Bored with no ideas for next startup - <AUTHOR>

After exiting my first startup and coming out on top ($60K), I feel like I can't think of any more ideas for my next startup. I've read all of PG (yes, even the ideas one), analyzed other startups, but am sick of seeing the same ol' stuff... Can someone help me out with what to do next?<p>Anon for now. <comment><USER2> A good way to come up with new ideas is live outside the tech world. Get a non-tech job in a totally different field. Haven't tried that myself, but I'd bet you'd come up with some good ideas that way.

<comment><USER3> Careful there! That implies that the best way to come up with solutions to a problem in an industry would be to get outside of it so you can get an external, top-down perspective on emerging trends and unmet needs. Then if you get an idea, you'll get a bug to implement it. But everybody will just laugh at you and scoff, "Pssst - what would you know about that? You don't even work in that field! You're not credible!"

<comment><USER4> >But everybody will just laugh at you and scoff, "Pssst - what would you know about that? You don't even work in that field! You're not credible!"

Which would put you in pretty good company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What do you wish someone else would build for you?

<comment><USER3> IN GENERAL this is a great frame of mind to come up with ideas for a non- programming mind; I think, however, that as a developer such a perspective would lead to technically interesting stuff that few people would use / pay for. As time remains constant and life becomes more complicated, I suspect people will become more selective and use more of the kinds of services they would actually bother paying for and limiting their interactions with things that are interesting, but not enough if they actually cost something. That said, most non-programmers usually start the "what would I want built for me" process from the perspective of "that would be so useful that I might even consider paying for it" whereas, from my experience with programmers (trying to recruit for my own startup efforts), most programmers start the "what would I wish someone built" process from the perspective of "that I would respect this guy's technical ability a lot."

Case in point: there are tons of ideas that can become good, useful, practical valuable services based on standard, already existing technology reconfigured in different ways. But most programmers, if they're anything like the ones I've come across, would consider that "below them" and instead favor a startup working on some obscure problem that 6 people on the planet could understand and appreciate.

Google aside, that rarely translates into "great business".

<comment><USER5> _Google aside, that rarely translates into "great business"._

I think you mean Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo aside.

<comment><USER3> No, I mean just Google.

Apple in my mind = present an OS GUI according to the needs of the human brain. A lot more than 6 people were/are/will be interested in that.

Microsoft = make big business computer functions possible on the home computer (at least originally). Apparently more than 6 people were interested in that.

Yahoo's proposition originally = the world wibe web is taking off exponentially and you need some sort of list or something to keep track of all the interesting stuff that keeps popping up.

Again, more than 6 people were/are interested in that.

So, only Google. And truth be said, even Google doesn't count that much since from my understanding Google was just living off of angel/VC funding for a few years until a biz-dev V.P. came up with the idea to tie search results to paid advertising as text on the side.

Without what became adwords, Google would have just stayed an interesting technical solution.

Had that V.P. kept his mouth shut and left, secured VC backing based on his cred as an exec in a KP/Seq-backed venture and started his own search engine based on his adwords idea, I suspect he'd be the billionaire and "google" would have turned out to be a startup his subesquent company bought and absorbed.

<comment><USER6> Your understanding of Google is not at all accurate.

<comment><USER3> On another note, I just looked at your profile and read some of your articles. Why take issues with "my understanding of Google" when it turns out I'm making a similar point to what you wrote about in terms of being humble enough to put pride aside and find out what people actually want/need/will pay for rather assuming for them only to find out that nobody cares about the brilliant programming of an idea nobody but the programmer appreciates?

Isn't that what you yourself said in one of your posts on your blog, or am I misunderstanding your position?

<comment><USER6> You're right that startups should be focused on building things that people will want instead of just trying to use cool technology, but you're mistaken in believing that Google wasn't doing that. Google had a strong following of enthusiastic users from very early on. "Make something people want" also happens to be the YC slogan, though I think it should be "Make something people will want", since people don't always know what they want.

<comment><USER3> Okay, let's leave Google out of this for a moment. My emphasis was that the transition from "startup" to "business" seems to happen when you connect with paying customers.

I even posted a post to this effect where I basically summed up the most interesting part (for me) of a marketing book:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=127157>

In order to have a clear value proposition to get people to give you their money, you need to answer (according to the book) these questions in succession of difficulty:

Who you are / what you do / for who / because they need what thing that they can't do without you / unlike your competitors / your different in what way / which is a very important distinction (how?) and makes people care (why?).

I'd say most startups start with "who they are" and stop. Some make it to "what they do" although not expressed clearly. The part about "for who" and "why they care" never seems to be spelled out, just implied or something.

The first response is by some guy who took this as both a personal attack and an attack on the whole Y Combinator community!

Then PG comes on and says, "well such and such venture capitalist says he funds business that solve a problem the founders had."

I try to point out that that only holds true as long as that problem is one a huge market of people are also having and are willing to pay for the resolution of.

Then, in a rather futile and pointless exercise, he goes on to systematically knock about 30 points off my all-time high of 80, perhaps under the delusion that I secretly covet a high point tally so I can impress him or something.

It's like, the very mere suggestion that people need to tie their technical ability to practical solution solving for paying customers, especially in this economic climate, seems to meet with rage and fury from programmers who seem to take basic economic reality like a personal insult or something.

> "Make something people will want", since people don't > always know what > they want.

That would need perspective and ability to anticipate possible patterns of future development, ability to assign probabilities to multiple scenarios, etc.

All "right brain stuff". Most programmers I've come across, especially here, couldn't seem to care less as long as they post their startup and score points from peers.

<comment><USER7> _Most programmers I've come across, especially here, couldn't seem to care less as long as they post their startup and score points from peers._

Perhaps you could stop being so _nice_ to us. Just kidding. Believe me, most of the programmers here understand this completely. We also understand that things like quantitative market analysis, business plans, etc are for the most part useless because no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. In this regard, I think we are more right-brained, or at the least more honest, in terms of what we think users want. We put out a rough approximation of what we think they want and let them guide us. What could be more empathetic than that?

<comment><USER3> From my understanding, Y has so far been involved in about 80 startups or so.

Name 1 that provides a benefit people care enough to pay for.

... ... ... ...

But if what you said is true, ie, that programmers are "more honest in terms of what we think users want", shouldn't you be able to point to a lot of things?

If it's true that "We put out a rough approximation of what we think they want and let them guide us", how come nobody seems to be guiding anybody towards an offering people are willing to pay for?

Or do you guys just _think_ you're "more honest" and "empathetic" when in reality you may be very, very far from the reality of what people actually want enough to pay for?

<comment><USER8> _Name 1 that provides a benefit people care enough to pay for._

<http://clickfacts.com/>

<http://wufoo.com/>

<http://virtualmin.com/>

<http://adpinion.com/>

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

I'm sure I've forgotten a hatful.

<comment><USER3> I could see adpinion and clickfacts possibly going somewhere to an extent ... though only because I don't know enough about advertising to figure out if they won't be able to get lots of customers

I can't help but notice, though, that clickfact's management team seems to be around PG's age so I wouldn't call it a pure Y Combinator thing based on the premise of Y Combinator as I understand it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Randomly select three words, then think about what they mean together and how to turn that into a business. Repeat.

<comment><USER9> Jump To Conclusions

I can envision a fun 'mat based' game for all ages here... Score!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It sounds like you're in a mental rut at the moment. To get out of it, you will need to put aside the problem of 'finding your next startup' and focus your attention on other things for a while. Teaching yourself a new technology or working for someone else's startup for a while might give you enough of a different perspective to make more progress on finding a startup idea.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have way more ideas than I can handle myself...

Write a bit about what are you looking for? Embedded, web, applications? Any particular fields that you like ?

</comment><comment><USER12> Aren't there idea repositories out on the web that are publicly accessible? Something along the lines of huge brainstorming sessions done by people who don't have the time or inclination to implement the ideas?

Here's the closest thing I'm aware of - the Global Ideas Bank: <http://www.globalideasbank.org/site/bank/>

Anyone know of anything else along this line?

<comment><USER3> Well, I just went to the link you provided and aside from 90% of the ideas being well-intentioned but half-baked, I can't help but notice there are no business ideas. So, to answer your question, no, there aren't. Why would anybody waste time documenting an idea they don't have the inclination to implement? Why don't they have the inclination? Because there's no motivation. Why? Because they realize they can't make money off of it. Hence the only ideas you'll find for "free" on the internet are ideas nobody can figure out how to make any money off of. If they _could_ figure that out, then they would have the inclination and thus, logic indicates that they'd MAKE the time. And keep the idea to themselves, not post it up for all to see and profit off of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> _"... After exiting my first startup and coming out on top ($60K), I feel like I can't think of any more ideas for my next startup. I've read all of PG (yes, even the ideas one), analyzed other startups, but am sick of seeing the same ol' stuff... Can someone help me out with what to do next? ..."_

There are some good resources for the "no-ideas" problem. Listen to this [0], then read this [1]. See how you go. If you still have trouble you are probably not determined enough.

[0] [http://wiki.ycombinator.com.nyud.net:8090/presentations/Paul...](http://wiki.ycombinator.com.nyud.net:8090/presentations/Paul_Graham.mp3)

[1] <http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html>

</comment><comment><USER14> Join another startup for a while? I think its almost a huge strength to want to work on startups but to not currently have an idea. There are tons of guys out there with good ideas needing co-founders. A few people in the current batch of YC included.

</comment><comment><USER15> I want a way to use Paypal to pay for Google Adwords and/or other sites that don't accept it.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why would you come up "anonymously for now" ? If you have an already successful start-up experience, why not talking about it and tell us a bit about you ? What are the risks in doing so ?

I'm a bit cautious by nature and I'm just curious about it. If I had an already successful experience and were in your situation I'd rather talk about it and introduce myself a bit. It helps to gain trust from other people and would make your request more appealing.

<comment><USER3> Anonymous = I don't have to tip my hat to people who can come up with ideas / admit that good business ideas are not as easy as everyone says they are / share any resulting credit/profits from application of ideas because nobody knows who I am.

I could be wrong. But I can't think of any possible other reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "but am sick of seeing the same ol' stuff..." That's just the spirit you need.

"Can someone help me out with what to do next?" That's not.

</comment><comment><USER18> Find a good way to have an asynchronous feed back from a web server to a web client, a true general purpose "push" protocol as an extension of HTTP. Hey you can even call it HTTP2W or HTTP2HTTP. Of course you'll have to come up with not only the protocol definition but also a reference implementation for both the client and the server. Sounds like fun, eh?

<comment><USER19> Already exists:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_%28programming%29>

<comment><USER18> Thanks, I'm aware of Comet. Not exactly what I meant, in Comet the connection stays open after being initiated by the client. I'm looking for something where the interaction is first client-to-server, then client registers a "callback" address and port that it will listen to. This would be followed by a server-to-client call where the server will send updates/events to client as they happen, the client then decides what to do with those events. I want to avoid a persistent connection, and either the "heartbeat" client requests or other forms of polling by the client. The interaction that I'm looking for is more akin to a P2P sort of model.

<comment><USER20> I think firewall and NAT ubiquitousness (is that a word?) would make this unfeasible.

<comment> a-priori Yet another reason to speed the transition to IPv6.

<comment><USER21> IPv6 has nothing to do with firewalls and NAT issues. Firewalls in particular will remain in place and render this setup unfeasible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ask your non-hacker friends what irks them about work... develop from there...(yes, it will take a while... but you were bored anyway)

</comment><comment><USER22> here's one: user generated content is hot. games are fun. turn a game into content creation or content creation into a game.

<comment><USER22> Bundled startup companies. Offer a Limited company with matching domain name and web-2.0-ey logo/trademark on the holding page. Your customers will get an instant web presence they can start coding into. Perhaps having an operational online payment system in that companies name would be good value for money.

<comment><USER22> is there an interactive-computer-help system going already? Punters pay per minute of help. They are matched with a nerd somewhere who can view their screen, offer advice (voip) or help using a remote desktop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Where do you live?

<comment><USER24> I was wondering the same thing. If he was near me, I could turn him on to about 8 years worth of code that needs to be done in the next 3 months.

<comes up for oxygen>

13 hours later, he hasn't answered. Either he's not serious, he got hit by a bus, or your question got buried in the noise in this thread.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> i'm a web dev with lots of time on my hands... problem is, no ideas to apply to it!

</comment><comment><USER3> I know how you can get an idea for your next startup. Call your favorite VC firm and ask them, "You know how VCs are always lamenting that great business ideas are a dime a dozen? I can't think of any ideas for now - but I have 30 cents! Can you please write down 3 dozen ideas you think are great so I can develop them?"

Problem solved ... for a mere 30 cents.

Keep me updated on any progress.

<comment><USER25> They'll say ideas are a dime a dozen but their time is charged at $500/hour.

<comment><USER3> That's ok. Just tell them that you have an awesome "ability to execute" dime- a-dozen ideas. According to their theories, that, the capital they would subsequently invest and their "value-added" should help you all become multi- billionaires. Surely they believe their own talk, so in theory they should gladly put aside their pittance of $500 an hour to share ideas you can execute for them.

Don't forget little people like me when you guys hit the big time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> BTW ... let's say you get the help you want. Do you offer anything in return?

<comment><USER3> This is sooo funny. Almost every week there's a "Ask YC" type of post where a business idea is seeking programming talent, and almost all the time the response is, "Why should I partner with you? What will you do for the startup while I code?"

And here we have a "bored software developer" just soliciting free business ideas and the mere suggestion that he should offer something in return seems to be unpopular.

Have you ever considered that the person who you seek ideas from may have developed the idea over months ... or even years of thinking, unpaid research, trial-and-error, awkward conversations with potential users, constant analysis of other things on the market, etc.?

Perhaps you may consider that from their perspective it would be something like, "Why should I share the insights of months/years of thinking about the problem? What were you doing while I was investing the time to investigate the feasibility?"

And yet the very question of what value the idea giver can expect meets scorn.

<comment><USER26> This is news.yc... have you read any of PG's thoughts on the value of ideas?

Here's an idea for bored_dev: Apparently, some people have a bizarre habit of highlighting the text as they read. Write a script that checks whether a user reads the entire text of, say, an EULA, or maybe an essay...

<comment><USER3> Okay, let's review reality. This "bored developer" is apparently not PG. So PG's opinions/thoughts are not relevant here, since obviously this particular "bored developer" is straying from that view. For example, PG said you don't even really need a good idea - just get started. But this "bored developer" apparently can't start without the good idea, so he apparently is experiencing a different reality at the moment than PG.

Seriously what does my response to "bored developer" have to do whith what PG says/thinks/does/where he goes on vacation? If PG writes an essay that says he thinks oxygen is useless and somebody next to you has an asthma attack, are you going to turn around to them and tell them, "Well, didn't you read PG's latest essay where he tells you he thinks oxygen isn't that important?"</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dolphin Smalltalk Goes Open-Source - <AUTHOR> http://object-arts.com/gettingstarted.html <comment><USER2> MIT License listed at the github site. Had some Smalltalk using friends who really liked it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Back in 2007, they refused to open the source, I think the authors just hated(!) the open source movement. Why so sudden change?

<comment><USER4> 8-9 years isn't sudden.

I mean I know it feels like yesterday if you don't stop to think about it.

<comment><USER5> That depends on how old one is, I suppose. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well done. Dolphin ST is an excellent product.

</comment><comment><USER7> How does this compare to Pharo?

<comment> david-given Dolphin's aimed at traditional app development --- you can use it to produce standalone native-look-and-feel apps which you can deploy separately from the IDE. (Although I suspect that what you get is a minified VM image and a runtime rather than true offline compilation.)

I believe it has a decent following in banking and stockbroking environments, presumably because Smalltalk's traditionally good at RAD and it lets them knock out database frontends very quickly. Certainly, whenever you hear actual customers talk about it, they all seem to like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> should programming languages evolve

its nice to have FOSS implementations of things like smalltalk

but shouldnt we look more forward to languages such as rust, perl 6, go, red .... or at least ocaml and haskell

is this useful for anything beyond legacy systems?

<comment><USER9> I have one word for you: Seaside.

Stuff done in smalltalk still manages to stay far ahead of everything else. Most of our intranet stuff runs it, simply because doing simple form- sumbission stuff with many pages is so much faster and simpler to smash out in seaside.

The only downside is that people have started getting used to the backbutton actually working when doing stuff like that online.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> From [http://object-arts.com/](http://object-arts.com/)

"It's fairly clear that huge systems cannot be created using static typing. It's just not feasible to assume that whenever a small type change is made, all other components that reference this type will be able to be recompiled."

"cannot be made"? really? heh.

"The World Wide Web is one such massive system that relies on dynamic binding at runtime in order to maintain flexibility and practicality.

As we look to build increasingly large software systems we shouldn't just rely on this one endeavour to validate Smalltalk's rejection of static typing. In nature we find systems that are orders of magnitude larger than any of the software we have succeeded in building so far. A biological ecosystem is composed of many organisms, each of which is made up of organs, then cells, then organelles and macromolecules - all towering atop the fundamental building blocks of molecules and atoms. All of these subsystems are dynamically bound together. At each level, elements will handle valid messages from their neighbours and safely reject messages that are, for whatever reason, not understood. In nature there is no compile time validation. In nature there is no compiler."

Sounds very kool-aid-ey to me.</comment>


How Copyright Industries Con Congress - <AUTHOR> http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/how-copyright-industries-con-congress/

<comment><USER2> All of this fuss, and it's only a few hundred million that's at stake?

If I had the money I'd get this into easily digestible form and plaster it all over TV so that people could see that a trivial amount of cash was being used to bring in appalling laws.

<comment><USER3> It's scary that they have this kind of power on a global scale now, and they are starting to convert country after country and get them to censor their own Internet. It's like MPAA and RIAA are the oil cartel of the 21st century.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Of the total $6.1 billion in annual losses LEK estimated to MPAA studios, the amount attributable to online piracy by users in the United States was $446 million—which, by coincidence, is roughly the amount grossed globally by Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel._

That's the money quote right there.

</comment><comment><USER5> In his latest remarks to the press, Representative Smith is still citing a $100 billion dollar figure as the cost of piracy to the US economy.

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/13/us-usa-internet- pi...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/13/us-usa-internet-piracy- idUSTRE80C04T20120113)

*edited spelling error.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a good article, and the bit about money saved by pirates being pure economic surplus that is spent and stimulates actual jobs is gold.

But it is obvious on its face that the publishers' concerns have virtually nothing to do with jobs (except a particular few of course), and that this is just offered up to Congress to use as talking points when replying to constituents or deflecting questions.

</comment><comment><USER7> Remember during the build up to the Iraq war (2003) when a dossier used to justify the war was revealed to have copied portions of a _graduate student's_ essay? <http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/529>

Think of how information is gathered for any kind of group/commission report...often through the use of assistants of varying skill in information- processing. It's not surprising that some number copied out of context from an out-of-date op-ed would be repeated ad nauseum.

Paper reports aren't easily hyperlinkable to ensure accuracy of their sources.

<comment><USER8> They are also often written by young consultants who don't really care about the topic at hand. I have often seen reports to congress be handed down 5+ layers of management to a 22 year old in the middle of a huge time crunch who basically says whatever seems reasonable to them and then everyone above them signs off on it at most skimming over what's said and then passing it on.

One example that comes to mind was someone who asked their boss a basic policy question which then traveled though 8 hops before someone asked them their own question. (up 4 over 1 down 3 then back to them) You could see their email address on the top and bottom of this long chain. He almost sent it back up just to see what would happen.

<comment><USER9> I hate to do this, but is there anywhere I can read that story (and forward the link to people that might... benefit)?</comment></comment></comment>


Blood-like microbes spew out of Antarctic glacier - <AUTHOR> http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/45981 Microbes isolated for a million years make quite an entrance. <comment><USER2> A lot more details here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Falls>

</comment><comment><USER3> You have to admire the balls of guys like Thomas Griffith Taylor, who discovered this place. I mean look at his picture on Wikipedia: the guy is walking around in Antarctica in less clothing then I normally wear in a Chicago winter. And no satellite phones or GPS to call for help either, if you get stuck or lost, game over. Wow!

<comment><USER4> I work out in the cold, and while it does appear he's wearing virtually nothing compared to what we usually wear in the present day, the quality of clothing plays a big factor.

I've sweated my ass off (literally dripping) at -15C with just a fleece sweatshirt on over a thin tshirt (literally less than 1/5th of an inch of material), but the slightest wind with that on draws all the protection from the cold away. Leathers provide a virtually impenetrable protection against wind, and a real fur below that would have provided great protection against cold. However I found that a simple summer wind breaker over the fleece sweatshirt was enough to get around in the winter <30 minutes outside without getting cold.

During my actual work periods (IE 8 hours) I typically go on the heavy side of clothing and with the heavy exercise I do I actually feel at risk of heatstroke at -10C. Considering these guys frequently had done military service, and often were actively in military service, they probably wore little clothing during travel for the same reason that they had to not only regulate heat loss but heat gain to form a balance between being freezing and boiling.

It's also worth noting that these expeditions were frequently performed during December, which is incidentally the height of summer in the southern hemisphere. Summer temperatures are between -15C and -35C, which is considerably more manageable than the winter temperatures of -40C to -70C. Note the freezing point of CO2 is -78C (not that at its pressure it would ever freeze in nature).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is such a pity that there is no adequate research budgets for extremophiles. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile> This reminded me of a friend of mine in South Africa who once showed me photos of living organisms that they collected from rocks almost 2km deep - that owed their existence to uranium. Does anyone have any co-ordinates for the glacier mentioned above?

<comment><USER6> > This reminded me of a friend of mine in South Africa who once showed me > photos of living organisms that they collected from rocks almost 2km deep - > that owed their existence to uranium.

How? Did you they live off radiation?

<comment><USER7> I don't know anything about these microbes in particular, but some bacteria can use metals, even uranium, as electron acceptors for growth. Two well- studied examples are Geobacter metallireducens and Shewanella oneidensis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have to wonder what people would have thought about this during biblical times.

<comment><USER9> AFAIK people still read the bible. You could probably still find out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why is this weird? It's iron-oxide and saltwater. Here's iron-oxide and freshwater: <http://www.quikrete.com/ProductLines/CementColor.asp>

The same used to be said about oil bubbling on the surface in California and Texas. And there's probably an asteroid of pure gold floating around somewhere too.

"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."

\-- Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy)

</comment><comment><USER11> If this red mixture is spewing out occasionally, and it's coming from the lake, how exactly is the bacteria colony in the lake "isolated for 1.5 million years"? It seems to me that there is potentially a path for flowing liquid connecting the lake to the front of the glacier. The alternative would be that the glacier occasionally picks up material from the top of the lake and slowly transports it as a separate mass to the front of the glacier where it gets released. Have radar studies of the glacier been done to determine its internal structure and the transport mechanism?</comment>


Where Did All My Twitter Buddies Go? - <AUTHOR> http://monocat.com/where-did-all-my-twitter-buddies-go/ <comment><USER2> Who cares ? it's just a number in some database.

Your interactions with real people are what counts, not how many packets get pumped around on some serverfarm. If you think it matters how many 'followers' you've got then I would suggest the following businessmodel for twitter:

\- 10 followers extra = $1 / month \- 100 followers extra = $5 / month \- 1000 followers extra = $25 / month \- 10000 followers extra = $125 / month

That way you too can be te envy of your neighbourhood.

By making the number public they're inviting gaming the system because peoples egos are involved. Why not capitalize on that :)

<comment><USER3> You are just a number in some database. Who cares if you get banned?

<comment><USER2> I don't think I follow you, care to explain ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks guys for your comments. Shame HN doesn't send notification when a person leaves a comment, or am I missing an option?

</comment><comment><USER4> one failed cloud (memcached) hundreds of wrong follower counts :)

</comment><comment><USER3> I lost over 100 followers today.</comment>


Wanting a Raise, but Afraid to Ask - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2015/01/07/wanting-a-raise-but-afraid-to-ask/

<comment><USER2> A lot of salary negotiation and asking comes down to preparation.

It's terrifying to ask for one the first time but it's a natural part of employment. The basic principal behind hiring an employee is that they will become a financial net positive for the business eventually.

As an employee you can figure out how you affect the bottom line. It may take some imagination but you can come up with a ball park figure. In a larger corporation this may be a little tougher but with some digging you can come up with an idea whether you've become a net positive.

At the point you've become a net positive everything you make the company beyond your salary goes to profit or your bonus. If you're really good at your job then a lot of it is going to be going to profit. This is the point where you should ask for a raise.

Again it will be nerve racking but if you go in knowing how you affect the business's bottom line your raise will be justified.

I'd also suggest walking in with knowledge regarding how much people with similar job responsibilities make. This can be found on salary look up sites. A quick google search pointed me out to payscale.com and indeed.com</comment>


Google Keyczar was using stock Python RNG for its DSA crypto code. - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/keyczar/source/detail?r=420

<comment><USER2> That's amazing.

If someone guesses your random number in DSA, doesn't that reveal your private key? r⁻¹(s·k - H(m)) mod q or something like that, where r and s are the two pieces of the signature, k is the random number, H(m) is the hash of the message, and q is the modulus from the public algorithm parameters?

Does Keyczar generate DSA signatures that are revealed to untrusted parties? Because if so, it just leaked your keys to those parties.

Maybe you (a) shouldn't use DSA and (b) shouldn't use Keyczar. Who's the Rivest grad student Thomas keeps going on about? Did Rivest award him a Ph.D.?

<comment><USER3> Yes, if the 'k' values are predictable, then someone can extract the private key. The Python random module uses a Mersenne twister, so observing a sufficient number of signatures would allow someone to extract the key.

This is not a flaw in DSA, but a flaw in the Keyczar Python implementation. Here's the original security advisory, again: [http://groups.google.com/group/keyczar- discuss/browse_thread...](http://groups.google.com/group/keyczar- discuss/browse_thread/thread/781c4db2c0b72b36)

PS - I was the grad student. Yes, I did get my degree, and no, they haven't asked for it back (yet).

<comment><USER2> My condolences. You must not be feeling very good right now.

I don't know whether to agree that it's "not a flaw in DSA". DSA's failure mode is that if you ever use your private key, even once, with a single guessable random number, your opponent knows your key and can impersonate you thereafter. There are other digital signature algorithms that don't have this failure mode, such as RSA. Maybe it's better, from a "defense-in-depth" point of view, not to design DSA into new protocols.

<comment><USER3> No condolences necessary. I'm glad that more people are looking at Keyczar and finding these bugs. We learn from our mistakes and in the end have safer code for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> But yeah, sure. I mean, all they had was a Rivest grad student leading the project, and Google's name behind them. You're definitely going to get everything right with your own code.

<comment><USER3> Mea culpa. I originally reviewed this code and missed it. Here's the post in the message group about this: [http://groups.google.com/group/keyczar- discuss/browse_thread...](http://groups.google.com/group/keyczar- discuss/browse_thread/thread/781c4db2c0b72b36)</comment></comment>


On the Rise and Fall of an American Utopia - <AUTHOR> http://blog.longreads.com/2016/02/25/when-the-messiah-came-to-america-she-was-a-woman/ <comment><USER2> From the article: _" Today, thinking grandly about the future is regarded as a sin in and of itself. Calling a proposal "utopian" is among the more routine slurs on Capitol Hill."_

Yes. There's a political mindset that the "free market" determines the future. This is a relatively new concept. From 1851 to 1970, there were frequent World Fairs, heavily supported by industry, showing utopian visions of the future. Expo '70 in Osaka was the last of the great fairs. World fairs continue; Expo 2015 in Milan, with a food theme, closed last October, if anybody cares. But they do not reflect national or corporate plans for a better future.

We have more productive resources than ever in the developed world, but no collective vision of what to do with them.

<comment><USER3> It has nothing to do with the free market. The reason people don't trust utopians is they tend to leave big piles of bodies in their wake.

<comment><USER4> That's a little unfair to utopians.

I think that what happens is that people only listen to calls for utopia when they are discontent. This discontent is used by ambitious characters to take power, frequently in the name of utopia.

Free market proponents are frequently utopians themselves.

<comment><USER5> While you make a valid point, one of the major problems with utopian visions is they offer an infinite good, so they give cover to commit anything up to infinite evil. I think offering paradise throws our moral calculations out of whack, which is one reason they do seem to lead to large numbers of casualties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good read. It certainly resonated with some of my own existential angst about modern society, and I was vaguely aware of this period in history, but I really like Jenning's take that there's so much to learn from these, like social experiments done in miniature. Another part of me believes that these experiments are probably worth doing again, this time using technology (particularly computers) to help organize things. Indeed, my own naive personal utopia would involve living in a nice place with individual apartments and a communal kitchen, day-care, and daily meditation/yoga. It would be cool if we all worked together too, perhaps as a software company.

Note that this is an excerpt from a recently published book, "Paradise Now: The store of American Utopianism! [http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?keyword=Paradise+Now%3A+Th...](http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?keyword=Paradise+Now%3A+The+Story+of+American+Utopianism+&mtype=B&hs.x=0&hs.y=0&hs=Submit)

<comment><USER7> Why would you need communal kitchen?

<comment><USER4> I suppose he miss explaining histories around a fire after a day of hunting in the wildness.

There are something alienating in the way we live in big cities. We miss the palaeolithic.

<comment><USER8> > We miss the palaeolithic.

Speak for yourself. All I see is forced interaction with people that are around you for reasons that have nothing to do with your choice to spend time with them.

<comment><USER9> Except in the paleolithic these people would be your extended family, the friends you grew up with, etc. And because of the cultural homogeneity of such societies, you would get along better with them than people get along with their families today.

In the modern context, these would be people you selected.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The feds pay for 60 percent of Tor's development. Can users trust it? - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/06/the-feds-pays-for-60-percent-of-tors-development-can-users-trust-it/ <comment><USER2> The Internet was made by DARPA. Let's stop using it.

I am really sick of these arguments. Do you realize how much research goes into Tor and how many university researchers are associated with it (Cambridge, Waterloo)? Furthermore, can you really think someone like the Tor core developers (Dingledine and Mathweson) can sacrifice their entire reputation just for putting a backdoor? The code is out there. They have a Git repository and they have an active, healthy developer community. It's not like TrueCrypt, where change logs read like, "Minor fixes" and there is no public repository in 2013.

Someone should bring proof of the alleged backdoors or just shut up. Because conspiracy theories are not only stupid, they are annoying. This issue has been addressed on the tor-talk list many times. Please show one iota of proof.

And I say this as a Tor user who has not only donated to the project but also runs a relay.

<comment><USER3> Because conspiracy theories are not only stupid, they are annoying. This issue has been addressed on the tor-talk list many times. Please show one iota of proof.

Isn't this exactly what someone would have said about the NSA spying on us even just a few months back? Did we learn from that AT ALL or just anytime we don't like a theory we will call that person a tin foil hat wearing nutcase?

<comment><USER2> > Isn't this exactly what someone would have said about the NSA spying on us > even just a few months back? Did we learn from that AT ALL or just anytime > we don't like a theory we will call that person a tin foil hat wearing > nutcase?

The NSA is a different case. We do not know anything about it, except from the leaks. But we do know things about Tor.

a). Actively developed, follows the best principles possible. Open discussions in IRC, active mailing list, developers who respond to queries.

b). Highly researched by some of the best universities in the world. Cambridge and Waterloo come to mind instantly.

c). There has not been a single case of mistrust on their part that should make someone suspicious about them.

The day Tor does something like this, not only they lose their funding, they lose users and they become a dead project. With so much reputation at stake -- and they are respected people in the community -- Dingledine and Mathewson doing something like this? I don't think so.

<comment><USER3> Sure, I understand that, but if that is the argument, just make those three points. Arguing "Because conspiracy theories are not only stupid, they are annoying. This issue has been addressed on the tor-talk list many times. Please show one iota of proof." is just silly, as though because we don't have factual proof the government is doing something wrong we are "stupid and annoying". All I'm saying is that this argument lacks a ton of credibility in a world where we just found out our own government spies on everything we do and the reaction from the mainstream went from "those tin foil hat wearing morons!" to "eh, they were right, and I was wrong, why would that possibly make me change my beliefs?".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the Q&A at the end ( [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XaYdCdwiWU&feature=youtu.be&...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XaYdCdwiWU&feature=youtu.be&t=1h1m58s) ), Grug has this to say on TOR:

"Against [Law Enforcement Officials], it's fine. Against a nation-state, the TOR network has insufficient resources and has sufficient bad actors that it is not actually secure. So if you're going to hack the shit out of the NSA and do really really bad planning and do not actually evalute the targets you are after, you will go to jail."

He also expands on how to unmask a user by controlling both the exit and entry nodes:

"So if you can purchase 300 VPS accounts at $5 each then you can set up 1% of the TOR network and statistically, over a month, you will be able to uncover a large number of users. [...] You are better of selecting your targets so they will not be state actors."

<comment><USER5> But what happens when the LEOs are getting their data from the NSA? [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- switch/wp/2013/08/05...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- switch/wp/2013/08/05/the-nsa-is-giving-your-phone-records-to-the-dea-and-the- dea-is-covering-it-up/)

TOR is not perfect. The NSA, or any other sufficiently large global passive adversary, can defeat it, with global timing correlation. However, a connection over TOR probably requires more resources to track down than a direct connection. On the downside, a connection over TOR may go through a foreign country, which removes any domestic safeguards the NSA does have in place, subjecting it to indiscriminate spying.

TOR is also insufficient on its own. You need to use strong crypto, and be careful of your privacy in other ways (cookies, caches, etc) on top of it.

<comment><USER6> The NSA does not have domestic safeguards, and the act of actually using TOR makes you a primary target by being suspicious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The NSA doesn't need a backdoor in Tor when they can do traffic analysis on a large portion of Tor nodes, either by eavesdropping on at least one link between each pair of nodes, or just running the nodes themselves...

<conspiracy>Maybe _that 's why_ they continue to fund it...</conspiracy>

<comment><USER8> you know, when the tor project had some scruples and ethical standards, they actually explicitly addressed this as part of their threat model, acknowledging that if someone could see enough traffic, they could de- anonymize the network.

then, shit like this happened: [https://www.eff.org/pages/tor-and- https](https://www.eff.org/pages/tor-and-https)

<comment><USER9> Thank you for the link. I find it very explanatory for me and a nice resource to explain to others what TOR and HTTPS can protect from.

I understand that using HTTPS through Tor can provide to NSA your rough location (entry node) and the site you are browsing to. But your user name and password will be safe (assuming that NSA cannot hack HTTPS). Using HTTPS only can provide the same information to NSA as the HTTPS+TOR, so for httpS sites Tor does not provide extra security against NSA?

If my understanding is correct then Tor would provide only value when using Tor services, aka onion sites, but not when using public Internet services?!

I would appreciate if somebody could provide their expertise on this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If we believe that chips and hardware have been compromised by the NSA (and I suppose the Chinese who make a lot of it), that encryption has been cracked by the same, and that it is spy open season at ISP level, then surely nothing that runs on or through such devices can be secure enough, Tor included?

</comment><comment><USER11> Two assumptions: 1\. An encryption system is only as secure as its weakest link 2\. The NSA can get the source whether its open or closed.

I imagine the NSA would task a team of researchers to analyze the source code, find a vulnerability, and develop a tool to exploit it. I imagine they'd then hand the tool over to a team to deploy and operate it.

No person from the TOR community would need be involved or made aware. And, assuming the NSA was the only one with the exploit, there would be no reason to stop funding Tor, since it advances American interests without (now, thanks to the exploit) threatening them.

</comment><comment><USER12> Tor does not protect against a global passive adversary. If the NSA can watch most network traffic, they can do packet timing correlations and readily identify you. They don't need backdoors or subverted exit nodes

<comment><USER13> Basically an extension of the tor attack where the feds knew roughly where the guy they wanted lived, and they could engage him in an IRC chat, so they talked to him in the chat, meanwhile driving a van around sniffing wireless networks looking for bursts in traffic that corresponded to the IRC transmissions.

I always thought that was a pretty neat attack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I trust tor to do what tor does: in fact -- as do US intelligence agencies who use it for anonymous open source intelligence.

I don't, however, trust it to do anything else: namely, I don't think of it as a security panacea. Goals of security are confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Anonymity is only a small part of confidentiality: tor provides a somewhat reasonable guarantee (i.e., much better than nothing or use of proxies) that I can anonymous browse censored web sites. However, alone it doesn't in any way help with secure communications to others, it doesn't ensure that the sites I am visiting aren't MITM'd, it does not protect against attacks that reduce availability of end points.

Since online content censorship is not currently a big problem in the United States -- but now a huge problem pretty much elsewhere, including in the Western World -- in most cases it isn't really an ailment for the ills inflicted by the current government overreach.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why is the government funding it? That is a valid question. I think the DoD has the resources to create its own version of TOR type communications if that were a big need for government agencies. SO. Why?

<comment><USER16> That's exactly how Tor got created -- it was originally funded by the Navy. The DoD version of Tor _is_ Tor.

Also, it's entirely possible that the government is using the same software (or a slight fork) on a different network, but using the public deployment of Tor as a way to easily get public review of the cryptosystem.

<comment><USER17> Furthermore, if only the DoD/whatever used Tor, "someone with Tor traffic going from/to them" would be a good-enough metric to locate DoD emplyees / government spies / etc. The idea is, that's why Tor continued to be developed not as part of a Naval Research lab project, but rather as a civilian project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Summary: "NSA can break 1024 RSA/DH keys in a few hours. The problem with Tor is that it still uses 1024 bit keys for much of its crypto, particularly because most people are still using older versions of the software. Only 10% of the servers have upgraded to newer versions."

[http://blog.erratasec.com/2013/09/tor-is-still- dhe-1024-nsa-...](http://blog.erratasec.com/2013/09/tor-is-still-dhe-1024-nsa- crackable.html?m=1)

</comment><comment><USER19> That's interesting. Just last week we were bombarded* with several news doubting the security of RSA, then we discover that some kinds of ECC may have back doors. Now we are getting news attacking TOR...

* I'm not accusing anyone. It's easy to believe so much in propaganda that you start to spread it too. One even honestly creates more unrelated reasons to believe. I know that I'll never trust RSA as much again, and will probably migrate to 3kb keys.

</comment><comment><USER20> Taxpayers pay for 100% of NSA development. Can users trust it?

<comment><USER21> No they don't foot 100% of the bill ... this assumes balanced budget and no additional money creation from the Federal Reserve. It also assumes NSA does not have their own revenue sources.

<conspiracy> With that much information on hand I could play the foreign stock markets like mad. And also forex. It will be sane for NSA to have capabilities to crash a potential adversaries currency and stock market. </conspiracy>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Its source code is available for audit and scrutiny, so yeah. If you're looking to spread FUD do that to the closed source stuff.

<comment><USER23> Open source isn't a guarantee of safety for two reasons:

1) It's highly possible that there are federal government agencies with knowledge of encryption and security beyond the current state of the art in academia. There could be deliberate vulnerabilities that even the most highly regarded researchers/academics in the field could not detect.

2) Even if you trust the source, the source can be compromised elsewhere in the toolchain (the compiler could turn safe code into malicious code). Unless you trust every element of your toolchain, you trust nothing (from a mathematical sense -- of course it's much more complicated, and thus less likely, to compromise Tor through its own source code rather than gcc's source code).

<comment><USER24> > It's highly possible that there are federal government agencies with > knowledge of encryption and security beyond the current state of the art in > academia. There could be deliberate vulnerabilities that even the most > highly regarded researchers/academics in the field could not detect.

That's true, but Tor uses encryption that is common in many other products. Even if it were a privately owned product, it probably would have been implemented in a very similar way.

> Even if you trust the source, the source can be compromised elsewhere in the > toolchain (the compiler could turn safe code into malicious code). Unless > you trust every element of your toolchain, you trust nothing (from a > mathematical sense -- of course it's much more complicated, and thus less > likely, to compromise Tor through its own source code rather than gcc's > source code).

OP is not talking about whether or not perfect security is possible. They are talking about the possibility of Tor specifically being backdoored, since it originated within and is funded by the U.S. government.

<comment><USER25> I doubt tor is backdoored, but it has it's own security issues. I wouldn't doubt for a second that three letter agencies are running a huge amount of nodes on the tor network and doing everything they can to correlate traffic and associate connections to individuals. At the end of the day, you can't rely on tor alone to keep you safe or anonymous on the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Find the backdoor or STFU.

<comment><USER27> Facepalm. The insecurity of Tor against NSA surveillance has nothing to do with backdoors.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you have a girlfriend? Is it good to have one? - <AUTHOR> I seem to be of the age everyone else works on making out with other people. And, a girl told me today that I'm a "lot more of a nerd", and an unlikely to find a girl for the rest of my life.<p>That was quite hurting, but, I think programmers don't usually have girlfriends, do they ? I mean, do you ? Does it distract you from your work ? <comment><USER2> I'd quite like a girlfriend, but don't think my wife would appreciate it.

Your time will come, so don't let one nasty comment cloud your entire outlook. Eventually someone will come along, possibly under the most unlikely circumstances, and you'll make a connection. Relax and let it happen.

<comment><USER3> Dude, tell me about it! You take a second look at someone walking down the street and the daggers come out. (Happily married, but damn sure not dead.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Been married twelve years & loving it. My wife is my friend, my lover, and my gaming rival.

I wouldn't say she distracts me from my work. It's just that most of the time I'd rather snuggle with her and watch TV or play a round of Innovation than hack on code in my free time. Work time is work time, though. I work from home, but I set boundaries.

If you're at the age where "everyone else works on making out with other people", then know that everyone else is still figuring it out, too. It's ok. Don't feel pressured to be in a relationship or think less of yourself if you're single. Let relationships happen on their own and you'll be much happier.

Also, don't try to find somebody to love; try to be someone people can fall in love with. Be a good person, but not artificially good. Be friendly & supportive. Find yourself and find your passions - this is the time in your life to experiment with different hobbies, sports, and future careers. It's so much easier to fail at something and get back up on your feet again when you're young. Who knows, you may find theater or track to be more interesting than computers and there's nothing wrong with making a living from either.

</comment><comment><USER5> A lot of programmers tend to be late bloomers to the dating scene. While some would see this as a negative, I actually see it as a positive. Dating can be a major distraction at a crucial time in a young person's life when they are getting an education, starting their careers, and beginning to build their financial history.

I have seen friends and siblings in their 20s that expend a lot of time, energy, and money on the dating scene with very little to show for it by the time they reach their 30s.

Many of my programmer friends, on the other hand, settled down fairly quickly (married their 1st or 2nd girlfriend) and could spend their formative years honing their skills, education, and careers. Also they could set themselves up better financially by paying down debts, acquiring assets, and saving for their future. By the time they hit their 30s, their careers are taking off, they have a very solid financial foundation, and they are on much better footing for future endeavors.

<comment><USER6> I agree. I don't think we're mature enough at a young age for that kind of commitment which often times ends in catastrophic drama and can put a toll on your education/career/finances.

<comment><USER5> I think it depends on the individual as to whether you're ready for commitment at a young age or not. Some are and many aren't.

The issue is that society sort of assumes you are ready for it regardless and there's a lot of social pressure to date. Even if you're ill prepared for it, and likely to lose a lot in the process.

You may be better off just sitting things out and focusing on something else, but your friends and family members will label you an anti-social nerd (or worse) because you opt out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _And, a girl told me today that I 'm a "lot more of a nerd", and an unlikely to find a girl for the rest of my life._

That's a terrible thing for her to have said. Ignore that. It's just not true that programmers don't have girlfriends/boyfriends/husbands/wives.

<comment><USER8> It comes across to me as her clumsy way of hitting on the OP. Ignoring might not be the correct course of action.

<comment><USER9> No, it isn't. I agree the nerd part should be ignored, but the sentence itself is her way of saying she's not attracted to the OP, which he should pay attention to. The OP should do what it is in his power to do and improve his social skills with women. If the OP is interested in hearing more of my opinion, he should email me (it's in my profile). I won't post it here because I'll get downvoted into oblivion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Girlfriends might distract you from your work if they sit in your office or otherwise interrupt you at work. But plenty of noted programmers seem to have been happily married or otherwise involved with the appropriate sex.

You are probably better off not meeting women in a context that is explicitly social. Find an activity where meeting them is a side effect, not the main point. Preferably this would be one where women are at least not outnumbered, as they might in softball and so on. Volunteering might be good.

(Married more than 25 years.)

</comment><comment><USER11> Reading this brought back some fantastic memories of my youth (that is sarcasm, teenage and early 20's years were not fantastic when it came to relationships). I am sorry someone would say something like that to you. Don't let her get to you though! To cheer you up, here's a joke from my youth (it will date me):

A lawyer, a doctor, and a programmer sit at a bar. The lawyer says, "Boys, you need to try having a mistress! It is great. We do anything we want and my wife never finds out!"

The Doctor looking shocked says, "Oh my no! There are so many problems with a relationship like this. Diseases, mental and emotional stress. Stick to your wife! That's the right way."

The programmer looks in his drink and with a knowing smile tells them both, "The answer is, of course, to have both a wife and a mistress! Then you can tell your mistress you are with your wife, and tell your wife you are with your mistress, and have more time on the mainframe! The mainframe is always less busy late at night anyway." [1]

I had a girlfriend! I was very happy when she said she would marry me. We are celebrating our anniversary this weekend. We have 6 kids together. I code a lot. I enjoy businesses. I play with my kids. I take my wife on dates. As everyone else in the thread has said, don't worry about what this girl thinks! You are the right young lady will find each other at the right time and everything will work out just fine.

[1] For those that don't get the mainframe portion of the joke: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time- sharing)

</comment><comment><USER12> Where I work, most of the staff have partners - girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, wives. Just because one girl can't see a girl like her or people she knows being interested in you doesn't mean the end of the world. There are lots of different kinds of people making the world go round. The more different places you go, socialise, interact with people, the more you are likely to meet someone who might be into you.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm married. Met my wife when I was 32. Didn't really have a lot of experience with girls before that, but that didn't turn out to be much of a hindrance to being the happily married father of two kids today.

Don't let social expectations and peer pressure push you into things you don't want or are not yet ready for. While I certainly would have liked to have a girlfriend when I was younger, I had no idea how to do go about that. Plenty of female friends; that wasn't the issue, but no true "girlfriend". At least one girl who otherwise liked me, mentioned that I was friend material rather than dating material.

I now realize that I wasn't ready for it. Once I was ready for it (around 30-ish), I started dating, and soon found a woman who's way better than I dared to hope for. Don't be afraid to be too late; there's plenty of time to catch up later. (Though if you want kids, 30 is a good age to start catching up.)

So do you need a girlfriend? Absolutely not. Is it nice to have one? If it's the right one, absolutely! Still, I do sometimes miss my alone time.

</comment><comment><USER3> No girlfriends for me, but I do have that one wife. Having a partner is great, and not a distraction at all. She understands and respects that I work from ~9am to ~3pm, and that if I'm in my office outside of those hours, I'm working. I could see some women being a bit more of a distraction, but you just need to lay out your ground rules early on in the relationship to make sure that they can be respected. (Don't sit down and say "these are the rules...!")

While its true that you may be a big nerd, that's fine! Just have to find a girl that will sit down for some Battlestar Gallactica, Firefly, and Doctor Who with you. Who will help with your lego sets, and looks forward to a good game of MTG. Feel free to sub-out things listed above that you don't like with things that you do, and be willing to do the same for things she likes. You don't need to overlap 100%, but having some interests in common is always helpful.

<comment><USER14> My soon-to-be wife does not play MTG (I do/did), but she definitely respects my hobbies.

As long as you have some things in common, she doesn't have to be a huge nerd or share all your interests :)

Also, reciprocate :) . If she sits down for some Battlestar Galactica, you can stand a romantic comedy or two :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you are both at the age of working on "making out with other people", I can assume you have quite a bit more living to do, and so does the girl. The funny thing about the teenage/young adult situation is that it's very easy to make broad, sweeping statements about the rest of someones life while having no clue what you are talking about.

Think about this: That girl has no idea what the rest of your life will be like, nor her own. It's very silly to make a comment like that. Programmers have girlfriends/boyfriends just like any other profession.

And as for the distractions, yes, girlfriends at your age can be a definite distraction. But that's part of the fun of teenage love. It is something new to explore and experience, but not something that everyone has to do.

Don't sweat it. You'll find somebody.

</comment><comment><USER16> Pretty much the same thing others are saying. I've been married 17 years to a beautiful woman and I'm very geeky. Carry on with your life, don't rush things. Smile and say hello at every opportunity. It'll happen.

</comment><comment><USER14> How old are you? I did really badly with girls and women in general as a teenager and young adult, but I started connecting more when I grew up more, and my first stable relationship started at 29.

I think I was a bit slow to develop emotionally, and I did not know how to relate to/interact with women (it sounds silly in retrospect, but it happened).

I disagree a bit with the "relax and let it happen" advice, I think you have to actively do some activities to meet with people more, etc. if you find yourself not meeting girls.

Edit: almost all the programmers/nerds I know in my age range have wives or girlfriends. Most didn't in their teens or early 20s.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm 14

<comment><USER14> Ah, way too young to worry then :) . I wouldn't take what that girl told you seriously.

As you might have seen from the replies, most programmers and nerds in general end up with girlfriends or wives if that's what they want (most do). You'll find your girl eventually :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> That girl sounds like a horrible person who will probably end up alone herself for being so damn shallow. People like that are great learning experiences on the type of person you don't want to be.

Yes programmers do have girlfriends and yes they can be distracting and by god that's a great thing to have! Moving from that point in life where you are focused on just one self orientated thing to caring about another and growing as a person is marvellous.

I constantly aim to find distractions from work, also known as having a life :)

</comment><comment><USER18> Agreed with the rest of the folks here. I'm assuming that you're in the age range of high school, and I'm here to tell you that once high school is over (and that can take a year or two into college/work), everybody has to figure their own lives out and these labels do not matter. They don't matter now either as long as you pay no attention to them. Just be sure to get out and be social. You can't date a person you never meet!

</comment><comment><USER19> "programmers don't usually have girlfriends"

Uhhh, no.

Life is like taking a trip. It's way more fun when you have someone to enjoy it with you. Your experience is enriched by their experience. That said, being single has it's merits as well, which I am sure the married among us remember a little too fondly and with rose colored glasses.

Go to meetups. Not with the intention of meeting someone, but to meet other people and have fun. The rest will fall in place.

</comment><comment><USER20> Talking to girls and negotiating salary are two things that us computer folk are historically bad at. We're actually bad at lots of things, but these two are unique in that rather than finding ways to get better at them, we instead proclaim them to be Impossible Things For Computer Programmers To Learn and refuse even attempt to get a little bit better at them.

This is really strange.

If you were bad at writing Objective-C code, but it was 2008 and knowing how to write Objective-C code would let you answer "Yes" to any of those dozen emails a week you were getting offering $150/hr to write Objective-C, what would you do? Would you perhaps spend a few hours learning how to do it?

Now what if you were bad at negotiating? "No way. Negotiating is evil. They should just pay everybody the same. That'd be fair."

Or dating? "No way. Talking to girls seems hard and scary. And I'd actually have to walk over there and _talk_ to one of them."

But here's the thing. It's only hard because you've never done it. Go do some of it and you'll find it's really not that bad.

</comment><comment><USER21> On my team of 8 at work, 2 are single and everyone else, including me, is married. And I'm polyamorous so I also have a girlfriend.

If I stop to think about famous programmers, most of them are married too. Except Stallman.

For me personally, I don't find it distracting at all, but rather very enriching and motivating.

</comment><comment><USER22> Idiots say idiotic things. Mostly idiots who have low self esteem. So bear that in mind when you interact with them.

Sure there's a subset of society that rejects those that are 'geeky' or 'nerdy', but that's fine. They'd probably annoy you in the long run anyway.

But everyone gets to be able to have relationships.

Yes, relationships can be distracting ... but that's not a reason to not have one!

The only real requirement is self-confidence, work on building on that and you'll find out that interesting people take notice! :-)

Have fun and good luck!

</comment><comment><USER23> Honestly women are more of a bother than a benefit. Part of maturing is learning to reject nature for your own self interest. Women will use your precious time for unproductive and impractical activities. They require constant upkeep and they will try to shape you into their ideals (a lot more of a nerd).

I do not need a woman to be happy. I do not need a woman to have children. There are plenty of children in need of a parent already (even if that is a single parent). Save for your own retirement and enjoy life.

</comment><comment><USER24> Some good thoughts on here. Pretty graceless comment on her part. Without having any context, my first guess is that it speaks more to her issues than yours.

I've been married for over 20 years. Met my wife shortly after I finally stopped working on making out with other people. If you're feeling pressure to find someone, it might show. You can be a total nerd (I was/am, and same with a lot of my friends). Just focus on being a decent, compassionate human being. Good things will happen from there.

</comment><comment><USER25> > I think programmers don't usually have girlfriends, do they ? I mean, do you > ? Does it distract you from your work ?

That's just not true, on either count. And work is work - it's absolutely normal for couples to have separate careers. Are bus drivers distracted from their work by their girlfriends?

Unless of course you take your work home with you... but then I think you have other issues. :-)

</comment><comment><USER26> Better to make a fool of yourself now, than to regret not having tried later. Plus, if you don't try now, you will make a fool of yourself later anyway!

Everyone learns through mistakes. Understand this and you won't care what others think.

</comment><comment><USER27> * That was a terrible thing to say to a person. * There's no "usually".

</comment><comment><USER28> I once told a friend who was single at the time: "You are _way_ too happy. We need to get you a woman!"

</comment><comment><USER29> This chick wants to bang you and she has low self esteem.

</comment><comment><USER30> "No Woman No Cry".

Be patient, my son - your time will come.

I was quite the nerd when I was young, but much later became popular with women.</comment>


MathBox2 – Part 2 - <AUTHOR> http://acko.net/blog/mathbox2-pt2/ <comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I thought part 1 is an old story, but actually it isn't. Please see part 1 first. ;)</comment>


Here's How The Government Can Fix Silicon Valley: Leave It Alone - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/07/heres-how-the-government-can-fix-silicon-valley-leave-it-alone/

<comment><USER2> This is the first Arrington article I actually wanted to double up vote. This guy may be a lot of things, but he is dead on when it comes to this subject. Government really needs to take a breath, relax and stay where they already are meddling - wall street, automobiles, health care, etc.

What Government should do is lay the groundwork to incentivize a coast to coast robust fibre optic network with fair access for all it's inhabitants. Fast, cheap, reliable communications access is the new transportation network. There are roads and highways that go to every location you can find on a map in this country. Why can't a lot of these places get good internet connections?

Speaking of transport, the Government can just keep bettering our transportation infrastructure. You know, all the shit we need to exist so that UPS can deliver our Amazon orders overnight.

Has anyone here been on a flight recently? It sucks. I'm just thankful when I land in one piece, safely. Let's get those newfangled super trains functioning. What's wrong with America when places like France and China have train networks that make us look like we're in the stone age?

<comment><USER3> Totally agree - TechCrunch really misses the mark sometimes but not on this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wasn't Silicon Valley built by major government handouts in the form of defense spending?

<comment><USER5> The author doesn't seem particularly opposed to handouts:

 _If the government wants to help innovation in this country they should get busy with infrastructure. Lay fiber to every home and business in the U.S. Actually start building some of these high speed train networks to make travel easier. Get computers into the hands of every child in the country as soon as they are physically able to press buttons._

The article mainly seems to be asking for better regulation/handouts, not none. Except for the last paragraph.

<comment><USER6> The entire federal budget was about 500 billion in 1960, inflation adjusted. The current federal budget is nearly 3 trillion. Yet today, we seem to be spending less money building infrastructure investments that create economic booms and more money to pay people to sit around. Perhaps he's arguing that we should be spending less on entitlement programs (handouts) and more on infrastructure investments like high-speed internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The government is going to screw up the delicate system of venture funding how, by eliminating the loophole that allows them to dodge taxes on the carry income they earn for managing other people's money?

I know there's multiple things on the table that could impact VCs (onerous reporting requirements for small investments among them), but it's hard to judge them when the valley ( _Arrington clearly among them_ ) is so obviously militant about retaining bogus tax loopholes.

<comment><USER8> Strawman: Arrington _specifically_ referenced Dodd's insane regulations + net worth increase in the latter's financial regulation bill, which most certain would have screwed things up. As it is, the current compromise of excluding an angel's primary home from his calculated net worth is going to remove a _lot_ of angels from the game.

<comment><USER7> I'm referencing Arrington's comments on Feld's blog.

<comment><USER8> Could you supply a link (doesn't have to be to the exact comment)?

<comment><USER7> Google "VC carry interest". Feld's blog post owns the search results page for it.

<comment><USER8> The first page of my Google results doesn't even have a link to his blog.

<comment><USER9> My top 100 for [VC carry interest] include no Feld links, either. Perhaps TPtacek is seeing highly personalized Google results?

<comment><USER7> Sorry, add "tax" to your query. But if it doesn't come up this time, I'm sure you can find Feld's post yourself.

<comment><USER8> Still no luck, and since it is you who is claiming that Arrington is referring to the carried interest tax hike proposal " _screw[ing] up the delicate system of venture funding_ " (something not evident in his comment on Fred Wilson's blog noted by gojomo), it is incumbent upon you to specifically support it rather than sending us on a wild goose chase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article really doesn't make any sense. My support of network- libertarianism notwithstanding, Arrington's major bone to pick is raising the angel limit, and his opening paragraph is about how Obama hasn't pushed through enough legislation to benefit the valley?

I don't get it. Seems like an article written out of frustrated cognitive dissonance, not one out of any cogent thinking.

At the end of the day, the system is the system. It's way easier to work the system's rules to change it (especially with the wealth that silicon valley has) than to ignore the system and tell it to go away.

</comment><comment><USER11> Given his view on the government's role in Silicon Valley, why didn't he endorse Ron Paul? Did he just ignore him?

</comment><comment><USER12> What a heap of self-serving, nutrition-free bullshit.

 _Mostly because of the broken promises. From my interview with [Barack Obama, pre-election]:

He is staunchly in favor of net neutrality, and has promised to make it a priority to reinstate it in his first year in office. He has proposed intelligent programs for increasing technology education and access to children. He doesn't believe the FCC went far enough in their proposed rules for opening up the 700MHz spectrum auctions. He wants to see increases in the number of H1-B visas given out each year. He strongly supports research into renewable energy sources and he has a realistic, market based approach to capping carbon emissions.

None of these things happened, nor seem likely to happen under his presidency.

But it's more than broken promises. Our government is just way too interested in mucking around in Silicon Valley by creating and enforcing rules based on little or no understanding of the consequences. A perfect example – recent proposed financial reform legislation by Senator Chris Dodd added on a few random provisions that could have devastated Silicon Valley's delicate venture capital ecosystem._

So basically government would be good if it delivered specific results that you like but it's bad because some of its proposals would lead to results that you don't like.

Net neutrality? Liked by tech companies, loathed by communications companies. Shut down (at least temporarily) by the supreme court, not the action of the executive. Meanwhile the FCC is drawing up a new policy which would enforce net neutrality, ariousing the ire of libertarians and those who think governments shouldn't tell telcos and ISPs how to operate their routers and switches.

Spectrum auctions, I have not paid attention to. Neither has Obama, perhaps.

H1-Bs? Good for investors in tech industry and holders of advanced STEM degrees, both of whom need each other. Not so popular with voters, many of whom feel the program has been abused by employers who want lower wages and onerous employee commitments. Of course some objections are also grounded simple xenophobia/racism, but given the unlucky coincidence of high unemployment and a relatively large population of illegal residents, overcoming the popular antipathy to importing more workers from abroad is extremely challenging in political terms.

As for renewable energy/carbon markets, surely it can't have escaped Arrington's attention that issues of fuel sources and environmental policy are among the most bitterly disputed policy debates between the two main parties, and that the administration is opposed from the left by hippies who think solar panels are free and anything which smacks of technology or markets is evil, and opposed from the right (at least until very recently) by a large body of people chanting 'drill baby drill'. Not to mention the more substantive questions of just how we should fund the transition to renewables, which technologies we should prioritize, and what effect a mandatory market for carbon credits would have on energy costs and economic growth.

So the financial reform bill first arrived in Congress with a policy tweak that might have limited the amount of investment $ for startups if interpreted over-literally by the two regulatory agencies involved. After a fuss was made, the provision was excised as part of the normal legislative process, and nobody went broke or had to go to court or got saddled with massive new legal compliance costs because the policy tweak never even became law.

This editorial is shallow and insubstantive, amounting to little more than 'government never gives me what I want and sometimes saddles me with things I don't want. All I want is to have a good time and government keeps ruining it for me and my friends. I hate you, government!' and since there's always a ready audience of people who like to complain about the government and how useless it is, at least some of his readers can be relied upon to cheer this tantrum - though looking at the TC comments, I see I'm not alone in my skepticism.</comment>


Will Exxon Get Googled? - <AUTHOR> http://spectator.org/archives/2009/01/14/will-exxon-get-googled

<comment><USER2> thesis: the only measure that matters in auto transport is energy density, and you can't do better than gasoline so there can't be any big disruptive technology as far as Exxon is concerned.

He's right about the energy density but makes a lot of crappy assumptions. He assumes auto transport is preferable to begin with (as do the politicians that choose highway funds over mass transit). He also doesn't consider that at a certain price (at the pump or environmental externalities), energy density becomes a less critical variable in the transportation equation.

There's also some general weirdness in the article. "The essence of digital- silicon technology is that more and more information can be stored and transported in ever smaller, profoundly less energy-intensive ways. Millions, soon billions, of ever tinier information engines (a.k.a. transistors) are etched onto a sliver of silicon." ok

"On top of this, software engineers use clever mathematical codes made ever more powerful by microprocessors, to parse, slice, and shrink information itself, compressing it without loss of essence. The combination is powerful. Compared to the dawn of computing, today's information-moving hardware consumes one million times less energy for a logic operation and can store data in a physical space 100 million times smaller. And progress continues." uh, what? has compression really improved in the past 20 years? If anything, software engineers are doing there best to waste the efficiency gains in hardware.

"OIL IS A REMARKABLE ENERGY SOURCE that is also uniquely easy to transport and store."[emphasis his] Oil is not an energy source, it's a transport and storage mechanism; storing millions of years of solar power.

Oh, the guy wrote "The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy" (he means that literally). He spent most of the article going on about the physical limitations of renewable resources. He's a maroon.</comment>


Happstack 0.4: A scalable framework for developing web applications in Haskell - <AUTHOR> http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-December/071083.html

<comment><USER2> I know HAppS advocated an approach of using static HTML with Javascript for content/dom stuff. From <http://happs.org/>:

 _HAppS does not come with a server-side templating system. We prefer the pattern of developing static web pages and using AJAX to populate them with dynamic content._

Does Happstack take the same approach? Can anyone comment on how this architecture affects googlebot and other spiders?

<comment><USER3> You can pretty much use any old approach you'd like with Happstack. I am using it right now and it is _very_ modular.

You could conceivably use the Text.HTML module to make your own pages in the functional style. You can use HStringTemplate a la psp and php. Or you can do the fun, bloated and awful web 2.0 thing and write an ass-ton of javascript to do everything in the ajax-y fashion, and just use happstack to serve up json.

A similar situation holds for the MACID data store. It looked ok to me, but I wanted to play with some distributed DBs instead (e.g. Mongo and Couch), and it works just fine there too.

The important thing is that if you understand how HTTP works, how requests are served up, etc., then you can pretty much hit the ground running with happstack, without having to set up Apache and learn cgi or set up Tomcat and figure out how to get the default permissions on Ubuntu to work. So in that regard, it seems much closer to RoR than the traditional approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Really scalable?

<http://tutorial.happstack.com/tutorial/macid-limits>

"A realistic way to use Happstack with macid is to write an alpha version of an application using macid (no database), and then add some other type of persistent hard drive storage (probably database) outside of macid only if it becomes necessary.

This raises the question: if you are eventually going to have to put in a database back end, why use macid at all?

The -- perhaps slightly depressing answer -- is that you probably won't have to put in a database back end, because your app won't be so successful that this is required."

Now this is ridiculous. That's the way you guys are going to convince people to use Haskell for reald world apps?

Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see Haskell winning in territories occupied by other languages, but this looks just like another piece of Haskell code written for the sake of being written in Haskell.

<comment><AUTHOR> Happstack's been around for a long time, and has been used in a number of production systems (including at Deutsche Bank). They're certainly trying some interesting things.

> convince people to use Haskell for reald world apps?

The project is not the language.

If you want regular old approaches to web apps, there's libraries for that ( [http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pkg- list.html#ca...](http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pkg- list.html#cat:web) ) in Haskell. But there's also happstack if you like their approach.

The vision all along was that the vast majority of web apps could be written in a MACID style -- they're not huge sites -- so make that as easy as possible.

<comment><USER4> Yeah I should have said Happstack not the language, but it isn't my point.

Point is that the tutorial section I cited discouraged serious use of the stuff it's supposed to promote.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Incredibly happy to see this. This could tip the balance in favour of Haskell as a viable platform for web development, given it is as or better performing than something like Go.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm curious, which web sites are currently running on Haskell?

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://patch-tag.com/> is a github for darcs, that happens to be running in happstack. <http://gitit.net/> is a wiki based on gitit running in happstack. DB used happs for analytic sites for day traders ( <http://cufp.galois.com/2008/abstracts.html#PolakowJeff> ), and notable, JanRain (the OpenID company) used Haskell on the server side for some components.</comment></comment>


Conflict and Consensus - <AUTHOR> https://thepointmag.com/2017/politics/conflict-and-consensus <comment><AUTHOR> "Americans relied on the organic growth of institutions to fit circumstances and experience. The true "genius" of American politics, he said, was that Americans had no political philosophy. Instead, they shared the common assumption "that institutions are not and should not be the grand creations of men toward large ends and outspoken values; rather they are organisms which grow out of the soil in which they are rooted and out of the tradition from which they have sprung." The American Revolution was simply an attempt to preserve political institutions and practices inherited from Britain and adapted to the circumstances of American life. Even the Civil War "did not represent a quest for a general redefinition of political values" because it was an essentially conservative struggle between differences of "constitutional emphasis," not different political theories."</comment>


Why Arduino is a hit with hardware hackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/07/hardware-hobbyists-arduino/

<comment><USER2> Summary + meta-summary from watching the Arduino community for a few years:

Because it's cheap, and because it's awesomely simple to use. It's a hobbyist's dream come true.

If you're interested in some of its uses, just look back through Make magazine's site. Loads and loads and loads of projects appear there.

<comment><USER3> Yes, Arduino is very cool. I'm working on a project that I'm calling "Spaceduino" to use an Arduino as the flight computer for a high-altitude balloon.

The idea is to have the Arduino interfaced to a Telit GPS and GSM unit plus a 433Mhz radio for telemetry downlink. I'll launch the balloon to take photos/videos of near space and use the telemetry to track the balloon for recovery.

<comment><USER4> Interesting. How are you planning to recover the balloon?

<comment><USER3> So, balloon will be attached to the payload box via rope which has two things attached to it: a parachute and a radar reflector. Reflector is there so aircraft can see the contraption, the parachute will be open all the time, but doing nothing as the balloon ascends.

Once the balloon bursts (somewhere over 30km) the parachute will slow the fall.

Throughout the payload will broadcast its location derived from GPS over a 433Mhz link (probably RTTY) which I can track. Once at a low altitude (not sure how low yet) and within GSM range the payload will also SMS its location to another cell phone.

This should give me enough data to find the balloon. Plus there is software to do balloon trajectory prediction based on weather forecasts. That'll give me a general idea of route as well.

Also, on a clear day the entire thing will be visible from the ground using high-powered binoculars or a small telescope. If I have time I'd like to get automatic ground tracking in place by attaching a Yagi antenna to a powered telescope and using the downlinked balloon location to steer the telescope to train the antenna on it and to get video of the balloon's ascent. That last part may be beyond my budget unless someone's got a steerable telescope mount that has a computer interface (RS-232/423 or USB) that they'd like to give me :-)

I plan to use a small video camera that will be activated at altitude to record HD video of near space (and the descent). Currently thinking of a Slide HD which can record 4 hours of video and is small and light, but this part isn't nailed yet.

This is actually a really complex project: navigation, telemetry, all the balloon related aspects, interface with ATC, temperature extremes, weather, ...

<comment><USER5> This sounds really ambituous. I seriously hope your plan will succeed! Just be sure to document the whole adventure in a.series of blogposts. Project like that is bound to top HN's front age in an instant.

<comment><USER3> Others have gone before me, so there's lots of assistance out there. But it should be fun documenting it. Look for my first blog post soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And because it's so popular, there are a bunch of libraries and tutorials for it. It also abstracts or designs away a lot of the tedium in programing micro- controllers.

The net effect? It's like python for hardware.

</comment><comment><USER7> At first, I loved it because it's pretty cheap, and I could just plug it into my USB port and start coding, without having to worry about making a programmer or buying a USB/Serial interface.

Now, I love it because it's pretty cheap, and it has full GCC toolchain support, so I don't have to use some proprietary IDE.

</comment><comment><USER8> Cool, I'd been meaning to get an Arduino microcontroller myself.

Can anyone give examples of the more interesting projects that are being done with the Arduino that you know of?

<comment><USER9> I ordered a sanguino kit and learned to solder at the same time :)

If you're interested in learning the whole parts procurement process, you can also buy a PCB of pretty much any arduino-based board with no components, then pick out the components you want yourself and solder away.

<comment><USER10> For auxiliary hardware for the Arduino, use a breadboard, and get components from a salvaged electronic device - an old pre-2000s TV is best, but anything will do: a radio, stereo system. They should ideally be pretty old so that they contain enough discrete components. Newer stuff is all SoC - System on a Chip - just a big proprietary non-reusable chip and very few other components.

You can desolder and reuse pretty much any component: connectors, passive elements (resistors, capacitors), switches, active elements (diodes, transistors), LEDs, speakers, relays. You can even reuse bigger functional blocks like power supplies or power amplifiers. I used to do this all the time when I was a teenager.

Nothing like having an idea at midnight and scavenging the components to try it out at once, and not having to wait next day to buy them. Plus, it reduces e-waste, which is horrible to recycle, despite what we are told.

And stay safe, learn you electric safety rules!

PS: nice first project idea - light alarm that wakes you up in the morning, like the fancy, pretty expensive Phillips Wake-up Light Alarm devices. Later, make the light able to fade-in using maybe a thyristor. A nice enclosure is hard to make though - that's where Phillips has the advantage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The BeagleBoard is stuck in a no-man's-land between low-end 8-bit controllers like Arduino and the many other AVR/PIC platforms, and a full-fledged embedded PC. If I want to monkey with Linux and take advantage of a full 1 GHz ARM core, I probably want to just use a commodity PC motherboard. Chances are, it won't cost much more, and it comes with the huge advantage that I already know how to develop for it.

<comment><USER12> It is also a total PITA to get 'booted' since it comes blank you need to mkfs a sd card. if you have linux on a computer already, this is pretty easy. but what if you dont have a linux machine ready to go? if you're me you spend 2 days trying to maneuver something, giving up and borrowing a laptop. I've had an easier time getting freebsd onto a Mac SE/30!

In the end what i really wanted to do is use the S-Video port on the BB and after much googling, determined that there was no driver, no easy way to do it and i was basically SOL especially without onboard ethernet/wifi.

The BB is a great embedded SBC, it completely slaughters the (hopefully now completely dead) PC104 but right now I'm tinkering with a Chumby: Its not nearly as powerful but for $110 you get a full retail package, LCD, composite video out, speaker, wifi, & power adapter. In 2 seconds i was ssh'ed in and porting SDL-based graphical apps with ease.

<comment><USER13> Do you think the lack of drivers and external support for things like the SVideo is a TI deficiency, or a linux community problem in general?

I'm trying to decide between i.MX51 and OMAP3/AM37 for an upcoming project and it seems like the level of support from TI or Freescale is going to be the only thing making a difference in the decision...the chips are just too similar in functionality.

<comment><USER12> im like the last person you should ask about embedded linux. ive done a smattering of projects but nothing detailed enough to advise :)

that said, i think the svideo thing is a 50/50 linuxwiki/TI problem. on one hand, the linux community loves to say "oh you know, just recompile the kernel" and on the other hand, TI should have made a completely ready-to-go bootimage one could download that demos -everything- on the board.

<comment><USER13> True, it would be nice if the SDK was complete on first silicon. But that never seems to be the case. And if there _is_ code to demo a feature, it's probably a hack.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>