Sam Altman interviewed on CNN Money [video] - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2014/04/09/technology/innovation/sam-altman-y-combinator/index.html <comment><USER2> On acceptance of failure...

I am curious how truly different Silicon Valley is versus other areas. While we give lip service to the idea of failure being OK, the reality is in most places it is destructive to your long term prospects.

I am from the midwest and around here there is a very cliquey mindset. Hang in and around the startup communities and you will see the people who claim to be investors, the people who actually are investors, the people who claim to be founders/entreprenuers and the people actually doing something. Then there are the posers, always around trying to be part of the game and gossiping about every founder, judging every idea and trying to generally be seen as part of the in-crowd. It is like high school only with serious money involved. I point all this out to say that this clique mindset gives lip service to the idea of failure or pivots being OK but in reality - you just blew it. You didn't have what it takes. You are really no good. Your idea sucked. etc etc etc.

What is worse is that breaking into the funding market is rather difficult unless you have a success story under your belt. Started a company and exited (even if a meager acquihire) then you get an instant seat at the table. On the flip side, if you failed - that failure acts as a noose going forward.

Like I said, I am really curious if SV is truly different or people like to think it is different and market it as different when in reality it is the same high school clique show that I see around here.

I hope it is different, I truly do.

<comment><USER3> There are posers of course, and people with other issues, but in general I've found folks to be pretty honest. What a lot of people miss though is that it takes _time_.

There is definitely an inverse power log sort of thing where the number of people who have gone right from college into startup success is really small, and the number of people who have gone from school to startup success in 10 years is pretty large.

A typical trajectory seems to be move here working for some current 'big' tech company. Build a network of the cool people there and figure out where you eventually want to live, then show your stuff at BigCorp while people who have been there longer start peeling off. Most people know who are the 'good' people and who are the not so good people at their previous employment, if they have you in the 'good' category and they've gone off to do a startup you find interesting, you can often follow them there. Then get your feet wet in a startup early employee to exit (death, buyout, what haveyou). During that time you get known by the VCs in the company and your peers there, perhaps you recruit people. You prove you can be effective in a small environment. Then using your connections with investors or other people you've met you go in as a really early group of already more seasoned people, which ideally has a solid outcome, and at that point 10 - 12 years have your graduation from school you are ready to start your own thing. The graphs in this chart [1] match my experience. People doing a lot of the founding are in their 30's.

Up until you're the founder though, success or failure is rarely on you, its on the founders. And even then depending on how it failed well that can actually be a positive if it was shooting for the stars and only making it to the outskirts of the solar system.

<comment><USER2> Your story in the 30s feels about right. I am 34 and just now starting to really get serious about founding something. I think the experience of working for 15+ years yet still having the drive to achieve is a pretty good potion for success. Would love to find some stats that break down startup success/failure rates with delineation like age of the founder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thinking out loud here...I'm sure this will get downvoted. I've never met PG or Sam - this comes only from videos I've watched online - but it seems not only the way they speak, but their mannerisms as well, are eerily similar. I doubt this is because Sam is mimicking PG or vice versa. Some of it I'm sure is due to the fact that in many videos they're just giving the standard pitch about YC's mission which is bound to sound similar.

I don't quite know what to make of it. I can hear my Organizational Behavior professor from college yelling "Group think! Group think!" or some bs like that but I was never a huge fan of that stuff. It certainly doesn't stand out as much as people who have picked up Zuck's habits. Ever hear anyone begin the answer to any question (literally does not matter what the question is or how it is posed) with "Right, so...". You can be sure their youtube history is riddled with Zuck interviews.

I know it's not isolated to tech and every industry faces this phenomenon. It just makes me cringe and I wish it wasn't so prevalent.

<comment><USER5> From my experience people tend to parrot the mannerisms of people that they emulate and vice versa. Or maybe spend much time around. No time to find support for this but I'm sure there are numerous studies that say the same.

Paul has a great deal of repect for Sam and Sam for Paul.

Not to mention that people are probably going to be more likely to support people that _are like them_ in one way or another. I know when I get a phone call I tend to like people who talk fast, don't mess around with niceties (to me "how are you doing" is a complete waste of time) and get right to the point. Others of course don't. [1]

That said I don't know if your point is correct or not but it wouldn't surprise me if it was.

Starting a sentence with "so" is a crutch that I started to notice people using several years ago. That's clearly something that they pick up when surrounded in a community of others doing the same.

[1] A bit of selling is always like modem negotiation. Usually it's a good idea to parrot the behavior of the person you are trying to sell to. If they talk slow you talk slow. If they talk fast you talk fast. In general of course always exceptions.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If YC's goal is to find the next Dropbox it makes sense that they fund ~3% of applicants. If their goal is to get more people starting startups it makes no sense. So this seems like a case where we should look at what they do, not what they say.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, that confused me. Sam says he wants to help more people who wouldn't usually start startups, start startups, and he says that YC is the best way to do that. I very much doubt that people who aren't determined to start a startup would get into YC (he says so himself when he states that YC looks for determined founders).

<comment><USER7> There are two separate parts to this: One is admitting people you deem most likely to succeed. The second is reaching out, enthusing and supporting people from a wide range of backgrounds so that they apply and know how to be successful. This is a good approach, the alternative is positive discrimination.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "One of the surprises for me, personally - I would have said a while ago that I thought intelligence was the most important characteristic of founders, but I'm now sure that that's wrong, and that determination is the most important thing."

pg says that a lot: [http://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html](http://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html)

"I now have enough experience with startups to be able to say what the most important quality is in a startup founder, and it's not what you might think. The most important quality in a startup founder is determination. Not intelligence-- determination"

</comment><comment><USER9> The comments on the CNN Money page almost universally negative, and almost all based on misunderstandings or sheer ignorance. I wonder how much longer the tech industry can ignore the inevitable backlash from growing inequality in this country.

<comment><USER10> As long as the backlash is based on ignorance and misinformation, why is there a time limit on the ability for the industry to "ignore the haters"?

<comment><USER9> As inequality grows (which it is), people become more irrational in their hatred. Those who are able to harness machines to increase their own value will be resented by those who are being replaced by machines.

<comment><USER11> that's correct. It's not like the mobs that put the aristocracy in the guillotine in France were logical, rational, or even educated. Not intending to be dramatic, just an example of how bad it could get.

<comment><USER10> Eek, time to hire a bodyguard and driver and move to a gated community. South African style.

<comment><USER11> or you know, fix the problem.

<comment><USER10> Well, sure, but in the meantime ... don't want to face M. Guillotin!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well, the arguments in the thread so far aside, I thought the reminder that being determined was important.

When you're sitting around in a room at 3AM in the morning in front of the glow of a monitor slaving away on code with no paycheck in sight, random inspirational tidbits on the internet make a difference -- particularly from people on the side of success. Even with funding, sometimes those 3AM silent moments can be scary.

</comment><comment><USER13> > "How do we convince that brilliant engineer that has the idea he's really > passionate about, that can change the world, to start a startup and not go > work as an engineer at a big company?"

I like the thought behind it, but it seems a liiiitle bit ingenuous to say it like that because success usually constitutes being acquired later on by the supposed "big company" and VC's making a lot of money.

<comment><USER14> Right. I wonder if Silicon Valley types will ever be able to move away from the faux-altruistic mindset and just acknowledge that they are interested in making more money than a single person could ever comfortably spend in 10 lifetimes. And that's not a bad thing! And maybe the world becomes a slightly better place in the process, but there's just such a disconnect right now between what they say and what they end up doing.

<comment><USER15> There are two types of altruism:

1\. The desire to perform win-win, wealth-creating transactions.

2\. The desire to redistribute wealth from yourself to people who ascribe greater utility to that wealth.

I think what you're objecting to is Type 1 Altruists pretending to be Type 2 Altruists. Although I can't fault you for that, keep in mind that both types of altruism are utility-promoting, and that you can't have Type 2 without Type 1. :)

<comment><USER16> Type (1) 'altruism' has various flavours.

Two oligarchs colluding is one.

Selling out to olligarchs may be another.

Both of these seem to be increasing "perceptions"

Of Silicon Valley's ~morality.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, "win-win" does not imply "wealth-creating". Negative externalities can cancel out the wealth creation or even push it into the negative. However, a lot of people who talk about wanting to "change the world" do genuinely want to make the world wealthier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> These are all things that we know already. Does the fact that it was covered by CNN Money really make it front page worthy?

<comment><USER18> I'm very interested to see how the mainstream press covers something I understand well. Gives me a input → output pair to train my model of the press's lens on the world. It's also interesting to see how the public reacts to such a thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "How do we convince that brilliant engineer that has the idea he's really passionate about, that can change the world, to start a startup and not go work as an engineer at a big company?"

Silicon Valley's engineer fetish is inane. Most early-stage web startups simply need CRUD applications that work at limited scale. Commodity-level web developers can build these applications.

What is not a commodity, in order of importance:

1\. Domain expertise.

2\. Product development/management.

3\. User experience.

I'm sure lots of people would disagree, but you can test this. Go out and try to find the following:

1\. Somebody who has worked in an industry for more than 5 years, knows it inside and out, and has relationships that can be leveraged for sales and business development.

2\. An experienced product manager.

3\. A proven UI/UX person capable of designing quality experiences around moderately complex workflows.

4\. A PHP or Rails developer who can build a working application if given a reasonable spec and design assets.

#4 is not your problem. Most of the time, this person will be the easiest to locate and cheapest to acquire.</comment>


FlockDB: Twitter's distributed, fault-tolerant graph database - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/twitter/flockdb

<comment><USER2> By the looks on the code this isn't really a graph database. It's more a graph database emulation built on top of a SQL database. For distribution it uses sharding so it isn't really distributed either, at least not like Cassandra or other distributed databases.

I think Redis would perform a lot better than SQL for graph like structures - since sets are a native datatype in Redis. And you can go A LONG way with just one Redis database (currently we are storing over 20 million keys in our Redis database and I know some that are storing 100 million keys on _one_ server). And with the new Redis VM coming up, I would guess that scalability of Redis is going to be even better.

Other than this, neo4j seems very interesting and would probably also have been a better choice than using a relational database.

<comment><USER3> You can go a long way with a SQL database too. I'm writing up an article about getting the two billion words of Wikipedia into an inverted index in a SQLite database entirely in memory, and that's another other order of magnitude bigger.

<comment><USER2> If you only know how to use a hammer then everything else looks like a nail. In other words, re-implementing an inverted index in SQL is waste of time when you can use tools like Sphinx and Lucene - which are highly optimized to do inverted indexes and that can easily handle 2 billion words. The same can be said about FlockDB - it's possible to emulate a graph database, but is the effort really worth it when there are such tools like Redis and neo4j which seem to be optimized for graph like structures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hmmm... This looks to only store first order relations efficiently, its seems that to traverse many nodes, you would need to repeatedly query the database (e.g. I can only get my friends, not the friends of my friends etc...). This severely limits the use for most problem domains you would want to use a graph Db for. Still, possibly useful if you have to solve a problem that looks alot like twitter's.

<comment><USER5> Once you start getting out to second order it becomes a much more complicated (and interesting) problem -- one that I've been kicking around for a while.

Data-locality is the kicker in a distributed graph database; when doing traversals that cross multiple nodes you need to have a partitioning scheme that coordinates with your traversal algorithms so that you need the minimum number of machine-to-machine hops in a multi-level traversal. Getting that right is far more difficult than traditional database sharding.

<comment><USER4> Yeah sure.... it is much harder and involves minimizing the number of relations across shard boundaries. Not easy. However, to call a system that only allows depth 1 traversals a 'graph database' is slightly pushing the definition. To me, its more a "key value database with relations between keys".

Everyone has different requirements though, if depth 1 and huge scale are what you need, flock db might be for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've yet to set try out Gizzard. Wasn't expecting FlockDB to be released so soon.

Wondering if FlockDB is truly abstracted from MySQL/Cassandra. And also wondering how performance compares Neo4j

<comment><USER7> Note that it's __in the process of __being released: it's as yet unusable by outsiders. Honestly, I did not expect this to make Hacker News so soon. :(

I have not used Neo4J first hand. It has really cool features, but it is not a distributed database and has expensive memory usage. FlockDB is distributed, uses little memory, and has a very limited feature-set that is highly highly optimized for OLTP. It's not really an apples/apples comparison. Theoretically, Neo4J could be used as a back-end data-store in FlockDB.

<comment><USER8> I agree that it's not apples/apples. From the first few minutes, I think the main strength of Neo4j is the rich ecosystem and functionality on top of it, and the fact that it stores an infinite-levels deep graph. In comparison FlockDB stores one level (e.g. user -> followers). The main strength of FlockDB seems to be that it has built-in distribution, which is something we're working on for Neo4j but it's not yet generally available.

All this of course based on just a quick glance, so I may come back all the wiser and revise my opinion later. :)

-EE [<http://neo4j.org>]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I didn't look too deep into the "distributed" features (no docs yet, the code suggests sharding), but the feature set looks a lot like Redis sets.

<comment><AUTHOR> Many (all?) of the distributed features (including the sharding) are part of gizzard, which it sits on top of.

<http://github.com/twitter/gizzard>

<comment><USER9> Makes even less sense to me, then.

<comment><USER10> Redis is less than a year old. I doubt it was a serious contender when Twitter started building their own solution.

<comment><USER8> Well, the data model seems very similar to Redis' from first glances [1], but FlockDB certainly seems to have completely different durability characteristics. So even if they started anew today they may end up building their own.

1] Which would make FlockDB less a graph db and more a key-value store with social network semantics for the values.

-EE [<http://neo4j.org>]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I took a loock at the code but I'm not sure i understand one thing: why one class per file for case classes, scala is much cooler than that :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Scala again? Damn, my bet was on Clojure this time! =)

</comment><comment><USER12> The contributors section names four people. If only four people wrote something like this, that's ridiculously impressive.

<comment><USER5> It's only about 2000 lines of code. More like, "that it took four people to write this leaves an impression". ;-)

(In all seriousness, no dig on the authors, planning on poking through some of the source in the next bit.)

<comment> brown9-2 size of source code is not a good measurement of size of achievement

<comment><USER5> I'm just going to post a link to my response to that comment the last time it came up:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1155026>

"Lines of doesn't say anything" is one of those flawed mantras that people keep repeating as an overreaction to the too often used assumption that it's the _most_ important metric.

<comment> brown9-2 Not sure if I get your point here. My response to a flawed statement is flawed?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Fault tolerant" and "Twitter" in the same sentence?</comment>


Who Invented Email? Just Ask…Noam Chomsky - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/noam-chomsky-email <comment><USER2> I'm flagging this, although I have mixed feelings about doing it. I think it might be fine as a blog article, but from Wired it just looks too much like pandering.

Sounds too much like "<PROVOCATIVE NERD-BAIT QUESTION X> Commented on by <FAMOUS UNRELATED PERSON WHO IS ALSO PROVOCATIVE>" It's just too easy to kick out dozens of these things.

Since it's the weekend, here's a few samples to show you what I mean (all of this is made up, of course)

"Functional Programming Not Worth Learning Says Al Gore"

"Paul Krugman Discloses His Favorite Unix Editor"

"Bush Reveals His Opinion on Advanced SEO Techniques"

"Lunar Colony Better Than Mars Mission: Michael Moore"

"James Cameron on Why Higgs Boson is Important"

You could do this all day. Lots of fluff and food for chitchat, nothing much useful.

<comment><USER3> Except that Chomsky is not completely unrelated, as your examples are. Ayyadurai is a colleague of Chomsky. Ayyadurai was a student of Chomsky close to to the time in question. Ayyadurai's claim centers around the semantics of the term "email", an area of expertise for Chomsky.

<comment><USER2> I usually don't deep-dive into threads, but I think my comment about flagging and your reply deserves an explanation.

Take a look at the comments on this article. Most of them are about Chomsky as a provocative person and how it relates to the question of email origins, not the issue itself. Famous-Provocative-Person-X wades into any discussion and suddenly we're off into the weeds. That's true whether you can draw a link or not. The issue of a link is irrelevant, at least as far as I can tell so far from the comments. (I'd argue that any _real_ story, as opposed to the made up ones I invented, would have some kind of link like this. Otherwise the game would just be too obvious)

The point being I flag things that generate lots of off-topic, emotionally- laden comment-noise. I might have gotten a little flag-happy with this article. Don't know. Been wrong lots of times before. Quite honestly I grow tired of seeing any famous person or brand name on HN. It's almost always an indication of time-wasting nonsense ahead.

<comment><USER4> > Quite honestly I grow tired of seeing any famous person or brand name on HN. > It's almost always an indication of time-wasting nonsense ahead.

Quite honestly your standards seem wildly inconsistent: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4113928>

Not that the standards of the rest of us are always consistent, but it's interesting to reflect on why linguist Chomsky on a tech/semantic subject might trigger one emotional reaction while Reagan advising on love triggers another....all here on a tech blog, eh?

<comment><USER2> The comment I made was about the value of historical people writing serial letters instead of just reading little one-of-a-kind snippets. But you are right. If I remember that set of comments correctly, it quickly wandered off into useless land as well.

If you'd like, happy to go back and flag it.

I'd like to view my responses as being consistent, but I know too much about how we all are screwed up to buy into my own bullshit. In my defense I believe my goal with that comment was to encourage people to read more history in long-form from the participants themselves. At least I think that's what I was doing. I know I went back and rewrote it a couple of times to make sure I wasn't wading into hero-worship, gossip, or partisan stuff.

I'm not that big of a Reagan fan. I'd view him in the top 1/3rd or so of presidents in the last century, but that's mostly because of his skills as a communicator and his ability to practice retail politics. Seems like the politicians that spend years doing some kind of face-to-face work like Reagan (working for GE and as governor) or Clinton (as governor) end up being at least more interesting as historical figures than the rest of them. Chomsky I have very little opinion about. He seems to like using his understanding of the philosophy of language to make political points. That's interesting to me as far as it goes. Hell, I'd love to talk philosophy of language, but I'm not sure that has anything to do with anything as far as what we're talking about. If anything, Chomsky to me seems one of those people who is still buying into his own bullshit -- but what do I know? As a famous person once said, a man has to know his limitations.

Damned internet. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Chomsky arguing semantics. He's a linguist, he has his hobbies. Why do the rest of us care?

This link is quite relevant: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_que...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_questions_about/)

<comment><USER6> Chomsky is being a polemicist, which has always been his greatest skill.

He has been off on politics rather than linguistics for some time now. E.g. check out <http://www.chomsky.info/articles.htm> (this is a similar pattern to many old scientists)

<comment><USER7> Your "many old scientists" parenthetical comment neglects several strong biases. You've likely never heard of most of the old scientists who don't get into politics because you don't know about their work at all. Older people tend to be more interested in politics than younger. It's hard to be trained/have experience in one field and then switch to another, so few young scientists would also be known for their politics. (For example, Margaret Thatcher's research chemistry impact is much less well known than her political impact.)

And yet, Chomsky is one of those few, having become one of the leading opponents to the Vietnam War while in his late 30s - as your link itself implies - and so doesn't fall under the premise of your comment.

<comment><USER6> You don't seem to understand what I said.

Dawkins is another example of the old scientist pattern - many successful and famous scientists do the work they're academically known for early, then shift into topics outside of their original area. It's quite natural.

The link was from fans of Chomsky's and simply illustrates that he has shifted his attention away from linguistics for many decades now. This is not uncommon in science and it isn't some kind of slam on Chomsky.

<comment><USER7> But Chomsky didn't change when he was old. He became well-known for his politics when he was in his 30s. Dawkins was 35 when his "The Selfish Gene" was published, and 45 when "The Blind Watchmaker" was published. Both are involved in areas that interested them when they were under 40 years old.

My point is that neither Chomsky (and now neither Dawkins) fits your description ... unless you say that people 30-40 of age are already old?

My other point is that most successful scientists _don't_ shift into topics drastically outside their interests when they were young. Dirac? No. Erdős? No. Barbara McClintock? No. Von Braun? No. Karl Sharpless? No. Jocelyn Bell Burnell? No. Just take the list of Nobel prize winners for science and see how few of them got into politics later in life, or for that matter moved into topics markedly outside of their original area.

Yes, of course some do. But car dealership owners, and chefs (Samak Sundaravej, PM of Thailand, was a television chef for 7 years), and priests and singers also get into politics. So my last point was that there's nothing of note about a few scientists getting into politics as they get older, because people of all sorts of different fields go into politics as they get older.

Hence, my comment that there are strong biases which affect your parenthetical observation.

<comment><USER6> And Dawkins was probably an atheist when he was young too. So what?

I have never made a generalized claim about all scientists so you are beating a straw man. I have mentioned a certain pattern which you will see recurring if you have any significant awareness of the famous scientists in a particular field... that pattern is not "getting into politics" but rather "moving well beyond the scientific area where they made their name"

<comment><USER7> And I'm saying that that pattern doesn't exist, at least no more for scientists than for any other field. (If you broaden your field to other than politics, then think about all the other people who have switched careers. President Obama was a law professor earlier in life. Sting was a schoolteacher.)

I gave a list of famous scientists who did not move well beyond the scientific area where they made their name. I'll add more: Cyrus Levinthal, Dorothy Hodgkin, Hermann Weyl, Edsger Dijkstra, Maria Mitchell, Abraham Maslow, John Wheeler. The list goes on and on. Again, consult a list of Nobel Prize winners and see how it's no more common for "famous scientists in a particular field" to do what you say they do than for any other profession.

I posit that you have sampling error, in that you've mostly only heard of scientists who are known in their field and are also known for work outside their field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Now, this is exactly what's so crazy about patents.

Something like email doesn't get 'invented' by one person, it's the kind of thing that multiple people will arrive at through different paths at about the same time.

</comment><comment><USER9> Slashdot discussion:

[http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/06/12/167227/inventor- of-e...](http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/06/12/167227/inventor-of-email- gets-support-of-noam-chomsky)

</comment><comment><USER10> We complain that there's nothing new, and here someone's electronic messaging system is being claimed to have been new _because_ it was a reinvention. No one can argue with its success.

Perhaps there's a lesson here, that the best innovations are adapting systems that already work to new contexts. Invention from scratch is hard to get right (and hard to adopt).</comment>


Second Undergraduate/Masters Degree in CS - <AUTHOR> After acquiring my first undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering, I have been working as an Engineer for last 4 years (basic knowledge of C++ and Low Level Programming). As I have decided to deviate my career path towards CS. I have applied for a combined CS BA/MA track (3 years). I have tried a boot camp before and created iOS apps but it seemed insignificant in terms of realizing the science behind functionality of programs. Although you pick up some coding skills in these boot camps, but the relative understanding of theory and structures of CS remains quite vague. What I am unsure of is that if my prior experience of Mechanical Engineering is of any value to CS industry once I am in job search.<p>Please share your thoughts <comment><USER2> Once finished you will have the perfect combination of skills for the robotics industry and probably many others. Ironically, I've actually thought about pursuing a mechanical engineering degree after my CS Masters.</comment>


Programming with an Aggressive Posture - <AUTHOR> http://impressmyself.co/post/49785548742/programming-with-an-aggressive-posture <comment><USER2> >I noticed the results immediately. I became more focused, more energized, more productive, and found myself solving problems more easily.

It's easy to make a change and become excited that it'll make you more productive, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and makes you more productive.

I'm more interested on changes when they induce long-lasting improvements in behavior, health, or mood.

Also, the article linked to compares effects of posture on _circulating blood volume_. Do we know how circulating blood volume affects productivity? This article doesn't tell us. The researchers tested lying down vs. standing up with armrests, not sitting with an "aggressive stance" vs slouching.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think most people who talk about posture recommend an upright posture, not an "aggressive", leaned-forward posture. (Without being an expert, I've looked at The Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, standard physical therapy theories and some other theory).

While there's debate about the details, most ideas of "good posture" are based on the idea that when the spine is balanced and so upright, your muscles don't have to exert continuous effort to support you whereas in any "leaning" posture, either forward or backward, involves one's muscles do have be tensed into a rigid position as they part of your body's support system.

</comment><comment><USER4> Posture maintenance is one reason I fell in love with the Swopper, an "active sitting" stool that I describe to inquisitive friends as being equivalent to a "German-engineered exercise ball that looks like a stool and doesn't pop".

I bought it because the health benefits sounded intriguing, but mainly because I needed an affordable "ergonomic" seat that would fit within a small footprint. (At the time, my home office was very small)

I purchased one for just under $500 just shy of five years ago, and I never regret a single penny spent on it. I have used it for full-time work for all of those years, and I've never had a negative feeling of "I'm in pain because I've been sitting all day". The only drawback I experienced was that I napped more than usual during the first week or two, since "active" sitting does indeed use more energy than traditional "passive" sitting.

I should mention that prior to the Swopper I used cheap office chairs, so I can't compare it to using an exercise ball or high-end ergonomic seating. That said though, I think the Swopper is a great product for anyone looking for affordable ergonomic seating with small footprint.

</comment><comment><USER5> Also, yelling at your code might help to debug faster.

<comment><USER6> Yup I swear at code all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Would coding in isosceles or Weaver-stance count?

<comment><USER8> Now I want a retention holster for my mouse >.>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The linked document shows physiological differences (circulation, etc.) with an erect posture, but makes no claims about the sitter being more "productive" or any of the other claims this post makes. Perhaps the author can cite other sources rather than lazily suggesting "if you need more proof just google the 'effects of posture'."

<comment><AUTHOR> It's kind of incredible that you call the author lazy, because you are too lazy to search google yourself. Win!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> On the other hand, there is research that suggests that sitting up straight or leaning forward is not as good for your back as leaning back:

[http://www.motleyhealth.com/news/slouching-back-is-good- for-...](http://www.motleyhealth.com/news/slouching-back-is-good-for-your- back-do)

</comment><comment><USER11> Wait... He makes an active decision to work more aggressively and chooses sitting up straight as the method.

...Sure its not the fact he made the decision the first place and is sticking to it, rather than the sitting?</comment>


Organizing Functional Code for Parallel Execution, Guy Steele (2009) [video] - momo-reina http://vimeo.com/6624203

<comment><AUTHOR> Too bad Oracle axed the Fortress language. I wonder if Guy is still working on it.

<comment><USER2> It seems like the answer is no (GS is Guy Steele): "I spent nine years on Fortress, a scientific programming language (the project is finished now, we decided to stop working on it)."

[http://ezyang.tumblr.com/post/62157468762/haskell-haskell- an...](http://ezyang.tumblr.com/post/62157468762/haskell-haskell-and-ghc-too- big-to-fail-panel)

For more on purely functional parallelism, see Guy Blelloch's research ([https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~guyb/research.html](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~guyb/research.html)) and CMU's algorithms course ([https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15210-f11/www/r...](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15210-f11/www/resources.html)) and parallel algorithms course ([https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15499-s09/www](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15499-s09/www)), and Manticore, a parallel SML ([http://manticore.cs.uchicago.edu/](http://manticore.cs.uchicago.edu/)).</comment></comment>


List of Java virtual machines - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines <comment><USER2> I thought MS-DOS on an 8088 sounded pretty exotic, and then I saw Apple II on that list. Wow.

But I guess, at its heart, how different is the JVM than USCD p-System, which ran on practically everything back in the day?

</comment><comment><USER3> Arg, how many of these caused me hell on various J2me implementations (OK, only whatever Samsung and LG happened to license).

</comment><comment><USER4> I was half expecting to find a JavaScript implementation, Atwood's Law still has a ways to go.

<comment><USER5> Don't worry, there's several!

[http://int3.github.io/doppio/about.html](http://int3.github.io/doppio/about.html) [https://github.com/nurv/BicaVM](https://github.com/nurv/BicaVM) [https://github.com/YaroslavGaponov/node- jvm](https://github.com/YaroslavGaponov/node-jvm)

The doppio demo even lets you run javascript-in-java-in-javascript (rhino->doppio->browser)!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I always learn something with Wikipedia pages, even if it wasn't what I thought it was going to be. I ended up on the page for Android L (the upcoming release) just to find out that they're completely replacing dalvik with their own implementation. Sort of reminds me how linux was supposed to build upon unix but then eventually didn't contain any unix code any more.

<comment><USER7> As far as I know, Linux never contained any Unix code at all. Neither did GNU :)

<comment><USER8> That was kind of the point! A Unix for the folks who didn't want to (or couldn't afford) licensing fees for AT&T.</comment></comment></comment>


Are China and the United States Headed for War? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/19/are-china-and-the-united-states-headed-for-war?mbid=social_twitter <comment><USER2> War exists now in many more dimensions than in previous centuries including non-conventional weapons and cyber, in addition to public sentiment, economic, social, political and military.

Considering the CIA's loss of double-agents, I'd say China maybe winning the HUMINT arms race at the moment.

There's too much to lose with direct military engagement (nuclear MAD), so competition will be limited to proxy wars, "sharp-elbow" island capture and overflights, trade wars and cyber attacks. The question becomes at what point does hard proof of attacks in these other domains necessitate an escalation of limited hostilities in the conventional dimensions (ie military).

</comment><comment><USER3> See previous HN discussion on China and the 'Thucydides trap' (2015) [1]

And also - "There is no Thucydides trap' \- an essay/review of Graham Allison's book by Chinese history scholar Arthur Waldron - "In this book review, he argues persuasively against a concept that has become a pillar of establishment thinking on China." [2]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10309448](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10309448)

[2] [http://supchina.com/2017/06/12/no-thucydides- trap/](http://supchina.com/2017/06/12/no-thucydides-trap/)

</comment><comment><USER4> It's a concern, but hardly in the Top 5 of Problems Facing Humankind.

War is inevitable. It's tragic that still sounds like a reasonable statement thus far into the 21st Century.

<comment><USER5> Why is war inevitable?

<comment><USER4> Because the article all but see so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No.

<comment><USER7> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> No. China recognizes it has far too much to lose in a war with the United States, and America realizes it too. There will always be saber rattling, and tension, because each wants to dominate a sphere of influence. But war? No. Proxy wars? Absolutely but all out, country to country combat? No.

</comment><comment><USER9> No way. Who would produce the stuff for west then? Western world will be in big trouble if that happens.

</comment><comment><USER10> china is growing into its mantle as world hegemon to replace the crumbling US.

there might be war, or there might not be. china isn't about to start shit when they could be making money hand over fist with anyone and everyone. they're not about to be bullied, either.

</comment><comment><USER11> In all honesty with all of the things the US is entangled with in the Middle East and Europe, I cannot imagine yet _another_ conflict. It just feels like we would be stretched much too thin with our resources and at some point would collapse.

</comment><comment><USER12> Some people are much more enlightened in this day and age but history has taught us that war is inevitable. We are a violent species, and eventually chance prevails and enough mistakes are made to trigger something unstoppable.

<comment><USER13> I don't think the tragedy is violent human nature; more the fact that some problems just don't have peaceful solutions.

One group of people don't voluntarily give up dominance over land (and other finite resources) to other group of people. Wars don't happen because people get bored, wars happen because people want what someone else has.</comment></comment>


Apache releases Lucene Core 4.0 and Solr 4.0 - <AUTHOR> http://lucene.apache.org/ <comment><USER2> If you've never heard of Lucene and are wondering why you should care, the IBM quick start guide is a decent place to get to know what it is and what you can do with it: [http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/os-apache- luc...](http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/os-apache- lucenesearch/)

Basically, its a search engine; if you need to run one of those yourself, it's really neat.

<comment><USER3> Lucene + Solr is also a NoSQL database. Not the best choice for every circumstance but then again, nothing really is.

<comment><USER4> Indeed. But its capabilities don't really take it above what you'd get out of a normal relational DB. Or even a more traditional key/value store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe it's just me, but over the years Solr and Lucene have become an impenetrable project. When I first started playing with Lucene many years ago it was very simple, transparent code backed by solid and understandable algorithms and data structures. Now of course, it was limited.

But now Solr has absorbed Lucene and it seems to do everything and the kitchen sink. The abstractions in Solr in my experience are mindbogglingly complicated if you want to extend its capabilities, because it does _so_ many things.

I have yet to look at 4.0 but I hope they have removed as much as they have added. I think if the focus for the next release of Solr was to remove lots of unused, poorly factored, or complicated features it would be a huge benefit to the project.

<comment><USER6> Yes, a bit like Java itself, I see it as trending towards being an "Aircraft Supercarrier Battle Fleet" of functionality. (See also: the Hadoop ecosystem.)

But, it's free, powerful, and supported by a giant community... so once you get the hang of picking and choosing the parts you need, ignoring the rest until needed, you can get impressive results with minimal effort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Last time I checked, Solr and Nutch (the web crawler) had a really bad documentation. Only some wiki pages slapped together, mostly outdated.

Any improvements on this front?

<comment><USER8> Nope, you're spot-on. The Solr Wiki reads like it expects you to be the person who wrote the entire system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone know what the most exciting features are since the last major stable release?

<comment><USER10> Lucid Imagination has an annotated version of the "Release Highlights" for Lucene/Solr 4.0

[http://searchhub.org/dev/2012/10/12/apache-solr-and- lucene-4...](http://searchhub.org/dev/2012/10/12/apache-solr-and- lucene-4-0-0-released/)

Spellchecking built into the index instead of needing an ancillary one is a big feature, IMHO.

Andrzej Białecki, Robert Muir, and Grant Ingersoll will be presenting a paper on the Lucene 4 architecture: <http://opensearchlab.otago.ac.nz/paper_10.pdf>

<comment><USER11> Will be? Already have, a couple of months ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The spatial enhancements are pretty exciting. You can support a lot of interesting things when search can be polygon queries against polygon data. WKT is a pretty fatty format though.

<comment><USER13> Spatial is great! What's better than WKT though? WKB?

<comment><USER12> Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Either way you (potentially) have a lot of data to push around, but encoding things as text that could largely be fixed width binary floats really bloats them up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm really excited about all the new features in 4.0. The more I read, the more I can't wait to try it out on my dev server. The new features that are most interesting to me: spatial search improvements, atomic updates, custom scoring options, pivot faceting, speed improvements and Solr Cloud. All these have the potential to make searches on $work's website much more relevant and faster.

</comment><comment><USER15> API is cool and dandy, but I think project should go in other direction. Lucene focus should be REAL support for languages, lack of proper dictionaries, lame stemmers makes it hard to use.

For me Lucene was always an NoSQL database and the rest of real search stuff I had to implement myself. (not to mention Solr mess).

It's fun and cool to work on some Java code architecture, but the real need lies somewhere else.

</comment><comment><USER16> SolrCloud- automated peer-to-peer scaling. Very nicely done.</comment>


Should we build Git repo backups into rsync.net? - <AUTHOR> https://0x.co/3BSSAK <comment><AUTHOR> Some feedback from existing customers so far ...

Many indicated they would not be interested in this value-added service because they are already doing their own repo backups to rsync.net with the 'git' command run over SSH.

Others have brought up the issue of backing up gist, wiki and issues - <USER2> understand that the wiki and each individual gist is a mini-repo on its own, so that works ... but what about issues ? Can issues be treated as a git repo ?</comment>


Will A California Law Result in More Payments Innovation Flocking to Boston? - <AUTHOR> http://bostinnovation.com/2011/05/12/will-a-california-law-result-in-more-payments-innovation-flocking-to-boston/

<comment><AUTHOR> Would love to hear anyone's thoughts on this.</comment>


Blockchain startup R3 sues competitor Ripple - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-r3-ripple-lawsuit/blockchain-startup-r3-sues-competitor-ripple-idUSKCN1BJ27I <comment><USER2> R3 had an options contract to purchase 5 billion Ripples for $42,500,000 any time until 2019

Ripple doesn't like that the same purchase would give Ripple Inc. $1,000,000,000 at today's exchange rates

Ripple doesn't know how options contracts work. ha ha oh well.

I wonder if there is another side to the story. Otherwise, easy case!

<comment><USER3> But would it be possible to sell even $42,500,000 of Ripple right now?

<comment><USER4> Easily. That's less than the daily volume on just one exchange:

[https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ripple/#markets](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ripple/#markets)

Of course, you won't get a good deal if you just try and dump $42M worth of Ripple in one sale order. I'd spread it over a week over multiple exchanges.

But note that it will actually be a billion dollars worth of Ripple, which is _much much_ harder to sell.

<comment><USER3> Right, I was thinking more along the lines of needing to raise the $42 mil to exercise the option.

Anyway, I'm really curious about what the relationship between trading volumes and how much money you can actually get is - it doesn't seem obvious to me. Like, if I'm a trader trying to make short term gains trading a million dollars a day, and I decide on a new strategy that involves doing 10 times more trades, the volume just went up by $9,000,000/day but the underlying demand for currency is still the same.

I posted an ask HN about this at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15203974](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15203974)

<comment><USER4> It depends which currency/ICO you're talking about. Trading $10M/day in bitcoin world is not a big deal.

You can look at the market depth on various exchanges:

[http://bitcoinity.org/markets/bitstamp/USD](http://bitcoinity.org/markets/bitstamp/USD)

For instance, if you dump $10M worth of bitcoin on Bitstamp, the price will shift by only $270, and that's ignoring the hidden limit orders. And the market will react to it as well - cheaper coins create more demand.

<comment><USER3> I'm not totally sure what the chart means (and I did read the explanation), but if I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying that Bitstamp has $10M worth of buy orders for BTC at a price of at least $(current price - 270)?

<comment><USER5> Yes, that is what he means. You can see a combined order book for most of the large exchanges here:

[http://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/books/USD](http://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/books/USD)

For example, by looking at this chart one can calculate that if one sold 10,000 Bitcoins right now with simultaneous market orders across all exchanges, one would receive north of $40M and the price would drop to $4,000.

<comment><USER6> That's great in theory, but in practice that's not what happens, because new orders influence existing orders, and cause additional new orders to be created. Much smaller sales can in fact, and to do, cause much larger price movements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is actually a really interesting dynamic to this option contract. Ripple Labs owns a large amount of Ripples. They own enough to tank the market price and make this contract irrelevant. I'm sure they don't want to do that for other reasons, but the existence of this options contract means they didn't anticipate the price to go up this fast so now they are torn between a)forcing the price down b)accepting this option contract and paying it c)trying to back out of it

<comment><USER8> It's not clear that Ripple Labs is any worse off honoring the option now than they were; in either case it's a fixed fraction of their holdings.

Edit: Let me explain this again. Let's say the option was exercised last year; Ripple Labs would be out XRP that is now worth ~$1B. Now let's imagine that the option is exercised right now; Ripple Labs would be out ~$1B of XRP. It's the same thing.

<comment><USER9> You're focusing on the wrong thing so let me explain again as well...

It's not about the beancounters realising the option is way bad for the issuer, it's management getting cold feet about signing off on 5% and mispricing future trades.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What event made XRP increase by a factor of 50 since March 2017, after years of going nowhere?

<comment><USER11> I'm a fan of "there is no rational explanation." The other answers seem plausible, but my theory is that if a coin has any kind of value proposition and doesn't completely fail, eventually some speculators will notice that it's a solid investment. The calculus goes like this: When it's a bull market, if you buy $X million of a coin that hasn't had much volume, everyone else will simultaneously see that this coin is suddenly popular. That will trigger them to buy, since it's going up.

Why doesn't it go back down? Well, once you've invested, there isn't much reason to sell. Your investment went up by some N multiplier, and as long as most people feel the same way, your multiplier is safe.

This explanation sounds too simplistic to be true, but whenever you look at the chart, the data seems to suggest it's plausible:

[http://i.imgur.com/OU6me1N.png](http://i.imgur.com/OU6me1N.png)

Notice the volume was completely flatlined up until a huge purchase in March 2017. That massive purchase kickstarted that 50x factor.

These dynamics are independent of any particular coin. So yes, it's true that CoinDuJour might offer some benefits and unique features. But that value proposition is secondary to the overall investment dynamics at play here. It almost doesn't matter what the coin does. As long as it does something different and it's stable, it becomes an attractive target for speculation.

There are a massive number of people with spare ETH and BTC to throw around. They all want to park it somewhere that earns them money. See Pinkapp for a strange phenomenon:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15153586](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15153586)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15151292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15151292)

After they posted that comment, I've been lurking their slack channel. A bunch of people have come in trying to invest in them. So if even pinkapp can generate a >$1M "series A" when it's straight-up illegal, it's clear there's a lot of investment energy floating around.

<comment><USER12> > When it's a bull market, if you buy $X million of a coin that hasn't had > much volume, everyone else will simultaneously see that this coin is > suddenly popular. That will trigger them to buy, since it's going up. Why > doesn't it go back down? Well, once you've invested, there isn't much reason > to sell. Your investment went up by some N multiplier, and as long as most > people feel the same way, your multiplier is safe.

That's basically definition of a bubble. 'as long as most people feel the same way, your multiplier is safe'? So basically your multiplier might go away at any point.

<comment><USER9> > So basically your multiplier might go away at any point.

Hedging, hedging, hedging. There are enough derivatives in the coin world to have a pretty decent portfolio growth, if you're willing to manage it and deal with the tx/transfer fees

<comment><USER13> But if there is a bubble, hedging coins against each other is probably the worst thing you can do, right?

<comment><USER9> If you've cashed out your initial investment plus a healthy return, anything left in that portfolio is gravy though, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Since Ripple control their coin, they could effectively do a stock split... change the code to give all current ripple holders 1,000,000 coins for each one that they own now.

R3 would still have their option, it would just suddenly be worth much less thanks to the forced inflation :)

<comment><USER15> Options don't work that way fortunately/unfortunately. In the event of a split in the underlying, you have to split the options also.

<comment><USER16> This isn't an inherent property of options. It's just how almost all options contracts are written otherwise they wouldn't hold any value. If this option isn't written that way, then it's feasible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why did they gave that R3 that option? Why? Is that true?

<comment><USER18> The article makes it sound like in exchange R3 was supposed to give them connections. Paying for things with centrally printed money sounds like a cheap way to get what you need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there any underlying value to anything here? Or is this just penny-stock froth made shiny and new by adding "blockchain" to it?

</comment><comment><USER20> Damn. I could swear have 100s of 1000s of XRP in an old wallet somewhere... at $0.20/XRP that's some actual money.

</comment><comment><USER21> woww, ripple had tied up multiple bank like SBI etc.

<comment><USER22> For anyone that hasn't been following them over the last year or so, they've made amazing inroads into the banking industry.

<comment><USER23> What do they do in that industry exactly? I never really got the purpose.

<comment><USER18> Provide a system for inter-bank transfers. Like SWIFT with (theoretically) lower costs and latencies.

<comment><USER23> Ah, thanks. That's actually a very interesting application for a blockchain, providing settlement services between banks on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> wonder if they've already gone through arbitration [https://ripple.com/terms- of-use/](https://ripple.com/terms-of-use/)

<comment><USER25> They have a separate contract, I don't know why you think it would be bound by their terms of use. Contracts nearly always contain language about how disputes will be resolves, and the venue they will be resolved in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Lateral inhibition /s</comment>


Ask HN: Best practices to store notifications in Node.js + MongoDB application? - <AUTHOR> This is somewhat of a complicated subject. Each application has it's own needs but I'm curious to know what best practices and architecture you all recommend when storing a user's notifications in a Node.js + MongoDB application.
Essentially, we have a notifications icon in our web application (similar to Facebook etc.) that shows notifications based on certain events triggered by other users in the application. Some notifications can also have actions when clicked on them.
The plan I had:
1. Store all notifications in a 'notifications' collection
2. Each document in the collection has the notification text, unread status and action (if applicable)
3. When the user clicks the notification icon in the interface, they see a list of unread notifications and upon closing the drawer, an XHR gets called to mark all notifications as read
Is this a good way to do it? <comment><USER2> I'm not even sure I understand what design issue you're trying to solve. Users have a list of notifications and they have associated metadata. What else would you do?

<comment><AUTHOR> TBH, I'm not even sure I have an issue that needs solving. I'm trying to understand how you would design the back-end for a notifications system in a Node.js application that uses MongoDB.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Open Covid-19 Dataset - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/open-covid-19/data <comment><USER2> Thanks for doing this! I have thought about doing this myself but don't have the time right now.</comment>


Walmart Sales Surge as Coronavirus Drives Americans to Stockpile - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/walmart-sales-surge-as-coronavirus-drives-americans-to-stockpile-11589888464 <comment><USER2> I unfortunately can't get behind the paywall - does the article mention or does anyone know how much of this actually has to do with the stockpile.

I would assume stockpiline would ultimately be a smaller factor compared to the issues of business shutdowns. I'd imagine, though I'd love to see data, that most of this just comes from an increase in online retail overall (with Wal-mart being just one of a few companies equipped to handle this) and the lack of money being spent at restaurants for everyday meals (Wal-mart is America's largest grocery store)

<comment><USER3> From working there part-time, I can tell you this: People are still cleaning out the rice, pasta, soup, and bottled water. Everything else is maintaining at pre-pandemic levels.

The tp and paper towels are starting to last into the next night, after being stocked the night before so people are starting to slow down. Every other product, even meat, seems to be back to normally stocked levels.

Each wave of stimulus checks have resulted in complete cleanout of our tv and game console inventory. Not even Black Friday looked like our store after those checks came.

<comment><USER2> Thank you! I appreciate the info.</comment></comment></comment>


The Arduino popularity contest - <AUTHOR> https://www.sparkfun.com/news/1982 <comment><USER2> Very interesting data! Thanks for sharing. Does your IDE support boards like the Yun? How do new boards fare if you look at their usage from introduction as opposed to all time?

<comment><USER3> Great questions.

In regards to the Yun, we don't support it yet, essentially because we don't support the Programming-over-Wifi. But anecdotal evidence from other companies we've spoken to seems to show a single-digit usage (usage, not sales).

As for new boards... that's also a very interesting question. It does fluctuate, but not as much as you'd think. The case that stuck out most was actually the case of the Arduino Nano clones with the CH340G chip, which made Nano the 2nd most used board. New boards tend to have a spike in "apparent interest", if I may call it that, in other words in things like Page Views on pages that have to do with the board, or Newsletter clicks, etc, but the actual usage is more gradual</comment></comment>


Service Workers Break the Browser's Refresh Button by Default; Here's Why - <AUTHOR> https://redfin.engineering/service-workers-break-the-browsers-refresh-button-by-default-here-s-why-56f9417694 <comment><USER2> The article accurately tells my story, of how I was trying to force update my service worker after updating a few pages, and ended up using this nasty hack (I think) when we install the service worker - self.skipWaiting(); from what I understand, this skips and let's the new Service Worker (with the latest cache version) install and skip the waiting phase.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone interested in becoming the second co-founder of my startup? - <AUTHOR>

Hello Friends,
I have developed a couple of (I think) extremely interesting ideas for new startups in the field of social networking and I am looking for a hacker willing to become the second co-founder together with me.
The idea is to develop a beta of the idea, see if it gets traction and then seek funding (or maybe apply to Y Combinator).
Anyone interested? <comment><USER2> We are also on a somewhat similar quest. As a small tech team, we are looking for a business co-founder with a great idea to start something new: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3174188>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for all the replies, I will email personally anyone who posts a comment here and shows interest. I don't personally use anything yet, as I am not a coder, I have just developed the idea :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you live in the valley? What do you bring to the table besides an idea? (my email is in my profile.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Do you use Rails? Email me at my username at gmail.

</comment><comment><USER5> In what way have you 'developed' your ideas?

</comment><comment><USER6> do you use jquery,Rails ? Is it mobile based social or web based ? Please email me at email@example.com</comment>


Codecademy launches Reskill USA - <AUTHOR> http://www.reskillusa.com/

<comment><USER2> _There once was an island with a population of 100 dogs. Every day a plane flew overhead and dropped 95 bones onto the island. It was a dog paradise, except for the fact that every day 5 dogs went hungry. Hearing about the problem, a group of social scientists was sent to assess the situation and recommend remedies.

The social scientists ran a series of regressions and determined that bonelessness in the dog population was associated with lower levels of bone- seeking effort and that boneless dogs also lacked important skills in fighting for bones. As a remedy for the problem, some of the social scientists proposed that boneless dogs needed a good kick in the side, while others proposed that boneless dogs be provided special training in bone-fighting skills.

A bitter controversy ensued over which of these two strategies ought to be pursued. Over time, both strategies were tried, and both reported limited success in helping individual dogs overcome their bonelessness -- but despite this success, the bonelessness problem on the island never lessened in the aggregate. Every day, there were still five dogs who went hungry._

\-- [http://www.philipharvey.info/directjob.pdf](http://www.philipharvey.info/directjob.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Meh. While entertaining, this is a fallacious allegory. This fails to consider the divisibility of bones, some dogs getting more than one bone or the fact that in real life scenarios that the number of bones can fluctuate (more or fewer bones).

Furthermore, the site states that there are 1 million unclaimed bones. While I won't argue either in favor of or against that figure, but assuming there are unclaimed bones, your allegory would be more correct if there were something like 105 bones and 5 dogs still went went hungry every day despite the 5-bone surplus.

<comment><USER4> You misunderstand the nature of the implicit argument. The allegory doesn't have to address the intricacies of bone accounting or the fantasies of bone accountants because the story it describes has already played out countless times in countless economic sectors with one overwhelmingly favored result. The burden of proof lies squarely on the shoulders of the person who believes that this time the story will have a different ending.

<comment><USER5> Your comment is so generic it is hard to argue with it. Also it is a fact proven by the growth of the gdp per capita and average living quality that economics in general is not a zero sum game.

Currently the overall number of programmers/computer scientists/coders steadily increases and still there is a large shortage of workforce in these areas.

Please provide citations to support that 'countless economic sectors/countless times' claim.

<comment><USER4> All of our arguments so far have been completely generic. Both of us would love for someone with quantitative historical perspective to shed some light on these issues, but it isn't going to be me. I don't have that kind of knowledge -- all I've got is Cunningham's law and the vague notion that other engineering disciplines pay slightly over ~1/2 as much as software engineering at comparable skill levels, presumably due to having had more time for supply/demand equilibration. A solid route for counter-argument would attack my notion of "comparable skill levels," and while I'd love to hear that I was twice as skilled (comparatively speaking) as my buddies in different engineering sectors I sincerely doubt that that's the case.

Economics is not a zero sum game, but there are a few significant zero-sum games within economics that suffice to undermine the "rising tide lifts all boats" argument: land ownership, profit ownership, power ownership. A significant chunk of the value behind a certain amount of wealth _is_ relative to everyone else. Resenting someone else for earning twice as much would not make sense in a world where prices were fixed, but that's not the world we live in. The 2x guy is absolutely capable of bidding up prices on houses, investment instruments, and political influence, which all hurts the 1x guy. The guy with a skilled job absolutely makes it harder for other people with similar skills to find work. The guy building automated burger dispensers absolutely makes it harder for those at the bottom of the totem pole to secure gainful employment.

I do not debate that the current situation is that there are too few programmers. My claim is that once supply and demand equilibrate (and unless demand experiences exponential growth forever this will certainly happen) then we'll be in the same boat as everyone else. And it isn't a pretty boat.

I would love to be wrong about this, but I just don't think that there's a certain level of education that will creates a sustainably large middle class. It can certainly help in places where there are deficiencies, but it stops being effective at the asymptote. Look at the US, look at Japan. More and more education every decade but at the end of the day the supply of jobs for educated people didn't magically expand to meet the demand. The "magic" I'm referring to is the same magic as the "it's not a zero-sum game" argument refers to. It didn't work: we massively increased education and the middle class crumbled anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > ReskillUSA will close the gap between technical education and employment.

No it won't.

> By connecting students with accessible vocational education programs and > employers eager to hire from them, we're training more Americans for the > jobs of today.

Yeah because the "jobs of today" all require you to know:

HTML and CSS Javascript jQuery Github

<comment><USER7> I actually asked their CEO about this on PH. Building websites != engineering, and we need more of the latter. I do think there's a place for skills-based learning to take up some of the slack, but simply rehashing the same Rails/JS tutorials isn't going to cut it unfortunately.

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like there's much resources online that say "Learn How to Become a Software Engineer!" without costing you three/four years of extra education and a sizeable sum of money. I'm learning how to program at the moment alongside my degree, and almost all the resources I've seen online are oriented towards web development; consequentially, that's what I'm learning, even though I'd much rather be learning whatever lets me go program things like rockets, robots, self-driving cars, etc., with the hope that I'll be able to eventually move towards that end goal.

<comment><USER9> Are there any chances at your school to learn Matlab or LabVIEW? Another option is to look into what people are doing with Arduino boards. I think that the Arduino crowd have created a lot of tutorials and example codes online.

I'm not touting these languages or tools as the best, but as ways to be exposed to the kinds of programming that people do in areas that you're interested in.

<comment><USER8> Sadly, no. I attend the worst of schools; a business school. As my education is European, I'm not allowed to just switch majors either. I'll take a look at your recommendation, though; thanks.

<comment><USER9> I suggest starting with something like an Arduino robot kit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love that we are bringing people into the industry, but I wonder if it's really responsible to plaster figures like "$80K for 3 months of easy training" is really a responsible way to market that... I know you have to pragmatic to some degree and speak to people in the language they will listen in... but people who go into coding "just to make money" generally end up like anyone who goes into a field just to make money without any love of the craft: unhappy. After 20-some years in and around tech, I have come to just accept this cycle while humming Elton John's "Circle of Life" in my head: "Make a ton of easy money in tech!" ::>> "So many people in tech just to make money." ::>> "Tech Crash Due to Overhype About How Much Money There Is" ::>> "No one makes money in tech - go get an MBA" ::>> "Someone in tech made a ton of money!" ::>> "Make a ton of easy money in tech!"

</comment><comment><USER11> > 3 months: How long it takes a dedicated beginner to learn the skills to > qualify for computing and web development jobs.

I'm genuinely curious as to how many people here, who either program or hire programmers, will say that the above is a true statement.

<comment><USER12> 3 months from beginner to job ready ready is, basically, bullshit. There are people who do it, but they're the exception. The jobs they're getting typically rely on their using other skill sets on day one so they can continue learning software engineering for months in order to gain a useful level of proficiency.

This doesn't make the "3 month" claim worthless, but it does make it hard to fit into a sound bite.

I should know: I'm the co-founder and CEO of the Thinkful, Codecademy's other online partner in ReskillUSA.

Our company has hired many of our own students and helped hundreds of others successfully make the transition to truly job-ready engineer.

I've also spent the last decade as a professional software engineer, and another five years before that writing software. I'm 33 years old. After coding for half my life I feel I know less than half the craft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wish we would stop with the fantasy that we can return to the golden age of Fordism, and instead work on distributing the productivity gains of technology to reduce all of our working hours.

</comment><comment><USER14> Even with a great college education in CS and an undying passion for coding, it took me a year to really _get_ web development. It's easy to learn the code, and I believe the MOOCs of the world have succeeded in providing great free resources for learning structural thinking. However, no course can teach you intuition - engineering intuition is the easiest characteristic to assess in a job interview and the skill that is most sought after.

</comment><comment><USER15> Are they targeting outplacement companies?

Microsoft Certification centers used to target job centers. I've been to a Microsoft training and couldn't believe somebody without understanding of MS Windows would want to become a certified Windows NT server administrator. Simple answer: "the job center is paying for the training". Well in this case it was for soldiers to find jobs in the open market after their 12month serving time ended.

</comment><comment><USER16> Unfortunate domain name.

</comment><comment><USER17> $12k seems a bit steep.</comment>


Uber drivers and other gig economy workers earnings fell 50% over past 5 years - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2018/9/24/17884608/uber-driver-gig-economy-money-pay-lyft-postmates <comment><USER2> Is average payout really a good indicator? There could be more part-time drivers.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Uber and Lyft's responses say as much.

> Uber's biggest competitor, Lyft, agrees with this sentiment. "The fact that > this study did not examine hourly earnings, the metric that drivers care > most about, has resulted in misleading headlines," a Lyft spokesperson said > in an email.

> "Many more drivers are choosing to earn with Lyft on a part-time basis, > often fewer than ten hours per week, and they tell us they truly value the > flexibility Lyft provides."

<comment><USER4> > Uber's biggest competitor, Lyft, agrees with this sentiment. "The fact that > this study did not examine hourly earnings, the metric that drivers care > most about, has resulted in misleading headlines," a Lyft spokesperson said > in an email.

It would just point out that they make less than minimum wage. $3.37/hr in USA it looks like. Would hourly earnings in this study really be any better of an outcome?

[https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation- now/2018/03/02/ub...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation- now/2018/03/02/uber-lyft-drivers-actually-earn-less-than-minimum-wage-mit- survey-suggests/389230002/)

[https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and- tech/ne...](https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and- tech/news/uber-lyft-earnings-minimum-wage-ridesharing-ride-hailing- independent-contractors-a8237541.html)

[https://jalopnik.com/about-75-of-uber-and-lyft-drivers- earn-...](https://jalopnik.com/about-75-of-uber-and-lyft-drivers-earn-less- than-minim-1823462283)

<comment><USER3> That study was essentially retracted by the lead author[1].

[1] [https://twitter.com/stephenzoepf/status/970754550968676352?l...](https://twitter.com/stephenzoepf/status/970754550968676352?lang=en)

<comment><USER4> It still says around 50%+ make less than minimum wage or lose money. Not good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It will probably fall a bit more once the VCs get tired of subsidizing the growth in these companies.

</comment><comment><USER6> Good, more people need to realize that it's not a good system for the employees.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is the dirty secret of capitalism. Eventually, someone will do what you do for less money.</comment>


The Washington Post has indefinitely shelved certain NSA stories - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/apblake/status/563497852031492096

<comment><USER2> A much better source:

[http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2015/02/8561767/...](http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2015/02/8561767/dean- baquet-marty-baron-and-susan-glasser-dish-national-security-repor)

And this isn't actually a new thing. One of the criticisms of WikiLeaks is that a lot of the material they released put people in very real danger (agents in the field, informants, etc), and that's something newspapers have been weighing up for a long time.

Of course, the trouble with this is that we don't know what the stories are, so we can't judge if they should have been published or not. Another way of saying it is that any speculation we make in this thread is likely to be pretty pointless.

<comment><USER3> I've submitted that here, though the clickbait title really sucks.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9009269](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9009269)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Mis-quoted.

Marty Baron @PostBaron replied in the thread:

"@apblake I didn't say we held back "would-be scoops." I said there was certain information at times that we chose not to publish."</comment>


Comet (getcomet.net): A new open-source Reddit alternative - <AUTHOR> https://www.getcomet.net/ <comment><AUTHOR> We are excited to announce [Comet]([https://www.getcomet.net](https://www.getcomet.net)) (getcomet.net) for the first time today! Here are some answers to questions you might have:

Q: What are Planets/Galaxies/Universe on Comet?

A: Planets are Comet's communities, equivalent to Reddit's subreddits. Planets are created, customized, and moderated by Comet's users. Galaxies are general categories that Planets can be placed in, allowing users to view a feed of posts from all Planets in a specific Galaxy. The Universe page is simply a feed showing posts from all Planets.

Q: How is moderation done on Comet?

 __A: Planet moderators are responsible for curating the content within their own Planets. Users can moderate no more than 10 planets. Comet admins will remove content that violates our [content policy]([https://www.getcomet.net/content](https://www.getcomet.net/content)) (e.g. spam, illegal content). Users are also given some tools to be their own moderator - users can be blocked, Planets can be muted, and posts can be hidden. __

Q: What is the Comet bot?

 __A: The Comet bot posts links on Comet so that there is always a steady stream of content even if users are not posting. __

Q: What are Rockets?

 __A: Rockets are Comet 's upvotes. Posts with a lot of Rockets will be shown near the top when sorting by hot. We chose not to include an equivalent to downvotes because of downvote's potential to silence individuals and create an echo chamber. __

Q: What features does Comet have that other reddit alternatives do not?

 __A: Comet has infinite scroll, post expansion (card view), categorized Planets (Galaxies), an advanced post /comment editor (no markdown!), sort by most comments, image upload, and more. __

Q: Does Comet have a mobile app?

 __A: Comet was designed to have a great mobile layout, and can be added to your home screen. Comet does not have a native mobile app, however a wrapper around the website will be in the Google Play Store soon. __

Q: What stage of development is Comet in?

 __A: We are launching as an alpha, as there are still a number of features planned and bugs are expected. __

Q: Comet is open-source - where can I see the code?

 __A: [[https://github.com/comet-app](https://github.com/comet- app)*...](https://github.com/comet-app\]\(https://github.com/comet-app\)**)

Q: How can I chat with Comet developers and users?

 __A: Join our [Discord server]([https://discord.gg/NPCMGSm)**](https://discord.gg/NPCMGSm\)**)</comment>


Kanban for Video Game Development (video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/presentations/kanban-video-game-dev

<comment><USER2> It gets really interesting right around minute 20. Inventory waste for developers.. These are very interesting ideas.</comment>


Type and the New Dark Age - <AUTHOR> http://webjournal.nerdfiles.net/2013/01/10/type-and-the-new-dark-age/

<comment><USER2> Am I the only one thinking this site's font is like a bleeding unreadable inkjet print?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's tough getting dyslexic fonts to render happily across all platforms. Mind providing a bit more insight? I know that Chrome/Windows has problems when font-smoothing: antialiased; is not set.

So at the same time, please bear the experimental nature.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> And see what AlphaSymbolic looks like, check the sticky footer.</comment>


Prognosis : Lessons learnt from developing a top 10 iPhone app - <AUTHOR> http://blog.medicaljoyworks.com/prognosis-lessons-learnt-from-developing-a-to

<comment><USER5> So, first thing to note is the difference between Top 10 in the free Medical category vs. Top 10 of all free apps. Not to talk down about their achievements, but the #1 Top Free Medical App doesn't even break the Top 200 Overall Top Free Apps.

My thoughts are if you are planning on adding ads eventually, you should ad them with version 1. Otherwise, people will complain when they come later.

We launched a free App (AppShopper) a couple of months ago, and we did hit the top 10 overall free.

We planned ahead with a dedicated server with a caching system (Squid) and the ability to spin up EC2 instances to mirror further. Fortunately, the one server (and the db server behind it) was able to handle the single traffic peak (which was over 100,000 downloads in a day).

I can identify with the testing thing (or lack thereof), as you can't fix a problem quickly, since you have to go through App approval. Which can be frustrating when there's a crashing bug.

<comment><AUTHOR> You do have a good point about adding advertisements later on.

We thought that having advertisements at the very start might turn off some users - but there is also the possibility of a backlash if we add them later.

Note that we were not planning on adding a generic ad network, but rather partnering with a pharma company and deploying ads customized for the iPhone.

The other possibility is to have 'sponsored cases', similar to what they have on Medscape - there would just a be a single line of text, i.e 'Sponsored by XYZ"

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have recently released a paid app - which has turned up in the top 10 sports section in the UK for both iPad and iPhone. I have designed this for the very latest version of the iOS - i'm guessing i'm losing sales doing this - <USER2> you or anyone else for that matter found any statistics around the numbers of users who download the app from previous versions of the iOS ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately Flurry's new SDK does not collect iOS version info, so we're as much in the dark as you are.

However, 90.9% of our users are listed as having iOS4 devices - I am not sure whether this indicates the iPhone 4, or whether iOS 4 prevents flurry from detecting the device type (in which case this would be an accurate estimate of the number of devices running iOS 4)

I guess that the percentage of users with iOS 3 devices should therefore be at most 9.1% - probably less than that.

Another statistic is that 7.43% of the users had jailbroken devices - <USER3> suppose that a significant portion of them would be using iOS 3, as it is so painful to upgrade to iOS 4.

<comment><USER7> The 'iOS4 devices' listing in Flurry means the operating system is running iOS 4 or greater. It doesn't mean the device is an iPhone 4.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Re: #2 ... I'm about to launch my first app and it will talk to a Rails app on Heroku.

Should I also keep a slicehost/linode vps running the app?

</comment><comment><USER9> Regarding the ios testing issues, would setting the iPhone emulator that comes with apple developer tools to the various versions have worked here?

<comment><USER10> The emulator doesn't contain older versions of iOS, and it should not be relied on for real testing. It links against different libraries, runs different code, and won't find issues with iPod music, sleep/wake, memory usage, multi-touch, case sensitivity, and more.

It's great for development and testing functionality, not good for testing compatibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> you can't afford $50/month even with a top 10 iPhone app? does not compute. if you're waiting to get your monies from apple, just email tim and i'm sure he'll let you pay on net 60 terms (or whatever apple's terms are)...

<comment><AUTHOR> Our app is free. We do have plans to add advertising later on - but not for several months at least.

All costs are out of my pocket (and Sandaruwan's and Parinda's)

Note that $50 is a LOT when bootstrapping from Sri Lanka - my salary as a Doctor (which is much higher than that of the general population) was only $400 / month - with most of that getting burnt up in living costs.

<comment><USER12> I'm sorry if it's a dumb question but why do you plan to wait to add advertising? You are on the TOP10 right now, you are having good review (by users AND blogs). Its seems to me like the perfect moment to add ads to your product.

Arent you afraid that you loose your momentum without made any dollar from your app? You can find clean way to do advertising on an iphone app (look at Twitterific for example)

<comment><USER13> At the moment we have no way of knowing whether our users are health care professionals or not. We are releasing a new medical case each week(or more often), so that would keep the medical professionals from removing it - <USER4> others who are just downloading to checkout the app would get rid of it (that's our guess - we are still learning, trial and error). Advertising to medical professionals is much appealing than a general crowd.

Yes, we have several clean advertising plans. i.e - sponsored cases.

<comment><USER12> It's not "really" your problem or at least you can made somebody else pay for the mistake if your users arent really health care professionals. With your app and your actual ranking you could cold call a few medical magazines and offer to them to be feature in the app for a couple thousand bucks. Advertising in medical publication is VERY VERY VERY expensive, I'm sure some big co or medias have moneys to spare on ads in your app.

If you are not confortable with that maybe you could contact them offer them that to have an idea of what they are ready to pay to be in your app. Maybe the amount will change your mind :)

I dont mean to be disrespectful with my comment but I made that mistake to wait to long before monetising my startup because I always wanted more and more data before selling ads on it. I lost a lot of time (and money) for nothing.

<comment><USER13> Actually, that seems to be a good idea :) We should try to do it now.

Now that I think about it, another point that should have gone into the blog post is that "be prepared to monetize if your app goes viral in few days"</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


IOS products are a local optimum - <AUTHOR> http://chriseidhof.tumblr.com/post/11178105951/ios-products-are-a-local-optimum

<comment><USER2> Weather forecasts are a more optimal way of knowing the future than looking at the sky. These incremental improvements might not mean much by themselves, but in aggregate, they've meant the human race has come very far.

<comment><AUTHOR> Weather forecasts are great, and a huge improvement. But another weather forecast reading app isn't such a big improvement, unless they're easier, more beautiful or have better forecasts. I think the first two points are pretty much covered (there is always room for improvement, but still). My point is that we should aim to improve on the third point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Zacks rant was mainly targeted at the horror of software development. In that respect iOS with Xcode and Objective-C are a step back.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure about that. I think it's about a lot more than just that =).</comment></comment>


Mathematical Modelling: The S-I-R Model for Spread of Disease Explained - <AUTHOR> https://nuadox.com/post/613686618163986432/how-to-model-a-pandemic <comment><USER2> Blogspam of

[https://theconversation.com/how-to-model-a- pandemic-134187](https://theconversation.com/how-to-model-a-pandemic-134187)</comment>


Google's headcount soars 57% to 19,000 - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/googles_headcount_soars_57_to_19_000_goog

<comment><USER2> There'll be a big dip when the stock options vest in Aug 2008:

By some estimates, more than 900 employees became instant millionaires when Google went public in August 2004, and that total has likely ballooned along with the stock price. ... By some estimates, nearly a third of the first 500 Googlers have departed, and many more of the estimated 2,200 pre-IPO employees are planning an exit as their stock vests. -- [http://www.news.com/Life-after- Google%2C-with-millions/2100-...](http://www.news.com/Life-after- Google%2C-with-millions/2100-1030_3-6226900.html)

<comment><USER3> I would be pretty surprised if August was the blow up date. Of those hired pre-IPO, the most popular start date would probably be in June or July, and of course that's the reference point for the vest of the stock, not the IPO date.

<comment><USER4> Good golly, that sounds like a lot more Angel money will soon be flittering about Mountain View and Seattle.</comment></comment></comment>


A keyboard for your back - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tartavull/thor-your-next-keyboard-20b9ce7dd2b1#.831esf3y0 <comment><USER2> Nice work... I really like it and would definitely be willing to give it a shot (and even to build my own if necessary).

I think there are two important concerns that need to be addressed that I didn't notice in the post:

1) The chords used to specify a given key should be a fact-based decision, made using actual data concerning

      a) which keys are actually used most for a given target language  and

      b) which motions are actually least expensive/easiest with this system

so a sensible layout could be determined (like dvorak for classic keyboards); and

2) These things seem to keep your hands pretty busy... though I'd like to stick to only using a keyboard, and usually can 9x% of the time, I still _must_ use the mouse once in a while... so the mouse either must be integrated (as a trackball, motion sensor, or ?) or it must be easy to switch.

Have these aspects been considered/resolved?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Choosing an optimal layout based on actual data is a very interesting idea. I'm not sure how you would assign a cost to a finger move, but even with some rough estimated cost might produce something better than my intuitively designed layout

2)I can still use the trackpad while holding the device, but no, is not confortable. Integrating a trackball would be great. I have also learned a fair amount of shortcuts and used stuff like [https://vimium.github.io/](https://vimium.github.io/) to decrease my dependency to a mouse.</comment></comment>


UBI and the Capitalist Production of Consciousness - <AUTHOR> https://musingmind.org/essays/ubi-capitalist-consciousness <comment><USER2> UBI is the right direction, but giving everyone hot bills off the printingpress is not the way to equality. If you give a billionaire 10k and a layman 10k they both move up by 10k, so equality is still not being addressed. UBI should go to people under a certain income level, just like this stimulus did, and it should curve towards zero as you exit UBI-range, just like the stimulus did.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I agree with this - under most proposals, this is actually how UBI works.

You can't fund a full (poverty level) UBI without progressive taxation (as you mention, most people don't recommend paying for UBI via deficit spending), and UBI advocates acknowledge that there will be a breakeven point beyond which people's taxes increase more than the UBI affords. This achieves the same "curving towards zero" of the benefits as if you had means tested people and only given people below a certain income some payment.

UBI advocates tend to prefer doing it this way - giving everyone the same amount, and taxing it back from high-earners to achieve the same "phase out" effect" \- so as to avoid the bureaucracy of means-testing.

What you're saying here is pretty close to the "modernized negative income tax" I suggest towards the end of the essay. Whether UBI, or stimulus-style phaseout, there will always be net recipients, and net funders. I'm not sure whether means testing is better than going universal and taxing on the back end to achieve particular distributions, but it's important to note that UBI's funded by progressive taxation, when all is said and done, are still redistributing money from above to below.

<comment><USER2> It's definitely better to do means-tested distribution because of the Friction of Money.

A hyperbolic example: One might be able to send fuel to Mars and reconsume some on a return voyage (taxes) but it costs fuel to get there and fuel to get back. There is no such thing as 100% efficient salvation of discretized token, so we have to distribute it intelligently to begin with.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree it's certainly an inefficient process (universal payouts and taxing some back), but so is means-testing, especially if it's to be on a monthly basis. A monthly payout requires monthly means-testing, and we struggle enough to do so on an annual basis. Not to mention the administrative and bureaucratic apparatus required to handle the monthly testing and payouts, which would itself be a source of inefficiency, and introduce numerous opportunities for exploitation and cheating.

The relevant question for me, which I haven't seen explored in any rigorous fashion yet, is to compare the inefficiencies of the two. What are the actual costs of means-testing, and what are the actual costs of universal payouts that are partially taxed back?

In theory, I don't see any obvious reason means-testing is less inefficient that universalizing.

(My personal hang-up is on the gross cost required for UBI relative to an NIT. Even with the same net effects, UBI's political feasibility is far less than NIT's given the disparity in tax revenues required)

<comment><USER2> >The relevant question for me, which I haven't seen explored in any rigorous fashion yet, is to compare the inefficiencies of the two. What are the actual costs of means-testing, and what are the actual costs of universal payouts that are partially taxed back?

Well said! It'd be great to get something like this on the books. In general, however, taxation is politically unsavory and, primarily, taxes have varying surface areas based on states' laws, so any attempt at trying to coordinate the appropriate amount of taxation would be indirect at best.

In my view, the universal-payout-and-taxback is a tarpit with no harmonious resolve, and giving money to everyone devalues currency faster than need be. It duplicates effort, and that's something to be avoided, especially at a national level where one bit of duplication is multiplied three hundred million times. Any inefficiency introduced in universal-payout-and-taxback will be egregious in the aggregate.

To me it's equivalent to saying "yeah we could experiment with a little salt in the soup, but why not just pour in the whole box of salt and see if it dilutes well." It's not our luxury to play games with our one economy, or our one currency, because irrevocable changes are irrevocable.

I wonder if the Hoover Institution would be interested in doing a cost- assesment of this make-it-rain-and-tax-it-back versus tactical-delivery. Maybe I will try and make a model just on the scale of a city or state and extrapolate from there. In general, I see devaluation of the currency because the wealthy are getting more than they need, so buying power for the bottom 50% goes down, meaning they must spend more on commodities, so there is more concentration of wealth at the top, simply exacerbating things. In other words, even if the costs are technically recoverable on the national ledger, the sociological costs of a "Universal" payout are devastating.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


100+ Companies with Open Remote Engineering Positions - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Sr0vy3eDn2fcEhxOdkPv0BjsWBR7JntDJqRM6_hyjbE/edit?usp=sharing <comment><USER2> Thanks for the list! I've just started thinking about some remote coding position.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you know companies that are hiring right now, put in the comment.</comment></comment>


[Faircoin] On proof-of-cooperation - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/faircoin/faircoin2/blob/master/doc/on-proof-of-cooperation.md <comment><USER2> Adding Certified Validation Nodes makes it centralized and concentrates that part of the network.</comment>