Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end - <AUTHOR> https://sitesauce.app <comment><USER2> I love this site. It's truly impressive for any solo founder, regardless of the age, let along an 18 year old. Yeah, you kind of rely on the generosity of your vendor (Vercel, in this case), but that's really the only option if you want to keep costs low.

I hated Wordpress so much so that I wrote my own CMS + static site generator using a different approach and used it for clients who run sites with 3 million+ visitors a month currently. Once we made that move, we realized how horribly slow was Wordpress even on the best hardware thrown at it. Our costs dropped down to 1/10th of what we used to spend as well purely in terms of hardware. I can easily believe that static sites are the future.

I think this space has a lot of room for new players and definitely worth to keep a watch on. All the best. Hope you see success.

Neya

<comment><USER3> This is a cute story, but what was -actual- the cost (time, monetary and opportunity) in building your own CMS instead of applying basic performance tweaks to an off the shelf system?

<comment><USER4> Well I had to do our corporate team site and got so frustrated with SharePoint that I coded a script in python to generate the html from rst files. It was a couple of days of work. It runs behind nginx and automatically updated on GitHub commit of new content. Bootstrap is very well documented and you can use rst directives for "widgets". I am in the process of moving to markdown + yaml now to make writing content even easier.

<comment><USER5> Why not just use any other static site generator like Hugo instead of re- inventing it?

<comment><USER6> I can answer that, since I also made a small static site generator from scratch in python.

I was using another static site generator (Hexo), but at some point I wanted to change some things and add some custom html to my posts. Since the documentation was ... well ... minimalistic on some aspects, I also spent some time looking at the source code. But at that point I was really wondering what benefit I still had from using that generator.

In the end, all a static site generator does is collecting some markdown or RST files, converting them to html and putting that into a template html file. And generating some lists (index page, RSS, ...) and some metadata for SEO. So it took me a single Saturday to make a working static site generator and now I can do anything I want without looking up documentation or source code, since it's my own dumpster fire :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, I've considered building this exact same app for about 11 years now, but I never did it because I thought there would never be a large enough market to make it successful.

Kudos to you for actually building and launching! Hope you have a lot of success and prove me wrong about the market size.

EDIT: After going through the site and your video, it appears as though you crawl the dynamic site, and generate static pages out of it. It's not really clear if you support sites that render on the client side. Do you?

</comment><comment><USER8> ...any backend that is a content-heavy website? Or are they somehow also abstracting away the application logic?

How is this different from a CDN cache?

<comment><USER9> The way it abstracts application logic is by finding out what parts of your site can be immutable functions, then produces all the variations of static content for each possible input.

<comment><USER8> Seems like static site generation for non-programmers, maybe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I read this as 'generate a static website for any backyard' and got excited for some reason. :) gardening?

</comment><comment><USER11> This is extremely impressive for an 18 year old, well done!

<comment><USER12> I think you mean extremely impressive for any solo founder, period.

<comment><USER13> I think you mean extremely impressive for any human, period.

<comment><USER14> Making it even more impressive for someone who is all 3 ;)

<comment><USER15> Making it even more impressive, that he has already contributed to 500 open- source projects! [https://www.buymeacoffee.com/m1guelpf](https://www.buymeacoffee.com/m1guelpf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow this is pretty cool! Seems like a great tool to throw onto an existing CMS, allowing clients to retain the flexibility of editing their website directly.

Does this deal with/forward dynamic content on the same domain? Or do admin panels, etc have to be hosted on a separate subdomain?

EDIT: Wow, Miguel is even completely transparent ([https://sitesauce.app/open](https://sitesauce.app/open)) with his revenue and costs. That's incredibly inspiring to see from an 18 year old.

</comment><comment><USER17> Vercel has a 16000 files limit (That we hit). How do you handle big sites?

Edit: This is not a problem for a lot of pages. But to me that is a deal breaker to use Vercel for any medium or large sized projects.

</comment><comment><USER18> Requiring a credit card before any functionality is enabled breaks the WordPress.org plugin directory guidelines.

To be compliant, the 7-day free trial should be possible without having to provide credit card details.

That is, in any case, best practice, unless profiting from people who forget to cancel is an important part of your business plan.

</comment><comment><USER19> Let me start off by saying good job on launching. Is there an ability to stop automatic deployments on change and instead allow for manual deployments? Also, I am a bit confused about the hosting. On your landing page you say:

"Sitesauce hosts your static sites on Vercel (formerly ZEIT), offering unlimited bandwidth and their world-class CDN for no additional cost."

Then in your Terms of Service you say:

"You agree that Sitesauce is not responsible for any additional fees charged to your credit card by third-party server providers such as Vercel."

How does the hosting work? Do I sign up with Sitesauce and also sign up for Vercel? If that is the case, would I be able to pick a different host if I wanted? If it isn't the case and Sitesauce handles the backend process of creating an account on Vercel is it paid for by using my credit card and you pass that info to Vercel?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sitesauce allows you to login with your Vercel account once you create an account with us. Once you've done that, we use their API to set everything we need up.

<comment><USER19> In that case perhaps the wording on the front page should be:

"Sitesauce publishes your static sites to Vercel (formerly ZEIT), offering unlimited bandwidth and their world-class CDN for no additional cost."

That makes it clear that you aren't the one hosting and that it is actually Vercel. My initial understanding was that you would pull my data and host it yourself using Vercel as your host. Since you are using the host's API do you have any plans to integrate with other hosts, such as AWS?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Landing page feedback: the backend that keeps changing ("like X-powered websites") could cause the whole page to jump. This is very annoying on narrow viewports (e.g. mobile), especially when I'm reading text, for instance the FAQ.

<comment><USER21> And super nitpick but the font used connects s and t and it really looks out of place to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I like it, will have to try this on my wp site.

Thank you for creating this. It's a great product, something I'd happily pay $20 for.

I think you should perhaps market this to the SEO community. They care tons about pagespeed. Also, set up an affiliate program.

All the best!

</comment><comment><USER23> Wow, good job! As a fellow teenager, it really encourages me that it's possible to launch something successfully without making it your full-time job :)

<comment><USER21> There is absolutely no reason a teenager can't nail these sorts of projects. And often being young has some big advantages in terms of not having got too comfortable with a salaried job and knowing what the next generation wants.

My advice (teenager or not) is join online communities like indie hackers and get all the help because anyone doing this at any age needs to learn diverse skills, it's not just about having an idea and coding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Because of losing my backups of my WordPress website this is a great solution I can just have a static website for my clients

</comment><comment><USER25> How does it play with Squarespace sites? I didn't see that mentioned as one of their supported back-ends.

</comment><comment><USER26> How can $20/month flat pricing realistically work? What if I've got a content- heavy site that gets a lot of traffic? Will I get hit with a surprise bill, or will you eat the costs and just cut me off?

It's a great idea for a service, but the pricing just seems too simplistic.

<comment><AUTHOR> The hosting is managed by Vercel, who recently announced unlimited bandwidth on their free plan [1]

[1]: [https://vercel.com/blog/simpler- pricing](https://vercel.com/blog/simpler-pricing)

<comment><USER27> Yikes.

So the bigger question then is what happens when they change this? Or go away. Also, have you seen what "Additionally, different hard limits apply for each plan." means on their pricing page[1]? Domain limits, maximum files, etc? What those might mean when you scale beyond expectation?

I don't mean to discourage. But big vendors pull the rug out from under people all the time, sometimes ruining a business because there's no viable alternative.

Make sure your eggs can be put in different baskets if need be.

[1] [https://vercel.com/docs/v2/platform/limits](https://vercel.com/docs/v2/platform/limits)

<comment><USER26> Yeah, that's almost worse. It means Sitesauce is relying on the generosity of their vendor for their business model to work.

<comment><USER21> Well they could also connect to upload to s3, netlify, github pages, GitLab pages, to name the free or pretty cheap static hosts I can think of!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've browsed the site and didn't see how are forms handled?

<comment><USER29> Bottom of the front page:

> Sitesauce recommends the use of JAMstack-friendly alternatives to this > services. For example, you could move your contact forms to StaticKit or > your comments to Commento.

> However, there are times where the only option is to rely on your backend. > For this, you can configure Sitesauce to proxy certain endpoints to your > backend. You can also use this if you need to fetch some data from your > backend via AJAX.

<comment><USER28> Thank you! All I could think about was contact forms and other opportunities intakes. Missed that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Site design is a direct rip from [https://www.designjoy.co/](https://www.designjoy.co/)

</comment><comment><USER30> This is looking great, I'm wondering if you folks can support webflow.com exports?

</comment><comment><USER31> Interesting product! But I find the font really annoying especially the st ligature.

</comment><comment><USER32> >Without access to your backend, there's no way for anyone to steal sensitive data or deface your website.

No way? At all? Why could they not deface or alter the static version? Of course there's a lot less attack surface but that doesn't mean it's invulnerable.

</comment><comment><USER33> Nice UI, value prop, and pricing. Well done!

</comment><comment><USER34> this is game changer

</comment><comment><USER35> There is hope for this industry when a 18-yo creates such an amazing conversion centric landing page. Well done, m1guelpf.

</comment><comment><USER36> This costs $20/month, what happens when someone releases an open source version that essentially does the same thing but for free?

<comment><USER37> Some people will use the open source tool and other people will gladly pay money to have someone else manage it for them. Pretty much the same as any service that provides a (real or perceived) value and has open source alternatives.</comment></comment>


Blue Banana - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana <comment><USER2> I must confess that I expected an article about java bananas that taste like vanilla ice cream. Taking in mind the area and the carbon based development, maybe charred sausage would be a more accurate term. We can have it painted in brick red, can we? :-)

<comment><USER3> Normally I'd ask if this was generated by GPT-3, but I honestly hope it isn't because it's utter nonsense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Totally looks like a banana and like nothing else. Live in the area but never heard of the term. Probably a bit outdated with the wider globalization.

<comment><AUTHOR> Has the distribution of the population changed that much in the last decades? The eastern parts of Germany are still more sparsely populated and less strong economically than the others for example, putting the eastern edge of this area at the same place as it used to be.

<comment><USER4> No, I don't think it has. On the contrary I believe it actually got even more concentrated.</comment></comment></comment>


Breaking Linear Classifiers on ImageNet - <AUTHOR> http://karpathy.github.io/2015/03/30/breaking-convnets/

<comment><USER2> I'd be interested in seeing if this same problem appears in generative models. It seems like a flaw of discriminative models.

Convolutional Boltzmann machines have been developed, and neural networks trained with Backpropagation can be pre-trained with generative models. Would this help alleviate the problem?

<comment><USER3> The original paper found that nets pretrained as autoencoders were the least susceptible to it, but still failed. IIRC the follow up paper ([http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6572](http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6572)) tested it or at least claimed it wasn't a solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I tried replicated Nguyen et. al's experiment on MNIST. I decided to do it using different classifiers and that "state of the art" was less than 5 percent 0-1 error on testing set.

I ended up with a ~98% accurate Gaussian kernel SVM classifier and my generated images all looked like numbers.

I also got ~96% using KNN, but haven't figured out how I would measure confidence in such a classifier (average distance?)

Any ideas?

</comment><comment><USER5> Can our own visual system be fooled in a similar way, or is the response of the neurons involved too non-linear?

<comment><USER3> Possibly. We can't backpropagate through all the neurons in a human brain. If we could we might be able to create real BLITs [http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm](http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What are the implications of this with self driving cars or biometric security devices?

Also.. In the "incomprehensible noise" pattern classes, I can pretty clearly see features that I would identify as a robin, cheetah, armadillo, and lesser panda. I don't think this means the classifiers are being fooled, they are just not being trained to recognize the class of "noisy image that looks kind of like something but is actally noise"

<comment><USER4> I think the required noise / subspaces are unlikely to be met in real world scenarios. That is, you won't take a picture of a spider where the sun just happens to shine in the right way and your lens is in just the right angle to make an image recognized as a giraf.

It may become an attack vector, but one the is very difficult to fit to the classifier you are targeting (your car may be using online learning, so there is a chance that an image generated on one self driving car won't work on another of the same model) then you have to show this carefully generated image to the car, but if you show it to the camera, it will already be distorted beyond its fooling capability. due to angle, lighting, lenses etc.</comment></comment>


State education rankings are riddled with methodological flaws - <AUTHOR> https://reason.com/archives/2018/10/07/everything-you-know-about-stat <comment><USER2> I don't have enough familiarity with this sort of research to evaluate it quickly, but I was a little curious about the authors' backgrounds:

> Stan J. Liebowitz is the Ashbel Smith Professor of Economics at the > Colloquium for the Advancement of Free Enterprise Education in the Jindal > School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas.

> Matthew L. Kelly is a research fellow at the Colloquium for the Advancement > of Free Enterprise Education in the Jindal School of Management at the > University of Texas at Dallas.

Here's another piece by them on net neutrality: [https://www.insidesources.com/state-governments-drop-net- neu...](https://www.insidesources.com/state-governments-drop-net-neutrality/)

Here's the site for the "Colloquium for the Advancement of Free Enterprise Education": [https://jindal.utdallas.edu/centers-of- excellence/capri/cafe...](https://jindal.utdallas.edu/centers-of- excellence/capri/cafe/)

Here's a press release about the founding of this entity, which includes some information on where the funding for it comes from: [https://jindal.utdallas.edu/news/new-program-at-the- jindal-s...](https://jindal.utdallas.edu/news/new-program-at-the-jindal- school-advances-freeenterprise-education)

<comment><USER3> I don't have enough familiarity with this sort of research to evaluate it quickly either, but the fact that an ad hominem is the top comment, that no one on HN found any serious criticism is enough for me.

<comment><USER2> I think this is either an over-reaction or a bit disgenuine. I was careful not to suggest (and certainly not _argue_ ) their research be _dismissed_ for any ad-hominem reason.

The fact that they are members of some brand-new academic* unit that claims to be "for the Advancement of Free Enterprise Education" suggests that there's some non-zero chance they knew the conclusion about public spending on education before they started.

I raised a small set of facts without making any claim/appeal/accusation of anything sensational or conspiratorial.

If researchers at the Colloquium for the Advancement of Drink Your Damn Milk publish a study concluding you should drink your damn milk, it's reasonable to weight their conclusions accordingly until you see how others with more domain knowledge assess them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have several thoughts on this:

The race adjusted performance is interesting and useful but they're basically using it as a proxy for wealth. Why can't they just use some metric that directly represents wealth?

If Massachusetts schools are efficiency with money than the system nation wide is far more screwed up than anyone is willing to admit.

That state ranking depends in part on money spent is abhorrent. That should be tracked for reasons that should be obvious but not part of a composite score meant to represents results.

The bit about unions lines up with my anecdotal experience. I worked with the education department in college and they did not hold teachers unions in high regard. If your unions are so bad that college professors at a state school in a blue state gripe about how they hold back progress then I think it's fair to say your union is pretty bad.

<comment><USER5> They're not using race as a proxy for wealth, because the two things are different. There are unique challenges faced by minorities compared to white americans of the same income level. (Remember, Trayvon Martin was a middle class black kid whose dad was a white-collar government worker. A big part of #blacklivesmatter is educating people that black folks face unique problems that aren't subsumed within the larger issue of income inequality. And as to Hispanic students the challenges there are obvious--they're much more likely to be in families that are English as a second language, and also much more likely to move around a lot.)

<comment> dan-robertson I'm not convinced that ESL families is the main difficulty facing Hispanic children. I'll accept that there are disadvantages to Hispanics but having ESL parents seems similar to those faced by almost any other child of immigrants. Perhaps one could argue that due to the visa system, non-Hispanic parents of Americans tend to have higher earning potential?

I have no idea whether this is true or not

<comment><USER5> Due to the visa system, immigrants in the U.S. are not identically situated to each other. Non-Hispanic immigrants are much more likely to already speak English and have advanced degrees because they come here through visa categories that specifically select for those things.

<comment><USER6> Sure, but their children aren't. Children of non-Hispanic immigrants that are born in the US do better than US-born children of Hispanic immigrants. While English ability is clearly important in education outcomes, it's not what makes the biggest difference.

<comment><USER5> The level of English proficiency at home has a large impact on the English- language ability even of children that are born here: [https://www.ewa.org/blog-latino-ed-beat/us-students- struggli...](https://www.ewa.org/blog-latino-ed-beat/us-students-struggling- english-outnumber-kids-born-abroad). _E.g._ a quarter of California's children are enrolled in programs for English language learners, even though 93% are native born.

<comment><USER6> I'd be interested in seeing a causative model for this. My guess is that it's purely Hispanic vs. non-Hispanic distinction.

The Hispanic kids grow up in mostly uniformly Hispanic environments, so they have less need to learn English, while latter grow up in more diverse environments. If hardly any neighborhood kids and classmates speak your native language, you need to learn English to communicate with them, while if you're Hispanic, chances are you're growing up in a majority-Hispanic neighborhood and are going to majority-Hispanic school, so you can do mostly fine with only basic English skill.

The same thing is true about your parents, so poor English proficiency of kids is not caused by poor English proficiency of parents, but rather both are caused by the same factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is no reason given to why they take per-student expense out of the picture, other than 'we just don't think it should count'. And that seems to be the entire basis of their finding that rankings are riddled with flaws.

There is much research (once you sort through the partisan fluff from research institutions with obvious bias) that supports the positive impact of revenue per student on academic achievement on standardized tests. It's actually funny this article popped up, I legit just read a paper from 2015 called "A Cost- Benefit Analysis for Per-Student Expenditures and Academic Achievement". I genuinely read that this morning. Weird. The authors found that "There was a significant correlation between revenues available per student and ACT scores as one outcome measure of achievement." And just to drive that point home, they replicated the findings from a 2002 study, further solidifying that sentiment.

And that's just the most recent one I've read. I'm sure there are more recent. And that is definitely just one in the series of research related to per-pupil expenditures.

Also, I'm afraid this piece serves no purpose other than to be self- congratulatory to the 'lower taxes at all costs' group and right-to-work proponents. Why I say this: research pieces probably shouldn't include snide comments like

"high-tax, high-spending progressive utopias."

"punishing taxes"

Maybe that's just me? Am I off base?

edit: also, the comment section on that article is awful. Just awful.

<comment><USER5> > There is much research (once you sort through the partisan fluff from > research institutions with obvious bias) that supports the positive impact > of revenue per student on academic achievement on standardized tests.

The article's methodology looks at academic achievement directly, so there is no need to use spending as a proxy.

<comment><USER8> Sort-of.

Per my reading of it, they used only one measure, the NAEP. The GP mentions a paper that used the ACT as a guide. In the least, we should resolve the difference between the NAEP and the ACT, if there is any. But, like the SAT or College Acceptance rates, those are just a few _measures_. Achievement is not easy to define in this context, let alone measure. All the test scores are just proxies for 'achievement' as a general term. Should we measure household income at the 10yr post mark too, College _graduation_ rate, number of pregnancies, marathon runners? It's all just a proxy in the end for trying to determine, in granular detail, if education is worth spending tax money on.

<comment><USER9> Aren't these all the same questions we should be asking when we decide to _have_ public education? When we decide how much we will spend on it? How many years our kids will go? What will be taught?

What _are_ our goals?

<comment><USER8> I mean, that's a question humans have been asking for nearly our entire species' history. Generally, it's a lot more fun to be around 'smarter' people than 'dumber' ones, so education is somewhat prioritized.

<comment><USER9> I'm getting at the idea that maybe we haven't been asking ourselves what are goals are here, and we're at a point where we're doing it this way because that's how we do it. And the fact that we are still wondering what a decent way to measure the results of our efforts are is kind of telling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I only have 2 data points of experience on this issue. Which I know doesn't mean much, but I'm left scratching my head after looking at their list.

I spent the first 14 years of my life in Las Cruces, New Mexico (the state's second biggest city), and the schools I went to were not very good. I did high school in Maryland and the school system was a lot better (I initially struggled because I was so far behind everyone else - a friend of mine who moved to North Carolina for High School told me he had the same problem). In the author's ranking list, they place Maine at #48 and New Mexico at #41. I find this very hard to believe. There are so many problems that New Mexico has that Maine doesn't seem to have (gang problems, drug problems - at least at the magnitude that I saw in New Mexico). Unless Maine has some pretty bad schools, this just doesn't add up. US News lists Maine at #6, a ranking drop of 42 spots seems really significant.

<comment><USER11> I'm confused by your comment, would you care to elaborate? Your anecdote has you moving from (the article's) rank 41 in quality to rank 6. You comment that the rank 6 state is much better than the rank 41 in education quality. However, you find their ranking hard to believe?

<comment><USER10> Sorry for any confusion. New Mexico moved from #50 to #41, while Maine moved from #6 to #48. This raised some flags with me since I went to school in New Mexico and find it hard to believe they have better schools than Maine, especially since Maine was previously ranked very high. So my gut feeling is their is a problem somewhere in how they're crunching their data (though I'd just be guessing if I tried to pick apart their methodology).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't really understand removal of graduation rates. Obviously that's meant to act as a proxy for learning, especially for those 38 states without proficiency exams.

<comment><USER13> > Obviously that's meant to act as a proxy for learning

That is the INTENT, sure. But does it work? If you have someone that graduated from a school A and someone that failed to graduate from school B that is in an entirely different area, can you draw any meaningful conclusions? Particularly knowing that school A has no particular requirements on why you graduate, while school B does?

I'm far more likely to complain about "But when we disaggregate student performance scores by racial categories (white, black, Hispanic, and Asian), the rankings change dramatically." I wouldn't want to go too far with that before ensuring that I wasn't trying to curb swimming deaths by keeping Nick Cage out of movies: [http://tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=359](http://tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=359)

<comment><USER14> The data is pretty useful in penalizing states that don't educate their students well enough to even get to the standardized testing stage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is interesting. What I like about it is that it tries to remove any criteria unrelated to a student's outcomes. Too often we see esoteric ranking methodologies that, unfortunately, not many people bother to look at very closely.

I'm the founder of PolarisList ([https://www.polarislist.com](https://www.polarislist.com)), a high school ranking based on the number of students sent to Harvard, Princeton, and MIT.

This prompted us to take a stab at generating state rankings based on our own dataset, and came up with the following list. We calculated this by looking at the number of students in a state who matriculated to the aforementioned colleges from public high schools divided by the estimated 2017 population:

1 Massachusetts 2 New Jersey 3 Connecticut 4 New York 5 Vermont 6 Maryland 7 Maine 8 New Hampshire 9 California 10 Virginia 11 Alaska 12 Rhode Island 13 Illinois 14 Delaware 15 Pennsylvania 16 Colorado 17 Minnesota 18 Washington 19 Michigan 20 Oregon 21 Florida 22 Georgia 23 Nebraska 24 North Dakota 25 South Dakota 26 Texas 27 Montana 28 Arizona 29 Wisconsin 30 Missouri 31 Idaho 32 West Virginia 33 Indiana 34 North Carolina 35 New Mexico 36 Ohio 37 Kansas 38 Iowa 39 Hawaii 40 Nevada 41 Kentucky 42 Wyoming 43 Oklahoma 44 Utah 45 Tennessee 46 Arkansas 47 South Carolina 48 Washington DC 49 Louisiana 50 Mississippi 51 Alabama

A couple thing stand out to me: \- All 3 rankings have Massachusetts and New Jersey within the top 10 \- All 3 rankings have Oklahoma and Louisiana in the bottom 10 \- Our numbers differ from the other datasets the most on: \- New York (#4 on our ranking, #30 on Liebowitz/Kelly, #31 on US News) \- California (#9 on our ranking, #34 on Liebowitz/Kelly, #44 on US News) \- Alaska (#11 on our ranking, #42 on Liebowitz/Kelly, #46 on US News)

<comment><USER16> A metric showing that students going to northeastern universities mostly come from northeastern states isn't very meaningful. Given that it counts only students _attending_ those schools and not all of those _accepted_ by those schools (e.g. the full population of those meeting the actual qualification standard) and doesn't account for _ability to pay_ renders it even less meaningful.

<comment><USER17> It's really a horrible flawed metric. It doesn't mention background of students, nor the connections they might have made in school/life that help them get to those places. It also doesn't take into account students who don't _want_ to necessarily go there (I was valedictorian and had a 4.0, 36 on ACT...I didn't apply Ivy because I didn't want to go there), etc. It's really just a "Hey, these schools have more kids here" ranking, saying nothing about quality of the schools themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ranking is nearly meaningless. eg compare these:

School A - full of underachieving kids that are pushed to get avg grades

School B - full of avg kids getting above avg grades

School C - full of smart kids getting top grades

School D - full of smart kids getting nearly top grades, but soft skills, nice personalities and VIP friends

School E - Mix of kids getting relevant grades

Which is the best school for each kid type? They're impossible to rank. Many schools with top grades are only there because they kick out failing kids, not because they're better at teaching. Many schools are rated good because they can improve grades, but you wouldn't want to send a smart kid there. Many private schools sell themselves on creating well rounded kids, not necessarily good grades.

<comment><USER19> The article is about ranking states, not ranking schools.

For the point of ranking schools, there are statistical methods to measure student growth, instead of achievement, such as SGP (student growth percentile) and VAM (value-added modeling), which kind of address part of your question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This may be unpopular but I really do think that spending should be included in a ranking system. There are a lot of aspects of education that standardized testing can't (or won't) measure: access to extra-curricular programs, funding for art/music departments, technical education, etc. I'm willing to bet a lot of people here have experienced first-hand the difference that having access to a decent computer lab can make. You're not going to see that reflected in tests.

Also, based on my own anecdotal experience of standardized testing in grade school, these tests rarely include questions about "controversial" topics in history or scientific ideas that are opposed by Christian fundamentalism. I suspect these are major areas where southern districts would struggle, given their disproportionate implementation of _cough_ alternative textbooks.

Overall, this smells of a common trend in American institutions where there's an ideological interest at play. An issue is raised, and it's decided that we need more data to decide. The data collection (in this case standardized testing) is designed in such a way that it produces results that skew toward the ideological position. Then the bad data is used to justify the ideological position. Law enforcement works the same way. Actually now that I'm thinking about it so do our elections.

<comment><USER3> If the purpose of a ranking system is to help decide questions like how much should be spent on education, then obviously it doesn't make sense to include spending in the ranking. (And this is not a strawman, the article mentions that Paul Krugman for example smartly pointed out that states that spend more have better rankings.)

> There are a lot of aspects of education that standardized testing can't (or > won't) measure: access to extra-curricular programs, funding for art/music > departments, technical education, etc. > these tests rarely include > questions about "controversial" topics in history or scientific ideas that > are opposed by Christian fundamentalism.

These are legitimate criticisms of standardized testings, but not excuses for ignoring its results, if you don't have better data available.

> Then the bad data is used to justify the ideological position. Law > enforcement works the same way.

Maybe instead of using "bad data", like how many crimes are solved, on law enforcement, we should just ask how much is spent on it - the more the better?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The efficiency measure sure seems dangerously misleading. My SC high school didn't have the budget to replace broken tables (which were simply overturned until a handy-ish student managed to unsteadily prop them up) and sent seniors home home early via free periods to cover for a lack of teachers.

Was that efficient? I suppose. Was it a desirable education? Not really.

<comment><USER22> The argument goes that if those cutbacks didn't harm outcomes, they were luxuries not necessary expenses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm wondering if there are confounding variables that are affecting this result. For example New York and New Jersey are some of the most regressive states defined as difference in funding levels between rich and poor school districts. I found this chart which shows each states:

[http://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor- kids-g...](http://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-get- fair-share/)

If race is a mediator for income levels and in turn funding level shouldn't the researchers here include the difference in funding levels between income levels into their model to determine the true performance per spent dollar?

I might be wrong as I'm no expert in the field but I think these type of problems are what causal models try to address. I've really enjoyed "The book of why" by Judea Pearl on the topic. It got me interested in learning more about causality.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is there the per-race data available somewhere?

</comment><comment><USER25> Is it just me that has a hard time understanding the racial aggregation thing. They claim to have split Iowa and Texas results by race and age. And found that Texas did better than Iowa for whites blacks and hispanics - but then aggregating the results ala USNews, Iowa comes out on top

I am struggling to imagine which category is the flip category. If iowa is not doing better for white black or hispanic, which racial category is somlatge as to flip the average?

<comment><USER14> Example using two races and just ACT scores:

Texas:

50% Hispanic who average 25

50% white who average 29

State average: 27

Iowa:

10% Hispanic who average 24

90% white who average 28

State average: 27.6

<comment><USER25> texas has 50 % hispanic population ?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Texas](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Texas) It has 84% white population, not noticeably different to UK makeup at 87%

Iowa has 88% White ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa)) or maybe 91 not too clear what they mean as difference between white and not hispanic

So them is some pretty small numbers to play with - somehow the "whites do better, and iowa has more whites" argument has only got 4-7% to play with

I would like to see the actual figures but it smells to me

<comment><USER25> OK I read wikipedia wrong - Texas it seems has 84 % white population _but that includes_ 34% Hispanic (an odd distinction - is that a common US measure?)

Which makes the Simpson's paradox quite possible. So Texas does not have a racial makeup like UK. (I only have spent a little time in Houston, mostly I found it populated by cars)

<comment><USER6> The term of art here is "Hispanic white" vs. "non-Hispanic white".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is a headline that raises an eyebrow from me because it seems me odd someone would believe _they are not_ gamed in some manner.

</comment><comment> temp-dude-87844 Disaggregating the results by race is real cute but also misses the point: blacks and asians and hispanics are residents of the state too and so leaving them in to evaluate the state's overall achievement (relative to other states) in education is fair. If anything it ought to be more problematic that Texas fails so badly at educating hispanic students when a fifth of them live in Texas.

Besides, the race in big-gap states is an unwitting proxy to income, so disaggregate by household per capita income (relative to local cost of living) if you want to disdain. This methodology would work well in all states and expose the challenges of anxiety and the quality of a student's home life in their education attainment.

<comment><USER5> "Disaggregation" doesn't mean taking them out--the ranking includes everyone:

> Think about that: White students do better in Texas than in Iowa. Black > students do better in Texas. Hispanic students do better in Texas. Asian > students do better in Texas. Given these facts, it is absurd for U.S. News > to rank Iowa higher than Texas in terms of educational performance.

This, of course, makes sense. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds face unique challenges. Under the traditional methodology, states can do a crappy job of educating these students so long as they have few of them. States that have large populations of disadvantaged students, by contrast, are penalized in the rankings even if they do a relatively better job educating those students.

<comment><USER22> Simpson's Paradox is the relevant keyword here. Averaging a across non- homogeneous groups (multimodal distributions) makes garbage statisics</comment></comment></comment>


Fasting for 40 Days - <AUTHOR> https://8.guru/fasting-for-40-days/ <comment><USER2> Fasting depletes glutathione, which looks like it might matter for COVID-19. Do your reading.

(Also relevant for acetaminophen.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip. I supplemented with many things after ending the fast, to be safe, including glycine which looks like a component of glutathione. I have not been sick or ill since mid-2019. I am still fasting often and believe it to help my immune system.

<comment><USER2> Yes, in general I think fasting is great for health.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why does management refer to designers, developers, etc as "resources"? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> This terminology comes from project management. An employee's work hours are finite. In an effort to estimate delivery dates and prioritize work, project management allocates 'resources' to work items the same way that hardware or funds are allocated; over-allocation should be a warning sign to competent management.

It's simply jargon in that particular field, that sometimes leaks into other workplace conversations.</comment>


Relationship Relevance In a Social Graph - <AUTHOR> http://quohive.tumblr.com/ I have come to HN the last couple of days talking about finding a co-founder etc. Well, instead of finding a co-founder (which I will eventually). I just started hacking away. I truly believe that we can establish relevance in online relationships that will lead to more productive research and collaboration, richer relationships and more information.
This is my 11th attempt at starting a company. I am a bit nervous but here goes nothing!
I do not mean for this to sound too promotional but I respect the community here and feedback is more than welcome and appreciated.
http://www.quohive.com to sign up for mail list. <comment><AUTHOR> Let's do it!</comment>


Ask HN: Should April Fool's Day Be Renamed Fake News Day? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> How about April Fool's Day so we don't dump its long history and eliminate a bit of fun (mostly) from life.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Hightened awareness that you're being misled day" seems more fitting</comment>


'We're in a Bubble' - <AUTHOR> http://blog.samaltman.com/were-in-a-bubble <comment><USER2> I'm disappointed to see this from Sam.

After Twilio filed for IPO, someone wrote a "here's what Hacker News said about Twilio," which only focused on the hilarious-in-hindsight but negative comments about the startup ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11786464](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11786464)). Naturally, it got massive retweets from venture capitalists who espouse the haters-gonna-hate attitude.

As dang notes in that other comment thread, this kind of argument doesn't look at the other side at all: there have been some _seriously shady dealings_ going on with unicorn startups. IPOs are failing. And let's not get started on Theranos.

<comment><USER3> Not to mention all of the unicorns supposedly worth billions that aren't IPOing. Because IPOing would finally let the public decide what they are worth (it would be a harsh wakeup call for a lot of them). Instead we're stuck with their VC cronies stuffing self-serving valuations down everyone's throats.

By the way, I too am worth 2.5 billion dollars. What?! You want me to prove it?! Get off my lawn!

<comment><USER4> > _By the way, I too am worth 2.5 billion dollars. What?! You want me to prove > it?! Get off my lawn!_

While I agree with the first part of what you wrote, when it comes to this I can say:

You don't need to prove it (and those unicorns didn't prove it either). You just need to be able to get some millions of dollars on your 2.5 billion self- valuation, and you'll be as good as them.

Because they did that.

<comment><USER5> >You just need to be able to get some millions of dollars on your 2.5 billion self-valuation

Mathematically speaking you just need to get someone to give you a single dollar in exchange for 1/2500000000 of 100% ownership, meaning that 100% is theoretically worth $2.5 billion.

<comment><USER6> A classic post from 37signals:

PRESS RELEASE: 37SIGNALS VALUATION TOPS $100 BILLION AFTER BOLD VC INVESTMENT [https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1941-press- release-37signals-...](https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1941-press- release-37signals-valuation-tops-100-billion-after-bold-vc-investment)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"

Or perhaps the more apt way of putting this in our times is: "Multiples will be crazy high as long as central banks keep interest rates crazy low"

Rather than thinking about this in terms of bubbles I think it's fair to say that the probability of getting very high ten year returns on the US stock market at these valuations is low. The problem is there's no other asset that will give you the chance of a better return. That's no coincidence.

Apple's P/E is 10.85 according to Yahoo Finance. That's _low_ given current interest rates.

EDIT: The average Nasdaq P/E is 22.55 ... This is historically high but is ~4.4% vs. the 10 year treasury being 1.61% (and I say that painfully as I attempted to go short at one point). That is basically the story right there.

<comment><USER8> > _Multiples will be crazy high as long as central banks keep interest rates > crazy low_

I have no idea how earnings multiples wound up with their pay-offs in the denominator. (Since it makes stupid things look bigger, and by default, anecdotally, most people agree bigger is better, I'm going to blame investment bankers.)

Thinking of a 22.55 P/E as a 4.4% E/P, _i.e._ 2 percentage points above the 30-year's 2.4% [1] is hugely clarifying. (I personally prefer the Shiller CAPE [2] for long-term broad-market assessments. It sits at 25.93, _i.e._ a 3.9% yield or 1.4 percentage points over the 30-year.)

[1] [https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart- center/i...](https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart- center/interest-rates/Pages/TextView.aspx?data=yield)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclically_adjusted_price- to-e...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclically_adjusted_price-to- earnings_ratio)

[3] [http://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe/](http://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe/)

<comment><USER9> Markets factor in growth.

<comment><USER10> JumpCrisscross was talking about using 1 / n instead of talking about n directly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For those of us who are young enough (30 or less) to not have witnessed the internet bubble at a conscious age, we might be tricked to think that we're in a bubble due to certain indicators. The NASDAQ index, the valuation prices, the money poured into venture capital, etc.

To those of you like me I recommend you to read about what was happening in 95-99. The panorama was crazy, and today's context doesn't compare to the one of those days.

At the end, if the macroeconomic environment changes, who cares? Yes, paying attention to the macro is important and that may even imply changes in strategy, but should you not start a startup because there's a bubble? Even worse, should you (person who hasn't built anything but criticizes everyone who builds something) try to convince your friends not to start startups because we're in a bubble?

The main difference between today and 1999 is that digital products are actually generating value in people's lifes. Please don't compare pets.com to WhatsApp

<comment><USER12> I was curious if you could tell me what value WhatsApp is actually providing? or for that matter facebook or twitter? Are they on the bleeding edge of scientific discovery?

I always felt they were like a social outlet for folks to waste time and their only revenue stream was advertising.

<comment><USER13> Actually, this - I believe - is the entire premise why we have no bubble this time around. It's because these companies _are indeed_ on the bleeding edge of scientific discovery. The brightest minds in research work at these companies. The research and development that comes out of these companies, that create new open source work, and spawn out new markets in analysis, intelligence, economics - all of the work from these companies fuels growth for every other business out there who use any part of the technology stack to drive their business model. Just my 2 cents

<comment><USER14> I'll give you Facebook, and MAYBE Twitter. But WhatsApp is a messenger service, a space where tons of others have come and gone. I'm not sure what bleeding edge they are sitting on in regards to scientific discovery.

<comment><USER12> Facebook is worth more than all the major auto manufacturers in the world combined. It is worth more than Boeing and Airbus and General Electric combined.

Where do they make the majority of their money? Is it advertising? or is it investments that they have made with public money? I am curious what their profits look like that their valuation is 328 Billion dollars.

<comment><USER15> That's because the VW stock price crashed because of "Dieselgate". The VW AG's assets alone are worth €381.935 billion and they achieve a far higher revenue of €213.292 billion (VW AG) vs $17.928 billion (facebook).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just because the bubble hasn't burst yet, doesn't mean we're not actually in a bubble. That line of reasoning irks me a bit, but still, it is laughable how the imminent bursting of the bubble has been predicted for nearly a decade.

<comment><USER17> If a bubble lasts over 10 years, is it really a bubble?

<comment><USER18> Possibly, the defining aspect of an investment bubble is the popping.

<comment><USER17> But the term bubble, at least when used by the media, also seems to have a connotation of bursting in the near future. If someone told me tech was in a bubble, but the pop wouldn't be for another century, I would not define it as a bubble. Even if the future pop was enormous.

<comment><USER19> What if the century long bubble concluded with a pop that resulted in total economic collapse? I'm not suggesting that is likely, just that the defining characteristic of a bubble seems to be the magnitude of the fallout after the pop, not the span of time leading up to the pop.

<comment><USER17> Investors, especially those of public companies, are known to be short sighted. Typical investors would never call it a "bubble" if they felt the pop wasn't for another decade, let alone a century.

Perhaps both the magnitude and the time leading up to it are of equal importance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If the intended insinuation of this essay is that somehow there _aren 't_ a bunch of seriously over-valued companies out there, or that there _isn 't_ a long-overdue downturn on the way, then I'm afraid I can't bring myself to agree.

People young enough to have never been through a downturn in their professional career are usually in denial right up until the moment it happens. And the people who try to call the bubble early, as funny as it may be to make fun of them as is being done here, are usually the ones who have been through it before, see it coming early, and try to warn everyone, even though no one ever listens (too busy enjoying the party!)

<comment><USER21> > _And the people who try to call the bubble early, as funny as it may be to > make fun of them as is being done here, are usually the ones who have been > through it before, see it coming early, and try to warn everyone, even > though no one ever listens (too busy enjoying the party!)_

First, someone is _always_ "calling the bubble". At the bottom of the housing market there were people screaming that it was going to keep dropping. People have been calling the tech market a bubble for literally decades. And conversely, there are always people claiming that we're nowhere near the top, even when we are. It's not useful to listen because the reality is that no one really knows. If you think we're the top of a bubble, then cash out and be happy with your superiority.

Second, what are you, as an employee, going to do if you think the tech bubble is going to pop? Sure, you should be saving, but you should do that anyway. You shouldn't be over invested in tech, but that's also always true. What meaningful steps should you take if you believe a tech bubble is about to pop that you should not take anyway?

<comment><USER22> Isn't it common in SV to accept jobs paying lower than market value in exchange for equity? Presumably, if one thinks the bubble is about to pop, they should avoid those jobs in detriment to offers from "safer" big companies.

<comment><USER21> I think this is probably in the list of "think you (shouldn't) do anyway". If you're a normal employee with a small amount of equity, the reality is that you are overwhelmingly likely to _not_ cash in big even in the event of a successful exit. If you're being paid in large part with equity, then you're probably being underpaid, not a great decision in any market.

But you're right that knowing a bubble is about to pop might certainly dissuade many people from entering this kind of risky, lopsided employment deal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Over the last 16 years we've seen several boom/bust cycles in speculative markets driven by interest rates.

First the bursting of the first tech bubble. Then Greenspan's housing bubble in 2001-2007. Then interest rates were held abornmally low, for 80 months straight, which is something that the world has _never_ seen.

Would we have seen this tech boom if interest rates had been say 5% and capital had somewhere else to flow?

I'm pretty wary of "The music hasn't stopped playing, so it can't possibly be a bubble" arguments. Lets watch what happens as rates go up and venture backed tech has to compete with other returns.

</comment><comment><USER24> Those aged 65 and up control most of the investment capital in the United States. This is not a risk-taking demographic regardless if the capital is family money or managed money. It is a demographic that wants to preserve capital in exchange for modest returns.

The same can be said for pension plans who formerly invested heavily in alternative investments, and who now must ensure fund stability as pension payouts peak in the coming years.

Foreign investors and sovereign funds are under increased pressure to keep foreign currency at home, particularly in China and Russia.

Interest rates are poised to rise, held back by a US Federal Reserve loaded, cocked and ready to fire; thereby increasing VC carrying costs.

The global political environment is not favorable for economic investment. Highly publicized bellicose rhetoric and outright conflict is pervasive. Investors loathe the uncertainty and anxiety this creates.

 __So, this time its different __

I suspect there may be strong returns to be had in M &A, particularly after Microsoft's aggressive bid for LinkedIN. I note even Twitter is performing well today*. I imagine there may still be strong IPO's, like Twilio seems positioned to be. But, I believe we're entering a less liquid and lower alpha period in investing.

I can't say I have special knowledge on the topic, other than being a close observer.

(Disclaimer: I do own TWTR)

</comment><comment><USER25> > One analyst predicts Facebook will easily be worth $200 billion by 2015. > Right on! And by 2020 it could be the first company with a $1 zillion market > value, so buy-buy-buy, everybody!

Decided to look this one up. It hit $200B in late 2014, so that prediction was impressively spot-on: [https://ycharts.com/companies/FB/market_cap](https://ycharts.com/companies/FB/market_cap)

<comment><USER12> They are worth more than Boeing and Airbus and GE put together.

Actually they are worth more than all the big auto manufacturers in the world combined.

Incredible. What were their earnings?

<comment><USER15> Airbus has 4 times the revenue.

<comment><USER26> Facebook has insane yoy growth though. [http://www.statista.com/graphic/1/268604/annual-revenue- of-f...](http://www.statista.com/graphic/1/268604/annual-revenue-of- facebook.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Well, that is the problem with people predicting the future: they may be correct on fundamentals but the world is a chaotic place and predicting just when something will happen, even if it is likely to happen in the future, is a bad bet.

I personally believe that the current economic regime, requiring constant growth (and large growth) for health is not sustainable. Am I willing to bet on when the next big economic crash will occur? No.

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't really get the point.

So at the moment, today, tech industry isn't dead / crashed . So we can find people who said that it will and point at them that they were wrong. And if the crash comes tomorrow, are we going to say 'well, it was predicted soooo', do the usual post-fact rationalization on how obvious it was, etc.

But so what? We can do exactly this for any prediction whatsoever. Wars, financial crashes, economical and political events, etc. People, from cab drivers to executives and ministers, make wrong predictions all the time.

I honestly don't see the point of it, other than highlight that someone was wrong and... feel good about yourself that you were on the winning side this time?

Should we stop predicting? Yeah, probably. But the ending 'And now Trump thinks we're in a tech bubble too, so maybe it's true.' doesn't really deliver this message.

</comment><comment><USER4> One difference between a bubble and a declining market segment is that the bubble bursts -- abruptly.

So it doesn't matter whether people repeat prophecies or doom for a long time or not -- unless it's actually a bubble, it won't ever burst. At worse it will start declining slowly.

That's why the arguments like "it hasn't burst all those years so it's not a bubble" don't get it either.

Being a bubble is not something that has to do with duration (whether it lasts for a long time or not) -- it has to do with the non-linear effects of the burst.

Of course it the burst never comes, or it's instead some gradual decline, then it's not a bubble.

<comment><USER29> So you're telling me you can only tell if it isn't a bubble if the market steadily declines eventually? Also how much should it steadily decline by before we're sure it's not some local decline phenomenon unrelated to the bubble?

Whatever "bubble" means, it should probably only be used as a description of an abrupt crash in retrospect, otherwise we're always in a non-falsifiable bubble state. Saying "We're in a bubble" really just means colloquially "I think this market segment is overvalued", probably not much more than that.

<comment><USER4> > _So you 're telling me you can only tell if it isn't a bubble if the market > steadily declines eventually?_

No, that's just its defining characteristic. You can "tell" by other signs too -- but they could be misleading.

> _Whatever "bubble" means, it should probably only be used as a description > of an abrupt crash in retrospect, otherwise we're always in a non- > falsifiable bubble state._

That's the case with every phenomenon that depends in the final result for its definition. E.g. is an act X "beneficial"? We might have some heuristics, but we can only certainly know from its effects after it is completed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The Microsoft LinkedIn acquisition seems to have positively signaled investor confidence, in spite of calls that the sky is falling. Whatever odds there were for a "bubble burst" are probably lessened by this purchase.

<comment><USER31> Maybe, or it's a sign that companies are recognizing they are richly valued and want to take advantage of that while it lasts.

MSFT has a P/E of 38, for example

If I had to guess, I think we'll see a lot of M&A activity at some very high prices from other companies that are richly valued.

<comment><USER32> That's true. Even during the dotcom bubble, internet incumbents used their high valuations to leverage questionable acquisitions. Yahoo's purchase of Broadcast.com for over $5B being the most notable example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The only real indication that we are in a bubble is the frailty of the future of digital advertising. I don't think there are many hypervalued hardware firms. Advertising hinges on corporate and consumer purchasing power which seems to be healthy if slightly waning, and to a certain extent the personal tolerance of ads and highly abundant Web content. Outside of the US the appetite for both continues to grow year over year. While display on publisher sites has many weak spots, search and social ads a solid footing on most advertiser's budgets. They won't dissappear overnight. What will?

</comment><comment><USER34> This post suffers from confirmation bias which feels weird coming from a writer whose entire accelerator is founded on principles which exploit other peoples' biases (e.g. others are biased toward teams with traditional credentials whereas YC evaluates more on accomplishments and building things)

</comment><comment><USER35> If you say "we're in a XYZ bubble" for long enough, you'll eventually be right.

<comment><USER36> The thing is that the nature of speculation is to generate bubbles. Every financial market is a bubble, financial products are always overvalued (relatively to their current earnings) because people believe they will be worth even more in the future. The real question that needs to be answered is: when will the bubble pop? AFAIK there's no scientific way to answer that question.

<comment><USER37> Yes and no. Speculation creates bubbles when people overestimate but not when they underestimate.

Financial products are definitely not always overvalued either. Accounting was created so that we can properly evaluate what a company's overall value discounted for future earnings and they are pretty accurate (accounting was never my favorite subject so that can probably be better defined)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It seems like it was just yesterday that everyone was arguing the Facebook valuation from Microsoft's investment was impossible to ever live up to.

$15 billion. They'll do half that in net income in the next four quarters.

Interestingly the $125 per user figure quoted on the Gigaom article (the $15 billion valuation divided by their daily actives or total users at the time), is now more like $195 per user (1.68 billion daily actives with $328b market cap).

</comment><comment><USER39> Whatever this is, it isn't a repeat of the late 90s. The term "bubble" doesn't even mean anything except that alot of people, many of whom aren't even investing or selling short, assume that the prices are way higher than they should be.

The 90s was a typical gold-rush type of scenario where no one knew what anything was worth, and so investment continued until someone figured out that there was no one everyone could make money even if the entire _mountain_ was made of gold and started betting against the herd.

Going by the cyclical pattern, we're overdue for a recession in the U.S. However, no one knows how severe it could be, especially considering that the "recovery" from the '08 meltdown was tepid at best.

As far as tech investing goes, the best way to make money is to back a number of good looking horses and hope the wins pay for the losses. Which is the same as it always was. If you're smart, you'll also diversify in case something does happen to cause the entire industry to take a dive. However, short of a major quake taking down most of SV, the number of different ways businesses are trying to make money means that, IMO, it's more difficult for one event to take them all down, unlike 1999.

</comment><comment><USER40> Anecdotal, personal, and completely my opinion, but my parent's entire life savings is $750,000. That's about how much Mike Markkula invested in early Apple ($250,000 in 1977 dollars adjusted for inflation). I like this figure because it represents a serious amount of money - you _could_ retire off of it, if you're frugal. So why take the risk of investing such a large sum in a startup?

I presume that the objective of investors (who have much more money that $750K) is to either to a) make money or b) make money and bring a new technology/innovation to market. In a bubble I see more of the former (focus on money) without the innovation piece. How many car sharing (Uber/Lyft/Sidecar), food-delivery (GrubHub/OrderAhead/DoorDash), and credit card alternatives (Venmo/Coin/Stratos) do we really need? Would the founders of such companies put their retirement savings into starting these companies? Maybe, maybe not.

Innovation is key to keeping a bubble at bay. Y combinator has quite a few companies where the goal is to make money through innovation. These are ventures dedicated to biomedical research (DNA sequencing/Gene Mapping), novel algorithm development (AI/Machine Learning), improving social welfare (Water Filtration/Education), etc. I'd be happy to see a world full of these, and I wouldn't call it a bubble. It would be people pursuing ideas that could solve real problems in the world. Ideas that are worth investing your (and therefore an investor's) money.

I believe that innovative companies keep a bubble at bay precisely because they are less likely to succeed. Investors must faithfully evaluate innovative companies to see if their technology is feasible and if the market is ready.

<comment><USER41> The difference here is that if you're near retirement age and that's _all_ of your money investing it all in a start-up is the worst possible thing you could do with it given the stats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I have a hard time understanding precisely what gives these companies such high perceived values.

In the end I have to believe people are measuring the value based almost exclusively on the website's "traction". Frankly, I think "traction" is an outdated metric (especially when it comes to the web).

I almost feel like I have to remind folks here (who are arguing against the premise that we're in the middle of a period of extraordinarily excessive valuations) that the web provides an almost frictionless environment to change. If tomorrow someone launches a better LinkedIn, there is ZERO reason I can't switch over (or use both) that same day).

In tomorrow's world I see individual engineers (or surely teams of less than 10) will have the capacity to build a product better than LinkedIn, at and beyond the scale of LinkedIn, in their garage (thanks to the cloud). With little to no investment.

In the future (by my estimation the not-too-distant future) $20+ billion for a resume website will be unconscionable (if it isn't already).

</comment><comment><USER43> The strangest thing to me is how upset this makes people, even though it doesn't affect them, at least not directly. Look at the quote about Facebook's valuation- who gets so upset about that?

Why is it an affront to you if some business guys can figure out a way to call FB worth $33B? Of course now nobody would question that, because they're one of only two games in town when it comes to advertising. But even before that, why get so pissy? If the valuation is sooo crazy then bet against it. Why get so upset that LinkedIn sold for $26B? If you think MS wasted their money then let them waste it.

Why be so concerned that VCs are making bad bets? Let them! Are you a limited partner? Then who cares?!

I get that people don't like the knock-on effects, rent goes up, engineers are harder to hire. But I don't see why anyone should give a shit if a dumb VC wasted their firm's money on a dumb idea.

<comment><USER44> The VC is not wasting his own money but some people's pension fund money. In addition they distort the market to make it difficult for regular companies to compete with companies that run on investors' money instead of profits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> the fact that there are very few tech ipos is probably the best indication that there is a bubble in common stock valuations of private companies, which would not be supported by public markets. Why? because public markets have many sophisticated players who can easily sell short and private markets don't.

</comment><comment><USER46> I don't think the bubble thing is true for our time, nor it will be in the near future, it's just tech has become more competitive than ever. I am too young to know exactly the circumstance surrounding the last .dot com bubble when did it happen ... but I guess, it could have happened, the VC had not seen the full potential of the internet back then...

I can't buy the notion, that we will or ever see a bubble ... it's just ups and lows just about anything in life ... because at this point and in future internet is too larger to be vulnerable to it.

But that said, there is a little room left, for developers living in the mom's basement., and that's truly sad.

<comment><USER47> > I don't think the bubble thing is true for our time, nor it will be in the > near future, it's just tech has become more competitive than ever.

No disrespect meant, but this kind of thinking is exactly how bubbles happen and everything gets out of kilter. Like people who believe house prices will go up forever, so they leverage up - it's irrational exuberance (to quote Alan Greenspan). But eventually this imaginary money that people believed to exist, actually didn't, because the human beings that needed to work N hours to produce that wealth haven't actually been alive long enough to do it. And boom, it all resets.

I actually think one of the key tells for being in a bubble is so many people denying we're in a bubble. The talk of it alone is enough to spread fear and doubt. That moves markets. All that is needed is an 'event' that confirms the fears, and boom. It could well be a failed IPO.

Who knows? Not I. I was one of the idiots that bought lastminute.com shares.

<comment><USER46> Point I was trying to make, there is clear distinction between the bubble and ups & lows.

<comment><USER47> Where are you making that point? I don't see it, what I see are a number of comments denying that a) we're in a bubble, b) we'll ever be in a bubble, because Internet.

> I don't think the bubble thing is true for our time

> nor it will be in the near future, it's just tech has become more > competitive than ever

> I can't buy the notion, that we will or ever see a bubble

> because at this point and in future internet is too larger to be vulnerable > to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Hilarious article. The fact that Silicon Valley VCs can make money out of extremely overpriced companies doesn't make them right. It's just an arrogant read this time. Mr Sam - you should be ashamed.

</comment><comment><USER9> This seems to violate yc and Paul Graham's general disdain for sarcasm.

</comment><comment><USER49> As other comments point out, whether there is a bubble (extreme overvaluation) or not depends in part on the financial background. If you just look at interest rates, they tell us that the future will be stable, the world is awash in capital, and you'll have decades to extract the value of your investment. For example, the $247 per LNKD user could be reasonable, notwithstanding that only around 1/4 of these users reportedly are active. So over 20 years, getting about a dollar a month per user will break even. And this is just one aspect, since global growth trends and unlocking network effects offer more value. But these metrics don't give the whole story. The central banking infrastructure pumps capital into the world due to deflationary fears, so can we really trust interest rates and assumptions of stability and growth trends to determine whether the value of unicorns is enduring?

An interesting aspect is Altman's position, argued by citing "they were wrong time and time again" data points. His day job is to create new ventures, some of which will presumably disrupt existing giants and lower their value. This dynamic is dangerous to the assumption of stability in organizational trends upon which value metrics are based. In some sense, there is overvaluation (because new opportunities are undervalued), if not a bubble.

</comment><comment><USER50> We just lived through two mega-bubbles: dot.com and real estate. Actually three if you count oil. People now see bubbles everywhere and in everything.

</comment><comment><USER42> One of my most memorable "bubble talk" moments was when I was living in South Florida. To clarify, that's only to say it's easy for me to recall given the unique circumstances of the conversation, not that it was particularly enjoyable for anyone involved.

A bunch of my co-workers and I were out to lunch with a new member of our team (management level). The conversation turned to the real estate boom that we were in the middle of. The new guy had already, during the conversation, let us all know he had made a nice chunk of change in real estate recently, and was in the middle of looking for a new house with his wife. They apparently had their eye on a few really nice waterfront properties. That sort of got a few folks talking "bubble". He laughed it off and smugly told us all that (paraphrased) "in reality the market is just going to keep going up."

Famous last words, he ended up closing a few months before the crash.

</comment><comment><USER51> Markets can stay irrational for longer than you can remain solvent. Just because the bubble hasn't burst, doesn't mean we are not in one. Of course the converse is also true, just because the market has been going up doesn't mean it will go down. It will be interesting to see what happens if the Fed ever raises the interest rates.

</comment><comment><USER52> Can anyone point to a bubble where everyone was, for years, constantly asking whether or not it's in a bubble?

<comment><USER53> 1999: The "Dot-com" bust; Alan Greenspan is famously quoted for using the term "Irrational Exuberance" in 1996 (3 years prior to the bubble burst)

<comment><USER54> the internet boom (and I mean boom not bubble) started to flicker in 94, gathered steam in 95, and really got going by 96. Saying that was the time to bail out, before 97 98 or 99? I would not say that Greenspan "called" it.

bubbles are caused by collective overinvestment; that means that a lot of the ideas can be good ideas: if everybody else also doesn't invest in them at the same time. It's a bit of tragedy of the commons, it's the collective knowledge that's lacking in individual decisions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I wonder if the frequency of "We're not in a bubble" articles tracks its counterpart over time.

</comment><comment><USER56> I don't think the bubble is just going to "burst". I think the rapid growth in technology is real. The market may correct itself some, like it is right now (particularly with investors), but I don't think there is going to be a great tech apocalypse.

</comment><comment><USER57> The 2008 bubble was caused by fraud, what is the current bubble caused by? Most people are saying we are in a bubble because all of these companies that are making 0 dollars are worth extremely large amounts of money. Everybody is aware that these companies aren't making money however and still believe the company is worth an insane amount of money.

If everyone is willfully deluding themselves and see nothing wrong with it, for what reason do we believe that it will change in the future and that the bubble will pop? And the current situation is different from the 2008 crash in that people _know_ what they are buying into, companies that don't make money, and they don't care.

<comment><USER58> Why do bubbles collapse at all?

When valuation changes cause widespread insolvency, imo.

That was possible in 2008 because household debt levels combined with the subprime scams create underwater households that could no longer keep up with payments.

Who would become insolvent when tech stock valuations change?

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Final argument from the article: "now Trump thinks we're in a tech bubble too, so maybe it's true."

To which I say: "Even a broken clock is right twice a day."

</comment><comment><USER60> Let's put it this way -- if everything were fine and companies had strong fundamentals, we wouldn't need some investor to tell us otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER61> [https://archive.org/details/memoirsextraord13mackgoog](https://archive.org/details/memoirsextraord13mackgoog)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusi...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds)

But this time is different.

</comment><comment><USER17> As the rate of innovation continues to increase exponentially, these so called "bubbles" will only grow bigger. The future will have A LOT MORE companies valued at 1000x revenue, not less. Think about all the new industries poised to exist just in the next decade: A.R. V.R. A.I., Bionics, Space, etc etc. Exciting times we're living in.

</comment><comment><USER62> The truth is things probably have been overvalued for while. Bubbles pop when enough people fear and start to sell. A good article on this should create a graph of how many articles over time have been jumping on the tech bubble bandwagon. Anecdotally I've noticed a massive increase in the past few months by more respected business people.

</comment><comment><USER63> Companies get acquired now whether they've ever had a viable plan to make money or not. Sounds like a bubble to me!

</comment><comment><USER64> > "The valuation of $1 billion – not as insane as the [$15 billion] valuation > placed by Microsoft on Facebook – was jaw dropping."

lol

</comment><comment><USER65> If we're not in a bubble, we have very serious structural economic and social problems created by the tech industry that we need to solve. The (supposedly sustainable) rising tide is mostly drowning people, and if no reprieve in the form of a crash is coming, we need another solution.

</comment><comment><USER66> Most real estate agents, mortgage brokers, and building contractors couldn't see the real estate bubble either. It's hard to see a bubble when you're inside of it.

The tech bubble may very well outlast the US dollar bubble.

</comment><comment><USER67> Valuations have been questionable but that alone does not mean we are in a bubble. I'd rather we looked at the amount of funding that has been raised and the amount loss to gauge whether we're in a bubble.

</comment><comment><USER68> Sam HAS to play down the fact that we are in a tech bubble. He is, after all, a venture capitalist, so do note the conflict of interest here.

My friend referred me to this Bill Gurley article [1]. My metric for whether there is another bubble is not so sophisticated. I feel that there is a bubble when celebrities (like sports personalities) begin investing in questionable startups [2][3]. Harkens back to the '99 bubble.

Edit: Before you bring up Ashton Kutcher, a single data point does not a trend make. But yes, we've been in a bubble long before he began investing actually.

[1]: [http://abovethecrowd.com/2014/01/24/on- bubbles/](http://abovethecrowd.com/2014/01/24/on-bubbles/)

[2]: [http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/04/kobe-bryant- silicon-v...](http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/04/kobe-bryant-silicon- valley-tech-bro)

[3]: [https://e27.co/boxing-champion-manny-pacquiao-throws-his- hat...](https://e27.co/boxing-champion-manny-pacquiao-throws-his-hat-into-the- startup-ring-invests-in-singapores-gtoken-20160606/)

<comment><USER50> VCs have interests both ways. They can benefit in new investments if valuations are lower.

<comment><USER69> Only if they are late-stage investors. SamA specialises in being early, as do most of the other valley venturati. If you are a first-round investor, there is only downside in the bubble bursting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Come on Sam, these clickbait fools aren't worthy of such attention.

</comment><comment><USER71> There might not be a bubble in tech, but China is absolutely scaring me right now. If those Chinese bubbles pop, it might shake investor confidence in other sectors as well (e.g. tech).

</comment><comment><USER72> As someone who's completely ignorant about this sort of thing, and about whether it's a bubble:

If it is indeed a bubble, is there anything positive that will result from it bursting?

<comment><USER73> I think there's a case to be made that bubbles result in malinvestment, that is, you end up building capability to produce goods and services for which there isn't enough demand to support that capability. It's inefficient.

When a bubble bursts we collectively look around and think "What is it that we really need?"

<comment><USER72> > you end up building capability to produce goods and services for which there > isn't enough demand to support that capability. It's inefficient.

Ohh, makes sense. Thanks for putting that in a clear way. So, while it's painful, you could say bubbles bursting is healthy...

Whenever I try to say that around friends I come off as malevolent. I'll use your words next time.

<comment><USER74> Note that overleveraged companies tend to outcompete more conservative ones in the short term, they just have more weight to throw. And if enough of them go down at the same time, the resulting slump won't do decent investors any good either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> It feels just like 1998, but for the fact there's enough folk memory of the dot com bust to put IPOs on ice.

I guess they don't want to risk duplicating lastminute.com

Only question is when it pops.

</comment><comment><USER76> A Google Trends search for "bubble" might also suggest we are not in a bubble. [I find a peak around 2009]

</comment><comment><USER77> As a college student, I wonder what implications this will have on the future job market.

</comment><comment><USER78> What the hell is Sam talking about? Quoting people from 2007-2008 saying we were in a bubble then as if nothing was wrong at the time? 2008/2009 was only partly insane because of tech, but it was an INSANE time: VCs were too scared to ask their LPs for cash because they knew the capital calls would fall short. Dealflow utterly halted for 6 months, and took another year after that to get back to something that felt productive. We were absolutely in a bubble then.

Using bubble-quotes from that era as evidence that we're not in a bubble now is absolutely preposterous.

<comment><USER79> "Deal flow halted for 6 months" \- Sequoia invested in Airbnb, Dropbox, and Green Dot within 6 months of RIP Good Times. Pretty nice deal flow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> You just jinxed us man. Taunting Lady Luck like that? Now we're really screwed!

</comment><comment><USER81> Thats just like... your opinion man...

</comment><comment><USER82> Everyone who says we are in a bubble should come up with a systematically better way to allocate capital.

Otherwise: shut up and fuck off.

Because for all the hullaballoo about poor allocation in X or Y [Combinator] or Z company being correct, the broader premise, that the market is working out good things to do with money, is clearly somewhat proven by Silicon Valley's last decade of spend: cheap, connected, actually smart smartphones; electric cars becoming affordable; affordable re-useable rockets. All of which are vastly humanly benign, as well as good ways to make money (not all of which do, but some do, i.e. phones).

So, pony up, or fuck the fuck off.

<comment><USER83> It's already been done, you're just too vehemently guarding your non-point to admit it. IPO. If these ridiculously over-valued companies ever went public, as stated MANY times in this discussion, they would get REALISTIC VALUATIONS, and come crashing back to earth quick, fast, and in a hurry. Companies are actively SCARED to IPO now, as it almost always means lower valuations once they have to prove feasibility, rather than convince rich people dumber than they to pony up the money. So how about come up with a cogent argument or GTFO?

-Also, good things with money? One words. THERANOS.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's up with Scott Bell? - <AUTHOR> https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sctb <comment><USER2> He's fine, but had to stop working on HN for the time being. Our loss.</comment>


An argument for a new definition of color - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/56/perspective/the-reality-of-color-is-perception-rp <comment><USER2> Everything we interact with has an effect on us. We name the causal origin of these effects, we do not name the effect.

When I say "the flag is white", I mean that it is causing a white-effect. Whiteness is the property which causes the white-effect (ie., a perception of white).

By communicating to you that it is so-causal, I am saying that it will cause you to experience the same thing. "White" isnt just any part of the process we want to choose it's the feature of the object which does the work. Communication is incohrent and impossible if "white" is naming something radically subjective like _my_ state which is private.

There is then the open question about whether what causes my white-perception now is the same as what caused it earlier, and whether the defintion of the kind "white" can therefore be performed by a physicist alone.

Probably, it cannot. Our sensation of colour is provoked by different stimuli.

That doesnt make colour relational, or physiological, or necessarily anything of that kind. It simply makes it plural. There are several ways to be blue, though we detect them all as-if they were the same.

<comment><USER3> _> By communicating to you that it is so-causal, I am saying that it will cause you to experience the same thing._

It'll cause me to experience what I normally think of as white. Which isn't to say that our experiences will match exactly because they include subtle associations. Some we will have in common, say a blank sheet of paper. But if I live near the equator then _snow_ may be one of many associations we do not share.

<comment><USER2> I meant something narrower by "experience". Not that you will be in the same mental state in every respect, but of the state you are in, it will have the feature of "seeming-to-see-a-white-thing" which I also share.

Causes carve experience into pieces which we communicate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is very reminiscent of another article on the philosophy of color, from last month: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910332](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910332)

In both cases, the most interesting thing about the article is the artwork used to illustrate it!

</comment><comment><USER5> "My response is to say that colors are not properties of objects (like the U.N. flag) or atmospheres (like the sky) but of perceptual processes—interactions which involve psychological subjects and physical objects."

I don't see a nod to Robert Pirsig in the article, but it reads like a textbook example of Dynamic Quality.

"I don't know how much thought passed before he arrived at this, but eventually he saw that Quality couldn't be independently related with either the subject or the object but could be found only in the relationship of the two with each other. It is the point at which subject and object meet."

Of course, he goes a little bit further after that. :)</comment>


Catching Cheating Servers in Decentralized Storage Networks - <AUTHOR> http://hackingdistributed.com/2018/08/06/PIEs/ <comment><USER2> Incentives are not aligned here. As a user, I'm not paying for file to be stored - I'm paying so it can be _retrieved_ anytime. As a space owner, I want to maximize profits per space, with cheapest ( _not_ reliable) disks possible.

This system would work much better if payment was tied to retrieval, not storage.

<comment><USER3> This system has its own set of issues though:

\- if I am storing data, how do I know I'll get paid? What if the data is never retrieved?

\- if I want data stored for later retrieval, how do I know it will continue to be stored?

\- if my data is stored with only one remaining party, how do I make sure they don't learn this and hold my data hostage?

\- how are retrievals public ally verified?

<comment><USER4> My team -- and I'm sure a number of other teams -- are looking into different approaches of implementing a "Proof of Retrievability". What we need is a cost-effective way for a data owner to verify that their data would be available intact should they need it. And that's where we want to tie our incentive policy for storage nodes owners. And yes, a storage owner does not need to know whose data that is, or which other nodes are storing replicas for the same data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been trying to figure this out as well. A few of my ideas.

Payouts could be based on having the largest unique set of hashes. So this should make a server excited to see something it hasn't seen before, and would discourage it from dumping unique data, as it's worth the most.

</comment><comment><USER6> > To do it properly, you need to store the file in multiple places since you > don't trust any individual stranger's computer. But how do you differentiate > between three honest servers with one copy each and three cheating servers > with one copy total? Anything you ask one server about the file it can get > from its collaborator.

How about just storing three copies of the same data, where each copy is encrypted with a unique private key (before sending it off to storage)? This way the servers essentially don't know that they're storing the same data three times.

<comment><USER7> As TFA mentions, this works fine for private storage, but we're trying to incentivise people to back up publicly accessable data like the blockchain or chunks of the internet archive. We want a way for possibly-malicious servers to prove that they're storing distinct bottom-layer encodings of data they _do_ know is the same.

<comment> irq-1 So encrypt large files not blocks. Then you ask for random segments and either the file is stored, or the cheater would need to re-encrypt a large file over and over, which would be much more expensive than storage. (and if it's not more expensive, make the files larger, the requests more often, etc...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > What happens if it's a public good like blockchain state?

Can't these be nodes use pruning such that this state is only needed for "full nodes"? (yes, this does mean less decentralization). Aren't full nodes already incentivized to store and backup the 75GB somewhat by the coin's stakers?

> And worse, we don't trust anyone to encrypt it properly. We need something > totally different that anyone can check and anyone can decode.

We don't trust anyone but we might trust "everyone". If you had a backup that was signed by several devs or community leaders, it would probably be "good enough."

I think the solution is interesting but the problem less so.</comment>


Diversity Event Featuring YC, Jopwell, and Mayvenn (August 6) - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/events/510484255774195/

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you free on August 6 from 6-9PM?

If so, I want to extend a special invitation to an event I'm co-hosting with my friend Charles Pridgen, featuring Y Combinator, Jopwell, and Mayvenn.

The following guest speakers have been confirmed:

Michael Seibel, Partner at Y Combinator Porter Braswell, Co-founder and CEO at Jopwell Danielle Leslie, Director of Revenue Growth at Mayvenn

Tickets are tax deductible and will support Black Founders (a 501(c)(3) organization). We will be at Hawthorne on 46 Geary and hope to see you there!</comment>