Show HN: Defaults – Simple default values in go structs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/i/defaults <comment><USER2> Very interesting.

I see what might be a problem, however: determining the difference between a zero-value in a struct that was supplied intentionally, or one that was left unspecified.

To clarify what I mean, in the example on that page the following line doesn't produce the right answer:

        p := defaults.NewWithDefaults(Person{ConvictedFelon: false}).(Person)

Of course, you could perform the assignment after the defaults have been initialized, but then you're giving up the optional struct initialization that Go provides. I'll have to think about how you could solve this. In the meanwhile, I'll open an issue on Github.

<comment><USER2> My practice has usually been to ensure that the zero values of the types ARE a sane default for a struct if that struct is public and may be instantiated by a client. It sometimes involves flipping the semantics of some Boolean values around.

That, and judicious use of a New() function to construct and initialize types, help make up for the lack of default attributes in structs.</comment></comment>


Freshjerky.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.cringely.com/2009/07/freshjerkycom/ <comment><USER2> "There is nothing Gus does that any of us couldn't do as well — nothing."

Making good jerky is a skill honed with years of practice. I think Gus deserves more credit than this.

<comment><USER3> I don't think he meant literally "make good jerky and sell it on the web..." He is pointing out someone who is doing well, serving a small niche. This shows that small success is within the reach of most, and that you don't have to have a idea for the next Google to succeed.

Unless you really have to have that private jet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What Cringely doesn't recognize (regarding the "furor" around Parrot Secrets) is that in the Fresh Jerky case, there is no attempt to deceive-- they actually make fresh jerky. No faking involved.

</comment><comment><USER5> Something doesn't make sense. $2 million in sales with just 178 monthly visitors?

<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/freshjerky.com/?metric=uv>

<comment><USER6> Well, Compete is probably really inaccurate, but still. I'd bet good money $2 million isn't coming through that web site.

According to Google, there's exactly one link on the entire web to FreshJerky.com. All these happy customers would be linking and talking about it, if it were true.

It's not like journalists actually verify claims like this. If the guy says he has $2 million in sales, that's what gets written.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm willing to wager that the 2 millskie is gross sales not net profit. Still, pretty impressive. People love their beef jerky and are willing to pay hefty prices for it. I bet his margins are Apple-esque.

</comment><comment><USER8> "So how is the company doing? Just fine, thanks, though most of the sales are online, about $2 million per year."

Or after Bob Cringely writes about you, $3 million per year.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yup, we can all get rich by choosing some product or service that we know nothing about and selling it on a web site. Consumers would much rather fill out forms and wait weeks for shipping than endure the fun and convenience of the mall, because hey, it's on the _internet_! This completely novel idea shall be named.. i-shopping.

</comment><comment><USER10> I found this to be pretty interesting: Gus, The Beef Jerky King [http://chrisblogs.typepad.com/chris_has_stepped_out/2007/09/...](http://chrisblogs.typepad.com/chris_has_stepped_out/2007/09/gus- the-beef-je.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> I think the point of the article is that too many startups are wasting time and money trying to create a market for their worldchanging revolutionary new product, as opposed to entering an existing niche market and dominating in it.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think it's worth noting that Fresh Jerky does what it does with a relatively poorly designed website (half of which is in Flash) and only PayPal for ecommerce.

I doubt Gus does much a/b testing on his site ...

</comment><comment><USER13> Ugh and he's using PayPal. Get a merchant account and save some money on fees, Gus!

</comment><comment><USER14> It's like real estate. It's all in the domain name and freshjerky.com is very attractive and sought after.

<comment><USER15> Sorry but that's nothing but an excuse, "I could do great things, too, if I had a great domain name..."

Unless, I guess, you really think linkedin.com is a better domain name than business.com</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Getting Started on MSFT Web Stack vs Other Frameworks/Platforms - <AUTHOR>

I have been in the LAMP stack for the last 9 years, and RoR and Django most recently.  I built my last company (which we sold - IMSafer) on RoR.  I am just now starting to wrap my brain around C#, ASP.NET and other parts of the MSFT stack.  What I am most interested in are people's actual experiences with trying to on-board with the MSFT stack.  Specifcally, the younger hackers, i.e. 25 and under.  Let's try to keep it factual, and leave invectives out.  You can see my personal thoughts about all this at www.n00bnotes.com. <comment><USER2> I come from a LAMP background (learning Ruby now). What I have seen - in my experience (25 year old, military making the transition to a NSA contractor) is:

LAMP and open-source is where it's at for the true innovators on the web. Your startups and companies that go out and try new things, will use some form of open source stack.

A Microsoft Stack is prevalent when working within "the establishment," for the man, or in Enterprise level development. These are commonly workcenters in which they rely on the support and testing made available by Microsoft - it is a key factor in their decision to follow that stack.

It's not always set in stone that way - my new job is a complete Microsft Stack (IIS, MS SQL) with the exception of the language (PHP). Every now and then, even the man, gets a little spunky and tries something new.

</comment><comment><USER3> The ASP.NET MVC framework is a pretty close imitation of RoR.

The traditional ASP.NET framework is an attempt to shoehorn the Web into the Windows Forms conception of the world.

One thing that MS MVC doesn't do particularly nicely is to capture the declarative character of ASP.NET 1.1; the default view templating machinery leads to a comparatively ugly mix of literal markup and imperative inclusions of C#. But, this may not be a severe problem for you in practice, and anyway you can use other view template subsystems.

I think if you're starting out, you should stick with MVC. It harmonizes better with the wider architecture of the Web (<http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/>), and it doesn't suffer from much accumulated cruft.

<comment><USER4> I'd agree with this comment that MVC is a lot nicer without the overhead of everything that comes with pretending you're building a Windows Forms app -- it's definitely in better harmony with the web's architecture and you get more control over the HTML you're outputting.

As others have said the databinding and drag+drop features are often useless and you spend a big chunk of your time working around the framework to get it to do something that doesn't /quite/ fit the drag and drop model, or figuring out exactly which event you need to handle to get things to happen in the right order (Page_PreInit, Page_Init, Page_Load, or Page_PreRender?).

But also as others have said, the C# language and the Visual Studio IDE are really nice, and while I haven't developed anything serious with the MVC framework yet, it promises to remove the frustration of endlessly working around the framework's artificially imposed complexity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I agree with spoiledtechie that C# is a nice programming language. Recent versions enable very concise higher-order functional (=fun) code to be written. The generics implementation has few warts and tooling is good.

Another gem is SQL Server, even the Express version is fast and has solid backup-restore features.

Powershell provides a (still somewhat embryonic) scripting environment.

One nuisance is the relative dearth of free-free software. The thinking seems to go, that because MS gets money, then so should developers of small utils and such. It gives the entire ecosystem a slightly different feel, and you often find yourself paying $10 or similar for small, almost-trivial add-ons, that would have been free on other platforms where a tradition of sharing for the good of all is the norm (codeplex -- I think -- have helped in this regard).

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a very interesting point...do you have any suggestion for the types of tools that you would want to see be free which aren't? Would contests from MSFT help in this regard? What kind of investment could they make on this problem which would resonate with this audience?

<comment><USER3> Until Windows is a free platform, I think you'll always find that it's relatively difficult to find, use, and develop free software there and that the users of the platform will tend to be people who care less about free software. Having said that, things would be better for free software contributors and users if Microsoft were merely passively uninterested in software freedom.

I think the first thing for them to do is to stop actively opposing the free software community. Microsoft has repeatedly attacked free software projects on the .NET platform, from NUnit to NAnt to NDoc, by launching alternatives with few or no technical advantages. This not only destroys momentum, but it strengthens the cultural tendency among Microsoft customers to distrust anything that does not originate in Redmond.

Lately Microsoft has released some of their software under liberal licensing terms. I think this won't help much, so long as they discourage and hamper participation beyond consumption by members of the public.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I came from a PHP and Coldfusion background and jumped into VB.NET/ASP.NET development after some brief self training through our company training portal. Basically, they gave me a copy of VS2008 and said okay, "We have this project that is behind and we need help, do you think you can handle it?"

I had a 2 day training on the internal corporate framework and then I was unleashed on the codebase. I would say it took maybe a month for me to 'get it' but after that it was just a matter of code reviews and common sense.

If you can write good code in one language, you should be able to translate it over. That said, the event model is a bit different than the straight scripting in PHP or legacy CF. Once you get used to it you're going to feel spoiled. In the WebForms model, a lot is already done for you. Templates are built in, grids are built in, paging is built in... It can almost be annoying how much is built in, but then you realize how little time it takes to get things done. You have more time to spend on real business logic, which is a good thing.

I would recommend checking out ASP.NET MVC RC1 if you're coming from Rails and Django. Less is built in, but it better suits the design patterns you've come from. The languages are the same, so if you learn WebForms first it doesn't matter: VB and C# are standalone. Once you learn them, you can use them anywhere whether its the web, GUI apps, or console batch code.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was lucky enough to discover ASP.NET MVC a couple of days ago, and it's much, much better. I think ASP.NET is fine for internal development, but for anyone looking to build consumer sites, is it a reasonable tool? Yes, I know MySpace is on it, but when I look at PHP adoption, and use of Rails/Django, I find people are willing to try that "new hotness" but just don't like MSFT. Someone told me that they didn't learn ASP.NET because they didn't think it would help their resume (for startup type jobs - for IT it's good). Is that a generally held view/opinion?

<comment><USER6> Personally, I think that would be an immature opinion. The language you write the application in has little to do with the outcome. I know of at least one company in town who moved from Ruby on Rails to ASP.NET recently. They were looking to hire new .NET developers to convert their code.

The issue is that the stack is expensive. Windows licenses, SQL Server licenses, hosting... It all piles up, and a start up cannot afford that out of the gate. MSFT has been making strides to inject into that market. Visual Web Developer Express is a good example. They are giving the IDE away for free.

That said, for start ups, certainly a Linux based stack is far more practical. I just think that discounting an entire language or stack because the company behind it isn't 'liked' by a minority in the community is off base.

Heck, one of the lead developers of PHP quit randomly. It happens, and the community plows ahead. If ASP.NET support just died, entire industries would have to rewrite but what they had already written will still work as is. Likewise when any new version of anything comes out there are rewrites. That is just the way our industry works.

You are right though, .NET is generally considered an 'enterprisey' solution. It does however help on a resume. Usually boosts your going salary by $10k or more. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am a big supporter of MSFT stack. I am a first time programmer out of college, being 24 now and 2 years on the job I would say it should be taught in school. They did a extremely good job with C# and it is becoming more dynamic with the "var" keyword. There IDE is out of this world which is just an amazing tool. It allows for extensions just like firefox in which there are tons out there. They allow you to talk to every type of server or data set with the new LINQ technology which allows going through tables absolutely quick.

It is highly functional beating most of the competitors on bench tests. Look up myspace asp.net case study.

The framework is solid and over all my time working on it, I haven't found a bug except one that existed in their ajax controls contributed by the community.

Its a bit hard to pick up when you have had no programming experience, but it can be compared to syntactical to C++ and Java.

Hope that helps.

<comment><USER8> "I would say it should be taught in school."

That depends on what you go to school for. If you're going for training in Microsoft technologies -- to a technical college or the like, that's fine. If you're going to what's supposed to be a computer science program, they should teach general computing principles using, whenever possible, free software that has been around for a while and will continue to be around for a while. (Yes, that means they shouldn't teach Rails either.)

<comment><USER9> Yes, Computer Science departments should not be running damn vocational programs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been using .NET full-time for 3.5 years. There are two types of .NET developers. The first group uses the * View controls, uses the designer, does everything (or most things) declaratively and generally conforms to the Microsoft way. Then there's another group of developers that care about design patterns, maintainability, testability, and everything else that goes along with being a good programmer, not just a good employee. I started out in the first group and now I'm in the second. It's a totally different world.

Microsoft has made a lot of effort lately to improve their appeal to hackers. They have free (Express) editions of their tools. IIS is still free. If you want the full-blown tools, they're available for _very_ cheap (BizSpark) for startups. They're releasing more and more source code everyday (you can step through the .NET Framework core while debugging in VS2008) and CodePlex is helping bulk up the available OSS libraries for .NET. It's very rare when I need a library and there isn't an open source one or its included in the framework.

ASP.NET MVC is an excellent framework and eliminates most of the problems Webforms has. Webforms has its place in corps for the first type of developer I listed above, but MVC is made for the second. I wouldn't spend anytime with Webforms if I were just starting out. Save yourself the headaches.

I think the quality of C# 3.0 has been covered enough. If you like dynamic languages, IronPython and IronRuby rely on the Dynamic Language Runtime which will be included in .NET 4. C# is getting support for interopping with dynamic languages. F# is purely functional and will be a first-class language with tool support coming up in VS2010.

</comment><comment><USER11> I am 24 and have also been in the LAMP stack for the past year until I began programming as an unpaid intern for a local web development company. The web company uses a MS stack and I have LOVED it. I have a physics background, so I never really "learned" how to code, and picking up PHP felt disjointed. One thing that I have appreciated about MS is the consistency. The IDE is wonderful.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really thought this topic was going to bring the haters...and yet the majority of the commentary has been uniformly positive. What is MSFT doing wrong, then, that more people aren't building web apps on their stack?

For the record, Visual Studio is amazing. My buddies use VI. Whatever works, but I love VS.

<comment><USER12> Deployment is less convenient (fewer Windows webhosts, especially on the low end).

If you don't run Windows, Visual Studio becomes less attractive, cutting out the free unix and Mac crowd.

Also, their marketing is just... not as nice. Compare rubyonrails.org to asp.net. One says 'Web development that doesn't hurt', and has big clickable pictures. The other is ugly and seems to be selling stuff.

When you're just starting out, the little things like that matter.

<comment><AUTHOR> What an interesting point...yes, the sites have very different looks and feels, for sure. I wonder how many newbies get scared off from ASP.net from the ASP.net site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You should have probably disclosed up front that you work for Microsoft. As much as I like .NET, I like full disclosure more.

<comment><USER9> Wow, you're right:

 _Brandon Watson ... is a board member of the Family Online Safety Institute and a former Microsoft manager._

 _I have been hacking away in Python for a couple years, but now that I am in the Developer Platform Marketing division at Microsoft..._

      That's a banning!

_Brandon founded IMSafer in 2006 in response to the growing threat of online predators and the lack of effective tools for parents._

      He's an opportunistic ass, evangelizing about the imminent paedogeddon...

_IMSafer uses an advance language analysis engine to decipher the cryptic language used in IM conversations and on MySpace message boards, scanning for language that is dangerous, threatening or sexual in nature. In addition, IMSafer monitors MySpace accounts and reports changes made to any age, name or location disclosed._

      ...and a snake oil salesman too!

<comment><USER13> Only a Microsoft person would stoop so low. When your browser and stock price is losing market share and value like crazy, you have to resort to dirty tricks to save your job.

<comment><USER9> It seems like it might be a hail mary for him, considering this quote from his blog:

 _Now that I have been working in the Developer and Platform Tools marketing group at Microsoft for close to a year, I have decided that it's probably a good idea for me to be technically proficient in our own technologies._

<comment><AUTHOR> Again, apologies. The last thing I want is to upset this community. I am Brandon Watson, and I work at Microsoft. I am not, nor would I, trying to hide that. I asked the original question with genuine interest in the opinions of this community about the MSFT stack. I'm an HN addict, and consider it a valuable knowledge discovery (links, blogs, products, answers, philosphical questions) resouce.

<comment><USER9> Except that it is your job to evangelize Microsoft products to us, and it's pretty clear that this thread is part of that. If you really are "new to the MSFT stack", what the fuck have you done at your job for the last year?

I've dealt with a Microsoft "evangelist" guy before in academia, promoting their "Shared Source" initiatives trying to convince professors to teach NT internals in OS courses. At least he was straightforward with his trolling, and entertainingly churlish.

Your whole deal just seems sort of pathetic. You don't have a clue about JS, CSS, or SQL? You've been paid to promote a "stack" for a year and you just tried it out for the first time a week ago and are posting about it in multiple places on the web?

You're ("pulling some marketing bullshit" ∪ "an idiot").

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't work in DPE (Developer & Platform Evangelism). I work in product management (marketing). I have decent tech skills, but over the last year, my group was focused on launching our Azure Services Platform. The bulk of that work was about positioning, partners, brand, pricing, features, etc. Not a ton of time for actually using the platform. A new year resolution was that I wanted to spend my free hcaking time in ASP.NET. It's all up on my blog, out in the open. I'm not trying to hide anything from anyone, and I apologize againg to the community if it came across that way.

<comment><USER9> The marketing for Azure makes more sense in light of you not having used any of the stuff you were promoting.

Nowhere do you mention any of your competitors, much less compare yourself to them. None of the "tracks" [Web Developers, Corporate Developers, ISVs, Systems Integrators, Business] had anything pertinent, and none of it was remotely useful to anyone to whom _cloud computing_ was more than the cover story of the latest _IT Drone Monthly_. The copy is littered with grating faux pas, like: "multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and XML".

The only useful information I could find about the offering was from your competitors! -- <http://snarfed.org/space/windows+azure+details>

_PS: use your hour-long edit window to correct your spelling and grammar mistakes_

<comment><USER14> Wow. People can be really mean. After almost three hundred skydives, I posted to an online community that I had been a part of for several years that I was quitting for various reasons (the least of which was that I wasn't even close to being coordinated enough to continue to pull it off). I was attacked almost instantaneously by various members of the site. Some saw it as me vying for attention. Others insisted I'd be back. Others still simply called me names. That was four year ago. I haven't jumped again since. I haven't posted again since. It is incredible in a society that has such a high tolerance for social malfeasance, one has such a conniption simply because of a small omittance. Seriously, have a drink. There are two pointless wars going on, there are starving people and people with no place to live... and pandemics like AIDS infiltrating the globe. If Brandon was willing to concede he didn't know PHP, SQL or JavaScript, perhaps he was actually being honest about everything else, too. He could have lied. He didn't. Chill out. Jesus.

-A

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My ASP.NET is a little rusty, but I did a fair bit upon a time. Bottom line, if you drink the Kool-Aid and do it their way, it's not so bad. If you try to translate some other web stack concepts into ASP.NET, you're going to be very frustrated.

Specific things to understand:

Page cycle. Critical. ASP.NET events. Viewstate (nice if you don't lean too hard on it) App_Code/App_Data directories. Master pages (heh)

Also MS has some funky way of handling javascript that is non-standard. You add a javascript handler in Page_Load or something like that. I wasn't doing JS back then so can't tell you more. If use a lot of JS you'll want to understand how the IDs for ASP.NET controls are generated.

I tried to use a UserControl in a project and wasn't satisfied, couldn't get the different pieces to see each other and talk to each other correctly. Try before you fly.

I'd recommend finding a source of examples and starting there.

(P.S. If anyone else is curious like me about why someone would want to move from RoR & Django to ASP.NET, read the first post on n00bnotes, it's explained there.)

<comment><USER10> This is mostly outdated information and these issues can be avoided by using ASP.NET MVC instead of Webforms.

</comment></comment><comment> tomh- I think if you are going to develop web applications you are better off with a dynamic language, recompiling large projects is a time killer and can get anoying. Another thing that is you might not like is that in general the opensource community for c# is not as big as other platforms have.

On the other hand the technologies are nice and fast, but for .NET it is all about tooling which can make you lazy and it can get in the way if you do not understand whats going on under the engine. You can pretty much forget about being productive without Visual Studio.

If you wanna geek around in a command-line interface, then .NET is not for you. If you want to do one part of your project the non-MS way, then .NET is probably not for you. I'm Microsoft partner and get all the software for a good price, but I'm not convinced that I would be more productive than with python and django.

<comment><USER10> _If you want to do one part of your project the non-MS way, then .NET is probably not for you._

This is completely false. There's a whole movement (<http://altdotnet.org/>) of developers not doing it Microsoft's way and getting along just fine.

<comment> tomh- You are right, but it doesn't feel the same as for example using freemarker instead of JSF or whatever. My point was more, if you start using some non-MS projects and you want to look up more information about how other people use it, that information might not be there or you will have a hard time finding it. If you are new to .net this can be a quite anoying. There are always exceptions for everything, but I wouldn't recommend someone new to .net diving straight into these alternative things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> After 4yrs developing on the MSFT stack, I can say that it provides a nice end 2 end experience, especially using VS IDE. Now with Mono your deployment options are more open as well, which I find useful.

My only gripe is the cost of the stack, if you are hosting your own servers. I also found it hard to debug live environments, as it was hard to do introspection without bring the whole system to a halt.</comment>


Street dogs in Moscow learn to ride the subway - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_dogs_in_Moscow <comment><USER2> I just read the entire article and I think it's amazing how smart these dogs are and resemble humans in most ways.

Compared to a pet dog who gets lost in a backyard...

<comment><USER3> Pet dogs can do it to, if they have a reason to (like their owner taking too long to get them to the dog park: [http://komonews.com/news/local/seattle- dogs-rush-hour-ride-o...](http://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-dogs-rush- hour-ride-on-the-bus-by-herself-weekly-11-21-2015))

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've seen stray dogs patiently waiting by the side of roads, and cross only when the traffic dies down. It looks extremely human. As if there is a person trapped inside the body of a dog.</comment>


Devuan 3.0.0 - <AUTHOR> https://www.devuan.org/os/announce/beowulf-stable-announce-060120 <comment><USER2> I'm happy to see this project going onward due to the fact that systemd continues to be a giant sore that keeps entrenching on the entire stack. If nothing else, it means that a usable Linux distro w/o systemd is viable.

Love it or hate it, choice is a good thing. They may be getting to the point that I'd seriously look at it for a few non-essential production servers running Debian and Ubuntu.</comment>


Dealing with Loneliness - <AUTHOR> https://manojsurya.com/loneliness-how-to-identify-and-deal-with-it/ <comment><USER2> One thing that's helped me is learning to enjoy my own company.

This is a life-long endeavor which is helped by my natural curiosity. I love going to unfamiliar sections of the library and learning about subjects I didn't already know.

From this can come hobbies like painting, making music, and writing that don't require anyone but yourself to do or enjoy.

Reading itself is a marvelous solitary activity which can let me live entire lives and in different time periods and places from the perspective of different people, and finding writers who are on the same wavelength as me and who "get it" is a real treat. Then I feel I'm really communing with thinkers who've trod the road before and have a lot to teach me, even if we never meet in person.

The toughest situations are on holidays or weekends when I'm walking by restaurants, bars, or houses with private parties full of couples or people who are friends with one another and having a great time. If I'm not focused on listening to a podcast or music or thinking about something else, and if I'm in a sad mood, that can sometimes be hard to take.

Fortunately, such situations are relatively rare, and most of the time I enjoy reading, watching movies, pursuing my hobbies, and learning new things by myself.

<comment><USER3> I have also been doing something similar for a few years to distract myself, reading, music, podcasts, long running tv shows, smoking weed, taking a longer route when leaving work on friday which does not have many restaurants/clubs, you name it.

But it still leaves me feeling empty and unfulfilled. And I can feel the problem only getting worse gradually. I have started hating the things I used to love, silence makes me anxious hence I need music pretty the whole time I am awake. Reading or learning anything new seems pointless since I don't know what to do with the new found knowledge/skill. The feeling of "no one cares" amplifies when you are alone. The advise of just "go out more" or "connect with new people" is not much helpful when you have terrible social anxiety and never learned to interact with people.

In short, distracting yourself might help in short term, but it is not a sustainable solution.

<comment><USER4> (using throwaway account so I don't have to sanitize what I write)

I can relate to what you write, I also used to feel social anxiety and always felt (and still sometimes feel) in the wrong place when going out with more social people.

"Not having learned how to interact with people" is exactly how I often feel, having spent much too much time in front of my computer (teaching myself programming) during my younger years.

But nowadays those deficiencies don't bother me much any more. Seems like I finally accepted who I am, and developed some sense of humor or towards situations where my lack of social skills become apparent. I think you overestimate how much people appreciate the social skills of the "cool guys". Sometimes it's quite ok to be a more introverted person that doesn't need to bother people with small-talk. It becomes easier once you stop trying to be someone you aren't. While it may be more difficult to get to know new people, once people get to know you, I think there is quite some tolerance towards people with less-than-average social skills. It doesn't make you a malicious person.

About "connecting with people": due to family ties I stumbled into various niche hobbies that connect me with similar-minded people. I started playing the game of Go at various local clubs and also sometimes take part in amateur tournaments that give handicap to beginners to give everybody a chance. I also started training in some niche martial arts club after suffering quite some anxiety after a neighbour started showing physical agression towards my family.

My experience with those hobbies where generally very positive. Those niche hobbies have a relatively small social circle, so you often run into people you already know, which is much less stressful to me than constantly having to learn to deal with new people. Also the "niche-ness" of those topics seems to impose a filter on the kind of persons that are drawn to them. I often meet very interesting, open-minded people that way, it's easy to have conversations and there's not much need for bull-shit small-talk :). A common, niche interest, already effortlessly creates some connection.

Thinking back now, I think when I was younger I totally underestimated the availability of open-to-everybody activities that you can join if you want to meet like-minded people (or at least people that don't make you feel uncomfortable). I'd also say that I generally was too pessimistic about the impression I made on others.

Not trying to dismiss anything of what you write, which honestly sounds like a pretty taxing situation to be in. Just trying to give some more data points for a bigger (and maybe or maybe not) more realistic picture.

Maybe I should also mention that I suffered panic attacks and related general anxiety problems since my youth but did nothing about that until starting psychotherapy sessions a few years ago. In the beginning, this was a very difficult step to take, but looking back, I think nothing else would have helped in the long run. If you suffer from "terrible" social anxiety, then maybe this is also an angle to consider.

<comment><USER5> > I can relate to what you write, I also used to feel social anxiety and > always felt (and still sometimes feel) in the wrong place when going out > with more social people.

I think it is important not to conflate social people with extroverted people. Being somewhat introvert I tend to get exhausted around very extrovert people who suffer from verbal diarrhea. To my mind, a social person is someone who can tune in to other people and make them feel comfortable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had several years of my twenties where I was a real loner, and while I enjoy having time to myself, I've found that chronic prolonged loneliness is very detrimental to my psyche, to the point where I get mentally ill.

It may seem hopeless, but it's certainly possible to change your circumstance if you're willing to put in a persistent effort. At the risk of cliche, if I was to give my younger self a few self help pointers, a short list would be: \- Turn to Christ in prayer. \- Quit porn. \- Be healthy. \- Go on 1000 awkward dates until your anxiety is beat into the mud, and your social skills have leveled up a few times. You will find love on date 1001.

Score dates on online dating sites. Look for sites that aren't just for adolescents looking for flings. If you're struggling to even get dates, buy a nice shirt, get a haircut and take some headshots with a professional photographer.

If you're willing to grind it out using these principles, your odds should be pretty good for turning your life around. I say this as a married father of three who hardly has a minute to himself anymore, who was a hopeless 'forever alone' case only a decade ago.

<comment><USER7> "Turn to christ for prayer"

I thought this was going to be a joke at first. Just remove that part and swap it with "meditation" because that's all it is.

Meditating (prayer to jesus) is completely worthless, spoken from someone who did it for 10 years straight daily. It doesn't change anything, and makes you CONSTANTLY second guess your decisions as though a higher power didn't intend for something you wanted to go your way.

<comment><USER6> Regardless of your experience, praying to Christ is what I did, and it worked wonders for me. I realise this point might get some negative reactions on a forum like this, but I wouldn't be true to myself if I didn't mention it when talking about how I turned my life around.

A church can also be a great place to meet easy-going people looking to make friends, if you can leave your intellectual ego at the door. Not to mention meet potential dates who aren't deeply into modern hookup culture.

<comment><USER8> I think you would have got a better reaction if you had kept it vague / respectful of other creeds. Stated like that, it is effectively proselytism - which I understand is something your creed might encourage, but most people are wont to react badly to people telling them what to believe in.

Next time, if you replace that sentence with "I concentrated on my faith rituals", you will likely not get any bad reaction.

<comment><USER9> >Next time, if you replace that sentence with "I concentrated on my faith rituals", you will likely not get any bad reaction.

Why should he have to deny or mask his own faith when speaking with himself?

After all it is a list he created to give to his younger self....Could you just imagine yourself going back in time and masking your own faith to your younger self, on account suggesting to yourself what faith to practice may result in a bad reaction..from yourself.

<comment><USER8> _> when speaking with himself?_

He is not - he is speaking _to the HN crowd_ about what he'd say to himself. Big difference.

It's like sitting in a pub telling the crowd about having wet dreams - you're not going to be literal.

<comment><USER9> >He is not - he is speaking to the HN crowd about what he'd say to himself. Big difference.

Clearly there was nothing in his comment pushing his religion on others or telling people what religion they should practice.

At the end of the day you are suggesting someone mask and deny their own faith.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article makes a good effort to identify the root causes of loneliness and provide solutions, but it misses the mark a bit.

Loneliness is an involuntary reaction that arises from a lack of _meaningful_ social connections. Here a meaningful connection is defined as one where there is a mutual sense that you can confide in each other, you understand each other, and you would be there to support each other through difficult situations large and small.

You can have hundreds of social connections but if they don't have these properties, they're of limited utility in combating loneliness. This is why even in a city where it's easy to meet people, loneliness is still a common ailment. This is why celebrities adored by millions can still be so lonely that they end their lives.

It's difficult though not impossible to develop meaningful connections during adulthood. It takes years of contact and requires social or environmental conditions that may not be easy to find. So historically, the #1 source of them has been family (though not everyone is born into a family which supports and encourages them, and the prevalence of such healthy families is decreasing).

The loneliness epidemic in modern times is thus attributable in great part to the erosion of family units and other early age relationships. What makes it difficult to solve is that there were a number of grievances with that model which the liberal, individualist project intended to address, such as the oppression of women who were economically dependent on their husbands, and the way in which tightly knit families often stifled self-expression. The modern system in which all adults are workers and consumers also supports the interests of capital (more workers equals cheaper labor, more consumers means bigger markets, together you get record growth). No one really wants to roll back the progress that the liberal project achieved, but the side effects are ravaging society.

The colloquial solution is Friendsgiving dinner--let's still do all the things people used to do with their families, but do it with our friends. However it misses the point that meaningful relationships must be developed over years of regular contact, mutual trust, and even sacrifice--not impossible, certainly worth attempting, but hard to do reliably in adulthood with people who may develop divergent interests over time (for example, starting their own families). Therefore it is unlikely to be a systemic solution. I have no systemic solution to propose.

<comment><USER11> > However it misses the point that meaningful relationships must be developed > over years of regular contact, mutual trust, and even sacrifice

The benefit of family over friends is that you start with a high degree of trust which can only ever be lost; whereas with friends trust either takes time, effort, or is accidental (in which case, unless you're lucky, you need to expend effort to find). Friendship bonds that started from a young age are more like family in that regard.

I always thought that the emphasis on "trust" was a pop psychology cliche and not very constructive, but only recently have I learned to appreciate that trust doesn't come easy for many people, and that I may be an outlier in being able to more readily trust others on the one hand, and requiring less trust as a precondition to being open, even after they've hurt me. (I suppose a similar dimension is your predisposition to feeling vulnerable. I experience embarrassment and shame all the time, but I don't think those feelings make me feel _as_ vulnerable and hurt as they do for many others, even in the context of my closest friends and family. If you feel more vulnerable to actual or perceived judgments, then it stands to reason you might be less willing to trust others enough to be open and honest--to experience a relationship from which you can derive strength, which may not require sharing secrets but definitely requires being receptive to feelings of affirmation.)

And to the extent one needs external validation, actual or at the ready, active or passive (e.g. a good listener), to maintain a positive, healthy mind, then I could see how loneliness could be especially devastating for some people. The very thing you would need to cope with loneliness is the one thing you lack; digging yourself out of that hole could be difficult, indeed, because not only does the simple act of meeting people and beginning relationships require effort in the face of diminishing psychological strength, developing the type of relationship needed to stop your descent requires even more effort and time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Open your phone or WhatsApp contacts, scroll them and check who are those > friends, relations or family you want to meet. Now plan for 2-3 meetings > weekly, until your loneliness feeling goes away.

This is what triggers me A LOT. When I open my contacts, there are literally only four. One of them is my mother and the other three are therapists. I don't know how to deal with that. Even if I want to I am not really able to find people to do something with like going out to a bar or whatever. I just don't have anybody to talk to.

Also, since I don't have a Smartphone, nor Facebook, Google or whatever account, it is even harder to get into contact with people. No, i won't make a google or facebook account.

<comment><USER13> What about a Meetup account? [https://www.meetup.com/](https://www.meetup.com/)

<comment><USER12> I try to go every month to the "Hack 'n' tell" organized from some people around the Chaos Computer Club. While it's fun, I generally just sit there and talk to nobody.

I do ask questions and discuss with people, but I don't get any closer then this, which results in an even worse feel of loneliness in the end.

<comment><USER14> I've had similar experiences in such settings. You might even find that you have some particular shared interests, might make plans to get together at some point, but nothing ever comes of it. I guess that is just human nature. My very particular piece of advice: If you are only and want to connect with people, don't limit yourself to Chaos events (or something similar). These gatherings are not very well-suited to making the type of connections you seem to seek. Even people who have been part of the scene for a long time struggle to meet people there. It's pretty much a scene like any other: If you don't meet the right people early on and make some kind of connection it's hard to get further and you will always feel left out to some degree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Loneliness works as a motivator.

The point where you get tired of being lonely is the point where you actually try to fix it. That can mean working to improve yourself and your social skills. It can mean joining local groups to meet people, make friends and do good work.

I watch people who are older than me and I see so many more habits that lead to consistently strong social lives.

Golf is huge. Guys who join a club and go play once or twice a week, then hang out together afterwards. I don't play but the older I've gotten the more I've respected the benefits.

Church is another. Easy to get involved, totally free.

Family is another and one that I think causes the biggest loneliness issue because so many people move away for work these days. So many people I know who are older have most of their family in one city and get together constantly.

I'm sure there's more, but the short of it is: use loneliness as a motivator to decide you aren't going to be lonely anymore and find ways to fix the problem. It might been a combination of self improvement, forced courage or effort but you can do it.

<comment><USER16> > use loneliness as a motivator to decide you aren't going to be lonely > anymore and find ways to fix the problem.

I'm sure it wasn't intended, but your post comes across as incredibly dismissive. Oh, you are lonely? You just need motivation. Oh, your family is a toxic dumpster fire that taught you all the wrong social skills? Dont move away from that. Oh, you are lonely? Try golf and church.

Your basic point that loneliness wont magically fix itself is true, but your words instead magically wave away every complication.

People can be introverts that nonetheless want social contact. By the end of a workday I'm exhausted. My peers all have young children, making schedules harder to coordinate and many of the activities I enjoy are off the table if one cant string 3 sentences together without interruption.

Which isnt to say that I cant work on improving things, but posts like yours are incredibly discouraging. It just says that my problems are my fault for bring me. Instead of saying I should find options that work for me it just says to learn to enjoy what I hate. It says just get motivated.

That's the kind of thing that makes people MORE alienated and lonely, and LESS motivated to think there is hope.

<comment><USER15> Was not intended. I was shy and lonely and it never got better until I got so sick of being lonely that I forced myself to overcome the problems.

Get motivated...to not be lonely so you get determined to find ways to fix it.

The longer you're lonely the more you get sick of it until it motivates you to find a way. That's what I meant. It's pain and eventually you will seek pain relief.

<comment><USER17> Honestly, your comments are pretty much an r/wowthanksimcured meme.

<comment><USER15> If that's how you're reading it, it is because you want to.

Loneliness isn't fixed easily and it requires a lot of effort on your part to fix it. Until you hit the point that you're determined to fix it, it won't get fixed.

It's not a virus that just has to run its course. You have to purposefully have the resolve to change it and over time, being lonely for long enough will make you hit a point where you say "Enough is enough. I'm not going to spend my life lonely."

Step 1 might be hitting the gym or joining a workout group like F3 or cross fit. Looking for a club like Toastmasters to help make you more comfortable stepping out of your shell. Invite people to lunch.

Start following a sports team and find other people who do too to talk about it with and get together with to watch / attend the games. Hockey games are a blast in person once you figure out what's going on.

None of it is going to make a difference unless you, personally, are determined to fix it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Find a gym, go. If you dont like it, find another. Keep going. 3x/week. Forever. Be humble, be curious, be friendly.

Start every gym session by running. If you cant run, jog. If you cant jog, walk. Exercize is _by far_ the most useful thing you can do for yourself. Other problems (like being lonely) become easier to fix or just fix themselves.

<comment><USER19> Exercise can be extremely beneficial. It can even be a diversion away from the pain of social isolation. I don't understand the odd stipulation of starting every gym session in any particular way.

<comment><USER20> For me a 5-10m jog at medium pace is a good way to warm up. Don't get tired, barely get out of breath, just stretch your muscles and get your body ready for the rest of the session.

If you prefer to stretch then do that instead :)

<comment><USER19> I prefer neither. That's my point: one of the beauties of exercise is that there are so many ways to approach it. One of the most important keys to a sustainable exercise program is tailoring it to what works for the person doing it, not what works for other people. A person is far more likely to do what they enjoy doing rather than forcing themselves to do what other people enjoy doing.

<comment><USER20> I've done the whole "no stretching" thing before weightlifting when I was younger. It's led to injury every time, and that injury leads to 3-month breeaks.

Trading 10 minutes per session for a greatly increased chance of sticking with it indefinitely is the choice I make.

If you're lucky enough to not need stretching, or you do something like yoga so as to be pretty limber all the time, more power to you!

<comment><USER19> You were injured EVERY time you lifted without stretching? Sorry to be blunt, but I don't believe you. You were injured when you were younger and didn't stretch. That's two veriables, not one. If you actually injured yourself as often as you say you did when you were young and perhaps lifting weights without the necessary care, in addition to stretching, you probably also paid stricter attention to your form.

I lift weights with zero stretching. And the vast majority of people who've attended the gyms that I've gone to don't stretch. [https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/34/5/324](https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/34/5/324)

<comment><USER20> No, I mean that within a few weeks of starting without stretching I'd get injured.

Form is definitely part of it, but I went through a few cycles of "start going to the gym, do sessions without stretching, get injured, take time off".

Stretching has increased the time between injuries. And moreover, when injuries have occurred after stretching it has been very obvious _why_ the injury occurred (bad form or too-high weights) whereas before it felt like form was fine, weight was fine, but injury occurred anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Lookup groups on Meetup.com, when I first moved to a new city, did not know anyone, started going to meetup.com, then I started my own meetup group. Lot of work, but have built a good list of good friends. Making and maintaining friends is work, you need to put time into it. No one comes out of the blue and want to be your friend (well unless you are rich or hot)...but I know many hot/rich people who are lonely too.

</comment><comment><USER22> I joined a salsa class about 9 months ago and my life has changed drastically because of it. Salsa is a partner dance, so improving my skills gave me the confidence to be more social. Since the salsa scene in my town is modestly sized the kind of people that join seem to be "interested in seeking new experiences" kinds of people. Lots of world languages are represented, and there seems to be a disproportionately high amount of Masters and PHDs in the group. For me the best part is that everyone seems genuinely interested in improving themselves.

I don't think this is a panacea (can there be one for solving loneliness?) but some might find it a good idea so I wanted to share.

</comment><comment><USER23> Am I reading this writeup wrong? Because to me it reads like "oh you're lonely? deal with it, or just make friends!" which isn't very helpful. It's more like a well-intentioned spitting in the face of everyone who is lonely and repeatedly tried and failed to make meaningful relationships.

<comment><USER24> >"oh you're lonely? deal with it, or just make friends!"

No, it's much worse, it's telling you to just hang out more with all of those friends you already have.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Guys, this is amazing. I wasn't expecting lots of comments and discussions. I had a long day and crashing right now. I will read comments here and will try to reply to my best effort to most of your thoughts. Got more than 7000 unique users from here. Thank you. Hope you liked the article :)

</comment><comment><USER25> > When your best friend comes to you and shares how he or she is feeling. How > would you react? I believe – you will have a listening ear for them, feel > their pain, care for them and support them.

many lonely people reading this wont know because they dont have a best friend.

<comment><USER26> the author doesn't seem to realize the irony

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> In an ever-connected world, it's entirely plausible for you to die alone and for no one to have seemingly cared.[0]

[0] - [https://www.oddee.com/item_98735.aspx](https://www.oddee.com/item_98735.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER28> Reposting as it is on point.

" Proximity, unplanned encounters and the privacy to confide with someone have been identified as key factors in making friends as an adult.[cite]"

Factors that make it difficult for Americans to make friends as they age:

1\. Isolation driven by car culture.

2\. Un-walkable communities outside cities.

3\. Media driven self absorption vitiating real world interaction.

4\. Political and social siloing as a result of #3.

"Bowling Alone" by Putnam was prescient by did not offer any realistic solutions.

<comment><USER23> I disagree with the first two factors, as a European. I live in a city where people walk and cycle a lot, but that does nothing for loneliness. No, seeing random strangers on the street is not a substitute for a meaningful relationships, and no, these random strangers you see do not make friends either.

Factor three is probably a major one in all countries where people are spending time staring at screens instead of interacting with each other.

Factor #4 doesn't really show up much in my corner of Europe.

<comment><USER29> I think this is where US culture and European culture differs a lot. For some reason, in US everyone needs to interact with anyone who stays longer than two seconds in close enough proximity. I am so thankful this is not a case in Europe (at least where I am) — for an introvert hating chit-chat it gets annoying really fast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There's a distinction between loneliness and solitude. I've been looking at this from a perspective that is more relatable to psychonauts.

I think the "social connection" is just the superficial aspect of loneliness. I think more fundamentally, this is about alienation, of which loneliness is one of ways it comes out.

I have met people who created the appearance of social connections -- idealized lives on Facebook, instagram, etc. and they feel very much isolated and alone. They feel that way because they still feel alienated, that they cannot be who they truly feel.

<comment><USER6> As long as you choose to live within a society, you're going to run into a lot of trouble if you try to just ignore everyone else and only structure your life around your own imagination (double so if your imagination has been bastardized by drugs).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Every time I get lonely I want to adopt a puppy. Then I struggle with the thought of my incapability to make him happy because of my lifestyle (I don't have my own house and move frequently)... Of course I feel even more miserable than before when my sadness was caused by my loneliness.

This happens at least once a month.

<comment><USER32> Why not go to the local pound and taking the dogs on a walk? That way you can feel the satisfaction of providing happiness to less-fortunate animals and not have to worry about owning one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> During the first 30 or so years of my life I actively strained to have a happy family, wide social circle and all the associated social trappings. The amount of money, energy and time I plowed into this was incredible, and, in retrospect, I was often taken advantage of due to my almost desperate need to belong. From the outside I was a picture of social success, especially given that I had recently moved countries and started from scratch in the middle of nowhere.

But you see, it is easy to completely lose ones own identity if one values themselves from the mirror of the expectations of others, or, even worse, their expectations regarding others' expectations of themselves. At some especially dark night of my soul I was forced to admit that I had no idea who _I_ was. Everything I did was, essentially, facade building, and behind that facade there was emptiness, and a fair bit of chaos as well.

So sometime around 35 I gave up. I cut out my toxic parents from my life, stopped pursuing romantic relationships ot of fear of being alone, stopped collecting 'cool' acquaintances in real life and on Facebook and focused instead on two things: \- building quality relationships with those few humans whom I loved, respected and who truly reciprocated in kind, \- discovering myself and building a stable foundation to become fully me.

I also got a dog, not because I am a dog person, but because I figured out that I have been looking for unconditional approval no human can actually give, but dogs, from what I read, can, and do all the time. This proved to be the right decision and has helped me a lot to become my own person.

It was, and still is, an adventure. I have discovered many new things I enjoy and discarded equally many I only partook because it was a way to please, finally stabilised my finances and career, acquired tons of knowledge, read hundreds of sci-fi and fantasy books, developed my own style, decorated my home entirely to my taste and, perhaps most surprisingly for anyone who knows me, taken up triathlon which I enjoy so much. It is both expensive and time- consuming, but, at last, all that time, money and energy goes to myself, forming a positive feedback loop.

My social interactions are a lot fewer and my circle of acquaintances a lot smaller these days, but each and every one of them is cherished. My life is busy enough now that both additional social interactions and romantic pursuits perforce are subjected to a sort of cost-benefit analysis - will this activity help me grow as a person more than the one I will be skipping out on instead?

My main insight from this process is that it seems that we in general expect someone else to provide for us the feeling of safety, companionship and happiness that we are fully capable of giving to ourselves. It is so much easier to blame others for our own misery - it requires no effort and gives a temporary relief from pain, transforming it into anger. Empowerment starts when, instead of hoisting it off to others we can not control, but can endlessly blame, we fully take responsibility for making ourselves happy, content and safe. The 'unconditional positive regard' [1] is something we can give ourselves if only we allow ourselves to do so, and in so doing, heal and become whole in a way that nobody else can do for us.

Similarly to @pmoriarty, holidays which are traditional to be spent with ones family can still be tough for me sometimes. But just this last Christmas (which I spent entirely by myself) I came to conclusion that my main source of sadness is not the fact that I am alone. I do not like large gatherings of people, I do not enjoy most of the traditions around the holiday and I am bored by inane conversations which are part and parcel of gatherings of people who have not seen each other for a while and do not even know each other all that well anymore.

No, the sadness is due to the feeling that I am missing out on something that everyone else has, which society has conditioned me to believe is the only way to be happy at this particular date and time, with the associated feelings of unfairness, jealousy and self-pity. Once I got past that, I realised that I have the freedom to choose what _I_ want to do with the evening that will make _me_ happy, most likely a lot happier than any alternatives any other humans could provide. So I took home delicious food and spent the night being cosy and reflecting on the past year and making plans for the next one.

So to conclude, "there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives" [2]. It takes courage and a fair bit of work to find yours, but it is worth it.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconditional_positive_regard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconditional_positive_regard) [2] [https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/11/01/figuring/](https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/11/01/figuring/)

</comment><comment><USER34> Allow me to "pimp" an old contribution of mine on this topic: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17794060](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17794060)

</comment><comment><USER35> This is a weird thread, full of personal solutions. There is no instruction manual for life.</comment>


There Are Two VC Industries - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/09/there-are-two-venture-capital-industries.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AVc+%28A+VC%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

<comment><AUTHOR> There have been a bunch of articles about VCs being replaced by Angels and Bootstrapping, but really those articles should just be saying that software businesses have matured to the point where VC funding might not be necessary at all.

At what point can I walk into a bank and get a normal business loan for my web app company? I think we're approaching that point.

In my mind you can bootstrap the average web app company, and when you actually acquire some revenue and need capital to grow, get a small business loan. Is the risk in these kind of companies any greater than the average restaurent? I don't think it is. Software has lower capital requirements at first, lower operating expenses, lower overhead, but for some reason the norm is still to trade equity for cash. Forget that, just trade debt for cash like a normal business. I'm not sure banks will go for it yet but I think we're approaching that point when it is possible.

<comment><USER2> But if a restaurant goes under, you have all the capital right there (pizza ovens, tables). Software consumes its capital. Banks aren't the answer. If it fails, what are they going to get back? That year of your life?

What we need is crowd-sourced, micro-equity. Anyone who thinks an idea is good to invest small amounts for small stakes of equity. The barriers have been regulatory legal issues, but those will be soon eliminated. OpenStarts is one such initiative working on this.

<comment><USER3> If a restaurant goes under, whoever provided funding takes a big hit. Losses = value destroyed. Liquidation values on fixtures and equipment are low.

BTW, here's a good rule of thumb for investing in restaurants as a non- controlling partner: Don't. I never heard of a good ending, even if it was good for a while.

<comment><USER4> That's why realistic restaurateurs buy all their initial fixtures and equipment used from liquidation auctions :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> is it possible to get pg to filter out the utm_source= google/feedburner querystring params on submit? it would filter out a lot of dupes...

<comment><USER6> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Since the capital requirement is no longer a large barrier to entry for web startups, I am wondering this mean:

\- a startup should stay in stealth mode longer in order to give it a bigger legs up on its possible competitors \- silicon valley connection to VC money becomes less critical and the team makeup for execution becomes more important. This may mitigate some of the advantages of starting in the valley.

What do you think about the assertion above?

<comment><USER8> Working on a web startup in Europe the big majority of advice I get is saying "Go to the Valley".

The thing is, in Europe, nobody takes web startups seriously yet. The web is still seen as something that neighbour kid does perfectly well. Why start a company based on that when some kid can do it for a fraction of the price and just as well?

In the Valley, I hear, the attitude is a lot different and if nothing else that means it's a lot easier to get traction.

<comment><USER9> I guess the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence... Sure, people in Silicon Valley usually have a great attitude towards the web and entrepreneurs but it's also cut-throat competition out there. Don't believe that being based in the valley alone will make your life much easier. If you already have a complete team, a minimum viable product and some traction, then you'll be able to meet there people who know how to build up your audience and maybe get funding. There's definitely more experienced people there per square meter than anywhere else. But it's also a very expensive place in terms of housing/office space and talents.

Europe might not be as web-friendly but there has never been a better time for startups there. Think Seedcamp in the UK, startup bootcamp in Danemark, Hackfwd in Germany and many, many more.. There are loads of people in Europe taking startups very seriously.

At the end of the day, users don't care if you're based in Singapore, London or San Francisco. Also, you should be able to get an iPad not too long after anybody else in the US :)

<comment><USER10> While I develop my first prototype in Mallorca I´m observing what's happening in the continent and speculate about the emergence of a fuzzy system of VCs, talented geeks, developers and researchers, with the same virtues of Silicon Valley. I dare say that the event here in Europe will be a Silicon Landscape instead of a Valley. We have the funding and the technical systems. The economic one will develop slowly. I see the main constraints within the policy-political system, which is based on command-and-control and top-down hierarchies, making it very difficult to emerge from the bottom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article raises an interesting point. However, I would argue that the startup costs have fallen across the board, whether you're a software startup or a startup in another field. First, it's much less expensive today for startups to obtain key services due to the prevalence and availability of offshoring. Second, new technology enables many startups to handle some services in-house, whereas before it required hiring an expensive service provider (e.g., Google AdWords). Third, there is a shift in mentality towards a leaner, smarter mode of starting up. Founders no longer feel the need to obtain overhead that (a) requires substantial investment and (b) creates little direct value for customers. If I remember correctly, a story from the dot com bust was when eToys used some of its funding to BUY a high-rise office building in Los Angeles.

<comment><USER12> Your second point: Isn't Google AdWords an example of a good third party service that replaces an expensive in-house specialist (or hired outside specialist)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's data that breaks the "Two Venture Capital Industries" down by dollars of funding, # of deals and median deal size.

[http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/there-are- two...](http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/there-are-two-venture- capital-industries-heres-the-data)</comment>


American Foods Chockfull of Ingredients Banned in Other Countries - <AUTHOR> http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/02/27/us-food-products.aspx

<comment><USER2> There's a lot of nonsense in this article, and it's important to take this source in context. Joseph Mercola is a crackpot who claims that microwaving food is dangerous[1], that HIV is not the cause of AIDS[2], that vaccines cause autism[3], and a lot of other patently false bullshit. That doesn't mean everything he says is false, but it does mean that what he says has about as much chance of being true as what you hear shouted by a crazy guy on the subway.

[1] <http://www.mercola.com/article/microwave/hazards2.htm>

[2] [http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2001/07/1...](http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2001/07/11/aids- part-one.aspx)

[3] [http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/08/0...](http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/08/06/Proof- That-Thimerosal-Induces-AutismLike-Neurotoxicity.aspx)

<comment><USER3> However the headline does appear to be true.

brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, olestra -- all banned here in the EU, but not in the US.

<comment><USER2> Trivially, yes, it is true. You can also find additives that are approved in the EU but not the US. What we're looking at here are additives that fall close to the "safe" line in terms of supporting research, and that's why different regulatory bodies disagree about them. A _fair_ analysis would be "Differences in banned substances between the EU and the US", but a sensationalist quack like Mercola has no interest in fairness or honesty.

The article also includes a section where he says "here are some of the most common food additives to watch out for:", followed by a list of ingredients many of which are harmless (unless you have a specific sensitivity), and most of which are not banned in either the EU or the US. But because of the context in which they are presented, a casual reader could easily conclude that sucralose and MSG are dangerous additives banned in the EU.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This quack does not belong on HN. Flagged.</comment>


You Need A Go Command - <AUTHOR> http://www.matthewhughes.co.uk/you-need-a-go-command/

<comment><USER2> Heh. I thought it was going to be a golang command that I sorely needed. Nice tip, though, for bash command line users.</comment>


DXR: a smart code browser using instrumented compilers for static analysis - <AUTHOR> http://quetzalcoatal.blogspot.com/2011/06/alpha-release-of-dxr.html

<comment><AUTHOR> See also <http://dxr.mozilla.org/clang/>, [http://dxr.mozilla.org/clang/clang/include/clang/AST/Recursi...](http://dxr.mozilla.org/clang/clang/include/clang/AST/RecursiveASTVisitor.h.html), and [http://quetzalcoatal.blogspot.com/2011/07/dxr- alpha-2-releas...](http://quetzalcoatal.blogspot.com/2011/07/dxr- alpha-2-release.html) for some more information and a demo. DXR does a bunch of static analysis to provide an explorable, informative view of source code, with special emphasis on dealing with C and C++ macros.</comment>


Rails 3.2 Performance: Another Step Slower - <AUTHOR> http://www.williambharding.com/blog/rails/rails-3-2-performance-another-step-slower/ <comment><USER2> We take performance very seriously, but we can't locate and fix every perf regression on our own. If you can give us metrics and repro code, we can work to fix the issues.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Aaron. I imagine I'll probably spend Thanksgiving weekend trying to dig further into what is newly slow on our 3.2.15.

The trick with pinpointing a cause is that when I look at the data NR provides, every partial rendered and every action called is slower than it had been previously. Combined with the immensity of our codebase, it's going to be time-consuming to put a finger on a single repro-able cause. But we'll do our best to isolate and report back.

FWIW, have you guys ever considered creating a performance suite test app? With such sparse Google results around Rails performance changes over time, it could be useful to compare the performance of Rails versions on an apples-to- apples basis if we could see how the performance of the test app changed over Rails versions. If we're lucky, it might even catch some of the performance regressions that have happened in the dot releases previously. Even if not, it would at least demonstrate that performance is an important consideration in Rails' evolution. I'd sleep better knowing that.

Maybe take a popular mid-sized framework like Spree and see how it performs on 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, etc.?

<comment><USER3> If you send me a flamegraph using ?pp=flamegraph_embed I can help you figure out why it got slow.

I am actively working on getting a long term perf benchmark using the Discourse bench. Server is already provisioned by ninefold. see my talk (towards the end) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWyEWUD- ztQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWyEWUD-ztQ)

<comment><USER4> You are doing god's work with Discourse & improving rails/ruby to support 50/ms response/per request.

Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ruby has some great tools to isolate and fix performance issues. In particular, ruby-prof and kcachegrind (or qcachegrind) are tremendously valuable resources for tracking down and eliminating performance bottlenecks.

I did a writeup on it a bit ago here: [https://www.coffeepowered.net/2013/08/02/ruby-prof-for- rails...](https://www.coffeepowered.net/2013/08/02/ruby-prof-for-rails/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks cheald. Will take a look at those. My problem with using the performance tracking tools in the past has always been that I get output like "100k string allocations," "3500 ActiveRecord objects instantiated," "6000 ActiveSupport methods executed," etc. With so much complexity in Rails, it can be maddeningly difficult to pick a culprit from amongst the 1000 papercuts that tend to slow an app down.

Even if we just arbitrarily said "let's focus on whichever method is cumulatively taking most time," we have no reference point for whether Rails could make that method faster or not. The time taken by a method or instantiation is just some number, and whether that number is "good enough" is ultimately a judgement call in which I have little basis for comparison.

I hope I'm wrong and that there are some big obvious things to optimize, but when I've gone down these rabbit holes in the past, my experience has been that there's usually so much data and so many pieces things contributing to slowdown that it's hard to find high-impact things to fix. Especially when it comes to a framework as multilayered & complex as Rails.

<comment><USER5> If you want to email me a gzipped callgrind or two, I'd be happy to take a look and see if I can make any suggestions. You can reach me at cheald @ gmail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've upgraded several Rails apps from ~>2.3.0 through to 4.0. I saw performance regressions around Rails 3, and they've subsequently disappeared when upgrading to 3.2 and 4.0 - the latter in general being much faster.

I have to wonder what you're doing that's giving you an average of 480ms? Have you stripped out middleware you're not using? Have you looked into exactly where the time is going? There are so many places to start, it's hard to offer much concrete advice.

</comment><comment><USER7> I just wish someone would find it in their economic interest to do for Ruby what V8 did for Javascript. Doesn't seem like there is any fundamental reason for Ruby to run slower - it's just a matter of putting the (substantial) resources in to make it happen. JRuby might be the solution to this though, if they can catch up with MRI's functionality and stay on par.

<comment><USER8> Twitter was in a nice position to better Ruby in terms of performance, though they chickened out and escaped to Scala.

Even Twitter went public recently and posed to challenge big guys such as Google, Facebook, they've lost my respect as a technology company.

<comment><USER9> > Twitter was in a nice position to better Ruby in terms of performance, > though they chickened out and escaped to Scala.

Actually, they escaped to the JVM, and if their job reqs are any indication, they hire massively for Java engineer positions and hardly at all for Scala ones.

I wouldn't call that chickening out, more common sense.

Rails is great for prototypes and toy apps, but once you start needing scale, it's simply not up to the task.

<comment> why-el > Rails is great for toy apps

This gets said here a lot. What about GitHub and Shopify, and ...? Are those toy apps?

<comment><USER10> I'm curious too how much of each of these is still built on Rails, and how much has been tweaked, tuned and rewritten to be 'inspired' by Rails, but no longer Rails.

<comment> why-el Good question. I would say it varies, but after all they are mostly likely not changing things dramatically, at least thats what you get from watching talks from both companies[1].

[1] [http://www.slideshare.net/jduff/how-shopify-scales- rails-204...](http://www.slideshare.net/jduff/how-shopify-scales- rails-20443485)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've upgraded several apps, I've been on the Rails train since 1.2, and each time there's been slight, and more often major, performance gains. Yes, some of these apps where big (Not Twitter big, but big enough. And no, they didn't need to do anything too crazy hardware wise.)

Almost all Rails apps that are slow on performance suffer from architectural flaws or oddities in the code. A lot of time Rails get a beating when it boils down to slow, illformed SQL queries. One time I had a customer who wanted me to rewrite their platform because "Rails was so slow", when in fact they did some heavy image processing and uploading to a cloud storage within the browser request. I'm not saying OP does any of this, but since I don't know any details about their codebase or infrastructure I'm making some general remarks that may or may not apply.

Ruby code can be written in so many ways, I guess that is its blessing and its curse. There are bad ways to do things, and there are good ways. With great freedom comes great responsibility.

I would encourage OP to push on and upgrade to Rails 4.0.1. The gap between Rails 3 and Rails 4 isn't that huge at all. I'm sure you'll be pleased.

</comment><comment><USER12> Rails is not for building big apps. It works better for small, even quick and dirty apps. When you want to build something that is big or that will evolve into big, choose a better language and don't rely on a framework to save you. In fact even big apps are better broken up into many separate functional apps integrated by things like an RDBMS or a message queue broker or a NoSQL cluster.

And you really need to think hard about caching. There are many layers at which you can cache stuff and when you get into caching parts of pages, there is a whole architectural design issue around how to divide things up.

In solving these kinds of problems Rails and its overly simplified ActiveRecord pattern, just don`t give you much wiggle room.

<comment><USER13> I've been thinking a lot of the same thoughts about Django. I'm tempted -- but far too lazy -- to write a decision tree about using Django (which would probably also apply for rails). I really love your comment, _Don 't rely on a framework to save you._

Django is great for consultants/contractors who need to crank out work fairly quickly that may be quite similar to other jobs they've got on the docket. It's great for new programmers or programmers who aren't familiar with the OS- level interactions between a web server and a programming language. It's great for apps with very low complexity (current and projected).

Once you start getting out of these use cases though, IMO, you are asking for trouble getting too invested in the Django (or Rails) ecosystem. It's worth it to learn about how the web server interfaces with the language runtime, so that you can capitalize on microframeworks. When you buy into a framework, you're buying into a huge set of opinions about really important things that have been made based on being flexible enough for about anyone.

I love Django for what it has enabled me to do in my life, and have learned so, so much from getting into its guts to solve problems. That said it would take a lot for me as a salaried, in-house software developer to start a new project using (Django | Rails).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> For what it's worth, apparently the Basecamp team was hitting ~50ms request times with their new (well, now it's not that new) design: [http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3112-how-basecamp-next-got- to...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3112-how-basecamp-next-got-to-be-so- damn-fast-without-using-much-client-side-ui)

All technology has its trade-offs. Rails can be plenty fast, it just all depends on how you're using it.

<comment><USER15> It'ns not that Rails is that fast (it isn't), they simply cache every damned piece upfront. When your requests barely ever touch the rails but are satified from the cache, you can use nearly everything as your backend stack.

<comment><USER16> This is exactly why I started to use rails recently. If it becomes pretty easy to cache everything and you get the amazing productivity boosts that rails provides you then there's really no down side.

My first rails app is approaching 4k lines of code and responses that are cached using fragment caching are rendered in 5-8ms usually on a micro EC2 instance (aka. really bad hardware). I'm using MRI with rails 4.0.1 and I have not done any tweaking. Just basic caching that was trivial to implement and running rails in production mode which is just setting an ENV variable.

<comment><USER15> You'll encounter the downsides when you have to do some serious number- crunching or analytical queries. Or just highly dynamic views that aren't cache-able.

But that's not rails' fault, we all know that ruby itself isn't the fastest language to develop in, the "bloat" of rails just increases this a little.

As long as you have enough cheap hardware to throw at all these problems, everything should be fine, though.

<comment><USER16> I'm not too afraid of number crunching because if I do need some type of analytical report crunching done I'll just chuck them in a sidekiq worker and use the whenever gem to setup a cron job.

I already setup sidekiq to work with e-mails and have whenever being used to generate a new sitemap once a day.

And tbh I don't think I'll ever go too crazy with highly custom analytical queries either because google analytics is quite strong with custom event trackers and tools like new relic are excellent for system health and performance metrics.

As for highly dynamic views that can't be cached then I would worry about them when the time comes. Maybe there's a way to setup varnish or nginx with SSIs to deal with that, it's something I never researched in depth but have to assume is a solved problem at this point with a little elbow grease and technical knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The original article seemed to be saying "Rails shouldn't get slower with every release" but almost everybody seems to be replying as if it said "Please help me make my Rails application go faster because I'm an idiot" ... did I just misread?

<comment><USER18> Debugging a large application on Rails for performance issues is a non-trivial task. I wouldn't be so quick to assume.

<comment><USER17> I didn't assume the author was right. I was pointing out the disparity between the point of the original article and the comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yes, would very much appreciate some flamegraphs [http://samsaffron.com/archive/2013/03/19/flame-graphs-in- rub...](http://samsaffron.com/archive/2013/03/19/flame-graphs-in-ruby- miniprofiler) comparing the apps behavior on 2.3 and your latest (and 4.0)

Without exact profiling information its very hard to fix these issues.

</comment><comment><USER19> It takes quite a bit of scrolling down to find Rails performance on this page:

[http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r7&hw=i7...](http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r7&hw=i7&test=query)

No surprises here.

<comment><USER20> Thanks for this, it's a pretty useful comparison chart.

I don't know why the Rails community gets their panties in a bunch every time someone brings up the poor performance of rails. It is a a slow bloated framework that requires you throw hardware at your scaling problem instead of writing decent code. In the end, there is only so much hardware you can buy before your app stops scaling and you need a complete rewrite, the way Twitter did.

<comment><USER6> Let's shut that trope down right now.

Ruby is slow, and Rails is slow, although they are both much better than it used to be.

But this isn't bloat. Rails is a large framework that provides moderately sensible defaults. The tradeoff of that is there's a lot of stuff in there which might not be used by every app. This, and the overall flexibility of the framework, can cause performance to suffer, and combined with Ruby's relatively lacklustre performance, that can cause big scaling problems.

Twitter is a poor example though, given the somewhat unique problem space it's tackling. But - building a standard e-commerce or service site? No problem. Getting bigger? Add some hardware. Still not enough? Start customising the framework. Because it's a toolset, not a one-size-fits-all solution. And if you've got outsize scaling requirements, you are going to have to get your hands dirty.

<comment><USER21> The difference between 3.2-stable and master is +14k/-19k: [https://github.com/rails/rails/compare/master...3-2-stable](https://github.com/rails/rails/compare/master...3-2-stable)

The difference between 3.2.13 and 4.0.0 was +121k/-103k [https://github.com/rails/rails/compare/v3.2.12...v4.0.0](https://github.com/rails/rails/compare/v3.2.12...v4.0.0)

So yes, it has grown, but only a little, and may even be a bit smaller, depending on how you compare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> You can easily get your APEX back up without blaming Ruby. There is nothing inherent to Ruby that should stop you from doing that.

More likely than not you probably have a couple nasty requests that should be handled by a background task and a few more or less caching calls.

Additionally, from your user's perspective, 300~ish ms is already pretty good, I wouldn't worry about that too much. You use Ruby on Rails because it is speed on speed for rolling out features. Focus on a better user experience with pretty good performance and you guys will be alright.

</comment><comment><USER23> OH: "Stupid Rails team. Why can't you fix performance issues based on anonymous New Relic stats alone?"

<comment><USER24> Doesn't "OH:" mean "Overheard:"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Maybe a partnership with New Relic could help the Rails team to see the real > world impact of their decisions on the actual apps

Last time I used NewRelic they gave you an option of sending anonymised statistics to the rails core team.

The stats given in support of this claim are very weak as well. An over-all average is pretty useless for determining the cause. It could be over-all faster with more high outliers skewing the average for some reason. Need more detailed information.

On a side-note, it took me 3 tries before I got the site and not an HTTP 503 error which is rather ironic given the situation.

</comment><comment><USER26> My car won't go fast, can someone tell me why?

</comment><comment><USER27> While I'm new to the rails scene, and can't speak for the 2.x -> 3.0 performance change, what surprises me is that this post is upgrading because of newer gem support.

It this purely a rails upgrade? Or is the OP upgrading other gems at the same time?

You're using newrelic. Use it, and figure out exactly where it's getting slower. Do an entire stack trace. You can figure out exactly where those pages have gotten longer responses. Then you can suggest to the rails community what's slow for your application.

The platform is only as good as the community makes it to be. Maybe it's missing your case's optimizations because you haven't given specific feedback?

<comment><USER28> newrelic isn't going to tell you that route url generation has gotten 2x slower, or that calling pluralize 100 times is causing the slowness. all you'll see is that a template takes a while to render.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Did you try to remove the parts of Rails you don't need? (ex: middlewares).

Also in New Relic you can look what's slower (ruby, db, rendering, request queuing, ...). Could you give us more details.

Also your average is 423ms, but what's fastest pages like?

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm inheriting a Rails app and I'm thinking of switching it over to Node.js for performance reasons. Most of the code currently implemented is pretty basic and it's all Rails but we're already having performance problems are we're still in beta. I've used Rails before, but I'm not guru and I wanted to know if someone could point me to some resources for tweaking Rails performance?

<comment><USER11> Definitely stick with Rails, the framework will give you the training wheels you probably need. Switch to Node.js and you'll probably end up with bowl of noodle code soup.

Railscasts has a bunch of episodes covering performance related topics [http://railscasts.com/?tag_id=1](http://railscasts.com/?tag_id=1)

<comment><USER30> Yeah, I've really been liking what I've seen from Rails so far. It seems like there is a lot of support for a lot of functions/features that you just generally need which is awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Rails performance tip: [https://engineering.groupon.com/2013/misc/i-tier- dismantling...](https://engineering.groupon.com/2013/misc/i-tier-dismantling- the-monoliths/)

<comment><USER32> I realize your comment is snark, but the lesson I take is to build your app in Rails, then if you become multi-billion dollar IPO-level success, rewrite...

<comment><USER33> The lesson you've learned is to pile on technical debt?

The real lesson is: if you can write your app in a much faster framework with equivalent development speed, why even waste time to write it in Rails.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > The server is temporarily unable to service your request

Performance is apparently not Rails' only problem.

<comment><USER34> That's wordpress. . .

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> So - just now you're upgrading to Rails 3.2 - nearly two years after it was released?

In 2016 you're gonna love Rails4 - its got some nice support for caching and client side rendering.

<comment><USER36> This is not an uncommon thing. Not everyone can immediately jump on the latest and greatest.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Money is not the constraint. Should I talk to angels? - <AUTHOR>

So I have startup idea and I have implemented a fare bit. We hope to launch a private beta in the next couple of weeks. Right now I bootstrap this besides my day job.<p>My question is: Should I keep slowly boostraping or should I start talking to angels? What other benefits besides money does a good angel have? Should I care about his connections or will the product sell itself if its good enough? <comment><USER2> I wouldn't talk to angels at this point, if I were you.

If you're able to bootstrap your way through your private beta, do it. If possible, I'd hold off talking to angels until you've found a repeatable, scalable customer acquisition processes. If you manage to do so, you'll be in a much stronger position with the angels, and you'll also have a clear idea on how to effectively use the money raised.

<comment><USER3> This may be a stupid question, but if a startup has found a "repeatable, scalable customer acquisition process" why would they need to talk to angels?

Presumably your repeatable, scalable customer acquisition process will be bringing in lots of customers, who in turn will bring in income. So, you won't much need angels for money.

Also, the fact that you have a repeatable, scalable customer acquisition process means that you've solved one of the most, if not _the_ most important problems a startup faces. So, you won't much need angels for the connections and advice on how to increase your traction.

Of course the above is over-simplifying a bit. Even with income and more and more customers signing up, you may still need money to expand at the rate you want. Still, once a startup finds a repeatable, scalable customer acquisition process, it's hard to see much need for angel investors.

<comment><USER2> _Still, once a startup finds a repeatable, scalable customer acquisition process, it's hard to see much need for angel investors._

I disagree. What's more, I think you do, too. You said as much a sentence earlier: _Even with income and more and more customers signing up, you may still need money to expand at the rate you want._

If you've got a repeatable, scalable customer acquisition strategy, more money in means more customers (and profit) out. In other words, you've built the money machine-- now you use angel money to get it running full speed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Think of some Angels as potential partners. Select those which advice, help, network can help you and start the conversation. Seeing that you do not need their money will make them more interested in your business in the future.

</comment><comment><USER5> You should talk to angels, in my opinion: fundraising takes time, and building greed / need in the investors takes time. Since you don't need their money, now is the perfect time to go see them.

You'll find a wide range of personal suitability (connections, meeting of the minds, smarts about your space) in the meetings, so definitely worth doing.

Now, if your product doesn't need money because it's paying for itself, then you DEFINITELY should go talk to investors a) because you'll come away feeling awesome about yourself, and b) because you'll be able to command some truly awesome pricing.

</comment><comment><USER6> Start talking to them just to get to know them/for them to get to know you. Investors love talking to companies that don't need money.

</comment><comment><USER7> There is no harm in talking to the right people at anytime. It does not mean you have to raise money right now or that you even find the right partner but you will learn a lot about the business and yourself along the way. If the question is should you take money, you are in a much stronger position when you have traction (however you want to measure that).

</comment><comment><USER8> I like to think of angels like Nitro in a car...helps you with short term rapid acceleration (making connections, early funding, a sounding board to bounce ideas off of, etc..)

EDIT: So my answer is yes, you should start talking to them.

</comment><comment><USER9> Angel will not make your product fly if it is a heavy one. If you think the opinion of Angel can make it a better product contact them else focus in your goal until your product is ready for market.

</comment><comment><USER10> Email firstname.lastname@example.com. We mainly give advice--if you need any, that is.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> So no clear suggestion here: Talk vs. work. Connections vs. overhead.</comment>


Woman hatches ducks from supermarket bought eggs - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-52838747 <comment><USER2> Why not? Eggs can endure room temperature, and in Europe they dod not chill eggs in supermarket cooler. Ducks, being water birds, may well have eggs that endure cooling better than chicken eggs.</comment>


Do Robots Take People's Jobs? - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/john-dulchinos-adept-do-robots-take-peoples-jobs

<comment><USER2> Robots are the answer for a lot of problems, most notably healthcare and domestic industrial competitiveness. As the article states; if the US (and other countries mind you) don't step up, China will only get stronger as they not only have the cheap wetware but are also deploying hardware at alarming rates.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes. But they create new jobs too. Who has to fix the robots?

You see in Tesco, those new (well not anymore) self checkouts, there's 4 checkers jobs gone. I doubt Tesco actually fired them though. You get my point :)</comment>


Ask HN: Why doesn't IT staff just dial 911? - <AUTHOR> I've seen many IT employees getting abused/exploited/sexually harassed in their work place. They'll 1. Silently suffer 2. Quit the job<p>But never dial 911. <comment><USER2> Under most circumstances, none of these are emergencies.

Sexual harrassment is difficult to prove criminally. Heck, even regular harrassment takes some work to prove and usually winds up with a restraining order. This isn't really appropriate for work.

Abused and exploited: This would have to be outside of the normal workplace norms and actually criminal. Most times, the abuse and exploitation is in the form of words (abuse, again hard to prove) and forcing folks to work long hours, despite difficulties (normal with some fields, so isn't considered legal exploitation).

It winds up there is little that the cops can do.

Occasionally folks can quit and get unemployment because a workplace isn't safe or is beyond what folks expect. For example, I knew a lady that started getting treated badly because her son broke into the school - loss of workplace responsibility and other such things. She got unemployment, but she was lucky. You can sometimes get the same for sexual harassment.

Occasionally, workplaces will have avenues for reporting such abuses, but one never really knows if they'll face backlash at work for reporting such a thing.</comment>


Joe Armstrong – Erlang, Low Energy Communication, and Kids – NightHacking - <AUTHOR> http://nighthacking.com/joe-armstrong-erlang-low-energy-communication-and-kids/ <comment><USER2> Very loud auto-playing video.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps a Not Safe For Java Workplace should be added to the title.

<comment><USER2> Or 'kids sleeping in the house'.

In a nightmare world someone will target Java to BEAM.</comment></comment></comment>