Software Is the New Oil - <AUTHOR> http://avc.com/2015/10/software-is-the-new-oil/ <comment><USER2> If software is the new oil, be prepared for a wild ride. The oil industry is notorious for decade-scale cycles of over-hiring and then layoffs and under- hiring, rinse-lather-repeat.

Regardless, it's a good analogy, but be careful how far you take it. There's a _very_ important difference between the energy and other major industries. It's a difference that the software industry shares, but in the opposite extreme: The amount of capital needed to do business.

The energy industry is notoriously capital intensive. For my employer, a project has to be over 250 million to be considered a significant project. We have a _lot_ of those, including multiple projects in the 10-50 billion range. Sure, I work for a very large company, but even a "mom and pop" oil company (there are a lot, actually) needs tens to hundreds of millions to get started.

By contrast, the software industry prides itself on being able to get an initial product out the door with essentially no other investment than time.

At any rate, it's a fine analogy, but keep in mind that the oil industry is _very_ focused on building _big_ infrastructure. In that sense, oil companies have more in common with independent nations than with other companies. It's something to think about, at any rate.

<comment><USER3> Oil is high cap-ex, low op-ex, as labor costs are relatively cheap. Software is low cap-ex, but once you've created a prototype and need to hire people to build a business on top of it, op-ex becomes expensive.

<comment><USER2> Oil is low op-ex compared to its cap-ex. I don't have numbers to back it up, but I'd argue software companies' op-ex is still far cheaper than oil's.

Oil production and infrastructure maintenance aren't cheap. It's not like we just turn on the taps after the wells are drilled. However, labor is cheap, even in the software industry.

<comment><USER3> > However, labor is cheap, even in the software industry.

I think by this point we're accustomed to dealing with large software players who have scaled their businesses to the point where labor cost is indeed marginal to overall profit picture.

Back in the days attempts to build a small-scale software company (local Web design firm) or even a medium-scale software business (seller of compilers, industry-specific tooling, shareware) basically broke down because of unfavorable economics.

So we're dealing with a bit of survivor bias here - smallish and medium software firms for whom labor was a major cost center are either out of business, commoditized or both. In energy business, while the large companies still enjoy large budgets and economies of scale, it's still quite possible to be a small to medium size player and enjoy a steady cashflow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not convinced by this blog post that "software" is the new oil.

To me, it's the top talent of "software PROGRAMMERS" that's the "oil".

Let's pretend that Google Inc opensourced their entire software stack. Now, anyone can just spend money on hardware and datacenters and "replicate" what Google does in a certain sense. But did you really duplicate their abilities? Would intelligent and visionary investors fund such copycat endeavors?

I say no because smart people would realize you didn't replicate Google Inc's "hiring pipeline" of the best minds from Stanford/MIT/etc. Yes, we may have gotten a snapshot of Google's source code but we didn't duplicate their ability to attract desirable workers who can build _< <the next future thing that's NOT in that source code dump>>_.

Even Bill Gates had noticed this point: Google's ability to poach top talent from Microsoft was better than Microsoft's ability to attract Google defectors.

Same analysis can be done for Amazon inc. A person could take all their source code for ecommerce and warehouse logistics and I'm not confident he could outcompete Jeff Bezos. First, you must prove that you're hiring a better pool of candidates than Amazon.

Lastly, the "software" advantage leaks outside of the organization because others copy it (open source) or ex-employees with knowledge leave and reimplement it (legally) at their next gig. On the other hand, it's not as simple to make top compsci graduates switch their career aspirations from Google/Facebook/Apple in SV to SmallPotatoesInc in Alabama.

<comment><USER5> This is more accurate. Taking the Amazon example, there is literally _zero_ financial reason that Wal-Mart could not compete with Amazon. None. Yet,so far, they have not even come close. The reality is execution, not deep pockets.

And that execution comes from the talent powering the company, at least in the right positions.

<comment><USER6> WalMart has a pretty significant investment in technology. It's not the same technology Amazon uses. It's more classic logistics, POS and backroom stuff. I've seen their job ads. They execute. WalMart grew primarily through technology - to be sure your Dad's technology, but Mr. Sam had a comprehensive printout for the day on his desk every day.

WalMart is significantly bigger than Amazon. WM - 485.65B v Amazon @ 88.99B. Call it 6x.

I shop at WalMart, and I will quite frequently take their "in store pickup" option. I also have amazon Prime and the goods I pick for those are different, it seems.

<comment><USER5> They execute in a different space than Amazon. What I wrote was 'competing with Amazon', which they are absolutely not.

I'm talking strictly in the 'online retail' space, which I believe was pretty clear.

<comment><USER6> But you can actually buy stuff on walmart.com . I think they do compete in that. And the sheer number of stores for in-store pickup is a pretty good option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it makes more sense to say that data is the new oil, and software is the machinery used to extract, refine, store, and convert it into energy. AWS, Azure, etc. will be the Shell and BP of the data world. But not all data is created equal, and we still haven't gotten the refining process down.

Hopefully we'll be able to use digital oil to fuel more than just the great engine of personalized advertising, which seems to be where most of the revenue is coming from right now.

</comment><comment><USER8> One of these is a capital-intensive industry that extracts finite resources from the particular areas of the earth that happen to have them. The resource is consumed on a continuous basis.

The other is entirely dependent on skilled labour, and once deployed continues to deliver value.

Software is much more like real estate: the first entrants erect a patent barrier around the best bits and use it to charge rent to everyone that clusters around the core. It's subject to gearing-driven bubbles.

</comment><comment><USER9> And yet when you look at it, the biggest opportunities to create immense value added are on the hardware side of things: self driving cars, pharma (aging, cancer, etc.), robotics, batteries, power generation, interstellar expeditions, bringing billions of people out of poverty, etc.

I don't want to be dismissive, but the software industry might very well go through and M&A and commodification phase once it matures. It looks like oil now because those companies are big monopolies, will it last? I don't know, I wouldn't put all my assets in software, that's a bad idea in general anyway,

<comment><USER8> _self driving cars, pharma (aging, cancer, etc.), robotics, ... , power generation, interstellar expeditions_

All of those involve very large software elements, and benefit from software innovation.

It's quite plausible that the existing winners are at the top of their ramp, so buying in today at high p/e might not be a good bet. But all the unicorn investing is betting on new software companies coming along and reaching ascendency.

<comment><USER9> Excluding maybe self driving cars (maybe), I doubt that the core capability needed to drive the innovation in the above is software. I mean, that's like saying metal is everywhere in those industries. Of course it is, but it's also a commodity because it's easy enough to be produced by many competitors. I don't see software as so complex that few companies can keep the monopoly.

<comment><USER8> I didn't downvote you, but I disagree strongly. Software is both the most complex and skilled-labour-intensive thing that humanity has produced, and something that needs to be individually commissioned for any kind of real business edge. And it's supply constrained; that's why we're paid better than most of the non-finance economy.

You can't just go down and pump another few thousand barrels of raw software into your Strategic Software Reserve.

<comment><USER9> It's really not, it's now because few things are relatively new, it wont be like this forever. Building a rocket, a plane, a car factory, it's way more complex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't know nearly enough about macroeconomic trends or basics to have an informed opinion on this, but I do wonder how much of the software giant's cash-generating power is eventually still based on industries that 'extract stuff out of the planet'. Even if that dependency were indirect - say by the amount of oil/minerals/diamonds needed to produce a chip that your software needs to run on - such a dependency would still mean that software can never be as much of a 'primal' industry as oil is/was.

<comment><USER11> It's an interesting consideration. Software is clearly not a primary layer, but neither is oil.

Energy, land, machinery, labor, transport - a few of the things you need to extract and then process oil. The same goes for creating and making a microchip useful. The first oil tower at Titusville didn't use oil as its energy source.

Is oil a layer two product, and software a layer three product? Perhaps, however oil is definitely not primal, it just seems like it is. The vast effort and industry required to make oil useful, along with a century of science, is mostly hidden away from view.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Difference between oil and software is that you can easily quantify oil (1 barrel) whereas it is tremendously hard to quantify the value of software product.

<comment><USER13> most companies pay by the click.

<comment><USER14> No, that's ad companies you're thinking of. Software companies make money by selling services or shipping a product.

<comment><USER13> Google's a software company last time I checked and most of their money is paid by the click. FYI, if you aren't paying for it your the product.

<comment><USER14> Google is an ad company. 91% of their revenue comes from selling ads. They just happen to be an ad company that started with a successful search engine.

All the amazing software Google develop is to support their ad business, more or less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _Amazon, the company that "will never make money" surprised Wall Street last week with strong profits and it seems to me that they are going to start producing cash like these other big tech companies now._

I missed this... any good articles about it?

<comment><USER13> wonder when amazon shed's it e-commerce business to focus on it's real money maker cloud computing?

<comment><USER11> They'll remain linked for at least another decade. Bezos can now lean on AWS to print money that he can funnel into numerous other expeditions. He won't let go of it any time soon, he has been seeking a big money maker for some time (see: efforts in search, auctions, advertising, phones - where the leaders have generated sizable profits).

Why did Amazon launch a semi-high priced phone (rather than stay consistent to the traditional low price strategy)? Bezos was hoping it would spit off a few billion a year in profit, and they'd finally have a big cash fountain to swim in like his competitors in tech.

In four to six years AWS will be a $150-$200 billion company in terms of valuation. It'll be capable of generating $4 or $5 billion in operating profit in that time frame. It'll likely pass Facebook in terms of sales within 36 months, and Facebook is worth $292 billion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> And posts like this are why I hold shares of Berkshire Hathaway instead of Tumblr.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's a grabby headline, but after reading it, it came across as an attempt to create a new business meme, rather than compelling arguments. All these companies make money through very different means, not just software. Most of them are valuable because they've monopolized sizeable chunk of consumer space through combination of good planning, products, designs, marketing, and a little bit of luck.

Also, there are other wildly profitable companies in other sectors that have been around for decades.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord More specifically, it seems that he's referring to software _as a service_ (or service as a software substitute, depending on your POV) as the one netting the surplus value. Distributed server-side applications with intrinsically limited client-side interaction and no standard release model or auditability so to speak of. That's actually a rather different beast than just "software".

</comment><comment><USER18> So what's the renewable alternative to software then? And are we going to make wars over software, too?

<comment><USER13> open source?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I like the analogy, and eagerly await the arrival of a software rentier state.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Facebook could have $20bn of cash in the next year and could be producing $20bn of cash a year soon."

Came here hoping to find a "Facebook could..." line when talking about revenue. Was not disappointed. :)

<comment><USER11> Why? They're tracking to a likely $18+ billion in sales in the next four quarters. That's obviously an extremely substantial business.

By comparison SAP is Europe's largest tech company and does $21 billion in sales. Facebook will surpass them within eight quarters (at a mere ~14 years old as a company).

<comment><USER20> It's just the common line that you see when people talk about revenue possibilities and Facebook. There's a tendency to talk about Facebook's potential (rather than their current state) because they're a company with a lot of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I feel 'data' or rather big data is the new oil. There are big monopolies which control a lot of it and are trying to make sense out of it, the likes of Amazon, Google, Palantir et. al. and similarly there are companies like ExxonMobil in the energy sphere. We could in fact extend this analogy to smaller players in the renewable energy zone which are trying to make better qualitative use of their resources and similarly you will find small startups trying to make qualitative sense out of whatever lesser data they have but with niche applications.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash The difference between data and oil is that you aren't going to drive to the oilfields one morning and find that it's all been hacked and stolen. Data is collected. Oil is sold.

<comment><USER22> > The difference between data and oil is that you aren't going to drive to the > oilfields one morning and find that it's all been hacked and stolen.

Ask Western oil workers in Libya or Nigeria or Venezuela or Mexico (depending on the decade) how accurate they feel that sentence is. Oil concessions have been regularly expropriated.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Fine then, stolen at the click of a button. Oil is a finite resource, software isn't. We create our own scarcity. Oil = software is a lazy metaphor.

<comment><USER22> As opposed to the stroke of a pen?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Assumes that software is a tangible item, when a more suitable term for it is the _wetware_ between the CPU and a user's screen? This connotation of software with some form of product is analogous to selling sand to The Arabs. There is more than enough to go around, and it is not scare. Soo leave it alone and create products _borne_ from soft, not make the soft the _product_.

</comment><comment><USER24> Very vague comparison. Software is a technology and oil is a commodity.

you can't copy oil, you can't open source oil, software isn't limited

</comment><comment><USER25> Oil is finite, one day there won't be anymore. Software is potentially infinite as long as you can produce electricity ton run it.

</comment><comment><USER26> Another interesting related perspective that we used to give our (business information systems) students to argue about is "IT doesn't matter" by Carr (2003) _.

_ Can be found online at: [https://hbr.org/2003/05/it-doesnt- matter](https://hbr.org/2003/05/it-doesnt-matter)

</comment><comment><USER27> I've heard the exobyte data centers called the 21st century's "refineries" or industrial plants. They are physical plants consuming large amount of electricity (and nearly no labor). Although valiant attempts are made to minimize environment costs, the overall energy consumption increases and data creation rapidly grows.

</comment><comment><USER28> Oil is fundamentally rent-seeking. You're pumping money out of the ground. Software platform companies are the real equivalents.

I think the difference is that the state of the art shifts so quickly, long term survival for platforms is questionable. There's always a new player.

<comment><USER29> How is oil "rent seeking"? They are pumping something out of the ground and producing a product for sale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Amazon made 17 cents per share and that was enough to convince you? "strong profits"? Drink the koolaid much?

I'll sell you some shares in my software company at the same multiple. We've even got better margins. It'll be great. I promise.

<comment><USER11> They generated a billion in operating profit between AWS and retail.

Specifically what's so amazing, is that AWS is set to produce perhaps $2.25 to $2.5 billion in operating profit in the next four quarters. With the growth curve it's on, it'll very rapidly become one of the most valuable companies in the world, buried within Amazon. They'll hit $20 billion in sales in just three years, assuming slower growth.

By comparison, AWS is already generating 2.5 times the operating profit of VMWare. It has greater sales than either Salesforce or Netflix, and is generating a _drastically_ greater operating profit than either of those two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> " _We are long software_ "

Of all the suit babble I ever heard, this must be the most incomprehensible. Juggling stock options apparently wreaks havoc on the speech center of your brain.

<comment><USER4> The author just inadvertently left out the word " _on_ " as in "we are long on software", or "long on gold", "long on the euro", etc. It's typical phrasing that describes a long-term bet on something going up in value.

<comment><USER32> FWIW, the duration has nothing to do with it - you could be 'long APPL' etc. for only a few minutes (or even seconds, microseconds etc.) - see [0] An alternative phrasing here might be "We are bearish on software" [1] [0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_(finance)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_\(finance\)) [1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_sentiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_sentiment)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's software as communication/marketplace platform that makes most of the money. metcalfe's law + near zero marginal cost = $$$$.

</comment><comment><USER33> Hydrocarbons are something companies buy in order to burn or use to make other molecules they can sell.

Explain to me again how this is an analog for software?

</comment><comment><USER34> software is definitely a lot of snake oil.

</comment><comment><USER35> Apparently acknowledging the existence of Michael O. Church is still verboten around here...

</comment><comment><USER36> The physical analogy isn't even close. The volatility at the present time may be applicable. Software is a product of someone's imagination, while oil is pumped out of the ground. Without invention of the combustion engine (also a product of someones imagination), all the oil in the world would be nearly worthless.

</comment><comment><USER37> So California Is the New Texas.

</comment><comment><USER38> I just know there is a "There Will be Blood" joke in here somewhere..

</comment><comment><USER39> Isn't it more like the new "Movies"?

</comment><comment><USER40> So when is "peak software"?

<comment><USER41> I don't know _when_ , but it certainly seems to abide by the diminishing returns rule:

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."</comment></comment>


Apple Hit with $2.8B Patent Lawsuit Over VoIP Technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2016/05/10/apple-vs-voip-pal-2-8-billion-patent-lawsuit/ <comment><USER2> Patenting caller to callee messaging? How is that even possible?</comment>


Social Media Marketing is Not Free Marketing - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zuupy.com/social-media-marketing-is-not-free-marketing

<comment><USER2> You are right the medium is free but it cost time. If a company hires a consultant for social marketing it cost them but on the other hand if a startup founder has time to spend they can do it themselves (for a while).

It can 'some-what' level the playing field because a small firm can play in that game unlike the advertising space.</comment>


The future of the postdoc - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/the-future-of-the-postdoc-1.17253 <comment><USER2> Full disclosure: I'm a last year Ph.D student in cognitive neuroscience, and I'm neck-deep in post-doc applications...

I think a large part of the issue has to do with government policy as it relates to science. I notice that many politicians reason in terms of "producing more science" as if it were a commodity good that should be produced and exported _en masse_.

The problem, then, is that the current academic system actively encourages people to pursue academic careers without disclosing the reality of the situation. They push masses of people through undergrad, then grad school, then post-docs, until the end of the line whereupon most people hit a huge brick wall.

I'm all for promoting research in STEM fields, but simply upping the quota of Ph.Ds won't cut it. As far as the U.S. is concerned, I think this has more to do with turning a blind eye to the dismal state of public education than anything else. It enables politicians to say "we trained 200% more scientists", while conveniently omitting the following truths:

1\. Virtually none of them will be employed in the sciences at a level that warrants a doctorate.

2\. For all the chest-puffing we do, we still get humiliated by the rest of the civilized world in terms of education.

3\. Those people actually employed in research positions in American universities are majority foreign.

<comment><USER3> "3\. Those people actually employed in research positions in American universities are majority foreign."

Even if this was true (which I doubt), that just reinforces the article's contention that postdocs aren't paid enough: the jobs are only attractive to foreigners, while Americans have other options.

<comment><USER4> Anecdotally, ~50% of the faculty in my department at a large American public university are foreigners. I've been told, but not verified, that if you count dual-citizens, that number gets closer to 65%.

<comment><USER5> > I've been told, but not verified, that if you count dual-citizens, that > number gets closer to 65%.

Why on earth would you group dual citizens in the same category as foreigners?

Even if 100% of the faculty are dual citizens (Americans + something else), it would still be 100% American.

<comment> T-A Because realistically, most of those dual citizens started out as foreigners and were eventually naturalized as a consequence of pursuing an academic career in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I found a major problem is that many people graduating with PhDs in biomed suffer from the misconception that rejecting the null hypothesis somehow allows them to conclude their favored explanation is the correct one.

This is a widespread, top-to-bottom, worldwide error. I was trained to think this in grad school, surrounded by people who thought it, and have read innumerable papers by those who pretty much explicitly write that down and publish it.

Since rejecting the null hypothesis is much easier than coming up with and deciding between multiple research hypotheses, these people appear to be much more productive (when measured in publication output) than those who try to do it right. I tried, and no longer believe it is possible to do a good job in the current academic environment.

It is just not possible to compete with people who only reject a null hypotheses and skip everything else, not according to the metrics being used to assess performance. It's a race to the bottom.

<comment><USER6> There is another problem with this null hypothesis focus as well. The literature simply does not include the information required to really develop and test quantitative models (do a good job). Instead, nearly every claim is of the form "A makes B higher/lower". But this is not the type of information we need, it is near useless!

Here is an example of someone trying to figure out whats going on, but being unable to really check. The information required to constrain the parameter values is not being reported in the literature:

>"Although the signals that transduce the external cues to the GTPase network are becoming clear (21), most of the chemical parameters remain unknown. Because many of the reaction coefficients in Fig. 1 B are also unknown, we allocated a number of possible parameter sets to qualitatively analyze the kinetics of these reactions." [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1366631/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1366631/)

Here is another, we don't even know how many cells are in the human body to within 8 orders of magnitude, let alone how quickly they are supposed to be dividing (which is related to mutation rates), etc. How can you expect a cure for cancer in the absence fundamental quantitative data like this:

>"First, we noticed that these data were typically mentioned in the literature without citing a reference; second, we observed wide ranges among data reported by different sources, ranging from 10^12–10^20." [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23829164](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23829164)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is one thing that is not mentioned in the article: very-short term post- docs.

For instance, I just started my first post-doc after having defended my PhD, but my contract only lasts for one year. This is not atypical, at least in France and in computer science, to have one-year post-doc. And since you can't do a post-doc at the same lab where you did your PhD, it means that in the course of one year you have to:

1- get to know a new domain or at least a new subject,

2- become proficient in this new domain or subject to the point you can publish something in a good peer-reviewed journal or conference,

3- apply for competitive faculty positions and/or another post-doc position (in which case, rinse and repeat, unless you get to extend your current post- doc for one more year, but that depends on external fundings that you have no control or effect on).

Of course 3 requires 2 which requires 1, which means that you only have something like a bit more than half a year to complete 1 and 2, otherwise your applications for your next position will seem weak ("you didn't do anything this year?").

It is really a horrible feeling to be urged to do science. Especially when you just finished your PhD, you have lots of ideas that you want to explore and being so short-sighted (one year term is really peanuts in science) is an atrocious feeling.

<comment><USER8> Surely you'd be hired for a post-doc because your doctoral work was relevant to the project they were hiring for?

<comment><USER7> In general yes (not so much in my particular case though), but even then entering a new research project, even if it is close to the one you were working on before still take some non negligible time.

But you are right, the time to complete step 1 from my comment may vary a lot and might be short in some cases I guess.

In my particular case, I did my PhD on "cryptographic implementation security against physical (side-channel and fault injection) attacks", and my post-doc is on "privacy as control". I chose to apply for this post-doc rather than take one of the few that were offered to me on my PhD topic, because it also interests me scientifically a lot, plus it interests me politically. On the one hand it may have been a bold (or stupid? we'll see that later :)) move career-wise, but on the other hand it was a good time to change topic, as it may be harder to do later when you are even more specialized. And that is not specific to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> First posted back in April... original thread comments are here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9334316](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9334316)

</comment><comment><USER9> _In December 2014, a committee convened by the US National Academies released a report aimed at highlighting and improving the postdoc's plight. The committee called for a hike in salaries, from the current recommended starting salary of US$42,840 to $50,000..._

Hands up, everybody who would love to hire a scientist with a PhD for less than $50k/year.

<comment><USER10> Depends on the scientist. My personal experience is the best postdocs are more than 10x more productive than the average. Some post docs are worth $300,000 per year, while the bottom 20% are worth -$100,000 per year. The real problem is that everyone gets basically the same salary and as an employer you have no ability to pay more to the great postdocs.

<comment><USER9> My point was that outside of academia we would laugh at any company which expected to hire a PhD and pay them under $50k/year.

<comment><USER10> Yes I agree, but the PIs don't actually have any control over the pay of their postdocs. When I was a PI I wished I could pay more, but I couldn't.

<comment><USER7> As a post-doc, I'm not sure people willing to stay in academia care that much about salary. I don't want to be paid a lot, if that was my priority, I would get a job in the industry. What I would like is a stable position where I could engage in mid- to long-term research projects, where I have less pressure and can focus on doing great things even if it means working hard without tangible results for a few years, etc. Salary-wise, I only want to have enough money to not have to worry about it and be able to focus on my research and my life. In many places in the world, $50k/year is largely enough for that.

<comment><USER10> I also agree with this, but once you get to a certain age and start having a family (or start thinking about having one) then just saying money doesn't matter does not cut it anymore.

In my opinion good postdocs are massively underpaid. This has an big effect as You could live without having a long term project if you had the savings to survive between positions.

<comment><USER7> I totally agree with your first point. But I stand by my case. I didn't say "money doesn't matter", I said "I want to have enough, rather than as much as possible". $50k/year means that you get something like 3000€/month. Early career researcher with faculty position are paid less than that in France, and it lasts years and years before you get to this salary level. And is you don't get a full professor or senior researcher position, you won't ever go much higher. A lot of people, if not most people, have children while earning less than 3000€/month and have no money problems.

On your second point, the problem is that even if you have enough money to live between temporary positions, not being able to get a position at some point is a huge red flag in your application file, and this kind of gap are often fatals in competitive recruitment process, as the people in charge of the recruitment are looking for ways to discard applicants.

I'm really not saying you are wrong as I don't think so, my point is to say that the problem you highlight (salary level) is not the one that needs to be addressed to "repair the system".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 12th year as a postdoc? While I don't think the postdoc system is working very well, this example is not the face of failure of the postdoc system. This example is a failure of market signals to overcome an individual's sense of entitlement.

<comment><USER12> Sense of altruism, more like it. I don't see the sense of entitlement in spending years in low-status, low-paying positions to research Alzheimer's.

<comment><USER11> you stay in a postdoc because you think you're entitled to a professorial position. You could advance to a staff scientist position or move on to industry, or just do something else. If you've spent 12 years doing something, it means you were probably a bad experimentalist, really unlucky, or just bad at 'playing the game'. If you're in science and any one of the three above applies, you should quit. The market was trying to tell her that, she didn't get the message, even when her institution forced her out.

<comment><USER10> There are no real "staff scientist" positions less competitive that an academic position. In regards industry have a look at how many Ph.D.s have been laid off by the pharmaceutical industry in the last 10 years. Not every field has had the run comp sci has had in the last few years.

<comment><USER11> I'm a biochemist so I'm aware. After four years of postdoc, I quit my job and drove for Lyft for a year. Now I contract code. So, I read the writing on the wall.

And by the way, staff scientist positions are most definitely not as competitive as professor positions.

<comment><USER13> Maybe every year she received several rejection letters telling her just how close she came to making it. I remember getting a few "you were one of X finalists so please try again next year" letters; they made it really difficult to move to industry and really easy to think that all would work out in my favor if I just stuck around for another year.

<comment><USER11> I have gotten that letter for startup accelerators, but never for an academic professor slot position.

<comment><USER13> I was in the humanities, and maybe the process is different in the sciences, but 3-5 finalists for each position would always be invited for an on-site interview.

Your rejection letter might not spell out that you were a finalist, but it was clear from the interview process.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Get links pulled from Twitter favorites into Instapaper - <AUTHOR>

@glasner and I shipped a product today, http://www.tweetgrabber.com, that allows anyone with an Instapaper account to receive full-length articles that were favorited by anyone with a public Twitter account. You can now essentially crowdsource your Instapaper reading to those you trust by following their favorites. We use Twitter's streaming API to send articles straight to your Instapaper. You can follow your own favorites (single player mode) or follow anyone else's (multiplayer mode), forming a graph of curated real-time news. <comment><USER2> Awesome app, just wondering- is there going to be some way to figure out which of your twitter followers are using it already? Or a list of 'recommended reads' or people to follow? Will it ever aggregate shared or "liked" items on Facebook?

<comment><USER3> Thanks. We're working on suggested users now based on who you already follow on Twitter. Global "recommended reads" will come after public profiles are launched. All the above will be done in the next few weeks.

Nothing is planned for Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> awesome app!

one suggestion, why not use instapaper's oauth rather than taking user's credentials?

<comment><AUTHOR> The full Instapaper API only works for users who are already paying a monthly subscription to Instapaper, which we thought was a small percentage...</comment></comment>


How to: disrupt television - <AUTHOR> http://www.derekflanzraich.com/2010/05/how-to-disrupt-television/

<comment><AUTHOR> Part summary, part prediction-- this is an attempt at capturing what's happening with the future of TV. An app store for your TV? Streaming live events online? Better UI? Smarter ads? Social integration? What're your ideas on how to disrupt TV?</comment>


Ask HN: Intro to SharePoint/SharePoint Designer books - <AUTHOR>

Recently my workplace made the decision to use MS SharePoint for all of our intranet sites. It's been purchased, installed and been half-implemented by 1 or 2 departments. My team has now been given the task of becoming SharePoint experts to fully implement it for the IT department and to lead the (16 or so) other departments going forward.
Trouble is, we know nothing about SharePoint. My team is mostly content-side, and we're not looking to create a super-custom site at the moment, but we really don't want to use the pre-made MS templates either.
We just need to get a handle on SharePoint's architecture, a good guide on customizing site look and feel, and how to best manage SharePoint's myriad WebParts and collaboration tools.
Any books/advice/sites you can point me at is much appreciated. <comment><USER2> I'll do a self-plug here - we have SharePoint 2007 admin training online @ <http://www.learnitfirst.com/Course/225/SharePoint-2007.aspx>. We have a relatively smaller number of user-based videos though so it may not be what you need. Hit me offline and I can give you a free subscription for one user.

<comment><AUTHOR> No shame there. I'll take you up on that offer, e-mailing you now. Thank you!!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anyone willing to share their thoughts on programming with D language? - <AUTHOR> I considering D language mainly because I want to do C programming but it would be nice to have a much more modern and flexible language that still interfaces really well with C.<p>I wondered is there anyone out there using D who can offer their thoughts an opinions? <comment><USER2> D is fast and easy to use. However, there aren't many jobs out there.</comment>


A ₹1 Crore Fund to Support Open Source Projects in India - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/08/30/1-crore-fund-support-open-source-projects-india/ <comment><USER2> 1 Crore = 10,000,000 in India [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crore)</comment>


Ask HN: Best city in India? - <AUTHOR>

I've been working for myself for the last several months and have decided to use my freedom to live abroad.  I'd like to start off with India (I'm an American-born Indian).  The major places to be seem to be Delhi, Bangalore, and Chennai.  Any others you'd recommend?  Do you guys have advice on pros/cons of the various cities and how to best get started there?
Number one priority is internet of course.  Also, since I won't be part of a company, I'd like a place where it is easy to meet other people - clubs and events and such.  I'm thinking of staying there for the first few months of 2011, so I would like a reasonable flat that has plenty within walking distance.
Thanks a lot! <comment><USER3> Bombay. In malls, people wait till you come out of the elevator before getting in. I bet you will not find that in any other place in India.

I grew up in Chennai and currently live in Bombay. I've lived a few months in Hyderabad and Bangalore, and I've visited Delhi a few times. So yeah, I can talk!

Apart from the generally civilized air that is so rare in India, Bombay has great restaurants and malls, easy internet connectivity, lots of clubs that stay open till 1, and some restaurants/clubs that stay open all night. Stay away from the train stations, though. South bombay is calmer than the suburbs and very expensive.

Chennai is hot and the people are rude. It doesn't have anything to recommend itself, except a few startups and beaches. You might run into interesting, smart people around Anna Nagar or Mylapore or the IIT, but it's no use - <USER2> don't talk.

Bangalore is full of people in their twenties working in software companies. There are some startups, too. The traffic is heavy, and the weather is the best in India. I interned in Google, Bangalore a long back and remember seeing the road get regularly jammed for several hours in the evening. It's just a pain to go anywhere there. Also, it has no diversity whatsoever. A little like the valley, I guess. It has a lot of clubs, but everyone drops asleep at 10 PM sharp and NOTHING stays open after that.

I don't know a lot about Hyderabad and Delhi. Hyderabad is currently somewhat disturbed by regional issues and has some good South-Indian restaurants. It also has excellent bookstores. Delhi is not safe(at all) in the evenings, and has an AWESOME metro.

As for cost of living, Bombay is crazy expensive, Chennai is dead cheap, and Bangalore, Hyderabad and Delhi are in the middle.

All of these places are overcrowded, noisy and hot. The people will invariably shove you out of queues and counters, stare at you if you wear a hat (or anything that they don't wear), break rules and honk a lot on streets. Welcome to India.

<comment><AUTHOR> Some may have gotten offended, but I found your post helpful, thanks! Bangalore sounds pretty cool, but things shutting down at 10pm is kind of a concern.

<comment><USER4> Yeah. It's a rule here in Bangalore to shut down all restaurants and shops by 10-10:30 PM.

Unlike in Bombay where I remember seeing kebab shops open at 1:30 AM and doing brisk business!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you want to meet other people and attend (tech) events and such I would suggest Bangalore. It is not called the silicon valley of India for no reason.

Of course I am biased.

BTW If you want to experience India, the real incredible India, you may want to roam across the country avoiding the cities. If you are doing this, don't always expect reliable internet connectivity.

<comment><USER6> If you want to explore a little bit of tech and a lot of other stuff, Mumbai (Bombay) may be a great place too. You can always travel to Bangalore once in a while but if you really wanna feel a big Indian metro, you should live in Mumbai

PS: I am from Bangalore so I am not biased :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I worked in Gurgaon a couple of years ago. Don't go to Gurgaon, if ever they were to remake the Office series in India, that's where it would be set.

I went to Delhi from Gurgaon a couple of times and thought it was a great place to go. I would've liked to have done Agra and Shimla, but I didn't have time. I can't speak for the rest of India (as it's huge and I haven't been) but I have friends from Calcutta who like it there.

</comment><comment><USER8> Pune. If you are looking for a vibrant startup community, Pune is the place to be. It may not be as big as Bangalore but its far more vibrant.

<comment><USER9> If someone is going there for say half a month, what would be an interesting way to learn about and make contacts with the startup community there?

<comment><USER8> there is a Google group - punestartups. also author of punetech.com is very active helpful person. hth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Start with pondicherry(some 180kms from chennai). Get in touch with Auroville Ashram and get an accommodation there. Once you have spent sometime there you can move to Chennai and then to Bangalore.

<comment><USER11> I second this. With or without Auroville, Pondicherry is awesome. Have decent internet connectivity, living cost is low and peaceful with all big city facilities in a small town.

Edit:- But no start up culture or any events worth participating. You can visit Auroville, of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Personally, I was never a fan of indian cities when I travelled there. I'd like to live near a cheap beach town like Gokarna or this place near Mangalore : <http://surfingindia.net/node/10> . That said there's likely no tech/startup culture out here, but hopefully much less smog/air quality issues.

Upvoted Pondicherry as that looks pretty promising too.

<comment><AUTHOR> If there is a reliable internet connection, I'll be able to work. I was thinking a city so that I could meet people and not get bored/lonely since I'll be working alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well, it all depends what's the reason of visiting India. My hometown is New Delhi, so I am little biased about it. Its beautiful, has its own charm and it has close proximity to Himalayas(a must visit place). You should start from here.

However, in case you want to visit for some tech. events or making new networks I would say Hyderabad and Bangalore are the best places to visits.(FYI: Google, MS, Yahoo, Oracle all have their big offices in these two cities). They are well connected by roads(12 hours journey), may be an hour on flight.

Since you are visiting early 2011, northern part of India is a great time to visit. Its bit cold during that time of year (or pleasantly cold)but its better than scorching Summers in May-July.

You would find plenty of clubs in each of the cities, you will meet beautiful girls ;) and what not.

I would say start from the North(Delhi), visit some places closer to Himalayas, Jaipur etc. They move south to Bangalore and Hyderabad. May be get a return flight from Mumbai(India's financial capital aka New York).

Hope that helps.

<comment><USER13> and this might help <http://www.incredibleindia.org/index.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Internet should not be a problem anywhere you travel within India. There are internet USB cards available with pretty decent speed & connectivity. Here are a few - <http://www.reliancenetconnect.co.in/> <http://www.tataphoton.com/>

With internet connectivity, you can travel to different cities and experience life there, rather than being based in only one city... just a suggestion.

Once you have decided on the city / cities where you want to stay while in India, for the accommodation, you can even post at HN google groups in India (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1885605>) to see if any member can help suggest a good option for stay. And yeah, as someone suggested, check out airbnb as well.

Safe & fun travels!

<comment><USER3> These internet cards don't work in several places. I've tried both Reliance and Tata Photon. They usually work in cities, though.

<comment><USER14> It could be... my experience has been pretty good so far. I used Reliance USB even in smaller cities and it worked great... even in a moving train in the middle of nowhere when I was traveling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For anyone wanting to work in the software/startup/tech scene,Bangalore is the best.The weather is always on the cooler side,its smaller in size compared to other metropolitan cities and traffic situation has much improved over time.If an analogy helps,Bangalore is kind of like San Francisco.

Mumbai is different in that unless you can find housing close to the center of the city(hugely expensive) where it "is easy to meet other people - clubs and events and such" ,you'll have to commute.Mumbai is NY + LA put together with all the excesses and advantages of both cities.

Delhi is nice but the weather tends to be extreme.As a newcomer,unless you have people to help out,it may not be that easy to start off there.Though its a great starting point to travel from for all of north India and worth a visit.

Have no idea about Chennai.

</comment><comment><USER16> For you: The Pros and Cons of Moving Back to India <http://labnol.org/?p=18133>

</comment><comment><USER17> Don't visit Delhi, Bangalore, and Chennai. You'll not miss anything. Instead visit places like Udaipur, Trivandrum, Kandalampadu etc.

From <http://airbnb.com> you can get decent accommodation.

<comment><USER9> why do you recommend going to places with no start up culture and no tech events?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you have time and want to visit a fun place then I would recommend Ahmedabad. I love the city (and live in it). A lot of smart people can be found near university road as it has colleges like CEPT or at NID Paldi. But you will have to get involved with the college some how to talk with them. Ahmedabad is cheap and safe (not exactly clean) and has a lot of history.

Edit: We do have a TiE branch here but I seriously don't know about the actual start up culture.

</comment><comment><USER18> Tekadi, Kerala. Just kidding.</comment>


Silicon Valley Is Awash in Chinese and Saudi Cash - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/1/18511540/silicon-valley-foreign-money-china-saudi-arabia-cfius-firrma-geopolitics-venture-capital <comment><USER2> I think there is a difference between SA and CN money. SA is mainly looking for returns on investment (as they see petroleum's long term viability diminish); they may seek some influence/favors but that is secondary. CN is mainly in it not for returns on investment (they have hot properties themselves), but rather they see it as an incubator and foundry for ideas and technical know-how they can leverage. One may have geopolitical implications in terms of optics, the other has bigger implications in terms of economic vitality and projection of power.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone who tried to buy a house in SV in the last 5 years already knows this.

Turns out Chinese are better savers of dollars than Americans and they now want to do something with those dollars. Like buying houses, companies, building structures etc.

Meanwhile, the fed doesn't allow US savers to accumulate wealth outside of speculation by keeping interest rates artificially low

</comment><comment><USER4> _"People are saying, 'The US doesn't really welcome our money,'" said one Chinese-backed venture capitalist. "So we need to stop investing in the US."_

This regulatory scrutiny is the needle that pokes a hole in the SV cash bubble.

</comment><comment><USER5> Has any startup in SV actually said no to an SA investment out of moral objection?

There is so much talk about how horrible SA is how we all want to change the world for a better place but when the money is put on the table people conveniently forget their morals.

There is also no push back against companies that take SA cash. Just look at Uber.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nothing surprising, China exports so much stuff to USA. The so called trade deficit means they have more dollars that they need to spend. Interestingly China spends it on more risky SV ventures.

The cheapest thing USA produces today is the green paper called dollars. This is a win win.</comment>


Brazilian chloroquine study halt after high dose proved lethal for some patients - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/24/chloroquine-study-coronavirus-brazil <comment><USER2> Previously discussed on news.ycombinator.com:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22880686](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22880686)</comment>


Show HN: :heart: Slack and use Google Calendar? Check out Gonebusy - <AUTHOR> https://www.gonebusy.com <comment><AUTHOR> /gonebusy [ <notion of time> | book | feedback | help | ... ] – Access to all Gonebusy functionality without having to invite a nosy bot that can see all messages in a channel it's been invited to. Slash commands only see the payload you send them.

/today – Quick shortcut for today's events. In a meeting right now? "Join Meeting" and stop fumbling to find that Hangout/Zoom/UberConference link...

[https://slack.com/apps/A2TM3CS8N-gonebusy](https://slack.com/apps/A2TM3CS8N-gonebusy)

_finally something to post on HN_

<3 GB Team</comment>


UDP and me - <AUTHOR> http://www.reed.com/blog-dpr/?page_id=6

<comment><USER2> This is a pretty good article, it reveals some of the "why" about TCP/IP and UDP/IP. One particularly revealing paragraph that's not about the "why":

 _One project where my friend and officemate Steven T. Kent (now chief scientist and vice president at BBN, and a chief advisor to NSA) and I lost was our strong argument to put mandatory end-to-end encryption into TCP (and adaptations of the ideas to UDP-based protocols, such as RTP, hich I worked out but abandoned). Steve's design was rejected, not because it was unsound, but because NSA did not want to see ANY encryption work going on in the public domain ARPA project, some say because they did not want to see the world be "too secure" by default._

That's very interesting. This Steven T. Kent goes from technical grunt to advisor to the NSA. I should temper my paranoia by mentioning that "not ANY encryption" was pretty standard for the whole US government all the way up to the end of the "Crypto Wars" in the 1990s.</comment>


Hacker Writing Style - <AUTHOR> http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/writing-style.html

<comment><USER2> > It may well be that future historians of literature will see in it a revival > of the great tradition of personal letters as art.

Ah what might have been ...

</comment><comment><USER3> I have found that hacker/programmer writing style tends to be grammatically correct and with complete sentences, as a rule of thumb.

</comment><comment><USER4> As far as I remember, the distinction between "typesetter" quotation and "logical" quotation appears in computerized typesetting. In traditional paper typesetting, a quote was kerned together with a period (or a comma) into a single character, so that quote is above, not before or after the period.

<comment><USER5> I don't know about that. Neither old books I've seen nor TeX do that.

<comment><USER4> Disclaimer: I don't have a citation for this, I just remember it mentioned a few times, so I may very well be wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I recently watched David Foster Wallace on Charlie Rose, and given his history in semantic research, and I would equate his style with these ideas. I don't know if this concept of a hacker writing style is a new phenomenon, but more a bi-product of mathematical aspects of language understanding.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's also getting quite common so see just:

/flame

I can only imagine that's coming from the html-style metadata they are showing in these exactly, but made a lot easier to type for non-hackers. I rather like it myself, even.

<comment><USER8> To me, that plain "/flame" at the beginning of a line looks more like a pseudo-IRC. Note that IRC is still common among lots of hackers. Other IRC- related statements might be:

/me is angry|happy|whatever

/join ...

any maybe others. Those aren't used very often, though.

<comment><USER7> Actually, I see it at the end. Example:

I totally love what you did there.

/sarcasm

At the beginning, I'd definitely agree with you.

<comment><USER9> But then, you can't tell whether the sarcasm was intended from the very beginning of the message or merely the last sentence/paragraph.

<comment><USER10> I prefer this method in irc </sarcasm>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> still surprisingly accurate, despite being a decade or so out-of-date.</comment>


Ask HN:Web hosting with bank account option (account and router number) - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking to switch hosting companies, but I don't want to switch to one that requires a paypal, credit card or check of some kind.  If I can find a web hosting that takes my router and account number.  Why do I have to pay on credit when I can just as easily pay through my bank.<p>Also do you suggest the cloud option, such as Amazon EC2?  How do I compare and do you use it? <comment><USER2> 1\. Why not just use your debit card (which comes with every checking account) unless you have only a savings account)? I'm not sure which hosting takes just your routing number and account number (never really thought about it before or looked for it).

2\. If you're looking to do develop something from scratch, I recommend using something else other than a cloud computing. EC2 is not cheap for development purposes. I would switch to EC2 when you need it but the costs can scale pretty high (I've been using EC2 and AWS in general for about 3 years now).

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, can you suggest a good web hosting company?</comment></comment>


Welcome to the Ice Cream Factory - <AUTHOR> http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2012/01/welcome-to-the-3.php

<comment><USER2> This is a question that is rather close to my heart: I do run an ice cream factory (well, a small sorbet shop) and my tendency is toward complete openness about methods and ingredients. We in fact had the Ben and Jerry's flavor research team stop by a couple months ago, and happily gave them a multi-hour kitchen tour. I don't think there were any questions we shied away from.

It's certainly a debatable business practices, and makes some of my partners uncomfortable. I think that we stand much more to gain from establishing open communication than we have to lose. Ben and Jerry's has a lot of knowledge, but very different constraints than we do. I'm not worried that they will steal our techniques of juicing pomegranates by hand, and while they were intrigued by our one-quart-at-a-time production, it's far from obvious how it would scale to their needs. We by contrast can learn a lot about their packaging, marketing, and distribution.

It may just be that I'm not a great business person. I'm much more excited by making something wonderful available to the world, and resent having to use price discrimination to make it possible to do so. We have started charging for kitchen tours to the public ($45), and while we've met some wonderful Google engineers, it makes me sad to think of all the people excluded because of the cost.[1] I'd prefer a world where people build upon others' successes to ever increasing heights, rather than one where everyone constantly reinvents the same trade-secret protected wheel.

In response to Dan's comment below, perhaps we run in different circles, but I have not found that smart people hoard information. Rather, the smartest people I know tend to be unable to stop talking about whatever they are currently working on, where they are currently stuck, and when they last had a breakthrough. But maybe this is just self-selection: if the truly smart ones don't talk, I guess I'd never know it.

[1] If anyone in the Bay Area is interested in a $5 shorter version of our kitchen tour, we're running one this weekend: [http://www.meetup.com/SanFranciscoFoodies/events/45091172/?a...](http://www.meetup.com/SanFranciscoFoodies/events/45091172/?a=ea1_lnm&rv=ea1)

</comment><comment><USER3> sharing publicly usually also means a good business culture of sharing internally -- and vice versa for not sharing publicly/internally.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's something about this "it's all in the open" mindset that I struggle with -- perhaps it's because so much of hacker culture is built around knowing something somebody else doesn't? But you're right: you can tell how sick an organization is by how poorly it shares inconvenient and embarrassing information among its members.

<comment><USER4> > perhaps it's because so much of hacker culture is built around knowing > something somebody else doesn't?

I've always thought that open source was deeply entwined in hacker culture. But perhaps you're referring to something else?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that was poorly-worded. Let me try again.

It's been my experience that some people naturally collect and hoard information -- it's a form of currency to them. It's not a hacker thing, but it does seem more common among really smart folks. We are taught that information is valuable, that education is a necessity for success later in life, and, worst of all, that magic ideas account for most successful businesses. In movies and in literature, over and over again we're shown people who gain and keep advantage because of information they hold. In addition, large parts of the structure of human society over thousands of years has been based on the value of keeping and sharing information. These different factors accumulate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's funny how right he is. Reading all these articles thinking you're learning all sorts of great useful things when really they leave out the most important parts. Then you go about trying to implement the things you read and you're left scratching your head wondering why things didn't work out like how the blog post said it would. By the way, not sure if someone has ever said this before, the author could totally be a stand-in for Philip Seymour Hoffman.</comment>


How Callbacks in PHP could increase the downloading speed of a Web Page - <AUTHOR> http://mrbool.com/how-callbacks-in-php-could-increase-the-downloading-speed-of-a-web-page/26580

<comment><USER2> Or use flush() command between fetches, no callbacks needed.</comment>


Clojure: Effective Programs (Rich Hickey, 2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V1FtfBDsLU <comment><USER2> Transcript for this and many other talks is available in this repository: [https://github.com/matthiasn/talk- transcripts/blob/master/Hi...](https://github.com/matthiasn/talk- transcripts/blob/master/Hickey_Rich/EffectivePrograms-mostly-text.md)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I love the anecdote at [https://youtu.be/2V1FtfBDsLU?t=515](https://youtu.be/2V1FtfBDsLU?t=515)

when Rich talks about the lightweight languages workshop at MIT</comment>


Ask HN: "Deals fall through" - <AUTHOR>

I'm curious which startup had this mantra (as discussed in http://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html) and how they're doing?<p>great mantra. <comment><USER2> I meant it's one of YC's additional mantras, not a mantra of one of the startups we funded.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been misreading that sentence since that essay was published - cool!

<comment><USER2> I changed it to "secondary mantras" in the original.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think pg is saying it's one of the mantras of YC, not that of one of their companies.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here is the startup: <http://tinyarro.ws/> And here is the guy: <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=thorax>

I hope this is the proper answer!

<comment><AUTHOR> err, sorry, i meant the startup referenced in the essay by pg located here: <http://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html>

<comment><USER4> Sorry because I misunderstood your question; Please forgive me, I am not a native english speaker!

Whatever, what is the point of your question? If you want such domain names, it's possible to buy it through Godaddy international domain names.

I have doubts that the name of this domain is written in "Arabic letters" but I am not sure but it looks chinese too. Anyway, it's possible to buy domain names with such letters, and if you want me to write any arabic word for you that would appear in such shapes - like the arrow, I can try doing it for you. I am native Arabian, from Cairo, Egypt.</comment></comment></comment>


Dude, Where's My Job? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.macleans.ca/2009/01/14/dude-where%E2%80%99s-my-job/

<comment><USER2> One of the comments was probably better than the actual article:

[http://blog.macleans.ca/2009/01/14/dude- where%E2%80%99s-my-j...](http://blog.macleans.ca/2009/01/14/dude- where%E2%80%99s-my-job/#comment-81567)

<comment><USER3> Agreed. There must be something about the gravitational center of my eyeballs that causes them to roll upwards toward the ceiling whenever someone refers to this generation as 'entitled.'

<comment><USER4> Repeating something that has been said so many times that it has become popular wisdom is an easy way to fill word count.

<comment><USER5> My eyeballs involuntarily roll up just the same, but I think it's only because it's an erroneous generalization. Generation Y is starting to split in half, but I don't think anyone's really taking notice.

<comment><USER6> What split are you seeing? I'm very curious.

<comment><USER5> I've been noticing it for a while, but it became ever more evident to me when I read this (<http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html>)

Namely, Gen Y is beginning to segment into those who'd rather keep up with the jonses and be immersed in culture (typically younger members of Gen Y), those who'd rather be more involved in social matters (the median), and those who are more focused on establishing their lives for the future as THE primary goal.

And the amazing thing is, it's incredibly migratory. The younger groups who follow MTV culture either phase out of it, and move into the second category, or cling to the pop lifestyle and migrate over into one of the other two, using pop as a blanket for wherever they go.

It makes little sense right now, I plan to research it rather fully this summer.

<comment><USER6> That is an interesting article. Supposedly I'm at the leading edge of the millenials, having been born in late 1982. But not a single person I know resembles these characters portrayed as hipsters.

On the other hand, I know quite a few civic-minded and tech-savvy peers who do give a damn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the real interesting part of Gen Y is the amount of writing which is being devoted to us. Is Gen Y really that difficult to understand or so unbelievable? Does it deserve all this writing and attempts to dissect it?

What's really interesting to me is how much criticism we're getting for wanting jobs that aren't a repeat of the workforce before us. Imagine if the Internet media was around when the generations shifted to cities and away from rural settings! Farmers crying out about the lost workforce from their children who went to work in the industrial revolution factories. Or maybe the outcry even further back when shepherds' kids decide to settle down and build a farm! _Gasp_ Shock horror. Cats sleeping with dogs in the streets. Anarchy abounds. It is... simply put... the end of the world.

Gag. I'm just so tired of the Gen Y angle and BS that gets written about it.

</comment><comment><USER8> So, what makes Gen Y the most entitled generation ever? I'd argue that title goes to the Baby Boomer generation (at least for the time being). They're the generation that decided that, while their parents paid for their education, kids should really pay for theirs (paying for zero educations in their lifetime while each other generation will pay for 1). They're the generation that has decided anything that costs money can be shuttled onto future generations through debt. They're the generation that paid too little in Social Security and Medicare taxes who are gearing up to fight for expanded benefits paid for by their children.

We'll see if Gen Y decides to be as entitled. Yeah, Baby Boomers get annoyed with Gen Y kids who think they know everything when they don't. Most people in my generation think they're a ton smarter than they actually are and think that minimal work should result in great reward. Maybe we're no better than the baby boomers, but I resent this implication that we think the world revolves around us. The baby boomer generation seems to like to forget that part of their success was that they were able to shift burdens onto others (often their children).

I guess I should apologize for how I started off this comment. It was too harsh. I got a little too aggravated by the article and being lectured down to by a generation whose greatest accomplishment was being born in the only industrialized nation not bombed out by WWII and, therefore, had the opportunity to create with barely any competition. OK, I'm still aggravated. I'm sorry.

Most people are hardworking folks and this author is trying to appeal to the few that are probably less hardworking and want to blame society on someone else. It happens all the time - it's those immigrants that are making your life suck and the like.

I think we'd all be better off if we remembered who we are really - not the idealized vision we have of ourselves. Baby Boomers went through a period of pot smoking and being lazy. Before them, dating was the hot button being seen as a waste of time and a disregard for morality. Let's all try to remember that life is a little more universal than this essay would have you believe.

<comment><USER9> > the only industrialized nation not bombed out by WWII

Switzerland anyone?

<comment><USER10> Watches and chocolate does not make an industrialized nation.

;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My generation is X, they called us lazy because back in the late 80s and early 90s the job market was the worst since... WW2? correct me if I'm wrong.

Crap job market = lazy generation.

And because the Y generation grew up during unprecedented economic growth they are the most entitled generation.

If we could bottle folksy wisdom, we'd have a lot of stupid in bottles.

<comment><USER12> I much prefer bottled alcohol, it helps us forget the stupid things people sometimes say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Oh yeah, cause I just _demand_ to have balloons and a cheap plaque for my first day on a job.... or, you know, maybe not? My gen is probably unreasonable (few people are in any gen methinks) but "they" clearly just don't get it at all.

</comment><comment><USER14> How does one manage to take people born within a range of 14 years and make sweeping generalizations about them?

Grouping people into Gen This or Generation That is astrology for sociologists.

</comment><comment><USER15> Google NYC had "afternoon tea"? What does that even mean?

<comment><USER16> Tea: a drink prepared by soaking leaves in hot water

Afternoon: a time after midday but before evening.

HTH!

<comment><USER15> So what you're saying is that Google has banned tea in the afternoons. You're right, that was helpful.

<comment><USER17> There is a social institution in some countries where tea is consumed in the afternoon and, importantly, this comes with a societal expectation that work stops during the consumption of tea. The societal expectation is similar to the expectation in the US that most professionals are not available for productive labor between 12:00 and 1:00 because they will be eating lunch.

Thus, when an American company says they're instituting afternoon tea-times, what they mean is they are adding a break to the workday which is not typically present in American companies. When an American company which previously had afternoon tea-time eliminates it, it means that the workers have lost a socially acceptable period in which they were not expected to labor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Same as it ever was. I narrowly miss the Gen Y cut-off, but was popular to bag on my generation's failings when we were first entering the workforce. Whatever.

(Aside: You don't even need a Kindle to spot this author's crutch words. Am I the only one who thought the repeated use of "cohort" was unusual? Dude, where's your thesaurus?)

<comment><USER19> The word "cohort" is a technical term in demographic studies, and the correct word for the article.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohort_(statistics)>

<comment><USER18> Touché. That'll teach me to only read the first few definitions (<http://dictionary.reference.com/dic?q=cohort>)

I see it now, all the way down at number 5! Everything they said about my generation was true. :)

Here's an amusing coincidence. I was a student at JJ Hill Elementary school in St. Paul, MN in the late 80s. This was the gifted/talented magnet back then, I don't know if it still is. I see you're affiliated with Minnesota's gifted/talented educational program. Can I somehow blame you for my inability to read all the way to the fifth definition? :)

<comment><USER19> The Gifted and Talented magnet school in St. Paul now has the name Capitol Hill. I don't know if that is a successor school to the one you remember.

In general, I'm not sure how schools have been teaching reading in specific places in the relevant generations, but I would agree with the critics who say that reading could have been better taught than it usually was in school over the last few generations.

[http://www.amazon.com/Why-Johnny-Cant-Read- about/dp/00609134...](http://www.amazon.com/Why-Johnny-Cant-Read- about/dp/0060913401/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Read-Thinking-Learning- about...](http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Read-Thinking-Learning- about/dp/0262510766/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Dyslexia-Complete- Science-B...](http://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Dyslexia-Complete-Science- Based-Problems/dp/0679781595/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Early-Reading-Instruction-Science- Brad...](http://www.amazon.com/Early-Reading-Instruction-Science- Bradford/dp/0262134381/)

Best wishes in your continued efforts to add to your technical vocabulary. I learn new words fairly regularly here on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The article sneers that "seven out of 10 rank themselves "above average" in academic ability."

This bias is not specific to Gen-Y: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon_effect>

</comment><comment><USER21> wtf is a generation anyway? I'm gen-Y but my sister who's 4 years older is gen-x? Basically these articles are corporate HR people bitching about people realizing that they've become disposable--the corporate/employee contract has dissolved--and responding accordingly.

<comment><USER22> _I'm gen-Y but my sister who's 4 years older is gen-x?_

They keep having kids at younger and younger ages....

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> So sick of crap like this. I'm Gen-X and very much remember being called whiny and entitled. We were neither -- no more than any 20-somethings have ever been.

<comment><USER24> Don't pay too much attention to the article - Macleans magazine's core demographic is primarily boomer. This is just a feel-good article for them.

[edit] Now that I think of it, this is terribly ironic. An article complaining about how Gen-Yers all want gold stars and reassurances that they're good... written for boomers who want gold stars and reassurances that they're good :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Fail.

 _They graduated with the expectation that it was going to be a sellers' market, that they were going to have multiple offers, step into an upper management role and have significant strategic impact on a Fortune 500 company, and that's just not the reality._

What? The moderate expansion of 2004-07 has barely passed and already it's being romanticized and blown out of proportion. The OP is completely out of touch with reality.

Getting into an upper-management role out of college, and having significant impact on a Fortune 500 company, did not happen, except for extremely well- connected people. The median Ivy grad, much less median college grad, did not have that as an option, and no one expected it either.

In fact, the major reason the bulk of the talent went into finance was its reputation for having a faster career track. They would rather pay dues for 4 years working 70 hours per week than for 10 years working 50.

</comment><comment><USER26> Being born in 1981, which according to wikipedia is the last year of Gen X, the following year, 1982, being the beginning of Gen Y, I consider myself more of a Gen X'er than a Gen Y'er. That said, just from the point of view of software, it is not fair I don't think to call Gen Y "entitled" because there is a lot more to know about technology than there was even 10 years ago. To keep up, people always need to be learning new things. So Gen Y has a burden unlike any previous generation of just the vast array of knowledge of different programming languages, etc. they need to be able to compete - a vast breadth of knowledge, if not depth. So it is really uncalled for to call Gen Y "entitled" as a whole group. Sure there are "spoiled brats" in every generation, but we cannot make these kinds of generalizations, especially in the technology sector. And even the whole notion of this article displays archaic thinking, regarding the job market, at least in technology. The whole "get a job" thing has been more replaced with "get a gig", i.e., people are more into independent contracting/consulting etc. than before, so Gen Y is not necessarily the same as Gen X in terms of trying to find a long-term employment, at least in technology. It is more a generation of independent consultants that is coming up. This article is wrong from top to bottom, wrong in calling Gen Y "entitled" and wrong to think that the ills of the job market are going to finally be all that damaging to them, since they are more independently minded than their predecessors. A response to this could be: What happens when deprecated purveyors of old technology get hit with web 2.0 and 3.0? The answer is they get replaced. By the same Gen Y they so despise.

<comment><USER16> _What happens when deprecated purveyors of old technology get hit with web 2.0 and 3.0? The answer is they get replaced. By the same Gen Y they so despise._

That's not really true tho'. The skills of uploading a video to YouTube or making a website with PHP are insignificant compared to inventing TCP and wiring the entire planet with bandwidth. Could Gen Y bootstrap the Internet if it didn't already exist? That's an open question.

<comment><USER24> Every generation has its great engineering challenges. While you may have invented TCP and wired up the planet, Gen Y'ers are here inventing HSPA and wireless-ing up the planet. New technologies will always come along, and there will never be a shortage of difficult technologies to implement.

To think that because you guys started this whole internet thing means there's no difficult work left to do? That's absurd.

<comment><USER27> I have a feeling that most of the real engineering that happens today (including wireless as you said) are actually depending quite a lot on the generation before Gen-Y. Gen-Y can't take credit for much of anything really. The only exception is some of the "Web 2.0" stuff.

<comment><USER24> The same argument can be made for any other generation - the real engineering that happened back in the 70s for ARPANet was actually depending quite a lot on the generation before it (transistors, dielectric research, the ENIAC and computers that came long before them)...

My point still stands: every generation has incredibly difficult engineering challenges to overcome. Yes, it all builds on top of each generation, but there's no reason to denigrate the accomplishments of one generation or another.

<comment><USER16> Then why is Gen-Y all like, we have all these amazing Interweb sK1Lz that no- one else does? 'Cos I'm not seeing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This article made me want to throttle the author, and I don't even belong to gen y. Where's the bloody downvote button?!?!</comment>


Show HN: Automatic Ghost Blog Hosting - <AUTHOR> http://ghost.3942.pw/web

<comment><AUTHOR> Ghost blogs are automatically deployed and provisioned as separate node apps. They are then separated from each other, chroot'd and ran with pm2 (Node.js management software). The user then gets a system user which is given FTP access to their content directory where they can change themes, add images and backup their database. It is all running on SSDs in RAID for optimal performance. The client area also offers the ability to restart the Ghost blog.

</comment><comment><USER2> What is 3942.pw? I'd probably stay away from using that in your marketing, it looks really spammy (all numbers, "weird" tld, tld I receive the most spam from at the moment)

</comment><comment><USER3> Great to see more ghost blog hosting solutions come alive. I'm in love with the Ghost platform and want to see it thrive!</comment>


'Optical fibre' made out of thin air - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/optical-fibre-made-out-of-thin-air-1.2715321 <comment><USER3> So, I do a little bit of related research in this area:

This is typically called a "filament", a "plasma channel", and sometimes described as a waveguide. It requires high powers (~10^13 W/cm^2, usually femtoseconds in duration) depending on gas. It essentially works because the index of refraction has two nonlinear terms:

        n(ω) = n_0 + n_2 I - <USER2>

the n_2 I makes it so that higher intensities (which occur closer to the center of the filament for a typical gaussian laser beam), have a higher index of refraction, causing the field to focus, increasing the electric field intensity at the center. However, when the field gets high enough, it ionizes the material, causing a plasma to form, which has a negative contribution, defocusing the filament. These two contributions balance out and cause a "waveguide" where the light essentially travels along a narrow channel, allowing the focusing pulse to travel longer without as much spatial dispersion.

You can't send another light beam along these channels, because after the beam has left, all that is there is a plasma channel, which defocuses and absorbs light instead.

This has been around for a while.

What is NEW here is that they modified their beam profile to have 4 or 8 or even an annular ring of these plasma channels. Accoustic waves propagate toward the center of this filament arrangement causing a change in the density (which changes the index of refraction, the index of refraction increases linearly with density) that makes the channels act like a waveguide for another light source. This source of the density change has a duration of microseconds. When the acoustic waves have dispersed, a thermal gradient has a similar effect, and this has a duration of milliseconds.

They used this method to channel light from a spark source while mostly maintaining the spectra of the spark.

Now, what this allows, or doesn't allow:

LIDAR is a possible use, but whatever you point this source at is going to have to be able to take 10^13 W/cm^2... and not a lot of materials can take that without breaking down. While there is good focusing and guiding of the light, I think single photons are probably going to have a high probability of being absorbed (the mode of the photon will overlap into the plasma channels, which will likely absorb it), The nice thing is that signals could likely travel through one of these channels (though there likely will have to be some dispersion compensation at the receiving end).

</comment><comment><USER4> I feel like I'm missing something important, but if laser photons naturally scatter over distances then wouldn't that issue apply to the laser being used to create the compressed air channel?

<comment><USER5> The paper goes into more detail.

Basically, if you shoot a pulsed laser of sufficiently high power, you can generate a phenomenon where the laser's interaction with air will basically cause it to self focus - resulting in a filament of plasma that traces out a length several times longer than the normal distance of the laser to double in cross section area.

By using this effect to generate waveguides, the paper specifically singles out utility in two situations (laser induced breakdown spectroscopy and LIDAR), focusing heavily on the first. In laser induced breakdown spectroscopy, you shoot a laser at a remote target, basically blowing it up, and reading the spectrum it gives off as it blows up. It is sensing this spectrum that the paper demonstrates the technique on. By providing the return signal with a waveguide, it is in theory possible to get a much better signal, at further distances.

As for using this technique to help transmit other lasers? I dunno if it makes sense or not. I kind of expect (speculating out of my ass here), at the crazy interactions that let you create the self-focusing/propagation effect also makes it difficult to encode a signal into the laser, so it still might make sense to use this technique to guide a lower power, normally modulated laser signal... maybe.

<comment><USER6> LIDAR -- that's related to driverless vehicles. I wonder if this might have implications in that space?

<comment><USER5> Little or none. LIDAR for road driving applications is hardly limited by range or resolution at this point. The problems are cost (which this does nothing to help with - it requires MORE lasers), and dealing with rain/snow/dust, which this also does nothing about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone has any idea of how long such a structure will stay in thin air ? Because to me it seems like a proof of concept but it wouldn't be viable : you need to keep the "fiber" open long enough to transmit data.

Since it's thin air, the soundwave created at the beginning will just continue and the effect would dissipate.

<comment><USER8> The article mentioned microseconds... so not long, but possibly long enough, if you could keep the pulses going and not cancel each other out, but it sounds like this technique still has a long way to go. And carrying data may not be the ultimate end-point of this particular technique.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This could have applications in free space quantum encryption links. Signals sent in quantum communications must be at the level of single photons to ensure security. Traditionally, high repetition rates are used to overcome loss. i.e. If you have a 1 in a million chance of getting a single photon through, then trying a million times a second lets you get one photon through per second, on average. Increasing the transmission of a long free-space link could increase the maximum distance at which the link will be usable. This may be especially useful for satellite-to-ground links in less than perfect atmospheric conditions. Very cool research!

<comment><USER10> It would have limited application in satellite-to-ground links, as the photons would soon be outside the atmosphere. It is a neat idea though.

<comment><USER9> Loss happens in atmosphere, not vacuum. If it increases the overall transmission the link, what does it matter if the waveguide doesn't go the full distance?

<comment><USER10> I agree that it will help, to the extent that it counters diffraction of the beam whilst is in the atmosphere, hence it having "limited" application rather than no application.

Diffraction still happens in a vacuum. The beam spreads, so photons are lost by not falling on the detector.

The waveguide effect would counteract scattering to some degree. Even then, wouldn't scattering emit photons in random directions, meaning that the majority of scattered photons would be moving at too great an angle to the high/low density boundary to be refracted back into the beam?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would be interested in looking at applications with applied electric/optical fields.

Could you shape the plasma after it was created, shaping the waveguide?

</comment><comment><USER12> Say they manage to sustain these channels over distance, and figure out the pulse timing to be usable for a relatively sustained link...

What happens on a snowy day? (or other weather types with lots of interference... hazy/dusty days, etc).

What effect would a stiff wind have on this?

What effect would it have on a person walking through the plasma creation beam?

</comment><comment><USER13> The connection will fail if your destination moves out of sight?

</comment><comment><USER14> I have wondered if such a thing would be possible in the interstellar medium for a sufficiently powerful laser.</comment>


Google chrome segfaults after upgrade on debian stable - <AUTHOR> http://text.krona.tm/post/12609384753/google-chrome-segfaults-after-upgrade-on-debian-stable

<comment><USER2> This feels like something that belongs in a bug report rather than HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> True! I'll add it there as well, I thought it was a bit of interest, to avoid upgrading and loosing the functionality of chrome when working. Sorry if a bit OT.</comment></comment>


How to Network Without Business Cards - <AUTHOR> http://epiclaunch.com/leave-your-business-cards-at-home-how-to-network-without-them/

<comment><USER2> On the other hand, not having business cards can come across as amateur and lose you points. I'd keep the cards handy but give them out to those who ask for them or those who give you theirs. If they ask for your card, ask for theirs too.

<comment><USER3> That's a good rule. I had cards made but rarely use them. When I did, it felt awkward, as if I was a salesman. I'll apply your rule and only give them out when asked.

<comment><USER4> _When I did, it felt awkward, as if I was a salesman._

Do you find it annoying when nice, non-pushy people give you _their_ business card?

I appreciate that things like this can feel awkward internally (it still does to me), but I realized that if I don't mind other people doing certain things, maybe they don't mind _me_ doing it too. Just another way of looking at the situation ;-) (Yeah, I picked this up in a CBT session for social anxiety..)

<comment><USER3> Nope, not at all. Probably because they are usually business type people and it being the common thing to do in their circles, so they are good at it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _"... Put them into a "networking" twitter list and stay on top of what they're doing. Send them helpful resources and retweet resources they put out. ..."_

This would probably make the beginning a good startup idea. If you do/don't have a card but do have a twit id a simple app to notify people you have met & manage the contacts (as long as you remember/record/contact their twit handles) - sort of an online business card. Stacks of contact apps have been built like this way but linking both the online/offline would be innovative.

But nothing beats having something physical to put in someones hand without the need to sling out your phone/computer. I use moo cards of flickr images ~ ~ [http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157616147825654...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157616147825654/with/3661538477/) Unique, cheap & good looking they get the right information across. They are cheap enough for me to order a new batch every year with images I've taken making each one individual. By letting users select an image each is personalised.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Twitter idea is very interesting, it could be done with so many networks, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.

Nothing may beat something physical for now, but soon in the future business cards wont exist anymore. It will all be virtual, thats just where things are heading...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think cards are essential to look professional, but I'm not against saving trees :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Many will say that!</comment></comment>


I built an AI web app able to design simple graphics as well as a human being - <AUTHOR> Hello,
I worked on an AI as a side project for the last 12 months with the objective to mimic the behavior of Human when designing simple graphics with text and images. I am launching it on ProductHunt today. Would love to get feedback and UpVotes from you guys if you like the project. :)
Of course, the performance of the machine learning model is not yet 100% as effective as a "Human" would but the algorithm will improve itself over time. Try it by yourself, it is 100% free and open to use.
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ai-designer
Few Upvotes to boost the launch would be fantastic!!
Don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions regarding the approach and Data modeling.
Thomas <comment><USER2> Incredibly impressive, I love to see projects like this but have no idea how one would start building AI for things like this.

Everytime I hear about data modeling my brain glosses over. The math is too abstract and doesn't click for me how that works.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, yes, it requires a lot of mathematics. But the results are really exciting and encouraging. We took a lot of pleasure in creating it. Glad you like it!

<comment><USER2> So what is your approach in starting this project, how did you begin? What are high-level building blocks to building a project such as this?</comment></comment></comment>