16 Things - <AUTHOR> http://a16z.com/2015/01/22/16-things/ <comment><USER2> Their "Security" section is a bit naive. The questions it poses go all the way back to the 1990s. If the Jericho Forum had started a VC fund, this page would be their investment thesis. The 2000s saw a wave of companies try to capitalize on "deperimiterization", some with huge capex requirements (one NAC startup had designed and contract fabbed their own MIPS core). They all flopped.

Maybe it's true that firewalls are less effective in 2015 than they were in 1998. The problem is: customers don't buy on effectiveness, they buy on cost- benefit. Firewall effectiveness can drop by 90% and they will still have a better cost-benefit than the alternatives. There's a reason for that: firewalls are the most straightforward network implementation of Saltzer & Schroeder's principles, and those principles are probably Right. Everywhere. In code. On the network. In identity and access management.

Why is 2015 different? "The cloud"? If "the cloud" is what's changed, _that_ should be the thesis: we need security solutions for the cloud. Unfortunately, that is also a tired thesis.

Similarly: the shift from prevention to recovery seems like a manifestation of the narrative bias. Sure, there are lots of newsworthy cleanups, and one very successful consulting- to- product- to- consulting pivot company in that space. But customers don't derive the same value from recovery as from prevention. The dirty secret of "recovery" work --- forensics, attribution, &c --- is that it's driven largely by legal compliance concerns, and probably doesn't have a great intrinsic ROI.

Maybe there's an opportunity for a "full stack" vertically integrated insurer informed by a compliance and forensics practice.

There are markets that seem to work the way VCs want security to work. For instance, mobile happens, and all the sudden you can build and 10+x a company that just does for mobile apps what Google Analytics does for web pages. Security just doesn't get valued by customers that way.

Also: "if you fight fire with fire, you're just going to get burned"... what does that even mean? P(burn|fighting-with-fire) ≥ P(burn|fighting-without- fire).

<comment><USER3> What bothers me are things like this which appear to be marketing messages aimed at CYA types or to simply lather up grandpa and the media:

"The threat of people getting into our systems today is so great that every company in the world has to embrace the notion that not only are they going to get hacked, there's a good chance hackers are already inside … and they just don't know it."

...and this:

"This set of companies comprise a very interesting category because everybody's going to get hacked, so now it's just a question of how quickly we respond when we see odd stuff going on within the company."

Specifically "everybody" and "every company". [1]

The idea that "everybody" is going to get "hacked" reminds me of the early days of the internet when newspapers were confused by what a "hit" to a website was. Not only would they print whatever you told them but they didn't recognize that serving up a graphic file which created a log entry wasn't significant in the way they thought it was. So we can just change the definition of "company" to suit our purpose and goal.

The fact is not even close to "everybody" is going to get hacked at least in a way that actually matters. Correct me if I am wrong (you would know the answer to this better) but are there even enough bodies to take advantage of all the targets assuming they had the skills and motivation to break into the targets and do something with the information?

[1] Is this the Valley's idea of saying that they can define things in a way that suits their purpose in other words only what they think is a company is a company?

<comment><USER4> Well, customer data isn't stolen by actual hacking, in my experience it's humans.

So many companies, particularly younger ones, have zero interest in putting up barriers to access as the company grows because in the early days, everybody was trustworthy and "because bureaucracy bad". So all the customer emails, phones, addresses, birth dates (and, I'm guessing, in the US SSNs) routinely fly around in Excel files called something like "Order Metadata Report" and sent to 50 people in 5 departments each of whom has their own use for it (like counting customers). Judging by the Sony hack it's not just SMEs.

If you want to steal data from a company, just pay a student a few hundred bucks to take up an unpaid internship in marketing (particularly anything to do with emails or customer segmentation) and give him a USB key and teach him some VBA and basic SQL (making him useful for reporting). The interns always end up running the reports so have a lot of access, usually complete access - financial information is the only thing that's not shared around. More advanced companies have a shared database access built into the excel files with a single login for everybody which never changes (hello 300 angry users) so with a copy of this file, you have perpetual up to date information long after you're gone.

Then you try to stop them from doing this and the C-level folks will say something like "it's OK just this time" and "please stop slowing us down". Most of them will be gone to the next thing by the time the black swan lawsuit hits - if there even is one. How would customers know? Why would they care?

Cf [http://xkcd.com/538/](http://xkcd.com/538/) and [http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/10/28/security- checklist/](http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/10/28/security-checklist/)

<comment><USER5> So genuine question: How should one manage their marketing intern so data doesn't leak?

<comment><USER4> Well, the simple answer is don't have marketing interns. Really, you should not have people in the company manually doing work that could be automated in minutes - I've even seen people manually do joins (yes, two Excel sheets open, look up one product manually on the right, copy the value over on the left, next product, next, next...). It's bewildering that tech companies who should know better and who have people who know better still insist that there be people who day in, day out, 6 hours a day, process files by hand.

Next best thing is to sanitize your data; hash any personal information like emails or phones, take a day or two to build a rudimentary BI database that has sanitized information on it before giving people access, use work emails to manage access to everything and log it (my team built [https://github.com/zalora/sproxy](https://github.com/zalora/sproxy) for this purpose), silo access, teach people SQL, and so on.

But honestly, to most management teams security is dead last on the list of priorities; it's just another tail risk that probably won't happen, if it happens it doesn't matter that much, doesn't cost that much, and there are a thousand other things on their mind like growing the company which are more important ('compliance is for when we'll be profitable' or 'we're not a bank, it's ok'). You can't do very much when working in such a company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think putting Big Data & ML in one Bucket is a Big Mistake, pun intended. From where I am (DS at a sv startup), I see a few discrete Big Buckets -

1\. Offline Big Data - This is mostly the ETL crowd - Scalding, Cascading, Spark & associated novel startups, who provide technology to run Map Reduce jobs on TBs & PBs of data. This isn't going away anytime soon. Investment Banks & enterprise, financial institutions are the big customers with risk analysis( Var, CVar) & large scale monte-carlo scenarios on diverse financial instruments being commonplace.

2\. Online Big Data - Storm, Summingbird & friends - continually ingesting high volume realtime data streams to provide realtime insights, which can be substantiated by #1 later, as and when those jobs run. For eg. say you ingest tweets realtime via a Storm pipeline & give me a running time series of how many tweets were from which city. Meanwhile, you squirrel away these tweets in hdfs so the offline MR job runs later & gives you exact counts.

3\. Small-data ML - The result of #1 is typically a dataset of modest size ( few MB - few GB ) that can be ingested into your favorite ML solution ( too numerous to mention) for predictive analysis & BI purposes.

4\. Soft "AI" \- Using #2 + #3 in intelligent ad serving, traffic routing, realtime pricing to match inventory ( eg. there are several hotels in Las Vegas who reprice rooms based on number of passengers from commercial flights arriving into Vegas, local weather (sunny,rainy etc.), industry convention dates & such - all the ML + AI done out of a tiny office in SF), electricity regulation ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8280315](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8280315)) etc.

5\. AI without the quotes - tiny startups using rnn's to predict time series, using cnn's for image captioning & other really nifty AI applications not currently commercially exploitable at scale but definitely primed for acqui- hire.

<comment><USER7> I agree. I don't care so much about grouping different disciplines of big data together, so much as putting it into the same category as machine learning.

The two definitely complement each other, but they are not the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Considering how much is happening in the 3D printing space this year, I'm surprised that it isn't on this list. It is an enabler of IoT and Crowdfunding, drones, and even the "Sensorification of the Enterprise".

Cdixon even retweeted this recently: "Holograms are like print preview for 3D printing."

Also where is Drones on this list?

<comment><USER9> " _Also where is Drones on this list?_ "

I second that, that was the first missing item that popped into my head as I scanned over it.

<comment><USER10> Which is weird because A16Z invested in AirWare (and they, as all VCs, love to talk to their book!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's probably not the section that most of you will be focusing on, but the "Insurance" section seems to be written by someone who doesn't know the industry. Insurers are absolutely already starting to monitor driving habits[1] and offering discounts for home monitoring devices[2]. Large property/casualty insurance companies are sophisticated competitors that don't hesitate to invest in promising new technologies or techniques many years before they pay dividends. The industry is anything but "stodgy".

The idea of a crowdsourced insurance company is not a good one (to put it mildly). The expected returns of an insurer are _highly_ correlated with the returns of the broader market[3], because a typical large insurance company makes little to no money writing policies and generates most or all of its income from investments[4]. But maybe he's thinking about crowdsourcing the insurance risk itself, not the whole insurance company with its massive portfolio of stocks and bonds (although that's not what he said). In that case, you get an investment that yields X% a year until and unless the underlying insurance contract is triggered, in which case you lose your principal. These securities actually exist[5], but as you might imagine they are not typically purchased by individuals.

I do think the insurance industry can be disrupted. It's harder for a startup to gain traction because economies of scale work differently in insurance than they do in other industries, but a Google or an Amazon could do some real damage if they wanted to invest the resources to do so. There are a lot of interesting problems to solve. But this article totally misses the point.

[1] [http://www.progressive.com/auto/snapshot/](http://www.progressive.com/auto/snapshot/) [2] [https://www.statefarm.com/insurance/home-and- property/homeow...](https://www.statefarm.com/insurance/home-and- property/homeowners/discounts/home-monitoring-offer) [3] [http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/...](http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/totalbeta.html) [4] [https://static1.st8fm.com/en_US/content_pages/1/pdf/us/2013-...](https://static1.st8fm.com/en_US/content_pages/1/pdf/us/2013-annual- report.pdf) [5] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophe_bond](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophe_bond)

<comment><USER12> I couldn't possibly agree more in general, though of course I'd quibble with many of the specifics...

As to stodginess, I'd say there's a big difference between personal/small commercial lines and the big ticket enterprise-type stuff -- the underwriting process goes from something data-driven to something relationship-driven very quickly indeed. The bigger the commercial line, the more likely it's all about who throws the best yacht parties (reinsurance in particular suffers from this massively).

Crowdsourced insurance is indeed a terrible idea, though you could imagine 'web of trust' insurance that almost made sense -- say my ten thousand best friends and I know that we're all great actuarial risks, perhaps because we have some kind of information on which it's illegal to select (that we're all in the same gym, say). We could then try to write ourselves health insurance for cheap, because our plan would select only us gym members. You can sort of make it work, as long as you're prepared to make the regulators hate you.

Which is the real problem, of course -- most people buy insurance because they have to, not because they want to. Auto insurance that wouldn't pass muster with the police, or home insurance that wouldn't satisfy the bank holding your mortgage, doesn't solve the problem.

Do good problems exist? Sure. A web-based Managing General Agency, for instance, could do very well for itself, but the expressed ideas in this section are pretty terrible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In the 'Online Video' section he calls out podcasts as an emerging/trending medium. I'd love to hear more about where people in HN community feel it's moving. Of course there's the obvious Serial momentum, and as a passionate consumer of podcasts I'd love to think through with you guys a little more where we think it'll go.

For example a YouTube-like podcast portal seems like a potential option (i.e. moving away from the need for dedicated apps/clients for a more _mainstream_ audience), but I'm sure this isn't a novel idea.

<comment><USER14> The subscription/download orientation of podcasting is so ridiculous. With music and video you just find what you want and consume. I don't want to subscribe and I don't want to download!

<comment> k-mcgrady Subscriptions make sense with Podcasts. It's kind of like a season pass for a TV show on iTunes. They tend to be something you follow and want each episode of rather than something you listen to once. I think this is mainly because finding something you like is difficult (good content, good hosts, good length, good production values) so you stick with it when you find it.

<comment><USER14> That's not how Hulu, Netflix and Amazon handle it. The subscribe thing is unnecessary.

<comment> k-mcgrady I'd like to see it on those services. Besides, you don't have to subscribe with podcasts. You can easily just search and download a specific episode.

<comment><USER14> You _can_ on some of them but they're still subscribe/download oriented. Which I think is one of the reasons podcasts have remained in the background (also the word "podcast" is tired).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _For instance, the cost of an endpoint CPU and memory is a 1000x cheaper than the cost of CPU and memory in the server._ [1]

What do they mean? How was that calculated? It sounds completely wrong.

[1] [http://a16z.com/2015/01/22/cloud-client- computing/](http://a16z.com/2015/01/22/cloud-client-computing/)

<comment><USER16> I think this "thing" is insane.

First of all, battery life. He specifically calls out phones, and "not just phones, they could be wearables and other...", as targets for this. Every bit of computing you do on my device is battery life I lose. You're welcome-in- theory to use some compute on my CPU, but stay the hell away from my battery life, which in practice means stay off my CPU. So there's that.

Second, latency is a big thing in user experience. Go ahead, follow this author's advice, and do your JSON-to-HTML rendering on the client. See how it affects your latency. See how it affects your user experience. See how the latency affects your SEO standings. Try it out.

So once you realize you don't want to use client battery life, and you don't want to use client computing anywhere it would make the user experience perceptibly more latent, what're you left with? Yeah, sure, you could use some background computing power in the style of SETI-at-home and so on... but if you want users' explicit consent, you're competing with those existing for- the-betterment-of-humanity projects, and if you don't get explicit consent, you'd better tread mighty carefully.

<comment><USER17> "Second, latency is a big thing in user experience. Go ahead, follow this author's advice, and do your JSON-to-HTML rendering on the client. See how it affects your latency. See how it affects your user experience. See how the latency affects your SEO standings. Try it out."

I think this _is_ actually worth trying out (albeit as an experiment). If you can send JSON to the client (and have already cached the templates) rather than full rendered (uncacheable) HTML, you can (hopefully) reduce the amount of data that's being transmitted. This saves you in

* latency - downloading a small JSON file will take less time than downloading a large HTML file (although with 4G and later high-bandwidth mobile data this becomes less relevant) - at what point does the additional download time offset the template-rendering CPU time?

* CPU usage (and hence battery life) - if we assume HTTPS for the download, the TLS decryption isn't free - at what point does it use less CPU to render your JSON client-side than to download a big file?

* radio usage (and hence battery life) - downloading more content means your radio must be on for longer, which is likely to use more power - at what point does the additional radio usage offset the CPU usage?

In each case, I don't know where the balance lies, but I don't think it's clear cut that server-side HTML rendering is always a better thing on mobile devices.

Having said that, I definitely agree with you on the battery life for general computation point - I'm not going to be bitcoin-mining on my cellphone! ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Enterprise software is definitely an area where there is plenty of opportunity. They're aching for good software; they pay exorbitant amounts for software that just isn't very good.

If someone can find a vertical where they can penetrate and provide real business value, they'll do well.

<comment><USER19> The bad state of enterprise software has been obvious for decades. The fact that it has persisted in being bad despite everyone knowing it should tell you that there are reasons why it remains bad.

Those reasons have also been widely known for many years. They boil down that enterprise software companies optimize for their ability to sell to decision makers who never actually use the software. See [https://www.mail- email@example.com/msg001...](https://www.mail- email@example.com/msg00109.html) for a detailed description. See [http://futureofwork.glider.com/why-enterprise-software- sucks...](http://futureofwork.glider.com/why-enterprise-software-sucks/) for verification that this is not simply an isolated disgruntled developer's opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder if they are including Augmented Reality with their Virtual reality "Thing."

Y Combinator breaks the two out as two parts of the same RFS [1]

[1] [https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#vrar](https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#vrar)

</comment><comment><USER21> > Crash or no crash, we should expect a significant increase in the level of > institutional adoption this year. Specifically, a large number of companies > will put together groups focused on what Bitcoin means to them — and as > early as next year we'll start to hear people ask "What's your Bitcoin > strategy?" in much the same way people asked "What's your social media > strategy?"…

This could be great news for social media _con_ sultants who have seen their wells run dry. Now these _con_ sultants can set their sights on convincing companies to add We Accept Bitcoin buttons to their websites.

But I believe a16z is thinking too small. Companies need to look beyond Bitcoin. Personally, I'm tired of the Benjamin Franklin branding on the $100 bill. Bring on the modern brands. I for one am looking forward to the day when I can convert all of my hard-earned money into LouisVuittonCoin and PepsiCoin.

</comment><comment><USER22> Isn't a bingo sheet supposed to be 5 x 5?

<comment><USER23> American or Commonwealth? Most Americans play with 5x5, but in principle you could do 3x3, 7x7, or 9x9. Commonwealth is typically 3x9, often sold in lots of six.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Notably missing: drones. This is a seriously expanding new industry.

<comment><USER25> The majority of their portfolio companies are based in the US, where regulation will likely stifle the growth of commercial drones, at least during 2015.

<comment><USER24> Another field the US will lag behind the rest of the world, then..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't know why these 16 things are more important than the other 16000 things start-ups could be working on.

Bitcoin is the interesting one, as I would love to know in 10 years time if we look back at that with a wry smile as a fad, or if it ends up being something everyone uses.

<comment><USER27> > We don't invest in themes; we invest in special founders with breakthrough > ideas. Which means we don't make investments based on a pre-existing thesis > about a category. That said, here are a few of the things we've been > observing or thinking about.

The list is nothing more than some of the things they find interesting.

<comment><USER26> > The list is nothing more than some of the things they find interesting.

If that is true, I don't see the point of the article or that it warrants much discussion.

I don't think that is the intent of the article though.

I took it as they expect these 16 themes to yield a lot of the new ideas they will invest in. If that is the case then these 16 are quite arbitrary and I don't see why these were chosen.

<comment><USER28> That would be PG point on his RFS [https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs](https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs)

The majority of VC companies have investiment thesis. In those thesis they put the kind of market and companies they would like to invest and why. It helps to guide the new associates and partner on where and what to look.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> List of investment trends, or Black Mirror bingo card?

</comment><comment><USER30> I found a typo on the homepage: "You never need to share the car strangers and we can pick you up and drop you off at your front door."

I assume you meant to say: "You never need to share the car WITH strangers..."

I love the idea, though.

Coming from a smaller town it's pretty hard to fathom a helicopter for hire service ever taking off the ground where I live. So it really made me think!

If you can really cut a 2 hour commute to 6 minutes for the cost of $99 USD and make money doing it, I imagine you will do quite well. There are many people in NYC who value their time much higher than $49.50 an hour.

<comment><USER31> I think you posted on the wrong thread by mistake.

<comment><USER30> That I did indeed! Thanks for pointing it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I have feeling that "16 big things that VC will fund" is different that "16 big things companies/people/users will pay for".

<comment><USER33> VCs dont care about users. They care about exit, and that usually involves bigger sucker buying you out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> When you have gotten lucky with a couple of investments, you make a lot of money, when you have a lot of money, a lot of people listen to what you say, they argue with each other about what you say, this keeps them occupied and stay out of troubles like original thinking and such, so you need to come up with things to say, otherwise what will people do?

</comment><comment><USER35> Talking about "Online Video", I'd like to explicitly mention [https://www.vessel.com](https://www.vessel.com), which Jeff Jordan implicitly mention here: [http://a16z.com/2015/01/22/online- video/](http://a16z.com/2015/01/22/online-video/)

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm not sure what they want to accomplish with this edict(?).

Maybe it's an attempt to influence entrepreneurs to create ideas in those 16 areas.

I mean, only those 16 areas? We are in the middle of some unprecedented cultural shifts, and those are the 16 areas to focus on?

<comment><USER37> For we, the readers, I think we should look at it more as kind of a brainstorm, something to get us thinking. I think looking for more in it than that is not what is most useful for us. Just my two cents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I just want to know who the fuck has $6000 worth of food in their freezer?

(See Internet of Things category)

<comment><USER39> Food suppliers, possibly restaurants.

<comment><USER38> Yep, good call. I didn't think outside of "consumer" headspace...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> No mention of media, which seems odd considering their investments in Buzzfeed and Genius.

<comment><USER41> Buzzfeed is mentioned in Full-Stack Startup.

<comment><USER40> Barely mentioned

<comment><USER41> Can a single VC fund more than one full-stack startup in the same market?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Loved the 'Failure'

<comment><USER43> Could anybody please explain that to me? It's super hand-wavy.

<comment><USER26> I think he is saying focus on success rather than failing quickly (i.e. pivoting).

Which at a more abstract level means focus on the goal not the process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I don't see selfie sticks anywhere in that list.

</comment><comment><USER45> "Cloud-client computing"

</comment><comment><USER46> > [http://a16z.com/2015/01/22/digital- > health/](http://a16z.com/2015/01/22/digital-health/)

LOL, I love these stories, especially when featuring games like these:

> [...] Tomorrow? To understand your personal diagnostic data, you might soon > depend more upon an iPhone app developed in a garage than on your local MD.

<rant> This garage theme is annoying. The fact that Jobs and Woz had a garage ruined garages... Seriously. They literally changed use in the post-jobs era. If your father owned a garage and you didn't come up with (at least) Dropbox, you're a loser!!!! </rant>

On a more serious note now.. The author seems to prefer applications written in a garage to measure things like blood glucose levels instead of machine- based lancets. If he were diabetic, I wonder, would he use an iPhone application to measure his blood glucose levels, or the MD?

<comment><USER47> Well if I were diabetic, I certainly wouldn't go to my doctor every time I needed to check my glucose. That would get really expensive. I would instead rely upon a home glucose checker, which could easily be integrated with an iPhone using Bluetooth or as an attachment ala Square. Even moreso, if it integrated with HealthKit, I could have my glucose levels over time and have them shared with my doctor using the integration with Epic's MyChart app.

So, not as silly as you might think.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: When will apple integrate iOS simulator into macosx? - <AUTHOR>

Should I port my iOS app to macosx or should I wait for apple to make the iOS simulator that already exists for developers available to users? <comment><USER2> I think it is more likely that Apple would start including mini-touch-pads with new Macs (like a standard peripheral).

Simply dumping touch apps on the screen is a bad idea. Even with my own work, I get tired of trying to click or scroll things that aren't meant for a mouse or a far-away, vertical screen.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It has been suggested that it will be several years, as a widget / simulator window would be too kludgy / inelegant and not something apple would do.</comment>


Packr – Packages Java apps for distribution on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/libgdx/packr <comment><USER2> Java distribution is one of the biggest pains I've experienced in my development career. In all its forms, whether than be an applet, a J2SE application or J2EE enterprise deployment it always seems to be 10x harder than it should be. Somehow the Java ecosystem manages to make it much harder than it could be. If Sun had brought out a tool in the late 90's as simple as Packr seems to be it could have made a huge difference in the popularity of Java.

<comment><USER3> I doubt they would have been satisfied with the mechanism Packr uses. Packr distributes a static copy of a JVM with every build, which results in some less-than-desirable side effects:

\- The more apps you've obtained this way, the more copies of JVMs you have on your hard drive.

\- These per-app JVMs aren't getting patched when the mainline JRE does.

In a lot of ways, this undermines the purpose of the way Java is structured. If you're going to be statically compiling your product, why not use a more suitable platform?

<comment><USER4> You can easily distribute the JRE, but also autodetect if there is an existing JRE installation, and use that instead.

Packaging a jvm is the right move for consumer apps. It's lower friction for people downloading and using it, and harddrive space these days are dirt cheap.

<comment><USER3> In that case, why not just have your installer check if Java is installed, and install a shared JRE if it's not? This is the case with most .NET applications I've had to install on Windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I originally thought this was about Packer[1], just in case anyone else gets confused.

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

<comment><USER6> Also /packer/:[http://dean.edwards.name/packer/](http://dean.edwards.name/packer/)

<comment><USER7> Don't forget about packer: [https://github.com/keenerd/packer](https://github.com/keenerd/packer)

<comment><USER8> For the ruby/node guys, pkgr do the same thing: [http://pkgr.io/](http://pkgr.io/)

<comment><USER9> Wow I didn't know about this project, really amazing. I see they have packaged Discourse which was a fairly complicated app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Al-Khwarizmi A good idea, but I would find even more useful a program that wrapped the jar into an executable that:

\- If the user has a (sufficiently new) JVM installed in their system, or if there is a JVM in the program's directory (see below), then it executes the jar with that JVM,

\- Otherwise, shows a simple "OK/Cancel" dialog prompting the user to download the JVM. Downloads it (to the program's directory without install, as in packr) and runs the jar.

This would accomodate non-tech-savvy users without a JVM fine (and without making them install Java in their system), while saving space for those that already have Java.

I have been wanting this for years... I'd do it myself, if only I found the time...

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if there are some legal ramifications to this. As far as I understand Packr redistributes Sun/Oracle JRE - does license allow them to do that?

AFAIK JRE is under GPL, so it should be OK, but I am guessing Oracle still retained some copyright? (I am genuinly curious - it's been a long time since I touched non-Android Java)

<comment><USER4> I m under the impression that sun (and oracle) lets you freely redistribute the JRE runtime.</comment></comment>


Royalty statements of a Grammy-nominated artist - <AUTHOR> http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2014/04/03/streamingstatements <comment><USER2> In the vein of "Full Disclosure", can we see how much this artist has made from royalties off CDs and digital sales as well, so we've something to compare against?

Also, for under 15,000 plays across a dozen or so separate platforms for an entire year, this doesn't seem too terrible. People aren't listening to the music very much, so why should a lot of money be paid to this artist? Just because they're Grammy Nominated?

<comment><USER3> I suppose an interesting comparison is the Gangnam Style video on Youtube, which has 2 billion views. If he had 2bn plays rather than 15,000 he'd have made $560,000, which doesn't really sound like that much to me considering Gangnam Style's the most viewed video on Youtube of all time. (I realise the revenue you'd get from the Youtube video is different).

<comment><USER4> That sounds like a ton of money given that it doesn't even begin to represent the amount an artist could make when you combine that with live performances and rights for it's use in movie or TV.

<comment><USER2> Or just CD/MP3 sales. Streaming is only one piece of the digital pie, and a fairly small piece, I'm betting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> But companies like Pandora and Spotify aren't profitable even at these numbers. If this artist made 10x as much, he'd still be upset at only making $40 for 14,227 music plays and these streaming companies wouldn't be able to function. This is also a barrier to entry for new startups that want to offer music streaming.

There doesn't seem to be a number that artists would be happy getting and that music streaming companies could actually offer them.

<comment><USER6> That point gets brought up to imply artists are in the wrong, when it actually supports that Pandora/Spotify are in the wrong.

Pandora/Spotify are debt-financed. They literally cannot afford to offer their services at the royalty rates they are paying _now_ , and are pressuring musicians to take _less_.

You can definitely create a service that is popular with consumers if you are debt-financed (see Napster 1.0). That doesn't mean that the service should exist, or that the songwriters should make financial sacrifices to make the service viable.

<comment><USER7> If artists think that (immensely popular) streaming services are worthwhile, then they're going to have to accept lower royalties. These legal streaming services are responsible for as much as an _80 percent reduction_ in music piracy. If artists kill off these services, then they better be prepared to accept the rampant piracy of the 2000s.

[http://www.digital-digest.com/news-63709-Music-Piracy- Down-b...](http://www.digital-digest.com/news-63709-Music-Piracy-Down- by-80-Thanks-to-Spotify-New-Report.html)

<comment> k-mcgrady I'd be interested to see whether it works out better for the artists if they were to remove their music from streaming services but offer it free to download on their website one change for an email address. If they have to make money through merch and concerts then a direct line of communication to their fans might be better than the pittance they receive from streaming.

<comment><USER8> I'm just surprised Spotify hasn't done more to let artists create brands. I'm imagining something like Facebook pages, and you have a custom newsfeed on your home page that artists could post to including stuff like "new t-shirts are available" and advertising concert tours. It could be based on who you listen to the most/recently instead of explicitly following people.

Apple's Ping tried to do that stuff, but it was a massive failure due to other reasons (everyone hates the iTunes app).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _14,227 performances of music (almost every track 100% owned by me) generated $4.20._

 _Someone's making money, and in true fashion with the music industry, it's not the artists._

Who's making tons of money from streaming 14 thousand songs over the internet? I can't imagine this brought in a serious amount of revenue for anyone.

<comment><USER10> The prices put down during the pirate bay trial, it was claimed that artists lost between 20-30$ per watched performance.

So 14 thousands performance is almost a half million dollar lost of revenue, stolen by those streaming services. Worse, they claim its all moral and legal.

<comment><USER11> 14000 * $0.30 = $4200 not half million dollars.

<comment><USER12> He said $30, not $0.30. Which makes it $420,000. Which is almost half a million dollars.

Of course, if the $30 figure is off, and it was really only $0.30 a performance you're right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Seems to be a disconnect where Chakmakian sees one Spotify/Pandora play as equal to a radio station playing a song when they are entirely different things. 14,227 listeners is less than some college radio stations playing a song once. But you won't see an article complaining about how little musicians get from college radio stations.

<comment><USER14> 14k listeners strikes me as an awful lot for college radio.

<comment><USER15> Depends on the size of the Uni, and more importantly the surrounding city. Big Uni in a big city, that's easily doable. KEXP in Seattle would be one example.

I guess it also depends on one's definition of 'college radio'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> At first I was thinking "$4 for 14k plays sounds pretty good!", but then I did a little math.

If I listen to a streaming service for 10 hours a week (seems like a plausible average?), that's about 800 songs per month. So I'm probably paying in the range of a penny per song listened to. If I played 14k songs, that's $140. So only 3% is going to the artist[1], which does actually seem fairly low.

To put it another way, he's making the same amount of my subscription as the credit card company is.

1 - We have no idea how much he's previously been paid via advances, etc.

<comment><USER17> My initial thought is the amount going to artists with volume like The Rolling Stones, and Bieber (or whatever the kids are clamoring for these days) must command a much higher rate per listen presumably shifting the total percent going to artists to be much higher than that.

<comment><USER18> Regular radio does this. There is a bonus if your music reaches a certain level. At 25,000 performances, it is 1.5x the base rate and goes up to 4x.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady He may be Grammy nominated but that doesn't mean anything. 14,000 plays isn't very much at all. I've seen unsigned indie artists with more plays. The amount of $4.20 also strikes me as a little strange. I've had music on streaming services and the payout is generally around $0.002 per stream. $28 isn't much better than $4 but it's significantly more.

His problem seems to be that people aren't listening to his music anymore, not that he's getting screwed on payments.

</comment><comment><USER19> No offence to the guy but 15K listens isn't a whole lot. I would imagine many other content authors would struggle to make any money with that kind of popularity.

Also did he think that the problem isn't streaming services though but the demographics those services have ? They are clearly skewing younger. I would be curious to see his royalties from CD and iTunes sales.

</comment><comment><USER20> No offense to Armen, but being a "grammy nominated artist" isn't saying much judging from this list: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/56th_Annual_Grammy_Awards#Winne...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/56th_Annual_Grammy_Awards#Winners_and_nominees)

I can't even count how many nominees there are on that page. And that's just for 2014.

I have friends who play in various bands every other week in front of live audiences and guess how much they make?

It's in the range of ~$20 each per night. And that's for about 6-7 hours of "work". Or about ~$3 per hour. "The horror! They are certainly getting swindled!" I can hear you shouting now.

They have to load/unload all of their equipment into a van which takes about an hour. They have to spend $20 or $30 driving their gas guzzler to/fro the bar that's booked them for the night. Spending another hour in travel time as you don't want to take any sharp corners or hit any pot holes with $5,000 worth of musical instruments in the back. They spend about an hour setting up their equipement themselves, testing accoustics and such. And then they play for a solid 3-4 hours. For $20 compensation. Oh, and I forgot that they also get together and practice for about 8 hours every week on top of that.

But that's O.K. because they all have full time jobs and they just really love to write and play music for people.

That's why you should be making or playing music imho, for other people's ears and your own enjoyment. Not to write a few diddy's in the hopes of making a killer profit.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think there is a disconnect between what an artist might expect to receive and what a listener would actually pay.

Even before streaming radio became the standard way of listening to music, people didn't pay every time they played a song. They paid for the rights to listen to it as much as they wanted, but they only paid that once.

Now that we have streaming, consumption is different, and artists actually get paid per listen. They can't expect to get the same amount per listen that they got per song on a CD years ago.

You really shouldn't get into music for the money, because there isn't money anymore. The fact that there was money ever was a blip on the radar due to new technology allowing an industry to explode. Technology continued on though, and made the scarcity of music artificial.

</comment><comment><USER22> Cool. I'm an award winning author, want to see my Adsense statement?

<comment><USER23> I recall a blogger I follow writing a book (10? 15? years ago) and asking people who were buying it to use his Amazon referral link. His affiliate payment on each sale was higher than his royalties.

<comment><USER24> I'm not sure if it's completely standard, but my royalties have always been 10% of wholesale (which usually works out to about 5% of retail). Amazon will pay out 5%-10% referral fees depending on the item and how good an affiliate you are. Also, you can often earn royalties for other items bought in the same session, so Amazon could well be a lot more lucrative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've always hated paying for music (CDs/LPs) before figuring out how much I'm gonna like it. I currently subscribe to spotify but dislike how apparently so little revenue goes back to the artists I love.

I've often thought on a revolutionary model to turn the music industry on it's head, from the current gatekeeper/distributer model (which tries to fight against the 'promiscuity' of digital content) to a 'charitable' model, whereby a non-profit, trusted organization accepts a periodic donation from me and distributes royalties based on my actual listening history over a period of time (which could be adjustable at donation time if I prefer to give my money to an all-time favorite artist, or conversely to a new artist I want to hear more from).

The trusted organization would be where I'd go to download my open-source, torrenting music player & music discovery apps.

For this to work, you'd have to reinvent how to attribute a piece of music to an artist properly, in my ideal world middle men would be cut out, and the money would go directly to the composer/performer. The hard part, but the key to making me want to donate.

<comment><USER26> Something like a Mozilla-run opensource p2p Rdio with periodic NPR-style fundraisers? Sounds good to me.

The problem as always would be with the major labels, they won't go for anything that weakens their control, but you could certainly start with an indie label alliance of some sort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "Idle reminder: recorded music is not a very big industry."

[https://twitter.com/BenedictEvans/status/464949346497085440](https://twitter.com/BenedictEvans/status/464949346497085440)

</comment><comment><USER28> My new startup is focused on lettings fans more easily get money straight to artists: [http://saycheers.co](http://saycheers.co) \- feedback encouraged

So many times I've been jamming to a track and really had such good will towards the artist and would love just to "tip" them some money, but alas had no way to do it. Now we're building that way.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm just curious, how much did the artist make off terrestrial radio plays? Is it more than $0.00?

<comment><USER29> [http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/07/17/spotify-r...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/07/17/spotify- royalties-appear-to-be-awfully-high-despite-what-thom-yorke-says/)

<comment><USER23> My reply was a bit of a joke, because while in Europe it's normal to earn royalties off radio play (especially from businesses that play the radio), it's not an accepted practice in the US. Artists in the US don't make any money off radio play.

<comment><USER29> Performing artists don't, but the songwriters do. Often they're the same person (not always, of course).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This whole transition period would be a lot less painless if artists and consumers would accept the reality of digital copying and its implications. Record companies already did way back when, and positioned themselves to profit off of non-ubiquity. Now that the ubiquity has arrived, they're just trying to keep their cash corpse alive.

It _would_ be great if creators could be directly compensated as envisioned by copyright, but that is just not how our physics works out. Trying to pretend that's so just enriches (old or new) middlemen, who make money pennies at a time across thousands of artists, treating creativity as a commodity and devaluing it in the process.

The future is here but it certainly isn't Spotify et al, with token compensation based on token control. It's torrents with alternative methods of compensation - concerts, merchandise, kickstarter, donations, commercial licenses. Ignoring this is surefire exercise in frustration.

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't know about everybody else here, but I would love to get a $35 quarterly check for software I wrote 10+ years ago just because 14k people used it.

Musicians somehow expect to write a song and get rich from it, sorry but only the best of the best have the talent to accomplish that. The rest, however, can make a decent living out of it.

</comment><comment><USER32> Comparing Hearts Of Space to Spotify is a little silly. HOS charges a couple bucks a month to listen to streamed shows totaling a few dozen songs. They charge more for less music (They're really charging for curation).

And each "play" on the show goes to thousands of people, not just 1, as each Spotify "play" does.

Silly comparison.

<comment><USER33> Did Armen's royalty statement sheet list streaming, radio, or both? Curious if he gets the same whether I stream it on demand or whether I listen to a local affiliate broadcast on the radio (?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> 15,000 plays over 90 days is an average of 166 plays/day. Despite his "Grammy nominated" status, he's not making much effort to market his music.

</comment><comment><USER35> What would the artist lose if he removed his work from the streaming catalogs? I wager he'd lose more than $4.20.

How much is worldwide exposure of your work worth? How about the analytics of who is listening to your music and where?

I'm a former pirate of music but today I'm doing my part paying $20/mo to Rdio for my family's music-streaming. Would you like to go back to those bad ol days where you got nothing at all, no money and no analytics?

<comment><USER36> You can always monitor the swarm for some kind of analytics.

I understand Netflix does this to some degree to determine the popularity of some shows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Nobody gives a shit about this guy's music. Why the hell should the world pay him a retirement stipend for perpetuity.

</comment><comment><USER38> How many would have bought an mp3 but didn't because they could hear it on the station? How many went out and actually bought the mp3/cd because they discovered it on the streaming station? How many went to a concert of the artist after discovering them on this. We don't know these.

It's possible that the artist has actually made more than the statement amount if people went out and bought his material after discovering it on streaming. Or maybe not. But back when CDs were the only real option, I remember buying many, many CDs for only one or two songs and being extremely disappointed with the rest of the album. As a consumer, I believe I grossly overpaid for music when CDs were the norm. Just because an artist could make X amount before internet radio doesn't mean they should be making X amount now.

<comment><USER6> Those are good questions but they don't necessarily support the conclusion that streaming is a net financial benefit to the songwriter. I did the back- of-napkin math once, and came up with this:

If a single fan would listen to your mp3 around 1000 times or more, you hope the fan will stream your mp3 rather than buy it, as you'd make more money that way. Otherwise you hope they will buy it.

As for the "discovery" benefit of services like Spotify, you have to factor in that Spotify also robs paid downloads. Why would someone download if they can stream from Spotify? So, in order for it to make sense, you have to ask if the benefit in music discovery makes up for the cost of losing album/download sales. That's a much higher bar than to just hand-wave and say "Well I buy some stuff I discover on Spotify!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This comes up every few months and this line usually gets people fired up and angry at streaming services:

> Notice one performance of "Ceremonies" or "Distant Lands" streaming radio > show like Hearts of Space that brings in 26 cents for the full writer's > share compared to 2,088 performances of "Gypsy Rain" on Spotify that brought > in a total of 60 cents.

Spotify "performances" are (probably) going to one or two people each. Radio or live performances go out to hundreds up to many thousands of people.

Now pull your music off Spotify and get a YouTube account so you can turn those impressions into a $2 - $10 CPM

</comment><comment><USER40> If this is such a horrible deal for him, is he for some reason prevented from pulling his music from these services and selling it on his own (or via other services) at a price that he deems more acceptable?

<comment><USER7> Artists are totally free to pull their music from these services. Popular artists like Adele and Coldplay have notably kept their music off streaming services, and still sold enormous amounts of recordings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I feel like there was supposed to be a point here but I missed it. A guy captures a tiny fraction of 1% of the plays of 10s of millions of internet music listeners and expects lots of money? Of Hearts of Space pays better than Spotify and Pandora? (does it? how many listeners do they have?)

I think people just see big numbers and expect big money to follow, but when you have millions of people that can just graze songs or songs are delivered to them passively, you need an extremely large number of listens to make money.

</comment><comment><USER42> If I had a website that got 14k visits in a month, would I expect to make a living from it? (genuine question. my personal website doesn't get 14k visits a year, let alone a month)

<comment><USER43> Depends on the traffic. You'd starve with 14K visitors for cat pictures, but could make a very healthy living of 14K visitors who want to buy home insurance or remortgage their house.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> There is a related post from David Lowery (2013), sorry if someone already mentionned this (link is from his own blog):

[http://thetrichordist.com/2013/06/24/my-song-got-played- on-p...](http://thetrichordist.com/2013/06/24/my-song-got-played-on- pandora-1-million-times-and-all-i-got-was-16-89-less-than-what-i-make-from-a- single-t-shirt-sale/)

His songs seem to have a little bit more exposure than in the discussed article.

</comment><comment><USER45> How do these digital services compare with radio? For example, if a radio station plays your song and 1,000,000 people hear it, do they pay you more than 1,000,0000 individual Pandora plays? Those numbers on your statement are for much smaller audiences than regular radio.

</comment><comment><USER46> Could also be titled "there's not a lot of money to be made in streaming music."

<comment><USER12> Or, the current payment system used in streaming music...

I saw a proposal once that I really liked, instead of having all money go into one large pot, and have that distributed among all artists based on the total number of plays, have each subscriber's money distributed out by the songs they listened to.

Basically, instead of having your money combined and split with everyone else for all artists, it goes only to the artists you've listened to, and with amounts based on your listening habits, and not the collective habits.

<comment><USER24> This is a strange proposal. Assuming everyone paid a fixed subscription fee and listened to the same amount of music each, the artist payouts would work out exactly the same.

In practice people vary in their usage of these services. Basically the artists you listen to would get paid more per play if you didn't use the service much. (i.e., if I only fired up Spotify once this month, listened to one track, then the artist gets my full $14 for one play)

<comment><USER12> I don't think that's true on the payouts front (I'll get to that in a second).

Yes, if you listen less, the artist you listen to get more. Which I don't think is a bad thing, because theoretically using the current system if everyone listens to less, all the artists get more per play.

This system, while not perfect, gives your money to the artists you listen to and support, as opposed to helping give lots of money to artists you probably couldn't give a damn about.

\----

As for the payouts, I don't think you did your math...

Example:

Person A listens to four songs by Artist 1.

Person B listens to five songs by Artist 2.

Person C listens to two songs by Artist 1, and four songs by Artist 2.

Assuming that $10 goes directly to the artists from each listener, in the huge pot system, artist 1 is played six times, and artist two is played nine times. Artist 1 gets $12, and artist 2 gets $18.

In the individual distribution, artist 1 gets ~$13.33, and artist 2 gets ~$16.77

<comment><USER24> I think that matches what I was trying to say. In the individual distribution, Person A prefers Artist 1 and his listens are worth more because he used the service less.

I'm not saying this is worse necessarily, I'm just not sure why it's better.

<comment><USER12> I don't know that their listens are worth more or less, but I think that it's arguably more representative of an individual consumer's choices (I hate that I just used that phrase...).

I might hate an artist you listen to, and don't think that any of the money I put down should go towards that artist. Similarly, you might hate an artist I listen to, and don't want any of your money going towards them.

In regards to worth, I think a better measurement would be percentage of a user's listens, as opposed to number of listens. While the percentage is based on the number of times they listened to an artist, looking at the percentage only somewhat weakens the argument based on someone listening less being worth more. That argument doesn't really hold with me because you can get the same payment numbers by just multiplying all artists by the same number, and while each individual play is worth less, the artists are still getting the same payout.

Basically I think an individual distribution is superior because .. wait for it .. it's more representative of each individual's listening habits over the collective's habits. Because of this, there's a large potential for smaller, less recognized bands to make more money, because they're paid for the percentage of times the people who listened to them listened to them, as opposed to the percentage of times EVERYONE listened to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> For a blog posts around the same topic in the book world:

[http://mark---lawrence.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/225.html](http://mark--- lawrence.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/225.html)

</comment><comment><USER48> I think this + other examples show that money is in live performances for artists. The end.

</comment><comment><USER49> So where does the money go? Subscribers pay real money.

</comment><comment><USER50> be the owner of the business, not the product

</comment><comment><USER51> should use Louis CK's approach: self-publish and eliminate the middleman

</comment><comment><USER52> I don't use streaming music at all. I don't get the concept. Back to listening "We do what we're told", on "So", bought on iTunes.

<comment><USER53> What about the concept do you not get? It's cheaper and has more selection than your music library.

<comment><USER52> If I like something, it is in my library. There is not that much good music out there, maybe 3 or 4 albums each year these days. I don't see how a subscription could be cheaper than just buying those albums.

<comment><USER54> I guess it depends on where you buy the album and in what format. Last time I bought a CD it was still over $10, so anything that can give you variety at under $30/yr should be cheaper.

The other nice thing about a streaming service is that you may get exposed to something you didn't know you liked.

I was about to quote the annual Pandora One price as being less than the cost of 3 CDs, but evidently I missed where the annual option was nixed due to several increases in SoundExchange royalty rates.

<comment><USER14> I buy a lot of CDs and they're about $13-$15, which is down from a few years ago when they were about $18.

I've never really had good luck with music recommendation services, I always seem to get the safe recommendations from the priors.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


China Built a Twitter Propaganda Machine Then Let It Loose on Coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/how-china-built-a-twitter-propaganda-machine-then-let-it-loose-on-coronavirus <comment><USER2> Can someone explain why Twitter's tech isn't better able to spot fakes which seem to follow obvious patterns? ProPublica was able to write a program to analyze the networks and patterns of behavior:

 _We found a pattern of coordinated activity among the fake accounts that appeared to be aimed at building momentum for particular storylines. Central accounts with more legitimate-looking histories such as Keegan's would make eye-catching posts; for example, a political message accompanied by a bold graphic or a meme, or a provocative video. An army of obvious fake accounts would then engage the posts with likes, reposts and positive comments, presumably to boost their visibility in Twitter's algorithms._

Why does it take an outside party to build the tech & point out the problem?

Twitter's response, FWIW:

 _"Using technology and human review in concert, we proactively monitor Twitter to identify attempts at platform manipulation and mitigate them. "_

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's something really stunning: Through publicity, diplomacy and propaganda, China was able to change its image of the perceived source of Corona Virus to the savior of Europe. China is stepping in with help to Italy where the EU is failing (Germany banned export of med devices, including masks, to Italy). China's winning big time in Europe... on social media, everything. Read the journals Foreign Policy and TheDiplomat.

Thanks for bringing this up.</comment>


Show HN: Authentication using image uploads [demo] - <AUTHOR> http://paveasy.herokuapp.com <comment><USER2> I like the idea, but i tried it twice and the images doesnt give me access. Second, set the focus on the field when asked to enter something.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sometimes there's like a 2 second delay for the redirect :/</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there any hacker who is also movie/TV actor? - <AUTHOR>

Is there any hacker who is also movie/TV actor? <comment><USER2> Masi Oka (Hiro from Heroes): <http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2006/10/71984>

</comment><comment><USER3> Barely.

A friend of mine has been having success with a TV show "startup". I appeared on one episode to "teach" him how to weld (the backstory is true, I'm among other things a self-taught goober-weld hack). Looking back we could have done more with the episode, and I plan to come back to film some followup episodes with him.

Anyway, you can see my 15 minutes of fame here: <http://www.motorz.tv/blog/1480/learn-how-to-weld/>

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.imdb.com/search/text?realm=name&field=bio&...](http://www.imdb.com/search/text?realm=name&field=bio&q=computer%20programmer)

Also, Ashton Kutcher was a biochemical engineering student before acting. Kinda close.</comment>


Google and the Myth of Free Time - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/08/free_time_innovation.html

<comment><USER2> _The problem with the 20 percent policy is that it's likely to generate a great deal of activity on the idea side of innovation and very little on the execution side -- the other side_

There are hundreds or thousands of these projects going on. The ones that become hits transition over into mainstream projects, like Gmail, Google News, Google Talk, Orkut, where they get more resources.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a simple question. Would you do this in your company? (assuming you have the power to do it)</comment>


Interview with Terence Tao - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rinL25rC8LnMTzZcGjg1axT-0r-oiCnoKKH1DLQlmVA/edit <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this. Salient point for me was the following bit I'd never considered before, but explains quite well the feeling I've had about testing for a long time.

 _There's a great observation called Goodhart's Law that basically says any metric becomes useless once you start using it for control purposes. So the SAT, for example, is a good general test of academic aptitude. But since it's used so much for admission to college, kids are trained and coached. They spend lots of time and effort, specifically to improve their SAT score at the expense of a well-rounded education, to the point where [the SAT] may not be such a good guide to general academic excellence, even though it used to be before students started optimizing_

<comment><USER3> Test preparation does not do much to increase SAT scores:

"For students that have taken the test before and would like to boost their scores, coaching seems to help, but by a rather small amount. After controlling for group differences, the average coaching boost on the math section of the SAT is 14 to 15 points. The boost is smaller on the verbal section of the test, just 6 to 8 points. The combined effect of coaching on the SAT for the NELS sample is about 20 points."

[http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionst...](http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionstestpreparation.pdf)

<comment><USER4> I went through the Princeton Review many years ago and it improved my score by about 200 points.

Maybe I'm an outlier, but I can tell you this: nobody would pay for or go through the course if the expected boost was 20 points.

On the other hand, if I hadn't taken the Princeton Review, I'd have done something else to prep. And who knows how much I'd have been able to improve on my own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _A: I used to have more. When you work and you have family, it's tough. When I was younger I used to watch a lot anime and play computer games and so forth, but I have no time for these things anymore._

He taught in Australia for a little while. I was in one of his classes and I watched some Roruoni Kenshin with him. He was probably the best math lecturer I've had. But I was a poor student.

<comment><USER6> I can't put my finger on exactly why, but this was the most interesting answer for me (not in the specifics of anime and computer games, but just in the ubiquity of the winnowing of interests over time due to career and family pressures; even Terence Tao didn't start out all-math, all-the-time!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _I mean you need a certain amount of base mathematics so that you can learn everything else quickly. But once you have the foundation, it's fairly quick._

Shame the interviewer did not proceed to ask him what he considers this foundation to be, I think the question almost suggests itself.

<comment><USER8> I wouldn't presume to answer for Terry Tao but such a foundation certainly included the usual topics covered in qualifying exams at top departments. For example, Princeton: [http://web.math.princeton.edu/generals/topic.html](http://web.math.princeton.edu/generals/topic.html). Now that I'm looking at it, these topics actually align fairly nicely which what Chicago requires first year graduate students to take: [http://www.math.uchicago.edu/graduate/grad_first_year.html](http://www.math.uchicago.edu/graduate/grad_first_year.html).

If you're looking for some interesting reading, Princeton actually posts write-ups of each student's qualifying exam ([http://web.math.princeton.edu/generals/index.html](http://web.math.princeton.edu/generals/index.html)), including Terry Tao's ([http://web.math.princeton.edu/generals/tao_terence](http://web.math.princeton.edu/generals/tao_terence)).

<comment><USER9> I wouldn't suggest focusing on qualifying exam topics unless you need to pass a math qualifying exam.

In modern mathematics, particularly applied mathematics, these are NOT the most useful topics. That's just how things have always been done, and no one wants to argue about changing them in faculty meetings. See also the language exam: [http://web.math.princeton.edu/~templier/language- exam.txt](http://web.math.princeton.edu/~templier/language-exam.txt)

In my former career I never once used topics covered in "abstract algebra" (note that I'm distinguishing linear algebra from abstract), a common situation among analysts. Most people outside of analysis never use complex variables.

The only common core of topics I can identify that nearly every mathematician I know uses is:

Measure theoretic probability (this intersects with real analysis)

Linear Algebra

Algorithms and optimization (this is less common than the above two).

<comment><USER10> I learnt how to do proofs and what proofs really mean in my abstract algebra class. I still use abstract algebra to refresh my math skills.

<comment><USER9> I learned proofs in a numerical analysis class. That doesn't mean a budding algebraist should study numerical analysis, it means you will learn how to do proofs in any rigorous math class.

<comment><USER10> Sorry didn't mean to imply that one needs to learn abstract algebra to do proofs. Was just mentioning my experience as it was course where I really enjoyed doing proofs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _The funny thing about mathematics is that you don't work with regular numbers so much. I never see a 37, I see 'n' –a lot of what I do involves a big number n that goes to infinity. Never any specific number._

An interesting answer to probably the most common question that mathematicians are asked. Radiolab[0] covered this and the significance of "favorite/lucky numbers" in a podcast a couple of months back.

[0] - [http://www.radiolab.org/story/love- numbers/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/love-numbers/)

<comment><USER12> Asking a mathematician for their favorite constant is like asking a painter what their favorite color is. I like Tao's diplomatic answer.

<comment><USER13> I'd rather say something like "Fischer–Griess monster" (it is a constant in the set of finite simple groups). Surely a constant, but not a numerical one. The interviewer will probably change the topic immediately for not becoming embarrassed. ;-)

Surely a less diplomatic way than Tao's, admitted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Perhaps the best thing of the article is his willingness to do an AMA on Reddit. :-) Fingers crossed!

</comment><comment><USER15> For the thinking about SATs, there's a standard situation not commonly discussed:

Get a lot of multi-dimensional, empirical data and find some pattern, maybe an equation, that fits. Okay.

But does this equation have to work in practice? Not really: The empirical data may not have actually represented all the possible _dynamics_ of the real system. So, when apply the equation, might not have maintained some crucial conditions that held when found and fit the data.

Or, e.g., looking at academic performance data and SAT scores, etc., have a lot of multidimensional data and might find a fit. But the data collected might have been done with some unstated, unclear _conditions_ and not have included all cases that could occur. So, this fit might not hold when those conditions don't hold. So, applying the fit in reality where the conditions are free to change might make the fit poor.

Or, if someone pulls too hard on the electric power cord of their vacuum cleaner, then they will have a broken vacuum cleaner. Well, that would be true for women like the mother of a girlfriend I once had! But not for me! I just did a little work with a screwdriver and pocket knife and fixed the problem. Maybe I impressed the mother of the girl! I was 14, the girl 12, and the prettiest human female I ever saw in person or otherwise. Maybe it was good I impressed the mother!

So, a _condition_ of the good fit was that I was that the user of the vacuum cleaner didn't know how to repair some broken electric power wiring; that condition held for the mother but not when she had a drop dead gorgeous, sweet daughter with a boyfriend whose father had long since been teaching him about basic work with hand tools.

For the SAT scores, early on might argue that so far in practice they really did capture _real, pure academic ability_. Even if that was true, that need not mean that SAT scores really have anything very important to do with _real, pure academic ability_ and that some students, maybe most students, could, with some additional _conditions_ , do well on the SATs and not have the coveted _ability_.

Standard, old problem in multidimensional data analysis!

</comment><comment><USER16> I like his response regarding strong AI. The idea that it is a moving target might have been expressed before, but I thought he formulated it very well:

"The funny thing about AI is that it's a moving target. In the seventies, someone might ask "what are the goals of AI?" And you might say, "Oh, we want a computer who can beat a chess master, or who can understand actual language speech, or who can search a whole database very quickly." We do all that now, like face recognition. All these things that we thought were AI, we can do them. But once you do them, you don't think of them as AI."

<comment> saint-loup "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, Oh, that's just a computation" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> _So I think, almost by definition, we will never have AI because we'll never achieve the goals of AI or cease to be caught up with it._

Never is such a long time. Maybe he is biased as an educator, i.e. not to discourage thinking because a machine might do it for you at some point in the future?

<comment><USER18> I think you missed the point. He's saying we won't the goals of AI because: " _it's a moving target_ "

For example: " _In the seventies, someone might ask "what are the goals of AI?" And you might say, "Oh, we want a computer who can beat a chess master, or who can understand actual language speech, or who can search a whole database very quickly." We do all that now, like face recognition. All these things that we thought were AI, we can do them._ "

This is very true.

<comment><USER12> I'm beginning to suspect Turing consciously captured the moving target definition when he conceived of his famous test.

<comment><USER19> The Turing Test is a fixed target though.

As far as I know there are no limits on how intelligent something will get. Exploring the limits of AI is like trying to find the biggest possible number.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The iPad keyboard: Atari 400 all over again. - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2010/01/28/hey-ive-felt-that-keyboard-before/

<comment><USER2> The iPhone has one property that improves its keyboard that will presumably be inherited by the iPad: predictive algorithms make "more likely" keys have larger zones, even though the keyboard graphic isn't redrawn, so that if your finger hits an area between two keys, or even slightly onto an adjacent key, the "right" key will be interpreted instead. (The author also mentions autocorrection, which is not quite the same.)

But yeah, it still is just not going to be as good of tactile feedback as an actual keyboard, and virtually impossible to type on without looking at the keys---small hand placement errors will compound without constant feedback and will eventually cause "keyboard drift".

(And the most infamous example of a membrane keyboard that I'm aware of is the IBM PCjr... it's certainly the example that I use when I'm explaining to people why touch screens suck for typing.)

<comment><USER3> _But yeah, it still is just not going to be as good of tactile feedback as an actual keyboard_

This was one of the most common complaints about the iPhone when it first came out. Now? Its not complained about nearly as often. I think its safe to say that for most people, the lack of a physical keyboard on the iPhone isn't a negative.

<comment><USER4> I still don't like the iPhone keyboard. I don't perpetually complain about it, I just elect to never buy one.

<comment><USER5> If you don't own one, then why are you commenting about it? Until you've used the iPhone keyboard for a significant length of time, how can you claim that you don't like it?

I don't know anyone that would claim that the iPhone has a great keyboard or would want to do any lengthy typing on it. By and large though, people I know think that it's 'better than expected'.

Perhaps with the larger size of the iPad, it might work well for a keyboard. I'm still not typing for hours on it, but for emails or notes during a meeting, it might work just fine.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps I'm biased. Unfortunately, people who purchase an iPhone may also be biased by post-purchase rationalization. I actually have used touch-screen keyboards, especially the iPhone's, many times. I'm not saying it's the worst experience ever. It's far better than typing on a number pad with T9 or another predictive algorithm. With time it would certainly be doable, maybe even unnoticeable to the user. Still, it is far worse than even the worst tactile qwerty phone keyboard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Has Apple officially announced that they will sue anyone who develops a third- party external keyboard?

Perhaps, but I doubt it. Ergo, I suspect that there will be lots and lots of third party keyboards for those of us who insist on trying to write novels on this thing. Or, you know, we will buy laptops.

It's worth noting that the Atari 400 had a terrible keyboard because... it wasn't really designed for writing. It was a gaming platform masquerading as a computer. Of course, many people tried to make it stretch, because at the time actual computers cost many thousands of dollars more...

<comment><USER7> For the iPad anyway, any bluetooth keyboard will work.

<comment><USER8> As long as Apple didn't disable that.

<comment><USER7> It's been reported by multiple sources to be a feature of the device, not a "this should work" but "this is made to work".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the size puts it closer to the Sinclair ZX-80/81 family.

</comment><comment><USER10> I owned various Palm models for years along with folding keyboards. I could take notes in meetings and seminars with that setup without having to look. My typing speed on the folding keyboard was enough to max out the Palm III models. The iPhone keyboard doesn't come close to matching this experience and I'm highly skeptical that even a bigger onscreen keyboard will meet the same need for eyes-off typing.

</comment><comment><USER11> One HUGE difference. The Atari 400 was the first computer I bought - for about that same price as an iPad if I remember correctly. I also bought a surplus real keyboard and wired it to the membrane keyboard's connector. That kind of hacking is not possible Now without license agreements, propriatary connectors, etc

<comment><USER12> or just buy any bluetooth wireless keyboard for the iPad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I had an Atari 400 and typed quite a bit on it. I assure you the iPad is nothing like an Atari 400. The Atari 400 required a bit of pressure that made it truly unpleasant.

<comment><USER5> I hated typing on the 400... the pressure was always hard to judge, and I always made mistakes when typing commands. Then again, I was a young kid, so I'm sure my dad appreciated the membrane keyboard when I was using it.

Now, when I hand my toddler my iPhone to watch one of his videos, it always comes back all grimy. I think I'm starting to appreciate the 400's keyboard more and more...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cute comparison, but do you really need key travel when there is great visual and audio feedback? It's not like you have to hammer the iPhone like you did the ZX-80...</comment>


The plan to let anyone become European – digitally - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/this-is-so-freaking-huge-man-its-insane-the-plan-to-let-anyone-become-european-digitally-7000029486/

<comment><AUTHOR> Opening lede: "In the near future, those from outside the country will have an opportunity to apply for an Estonian e-resident ID card — which means that they can use Estonian online services, open bank accounts, and start companies without ever having to physically visit Estonia"</comment>


ULocate shows how to earn actual money on location-based mobile apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/12/16/ulocates-where-is-that-rare-beast-a-location-based-mobile-platform-earning-real-money/

<comment><USER2> Single page view: [http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/12/16/ulocates-where- is-t...](http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/12/16/ulocates-where-is-that-rare- beast-a-location-based-mobile-platform-earning-real-money/?single_page=true)</comment>


Ask HN: Does every pet project you launch belong to your employer? - <AUTHOR>

I know I have legal agreements to re-read and the local legislation around IP to study, but seeing how I'm the opposite of a lawyer and until I find one: Do default IP regulations state that anything you produce at any time or place belongs to your employer? That's what I keep hearing from my friends
If the subject is too broad: Is there anything that can happen against an open source project released personally while working at a company?
PS. Located and employed in eastern Europe <comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure regulations varies by state. I also think it varies per employer. In states where the wording is vague, some companies will slip in specific language/wording into their NDA and employee policies to cover their bases. Whether those policies will hold up in court is another matter, but it could be an added headache.

</comment><comment><USER3> Consult a lawyer. This is complicated, and depends upon location, your project, and your employer's lines of business. In the absence of that, though, a conservative approximation is that yes, everything you launch belongs to your employer.

</comment><comment><USER4> What "default IP regulations" are you talking about? Are there any in eastern Europe?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have no idea, that's why I'm asking

PS. IP is intellectual property if that's what you're asking [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The legal test of what IP would belong to your employer is that if the IP you developed was at the direction and expense of your employer. By expense, would also mean if you used knowledge gained specifically by working for your employer.

That is usually interpreted to mean... That you are building competing or complementing products to your employers.

For example if you build a great CRM system... And you work for a company that builds a word processor... They probably dont have a claim.... But if you build a specialized font system... They would probably have a claim based on the fact that you used knowledge gained by working with them.</comment>


From Mercury to Artemis: The evolution of the spacesuit in photos - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/mercury-starliner-evolution-spacesuit-ncsl718296 <comment><USER2> So they show Boeing's Starliner suit but not SpaceX's Dragon spacesuit? Seems a little odd.

</comment><comment> j-pb Am I the only one incredibly turned off by that "photos refresh but don't scroll" behaviour? It looks like such a neat idea in theory, but feels so "wrong".

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm ready for mech suits. When is that happening?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm ready to go back to the office in a spacesuit ;-)

And not only for the "dress for the job you want" day.</comment></comment>


Bing live code editor with run option - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hackerrank.com/hackerrank-partners-with-bing-to-help-you-find-solutions-faster/ <comment><USER2> Using the example searches in the article (eg "quick sort java", "string concat c#"), I don't get a code editor.</comment>


Bfloat16 – Hardware Numerics Definition [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/managed/40/8b/bf16-hardware-numerics-definition-white-paper.pdf <comment><USER2> As I understand it, the shortened mantissa matters less because these numbers never appear alone. The total number of bits, of all the numbers in the set, provide enough precision to make fine distinctions between states of the network.

Even for regular calculations, it is unfortunate that the conventional split reserved only five bits of exponent. A single extra bit there would make it much more useful, and the loss to the mantissa would be an easy tradeoff.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll just leave this here. :-X

Bfloat16 is much better for conversions from f32.

[https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/master/tensorf...](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/master/tensorflow/core/framework/bfloat16.h)

<comment><USER4> It's definitely conceptually simpler, but both conversions are a single fully- pipelined operation on any CPU made in the past 5 years, and can be folded into the arithmetic operation on custom HW. In practice the cost of conversion isn't really an issue; the win with bfloat16 is the added dynamic range.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a computational scientist. Do ML problems not deal with problems that are sensitive input precision? Is it too naive to say if they don't, does one really need ML for said problem over just plain old fitting and stats?

<comment> Tuna-Fish These are not used for data but for the computation of the internal coefficients. Said coefficients would be stored as F32:s, and the job of modifying them involves computing a lot of multiplications, none of which need to be that precise.

<comment><USER5> Wouldn't conversion between the steps lead to round off?

<comment> Tuna-Fish Conversion from Bfloat16 to f32 is just extending the mantissa with zeroes.

Basically, what they are computing is:

f32 acc = C_a0 * C_b0 + Ca1 * Cb1 + Ca2 * Cb2 ... with very many coefficients, all of which are Bfloat16. The precision of the coefficients is not that important, but they can be of substantially different magnitude, so the coefficients can use few bits in the mantissa but the accumulator needs to be wider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 7 bit mantissa doesn't sound like a lot, 2^-7 is 0.0078125... shouldn't there be at least 9 bits for the mantissa?

<comment><USER7> Note that 7 bits stored means 8 bit mantissa.

And bfloat16 is new but not that new: Tensorflow had it 3 years back[0].

Apparently range is more useful than precision for machine learning, which would be why they went 8/8 instead of IEEE's 11/5 FP16.

[0] [https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/f41959ccb2d9d4...](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/f41959ccb2d9d4c722fe8fc3351401d53bcf4900/tensorflow/core/framework/bfloat16.h)

<comment><USER8> My understanding is that the optimization steps of neural networks (typically gradient descent + backpropagation) act a bit like Lloyd's algorithm. Neuron weights will push each other into place. Often, what matters is how they compare to each other, such that the error is minimized; reaching the theoretically-perfect weight is less important.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sorry for not in topic, did Intel calculate bonuses on hn karma (more officially impact)? I see this bf16 multiple times and it like authors dying for Christmas bonus.

<comment><USER10> To me it looks like a clever optimization. Same range as FP32, but half the size and less precise and can be converted back and forth by truncating and concatenating zeros.

Is anyone else using it?

<comment><USER11> Google uses it on their TPUs [0]. If you're interested in how it would effect the numerical stability of an algorithm you want to use, there is a Julia package that makes prototyping linear algebra over this datatype pretty straightforward [1].

[0] [https://cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/system- architecture](https://cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/system-architecture)

[1] [https://github.com/JuliaComputing/BFloat16s.jl](https://github.com/JuliaComputing/BFloat16s.jl)

<comment><USER12> And Facebook is taking this even further. And while all these things are very cool, do not let ASIC designers claim they are barriers to entry for GPUs and CPUs. Whatever variants of this precision potpourri catch on are but a generation away from incarnation in general processors IMO...

[https://code.fb.com/ai-research/floating-point-math/](https://code.fb.com/ai- research/floating-point-math/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


StackOverflow Data Illustrates Why I Prefer Hiring Experienced Developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.scottporad.com/2011/06/14/stackoverflow-data-illustrates-why-i-prefer-hiring-experienced-developers/

<comment><USER2> Interesting conclusion.

I think there's a balance. Young hackers have amazing energy and still-empty lives (no mortgage, kids, etc). They truly enjoy coding for long stretches, reading about coding in their off time, etc. They also tend to be fearless learners. When was the last time you saw a 45 year old pick up a new instrument? Younger folks are more willing to jump on new technologies. That's powerful.

As you say, older folks are more efficient. But perhaps the wisdom they've gained makes them more powerful in lead dev/management roles where they can apply that wisdom to a larger group of younger rockstars.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does one ask more questions if and only if they know less than those who ask more questions?

Maybe young folks are more inquisitive individuals.

<comment><USER4> Very important point. Knowing to ask is a valuable skill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Whatever happened to the idea of having wide range of skills and experiences in the workforce. The best way to actually get competent workers is to CULTIVATE them, not simply scrounge around endlessly trying to grab all the elites in an area.

Masters teach journeymen, journeymen become masters.

r

</comment><comment><USER6> I think you should take the statistics with a good pinch of salt―and not only because of the issues brought up in the debate on the article about the Stack Overflow data[1].

> _The junior developers ask more questions. This means they know less (which > is why they ask)._

I dare say they "know less", but this doesn't necessarily mean they are less _expert_. Junior developers might be more experimental, more curious, and more willing to actually ask questions―and these are all very desirable traits in a developer.

"You can't teach an old dog new tricks."

[1] [http://coding-and-more.blogspot.com/2011/06/its-official- dev...](http://coding-and-more.blogspot.com/2011/06/its-official-developers- get-better-with.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Maybe older developers have more time to go on SO?

<comment><USER8> Better workplace alt-tab skills. They take years to develop grasshopper. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> tl;dr developers with more experience are more experienced

</comment><comment><USER10> wow, what an arrogant post! I hope young and old devels alike will think twice before going to work for a manager who treats skilled labor as a sweatshop commodity and totally ignores basic economics (yes, experienced devs _might_ provide more value, but they also _cost_ more - you have to treat everyone on an individual basis - it's risk/reward what matters, not just reward!).

P.S. also, I don't think you'll be hiring your devs to answer questions all day long on an internet message board? So Stackoverflow statistics are useless.</comment>


Tech CEOs tell US gov't how to cut $1 trillion from deficit  - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/100610-tech-ceos-tell-us-govt.html?page=1

<comment><USER2> Without getting too political, I can't help but be reminded of Atlas Shrugged. There are so many things wrong with the way our government runs its financial affairs, not the least of which is maintaining a global military empire, massive entitlement programs, endless foreign aid, staggeringly unfunded liabilities... You can go on and on, and Ron Paul seems to be just about the only elected official who cares in the slightest or even grasps where we seem to be headed. Yet in spite of all this, as the tech community we're stilling willing to do our best to keep all those plates spinning as it nears impossibility. The government acts like a teenager with its first credit card, and we do what we can to tell it how it can save a few bucks with a rewards program... I can't help but wonder at what point we're all going to shrug and say, "Who is John Galt?"

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like a reasonable way to cut the ever expanding deficit. The real question is will the Obama administration welcome the ideas, especially from outsiders? A good idea is a good idea, regardless of where it came from.

<comment><USER4> _The real question is will the Obama administration welcome the ideas, especially from outsiders?_

I think it's more complex than that. I'm sure the administration will welcome the ideas, but the federal government is like an aircraft carrier while businesses are like speedboats...you can't turn the government around as quickly. It will probably take several acts of congress to get any of these implemented, and senators and representatives will likely fight every one because it will kill jobs in their districts.

<comment><USER3> Too true, hence the need for more businessmen/women in office. I would think a lot of cuts they're recommending could be accomplished through executive orders as a lot of them are involving federal programs and mandates. If not we could only hope both sides could come to an agreement and pass them through the houses.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are there any devs willing to practice in exchange for equity? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> i'm curious exactly what this entails as well...it sounds to me like "please build me something in exchange for some equity". if there are indeed developers interested in this, I am interested in working with these developers.

One thing I'd love to have built: <http://baberuth.posterous.com/idea-regular- donations-to-me>

</comment><comment><USER3> What do you have in mind here?

</comment><comment><USER4> curious..go on..</comment>


My experience with Uber Cabs in Delhi. - <AUTHOR> http://www.gauravgupta.in/blog/2013/12/experience-with-uber-cabs-in-delhi/

<comment><USER2> Meru cabs, man.</comment>