We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today - <AUTHOR> http://www.christophmccann.com/blog/2014/6/23/we-have-the-potential-to-solve-the-biggest-problems-of-today <comment><USER3> Unfortunately, this line of criticism works equally well about all games, art, haute cuisine, movies, national parks, and about 96% of our economy.

More importantly, it also works against articles that gripe about effort wasted on apps the author doesn't care for.

<comment><USER4> With the exception of games, the items you mention aren't distracting much engineering talent from solving the big stuff. With $1.2m, Yo can directly compete for talent that might otherwise go to graduate school or make progress in a more serious venture.

<comment><USER5> Right. It's just distracting chefs, artists, ecologists, photographers, etc. Clearly these people neither have engineering talent nor could contribute in any other way to McCann's chosen causes.

<comment><USER6> He hasn't given a chosen cause. Just says that Yo is trivial crap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's a lot that I dislike about this article, but I'll start with this: it is probably self-refuting. Someone could just have easily written: "I find it difficult to see individuals who could focus their time and effort solving [problems like energy, food, water, health, education], instead put their efforts into something like a takedown of the moral priorities of the people behind Yo on a their personal blog." A person could argue that the post has more value than Yo (though I'm not sure this is self-evident), but it still isn't in the same ballpark as "energy, food, water, health, education." I mean, c'mon Christoph McCann, get your priorities straight!

Of course, I don't actually make that argument, because I reject its premise. As the above argument hopefully illustrates, it is not reasonable to insist that everyone spend all their time in the most socially beneficial way possible. Should we all strive to make the world a better place? Of course. But I don't know many people who think that we need to spend all our time tackling the world's biggest problems.

And, by the way, who appointed Christoph McCann arbiter of what it good and valuable in this world? Maybe an app like Yo will bring us together in a new (albeit marginal) way. That's valuable, even if it is also silly. (See, e.g., the first few paragraphs of this article: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2014/06/23/goo...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2014/06/23/goodbye- yo-or-how-the-worlds-most-fun-and-heartwarming-app-met-its-tragic-end/)) Or maybe it provide a cautionary tale to remind us (as, perhaps, it already has) what is really important. Value exists in subtle forms that are not so easy to glibly list, and can be advanced in subtle and unexpected ways. While I wish we lived in a world where more people focused on problems like energy, food, water, health, education, I'm not sure I want to live in a world where EVERYONE works on those problems. I want people to be free to do the unexpected, even if the results sometimes seem frivolous.

So, if McCann's only point is that we should take a moment and reconsider our priorities, point taken. But this looks suspiciously like something a bit more (with respect, and apologies) totalitarian.

<comment><USER7> >> And, by the way, who appointed Christoph McCann arbiter of what it good and valuable in this world?

This is such an important point, and why free markets work best. If people derive value out of Yo, then terrific. If they don't, it goes away. Don't need a moral crusader to decide what is worthy.

<comment><USER8> >This is such an important point, and why free markets work best.

Well, there's a subtlety there.

It's not that "free markets work best". It's that the efficient market hypothesis claims that a market with perfect information dissemination consisting of uniformly rational agents will deliver Pareto-optimal resource allocations.

There's a lot to disagree with in that sentence; market agents collude, people are demonstrably irrational/rely on cognitive heuristics and just because something is Pareto efficient doesn't mean it's fair or equitable.

All three are valid critiques, and the case in point in TFA - the market allocated money to Yo, but that doesn't mean a priori that funding Yo is a worthy and moral choice.

So, if we have markets that routinely deliver inequitable outcomes it's perfectly reasonable to ask - why is this happening?

<comment><USER7> Having studied with the originators of the efficient market hypothesis (Fama), I regret to inform you that what you describe is not a feature of EMH but is rather frequently attributed to it in an attempt to discredit it. There is nothing that rationally follows EMH that leads to Pareto-optimal outcomes in society.

EMH means that well informed markets make sound decisions on the pricing of assets. This means that based on the current information available, markets are excellent at understanding the probability-weighted value of an asset. It doesn't mean that the outcome ends up being right, it means that it's fairly priced based on the information at hand. Nothing guaranteeing Pareto-optimal outcomes from that.

Furthermore, an investor giving 1.2M to a company is not an efficient market under any circumstance.

<comment><USER8> I was critiquing "free markets are best" and not singularly EMH. I will grant that I've used terms imprecisely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Let's build apps like Yo. They're good practice. Doing silly things that amuse oneself is a critical component of hackerdom.

Let's just not fund them.

<comment><USER10> Let's fund them, let's just not acquire them. That way they won't be funded in the future :)

<comment><USER11> Let's acquire them, just not for too much money. Otherwise we tell people that anything on the internets is worth billions. :)

<comment><USER12> Oh what the hell, fine, let's acquire them for billions.

<comment><USER13> are you listening, Zuckerberg?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Unless my mom or dad recently signed up for HN, I'm not terribly interested in any of this paternalistic (and patronizing) advice on how I should spend my life and time.

<comment><USER15>
        > Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is
        > inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic,
        > flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all
        > users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something,
        > please don't also comment that you did.

[http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER14> I didn't do any of that. Read closer.

<comment><USER15> Considering on-topic is "anything hackers find interesting," a complaint that something is not interesting is a complaint that something isn't appropriate for the site.

<comment><USER14> Again, read closer. I did not complain that it wasn't interesting. I said I wasn't interested [in considering] such advice. The use of the same root word is only interesting (uh oh) to those in the business of equivocation fallacies.

<comment><USER15> If you are not interested in it, then you find it not interesting. If you found it interesting, you'd be interested in it.

This is the least interesting conversation I've ever had.

<comment><USER14> > If you are not interested in it, then you find it not interesting.

Equivocation fallacy. Can't say you weren't warned.

> This is the least interesting conversation I've ever had.

It's difficult to have an interesting conversation with people in so much of a hurry to misunderstand what's being said.

<comment><USER15> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy)

<comment><USER14> Wrong again, my friend.

At no point did I claim you were wrong simply -because- you used a fallacy. I had other, better, reasons for that. You are bad at this and I've become bored.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The future is tricky to predict. A lot of things look like toys, until all of a sudden they're not.

Worth reading the counterpoint: [http://avc.com/2013/04/return-and- ridicule/](http://avc.com/2013/04/return-and-ridicule/)

"This notion also plays into Clayton Christensen's framework for disruptive innovation. Many of the most disruptive technologies started out as what Clay calls "toys". The PC is a great example of that. PCs came out of the homebrew computer movement. Geeks were building computers in their garages. And everyone thought they were nuts. But from that came the Apple Computer and the IBM PC and we were off to the races with personal computers."

<comment><USER17> Precisely. Who would have predicted that Twitter would have been used to organize people in a meaningful way during the Arab Spring?

The overthrow of tyrannical regimes is a noble cause that a startup would almost certainly never been able to focus on as a solution to a big picture problem.

<comment><USER18> …and then rejected that noble use by allowing other tyrannical regimes to censor content so it can't be used that way again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "The problems facing us - energy, food, water, health, education - require big solutions and we are just starting to see some of these solutions come out of a new wave of startup businesses."

You can't engineer technological solutions to social problems. You will get so far, but then you'll run into politics and religion.

<comment><USER20> Building a nuclear power plant solves a lot of energy problems. Getting a permit to build one is more challenging than assembling the engineers to do it.

Innovating on the hospital is not even legal. You don't need to ask permission to develop an app (unless you count Apple's process as permission).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Your reasoning suggests that if the people who built Yo were not building Yo, that they might be out there curing the world's diseases. See the flaw there?

<comment><USER22> If the people who built Yo had been curing the world's diseases instead of building Yo, then everyone would still be stuck with giving each other Facebook pokes, and would therefore be too demoralized and disconnected to complete the task.

The article simply sounds like sour grapes. If something as simple and stupid as Yo can get funded for $X, then why hasn't my worthy and interesting project been funded for $Y ? Obviously, the developer of Yo is to blame for finding a big pile of money curated by fools and taking it?

It is pointless to question why Yo exists. It is far more useful to ask why nearly everyone capable of accomplishing great things has to go beg shrewd financiers and capricious morons (depending on whether or not they give _you_ anything) for the money required to attempt one, or languish under the direction of someone else as an employee until finally saving enough to try.

And the answer is that life is not fair. A plutocracy is not a meritocracy. If you don't like it, be born rich or win big at business roulette, and then invest only in worthy things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Programming skills do not translate into solutions to big problems. The amount of education required to tackle something serious weeds out nearly all coders. Most programmers spend their careers writing code to someone else's spec, and a Yo app is a fantastic — and lucky — way to escape that fate. My hat is off to the creator for doing it, getting attention, and raising money.

</comment><comment><USER24> The title should be "Let's not 'invest' in apps like Yo"

For a programmer this is only a win-win scenario. The founder gets experience, funds, exposure, and something whimsical to hack on for awhile. The people in return get this insane idea plastered all over the news only to hopefully inspire a couple hundred kids to get into programming with their chance to strike it rich.

If you hope for anything, why don't you hope that all investors in this idea take a huge loss and do their part in stabilizing tech valuations.

</comment><comment><USER25> "some of the worlds most driven, focussed, intelligent and inspiring individuals"

It's quite possible that a company does not contain any people like this. This article seems to assume a lot about a large group of random programmers and business people. There are plenty of hacks out there and some of them will be founding a start up near you.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is an interesting discussion and I a waffling on this issue like an incumbent red state Democrat...

I am a little surprised that no one has trotted out this history lesson:

"In 1969, Ken Thompson wanted to play SpaceWar on a PDP-8 computer..."

</comment><comment><USER27> Lets not take ourselves so seriously. Lets not let YO be representative of what investors, entrepreneurs, developers and technologists are doing as a whole, despite its outsize media coverage. Lets remember that quirky, weird, seemingly useless things like YO can still put a smile on someones face, even if it didnt solve any of society's problems. What a dry place the world would be if we didnt have things like YO.

Variety is the spice of life. Some will make YO, some will build Tesla, and most of us will fall somewhere in between. Not every startup needs to be a world changer, and thats OK. Thats life.

The author insists that he's not being pretentious, but evaluating what is a good and poor use of someone elses time and smarts seems like just that.

<comment><USER11> I agree. Though Yo should not have a 1.3 million funding. However, any sane person would quickly recognize that investors put in that 1.3 MM to fund the founders. They don't care about Yo. It may be a situation of "give some smart people who get the internets a bunch of money and hope it sticks". Which is a bit of a bubble IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> We have the potential to solve the big problems. But the big problems cost a lot more than $1 million to solve and aren't likely to get funded unless the founder is already a Silicon Valley billionaire with VC connections.

So let's build apps like Yo because Silicon Valley deems them to be a prerequisite to being allowed to solve the big problems.

</comment><comment><USER29> I disagree with the premise that being able to create an app that sends "yo" to somebody implies that you should be able to solve any of the various health crises around the world.

For one thing, this is incredibly insulting. Do you think that nobody is working on solving these already? Do you think that the people conducting medical research are just so unbelievably stupid that they couldn't comprehend how to write an app that says "Yo"? Maybe these problems are a little harder than you think.

</comment><comment><USER30> Every time you talk about "Yo" an angel loses its wings or a kitten dies or... whatever.

If you stop talking about it, it will just fade into obscurity like Doogie Howser - only to appear years later as a successful, charming actor that can --- wait, where was this going?

Right. Stop talking about it and it'll go away. Don't be bitter about Yo; there's no point in it. Just let it go. Keep calm and carry on.

</comment><comment><USER31> So, here's a better one:

"We have the potential to solve the big problems. Let's not _fund_ apps like Yo."

</comment><comment><USER32> I think we need a good, solid list of the big problems. Then we need to break them down into smaller problems.

<comment><USER33> I have a plan to do this, have it kind of like a wiki with a breakdown of problems based on location (Becuase you can't solve world hunger all at once, each place has its own issues). Then have users submit possible solutions, and then open people to volunteer to implement solutions (maybe add a crowd- funding portion to it). Only issue is I'm too lazy to brush up my web development skills.

<comment><USER32> What do you do?

<comment><USER33> I'm a business analyst that also does some basic IT work. I know some basic HTML/CSS/JS, enough to tweak some web pages that I support, but nothing from scratch.

<comment><USER32> My email should be in my profile. If you can't view it let me know. We'd need to get an outline.

<comment><USER33> I cannot see the email. My email should be in my profile, if you want to contact me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Maybe, Chris, me old mucker, you meant well in this article. You wanted to point out that there are some real, hard, difficult, real-life problems, things that affect people in large numbers, and that it would be great if people worked on those.

I would agree with that sentiment. A million more chat apps, a million more web frameworks, a million more crappy-bird game clones, twatter, farcebook, none of those solve real-life hard problems.

The difficult part then, is how to make solving those problems attractive. Money? Fame? Something else? A good feeling in the stomach and soul, knowing you have contributed to helping? That is the harder part. People are complicated, their motivations often less so, but hidden away beneath complications and layers of deceit, so as to often obscure them.

</comment><comment><USER35> This signal says that people are still willing to pay for effective data collection. An app like Yo simply proves that quality/purpose do not really matter for making money. If it walks like a bubble, and talks like a bubble

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation)

Disclaimer: I thought the aftermath of Yo was absolutely stupid, as well.

</comment><comment><USER36> I don't think our big/bigger/biggest problems can be solved by apps.

</comment><comment><USER37> The triviality of Yo is obvious, it's not an amazing feat of engineering, but it is an important app. It shows that millions of people would much rather use an app that takes two "touches" to let someone know they would like to have their attention when they are available. It's a data point on what people are looking for. Many tiny data points can lead to big conclusions and inform design decisions far down that road. Finding out that users still want things that reduce the friction of communication was worth having built Yo.

</comment><comment><USER38> Electricity was considered an intellectual gimmick for more than a thousand years up to the 19th century. You never know where innovation comes from, and simplicity of use certainly is a valid vector.

</comment><comment><USER39> Solving problems in an already crowded domain often takes non-trivial political skill even where it's technologically feasible to do so. If politics weren't an issue, I could walk down to the local hospital right now and save them tens of thousands of hours of time a year - they wouldn't even be hard problems; simple things like typing certain kinds of reports rather than using hand-writing, making one system able to read the files of another - that sort of thing. But, sadly, that's not the world we live in.

</comment><comment><USER40> I think a lot of people here take offense at the tone of this article (a tad bit condescending and patronizing) and rightly so. However I think people are missing the bigger point of the article which is to serve as a reminder that there are bigger(other?) problems to solve, and it would be prudent to make a case for the other causes the author mentions. Think of it as a pitch to the next generation of entrepreneurs. (Yo knocked its pitch out the park with its million dollar funding and news headlines).

I do not agree with his target audience, since the bigger problems are big because of their difficulty. If they were problems that could be solved with little effort/limited finances they would have been. (energy, food, water, health, education). Apps such as Yo exist because they can obtain funding to the tune of a million dollars. His pitch should be to investors to invest wisely keeping in mind their social responsibility and make a case for the importance of these other big ticket problems as opposed to apps like Yo. It does not make sense to berate engineers/start up founders etc. for their chosen path especially since they do not own the capital required to solve "smaller" (acc. to the author) problem let alone a "big" world changing one. They are almost entirely reliant on working up to their next round of funding.

</comment><comment><USER41> Let's do whatever gets us out of bed in the morning, lest we end up doing nothing at all.

</comment><comment><USER42> What the heck is wrong with Yo?

Have any of you installed and tried to use it? It's an app designed to send pre-fabricated messages amongst its users. Instead of typing "are you up?" late at night while I'm driving home (hypothetically; texting while driving is bad, kids), all I have to do is hit the "Yo" button on my screen. One, MAYBE 2 clicks later, my existence and consciousness is broadcast to my friends, en masse, and I can continue focusing on the road instead of my phone keyboard.

It also looks like, soon, new phrases will be sendable. Stuff like an actual, "Are you up?", "Lunch?" etc. I know in my friend circle, a button like, "Wanna game?" would work immensely well.

What about a "Help!" button? Now we're suddenly into the, "saving lives" territory the submission tries to say Yo has nothing to do with. "I'm suicidal"? "I'm lost"? "I'm hurt"?

Can we solve this problem using a million other apps, in a million other ways? Yes. Did Twitter go under because text messaging was the "exact same thing"? No.

</comment><comment><USER43> This argument comes up from time to time, but it's first order thinking. The real question he should address is the following:

 _Why does the modern economy incentivize negative and /or zero sum endeavors (e.g. trivial startups, exploitative finance,etc) instead of positive sum endeavors (e.g. genetics research?)_

Which leads to a very interesting discussion. In short, extant economic policies disincentivize research so strongly that it's a wonder any research occurs at all.

I think at some point, "free-market" radicals threw the baby out with the bathwater, and have forgotten that some activities, such as research, are extremely risky in the short term but produce unfathomable long term benefits (antibiotics, vaccines, etc.). At present, neither companies nor governments want to foot the short term costs of research.

As such, we are paid six figures to brainwash people to click ads, but must accept financial ruin to even attempt to contribute to research.

</comment><comment><USER44> I wanted to tear this article to pieces simply because of the title. But I can't. All of these points seem valid and well targeted. There seems to be a rejection of any _negativity_ here on HN but that really is not doing anyone any justice. Let's be tough on each other. If it's crap call it crap and take it on the chin if you are the creator of said crap. For every "that a boy" we give a weak attempt we diminish those that truly strive for excellence and push us forward.

In fairness to the guys at Yo though, 1.2M is really not that much money. Enough to get a few guys going and keep the lights on to see where it goes. So let's see it play out.

</comment><comment><USER45> So let's not study stuff like astrophysics, since it doesn't really help the starving kids somewhere nor does it solve energy problem, right? And also, let's not make art, after all, it's just some first world people enjoying their luxury while someone somewhere in 3rd world is suffering, how about that? As mere mortals we can never know what impact a technology can have in the long term, no matter what it looks like right now. It's arrogant to judge someone else's creation no matter how silly it looks, especially when it is something that managed to get into a lot of people's mindshare.

</comment><comment><USER46> Yo's popularity entirely rides two facts: (1) it's a silly app, (2) it got a million dollars. We currently know nothing about user engagement and retention. I'd be surprised if anyone uses it for more than a few weeks.

<comment><USER35> If an app that does nothing and has a half life of 3 weeks can raise $1 million, then the industry has a problem.

<comment><USER47> It doesn't mean the industry has a problem, it means the people who put the $1 million into the company have a problem.

<comment><USER48> If only I hadn't squandered my life savings on beanie-babies I could've invested in Yo before it went public!

<comment><USER35> I don't even think the screenwriter for Idiocracy could have planned Yo! as a stock symbol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I don't think I've got the chops to make an app that solves world hunger, but I might be able to write a simple app like Yo and make it easier to feed my family. That is also a problem I am concerned about solving.

</comment><comment><USER50> I think the point the OP really should be making isn't that we shouldn't be building them, but that we shouldn't be giving them so much press. Who's to blame here, really?

</comment><comment><USER51> There are significantly bigger problems than those, but if you want to make money you have to solve problems that rich[0] people have, which mainly seems to be boredom.

The people with the biggest problems are the people with the least money. You can't save them with apps, but you could help them with money made by making apps. Not that most will though, if they ever make it big.

[0] Rich is a relative term. Got enough to eat and access to the internet? Compared to most humans, you're relatively rich.

</comment><comment><USER52> It strikes me as the company equivalent of a fart app.

If money is easy enough to come by that investors can drop $100k like you and I can drop $0.99, _sell them what they 're buying_.

</comment><comment><USER53> "I therefore find it difficult to see individuals who could focus their time and effort solving these problems, instead put their efforts into something like Yo."

Since when is this stuff zero-sum? Yo allegedly took 8 hours to build. Sure, during those 8 hours, Moshe Hogeg wasn't out solving the "big" problems, but in that day alone, he had 16 other hours, to do things the OP might deem worthy of his time.

</comment><comment><USER54> Yo is a hack, over 100k Anroid downloads. They built their audience, now they can turn it into something usable.

Oh, and they have your social graph based on cell numbers.

<comment><USER55> Or Arbel, cofounder and CEO of Yo, told Mashable that the app has had 110,000 downloads since Wednesday morning and 160,000 total downloads since it launched quietly in April.

<comment><USER54> I was just quoting the stats Google gives in the play store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> That some people built Yo is not the problem. They most likely lack the talent to solve the hard problems facing us - given what they've built so far, anyways. These problems get solved by a different class of people altogether.

The real problem is that someone with money and influence deemed their project worthy of support. The motivation is not to make the world a better place, but to get rich.

</comment><comment><USER57> > I am simply pointing out that another instant messaging app, however novel > or 'hipster', isn't going to solve what really needs solved.

And here i've been wasting my life on novel hipster apps, thinking it would solve the big problems, when in fact I was just wasting my life working on fun things. Thank Bob i've been set straight.

</comment><comment><USER58> To me, there's three categories startups fall into: fun, world-changing, and failures.

SnapChat and Facebook are fun. Google and Tesla are world changing. The failures may be nameless, but they outnumber the rest 5 to 1.

If you're a success story, it doesn't matter to me whether or not you are fun or world-changing. You succeeded. That's enough in itself.

<comment><USER28> 5 to 1? Try 1000 to 1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I'm pretty sure creating Yo doesn't require a team of the most "driven, focused, intelligent and inspiring individuals" of our society." Does the author really feel the people behind this (or any/every startup) could easily cure cancer or solve world hunger?

</comment><comment><USER60> Through innovative social mobile single bit networked communication we are making the world a better place.

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm surprised by the number of comments criticizing this post. Yo really is utterly pointless. Sure, they have every right to exist, and might even make some money. But it's still a joke. It is a parody of the efforts being made every day to improve the world with technology.

</comment><comment><USER62> Speaking as an industry outsider, I don't agree with the assumption that fresh-faced app programmers have the capability to solve any real world problems.

Why ignore the possibility that writing apps, new web frameworks, and "pivoting" is in fact the best possible use of this talent?

</comment><comment><USER63> I wonder if Yo is popular because people feel it is a funny pointless app or because it makes a common message incredibly easy to send?

I like apps like Yo. They do exactly what they say they will do. Yo requires fewer taps than texting "Yo" to somebody. It's refreshing!

I would venture a guess that the people who are solving for big problems can be inspired by how minimal Yo is, and the decisions that stem from that inspiration may be the tipping point they needed for their businesses. There may be applicable uses for the Yo type of simplicity for any of the problems mentioned in the blog post.

There's a good place for apps like Yo. They challenge the status quo. They disrupt. They prove that removing mundane steps to doing something as common as texting can be popular and worth testing as a business model.

Maybe Yo has already solved a big problem. Maybe we have yet to experience the ripple effect.

</comment><comment><USER64> Yo, lets instead spend our time discussing how Yo is a waist of our time.

</comment><comment><USER65> > "Some expressed anger that there own startups hadn't received funding"

Hard to take this guy seriously when he can't even grammar right in his intro paragraph. I love yo.

<comment><USER66> > "Hard to take this guy seriously when he can't even grammar right in his > intro paragraph. I love yo."

Can't "grammar" right? Can "grammar" be a verb?

<comment><USER67> Yes, "grammar" can be a verb. And even if it were in some sense incorrect, the meaning is clear. Confusing "there" and "their", OTOH, is outright misleading, and suggests a lack of understanding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Build whatever the market wants. Fund whatever the market wants.

</comment><comment><USER69> How about we don't even talk about Yo?

</comment><comment><USER70> Building Yo is not a hard problem.

</comment><comment><USER71> Yo.

<comment><USER72> Sef.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> How about if you want something done, do it yourself.

</comment><comment><USER74> Sorry, I can't agree with this argument, as the line of reasoning essentially boils down to:

"Don't spend your money on things I don't think are important."

That is the great thing personal freedom and property rights. we all have the choice of how we want to spend our money. If you don't like what other people are spending their money on, spend your own money on something else.

</comment><comment><USER75> > The problems facing us - energy, food, water, health, education - <USER2> > big solutions and we are just starting to see some of these solutions come > out of a new wave of startup businesses. For me, innovation and invention > doesn't come from the top, but it comes from the bottom. It comes from > disruptive startup businesses who dare to try something new, who dare to > think a bit differently.

Do you know anyone who writes about these sorts of things? I.e. innovative technologies that ultimately aspires to improve the world around it a little bit (and not just in the stereotypical SC sales-pitch way ;) ), and not just the bottom line? I would like to read about stuff like that, either people who are doing it or just ideas.</comment>


A Big Surprise from the Edge of the Solar System - <AUTHOR> http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/09jun_bigsurprise/ <comment><USER2> There is a Terence McKenna quote from the early 80's where he says that basically everything we know about the (largescale) universe comes from radio telescope data, and all the bits from all the data ever recorded have roughly the same amount of energy as a piece of cigarette ash falling about two feet. And this is what our entire understanding of the cosmos is based on.

Not sure of the validity of the measure/comparison, but it's an interesting idea nonetheless. One does have to wonder though, if it's so obvious now why this phenomenon is happening then why didn't they predict it before seeing the data? Especially if we see the same thing in solar flares. It seems like it's generally a good idea to bet on the laziness of the universe, but beyond that anyone who pretends they know what's going on is probably full of shit.

edit: The Terence McKenna quote is from this talk about his life: <http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=1509>

The talk in general is about his formative intellectual influences, and about why he finds psychedelic drugs to be intellectually interesting. He has another talk that's more about his views of physics, epistemology, and cosmology here: <http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=297>

Perhaps my two all time favorite talks on any subject, albeit you need a high tolerance to ideas that are at times _highly_ speculative. (And sometimes flat out wrong.)

<comment><USER3> your "if it's so obvious why didn't they predict it?" question is a result of the way that the article is written which, in turn, is a consequence of the dependency of nasa (and astronomy and space research in general) on public goodwill to motivate funding.

this isn't so exciting, and it isn't so shocking.

it's a standing joke in astronomy / astrophysics that magnetic fields are complicated and misunderstood. whenever something can't be explained it's attributed to tangled magnetic fields. so complexity in the magnetic field - this "foam" - would not be a great shock.

i have a phd in astronomy. one reason i left the field (apart from the small matter of being a pretty crappy astronomer) was that i felt it was a fraud. sure, it wastes much less money than the arms program and, yes, we do have non-stick pans now, but _everything_ you see from the field is presented in a sexed-up, over-sold, exaggerated way to get more funding.

<comment> DanI-S Incidentally, did you manage to find a career in a field where things _aren't_ oversold in the pursuit of popular enthusiasm? It seems a fundamental component of capitalism, if not human enterprise in general.

<comment><USER3> sorry, previous reply mis-understood your question.

this is the same point as the pressure for jobs, really. it's not that astronomy is the _only_ place where things are oversold, or where there's a lot of competition for jobs - it's a question of degree.

in the case of astronomy it doesn't produce much at all of quantifiable physical value. it's not that different to poetry (you can make the same "life-affirming" arguments for both). in contrast, car mechanics, say, do something physically useful: they fix your car and you're willing to pay them for that.

so astronomers and poets are, largely, state funded (through science and arts grants, respectively).

you could, i guess, argue that a car mechanic who places an advert in the local paper is also relying on "over-selling". sure. but i hope you'll agree there's a difference in degree between the two cases: the mechanic is, say, 90% useful, 10% "ephemeral"; astronomy is 99% "ephemeral" [edit: made phrasing less abrasive].

in modern universities, most depts have a range of sources of funding. it's very unusual for astronomy depts to have links with industry because they don't produce anything that people want (there are engineering-related exceptions for optics and detectors). the way they get money is by being cool and hoping to appear attractive to rich donors (or the govt). hence the reliance on "advertising".

ps and to reply directly: yes; i now work on projects that help save people's lives.

<comment><USER4> Speaking as someone who has also wished at times to make a more immediate, tangible impact on the world around me, I'm glad you're liking your new job. That said, even "ephemeral" things have value. Individuals will buy poetry books, for instance!

You seem to be saying that, since one can't persuade the average person on the street to pay you to write a research paper[1], the research that gets done is "over-sold" through "advertising." In other words, the work is funded not on its own merits, but as a popularity contest. I'd argue, though, even within astrophysics alone, some research is more important than others: maybe it answers more fundamental questions, or could enable a unifying explanatory framework for a broader class of phenomena, or is actually of near-term importance to us on Earth (asteroid location, space weather).

Science is a human endeavor. Yes, there is often hype and trends as people advocate for funding for their next big thing--but there's a lot of that here on Hacker News, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting. All of a sudden a deep space radio telescope seems like a good scientific mission. It would be a fascinating discovery if we poked our noses out of the heliosheath just to discover that all of the missing mass in the universe was to be found in cosmic rays that never reach the inner solar system.

<comment><USER6> We have good reason to believe that the missing mass cannot be baryonic or fast moving massive particles. This comes from the abundance of elements, so it is indirect but is consistent with other findings.

Furthermore, those cosmic rays would radiate when decelerated. I think if there was substantial mass in cosmic rays, we would see this radiation (did not make a calculation though). Note that the estimate for the mass of dark matter is about ~5 times the normal matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It would be great if we would send one or two such probes out per year, in different directions. We could find so many interesting things. There are currently only two.

<comment><USER8> Voyager1 and 2 were sent around 30 years back. If we send now, we will get results only after 2040 only.

<comment> mkr-hn I don't think a new one would take 30 years.

<http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/ion/overview/overview.htm>

It tops out at 90,000 meters per second.

<http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/interstellar.html>

The furthest one out is 17 billion kilometers.

[http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...](http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=17+billion+kilometers+divided+by+90000+meters)

[http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...](http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=188888889+seconds+in+years)

That's about six years, though I don't know how long it would take to reach the top speed.

<comment><USER9> How long does it take the data to reach us?

<comment><USER10> Speed of light, baby! IIRC, on the order of 4 hours from Pluto. 16 hours (one- way) out to Voyager 1 where it is now.

<comment><USER11> Wolfram Alpha excels in that type of questions:

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+pluto+%2F+ligh...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+pluto+%2F+lightspeed)

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+voyager+1+%2F+...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+voyager+1+%2F+lightspeed)

P.S. You are correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This seems like a sort of analog to the way hurricanes sometimes spawn tornadoes. At the boundary where the relatively still external air/space meet the rapidly spinning air/magnetic field generator, you get some turbulent interactions.

I would love to see the equations or programs they're using to model this.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is magnetic reconnection an established phenomenon, i.e. verified in a lab or at least strongly theoretically founded?

<comment><USER14> Apparently it is: <http://mrx.pppl.gov/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> TL;DR

"The sun's magnetic field extends all the way to the edge of the solar system," explains Opher. "Because the sun spins, its magnetic field becomes twisted and wrinkled, a bit like a ballerina's skirt. Far, far away from the sun, where the Voyagers are now, the folds of the skirt bunch up."

<comment><USER16> That's just the setup. The point is a little later: "The crowded folds of the skirt reorganize themselves, sometimes explosively, into foamy magnetic bubbles."

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I always wondered why those pictures depicted the sun's magnetic field limits as so clean cut from the rest of the galaxy.. didn't seem natural..

Maybe I should have followed my science instincts and perform a career in physics instead of System's Engineering

</comment><comment><USER18> This seems to be the problem with relying solely on the private sector space exploration. With shuttles there is opportunity for revenue, with revenue come investors, with investors we can make progress. However, where is the revenue opportunity from either of these probes? Without a body that can be truly altruistic about projects and the benefit they'll provide, certain projects may never have/or my never again, become a reality.

This kind of news makes me truly excited about the future. We have concrete knowledge about so little in this universe, the future is ripe with possibility if we can just show a little foresight.

<comment><USER19> Nobody is proposing relying solely on the private sector for space exploration. But we'll be far better off harnessing market forces to make space access cheap then letting NASA just do the minimum stuff it can do with the suddenly-cheap tools it has access to then we will ever be trying to make the unaccountable jobs-program government space program provide the access. That has demonstrably failed. How many more probes would we have if we cut NASA's budget in half _but_ they could just buy rocket space instead of building and maintaining the Shuttle and ISS at umpty bumbkin billion dollars each?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Watching that video, I couldn't help but wonder what Sheldon Cooper would say. It's unfortunate that NASA needs to work towards _this_ level of public appeal just to try and secure funding.

</comment><comment><USER21> Could this offer some protection from a gamma ray burst?

<comment><USER4> Gamma-ray bursts happen all the time, and aren't dangerous to us--the Earth's atmosphere absorbs all of the gamma-rays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Correct me if I'm wrong, at that distance isn't it possible to get some unreliable data.

The discovery is huge, but I'm just wondering

</comment><comment><USER23> Boring. With that title, I was expecting a monolith!</comment>


Atari 8 Bit Computers FAQ - <AUTHOR> http://seriouscomputerist.atariverse.com/media/pdf/book/Atari%25208-Bit%2520FAQ%2520(Letter).pdf&ved=2ahUKEwi199j9iNnZAhWFo1kKHeBMCWU4FBAWMAJ6BAgJEAE&usg=AOvVaw1Inygs7tPsD2IALT9J3zqh <comment><USER2> Link dead, this seems to work:

[http://seriouscomputerist.atariverse.com/media/pdf/book/Atar...](http://seriouscomputerist.atariverse.com/media/pdf/book/Atari%208-Bit%20FAQ%20\(Letter\).pdf)

Document itself contains another mirror:

[http://www.atari800xl.eu/faq/atari-8bit-faq-us-letter- format...](http://www.atari800xl.eu/faq/atari-8bit-faq-us-letter-format.pdf)

<comment> 52-6F-62 The entire parent folder is a serious treasure trove of good programming books:

[http://seriouscomputerist.atariverse.com/media/pdf/book/](http://seriouscomputerist.atariverse.com/media/pdf/book/)

I spent probably $100 between C Programming and Elements of Programming w/ Kernighan. Had I only known they were in good shape here. ;) (I kid, I'm actually a bit of a bibliophile so I prefer the hard copies anyway...)

But seriously. It's worth browsing!

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link. I actually have an original copy of "Machine Language for Beginners".

I think I actually typed in the whole machine language code for the monitor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting this is popping up. I had an Atari 800 and loved it. Not sure, though, why it's currently front page. Loved my C64 as well.

Anyone else that was hooked on the "Miner Twenty Four Niner"[1] game that was popular on Atari 400/800? My non-techie wife even loved it.

Also loved "Full Metal Planet" on the Amiga platform.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miner_2049er](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miner_2049er)

<comment><USER5> Still have the cartridge, Miner 2049er was something of an obsession for me after Star Raiders and the Atari 8-bit Donkey Kong cartridge. 4 player M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities of Gold were amazing.

Actually, playing Seven Cities of Gold on a reservation generated some amusement.

<comment><USER6> MULE, Archon, Miner 2049er, Boulderdash, and one of the Ultimas [Ultima IV I think] were my favorite computer games in my childhood.

There was a semi-realistic semi-3D RPG-style game that I really wanted to get into but never could. This thread caused me to research it, only to find out that it was Alternate Reality that another sub-thread is extolling. I think I was too young and impatient perhaps, but I got so frustrated at dying and having my bank investments go bust so often.

<comment><USER7> Archon, oh Archon. Friendships were almost lost from Archon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a true shame Jay Miner died in 1994. I really think someone would have gone one past Amiga on the journey from the Atari 8-bit.

Learned to program on a Atari 400, and very glad their was an easy to get, affordable, non-technical parent friendly option for those at the lower end of the income scale.

<comment><USER4> Oh, but the crap keyboard on the 400. I got a good deal on an 800, so wasn't subjected to it. Good for you for powering through it though.

Edit: Lol on the downvote. It was a membrane keyboard that actually fought touch type and encouraged hunt-and-peck. It truly sucked...a friend had one so I'm commenting from real world experience. Consider that _" open source"_ at the time meant retyping code from long passages in a printed magazine. A time when the competition had at least decent keyboards. (C64/Coco/99-4a/Apple ii/etc).

<comment><USER8> Brian Bagnall's books on Commodore argues that one of the reasons the VIC-20 and later the C-64 got proper keyboards was a combination of a costly mistake Commodore did on that front with one of their PET models that got slammed for the poor keyboard, combined with Tramiel seeing it as a way of making the VIC-20 look like a more expensive computer next to the Atari 400.

<comment><USER4> Makes sense, in retrospect. My C64 keyboard was awesome. I took touch typing in high school on old school typewriters, and the C64 keyboard seemed natural and fast to me.

I had gotten a steal of a deal on it... basically another high school kid bought one and didn't understand it, so I got a fire sale price on it.

My friends had inferior things like Timex Z81's or similar, so I was soaring past them just on touch type ability.

And my middle school had a relationship with DEC, so we had decent VAX/VMS 11/780 backends with VT-200 terminals.

Truly most of any of my success was, _" right place at the right time"_, versus any real mental advantage on my part. I'm truly grateful for advantageous timing. It helped me more than any skill of my own.

<comment><USER9> Could have sworn that Commodore started out making typewriters, so they should know how to do keyboards (and the value of them).

<comment><USER4> It was calculators, not typewriters, but your point stands for the same reasons.

<comment><USER9> > The company that would become Commodore Business Machines, Inc. was founded > in 1954[3] in Toronto as the _Commodore Portable Typewriter Company_ by > Polish immigrant and Auschwitz survivor Jack Tramiel.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_International](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_International)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Since we are in Atari mood :), Atari Archives is a nice website for those that miss the old Atari programming books.

[https://www.atariarchives.org/](https://www.atariarchives.org/)

</comment><comment><USER11> There really is some amazing work done on the Atari 8-bits, still. Especially in eastern Europe, where there's a very vibrant enthusiast community. Some really great expanders (VBXE adds Amiga-quality hi-rez graphics, and there's expanders that bring it up to 1MB graphics, high clock rates, etc.).

I was a Tramiel user back then -- VIC-20 then Atari ST. But as an adult have gone back and played with the other lineage (Atari 8-bit and a bit of Amiga). The A8s were great machines. In some ways a far better architecture than the C64 -- the SIO expansion bus a precursor to USB, very novel powerful video hardware, etc. And what's amazing is that the 400/800 came out quite a bit before the C64 (albeit for far more money)

</comment><comment><USER12> The graphics capabilities of the 8-bit Ataris are quite mind blowing. Having grown up on an Apple II, the whole idea of the graphics chip running through not a bitmap, but a kind of "program" that caused pixels to appear on the screen was extremely liberating.

</comment><comment><USER13> Had an Atari 400 back in the day that's been lost to time. Recently picked up an Atari 800. Looking for an Assembly cartridge to pick up programming on it again.

Finding a lot of interesting pdfs on 6502 processor specs that are out there : Atarimania is great for these: [http://www.atarimania.com/documents- atari-400-800-xl-xe-book...](http://www.atarimania.com/documents- atari-400-800-xl-xe-books_1_8.html)

Played Star Raiders with my son -- that was awesome!

</comment><comment><USER14> This is an amazing resource.

Anyone know of similar documents for other families of 8-bit computers? c64, TI 99/4, TRS-80, Apple ][, ...

<comment><USER15> >TI 99/4 That was a 16-bit machine

<comment><USER16> Parts of it were 16-bit, parts of it were 8-bit.</comment></comment></comment>


Why We Prefer Founding CEOs - <AUTHOR> http://bhorowitz.com/2010/04/28/why-we-prefer-founding-ceos/

<comment><USER2> The craze to bring in outside CEOs reached its peak in Silicon Valley in the bubble era when the "goal" of many of the dot-com startups became one of packaging themselves for a quick IPO exit - in such an environment, bringing on a "big name" CEO who had taken one or more previous companies public became indispensable to the packaging process - so much so that startups were routinely willing to give as much as 7% of their stock immediately prior to the IPO to such persons just to get their name value added to the offering.

That trend (at least in its reflexive and frenzied form of "let's automatically dump the founder CEO once we get to the stage where we need a real CEO") died with the IPO craze that accompanied it and this wonderful piece explains why it met a well-deserved end - you need to build real value for something lasting to come of it and those who have the vision to found companies and build innovative products are very often best positioned to build such value and to guide that process.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is particularly important in the early to mid stage of a startup. I've seen cases where professional CEOs were brought in pre-funding or just as the company was getting funded.

The CEOs that I saw in these instances simply didn't know how to operate creatively in an environment with tight constraints, so they did the only thing they knew how to do: bring in unnecessary layers of middle management which of course results in burning through cash before achieving a scalable business model.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is Yujin Chung, the grad student at Wharton who helped Ben with some of the research. One thought I had (which I will blog about) is the context supporting Ben's three reasons is large founder equity stake (which is generally many times larger than a professional CEO stake). More specifically, on "moral authority," it's not just having the guts to change a company's direction, but having the actual shareholder and board control to force such strategic decision.

</comment><comment><USER5> A fantastic and very important essay.

" _[...] innovation is the core competency for technology companies._ "

And this shows up in their financial results.

And with _very_ rare exceptions (two are mentioned) professional CEOs don't have what it takes to do that (three reasons are detailed) and (many) founder CEOs can learn what they're missing.

</comment><comment><USER6> This earlier article it linked to is interesting as well: [http://bhorowitz.com/2010/03/14/notes-on-leadership-be- like-...](http://bhorowitz.com/2010/03/14/notes-on-leadership-be-like-steve- jobs-and-bill-campbell-and-andy-grove)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm glad to see Steve Blank mentioned. Having recently heard Blank talk about the Transition from Scalable Startup to Large Company (slide 34 of [http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/why-accountants-dont-run- st...](http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/why-accountants-dont-run-startups- sllc?from=ss_embed)), I've wondered whether I care to make the transition. At least right now, my heart is in the chaotic early stages. Of course, I can't speak for being a "real" CEO later on but my gut tells me I'd have more fun at the startup stage.

</comment><comment><USER8> Of all the blogs about how to run a startup from the discomfort of your own home, this one stands out. It's well written, has some research and it's obvious that the writers spent time on the posts.

But perhaps too analytical, too long for getting a conversation going. There's not much to argue about.</comment>


Ask HN: Assume GTP-X arrives in 6 months and is 100X – what now? - <AUTHOR> After reading https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N6vZEnCn6A95Xn39p/are-we-in-an-ai-overhang I was thinking...
What would a 100x improvement on GTP-3 do to your employability, for example? What changes would this bring in the short term? Medium term? What should one do to stay afloat in the medium term?
For the purposes of this question, I don't care about the details of the network/GTP etc... just the outcomes of a 100x improvement in results. <comment><AUTHOR> How far can you get in some jobs by _just_ being _really_ good at NLP - i.e. without any insight or domain knowledge/reasoning, beyond what's needed for the NLP?

</comment><comment><USER2> GPT-3 is not a 100x improvement over GPT-2.

<comment><USER3> Are you sure? When I look at the GPT-2 examples, and remember my experience with it when you could try on talktotransformer.com, I would say it is.

GPT-2 would start to ramble incomprehensibly almost every time. It would forget context after a few words. It would get into loops. To make something resembling a conversation you had to heavily influence it.

<comment><USER2> It's _better_ , just not 100x better, which is a big difference in practice.

Quantitatively about 5x of the output is more useful in my usage, which is not enough to upend society.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What was it like when dot-com bubble collapsed during 2000-2002? - <AUTHOR> Would you mind sharing your stories? <comment><USER2> By 2000 everyone knew there was going to be a big correction. Few accurately imagined how big. It was like going to the doctors because you knew something was 'a little off' and finding out that you were going to die in three months. Then talking to all your friends and realizing that everyone you knew had the same disease.

Initially many thought it would be similar to the early 90s recession. I.E. A few layoffs with everyone getting hired back again two years later. It wasn't until 2002 that people realized that springtime wasnt coming back.

It wasnt just places like pets.com that crashed. You had every single non-tech company simultaneously scaling back IT initiatives. At the time there was still a large cohort of management types who considered the Internet more of a fad than a new paradigm. These types took full advantage of the shifting winds to cut deeply into anything tech related. This broad overcorrection did a massive amount of damage to the industry.

You can still see the impact crater. Remember the big talent shortages during 2008-2012? Thats because you no longer had a cohort of mid career professionals to draw from. Only the thin number of people who survived the collapse and a bunch of novices who were just getting started. Everyone was missing that valuable group of mid career 8-12 years of experience etc... Basically a generation of careers strangled. Which is why you'll often see no sympathy for the 'talent shortage' complaint. Five years after cutting everything and leaving people to starve you have the same cohort of managers demanding to know "where are all the people with five years of recent experience"

<comment><USER3> Your cohort point is particularly insightful. I had just started my career in 1999 .. I had a bad feeling about the situation and went to grad school right away (after a year). Was a good move at the time because a year or two after I started, good programs had a crazy number of applicants (which of course, raises the bar to get in). Other than the grad school crowd and people who braved unemployment, what did these professionals do? Get out of tech completely?

Btw ... love the hn handle :)

<comment><USER2> Yes in many cases they got out of tech. One of the nice things about tech careers is that your floor is most other people's ceiling. Having tech skills in the early 2000s created a large gap between you and other office workers. Imagine if being able to read/write was a rare skill. It would make you generally competitive in many areas, because you could learn and communicate better than your peers.

I went into banking because I already knew a few people in the field and they were desperate for people. Did really well, set a bunch of performance records, put on track for various promotions/advancement. Strongly considered never returning to tech despite it being my passion. Eventually I couldn't stay away from tech, but it took some time.

It also discouraged many new students from entering CS programs. This is why the 'talent shortage' lasted so long. It wasn't just a mass exodus of existing tech pros, but also a sharp decline in people pursuing tech careers. The high school class of 2002-2004 was much less likely to consider pursuing a tech degree. This is the reason you can't find piles of skilled/cheap early career programmers with 5 years experience in 2012. That means they would have graduated in 2007 and selected their undergrad program in 2002-2003.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dot-com I worked for went down hard. Sysadmin was reading management's email and telling people in advance they were going to get fired. Went from massive office to nothing in just a few months.

Practical advice: save money and live below your means. This will let you survive the next bust, whenever it happens, much better. It will also help you survive a non-systemic layoff, and will help you find better jobs... it's pretty much always a good idea.

[https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/08/living-below-your- me...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/08/living-below-your-means/)

<comment><USER3> The biggest issue right now is rents. I have 2-3 friends who just signed 1 year leases for north of 3K for 1 bedrooms. My own evil apartment complex (shitty place but Mountain View so what can you do) raised my rent and said I could go back to the lower one if I sign another lease. While your advice is sage, it isn't practical.

<comment><USER5> If you aren't making enough money to save in Mountain View, perhaps consider relocating to anywhere else in the country?

I'm guessing you have some other budgeting issues?

<comment><USER3> My last apartment complex, the manager boosted how 2 bedroom apartments (going for like 4K) were being shared by 3 engineers so it wasn't too bad. As an older tech person whose room-mate days are over, this seems exploitative.

I do okay financially .. I just don't like getting fleeced. Also, few jobs in tech are 100% secure (the point of this thread) so I have a problem with a land owner who is intent to pass most of their risk over to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> People say there is a bubble, but Marc Andreessen is right that the situation is completely different now. When we started in 1998, our whole startup was on one _dialup_ line, as a T1 was really expensive. We had to take turns downloading files. This was in San Mateo, California, not the middle of nowhere. The sysadmins once put out a request to the developers one time to physically show up and help move all of the servers. Our colo site got mad at us because we packed so many servers in that it overtaxed their air conditioning. Who buys their own servers now?

Now everybody is connected. You really can expect a huge number of normal non- technical people to be able to use your website to do everyday mundane tasks like hail a cab or order food. As Marc points out, all the stupid ideas from the bubble all work now. In 2000, selling pet food online was stupid. Now people buy so much online that physical retail businesses that sell generic stuff like pet food are going out of business.

Not sure if I can can communicate how utterly strange the internet was to most people in 1998. There had never been anything like it. People knew it would change everything, and they were right. It just needed a decade and a half for everyone to get network, get a client machine they liked (iPhone), and learn how to use it. I think Marc is right: this is the deployment phase of the technology. I do not think there will ever be another internet bubble. The next bubble will be in some new technology that does not work yet, like biotech or self-driving cars.

Or, maybe people are now so well-informed and information is in such a tight feedback loop that there will never be that kind of bubble _ever_ again. Bubbles come from ignorance and a slow feedback loop. People forget how hard it was to find information in the past: you literally had to know where to physically go to get it. Now some dude in rural China can find out more about the meeting schedule of subcommittees the North Dakota legislature next week while sitting on the toilet than most people in North Dakota could in 1995 without at the very least making a bunch of phone calls all the time or living in Bismarck and going to the capital ever day: [http://www.legis.nd.gov/](http://www.legis.nd.gov/) I was so confident of that sentence that I guessed that to be true and only searched for the site after writing that sentence: yup, there's an app for that.

<comment><USER7> Who buys their own servers now? Well that is funny in a sad way. You may be looking at this in ten years and hopping to another lily pad.

Anyone who needs 4 9's or better has some kind of hardware presence even if they are heavily invested in the cloud. Full stack (hardware->development) SAs are a vanishing breed but I am one of them. I can spend 24k a year on colo with 150K invested in hardware and beat the hell out of cloud providers long term...for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was a technical sales manager at a fast growing ISP focused on selling T1, DS3 and "business grade" DSL. The money was good. It felt like we were on top of the world. Embarrassingly, looking back, the movie that best describes our culture/ environment back then was Boiler Room. It's one of Vin Diesel's last movies before becoming a star w/ the Fast & Furious series and it's streaming on Youtube if you're ever interested. Different industry but same vibe. Most of us were recent grads from no name schools. There were also a few dropouts and a few who never attempted college. Depending on where you live, this would be the equivalent of coming out of school in your 20's w/ very few skills to make a doctor's salary almost 20 years ago.

Towards the end, every week for a few months, we'd talk/ read about mass firings or competitors shutting down completely. The writing was on the wall when the CEO brought in the PE guy (who still maintained his role at the PE shop he came from) in as a VP to "tighten things up".I was too young and naive to recognize what that meant but his role was to come in and get the company ready to be acquired or parted out like an old car at the junkyard. Yup, we were being prepared for the slaughter.

That last day was tough. We knew it was coming but didn't know when. Working under that type of environment is a tough feeling to describe. Big cardboard boxes on everyones desk one morning, along w/ an offer to take or leave was devastating & relieving at the same time. I took the offer and used the cash to start a company.

Some never recovered. Some had picked up bad habits (cars, alcohol, coke, fast life) while the money was flowing, making it harder when the cash dried up. I always lived a low key existence. I never appreciated it more than when our world stopped spinning.

</comment><comment><USER9> A magazine (Fortune, The Industry Standard?) ran an article about the declining prices of dotcom IPOs and included the sentence, "It can go down to zero." That was correct.

</comment><comment><USER10> The highways were empty and I spent my time playing Vampire LARP in downtown Palo Alto , or talking with my friends about larping. There were no jobs anywhere and I almost moved out of state. However, I decided to stay and take the consequences. It worked out for me, but I occasionally see some people I knew from back in the day. They never bounced back.

<comment><USER11> How long did it remain empty? Did real-estate prices crash?

<comment><USER12> Commercial yes, but housing no. Houses leveled off briefly. It meant that instead of having to make an offer 50% over asking and literally beg in a personal letter to the owners, you could make a 10% over offer and leave it to the agent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was in college at the time. I remember people saying during that time, once you graduate with a Computer Science degree, you'll get 45k a year starting salary, easy!

And then the bubble popped and they were like "Oops! Nevermind!"

Nowadays that number seems low.

<comment><USER11> I was 18 in 2001 and started my first job as a programmer at the nadir of the bust (October '01).

I got the job via some personal contacts, it was in an academic institute and I was making barely over minimum wage (probably why there wasn't much competition for it). It wasn't really even an open position but when I asked around they had the budget to hire someone to help the physics phds with their non-research tasks.

I started studying CS at uni the next year ('02) and it was much easier to get in than previously, cause there were far fewer applicants. By the time I got my first job with a more decent salary it was 2005 and the worst of the bust already cleared away - so I guess I somehow managed to skip it altogether.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Before: Mt. View cinemas with pre movie recruiting ads with sign on offers of a new car.

After: Ads for used routers and switches and office furniture.

</comment><comment><USER14> I went through the whole dot com boom and collapse. The weirdest thing was driving on 101 during rush hour and it being empty.

</comment><comment><USER7> It was shit. You took pay cuts to stay on a job or you left the field. Personally I worked through it but it was not fun and eventually had to leave the position anyway. Adrift in 2003 and thankfully late 2004 showed up and government started hiring contractors. Otherwise I would be making 40K a year teaching PE at a middle school.

</comment><comment><USER15> Eagerly taking the sort of Beltway Bandit contracting job that we had mocked in 1999 when I graduated in 2002. Windowless basement in a '70s government building in suburban Maryland with the office furniture the government employees had rejected, writing and tracking Java unit tests, and I was deliriously grateful.

</comment><comment> V-eHGsd_ oh man, there was a lot going on back then. enron's rolling blackouts in california, 9/11, gray davis' recall, my roommate telling me that now was the time to invest because there was no way tdfx could go lower ...

what a time to be alive.

</comment><comment><USER6> The Valley hit the floor so fast that the auction company selling off what was left of our startup just combined the auction with that of another startup in the same building that hit the floor at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER16> A number of colleagues had become rich very quickly and "retired". When the bubble burst, I realized that the money rush was over, and my lotto number had not been drawn. However, within 2 years, most of those colleagues were selling their sports cars and looking for work again.

</comment><comment><USER17> fuckedcompany.com on 6-hour refresh.

</comment><comment><USER18> Do you think we're in a bubble and it'll burst?

<comment><USER19> Of course, do you not?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> pink slip parties</comment>


So I decided to program a Solar System simulator in WebGL and Javascript - <AUTHOR> http://lab.la-grange.ca/en/so-i-decided-to-program-a-solar-system-simulator <comment><USER2> Huh, looking at that Orrery, I realise my mental map of the solar system was a little off.

I always though comets like Haley's went much further out on their trip away from the sun, but that shows it doesn't even reach past Pluto.

And the orbits of Mercury and Mars are a lot less circular than I thought.

<comment><USER3> The Oort cloud/Kuiper-belt area goes _way_ further than Pluto, but the comets that have orbits from out there into the solar system are too long-period to get fancey names like Halley's. Think about it - Halley's comet comes by every 76 years. That's insanely short for a Kuiperoid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's the article describing how the simulator was built: [http://lab.la- grange.ca/en/building-jsorrery-a-javascript-we...](http://lab.la- grange.ca/en/building-jsorrery-a-javascript-webgl-solar-system)

</comment><comment><USER5> I really like how you've documented the challenges you encountered. The "Building jsOrrery" article is probably one of the best sources on the internet describing the process of building a full solar system viz. Your code is also very logical and easy to follow.

I made a similar simulation that shows the inner planets and asteroids, called Asterank ([http://asterank.com/3d](http://asterank.com/3d)). Your code is open source, but does it have a license? I'm interested in adapting your accurate star background for my simulation.

<comment><AUTHOR> MIT license. Glad to know you like it. Your project is nice as well, I like the addition of the asteroid belt!

</comment></comment><comment> Joe-Z for the people who came here wanting to see a solar system simulation, here's the direct link:

[http://mgvez.github.io/jsorrery/](http://mgvez.github.io/jsorrery/)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, I should probably have posted the link to the live project instead of the blog post. I figured that the story of why I did it is interesting as well though.

<comment><USER6> I was more expecting to see the link of _how_ you did it on HN. I mean I got there from the link you posted but as this is a technical crowd I'd have thought that was the more interesting thing.

As an aside, I'm very impressed that the Sun appears to dim during a solar eclipse ([http://mgvez.github.io/jsorrery/?scenario=EarthMoon&planetSc...](http://mgvez.github.io/jsorrery/?scenario=EarthMoon&planetScale=1&lookFrom=earth&lookAt=moon&date=2017-08-21T18:26:40.000Z&cx=0&cy=0&cz=0&fov=45)) but I'm surprised it isn't hidden completely - have I just got the timestamp wrong for the specific viewpoint you're using?

<comment><AUTHOR> I hesitated when posting the article. Maybe I should have posted the technical one. I wrote them all in one piece, but split them afterwards for different crowds. The one I posted is the least technical one of all, but it's the entry point. My bad. The best scenario to see eclipses is the Inner Solar System, and put the scale to 1. Eclipses are very difficult to simulate, as the distances are so huge, you need to have incredibly precise positions to observe one. But it is still possible to see them, for example at [http://mgvez.github.io/jsorrery/?scenario=InnerSolarSystem&d...](http://mgvez.github.io/jsorrery/?scenario=InnerSolarSystem&date=2009-07-22T02:35:00.000Z&planetScale=1&lookFrom=earth&lookAt=moon&cx=0&cy=0&cz=0&fov=3.03)

<comment><USER6> Having read the help text about the moon position I understand the problems. It's still so damn impressive though, I didn't mean to sound critical above :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That is more then awesome, I will show it to my daughter, it is funny how different the reality is to the map of our solar system we get through traditional media like TV.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm very happy to know that this project has educational value!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looking at this, it's hard to believe that we have subsisted for so long on the standard top down flat version of this that we have seen in books since... Pluto was discovered. The children of the future will not have to remember those dark days.

Solar System visualization industry: Disrupted.

</comment><comment><USER3> For fans of this, the biggest project on this subject is traditionally Celestia, but that's pretty long in the tooth now.

[http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia/)

</comment><comment><USER8> This pretty much settles the "Is Pluto a planet?" debate for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd let the "scale planets" go to more than 100x. Even at 100x they're crazy small when looking at a full map.

</comment><comment><USER9> Appropriate to do an orbital mechanics thing for a company called La Grange (=> Lagrange) :oP

</comment><comment><USER10> What the author forgets is, these projects can help you gain a good reputation.

</comment><comment><USER11> It would be really cool if this supported multitouch pan/zoom.

<comment><USER12> It supports scroll to zoom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Doesn't seem to work with Safari.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it seems that WebGL is not enabled by default on Safari. [https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3300585?start=0&tstart=...](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3300585?start=0&tstart=0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Awesome stuff.

</comment><comment><USER15> The Apollo 8 flyby scenario is amazing. It's awesome how much this changes my mental model.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this is for me the best part. To be honest, I really don't know how realistic it is. All I can say is that I plugged in the numbers and that's the output.

You can read about it, if you haven't already, on [http://lab.la- grange.ca/en/showing-an-apollo-mission-free-re...](http://lab.la- grange.ca/en/showing-an-apollo-mission-free-return-trajectory-in-jsorrery)</comment></comment>


MLB, Homeland Security, and the Undercover Underwear Sting - <AUTHOR> https://sports.vice.com/article/panty-raid-mlb-homeland-security-and-the-great-undercover-underwear-sting <comment><USER2> > A group of agents then charged past him into the doorway. Lindquist was > briefly handcuffed as they entered the unit, with guns drawn. Agents then > told him that if he insisted on a warrant, they would take everything print- > related in his shop as a precaution to keep him from printing further > counterfeit apparel.

This absolutely infuriates me. I don't care how much of the law he is breaking - you are threatening to take away a man's livelihood because he was making sure due process was being followed. The fact that is remotely legal is absurd. Those agents and their supervisors should be fired.

<comment><USER3> Guns-drawn raids are just how things are done in the US these days.

<comment><USER2> The guns drawn are the least of my concern [0] - officer safety is important too.

My concern is the fact they are threatening him for wanting his rights maintained and due process followed.

[0]: I'm not saying it's not an issue, just not what I'm focused on in this comment.

<comment><USER4> 'cause sometimes two-year olds are packing

[http://www.salon.com/2014/06/24/a_swat_team_blew_a_hole_in_m...](http://www.salon.com/2014/06/24/a_swat_team_blew_a_hole_in_my_2_year_old_son/)

<comment><USER5> Jesus Christ... how can that be acceptable? How can there be no punishment for the idiots that _flashbanged a family_? It's reprehensible...

<comment><USER6> Not that it helps at all, but if this is the same case, the police claimed the crib was positioned to block the door. So given a situation where the police _thought_ they were after "evil" drug dealers, and they encountered something blocking the door, it's _slightly_ less absurd sounding.

It's still utterly disgusting, from the drug laws down to the police themselves.

<comment><USER7> why would you even bother repeating what the police claim or thought?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The federal government is fast becoming the military arm of corporate America. It's reprehensible, but the only way to fight it is to make billions of dollars yourself, then dedicate that money to fighting against the very system that enabled you to make and keep your billions.

This, of course, is unlikely to happen, and is why this problem will only get worse over time.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is infuriating to me, and corrosive to our republic. I want to help, to fight this. I have some money and some time. What is the most effective to do this?

<comment><USER10> [http://populardemocracy.org/blog/demanding-police- accountabi...](http://populardemocracy.org/blog/demanding-police- accountability-ferguson-and-across-country)

There isn't actually all that much organizing being done, but these people are at the center of a lot of grassroots organizations, and have a ton of institutional support from foundations etc. Depending on how serious you are, I'd get in touch with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm nearly speechless reading this, shaking my head. The "laws" that the esteemed enforcement agencies are choosing to enforce are astounding. The best thing that can possibly happen is transparency and subsequent outrage.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why are the agents involved in these raids never named in the news coverage? These kinds of incidents should become part of their reputations.

<comment><USER13> They're protected, by law. As far as I'm aware, they can't also be sued (in an individual capacity) for anything they do on the job (unless they're blatantly violating laws/policy/protocol, obviously).

<comment><USER14> > They're protected, by law. As far as I'm aware, they can't also be sued

Which is why they should be publicly shamed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> isn't whether a trademark is being violated a legal question? HLS just gets to make this determination on its own and act? seems odd...

<comment><USER16> What does homeland security have to do with trademarks anyway?

<comment><USER6> At least on one angle: Customs enforces the laws around contraband (including IP infringements) from being imported, and they are under DHS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Might be about time to wind back copyright enforcement _just a tad_.

</comment><comment><USER18> How is this a copyright violation? Trademark possibly, but not copyright.

<comment><USER19> Copyright or trademark infringement. Either way I fail to see how this affects national security. Isn't that what DHS is supposed to be about?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Lobbyists As A Service. Anyone?

<comment><USER21> That's called a law firm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Now that's what I call a panty raid!

</comment><comment><USER23> Not surprising. Third world country requires the third world police.</comment>


Show HN: ClickSend - Stream files to Android via WiFi with two clicks - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.timtips.clicksend

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the technical background: ClickSend consists of an Android App and a Java server. Both register with a Google App Engine backend. If you send a file to the Android App, the Java server opens an HTTP server, generates a random URL for the file and sends this as a push notification (GCM) to your Android device, along with all IP adresses of the server. The client is triggered by the notification and tries to reach the server on all IP adresses and opens the URL. This allows for direct streaming of multimedia content (player App needed) or downloading. The data never passes through our servers, so it only works if server and client are connected to the same network. We are currently preparing to launch this so all feedback is appreciated.</comment>


Good, freely-available textbooks in machine learning - <AUTHOR> http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/186/ <comment><USER2> For anyone interested in Machine Learning let me again link to the entire lecture series from Stanford.

[http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewiTunes...](http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewiTunesUCollection?id=384233048)

<comment><USER3> Andrew Moore's lecture slides are also very useful: <http://www.autonlab.org/tutorials/index.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> AARGGH! I paid close to a hundred bucks for the Tibshirani book a few years ago! On the plus side, I think it's a beautiful, beautiful machine learning book that is a welcome replacement to Tom Mitchell's book, which is showing its age. I highly recommend the Tibshirani et al. book to anyone with college- level math and a desire to understand what the hell this machine learning thing REALLY is.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not free, but I highly recommend "Programming Collective Intelligence" if you are looking for python examples applicable to web applications. <http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321>

<comment><USER6> That book has the worst Python code ever in a print publication.

<comment><USER7> I'm not a computer scientist nor really a programmer and I found it very readable. Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER6> I read it when it came out which was a while ago. I found it to be very unidiomatic Python at the time.

More critique at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=208895> if you'll chase the parent links.

<comment><USER5> Idiomatic, no (agreed). Very readable, yes (I think the style was intentional). For tutorials, I generally implement everything myself as part of the learning process and avoid source copy-pasting. So I wasn't irked but YMMV depending on learning style.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> ML definitely seems to be more on people's radar these days but as far as I can tell the job market is pretty small.

<comment><USER8> My experience has been the opposite:

[http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/2542/job-prospects- in-m...](http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/2542/job-prospects-in-machine- learningdata-mining)

I guess it depends what you're comparing against. Against general purpose programming jobs, yes, the market is small. But, of all CS PhDs, people who do ML are the most sought-after.

<comment><USER3> That was actually my question. :)

I'm sure CS PhD's are in good shape but breaking into ML from another programming discipline seems pretty hard.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think most of this is due to the fact that most ML techniques need lots of specific knowledge to apply correctly. Many introductions focus too much on specific algorithms, for example, while ensemble methods are probably best in real-world data. The pactices of building training and test sets, of regularizing, of doing proper feature engineering, and of making structured models (for example) are more easily learned in a mentor-student relationship than by reading blogs (reading papers might take you a long way, but you won't build an intuition as to why things work and why they fail without lots of experimentation or advice from someone who already has this intuition) and/or AI books, and ML books are usually far too technical (or too superficial in the technical side, as is programming collective intelligence).

<comment><USER3> Most of the ML books I've worked with so far seem a bit overly formal. Steven Marsland's book seems to strike the best balance between theory and implementation I've seen, even if the Python code is a little clumsy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've read a good 1/4 of Artificial Intelligence - A Modern Approach, and scanned a handful of pages further on, and thus far it's been excellent.

So far, it looks to be very much rule / first-order logic oriented, but that makes sense, as it's been the most well understood, and much more easily provable / understandable once something is built. There's very little about neural networks, for instance, or genetic algorithms, aside from an explanatory section or so. Though I may have the first edition, and apparently the 3rd came out last year.

So, if anyone is interested in a relatively-introductory, _extremely_ readable book on machine learning, it's the best I've come across so far.

<comment><USER4> > There's very little about neural networks, for instance, or genetic > algorithms

For good reason. Outside of neuroscience, there's very little reason to use neural networks for classification or regression problems, and outside very ill-posed optimization problems, there's very little reason to use genetic algorithms. If you want a good MODERN machine learning book (which is where your post seems to imply your interests lie), try the Elements of Statistical Machine Learning by Tibshirani, Hastie and (I forgot the third guy's name, sorry). Anyway, it's included in the posted link.

<comment><USER10> Not sure neural net expert Yann LeCun (yann.lecun.com) would agree with your neural networks comment. Neural nets have taken on a life of their own since the time they were originated and actually have little direct connection with neuroscience these days.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is true, but the very good deep learning results are very recent (from less than 5 years ago), and they generally require very different models and/or training strategies from the standard multilayer perceptron you find in most AI textbooks. So it's an omission, but I'm not aware of any textbooks that cover these new neural networks in depth, as basic research in this area is still going in a frantic pace.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I'm finding that there's little book-format info on deep neural networks as well. Similarly for belief networks. Gotta hunt down some journals, and wield some Google-fu.

<comment><USER11> The most promising approaches for neural nets these days involve learning generative models using Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs). Geoffrey Hinton at UToronto has some good seminal papers on these, like <http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/ncfast.pdf>. See <http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/> for excellent videos of digit generation / classification.

As a note, this approach outperforms all others (sans tweaks), whereas neural nets used to be beaten by SVMs and the like.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, the best recent results in this area involve discriminatively trained stacked auto-encoders using second-order algorithms (for which the code, as of Sept 2010, is still private to the group at the university of toronto), as described in James Martens's paper at this year's ICML: [http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~jmartens/docs/Deep_HessianFree.pd...](http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~jmartens/docs/Deep_HessianFree.pdf)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


First Round Capital: San Francisco Office Hours - <AUTHOR> http://redeye.firstround.com/2009/05/san-francisco-office-hours.html

<comment><USER2> that's awesome. I hope more VCs did the same. Keep an open dialog with the entrepreneurs community is crucial to find out about teams that might have great ideas/skills but happen not to be as well connected with people in the VC world.</comment>


Danish resources, datasets, and tools for use in automated computational systems [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/pubdb/views/edoc_download.php/6956/pdf/imm6956.pdf <comment><USER2> Great list. A shame it doesn't go into depth with the CST tools (and a for shame that CST doesn't put in more effort into making their tools easily accessible)

Particularly you should read the papers on snowball before using it for lemmatizing and then consider using CST's tools instead as snowball has a speed/accuracy trade off that is optimized for certain problems.</comment>


Scaling SQLite to 4M QPS on a Single Server (EC2 vs. Bare Metal) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.expensify.com/2018/01/08/scaling-sqlite-to-4m-qps-on-a-single-server/ <comment><USER2> There's a few things that stood out to me that seem like "bad practices":

> we don't use DNS internally — just configuration-managed /etc/hosts files

This seems very odd and redundant. Does someone manually edit all servers when a new server comes online?

> Make RANDOM() deterministic

Why would you use random if you want determinism? That sounds like the opposite of random to me.

> David Barrett, Founder of Expensify

Was this blog post really written by the founder!?!

The perftest[0] code is in a branch named "dbarrett_perftest" but that still surprises me.

[0]: [https://github.com/Expensify/Bedrock/tree/dbarrett_perftest/...](https://github.com/Expensify/Bedrock/tree/dbarrett_perftest/perftest)

<comment><USER3> > > we don't use DNS internally — just configuration-managed /etc/hosts files

> This seems very odd and redundant. Does someone manually edit all servers > when a new server comes online?

That's what configuration management does for you, edit the file in one place(preferable it's also in version control) and it will change it on every system for you. Some config mangement "tools" that do this for you: Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Saltstack, ...</comment></comment>


Small Functions Considered Harmful - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@copyconstruct/small-functions-considered-harmful-91035d316c29 <comment><USER2> [https://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html](https://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html)

'Considered harmful' essays considered harmful.

</comment><comment><USER3> Needs an example. The closest it gets is when you add "function x, function y" between "function a, function b" and I didn't see why that was bad.</comment>