Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/apollo-is-buying-rackspace-in-a-43-billion-deal-2016-8 <comment><USER2> I guess it was only a matter of time before they got bought out. It's tough to compete against one of Google, Amazon or Microsoft, competing against all 3 at the same time in an area that all three consider to be core to their future must just be cut throat!

It's never great for a companies employee's to be taken over by a private equity firm, if you actually find someone whose had a good experience then please let me know, but given that this is a 38% premium over what RAX was trading at when the deal leaked on august 3rd, this is almost best case for rack space employee's and given that this is an all cash transaction they should get some liquidity out of the deal!!

Given that the RAX board unanimously approved the deal, I'm going to guess this is going through.

Often when a company is brought private by a PE firm they'll combine it with other portfolio companies before spinning it back out. I don't see any relevant companies in Apollo's portfolio that could be joined to RAX.

If you are wondering who in wall street makes money on these types of deal, its the usual suspects. Everyone wets their beak in take over transactions:)

\- Financing provided by Citi, Deutsche, Barclays, RBC;

\- Goldman advised RAX, Morgan Stanley also provided services in connection w/ deal; Citi, Deutsche, Barclays, RBC advised Apollo

<comment><USER3> Off topic, but can you tell me more about the issue with being taken over by a private equity firm? I work for a 10k employee company who will be taken off stock exchange and sold to a Chinese equity firm.

<comment><USER4> Besides cost cutting via layoffs being a favored (although by no means the only) strategy for PE firms, there's also debt servicing.

Typically, PE companies buy the company while only putting down a small portion of the purchasing price. They finance the rest through banks. The whole concept is pretty similar to buying a house with a mortgage, except you're buying a company. The debt payments are then a tax write-off, and all/most available company cashflow is diverted to paying off that loan. The ideal company is one with reliable cashflows and access to a growing market (of which I'd say a large cloud infrastructure provider fits the profile).

To improve cashflow: pay fewer people less, convert assets to cash, and/or make more money from your core business. Usually a mix of the three.

From an organizational standpoint, you can think of it like Rackspace just took out a very large (maybe subprime) mortgage on the company and some new people are going to try to make sure that doesn't turn out to be a horrible bet, first for the investors, then for the company.

<comment><USER5> It also depends on the kind of PE firm. The vulture firms will buy a stable firm and load it up with debt doing stock buybacks and then cash out and let the company crater.

Other firms, like Texas Pacific Group, are turn around specialists that take struggling firms and fix their business processes to make them run better and raise the stock price by actually building a better company.

There are a lot more of the former than the latter, mainly because it takes some uncommonly smart people to run the latter kind of fund and just a bunch of bean counting jerks to the run the former kind.

<comment><USER6> So where does Apollo Global sit on this spectrum of PE vulture <-> turnaround ?

<comment><USER7> They own for-profit education companies like University of Phoenix. Read up on their history, especially the law suits, to get an idea of what the management's values are like: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Phoenix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Phoenix)

<comment><USER8> That's actually a different firm called Apollo Group (which is mostly comprised of Phoenix and a small number of other things) – Apollo Global is a much larger private equity firm with a confusingly similar name

<comment><USER9> It appears that Apollo Global is part of a consortium that bought Apollo Education Group earlier this year [1]. Looking at the press releases, those appear to be the two Apollos in question. Though, I suppose you should give them some time to see what they'll do with it.

[1] [http://www.streetinsider.com/Corporate+News/Apollo+Global+to...](http://www.streetinsider.com/Corporate+News/Apollo+Global+to+Acquire+Apollo+Education+Group+\(APOL\)+for+$9.50Share/11287230.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > $32 per-share-offer represents a premium of 6 percent to Rackspace's > Thursday closing price.

Quite a fall from almost $80 in 2013.

I was a satisfied Rackspace customer back around 2001 when I had a web hosting business, but it was truly a premium service - very expensive compared to competitors. We ended up going with our own bare metal eventually. Then, when everything moved to the cloud, Rackspace seemed a little behind the times and Heroku and AWS got my business.

<comment><USER11> ditto. customer in 2001-2003. Definitely 50% more than competitors back then for just a basic dedicated unix box. But founder and chief evangelist paid us a visit at our dinky little office in Manhattan, so that was a treat. :)

<comment><USER12> 2011-2013 surely :-)

<comment><USER13> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rackspace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rackspace)

        Rackspace was launched in October 1998 with Richard Yoo as its CEO

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Over the past six months I've been battling with poor service from Rackspace, with hosts mysteriously dying and their agents are trying to upsell me (load balancers for a single server, for example). We're migrating away but this doesn't surprise me.

<comment><USER15> what was the use case when they wanted you to have a load balancer for a single server..?

<comment><USER16> I was told it was to avoid changing my DNS when I spun up a new server. With the load balancer being $50/month; that was the pitch that put me off Rackspace.

<comment><USER17> The LB itself (in IAD) is $10.95/month + traffic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I still have a couple of dedicated servers with Rackspace. Been with them for over 10 years and am sad to see this. They truly did have the best support and were an amazing partner to my business in the earlier years.

I knew this was coming and have moved a lot of our stuff off in preparation. Partly because of the unknown but also partly because their support has diminished over the past 2 years.

I was kind of hoping Amazon would acquire them. I don't have much faith with the purchase being a PE firm. Time now to move the rest of our stuff off.

<comment><USER17> I'm in the same boat. Where are you moving to?

<comment><USER18> We have moved a lot of our stuff to AWS and plan to move 2 more sites that are on the RS dedicated server to AWS. 1 service in particular really does need a dedicated server and we plan to move that to a Hostnexus dedicated box. We have a couple of other boxes with Hostnexus that we have had for years. They are not as good as RS but they do have decent support especially for the price of the boxes (fraction of RS) [http://www.hostnexus.com/solutions/dedicated- hosting.php](http://www.hostnexus.com/solutions/dedicated-hosting.php)

<comment> ezequiel-garzon How come this is an order of magnitude more expensive than European providers such as OVH and Hetzner? Are there "American equivalents" of OVH and Hetzner? European goods are generally pricier, not the other way around!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Rackspace's problem is this: they are not really a hosting business. They are a Managed services business. They USED to be a hosting business, but it turned out that their real value add was in running clouds for companies that couldn't do it themselves. My guess is that the real reason they sought this is that the hosting business is not going to grow, and they don't want to invest in it. Instead, they are going to transition into becoming a managed services provider for Openstack private clouds (customer premises or equinix), Azure and AzureStack, and AWS.

Many enterprises are not making the transition to Cloud cleanly, and Rackspace is positioning themselves as the premier services provider to deploy, manage, and monitor cloud usage for many organizations.

<comment><USER19> Shameless self plug - [http://insights.isg-one.com/rackspace-sold-toward- future-man...](http://insights.isg-one.com/rackspace-sold-toward-future- managed-cloud/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Rackspace has been looking for a buyer for a while. I suspect that their business is not in terribly good shape.

They even started consulting on AWS deployments a while back: "Need some help moving your servers over to AWS? We're here to help!"

<comment><USER21> Re: "Business not in terribly good shape" \- there are 4.3 Billion reasons to suggest otherwise. This isn't the type of business that gets purchased without a lot of due diligence, and, we're not really in much of a tech bubble right now - so I thinks it's reasonable to asses that the underlying revenue/profit of Rackspace was sufficient to justify the (impressive) valuation.

<comment><USER22> The assumption on Hacker News is that a buyout/acquisition === failing. This is sometimes true and sometimes not true.

<comment><USER23> > _The assumption on Hacker News is that a buyout /acquisition === failing_

Their market cap was over $10BB a few years ago, and they were purchased for less than half of that. _Something_ went wrong; what do you suppose that was?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm praying that Mailgun doesn't get affected by this, they're absolutely awesome for the small shops like me (and easy to integrate).

<comment><USER25> Just went through this process with the Mandrill debacle earlier this year. I've found SendGrid to be on par with Mailgun (with a less wonky admin dashboard too). Both have comparable 10k~12k free sends per month.

If you're using the SMTP gateway instead of direct API integration (which is the only way I'd do it these days, after dealing with a bunch of sites that were tied to Mandrill's API), then there's not really much that needs to happen for the switch.

<comment><USER26> I just switched to running my software's email from my personal mail server when Mandrill died. Setting up your own mail server is a pain in the ass but it has paid off 100x imo.

<comment><USER27> I used to send emails from my own servers, with everything configured according to the best practices, as much as I could. This was for account management emails: things like verifying user accounts, resetting passwords, etc.

It seems my emails were getting into spam boxes or outright rejected over 50% of the time, which obviously was driving users away. Mails would sometimes be classified as spam on my own Gmail, even after telling it multiple times to not mark those emails as spam. So I switched to Mailgun, and things have been much more peaceful - sometimes emails take a while to arrive, but I don't remember the last time anyone said it was in spam. It was not about the email content, as the content didn't change...

What's your experience with this? I suppose some domains/TLDs and certain IP address ranges are more prone to be classified as spam than others, and that's why I prefer using an external service: hopefully these guys can control their infrastructure in ways I can't do with mine. But I'm also a supporter of Internet decentralization, and email is one of those things that in principle is easily decentralized...

<comment><USER26> It takes a lot of upfront work, but I haven't had to do much maintenance on it since the initial setup and my emails get delivered. You have to set up SPF and DKIM, appeal to the blocklists, and set up reverse DNS. Then you have to, you know, not spam people. I highly recommend mail-tester.com, you can send them an email and they'll tell you how to improve it. Here's my score: [https://www.mail-tester.com/web-ghs5t5](https://www.mail-tester.com/web- ghs5t5)

<comment><USER27> Thanks, I didn't know about mail-tester.com and similar tools. I am definitely not spamming people, and I had SPF, DKIM and reverse DNS set up, but I don't think I ever did the blocklists part. Something to keep in mind if my projects ever grow too big to fit in the free tiers of Mailgun and similar services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting. In contrast just about a year ago Verio's web hosting assets were sold to EIG for a mere $36 million. Both companies were founded around the same time ~ 1996, and at some point at the top of the dot-com boom were the two dominant dedicated server providers out there.

<comment><USER29> Verio's big play was in the transit business; they ultimately became NTT America.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I understand that publicly traded companies are one cornerstone of our economy.

That said, it's depressing to see companies get bought and sold just to move money around, and the people that work in those jobs completely ignored, or just seen as pawns to manipulate for nothing more than the bottom line.

To me, when a company goes from private to public, it's not something to celebrate in the long-term.

The company's focus inevitably seems to go from doing/creating something innovative, to maximizing shareholder value at _any_ expense.

Rackspace was awesome. RIP Rackspace. (I don't know this for a fact, of course... but as others have surmised already, this will likely be just another pump and dump.)

<comment><USER30> When I think of companies "doing it right", I think of the ones who choose to stay private and retain control. Slow but methodical growth.

Basecamp. Dyson. Cargill. Patagonia.

(to name a few)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've been a loyal rackspace customer since 2011. I really hope that if this is indeed true, as I will wait until Rackspace officially announces it, that Appollo doesn't destroy the good things Rackspace has going for it. Mainly their wonderful customer support.

</comment><comment><USER32> So I think people are missing some points around this deal.

Investment firms like hosting companies for two reasons:

1) They give predictable revenue, which is a great thing. Even if the profit rate isn't amazing, the revenue gives a lot of cash-flow.

2) They (often) own large infrastructure asserts (data centers), which can be depreciated and used as a tax write-off.

Not saying that they won't want to take costs out of the business too, but the motivations for a purchase like this aren't as simple as one might think.

</comment><comment><USER33> Nice. So in a few years, there will be one less competitor in this space.

<comment><USER34> What do you mean?

<comment><USER33> I think this is a smash-and-grab deal. They'll write down RAX's assets, then sell them while calling the difference between their sales price and the written down value "profits." They'll dish themselves out a dividend from the sales, maybe issue some more debt to buy additional infrastructure, then IPO it knowing that blackrock and fidelity and pension funds only look at earnings when they value companies (which they manufactured with their accounting gimmick), and flip the remaining shell of a company on to them for a hefty return.

What's left will collapse under the debt load that Apollo stuck it with.

<comment><USER35> Surely analysts at the companies you mentioned are wise to this and factor in the likelihood of this happening, no?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm sure Rackspace is a great service for established companies and startups but for the rest they were always too expensive. I never felt like the premium paid made a difference.

</comment><comment><USER37> I like to look at comparisons like this:

That is about 1 Yahoo in 2016

Or about 3 youTubes in 2006

Or 1.5 Lucasfilms in 2012

Or 0.2 Whatsapps in 2014

EDIT: Whatsapps number corrected, thanks.

<comment><USER38> 1 Marvel. Marvel is always my measurement for these acquisitions. It's always fun to compare acquisitions to a cultural icon with +50 years of history.

Moreso when the company is a mobile gaming company, social media site, or other "time-waster"

<comment><USER37> Yeah, I refer to Lucasfilms for almost exactly the same reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Their service is very expensive compared to Google, AWS and the rest. I wonder how they've managed to survive on their own for so long

<comment><USER40> Great customer service.

<comment><USER41> Shockingly bad pre-sales though - in my last job I tried to engage with them on the hosting for a large scale ERP project for a multinational and they were pretty reluctant to get involved even though they advertised that they were targeting that niche and claimed expertise in the ERP application.

<comment><USER42> This is really a huge difference in the enterprise space. Projects are won and lost on the most trivial things, and having very intelligent people in presales is so critical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Has there been any analysis on the upswing in acquisitions of cloud computing and storage companies? First EMC gets bought by Dell, now Rackspace is getting picked up. Is it just in response to growth on the part of Google and Amazon?

<comment><USER44> Apollo is a private equity firm, so they are most likely acquiring Rackspace because they see fat they can trim (read: laying people off, outsourcing labor, tax optimization) off a decently competitive company that they can possibly take public or sell in 5-10 years.

It's not so much about competing with Amazon, Google, etc. or advancing the state of the technology as much as making a bet that the brand is currently undervalued and that conditions in the cloud computing market will allow for a profitable exit in the medium term.

For examples of Apollo bets that have gone wrong see its LBO of Harrah's (basically bankrupt) or Linens 'n Things (bankrupt).

<comment><USER45> (Disclaimer: former employee of Rackspace) That is exactly how I read it. While Rackspace has been doing pretty well, its just not growing as fast as its competition and Wall Street in concerned.

It is a big shame though. Rackspace is one of the few Texas-born companies that managed to strike it big and still have a very egalitarian culture. They have a very interesting culture and I wish it was something that could go on; a lot of my former coworkers absolutely love that environment. But it doesn't look like it will last for much longer.

<comment><USER46> For a successful LBO, growth is largely irrelevant. What is relevant however, is that you can protect your existing market share. If you can buy a company for $1bn with $800m in debt and pay that down, and sell it for $1bn again 5 or 10 years down the line, you just made a cool $800m. If you can double the net profit, you'll be able to sell it for $2bn, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I'm only missing one thing out of your comments -- what will change for someone who spends over $10,000 per month across US, UK and HK on servers and hosting.

Is it time to move forward?? Will my hosting be affected??

<comment><USER48> If you have a stable codebase and infrastructure you can probably still keep using them, if you rely on their technical services heavily I would start looking around. I expect most of their good people won't be there for much longer. In other words the services they provide you with will likely rapidly degrade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> As someone who's first VPS was from Slicehost: Oh, not this again.

</comment><comment><USER50> This is the wrong time to be in the datacentre business. Especially one that traditionally provides a high-touch, traditional bare-metal based model.

It probably doesn't make a dent in their revenue, but Xero is just completing their migration from Rackspace to AWS for reasons they don't articulate well.

</comment><comment><USER51> So what other BIG Cloud Hosting Companies are there left?

Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM ( SoftLayer) OVH, AliYun.

<comment><USER52> Digitalocean, Vultr, Cloudways, Bluehost

<comment><USER51> none of these are anywhere close to be size of the above.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I wonder if this will mean an influx of capital in the Austin/SA area.

<comment><USER54> I was wondering this myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Is the playbook "Financial engineering, and decrease support for existing customers"? (Financial engineering meaning load up on debt, where interest payments can be written down)

</comment><comment><USER56> Interesting year so far for PE M&A in SaaS companies

Vista - Cvent $1.65B

Vista - Marketo $1.80B

Vista - Ping $600M

Apollo - Rackspace $4.3B (moreso IaaS)

Thoma Bravo - Qlik $3.0B (debatable SaaS)

<comment><USER57> Thoma Bravo has then

      * Qlik (BI)
      * Riverbed (APM, app & network analytics)
      * Dynatrace (APM, app & network analytics)
      * Compuware (mainframe maintenance, Dynatrace was a business unit of Compuware)

[https://thomabravo.com/portfolio/all/current/](https://thomabravo.com/portfolio/all/current/)

What does Thoma Bravo do with two old-school APM companies that barely provide a modern cloud service, a BI that barely provide a cloud service and a stone age relict? Will the merge the company assets and lay-off some "fat"? Or wait until IBM or Microsoft wants to buy one of their companies?

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> RIP.

SoftLayer has been growing substantially after the IBM acquisition. This space is pretty interesting.

</comment><comment><USER59> Wonder what this means for mailgun. They have wonderful customer support.

</comment><comment><USER60> Is it too late to sell it to Yahoo instead?

</comment><comment><USER61> Are Apollo likely to make money from it?

<comment><USER62> PE companies usually do. They will just layoff a bunch of people cut salaries and probably saddle it with debt and get as much cash flow they can from the company.

<comment><USER63> Layoff the people with know-how, but also hire a bunch of salespeople with lucrative commission plans.

<comment><USER64> Primarily this. PE firms tend to do a poor job at putting people in charge who know a company's full stack operations, and tend to underpay new non-sales hires which results in a net loss of talent for the company. Do this too often and you become a stagnant company that can't draw in new customers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hands on with Droid. $199 on Nov 6th  - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/28/motorola-droid-first-hands-on/

<comment><USER2> Ugh. I had a lot of hope for this one, but the aesthetics do nothing for me, meaning that the GUI had better be a LOT better than my iPhone. W(hy)TF does there have to be a Motorola, Verizon and Google logo on this thing? It looks like it was designed by NASCAR.

<comment><USER3> All three of the logos combined are smaller and less conspicuous than the giant Apple on the iphone.

<comment><USER4> conspicuousness of logos = (size of logo) * (number of logos ^ 2) * (1 + logo is text)

<comment><USER5> There's also the fact that these logos are on the front where they would annoy me, whereas the Apple logo is on the back of the iPhone where I couldn't care less about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> <https://developer.motorola.com/products/handsets/droid/>

Dev Specs

</comment><comment><USER7> I've noticed a pattern, that I'm calling the iPhone Asymptote Theorem. Basically, phone manufacturers are copying the iPhone experience best they can, and they're getting closer and closer to the iPhone, but they're never quite duplicating it or beating it. The second video showed the Droid loading a endgadget.com slightly slower than the iPhone. The interface, aesthetics, all seem slightly or somewhat worse than the iPhone (representative example: compare the back of the Droid to the back of the iPhone). The scrolling on the Droid seemed a bit less polished than the iPhone, and you could tell the first woman was fumbling a bit with the interface.

To put it mathematically, lim t -> inf (non_iphone_quality) = iphone

<comment><USER8> iPhone advocates seem to forget all the features that the iPhone is missing. What if I want to be on IM and at the same time browse the web? Unless there is an external IM server sending me Apple-approved push messages, it can't be done.

On Android, this is trivial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm skeptical of how well Verizon's network is going to hold up. Out of the 4 major US carriers they are probably the least tested due to their historically awful handset selection. There is such a huge difference between a modern SmartPhone and the last-generation of e-mail centric devices. AT&T has got a bad reputation in the lat 2 years but they are moving ahead with their 7.2Mbit HSDPA upgrades at a pretty good pace. Assuming they can fully utilize those channels and beef up their marginal coverage areas they will have have a pretty big advantage over EV-DO Rev A.

<comment><USER10> I'd be much more skeptical if this wasn't already the nations largest and best network. They bounce between #1 and #2 in subscriptions regardless of the phone selection. And by the time HSDPA is rolled out Verizon will be rolling out LTE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> any newer rumors about how badly verizon nerfed it?

<comment><USER12> It includes Wifi, which I was pretty suprised about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think I must be the only person in the world that likes the default Android UI. This and HTC's interpretation are ugly and unusable in my opinion.

Looks like Verizon also killed off the unlock pattern?

<comment><USER13> Unlock pattern? What's locked down about the phone? I thought one of Android's main selling points was that it's a completely open platform.

<comment><USER14> When you "lock your phone" to prevent others from using it, the G1 has a system for unlocking where you could draw a pattern on the screen rather than typing a password. It's pretty nice. Not sure why the grandparent thinks it's not available on the Droid.

<comment><USER8> The lock screen shown in that video is a "slide-to-unlock" thing.

<comment><USER14> But the G1 had more than one unlock method, too.

<comment><USER8> "Press menu twice" and "draw your pattern" are the only ones I know of. But yes, you can write your own lock application, and there are a few on the market. ("Slide to unlock" is one, although it was very broken when I tried it.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks like a very nice phone indeed. Interface wise though, they're miles off, does not look easy to use in the slightest.

Edit: clarification of point.

<comment><USER16> What in the photos gives you that impression? People say that sort of thing often, but it seems more like a mantra than something backed by actual evidence.

<comment><USER15> It was more the video and the fact that the email for the woman's corporate email account and gmail account was called "Motorola", it made little sense.

I dunno, it just really did not look like someone who _does not read hacker news_ could pick it up and understand it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What's the screen resolution? It looks like 320x480... I guess Droid will be just another phone rumored to have 800 wide screen resolution. :(

<comment><USER18> This article claims "400,000 pixels, gives twice the resolution of any other (smartphone)". So, it's gotta be a lot better than 320x480, or the Motorola spokesperson is simply lying. The only specific number I could find has it at 480x854, which is _more_ than 400k pixels.

<comment><USER19> From what I saw of the videos the spokesperson simply seemed to be not too bright. She made somewhat stupid errors throughout the video.

The resolution of the screen is 480x854 and you can see the full specs here: [http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product- and...](http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and- Services/Mobile-Phones/ci.Motorola-DROID-US-EN.alt)

<comment><USER17> Thank you. I guess I am getting a Droid then. I'm surprised more people aren't commenting on the screen resolution; that's enormous from a usability standpoint.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I don't know of any similar phones on the market this year that have this resolution or better (except the N900; very similar specs, but not Android). I had a few specific gripes with my G1, and it may well be that the Droid fixes all of them.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Computer Science vs. Computing Science (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD1284.html <comment><USER2> > The latter, not surprisingly, turned programming from an intuitive activity > into a formal one in which the program is derived by symbolic manipulation > from its functional specification and the chosen form of correctness proof.

> The idea of a formal design discipline is often rejected on account of vague > cultural/philosophical condemnations such as "stifling creativity"; this is > more pronounced in the Anglo-Saxon world where a romantic vision of "the > humanities" in fact idealizes technical incompetence. Another aspect of that > same trait is the cult of iterative design.

> Industry suffers from the managerial dogma that for the sake of stability > and continuity, the company should be independent of the competence of > individual employees. Hence industry rejects any methodological proposal > that can be viewed as making intellectual demands on its work force. Since > in the US the influence of industry is more pervasive than elsewhere, the > above dogma hurts American computing science most. The moral of this sad > part of the story is that as long as computing science is not allowed to > save the computer industry, we had better see to it that the computer > industry does not kill computing science.

Typical Dijkstra. You do it his way or you're not only wrong, but also stupid. But "his way" is to have a _correct_ formal specification that you can operate on using mathematical logic. We have learned, from bitter experience, that that's asking quite a lot, and even when you can get it, it's a recipe for building systems that are obsolete on the day they are completed. But Dijkstra is content to pronounce the system produced to be "correct". That approach may cut it in academia, but in the real world it has been tried and found to be sorely wanting.

Then you get to aspects that really are a combination of art and science. Would Dijkstra's approach have produced, say, the iPhone user interface? I strongly doubt it.

<comment><USER3> I used to think like you, until one day i read D.L.Parnas' paper "A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake it" ([http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~perry/education/SE- Intro/fakeit...](http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~perry/education/SE- Intro/fakeit.pdf)). I then could understand Dijkstra's pov. He was advocating for rigor in Programming and that the very effort reqd. to hew to his ideal would result in better Software. That is the gist of his argument.

Unfortunately, Humans are heuristic, pattern-matching, infinitely adaptable organisms and hence absolute rigor is very difficult. The fact that programming languages are so evolved that one can easily code-up any incoherent stream of consciousness and still have the system-as-a-whole work in some fashion is what has contributed to both the boom (anybody can contribute) and mess (quality sorely lacking) in the industry.

PS: Never ever dismiss pioneers like Dijkstra, Hoare, Wirth and others offhand. They built up the Fundamental Theory, Science and Tools which directly led to today's Computer Industry and its effect on Society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _> In the early days, John von Neumann has looked at the problem of constructing a reliable computer out of unreliable components but the study stopped as von Neumann died and transistors replaced the unreliable valves. We are now faced with this problem on a global scale and it is not a management problem but a scientific challenge._

Wow, John von Neumann is my man! I need to get more exposure to his intellectual legacy. I couldn't articulate why my POC of parallel computation surviving asynchronous loss of threads [0] would be of any interest (I don't see any practical value in it myself and treat it as a piece of art). I think the man would find more than two words to respond to it.

[0] [https://github.com/OlegMazurov/Robusta](https://github.com/OlegMazurov/Robusta)

<comment><USER5> You might be interested in David Ackley's work on robust-first, best-effort computing. Here's a relevant paper: [https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/hotos11/tech/final_file...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/hotos11/tech/final_files/Ackley.pdf)

He's working on a pertinent hardware project called the T2 Tile and is documenting it all on YouTube: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1M91QuLZfCzHjBMEKvIc-A](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1M91QuLZfCzHjBMEKvIc-A)

<comment><USER4> Thank you so much! From the first look it's right on the money.

 _> Our strategy is to entice smart people to play with programming robust, indefinitely scalable computations by lowering barriers to entry, and as idioms, motifs, and best practices emerge from such explorations, we believe opportunities for wise optimization will arise._

I believe I have unknowingly contributed to that strategy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> > LISP had its serious shortcomings: what became known as "shallow binding" > (and created a hacker's paradise) was an ordinary design mistake; also its > promotion of the idea that a programming language should be able to > formulate its own interpreter (which then could be used as the language's > definition) has caused a lot of confusion because the incestuous idea of > self-definition was fundamentally flawed.

Would any Lisp expert care to comment on this?

<comment><USER6> Modern terminology is "dynamic" vs "lexical" scope[1][2]. Lexical scope makes it very easy to reason about closures[3]. Dynamic scoping is slightly easier for language authors to implement. Terrible languages like ColdFusion[4] and MUMPS[5] use dynamic scoping, although lexical scoping constructs were bolted on later. LISP has both[6], at least it does now. Dynamic scope makes it possible to do certain kinds of code re-use not possible with lexical scope[7]; these are often called "macros" but what exactly is meant by this varies from language to language; in general, only an "unhygienic" macro requires dynamic scope to implement, while hygienic macros generally require a pre-processor but no access to dynamic scope[8]. Because dynamic scope leads to all kinds of unexpected side-effects, makes closures difficult to implement, and is only really useful for writing the worst and least useful kinds of macros, the programming language world has come down hard in favor of lexical scoping, which is now ubiquitous; almost every modern language you've heard of exclusively uses lexical scope.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_(computer_science)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_\(computer_science\))

[2]: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1047454/what-is- lexical-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1047454/what-is-lexical- scope)

[3]: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Clos...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Closures)

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

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

[6]: [https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DynamicBindingVsLexicalBindi...](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DynamicBindingVsLexicalBinding)

[7]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_(computer_science)#Macro...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_\(computer_science\)#Macro_expansion)

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

<comment><USER2> So, if I understand all this correctly, Lisp originally had dynamic scope only (which was Dijkstra's criticism), and later came to rely mostly on lexical scoping?

And, would you also comment on Dijkstra's "self-definition" comment?

<comment><USER6> The self-definition comment is a reference to the common LISP exercise of writing a "meta-circular evaluator"[1] - that is, writing a LISP interpreter in LISP. This is famously done[3] in "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", which is a very popular textbook and MIT course which uses LISP as a teaching language[2]. This can be found for example, in lecture 7 of the SICP lecture series on Youtube[4].

Dijkstra's comment on this is quite acerbic, isn't it? Here is the full quote for easy reference:

> [LISP's] promotion of the idea that a programming language should be able to > formulate its own interpreter (which then could be used as the language's > definition) has caused a lot of confusion because the incestuous idea of > self-definition was fundamentally flawed.

I agree to the extent that the exercise of writing a LISP interpreter in LISP is indeed often a very confusing exercise for beginner, partly because writing any interpreter (or compiler) is fairly arcane for a beginner, and partly because keeping track of which parts are in implementation and which parts are in the target language can be made more difficult; also because it's easy to "cheat" and rely on outside language in inappropriate ways. I would recommend using a language you already know well and implementing a moderately simple language as a first exercise to a student. But on the whole the exercise of writing an interpreter in its own language - or alternatively writing a self- hosting compiler[5] - is rewarding and does teach you a great deal about how programs work.

I also can't agree the so-called "incestuous idea of self-definition" is "fundamentally flawed:" it is in fact fairly interesting and related to important meta-mathematical concepts like Godel numbering[6], reductions[7], and the Church-Turing thesis[8]. Writing a meta-circular evaluator seems like a reasonably concrete way to start building intuition towards these important ideas. Perhaps Dijkstra has in mind such problems as Curry's Paradox[9] or Russel's Paradox[10], both of which are paradoxes arising from self-reference? In my view a meta-circular evaluator is much closer in spirit to Godel numbering (which _is_ valid and useful) than these paradoxes.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta- circular_evaluator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-circular_evaluator)

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

[3]: [http://www.sicpdistilled.com/section/4.1/](http://www.sicpdistilled.com/section/4.1/)

[4]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m6hoOelZH8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m6hoOelZH8)

[5]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self- hosting_(compilers)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hosting_\(compilers\))

[6]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_numbering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_numbering)

[7]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_(complexity)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_\(complexity\))

[8]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis)

[9]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%27s_paradox)

[10]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting as expected of Dijkstra. I found this part funny:

> _" That name ['programming languages'] was unfortunate because very soon the > analogy with natural languages became more misleading than illuminating. It > strengthened the school of thought that tried to view programming primarily > as a communication problem, it invited the psychologists in, who had nothing > to contribute, and it seriously delayed the recognition of the benefits of > viewing programs as formulae to be derived. It was the time of Edmund C. > Berkeley's "Giant Brains or Machines that Think", it was the time of rampant > anthropomorphism that would lead to the false hope of solving the > programming problem by the verbosity of COBOL and would seduce Grace M. > Hopper to write a paper titled "The Education of a Computer". Regrettably > and amazingly, the habit lingers on: it is quite easy to infuriate computing > scientists by pointing out that anthropomorphizing inanimate objects is in > science a symptom of professional immaturity."_

This school of thought that Dijkstra decried is the one that eventually triumphed in our industry, and nowadays it is widely held that a general- purpose programming language "succeeds" primarily when it enables communication with/between programmers. Armies of consultants and bloggers and Uncle Bobs make a living out of this idea. The whole "languages are first for programmers to read, and second for computers to run" shtick.

I'm not sure which is my own position, but we do know which was Dijkstra's and that he would not be happy today.

<comment><USER2> It's incongruous that Dijkstra, in a paragraph decrying anthropomorphism, anthropomorphizes anthropomorphism (via saying that it seduced Hopper).

<comment><USER8> I saw that and suspected it was intended as humor on his part. That or he actually missed it when writing that letter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Computing Science is a lot better name. I prefer to use that term to "Computer Science".

<comment><USER10> On the one hand yes, but I think Computer science (as a superset) is the better name due to the added focus on learning how computers "actually" work.

The focus should be on computing, but understanding the machine is very important

<comment><USER11> I agree with your observations, but reached the opposite conclusion and prefer Computing Science as a name. I take this as evidence that it's not really important what we call it so long as we're clear on what's being studied.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >would seduce Grace M. Hopper to write a paper titled "The Education of a Computer".

I'm one of the least likely people to start screaming sexism at the drop of a hat but does this turn of phrase seem a bit, well, sexist?

On the nomenclature topic, it's interesting to note that Georgia Tech and many others have a School of Computing so it's not that unusual of a term.

<comment><USER7> I don't see it. What part seems sexist to you? The sentence is relevant because Grace Hopper's work was the precursor to COBOL, and COBOL is the embodiment of what Dijkstra was complaining about.

<comment><USER13> It's a bit odd to use the word "seduce" there.

<comment><USER7> Fair enough. It doesn't seem odd to me (one is seduced by dangerous but superficially appealing ideas, and this has little to do with one's sex), and more importantly, look at the whole sentence:

> _" It was the time of Edmund C. Berkeley's "Giant Brains or Machines that > Think", it was the time of rampant anthropomorphism that would lead to the > false hope of solving the programming problem by the verbosity of COBOL and > would seduce Grace M. Hopper to write a paper titled "The Education of a > Computer". Regrettably and amazingly, the habit lingers on: it is quite easy > to infuriate computing scientists by pointing out that anthropomorphizing > inanimate objects is in science a symptom of professional immaturity._"

Like another comment here points out, this use of "seduce" is akin to "being seduced by the Dark Side of the Force". Anakin Skywalker was a man!

Also, this was Dijkstra's (slightly vitriolic) way of speaking. If you've read other [0] stuff [1] by him [2], you'll instantly recognize his style. And he isn't singling Grace out either; in any case, he seems to refer to her as another computer scientist, sharing the "professional immaturity" with Edmund Berkeley, a man.

[0] "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" [http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_T...](http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_To_Considered_Harmful.html)

[1] "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science" [https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD103...](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html)

[2] "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."

"FORTRAN, 'the infantile disorder', by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use."

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra)

<comment><USER13> Good points - I don't think this is a case of egregious sexism or anything.

But I think greed can seduce a person, I think power can seduce a person, I think fame can seduce a person.

I've never heard of "false hope" or "rampant anthropomorphism" as seductive, though.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Feedback on SwarmIQ, a new Social RSS Reading Experience - <AUTHOR>

Immediate access to our Invite-only Beta : http://www.swarmiq.com/register/ASKHN
Hi Guys,
      We just released v1.0 of the new SwarmIQ Social RSS Reader. Would love to get some feedback. What's your wishlist for a great reading experience?
thanks, Team@SwarmIQ <comment><USER2> The ability to engage deeper on certain channels vs others is pretty powerful.

</comment><comment><USER3> awesome interface.....easy to subscribe to rss feed sources and share it with friends .....first social feed sharing service.</comment>


Reddit co-founder calls out Google, Twitter, Facebook over CISPA - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/041013-reddit-268596.html <comment><USER2> I would like to hear from Ohanian about what changes he would like to see to improve the scope and privacy controls in CISPA.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. There are valid reasons for the bill(mostly around giving agencies the ability to do their jobs in the digital age without unnecessary restrictions). Also, there's that whole issue of having the ability to do something about cyberterrorism(which is happening today by the way). The implementation may not be sound, but something does need to be done.

The CIA and FBI need to be able to research and distribute malware. The government needs to have a way to do something in cyber warefare scenarios. This is why the bill has so many supporters.

My guess is that big businesses are supporting this(Google) due to them having been bit by state sponsored attacks in the past([http://world.time.com/2012/06/06/google-warns-gmail-users- of...](http://world.time.com/2012/06/06/google-warns-gmail-users-of-state- sponsored-attacks/)).

<comment><USER4> >something does need to be done.

Can you elaborate on why that is?

"Something must be done" is the refrain of private defense contractors seeking new revenue streams following the tapering off of our most recent foreign excursions. "Cyber war" is total B.S. It's just taking the same industrial espionage issues that have existed forever and adding "on a computer" to it in order to increase the hype level.

There are a ton of things the government could actually do to help with information security. Some of them are even in the bill -- I don't think anyone has a problem with government providing threat information to the private sector. Or how about more funding for security research. Incentives to implement protocols like DNSSEC.

But there is no excuse for exempting corporations from _all_ privacy laws using extremely vague language. The problem with this bill is very much the implementation rather than the intent, but "good intentions" are no justification for bad legislation.

<comment><USER2> Incidentally, not to get me started on another topic that will result in 18,000 new comments from me, but DNSSEC is a boondoggle that won't help the Internet and is a massive favor to the largest registrars. We should be thankful that we dodged the bullet of a bill that mandated DNSSEC.

<comment><USER4> It seems like your argument is that TLS is better than DNSSEC, so use that instead. But how is that better than using both?

I'll give you that DNSSEC is imperfectly designed, but given that it hasn't been widely deployed, why not just make DNSSECv2 which addresses the concerns (like have the end user device verify the signature)?

<comment><USER2> TLS isn't simply better than DNSSEC: DNSSEC still requires TLS. If you use just DNSSEC, and you stipulate that DNSSEC does what it's supposed to do (spoiler: it doesn't) then all you've done is protect your DNS lookup. So TLS is a non-optional component in the web stack even in the very unlikely event DNSSEC is deployed.

So the problems with DNSSEC then boil down to:

* TLS isn't designed to depend on the security of the DNS. How you know that is, TLS works today, and nobody uses DNSSEC. So if everything needs TLS anyways, why forklift in a new DNS when we could instead work on making TLS better?

* DNSSEC actually degrades the DNS. In a couple ways. First, DNSSEC changes the security model of DNS records; they're now signed, but also they're public. For a long time, DNSSEC advocates claims that DNS records were _always_ public, but that's clearly not true; try to dump Bank of America's zone files. When the advocates lost the argument, they introduced a grotesque hack that turned DNS zones into crackable password files (this is "NSEC3"). That's just one example; there are better examples.

There is a proposed alternative to DNSSEC that I like: DNSCurve. DNSCurve gives up on the idea of signing DNS records and instead just allows any DNS client to create a secure connection to any DNS server. That's a totally sane improvement to the DNS which inexplicably isn't included in DNSSEC (your DNS lookups in a DNSSEC world are still unprotected!). We should do that instead of DNSSEC.

<comment><USER4> >So if everything needs TLS anyways, why forklift in a new DNS when we could instead work on making TLS better?

For one thing, not everything uses TLS (even if it should). TLS normally requires support by the application, securing DNS could be done in the OS. You could fix DNS and have at least that fixed even for all the legacy applications that nobody is ever going to update to use TLS. It would also make IPSec easier to deploy to the same effect because it would allow the DNS to be used for key distribution. And likewise for distributing ssh host keys.

I'll give you that DNSSEC is poorly designed, but I don't necessarily want "DNSSEC" in particular, I'm just looking for something that allows client devices to securely verify DNS query responses. Does DNSCurve do that? The Wikipedia entry doesn't clearly distinguish whether it's securing the connection to the server or the query response. In other words, does DNSCurve allow you to detect if your ISP's DNS resolver is compromised?

<comment><USER2> That is exactly what DNSCurve does, and is something DNSSEC _does not_ do.

<comment><USER4> See, this is why I like this place. People who can teach me things. OK then, so why haven't we deployed DNSCurve?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Actually... Why do they want to pass this bill in the first place?

I mean... The things they want to do are comparable with monitoring all phone calls. Listening to all phone calls and trying to catch dangerous words in the conversations. Why nobody tried to do this with phone calls, but now they try to do this with on-line messaging and social networks?

<comment><USER2> What CISPA purports to do is not comparable with monitoring all phone calls. Where, in the text of the bill or any of its amendments, do you find support for the concern that the law would be used that way?

<comment><USER6> They don't have to say those exact words pre se. All they have to do is keep the wording vague enough so that those actions can be justified.

<comment><USER2> In what words in the law do you find refuge for mass collection of the texts of online messages?

<comment><USER7> They dont need it. Look at the FBI's Carnivore Program, now obsolete. All they needed was a warrant (or, nowadays an NSL) to do so. Just because its not explicitly stated does not mean it cannot be a reality, justified by vague wording and obfuscation.

<comment><USER8> This seems like a generalized concern about the government's practices rather than a specific concern about CISPA.

<comment><USER6> Well of course it is.

All CISPA is, is the next logical progression of the totalitarian[1] state. It harks back to the Patriot Act. There was an event of terror. Therefore there must be "terrorists" out there and we really need protection from them. So much so that we are willing to surrender our rights to a fair trial.

CISPA is the same thing. It focuses on one instance, or issue and abstracts peoples actions away from that to make it seem like something they'll never have to deal with. Case in point, no one thinks that they'll be detained and held without trial, but that still doesn't mean the government can't do that.

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

<comment><USER9> You could make the same argument about any law. The point is that makes it a weaker argument, not a stronger one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The video is clearly meant to be less than totally serious - it seems > unlikely that Ohanian, himself a prominent figure in the tech world, would > need to resort to trying to talk his way to Page through Google's public > phone number...

I realize that the author probably meant that Ohanian would have connections who might have connections who would have Larry Page's phone number, but the wording of that briefly made me think that the author thought there was some secret phone book you get when you cash out your popular startup for a certain amount.

</comment><comment><USER11> Here's the petition: <http://www.saveyourprivacypolicy.org/>

</comment><comment><USER12> If only Aaron Swartz was still alive.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hopefully Namecoin will see some more development out of this: <http://reddit.com/r/namecoin>

</comment><comment><USER14> I would have a beer with that guy.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why does this only have 73,000 views on YouTube?....

</comment><comment><USER16> freaky moves in the last part

</comment><comment><USER17> well the market just went uptick for the encryption products/services :P</comment>


Samsung Confirms Critical Security Issue: Every Galaxy After 2014 Affected - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2020/05/07/samsung-confirms-critical-security-warning-for-millions-every-galaxy-after--2014-affected/ <comment><USER2> So I wonder how hard it'd be to chain this with a jailbreak, and use it to, say, exfiltrate the Covid tracking database for apps like Singapore and Australia's "totally secure" contact tracing apps?

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting thought</comment></comment>


VCs And Super Angels: The War For The Entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/15/venture-capital-super-angel-war-entrepreneur/

<comment><USER2> This is a good overview of today's funding ecosystem.

I'm not sure how concerned I am about having enough founders swinging for the fences and building big companies.

Certainly founders are getting more of what they want as these small exits happen more frequently. For first time entrepreneurs a few million in the bank is a huge fucking deal.

Acquiring companies are getting what they want, too. Often at the lower prices they want the talent, and I think companies are starting to understand more and more the value of acquiring founder talent.

I think we'll see where this goes. Everything is still playing out and it's a very rapid evolution. Examples:

1) Founder cash-outs are happening more and more, likely in direct response to more frequent early acquisitions.

2) Acquiring companies are still experimenting with how to motivate founders after a talent acquisition. The state of the art for the median case -- shelf their code and throw them into a team often with little creative freedom -- is quite stark.

<comment><USER3> "Certainly founders are getting more of what they want as these small exits happen more frequently. For first time entrepreneurs a few million in the bank is a huge fucking deal."

This is the important point, imo.

More small startups -> more small exits which "solve" the money problem for first-time entrepreneurs -> more entrepreneurial-minded people creating companies for "fun" without worrying about the money.

I.e., solving the money issue for entrepreneurs by them having one smallish success is probably good, since they're the kind of people who will go on to create much larger, more interesting companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Mike actually makes some interesting counter arguments against the super angel movmeny. I'm curious to hear what HN thinks about this statement:

"And without those occasional but huge exits, the entire ecosystem can fail. Venture firms need big returns to raise new funds. Without venture money a lot of the innovation in Silicon Valley would end.

So in effect, the argument goes, the angel investors are like a quickly growing cancer. Without radically invasive surgery, Silicon Valley will eventually flatline."

<comment><USER5> It's a sort of strange argument, because it seems to be making a good-of- society kind of argument, but via free-market investing, in a weird hybrid. The argument is that _one_ kind of free-market investor ought to bow out, because they're hurting the other kind, who, the argument goes, are ultimately required for innovation. But what's this asking for? Government regulation? Angels foregoing profitable deals in order to altruistically keep the VCs in business?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Something to be wary about as an entrepreneur: the angel investors who are now raising larger funds will have to invest in more companies, which will result in them being able to spend less time and less energy with each startup.

The traditional VC model is to have a large fund spread out across a number of partners who can each invest in around 3-10 companies each per fund. As an entrepreneur, you have the benefit of more attention from your VC partner, as well as the resources of the partnership as a whole.

These super angel funds will likely start hiring associates and bringing in other partners to share the load, and at that point they become no different to, and competitors to, the traditional VC firms.

Every investor has limited deal bandwidth, regardless of if they are an angel, a super angel, or a VC.

<comment><USER7> _Every investor has limited deal bandwidth, regardless of if they are an angel, a super angel, or a VC._

I guess the difference is that the new breed of "super angels" can provide a lot more technical help compared to traditional VCs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems like the most fundamental difference between VCs and Super Angels is that VCs have more checks and balances (and overhead) surrounding where they invest their money. With Super Angels, one person makes the final decision. For making $50 million bets, checks and balances seem like a good thing. For making $500,000 bets, perhaps one (very competent) person is the better approach.

Some of the appeal of the VCs and their checks and balances may be for reassuring the LPs investing in the VC fund, rather than with its actual effectiveness in improving investment decisions. As Super Angels invest larger and larger sums, perhaps we'll see to what extent the VC approach is (or is not) needed when large sums of money are involved.

</comment><comment><USER9> "But if big companies aren't being built because of this small thinking, we'll all suffer sooner or later. "

This assumes that SV has only web and software startups. Certain kinds of companies (biotech, telecom, etc.) do need VC, and these companies are built to IPO. That won't change.

</comment><comment><USER10> Isn't this the free market speaking? Maybe the message is that the VC's need to change their ways. Treat founders better, have their interest and they will come back.

If the ways startups are created is changing (nimble, cheaper), why shouldn't the way their being funded change?</comment>


Google's Barcode Logo - <AUTHOR> http://grab.by/84P

<comment><USER2> Out of curiosity I scanned it with my phone's barcode scanner.

The barcode is CODE_128 format TEXT spelling "Google".

I was hoping for something a little more mysterious/adventurous.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Google has had some adventurous logos before, but this is seriously bold.

</comment><comment><USER3> It would have been better if the bars were in color like the logo.</comment>


Growing fibers - <AUTHOR> https://wingolog.org/archives/2017/06/27/growing-fibers <comment><USER2> This is an excellent article not just because it explains this new concurrency library for Guile, but also because it demonstrates the fundamental concepts which underlie all concurrency. Processes in a Unix kernel, for example, deeply and directly parallel this implementation of fibers on a Guile VM.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been playing around with delimited continuations in a toy programming language of mine for a while now and I seriously think that its a paradigm that will eventually take over the scripting language space. First-class control flow is so powerful once you get the hang of it!

<comment><USER4> they already exist even though in a limited form: async/await, coroutines, generators etc. I doubt whether first-class support is that important.

<comment><USER5> "First class functions exist in a limited form: Function pointers, etc. I doubt whether first-class support is that important".

<comment><USER4> Well, i would love to see some applications of delimited continuations other than those mentioned here: [http://matt.might.net/articles/programming-with- continuation...](http://matt.might.net/articles/programming-with-continuations --exceptions-backtracking-search-threads-generators-coroutines/) . Most languages have support for these applications.

The only thing other than that i have seen work is continuation based web servers.

<comment><USER3> The page that you linked to shows off some features that are not really found in any major programming langauge. Time-traveling search is a big one for me.

Many languages have exceptions, but with shift/reset, you can implement your own exception handling behavior trivially, including things like resumable exceptions.

Some languages have async/await, but almost all of those implementations are state-machine based, which means that they don't compose well when used with more complex language features like generics and higher order functions.

But more than that, in continuation-based asynchronous programming, "async" functions are just normal functions that execute in an async prompt. Here's an example of a multi-user asynchronous TCP echo server in my toy language with tagged delimited continuations:

        async {
          loop {
            let conn = accept_connection("localhost", 9999)
            async {
              loop {
                let data = conn.next_data()
                conn.send(data)
              }
            }
          }
        }

Where all of those asyncrhonous constructs (including `async` itself) are really short wrappers around delimited continuation machinery.

You'll notice that the nested calls to `async` indicate that there are two asyncrhonous contexts

1\. Connection acceptance happen on their own "thread" of control

2\. Each connection gets their own context in which everything is internally asyncrhonous

<comment><USER4> time-travelling search can be done with recursion. Otherwise, i agree that they don't compose well with each other in some languages. However, it is harder to implement efficiently as far as i understand; time will tell if they are widely understood to be implemented in future languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there an equivalent library for Racket?

<comment><USER7> Delimited continuations are in the Racket standard library. Racket's thread system isn't built directly on them but is also lightweight. The in-progress work to run Racket in Chez Scheme uses an implementation more like what wingo describes, based on what's called "engines".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anyone have any recommendations on resources guiding implementation of delimited continuations?

<comment><USER4> [http://okmij.org/ftp/continuations/implementations.html](http://okmij.org/ftp/continuations/implementations.html). The first paper on delimCC is a good start.

<comment><USER8> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thought this was going to be about growing physical fibers -- making cellulose threads in a reactor or something.</comment>


What Engineering Testing Assessments Are Out There? - <AUTHOR> My recruiting team is looking for assessment tools that we can use to assess the technical abilities of engineering candidates at all levels (jr-senior). Can anyone recommend tools that my team should look into? Price is not of a concern to us. <comment><USER2> Talk to them for 30 minutes about past projects.</comment>


System D - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_D <comment><USER2> Snappy and think-on-your-feetedness ! Quick witted? Parting on a repartee?</comment>


ClusterK can run apps on Amazon's cloud for 1/10th of the regular price - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/19/clusterk/

<comment><USER2> Is this really viable in long term? Won't the spot price increase if more customers bid for the resources? Can Amazon just change its pricing conditions to make this obsolete if the startup gets more customers and Amazon actually starts loosing money?

<comment><USER3> Amazon makes money as they monetize their otherwise unused resources. More usage -> higher bidding, better prices, not a 90% gap with on-demands.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you harmonize user data? - <AUTHOR> If you have an app you probably have user-related data sitting in a bunch of different places.
For instance, I've seen companies with app-specific user data sitting in a database, user sales info in Salesforce, user support info in Zendesk, user chat in Intercom, user design feedback in a Google Sheet, and the list goes on...
Keeping this info separate is bad user experience. People want things personalized. The support team should know about a user's latest design interview, and sales should know about their recent in-app behavior.
What are some best practices for harmonizing user-related data? I'd love to hear some success stories. <comment><USER2> Generally the best advice is to conform to the SPOT (Single Point of Truth) rule as much as possible. For example, the place DEFINING users' addresses can be your own database and the data in salesforce is only a REPLICATION of that data. And the DEFINITION of chats is in Intercom and you only have an API for RETRIEVING the data in your own code.

It helps a lot when the "owners" of data are defined that way, because it's easy to reason about the flows. You can then have a set of APIs in your code for accessing (be it the master data/replicated data/live-fetched from an external system).

</comment><comment><USER3> It is called a data warehouse. (and/or Business Intelligence) You can have disparate systems that each create their own data... and each datum comes from the system that "owns" that data. But it gets aggregated to a central location, which owns none of it, but pulls it together for reporting and analysis.

There are comments here giving some examples of products intended to help with this, but this is one of those area where the concepts are easy, but execution is challenging. I'd recommend looking less at products, and more at theory to decide how you want to approach it... and then go back and see if any of the products match your decisions.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to empower business teams to have a single view of the customer. When providing support, to see how other teams have interacted with this person. To see info from all of our apps, as well as add their own info in when needed.

A well-designed data warehouse is a myth. As long as I'm the person the business needs to call to both get data (eg via SQL) as well as add new data (eg new ETL process), we'll continue to be f'd.

<comment><USER3> That is quite a defeatist attitude. I've worked with well-designed data warehouses. Sure, it is a skill to do it well, but isn't everything?

Even if you do need to develop new reports and inputs, so what? Those results empower the business from then on out. And that is ignoring the fact that many products exist to empower the users to develop their own reports.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A decade ago, SaaS companies didn't exist. People had all their data (support tickets, payment details, analytics, …) in their own backoffice.

Then, SaaS came to remove tremendous pains…

• Paypal/Stripe/Braintree/… solve the payments nightmare.

• Zendesk/Intercom/Front/… solve the support nightmare.

• etc…

Nowadays, you have your data from your application in your backoffice and all data from SaaS in their own web interface. As your perfectly said, keeping this info separate is bad UX. It can be very difficult to take good business decisions when data are split.

It is one of the main reason I developed Forest ([http://www.forestadmin.com](http://www.forestadmin.com)). Forest helps web businesses to have instantly their own customizable admin interface (backoffice). Forest connect your services (SaaS) to gather all the intelligence in one place. You have best of both worlds :-)

</comment><comment><USER5> In my case its been a generic API that connects all services and feeds a simple dashboard. Everything a user does is shown there in realtime. Data is formatted for specific actions. For example: the user created a support ticket. The generic API gets a signal with data from the ticket (user id, etc) and ads some predefined tags to it and passes it to a dashboard widget. That way the staff can see everything that's going on without excess information. It works pretty well because the sales and support team can help each other over the company chat. It was built on python and uses websockets for the live updates. Can't open source it due to it being a day job tool, but am working in something similar (without the dashboard just yet).

<comment><AUTHOR> This sounds useful!

<comment><USER5> It really is! I'm currently building a hacky version to get it out there and see how it works out in the real world. Also doing client libraries in multiple language so people don't need to do a lot of boilerplate API code just to get some JSON response.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The point you've raised about different types of data being stuck in different services across teams is a real pain point, especially for startups as we tend to embrace brand new tools.

Segment ([https://segment.com](https://segment.com)) is one attempt to be the "customer data hub". It never quite did everything I wanted personally. If it works for you, then you can hook it up to something like Keen ([https://keen.io](https://keen.io)) and get a dashboard with nice realtime charts very easily.

My most common approach is to let the data sit in third party services, then pull it together via APIs for reporting.

</comment><comment><USER7> RJMetrics Pipeline - [https://rjmetrics.com/product/pipeline/](https://rjmetrics.com/product/pipeline/)

Fivetran - [https://www.fivetran.com/integrate](https://www.fivetran.com/integrate)

Segment Sources - [https://segment.com/sources](https://segment.com/sources)

Snowplow - [https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow/wiki/Setting-up-a- Webho...](https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow/wiki/Setting-up-a-Webhook)

(Disclosure: Snowplow co-founder)

</comment><comment><USER8> Take a look at data virtualization. It's an alternative to data warehousing without the burden of making mutiple copies of the data; instead, it retrieves the information fron source systems in real time.

The "single view of customer" use case, which is the one you mention in your post, is one of the oldest that this technology aimed to solve and it does solve it very well.

Disclaimer: I work for Denodo ([http://denodo.com](http://denodo.com)).

<comment><AUTHOR> Does this actually work though? For instance, we may have user data in an API that, thanks to arbitrary rate limits, isn't useful at all when querying in real time.

<comment><USER8> You mean not being able to access specific user data due to hitting the rate limits of the API? In that case, you can always cache the data (using the cache facilities of the data virtualization layer) and create a hybrid real time/cached workflow that pulls data in real time when possible and from cache for the APIs that have restrictions in place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> tony-allan There is no incentive for separate SaaS companies to use a shared source of data. Each system will have data for it's own needs and will manage that data as it see's fit.

The best you could do is to have a web page for the customer that shows all of the details from each app in the same place, using API's from each SaaS platform to fetch the user data from each.

If you take an example of an email address, it seems like you could just synchronise it across various systems but that ignores the different purposes that each email address might have. For example, you might have a legitimate reason to separate emails from financial apps from social networks, and games.

</comment><comment><USER9> SAP is built for this, however:

Being in a very locked-down corporate environment, I used... Excel. A 'master sheet' output various files to various directories that themselves were permissioned for user access, updated once per minute. Which is a crux:

If you're trying to tie a range of systems you need to take into account:

* Permissions. If you have user-related data, you probably don't want everyone accessing and/or writing to this data;

* Data quality. You're lucky to get a unique ID across these systems, unless you've got a unique ID policy in place.

</comment><comment><USER10> Good question. I've seen some crm-like systems like pipedrive come close to capturing both traits (static features) as well as behavior /events of prospects/users. For capturing and using a bit more structured stuff, e.g. 1-n user-survey, user-emailOpen, etc even pipedrive etc, even pipedrive (being the most flexibele i know of although that doesnt say much) falls short. Dont know of any 'customer/contact/profile'-hub like tool that does all of this.

</comment><comment><USER11> One way to deal with this is to do bulk data downloads into a data warehouse or your main database. Alternatively, you can spend time integrating the third party into your systems.

</comment><comment><USER12> Domo is working on this I think.

</comment><comment><USER13> While it doesn't cover all user data by any means, one of the secrets to Goldman Sachs' success, and survival in 2008 plus or minus, is their SecDB securities database implemented in their own Securities LANGuage SLANG. It allows them to know all of their positions, play what if games relatively quickly, etc., without requiring manual scraping of Excel spreadsheets, etc.

It is, at minimum and for all its present day technical deficits, a big success story.</comment>


Physicists demonstrate existence of new subatomic structure - <AUTHOR> https://las.iastate.edu/isu-physicists-help-demonstrate-existence-of-new-subatomic-structure/ <comment><USER2> Mmm, scientific click bait titling. More accurate would be "Physicists demonstrate a theoretical subatomic structure in simulation". That's important, to be sure, but it has nothing to do with demonstrating the existence of a particle - we've determined something "should" exist based on simulation and data-interpretation plenty of times, and many of those have ended up being wrong. And that's good: good science comes from discovering what _isn't_ true, but that makes it all the more silly to have this title on the article. We've got the simulation worked out... now we need to see if it holds up to reality. It might not. If so, that's valuable information.

<comment><USER3> Apparently you didn't read the article in full before criticizing it. The article says that the simulation was used to verify real world observations from a particle accelerator experiment in Japan.

<comment><USER4> "Verify" is a strong word. The RIKEN experiment didn't come close to the usual standard of evidence for declaring a new particle exists, it just showed a reaction for which creation of a tetraneutron is a possible explanation. There need to be a lot more experiments (different ones, not just repeats of RIKEN's) before anybody would be willing to declare tetraneutrons "exist".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "On their own, neutrons are very unstable and will convert into protons — positively charged subatomic particles — after ten minutes. " ... "For the tetraneutron, this lifetime is only 5×10^(-22) seconds (a tiny fraction of a billionth of a nanosecond). "

10 minutes is an eternity and 5×10^(-22) seconds is closer to what I'd consider 'very unstable'

<comment><USER6> > The research in Japan used a beam of Helium-8, Helium with 4 extra neutrons, > colliding with a regular Helium-4 atom. The collision breaks up the Helium-8 > into another Helium-4 and a tetraneutron in its brief resonance state, > before it, too, breaks apart, forming four lone neutrons.

I don't know how fast these particles were going in the experiment, but if they were going at the speed of light, then the tetraneutron would make it 150 femtometres from the site of the collision before decaying. By way of comparison, neutrons and protons are 1 - 2 fm across, and a uranium nucleus is 15 fm across [i]. So if the tetraneutron was actually going at a tenth of the speed of light, it would barely make it a nucleus's diameter away before exploding.

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

<comment><USER7> That's not how relativistic speeds work. If this was going near enough to the speed of light, it could travel almost any distance before decaying. Time dilation would be observed of the particle, where it would appear that time is ticking slower for the particle compared to our own frame of reference.

<comment><USER8> Actually what the parent comment said would be correct. Time dilation and length contraction do not arbitrarily change the proper distances that particles travel at near light speeds.

As observers, the detectors would see precisely what we expect if we calculate the distance using the detector's proper time when compared with the distance we experimentally measure.

<comment><USER9> Mmm... I have the strange feeling that you both agree, let's write this with more details to avoid confusion.

The half life of a static tetraneutron is (theoreticaly) 5E-22s.

If you are at a laboratory and the tetraneutron is moving at relativistic speed, the apparent half life in the laboratory frame will increase substantially.

To calculate the distance that the tetraneutron will travel you must multiply the velocity x the apparent half life. I.E

d ~= v * 1/(1-v^2/c^2) * t_hl

where t_hl = 5E-22s = the half life of the tetraneuton

not the classic version that is

d_clasic_wrong = v * t_hl

For a more detailed explanation, with numbers and graphic you all can see the analogue experiment with muons: [http://hyperphysics.phy- astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/muon.html](http://hyperphysics.phy- astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/muon.html)

\--

Anyway, IIRC a half life of 5E-22s is still very small. IIRC you can use a bubble chamber or something similar to see the trajectory of the particles. You can only see a collision and examine the debris and you will note that when the collision has some specific energy you will get an unexpected excess of collisions. You only can examine the direction and energy of the debris to make a good guess of the intermediate steps of the collision and discover that for a very short time you had a tetraneutron.

<comment><USER8> I do agree that time dilation occurs, what I disagreed with/corrected was with this: _it could travel almost any distance before decaying_ , which I took to imply that the lengthening of particle lifetimes was not measurable in the way that you just pointed out.

In retrospect perhaps the parent comment was saying theoretically it could travel any distance which is true, but doesn't really help in estimating whether it could clear nuclear radii or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Physics is one science where the seemingly impossible winds up being possible all the time. Strange to think people spend a good portion of their lives studying things thought to not exist.

<comment><USER11> > where the seemingly impossible winds up being possible all the time.

No, it's where the possible is often portrayed as impossible by popular reporting all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> We've updated the link from [http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/7339.html](http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/7339.html) to this, which looks like the original source.

</comment><comment><USER13> I read the headline as "demand" and thought this was a rather petulant reaction to the "no new physics" development this year.

[https://home.cern/about/updates/2016/05/theory- theoretical-p...](https://home.cern/about/updates/2016/05/theory-theoretical- physics-crisis)

</comment><comment><USER14> The original paper [1].

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.05631](https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.05631)

</comment><comment><USER15> Is it really "subatomic" though? Seems more like it could be considered isotope 4 of element zero.

<comment><USER4> Technically subatomic refers to the size of an atom with electrons, not a nucleus (which is much smaller). It's especially appropriate here because neutrons aren't electrically charged, so their interactions with other particles are very short range.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't know, maybe this discovery has scientific value. But could it be the sometimes scientists report small "breakthroughs" just so that they keep the funding coming ?

</comment><comment><USER17> Still no turtles.

<comment><USER18> it's subatomic particles all the way down i tell you!

<comment><USER19> I would have sworn I've seen an animation implying that at sufficient magnification the whole thing loops around to galactic superclusters. Non- intuitive, to be sure...</comment></comment></comment>