for app development.

Anything in enterprise level costs loads of money. From developer perspective think about all consulting companies which do body leasing. How much companies pay for having hands to work is alone insane. Price for custom B2B development goes really high. Then you have to pay high price or your business is going to loose money in the future. Where consumers don't care, I am not going to loose money because I don't have someones app.

<comment><USER37> I meant potential for higher margins. For my B2B projects I've done, the profit was written into the contract (and was usually around 3%), there was no way to make a larger profit margin, it was agreed upon beforehand and was a done deal. Whereas with B2C you can have something that goes viral and suddenly brings in a ton of money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> My guess: Taxes. In Sweden at least, roughly half of the money any company makes, is going to taxes before getting in the hands of the employees, leaving much less buying power for consumers. Add to that a 25% VAT on anything you buy, and, yeah.

<comment><USER40> I don't know the percentage B2B vs consumer-focused startups in EU or US so giving a few examples makes no real sense but Spotify, iZettle, Skype and Pirate bay are all of swedish origin. And business taxes in Sweden are among the low ones in OECD. Salary (after tax) is lower than in US but schools and health care is free so compared to US the living standard is not that bad, i.e. assuming the original poster assumption is correct, I don't think taxes is the explanation.

<comment><USER39> What I mean is that businesses, even small companies, will have a lot more money than any consumer, as any money being paid as wage is decimated to such a large degree.

Spotify, Skype etc are addressing an international market, so the exact situation in Sweden wouldn't affect that much, and also I don't know if e.g. Spotify is even really making that much money yet from customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Because there is no proper funding in Europe for those kinds of risks.

</comment><comment> shady-lady Real money vs potential ad money.

</comment><comment><USER42> I dislike the current debt-based economy (based on extracting more US dollars from consumers) partly because of this reason. There is a reason why I wrote the Google DoubleClick Mozilla essay.</comment>


Hippie Daredevils Who Invented Mountain Biking - <AUTHOR> http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-hippie-daredevils-who-were-just-crazy-enough-to-invent-mountain-biking/ <comment><USER2> As an avid mountain biker, this article reminds me about the pure fun of riding in the outdoors. You don't need to spend 5K+ to do so. The technology in mountain biking has really taken off in the last 15 years. I can ride trails that only people on downhill bikes would have done 10 years ago, and the bike weighs less than 30lbs, making pedaling up hills not a problem. Enduro mountain bike racing has really taken off in the last few years and really captures the essence of mountain biking. It's a good time to be into mountain bikes. Here are a couple of examples of the new generation of Enduro Bikes:

[http://www.giant-bicycles.com/en- us/bikes/model/reign.advanc...](http://www.giant-bicycles.com/en- us/bikes/model/reign.advanced.27.5.1/18765/76217/#technologies)

[http://www.specialized.com/us/en/bikes/mountain/enduro/endur...](http://www.specialized.com/us/en/bikes/mountain/enduro/enduro- elite-650b)

Both are relatively decently priced with good specs.

<comment><USER3> Any advice on bikes if I don't want to spend $5k?

<comment><USER4> Something like this will be good enough to get an idea if you like the sport or not, and is a fraction of the price.

[http://www.eriksbikeshop.com/Specialized-2014-Hardrock- Base-...](http://www.eriksbikeshop.com/Specialized-2014-Hardrock-Base- Mountain-Bike/PR3C12480/Product)

Many bikes in this price range have similar frames and components. The components won't last as long as on a better bike, but will be good enough to get you started. After that you pretty much get what you pay for in improved components. Its like buying a computer - the more you spend the better components you get but the higher you go, the less gain you are likely to notice (unless you are really pushing limits).

If you are keener to commit and spend a bit more trail centres should be able to rent you a trail bike.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The reason Ritchey, Fisher, and the rest of their group are known as the "founders of mountain biking" is because they were the first to make bikes for others to also enjoy off-road riding.

Lots of people rode off-road, down mountains and on trails before them. But they were the first to turn it into a successful business.

</comment><comment><USER6> Charlie Kelly doesn't get enough credit for the mountain bike. It was Gary Fisher and Charlie Kelly who started a company in order to build mountian bikes.

As life goes, they had dissagrements--and Charlie walked away. Charlie was the bike builder, and the bike mechanic. Without Charle I don't think Marin Mountian bikes would have ever build bikes?

The shop was on Tundtead Ave. There was always a thick cloud of the early 80's in the air. The bikes were stunning.

There were so many people who thought they would never be successful, but the bikes started to sell-- and the rest is history. The people who thought they would fold were adults. All the kids who drooled over the bikes(myself); knew different, but knew it was still a very risky business. As a chid, I would look into the shop and I used to say to myself "I hope they are still in business when I earn enough to buy one."

As to Charlie Kelly; I don't think he is rich, but he looks younger than the rest of the guys, and seems genuinely happy. It's not just about money?

I wouldn't label them as Hippies though. They were just young guys who liked riding bikes(road and mountan). Young guys who didn't want to follow in their fathers footsteps? Putting on that tie and spending years at same company seemed like a prison sentence years ago.

(I let my brother use my bike and he eventually destroyed it. Then someone stole it. Somethings never change.)

<comment><USER7> I used to see Kelly on Skyline in Oakland in the mid 90's on a Kelly frame. I knew he was a somebody but didn't know the story. Did he move to the East Bay?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Aside from all the other interesting history, it's great to recollect the pre- spandex, pre-"fashion" days of the sport.

<comment><USER9> I don't see why spandex is fashion. I don't wear it because I look good in it (I think it looks dumb, and I'm old enough to start to have a belly), I wear it because it's hot in Texas and it is the least amount of clothes I can wear and still feel like I have enough clothes on.

Now, bar ends and disc brakes, that's fashion. :D

<comment><USER10> Disc brakes, fashion? You must not be riding the right trails.

<comment><USER11> No kidding, especially when you consider mud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _"The reason mountain biking is so popular," says Charlie Kelly, "is that it's one of the only ways in modern life that you can turn on your adrenaline pump, and leave it on for a long time. You can go big-wave surfing or skydiving, but downhill bike riding gives you all the adrenaline you can handle._

I find that quote funny and sad, given that any skidding on trails in that area are now highly ticketable offenses, and have been since at least the early 1990s.

Given the popularity of mountain biking these days, it's ironic that I now find it easier to get my thrills by doing downhill _road_ cycling. I don't have to worry (much) about coming across a cyclist or pedestrian in the middle of the road, and cars are the only thing slowing me down.

</comment><comment><USER13> Check out the documentary, Klunkerz ([http://www.klunkerz.com/](http://www.klunkerz.com/))

<comment><USER14> It is referenced at the very end of the article and is quite a fun flick.

The Marin Museum of Bicycling is worth a visit if you are in that part of the Bay Area (oh, and grab a beer or two in the near by breweries...) [http://mmbhof.org](http://mmbhof.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> All these bikes were at the SFO International Terminal awhile back. It was pretty neat seeing all the old frames again and the evolution.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's crazy that Gary Fisher, Robin Williams, and Pete Carroll all went to high school together.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is great history, however there is more to the craze of mountain biking than these tales of pioneering legend.

History can be taught as 'kings, queens and their wars' or it can be told in terms of economic and social things. With the mountain biking craze not much has been written about why it did take off like it did - really very few people knew who Fisher, Breeze, Ritchey et al. were. People just wanted a mountain bike for some reason.

I also don't believe that these mountain bike pioneers were really that pioneering - since the invention of the bicycle people have been cycling off road and enjoying the thrills of descending at speed. It is kind of a natural thing to do. To a certain extent the bikes that came before mountain bikes - BMX - were off-road bikes albeit with small wheels although you could get medium flavour wheels with a BMX.

My revisionist view of the mountain bike craze is to see it as a natural reaction to what politicians, planners and motorists were doing to our roads. Back in the day roads were many times more deadly than they are today with country roads unrestricted so 'idiots' could drive them far too fast to possibly stop for any cyclists that might be using them. As a consequence, in the 70's and 80's roads were not at all safe for cyclists and the only cyclists that would use them would be doing so for reasons different to today.

As well as the instant danger roads back then were laced with deadly poisons from cars that are incredible to think about. Imagine putting lead in petrol?!? Who would have thought that was a good idea?

Cycling is enjoyable - that is a statement of fact. Cycling on dangerous roads is no fun at all (unless you really enjoy that, which I can understand). So mountain bikes came along and just filled a need for something that had been denied by the motoring thing.

Shimano did great things to get mountain biking started - they did a fantastic job of creating easy to service brakes, gears and other components. European component suppliers just did not get their act together which was their loss. Yet again, despite how wonderful Shimano were there were wider economic factors - the Yen was a fairly worthless currency at the time so Shimano parts were amazingly cheap given how high quality they were compared to their European counterparts.

The frames for the bikes and the bikes themselves tended to come from 'new' suppliers. Older brands that made 'lugged' frames lost out. The factories in the Far East (Taiwan) that had been built to TiG weld chromoly steel tubes were the ones making the mountain bikes. For them this was a natural progression from the BMX that had gone before. As contract manufacturers 'OEM partners' they took the brands that the likes of Fisher had started and churned out some real product, this being the right product at the right time.

Mountain bikes also rode on the crest of a wave of a consumer boom. Money was cheap and along with all the other consumer gizmos of the time, mountain bikes sold very nicely.

So, although the Marin County history is fun, the real story of why the mountain bike happened has more to do with the tragedy of the roads and economic circumstance at home and in the Far East.

<comment><USER18> It's hard to say why certain types of activities take off.

Inline skating (aka Rollerblading) came out of nowhere to become a very popular activity by the late 80s or thereabouts. (It predates that but that was around the time it really took off in the US.) Today, my observation in at least the places I live and visit is that it's essentially gone away--in spite of the increased availability of paved rail trails and the like.

Recreational kayaks have replaced canoes to a large degree.

Paddleboards are probably the hottest new thing in the watersports arena.

That said, you're right about both the technology aspects and the fact that road cycling was less prevalent and generally more dangerous at the time mountain biking came onto the scene.

<comment><USER19> I think a lot of the kayak story is price. And portability (so to speak anyway).

<comment><USER18> I think it's more that it's technically easier--especially for a single person (and lighter/easier to load and unload from car/get in water for that single person). And, yes, Royalex has gotten to be a terrible price but given the same materials, kayaks aren't necessarily cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> great article</comment>


17th-century painting discovered behind a wall during renovation - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/21/fashion/the-treasure-behind-the-wall.html <comment><USER2> > _In the arms race for the most unique! most authentic! store currently > underway, when only-in-person experience is what differentiates retail from > e-tail, a cultural treasure surrounded by a puzzle straight out of a Dan > Brown novel may be the ultimate accessory._

Not exactly a garden-path sentence, but I had a few branch mispredictions on my way through this sentence.

<comment><USER3> Are exclamation points are no longer sentence-ending punctuation?

<comment><USER4> Not since Tom Wolfe, at least.</comment></comment></comment>


Announcing Firebase Mobile Offline Support - <AUTHOR> https://www.firebase.com/blog/2015-05-29-announcing-mobile-offline-support.html

<comment><USER2> Hi HN! I'm Jonny, one of the lead engineers who worked on this feature. I'm really excited about this release, and I'm looking forward to getting your feedback when you try it out.

<comment><USER3> Is there some sort of guarantee that Google won't just start killing features (including this) if its not a hit? Lot's of people here have been burned.

Also: there's no mention of conflict resolution which will be a lot more prevalent with the long disconnects, what are the available options for handling it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why is this just being added to the native API?

What about wrapped-js-apps, and single page apps?

<comment><USER5> We haven't forgotten about web developers! We prioritized offline for mobile first though since its a more critical use case there.

<comment><USER6> I noticed Firebase stores things in localStorage. That wasn't being used for handling being offline in webapps/mobile hybrid apps?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It'd be nice to know how it determines which writes to use if two devices are offline, have conflicting data, and try to write to the same database after they're both connected.

Vector clocks? Last write wins? Conflict resolution functions?

<comment><USER2> Firebase (even without offline persistence) uses a simple last write wins strategy. This will work well with most apps. However, if this is not enough, our security rules allow you to have more complex strategies based on client time, for example. Even without offline it really depends on the kind of conflict resolution you want in your app. For complex apps that require merges we recommend to build something like operational transform on top of Firebase (As an example look at Firepad [1]).

[1] [http://www.firepad.io/](http://www.firepad.io/)

<comment><USER8> Could you add more detail as to what you mean by "last write" ?

Is it the time at which the write was performed locally, or the time at which it was sent to the server ? the difference can be quite large if for example you connect a device after having worked offline with it for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Isn't this mostly basically how Meteor works?</comment>


CE+T Power's Red Electrical Devils Win Google's $1M Little Box Challenge - <AUTHOR> http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2016/02/and-winner-of-1-million-little-box.html <comment><USER2> Wow, that just blows me away. Setting them up in a grid tie configuration would make for a very cost effective field of solar collectors. You would achieve 100% on time with the ability to work on any 2KW chunk at any time.

Honestly I didn't think it was possible to meet the specs of the Little Box challenge and here these guys exceeded them by 3x.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you deal with Big JavaScript files? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I'm building a JavaScript engine. I used a simple function as a class, added subfunctions, strings... and used prototypes to add other objects as needed...
Everything is fine. The problem now, is that I'm using one class (or main function), because I need it to be so. It's becoming huge, to the point that I can't control it any more and debugging the code is becoming as hard as hell.
I'm a C# developer, who used Visual Studio. I never come across this problem, because I have different files/classes/forms...
I wonder how developers here deal with large JavaScript files. What tools/strategies/techniques do you use to solve this issue.
Note: I want to use ONE main function (or javascript class).
Thanks <comment><USER2> I don't understand. WHY do you want to use one main function or class? Why not break things up into modules, classes, and functions similar to the way you do in C#?

Look at the source code of any well-written JavaScript library or app and you will find quite a bit of modularity. Some examples, from small to large:

[http://osteele.com/sources/javascript/functional/functional....](http://osteele.com/sources/javascript/functional/functional.js)

<http://github.com/jdalton/fusejs/tree/master/src/>

[http://github.com/aptana/activejs/tree/master/src/active_rec...](http://github.com/aptana/activejs/tree/master/src/active_record/)

It makes sense to use one global object as a namespace, but within this namespace you can have as many classes, objects, and functions as you like. Look at the source of jQuery, for example: <http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.1.js>

Even if you have a single class, you can define that classes' members across many different files. You can concatenate all the files together at build- or deployment-time (for performance reasons) but keep them separate in your source tree. For example, the jQuery source code I linked above is actually a concatenation of half a dozen different source files. Just use the "module pattern" to wrap each file in an anonymous function, and have it export its public interfaces to objects/classes in your single global namespace: <http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2007/06/12/module-pattern/></comment>


Symantec reveals biggest Android malware threat - <AUTHOR> http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2142287/symantec-reveals-biggest-android-malware-threat

<comment><USER2> The biggest threat to Android security is the inability of normal users to control their firewall.

What? Android has a firewall?

No, of course not. But Linux has a firewall, and it's installed by default on every Android phone. If you don't have root privilege, it's useless to you -- everything is open. But if you do have root, the DroidWall app is a simple way to manipulate it.

You see, every Android app has its own UNIX userid. That's how cross-app permissions are enforced. And iptables can associate packets with the userids of the processes sending or receiving them. So DroidWall offers you a simple list of all of your apps, with checkboxes for allowing packets through via cellradio or WiFi (or both or neither).

Frankly, Android ought to ship with something like this.

(Not the author, just a happy user.)</comment>


To pay or not to pay: are the best things in life – like coding courses – free? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.freecodecamp.org/to-pay-or-not-to-pay-are-the-best-things-in-life-like-coding-courses-free-b723c9de73d7 <comment><AUTHOR> My opinion: don't pay for anything until you can assess by yourself with a high level of certainty if what you are paying for is worth its value in newly gained knowledge.</comment>


Genomic Loopholes and Other Weapons (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/6/secret-codes/genomic-loopholes-and-other-weapons?utm_source=tss&utm_medium=desktop&utm_campaign=linkfrom

<comment><USER2> this is so interesting! games have a long way to go before becoming as interesting as ecology.</comment>


Understanding Agent Cooperation - <AUTHOR> https://deepmind.com/blog/understanding-agent-cooperation/ <comment><USER2> Part of my brain briefly considered the possibility that this was an article analysing the dynamics of Twin Peaks:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uxQjydfBOU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uxQjydfBOU)</comment>


<span> for your terminal - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/LuRsT/span Tired of the boring white on black output of your terminal? Need a little more emphasis? Or maybe display some quotes that make you smile or inspired in your terminal? (We all know that a quote is not a quote if it's not in italics) <comment><USER2> This is even more useful than your <hr /> for terminal :D</comment>


What markup is available on news.yc? - <AUTHOR>

Is there any? <comment><USER2> asterisks around words make _italics_ , and if you start a line with a space (and put an empty line above it)

     it looks like code().

PS: The italics deal makes it hard to insert more than one *. Although I _think_ there's a workaround (I just don't remember it).

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there a way to insert links with text other than the URL?

<comment><USER3> No, and it has to be the full URL with <http://>.</comment></comment></comment>


Vibease helps couples to Stay Intimate. Private social app + Bluetooth massager - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vibease.app

<comment><USER2> Oh. My. God.

So, first off, they're so far off of being the "first company to do this" that's it not even funny, but this is a common claim in, well, every company to release a product ever. For apps, there was Body Heat (<http://www.ohmibod.com/app/>) and Closer ToGetHer (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGMrGN5ViNo>) for iphone, Dildroid for android. For bluetooth, there was The Toy, possibly the worst named product in the history of naming things, which established Bluetooth comms with a phone to pick up SMS messages to set patterns on a vibrator.

Vibease will be selling their own vibrator, but that's not really a very big deal when you can get a OhMiBod and do audio control (though you lose voice streams since you can't split audio channels to be different between speakers and headphone output).

Secondly, their marketing is... so wrong it's scary. They're CRAZY heteronormative, to the point of telling me that gay couples couldn't use it and should find another toy. It's a damn vibrator, people. It works in a surprising amount of locations on all genders you can think of and some you can't and a few you probably don't want to. (Can you tell I live in the Bay Area?)

That said, they're one of the first teledildonics companies to really get out there and try to pull VC funding. Jimmy Jane did this with their luxury vibes, though continued success on that is not looking so hot.

This is an incredibly difficult industry to stay alive and relevant in, because people's wants and needs change, and if you don't get the interface 100% right the first time, you product is done. Finito. The end. Your app doesn't work right or crashes, you crash someone's brain chemistry in an intimate moment, and you will never, ever recover from the resulting experience memory.

<comment><USER2> Also, just noticed the original poster. Hi Dema! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Kyle :D Thanks for the comment! Nope, we don't discriminate people based on the their sexual orientation. Due to limited resources and time, we could only focus on problems within our reach. And of course, I used to have problems with staying intimate when I was away.

<comment><USER2> Ok, on the constructive criticism front... The fun facts section of the app description sounds kinda weirdly... cold? Considering it's not really building on your app, that seems bad. It feels too "Science facts", and less "romance facts", which is more what I think you're looking for. I think a lot of people will feel uncomfortable being told how fast they get off or how they like to get off based on their gender, especially when you're trying to sell something to them to do that exact thing. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Will consider that :D Btw. I have taken down the video. Any suggestion how to make a better video?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Normal for recruiters to ask for last 4 of your social / dob on first call? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Absolutely not. I hire engineers, for myself and others, and the last thing I want to know is how old you are. Are they insane? I can't think of an easier way to set yourself up for an age discrimination lawsuit.

Also, for third party recruiting, I've never asked for anything related to an SSN. The hiring company may ask for that for a background check, if it is contingent on an offer, but not from me.

I'm wondering if this another situation where the recruiter is not in the country the job is in, because someone wanted to pay pennies on the dollar.

<comment><USER3> One fucked up thing about my home country Sweden is that it's totally legal with age discrimination and even the state is doing it all the time.

For example, at specific jobs in the government you get extra holidays if you're above a certain age. Why they think older people deserve more holiday is beyond me. It has nothing to do with how long you've worked there since a 29 year old that has worked there in 10 years wouldn't get as much vacation as a 40-year old that recently was hired. It has nothing to do with experience. Just age.

I can say as a young developer, I have felt this age thing several times at companies. They just don't give you the same salary or take you as serious because of the age. It doesn't matter how skilled you are or how much value you provide to the company.

<comment><USER4> They stopped doing the age related holiday amount thing at German universities about 4-5 years ago (I'm not sure if everywhere but at least where I'm at). Their argument for stopping was, as you said, that it discriminates by age, which they deemed unacceptable.

Now, everyone gets the same amount of holidays, i.e. younger employees get as much as the older ones, not the other way around.

<comment><USER5> Its not them who deemed it unacceptable. Its simply illegal.

<comment><USER4> Of course, you're right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No. Run, don't walk away.

There's no need to reveal that information until you've at least got a firm job offer.

<comment><USER7> Easy to say if you don't need the job.

<comment><USER8> When you're desperate is when you're most vulnerable. Unfortunately there are people/organizations that operate by taking advantage of this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh, hell no. That's a scam.

</comment><comment><USER10> Scam. Block their number/email.

</comment><comment><USER11> I totally didn't get this, but inferred from a comment: "dob" in this context means "date of birth".

<comment><USER12> also: social apparently meaning social security number. some American thing obviously.

<comment><USER13> No, DoB is always Date of Birth. SSN is Social Security Number.

But in the US you can really easily get DoB from the SSN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> No

The interview training at my company mentioned age as one of many things we were forbidden to ask about.

SSN? It was so obviously disallowed it was never mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER15> No. Or maybe, for an awful recruiter. Just bounce.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you're in the US the most common time for that info to be collected is at the offer acceptance stage. This is usually a form you fill out for their HR system.

This might be different depending on the country. I've seen CVs that have SSN/DOB/Marriage/Picture/Driver License because where they are located that's normal info to have on there.

</comment><comment><USER17> Must be a scam

</comment><comment><USER18> I've had this recently in the UK where the client is Capita, who do insist on it.

<comment><USER19> And just like companies that insist on using the truly horrible painful Taleo system for their job interface, I just say "NEXT" and find a better opportunity.

<comment><USER18> A million times yes! Especially when you can't right-click a job into another tab. Where do they find these people, and who keeps paying them?!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Preying on job seekers is abhorrent. Try to find out who they are so that you can report them.

</comment><comment><USER21> Run like the wind.

</comment><comment><USER22> Some candidate submission systems at larger companies use that info to get a unique id so recruiters don't double submit candidates. At least that's what the told me. Not sure if it's true or not.

</comment><comment><USER23> there is no reason for the SSN digits unless you actually get a legitimate offer. there should be no reason to even ask your DOB at this stage, but that's slightly less worrying. but most of all, i've never gotten a job from a recruiter that was worth it. they are trying to get a commission and that is all. apply directly for jobs YOURSELF. stay away from 3rd-party recruiters.

</comment><comment><USER24> What does last 4 refer to in this case?

<comment><USER25> The last 4 digits of his SSN. The last 4 are often used as a default password for financial accounts and to verify identity over the phone. Along with the date of birth (dob). It's a bad idea that it's used so much for security, but it is. It's a good thing for scammers to have and asking for it and the dob in this context is a huge red flag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Phishing.

</comment><comment><USER27> Employers, like your phone company and gas company, use your SSN to identify you in their databases because it's a unique number. It's the lazy vendor's way to track customers, and the lazy HR department's way to track job applicants. And it's frankly irresponsible. > [http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/7696/wanted-hr-exec-with- the...](http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/7696/wanted-hr-exec-with-the-guts-to- not-ask-for-your-ssn)</comment>


Blueseed or Canada? - <AUTHOR> http://startupnorth.ca/2012/05/09/blueseed-or-canada/?__lsa=7e578a7b

<comment><USER2> Blueseed is close enough to Sand Hill to let companies raise from them easily, and near enough that investors will personally make the trip -- especially for demo days, although those could be held onshore too.

There is a clear quality of life advantage (aside from startups, living in Vancouver or Montreal would be amazing), but no bucks, no buck rogers, as the expression goes.

</comment><comment><USER3> How is healthcare in Canada compared to the US?

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_health_care_s...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_health_care_systems_in_Canada_and_the_United_States)

"A 2007 review of all studies comparing health outcomes in Canada and the US in a Canadian peer-reviewed medical journal found that "health outcomes may be superior in patients cared for in Canada versus the United States, but differences are not consistent."[7] Life expectancy is longer in Canada, and its infant mortality rate is lower than that of the U.S., but there is debate about the underlying causes of these differences."

<comment><USER3> My question is less about the quality - which I assumed is more-or-less similar - but in the acquisition of and payment for.

<comment><AUTHOR> Acquisition? Healthcare in Canada is managed provincially, so there are difference between each province. In Ontario, OHIP (Ontario Health Insurance Plan) covers a wide range of health services; however, it does not pay for services that are not medically necessary, such as cosmetic surgery.

OHIP is paid for out Federal Transfer payments and Ontario taxes. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Health_Insurance_Plan>

There is an external health premium (aka a tax) that maxes at $900 annually. OHIP generally costs about 10cents of every tax dollar spent in Ontario [http://news.ontario.ca/mohltc/en/2012/05/a-real-wage- freeze-...](http://news.ontario.ca/mohltc/en/2012/05/a-real-wage-freeze-for- doctors-the-facts.html)

But it is accounted for in existing personal and corporate taxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How are taxes in Canada compared to the US?

<comment><AUTHOR> Depends on if you are talking corporate tax rates, personal income tax, etc.

[http://slumbuddy.wordpress.com/2011/03/20/comparison-of- us-a...](http://slumbuddy.wordpress.com/2011/03/20/comparison-of-us-and- canadian-tax-rates-for-2010/)

Though it feels like some of the statistics are biased towards Canada.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Canada> provides a comparison of personal income tax with Canada being higher than the US.

Canada Single no kids - 31.6% US Single no kids - 29.1%

Canada Married 2 kids - 21.5% US Married 2 kids - 11.9%

My experience is that I have less disposable income in Canada (based on my living previous in Pennsylvania, Illinois and Texas), but I have more available services including healthcare.</comment></comment>


Patreon CEO says the company's generous business model is not sustainable - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/crowd-funding-platform-patreon-announces-it-will-pay-out-half-a-billion-dollars-to-content-creators-in-2019.html <comment><USER2> I'm curious what isn't sustainable, since it doesn't go into detail in the article.

If using stripe (or similar), all payment backend/scalability is included in the processing fees. And that portion is covered by the additional 5% fee Patreon charges directly.

5% of 500 million = $25 million USD.

\+ 10 million USD extra since the actual processing fees are typically 3% or less in cost.

That leaves ~$35 million USD to cover:

\- support staff \- ethics staff (mentioned was important) \- ops/accounting staff \- developers \- designers \- legal/insurance \- office space/expenses \- marketing \- hosting, transactional email expenses \- r&d

Most videos/content are using YouTube still from what I've seen, that would help avoid a large bandwidth bill.

It's not a large company for sure, but do content providers really want a large, for-profit entity with ever increasing revenue needs in between them and their subscribers?

I'm curious what the unsustainable bit is when the above is considered.

<comment><USER3> Not making enough for the level of investment taken ?</comment></comment>


Samsung Galaxy S III vs iPhone 5: Side by side comparison - <AUTHOR> http://sortable.com/phones/Samsung-Galaxy-S-III-Dual-core-64GB-North-American-Edition-vs-Apple-iPhone-5

<comment><USER2> It's interesting that Apple's competitors prioritize adding more features to their phones while Apple is apparently prioritizing compactness and minimizing weight.

A few years ago it would have been obvious to me that a compact, light weight smartphone with a very fast processor would be highly desirable. But, every day I see people walking around with tablets in their arms, using them as cameras or extensions to their smartphones. So, I guess that shows how little I know about people.

It'll be interesting to see which direction the market prefers in the long run.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely, I think that one of the biggest (if not the biggest) advantages of the Android smartphones environment is the wide range of options (specs and price wise) final users have. Just like laptops: in the end, not everyone needs a quad-core processor or a huge screen.</comment></comment>


Moon 1.1.0 – Golang web framework - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/huoy/moon <comment><AUTHOR> Started this project a while ago and it's starting to take shape a bit :) It's a simple framework for Go that implements webpack with HMR and some other useful things for rapid prototyping and SPAs.</comment>


Bsupdate newest version works on all types of linux and OS X - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/alexanderepstein/bsupdate <comment><AUTHOR> bsupdate is a bash script that can be added to any bash application/CLI to automate updating</comment>


Ask HN: How much do you get paid in Banglore (India) - <AUTHOR> Myself : BE,CS; Pune ; 42 lacs (all inclusive) <comment><USER2> That's like 63k USD. how much experience do you have??

<comment><AUTHOR> I graduated in 2005 and have been working with the same company since.

<comment><USER3> What's your role in the company?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm basically a lead developer.</comment></comment></comment></comment>