Humans Will Never Colonize Mars - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/humans-will-never-colonize-mars-1836316222 <comment><USER2> > Air pressure on Mars is very low; at 600 Pascals, it's only about 0.6 > percent that of Earth.

> The thin atmosphere also means that heat cannot be retained at the surface.

> Once temperatures get below the -40 degrees F/C mark, people who aren't > properly dressed for the occasion can expect hypothermia to set in within > about five to seven minutes.

Such a thin atmosphere will not transfer heat as effectively as it does on earth, so hypothermia due to exposure to -40 degree Martian air is not as big of a concern as it would be on Earth. Interesting points otherwise, though.

<comment><USER3> help me wrap my head around that. If you're in -40 in a low pressure atmosphere, it doesn't cool you down faster because there's less mass for your heat to transfer to?

Does that mean things don't cool down in a vacuum? Is there a weird curve where by at some point having less cold gas arounds you means you'll cool down faster instead of slower?

<comment><USER4> Heat transfer happens by heat conduction and heat radiation, so even in a vacuum you will radiate heat away in the form of infrared photons, at least if the vacuum is not at a higher temperature. Heat radiation is however a less efficient process then heat transfer in a sufficiently dense environment. That is also an issue for spacecrafts, they need rather large radiators to radiate away excess heat into space.

<comment><USER5> Vacuum does not have a temperature.

You would probably need very little thermal insulation, if any, for a space walk around Pluto as heat from sun will be quite low as well.

<comment><USER4> If you place a thermometer in space sufficiently far away from all heat sources, it will eventually reach 2.73 K, the temperature of the cosmic microwave background. I am not sure about the correct terminology but at least in some sense this is the temperature of outer space.

<comment><USER5> Vacuum has no temperature. What you describe is a black body spectrum 'temperature'.

<comment><USER4> That is why I said that I am not sure about the precise terminology. But it still does not change the fact that an object placed in the vacuum of outer space will eventually reach the temperature of the cosmic microwave background, i.e. the temperature of the electromagnetic radiation filling outer space. Also not that I am not talking about any vacuum, I am specifically talking about vacuum of outer space.

<comment><USER5> It does not change the fact that vacuum, any vacuum, has no temperature...

<comment><USER4> Also no perfect vacuum exists which renders this rather irrelevant for discussing what happens in real situations. I also did some reading to figure out the correct terminology - it is certainly correct to say that a perfect vacuum has no _thermodynamic temperature_ as it is defined by the state of motion of the particles making up the system you want to assign a temperature to, however I am still not convinced that it is wrong to associate a temperature with a vacuum based on the electromagnetic radiation filling it.

<comment><USER5> Yes, vacuum has no temperature.

The energy of any radiation that may be going through a vacuum at a given instant is not a property of the vacuum (and is not an actual temperature).

I'll leave it here as I think I have repeated the same thing enough though I am not sure it has been heard.

<comment><USER4> You keep repeating a point I never disagreed with, a perfect vacuum has no _thermodynamic temperature_. My issue with that is that I think it is a too narrow viewpoint for the comment I initially replied to. If one understands temperature as what a thermometer measures, then the temperature of a vacuum will be the temperature of its walls, it will not magically show »undefined« because you insist that temperature means _thermodynamic temperature_.

<comment><USER5> You say you don't disagree but you keep disagreeing...

I made a simple, yet fundamental statement. It's either true or false. There is no need to argue as if you had to out-do me in any way.

Vacuum cannot have a temperature. This follows immediately from the definitions.

This also means that the temperature of a vacuum's "walls", by which I'm guessing you mean particles in 'contact' with the vacuum, is just the temperature of these particles. It's not an indication of any "vacuum temperature".

Have a nice day.

<comment><USER6> Vacuum cannot have a temperature, by the definition you are using. This makes it useless for certain tasks, such as determining the temperature an object within a vacuum will stabilize at over time. Thus, we use a different definition of temperature - because saying 'the temperature an object will stabilize at' every time instead of 'temperature' is really wordy.

<comment><USER5> > Vacuum cannot have a temperature

That's what I have been repeating, yes.

You seem to agree with me since you explain how 'temperature' may be assigned to vacuum as a fudge. This is a dangerous thing to do as equilibrium temperature does not depend on the vacuum itself but on any radiations present.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The way I see it, there are two goals to human space travels.

The first, very distant one, is to seed ourselves among the stars to avoid being erased from existence by anything that would threaten our existence on earth, from man made cataclysm to natural event.

The second, with much more immediate result on a human scale, is that every time we face such a challenge it's only an opportunity for us to develop a new technology. Eg sure lower gravity will be an issue, until we figure out how to regulate gravity on a ship / base. That might seem far fetched but just looking at the tech invented to put human on the moon how many of those were far fetched beforehand ? Give people a challenge for tomorrow and watch them work at solving it.

<comment><USER8> I honestly think that both of those are weak reasons. The first is a problem for other generations; on our own time scale we should focus on the problems that affect us on our own time scale. The second is just not compelling; space exploration is hardly the only endeavor that produces spinoff technology, and it's far from certain that it's the best or most productive way to do so.

There has only ever been one goal that has actually driven us to push our horizons further out into space, and I think it's the only one that really makes sense: We do it for the challenge and for the adventure.

As John F. Kennedy so famously put it, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills."

<comment><USER9> I honestly think the first one mentioned will become a "primary" reason as soon as the first largish "came from the direction of the sun" doomsday asteroid slams into us, and makes us rethink some of our priorities.

Assuming we survive the event - and assuming it isn't "The Killer Event".

You know - something largish that takes out 3-4 major cities, and we didn't see until much too late (like the near-space flyby we just had - though it was smaller).

Then again - we are talking human society here - so even that probably wouldn't cause us to sit up and think "you know, we're kinda sitting ducks here" and do something about it collectively.

I mean, look at the number of natural disasters that happen all over the world virtually every year in the same spots, yet do people really do anything to improve their chances next time, or do they say "it won't happen again next year" \- and it doesn't, until a few years later when it does.

We're such a short sighted species for these kinds of things, and the dumb thing is, we know for absolute certainty that these events will happen, but because we don't know when, for some reason we decide to put off what we should be doing NOW, because when it happens, we'll either not survive the event (and everything we have ever done was all for naught - a footnote at best), or what remains won't have the means, perhaps ever, to rise to a similar level of technology to prevent it happening again.

<comment><USER10> It's really hard to conceive of any disaster which would leave Earth less habitable than Mars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The author is listing facts about Mars that are pretty basic and well-known in the first two paragraphs and proceeds to talk in generalized terms about how we will never get around these obstacles. These are all basic facts about Mars that the engineers working on these problems know very well. Simply listing these facts as proof that colonizing Mars will never work seems overly pessimistic.

<comment><USER12> Well, I agree there is not that much merit in the article for pointing out the obvious, but if the emperor has no clothes someone needs to say it.

The engineers working on these problems will never solve them in a cost- effective manner. Never. A lot of new cool tech will come out of the space race, but never will (current versions of) humans live in a self-sustained Mars. And I'm not counting exporting scientific research and souvenir rocks as being self-sustainable.

PS: I'm not rejecting the idea that eventually big actors like states might compete for automated resource extraction and production of war commodities, nuke tests, etc. It's just human habitability that I question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a really well-written, thorough article. Here's another way to think about it:

Before we try to colonize Mars, we should try colonizing Canada. It's warmer than Mars! It has air and water, so it should be easy! And yet:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_Canada#/media/Fi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_Canada#/media/File:Canada_Population_density_map.jpg)

<comment><USER14> If you watch the opening credits of The Expanse, you'll see the moon is almost entirely populated, yet if you look closely at the Earth shot, Tibet is basically dark.

Even in a work of fiction we can't seem to make use of the entire Earth!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Something that this article hints at but seems not to explicitly state: there is near-zero economic incentive for anyone to establish or occupy a colony on Mars, and even if there is some incentive, it is not worth the cost. Just the sum of money required to fly the people there alone would be absolutely staggering, and ironically, would create enough greenhouse gas emissions from the launch vehicles to put our environmental issues here on Earth into an even bleaker perspective.

Halting the damage we are doing to our own planet is urgent and important. Colonizing Mars is way less of either.

<comment><USER16> Getting, say, a million people to escape velocity would not be significant in terms of greenhouse emissions, compared to the ~8 trillion revenue passenger kilometres flown annually (which itself is a tiny fraction of global emissions).

Also, if you assume that those colonists are not coming back, their exodus is likely to be carbon negative for Earth.

<comment><USER17> Excellent points. I want to follow up with some back-of-the-envelope math on this later, if I have time. My intuition was that it takes a whole heck of a lot of fuel to get someone to even LEO velocity. Would love to see how that corresponds with air travel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Not to be "that guy," but I think the real reason we'll never colonize Mars is simply that we're going to run out of time. Climate collapse and/or nuclear war will probably set in long before we have the technology or wherewithal to terraform a planet millions of miles away. We may be only a decade or two from severe environmental catastrophe, which makes the prospect of Mars colonization pretty far-fetched at best.

To be clear, I don't think studying this is a waste of time. On the off chance that we get there, that'll be great (setting aside the concerns of this article of course). It just gives me a sense of a terminally ill person planning their retirement. Sorry to be the downer here.

</comment><comment><USER19> Robert Zubrin figured out a plausible plan to put a colony on Mars, yet the article fails to mention Zubrin and his Mars (Semi-)Direct plans.

Colonizing Mars with a small team of experts is possible and within our technological and financial means to do so within a decade or so.

However, the interesting question to me is not "can/how can Mars be colonized" but rather why would people move to Mars in the first place.

"Freedom from Earthly oppression (perceived or imaginary)" cannot work as an argument: a Mars colony will basically have to be run like a prison with 1984-level surveillance. A single crazy person blowing up airlocks or sabotaging the water or food supply can deal a death blow to the whole colony, and the cost to rebuild/repopulate will be tremendous, therefore the entire investment will be watched very closely.

Secondly, the monetary cost of moving to Mars will be huge and will be even beyond the means of Earth multi-millionaires, reducing the number of possible colonists. Also, because of the extremely high cost of getting anything to Mars and a lack of native manufacturing, there can not be a co-operative ownership of Martian infrastructure, so in practise everything will be owned by some entity (corporation/government) operating from Earth.

These points might change and "freedom from Earthly oppression" might become a driver once the colonists become self-sufficient enough to build self- sustaining underground dwellings with locally produced tools.

Therefore I think a succesful colonization must have two things: firstly, some kind of business force to fuel the flow of colonists, and secondly colonists who are not idealists looking for a frontier world freedom utopia, since it will not be such, at least in the beginning.

As for the business force, I don't know what this could be, maybe mining or manufacturing or such.

So I don't think the colonization is gated by things like lack of gravity, surface radiation, or impossibility of terraforming, etc. The lack of a plausible business model which could profit from having people live on Mars is the main gating factor.

<comment><USER12> >Colonizing Mars with a small team of experts

Like the thousand people in Antartica right now? I just wouldn't call it colonization.

>The lack of a plausible business model which could profit from having people live on Mars is the main gating factor.

Right on the money here. Save for space research, what could you possibly do on Mars that you couldn't do more cheaply and comfortably in the crowded Earth? Resource extraction only becomes cost-effective if its self-sufficient and automated enough, and which point human presence there would be more comparable to an oil rig than a colony.

<comment><USER19> About Antarctica and colonization, yes, I agree it is not colonization, but then again it cannot be, since no-one can live permanently in Antarctica because of the treaties (ATS).

"Oil rig workers" or not, if people on Mars would live there until their old age and death, I'd call them colonists. If they are there on a 3 year rotation, then nope, not colonists.

(As a side note Antarctica would be the perfect place to learn about eventual self-sufficient space colonies in an environment which is a softer version of Mars, without complexities around airlocks, suits, oxygen and the omnipresent sand etc.)

Earth has limited and dwindling resources but Mars is still completely untapped. Then again I have no idea what could be so rare or useful to actually drive the colonization of Mars. I mean maybe something like that exists already, but I just don't have an idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Headline is speculative and unprovable since "never" is a very long time and there's no reason to think we are any good at predicting the far future.

But otherwise, it's a good argument. It would be much easier to live underground, on the ocean, or in Antarctica, and if these aren't worth the investment, there is much less reason to think the obstacles to living on Mars are worth taking on.

</comment><comment><USER21> I mean, I think it's fairly obvious that we will never be able to colonize Mars perfectly. It would require constantly sending massive amount of supplies from Earth to Mars.

The atmosphere is too thin, and the planet itself is too small to maintain a real atmosphere. Even if we terraformed it using science fiction technology, most of the atmosphere would escape into space so it would require constantly producing this atmosphere, requiring a lot of off-planet resources, which is fundamentally impossible.

In addition, the lack of strong magnetic fields and Van Allen belts means that cosmic rays would kill everything eventually.

</comment><comment><USER22> If you think about all the things that were likely considered improbably or impossible in 1800, I think it is clear that the possibilities of life in 2219 are not to be assumed from present conditions.

</comment><comment><USER23> Very wrong: [https://www.amazon.com/CASE-MARS-Robert-Zubrin- dp-0684827573...](https://www.amazon.com/CASE-MARS-Robert-Zubrin- dp-0684827573/dp/0684827573/)

Everything they object to can be dealt with, including radiation and low gravity. If close to 1 G turns out to be necessary for human health, we could build cities as inclined racetrack centrifuges.

Given enough energy, we could not only make fuel in-situ, we could even make plastics out of the Martian atmosphere. In addition, Mars had geologic processes which would produce mineral ores. An entire human civilization could be started on Mars. Historically, this would be analogous to the founding of the United States, just without the smallpox and killing-off the people already there, also starting from more desolate conditions. (Instead of just starting agriculture and industry, we would have to start biospheres.)

</comment><comment><USER24> It brings up many interesting challenges and unknowns of living on Mars, but it comes across as a naysayer's rant. Humans are capable of (and perhaps wired for) incredible personal sacrifices for the sake of exploration and progress.

Nothing in the article will stop individuals from trying, only government policy can stop that.

</comment><comment><USER25> The fastest and easiest way to colonize space is to advance cybernetics to being able to transfer a human brain into a machine one. At that point, you can custom-build any kind of machine body designed for pretty much any environment, saving the trouble of adapting to the new environment through genetics (messy, slow, difficult to test) or bringing the environment with you (terraforming, purpose-build earth-like facilities).

Good on the article for outlining a lot of the issues with this, though I don't think enough time was spent on the mental aspects. We're adapted to live in a certain environment - a different one with different, more boring light, minimal plants, extreme temperatures, no area to roam, etc., is most likely going to be a miserable experience for all involved.

<comment><USER26> "Transfering" a human mind isn't necessary. If we can create a machine mind capable of similar cognition to a human one, then that's close enough. It will effectively be our offspring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> [https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=KXhfAAAAIBAJ&sjid=my8M...](https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=KXhfAAAAIBAJ&sjid=my8MAAAAIBAJ&dq=all- that-constitutes-a-wild-dream-worthy-of-jules-verne&pg=3288%2C6595098)

</comment><comment><USER28> > _Once temperatures get below the -40 degrees F /C mark, people who aren't > properly dressed for the occasion can expect hypothermia to set in within > about five to seven minutes._

Okay, but that's the experience in an atmosphere that is 100X thicker than that of Mars. :)

</comment><comment> java-man "will never" is probably an overstatement, but the article does discuss some interesting points, gestation in lower gravity environment, for example.

<comment><USER29> I think "guests on a robot-colonized Mars" is the more likely scenario.

Humans are poorly adapted to space travel, and it takes a great deal of effort to keep humans alive in space.

It's a shame about what's happening to our habitat, when you think about it that way.

<comment> java-man Mankind is basically too poor and too stupid at the moment. Building a self- sustaining colony on Mars will require not only tremendous amount of resources, both material and intellectual, but also a transfer of knowledge - which will be impeded by the current legal framework, i.e. copyright laws, for example.

But I do agree with Musk: we must colonize Mars in order to survive the next extinction event.

<comment><USER30> Mostly too poor and perhaps lacking better engines - we really need nuclear propulsion at the very least (with concomitant big amounts of radioactive material) to not spend a year in space just getting there, which could cause damage, physical and psychological. Or maybe some form of suspended animation. We cannot really build city sized ships, not yet. That'd require huge space stations.

Self sustaining architecture is one thing, getting it scaled up is another - and relatively hard.

Plus design so as to not cause problems related to living in confinement or in dreary space.

This necessitates at least village scale if not a bigger city.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Underground is the only way to live on Mars. So if you can find people on Earth who want to spend all their time underground (with no external food/water/air supply network to fall back on), you have a start.

The next step is finding people who want to live in a permanent totalitarian technodictatorship, given that one small act, say a minor hvac compromise, is all that it would take to kill everyone in the Mars colony within hours. Seriously, on Mars, the consequence of the smallest criminal action is colony genocide. Think of the social and legal consequences of that. Presumption of innocence is too expensive when the consequence of crime is everybody dies.

<comment><USER32> Isn't this quite similar to the scientific bases that exist on the Antarctic though?

I mean I imagine any Mars colony could be incredibly selective about who to take.

<comment><USER33> You can be selective about who you take, but only so long as it's a small group. I'd hesitate to call it a proper colony if there's no way they can ever raise children there.

<comment><USER31> Some people barely want to birth on Earth, where there's freedom and opportunity and sights to see and a very vague threat of potential modest temperature increase where you can just walk away at a snail's pace from the climate change threats. I wonder what kind of people would want to raise a child in underground technodictatorial Mars colonies

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I will overlook bad physics in the article.

The title should really read "Humans Will Never Colonize Mars (using current technology, that is)"

Just imagine what happens if, finally, we are able to set off a bunch self replicating drones that will collect materials and fuel from across solar system and set it off to deliver raw materials in the direction of Mars. We might not even need Mars, we would just build platforms in space.

It is not really that inconceivable. The solution isn't outside the realm of physics. It really is just a bit of programming (not even AI) and kind of technological moonshot program (ie create a system of space factories that can gather and process raw materials up to the point where they can replicate themselves, creating also a bunch of drones that can scour solar system for raw materials and deliver variety of them to the factories).

</comment><comment> La-ang Well for fact, humans shouldn't colonize any other planet until they clean up this one damn it..

</comment><comment><USER35> I see no technical reason for why Mars could not be home to humans, or even an economically self-sufficient society, in the future. That said, it is inhospitable, and once the first people have set foot there, I see little reason why it would be more attractive a place to live than Antarctica.

A major appeal of Mars is stated to be in case Earth becomes inhospitable, although it seems to me that it would be easier / cheaper to create self- sustaining colonies underground on Earth with nuclear energy and hydroponics, yet even this isn't being done.

</comment><comment><USER36> Honestly, I agree with the author. We'll set up a few bases, it'll take decades, and by the time we come close to having the technology to make Mars somewhat inhabitable we'll have discovered a more hospitable planet and have the spaceship tech to get there.

<comment><USER37> Assuming you are talking about extrasolar planets: Outer space is far less hospitable than mars, and the timeframes involved in getting to even very close stars means living aboard the ships traveling there for an extended period of time.

<comment><USER36> > timeframes involved in getting to even very close stars means living aboard > the ships traveling there for an extended period of time

At our current level of technology. Colonizing Mars is likely 50-100 years away, within that time frame it's very conceivable that we might develop the ability to travel between stars quickly.

<comment><USER37> There are only 11 stars within 10 light years. None of the exoplanets yet discovered around them are expected to be more habitable than Mars.

This puts a hard lower boundary of 10 years for travel to an earth-like exoplanet. If we limit the craft's acceleration to 1g, add a couple of extra years (about a year to hit 0.9c at 1g acceleration, and then the same amount of time to slow down on the other end).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I will say that there are +7 billion human beings on this planet all requiring their share of resources. We need to do this. Nothing wrong with a dissenting pov in good faith. That is part of the process and how these kinds of things work.

</comment><comment><USER39> Probably closest are antarctic station or long nuclear powered submarine tours. People don't do it for years continuously.

How does the radiation environment on asteroids compare to Mars? Asteroids are extremely interesting targets for many reasons.

</comment><comment><USER40> What is less far fetched but also unlikely to happen is global warming will be fixed.

<comment><USER41> Going off a tangent here, but global warming is pretty much our alpha-version of terraforming other planets.

We also have to be clear what the end goal is for being on Mars. Is it to have a permanent research base or an actual livable planet where you can go outside and not die without a spacesuit. They're radically different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> This article was illuminating for me because it makes me second-guess my own projections of the future; the idea of getting so lost in the hows and whens of a conceptual challenge that you forget to ask why.

</comment><comment><USER43> Why are people so obsessed with sending people to do a machine's job?

Let the machines colonize space (and let them create a paradise on earth)

</comment><comment><USER44> One possible motive for large numbers of people to colonize Mars: escaping the control of Earth governments.

It's like seasteading except that when you get up to something the governments really don't like the cost of intervening is extraordinarily high.

On Mars we can build our society of genetically engineered supermen that engage in plural marriage, ritual funerary cannabilism, and telekinesis.

<comment><USER36> Only problem is that the only entities that will be able to colonize Mars as well as project power will be those same Earth governments.

<comment><USER45> The USA was colonized by the British but is no longer ruled by it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Just posting this comment for future Martians to look at. Hi! How's the weather?

</comment><comment><USER47> Well yeah, because if they colonized Mars, that would make them Martians

</comment><comment><USER48> Yes, and 640K of memory should be enough for anybody.

<comment><USER7> Difference being that one was not actually said by Gates: [https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the--640k-- quo...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the--640k--quote-won-t- go-away----but-did-gates-really-say-it-.html)

<comment> david-gpu Besides, it's a reasonable thing to say in specific contexts. Never understood why it is used to ridicule.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> If this George Dvorsky fellow were a software developer, like me, he would be smart enough to know that technology advances exponentially, in all fields, all the time. If you want proof, just compare today's Google Docs to Wordperfect. It's like, a million times better. Anyway, that means that all technological problems will be solved sometime in the next few decades. We probably won't even need to do it ourselves: now that we have AI that can tell the difference between a bear and a mouse after the millionth try, we basically have everything we need to build a super-intelligence that can solve every problem for us.

<comment><USER17> I disagree and actually think humans are very prone to overestimate how quickly certain technologies will develop. A good example is self-driving cars, which are still years – if not decades – away from being truly production-ready. I'm not even close to being an artificial intelligence expert, but I know its current capabilities are extremely limited and we are nowhere close to having a general AI; we don't even see a feasible theoretical path to get there from where we are today. Getting a computer to conduct abstract reasoning is very hard.

<comment><USER49> Well that's obviously wrong because some people used to think that a computer would never beat a human at chess. It follows logically that no one can ever overestimate how quickly technology will develop.

<comment><USER50> The form of your argument is that some people were wrong about a subset of _X_ , therefore the opposite attitude of those people must be true for all of _X_. That's clearly not a valid argument.

<comment><USER49> And Bill Gates said that 640K should be enough for anybody.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What every programmer should know about memory - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/Articles/250967/ <comment><USER2> Does every programmer really need to know the physics behind dynamic ram?

What every programmer _should_ know is the latency of the various memory types (cache, RAM, virtual) and their respective sizes.

Here's a nice graphic:

[http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/what-your-computer- does...](http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/what-your-computer-does-while- you-wait)

<comment><USER3> Not every programmer needs to be a hardcore systems hacker; you can ignore the low-level details and lead a healthy productive life. But me, personally, I get a massive inferiority complex if I don't dive into Nasm and GDB every 2-4 months. It would pain me not to know useless things about obscure stuff.

Yesterday I was prancing through reddit when I followed this link: <http://pvk.ca/>

My stomach sank when I realized I wouldn't have the time to "follow along" (i.e. waste the day reproducing his results, checking facts, researching and following links) because I am about to start a lead-dev/PM position and need to work on SaaS and EA stuff. So I closed the tab and moved on to focus on what matters. It wasn't until 1AM that I realized what I have done; aarongough sent me a link to his toy prototyping language and I have just spent 5 hours reimplementing it in Lisp, in the process re-digging into the Self papers! (and discovering warts, but that's another story.)

I am an Adderall prescription away from leading a healthy productive life, without unnecessary knowledge about _stuff_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nonsense. What happened to abstraction?

To suggest this as recommended knowledge to all programmers is actually making me angry.

My education is in Computer and Electrical Engineering, while I mostly work with high level languages building software for the web. I've traveled up and down the abstraction ladder out of curiosity -- that explains the dual in EE. I've enjoyed it all, but there is zero reason for a programmer to know almost anything from that page. You can make phenomenal software without ever knowing what a transistor looks like on paper; and that's the whole point of progress.

If anything, we should encourage higher level thinking and discovery of more expressive languages and tools.

<comment><USER5> To me, the mentality that CS should require (near) EE dual-citizenship reeks of "we had to learn it, so you have to too". I highly doubt that knowing how to construct a logic gate from silicon will help me program one iota better.

Heck, even including what the logic gates _are_ and how to combine them to make RAM, for instance, is valueless. So my CPU is mostly NAND... this changes things for me how? If you're going into digital electronics, then by all means... but CS != digital electronics.

<comment><USER6> I maintain that to work well at abstraction level N, you need a good _conceptual_ understanding of abstraction level N - 1. All abstractions leak, and you need to be able to handle it.

<comment><USER7> So by induction, you need to learn N - 2, N - 3, ..., 2, ... 1? I wholeheartedly disagree. By that logic, why stop at transistors? Let's get down to the physics of how transistors work, or hey, atomic physics.

<comment><USER5> Ehhh... only partially. If you need to work well _at_ level N-1, then yes, the inductive proof works. They only mentioned knowledge _about_ a level lower than you're _working_ at, though.

<comment><USER7> My bad, I read it wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If it's something every programmer should know then there should be a summary that every programmer will actually read.

<comment><USER9> Grep the articles for "conclusion" and read the articles on "what every programmer should do..." in semi-detail. HTH.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's a cool link, but it gets reposted a lot, last one being 5 days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1496377>

That link is a PDF/scribd version. I find it easier to read than a webpage.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, but every time the discussion is different though. To me, most of HN value is in comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If anyone is interested, a PDF of the entire thing is available at: <http://people.redhat.com/drepper/cpumemory.pdf>

Drepper's site has a bunch more articles, too: <http://people.redhat.com/~drepper/>

</comment><comment><USER12> _The former is much faster and provides the same functionality. Why is not all RAM in a machine SRAM? The answer is, as one might expect, cost._

But since the density of transistors is pushing the cost of everything down how expensive is expensive? Does it make sense to product a SRAM-based laptop with 512MB of fast memory?

<comment><USER13> Well, part of the faster-than-DRAM is because the cache is limited in size. Addressing 512 MB (and keeping it close enough to the CPU) would require a lot more address lines/multiplexing and CPU die real estate [1] that it would be prohibitively expensive and not as fast.

It'll still be faster than DRAM so you still have a point.

[1] In this die-shot (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Barcelona_die.jpg>) of AMD's Barcelona (4 core) all the regular grid like pattern is the cache (total is about 4MB + 512KB or so.) That takes about half the chip's real estate.</comment></comment>


Functional Programming Is Hard, That's Why It's Good - <AUTHOR> http://dave.fayr.am/posts/2011-08-19-lets-go-shopping.html <comment><USER2> FP is becoming the new OOP. People who don't understand its original meaning are misinterpreting it and incorrectly expounding its usefulness. Newcomers are not grasping how it fits into the bigger picture. Be cautious.

<comment><USER3> You know, I've learned something today!

When some people talk about functional programming, they talk about monads and iterating with recursion and lambda calculus.

Other people talking about functional programming mean using data-oriented abstractions, where functions operate on data in well-defined ways, to avoid state and interlocked dependencies[3]. I've been calling the latter a "functional style", but clearly there is ambiguity and people get turned off and say things like "we're using an OO language why would i want FP"

in Avdi Grimm's talk "Confident Code"[2] he calls this style "narrative structure", compared to "haphazard structure"[4]. I like that; "functional" envokes all sorts of emotion about being hard to understand and unnecessary. "Narrative" or "confident" or "data-oriented" are more articulate, and don't evoke flame wars.

Avdi's example (code screenshot) is the most articulate example of this I've yet seen. [https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-Cs- muD17ato/Tk6b1Rb9MwI/A...](https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-Cs- muD17ato/Tk6b1Rb9MwI/AAAAAAAAAeY/MTDO67H4r1c/s912/narrative-code-avdi- grimm.png)

And it's in ruby. Nothing hard here, but it meets a functional style per John D Cook's definition[1]: "OO makes code understandable by encapsulating moving parts. FP makes code understandable by minimizing moving parts." "functional in the small and OO in the large" seems a good path. The Scala community seems to get this, and seems to me Scala is mainstreaming much quicker than any of the pure functional languages.

[1] [http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/11/03/object-oriented- vs-...](http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/11/03/object-oriented-vs- functional-programming/) [2] [http://avdi.org/talks/confident- code-2010-01-12/confident-co...](http://avdi.org/talks/confident- code-2010-01-12/confident-code.html) [3] <http://www.dustingetz.com/how-to- become-an-expert-swegr> [4] <http://www.dustingetz.com/confident-code-vs- timid-code>

<comment><USER4> _functional in the small and OO in the large" seems a good path._

That's what I like about Erlang as well. Once you recognize processes as your objects, this philosophy just flows out of the language.

<comment><USER5> But is taking a while for Erlang to come to terms with it...see Joe Armstrong "Why OO sucks" (<http://www.sics.se/~joe/bluetail/vol1/v1_oo.html>)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ok, I've been a procedural programmer for years. I struggle even with OO. Where's my easy bridge to Functional? Where's the killer "here's the trick, the secret, the leap"?

Because I have to say, for all the "functional will save you" mantras, I keep finding a procedural approach gets the problem solved. Are my problems too simple? Not scale issues? Perhaps. And clearly, I am not trained in anything other than intro Lisp and Hadoop, so I haven't had the deep dive indoctrination others appear to have had.

But as each new computing metaphor comes, we find ways to make it easy for folks trained in older metaphors to come over. Other than Scala, I've found few bridges that are trying to help procedural and OO lang folks adopt functional. It's no-one's fault, I guess, other than new folks are trained in it, and older folks aren't.

But I'll keep looking for that bridge, that shining one thing that will make me go "aahhha, I see" and not "one of these books will explain how passing this function through this multi-nested other function is better than just making a loop".

Because after all these articles, I know functional is great. I just feel bad that I haven't been able to make it great for me... yet.

<comment><USER3> one of the cardinal rules of OO is: "each unit (method, object, whatever) should do exactly one thing"[3]. this rule is universally ignored in all the big OO codebases I've seen[1]. applying this rule with discipline, forces you to have a better understanding of what your code is actually doing. I think, that applying this rule even in OO languages forces you towards "functional- style in the small, object-oriented in the large", and the only difference is your code will have fewer classes/methods, and more high-level data-structures with operations like list.filter on them.

[1] i get it, refactoring takes discipline and time, and desire to practice and learn[2], and a team of like minded people, on top of sensible business constraints. [2] [http://www.dustingetz.com/nostrademons-75h-work-week- harmful...](http://www.dustingetz.com/nostrademons-75h-work-week-harmful-to- personal-growth) [3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_responsibility_principle>

edit: added source for single-responsibility principle

<comment><USER7> That's not a cardinal rule of OO or even a rule of OO.

<comment><USER8> It is if you don't want to write side effect riddled 'objects'.

<comment><USER7> If it's a rule it's a rule of programming in general, not OO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The thing that got me really interested in learning Haskell was the realization that something like 90% of the nasty bugs that I fixed in production over the years would be have been impossible in a pure functional language.

The thing that slows me down is the prospect of actually getting paid to write Haskell, and my doubts about it's ultimate suitability for iterate-quickly, fail-fast software world.

But reading this article reinvigorates me. Pure functional programming may be much harder, but its rigor allows for more powerful abstractions. Grokking those abstractions is no doubt useful regardless of what language you're using.

<comment><USER10> >doubts about it's ultimate suitability for iterate-quickly, fail-fast software world.

Lest you doubt: <http://thesz.mskhug.ru/svn/hiersort/doc/hhm-eng.pdf>

We did a cycle-accurate prototype of MIPS CPU with some twists. In Haskell.

For Haskell to shine in prototyping you have to apply it to some critical and new task, where type system works with you, preventing errors. The novelty is crucial, I think. You will have to explore the solution space with the help of some sort of theorem prover (type system).

<comment><USER11> "You will have to explore the solution space with the help of some sort of theorem prover (type system)."

Have you tried ATS (Applied Type System)?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATS_(programming_language)>

<comment><USER10> No, I haven't. When I looked at it, I didn't see a well-composed thing like Epigram or Agda2.

So I decided to stick to Haskell for a while and then slowly work my way to Agda2, if I would feel the need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is worth noting that there are a few other paradigms that can change the way you think of programming - recently there was a post providing a good overview of languages that will make you learn some new abstractions, functional programming being one of them: <http://blog.fogus.me/2011/08/14/perlis-languages/>

</comment><comment><USER13> I have done a few real, production projects with Haskell, and I've come to realize that a lot of interest in it is hype. The paradigm is neat, the language is relatively well designed (considering that it's an academic committee language) and the implementation is passable.

Programmers sadly forget that the greatest challenge of software creation very often happens outside of your text editor: it happens in the domain, in architecture, specification and communication. If you succeed in those, your project will succeed, no matter which language* you chose. If you fail in them, no amount of strictness in your programming language will save you.

* _unless of course it's Java_

</comment><comment><USER14> I see that some people are saying that functional programming is more powerful than OOP. I disagree with that.

I do not think one is less than the other. Actually there is a mathematical argument why one is not less than the other. To me functional programming is "what does what I'm trying to describe do?". In object oriented programming it's "what are the properties of the thing I'm trying to describe?". In functional programming I describe the interactions directly and in OOP the interactions come about from how I have described the objects. Done properly, they are both about interactions, it is just a difference of what you focus on.

It has been shown that classes of OOP can be modelled for the most part as co- algebras. This means that objects are a mathematical dual to algebraic types of functional programming. The reason why functional programming is important is that some things are easier to express in a dual space. This means that many things that are hard in OOP are trivial in functional languages. But the reverse is also true. This is why it is important to not drop one for the other.

The real advantage IMO in functional programming is that these languages tend to be developed with stronger mathematical foundations. Hence programming in them tends to encourage people to be principled and rigorous (at least in theory). It is very likely that if you study the subject you will naturally come to be interested in why monads are only one particular type of functor, that polymorphic functions are well described as natural transformations or try to wrap your head around mechanically generating dynamic algorithms in terms of hylomorphisms. The more mathematical nature also makes it less magical and rickety to the self taught programmer (such as myself). That I think is the real advantage. But there is nothing inherent in OOP that stops it from also being built from more rigorous foundations. Such things will come to matter more with increasing concerns in security.

I think functional programmers sleep on the power of coalgebras. In fact his example of google map reduce is completely ignorant of the fact that the real hero in MapReduce tm is unfold not reduce.

I have a pet theory that the fact that algorithms are written in dual styles is why experienced OOP people find functional programming so hard. They literally have to reverse their style of thinking. This takes a lot of energy. Just because it takes place in your head doesn't make it any less physical than trying to roll a boulder uphill or get a wagon wheel out of a rut.

<http://www.cs.ru.nl/E.Poll/papers/durham97.pdf>

<comment><USER3> i think the root problem here is out-of-band -- expertly written OO models are fine. the problem is that i've never encountered an expertly written OO system, which is probably because OO allows you to get lazy, where functional patterns require thought and understanding. i'm gradually starting to suspect that an expertly written OO system actually kinda looks like a functional system, except with practical compromises with respect to functional purity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> And here I was expecting the surprise moral to be, "Functional code looks better than average, just because only smarter-than-average programmers can manage to work in FP languages."

</comment><comment><USER16> _Functional Programming Is Hard, That's Why It's Good_

This is a major issue in software development. Developers like a challenge so they are often drawn to complexity. Unfortunately, this interest in complexity often carries over into their work.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'd really love to hear PG defend this line: "But with Lisp our development cycle was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release. By the time journalists covering the press release got round to calling us, we would have the new feature too."

I'd really love to see the code for something that one would do in a day or two in Lisp, but would be much longer in another language. I don't suspect there exists a wide class of such things -- I suspect the features tend to look like embedding Lisp compilers.

<comment><USER3> i speculate the edge compounds as, say, a competitors java codebase's complexity increases faster than a lisp codebase. exponentiate this over time and the edge is obvious.

<comment><USER18> _The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried._

<http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How about learning functional JavaScript?

</comment><comment><USER20> "Pointers are a very powerful and fundamental abstraction"

An abstraction of what? Can't get much closer to the metal than with pointers. Frankly I'm not sure someone writing this have much insight worth wasting time on.

</comment><comment><USER21> I have an electrical engineering background and all this FP VS IP sounds like Async Logic VS State Machines. How far off base is that description?

</comment><comment><USER22> In the first paragraph a dialect of Lisp is considered a functional programming language. So I don't read any more. 133 points for this?

</comment><comment><USER23> The "One True Language Paradigm"....

... Is functional programming!

(while it lasts that is).

Keeps the money circulating.

</comment><comment><USER24> Can anyone recommend any resources for getting started with Scheme?

<comment><USER25> the little schemer series was very good. you can safely skip the first 5 chapters if you're comfortable with recursion. learn scheme in fixnum days is good too for learning the language right away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I love Erlang so much I haven't yet gotten around to learning another functional language. (still growing with erlang).

I learned it reading Armstrong's book from Pragmatic Programmers. It was a joy. I'm also reading the OReilly book, and it seems good as well, though I can't tell how it would be if I didn't know the language already. As for the titles-- one is Programming Erlang, and the other is Erlang Programming!

<comment><USER27> I think you should learn Brainf*ck. It has awesome mental/intellectual benefits to you as a Erlang lover. No, but really.... ! And if you don't you will suffer! Muahaha!

<comment><USER26> Erlang is easy to read and makes a lot of sense, without requiring much brainpower... if you'll take a few days and read about it.

I think its kinda silly that people will just ignore a language because it doesn't look like java/C/pascal. Its not like the syntax of erlang is stupid, or pointlessly obtuse.

<comment><USER4> IMO, the only really ugly part of Erlang is it's record syntax, but it's binary handling more than makes up for it!

Doing Erlang at the day job for the last few months has been awesome. I really wish it would catch on more. Maybe when the JVM supports tail-call optimization and there is a JVM implementation of the runtime...

<comment><USER28> We know, we know. BUT no one has come up with a better syntax that really works, all the time. There have been suggestions but none have really worked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is the lie that every functional programmer has perpetuated for the last 50 years since the dawn of Lisp - that somehow, automagically, productivity or effectiveness of programmers increase with the use of functional languages.

It's the biggest lie in the programming world, and it was designed to make the uber-geeks of this world, those people that you walk around the block just to avoid saying hello to because you know they are deeply and profoundly anti- social, feel good about themselves, to feel special, as though they have the "upper hand" that other normal people who deliberately choose other languages over purely functional ones.

There is value in learning how to think recursively, but a lot of programming, especially systems programming doesn't need to have its for loops transformed into recursive functions, or its addition operators into primitive recursive functions.

I am sick and tired of people expounding on the alleged efficacy and efficiency of functional languages and I wish they would just STFU once and for all and go back to their porn intermezzos between their functional programming spurts.

<comment><USER9> You're making the same mistake that the Java loyalists did when Rails came out: judging something based on your distaste for the advocacy around it without any real understanding. I'm not going to pretend to know your motivations here, but often times people throw up this defense mechanism to protect their own professional knowledge; but here's the thing, that does nothing but stunt your own growth.

Functional programming is about the removal of side effects, aka mutable state. Removing side effects makes programming harder because ultimately the _whole point_ of computer programming is to create side effects. Isolating those side effects and writing most of your code in a functional (mathematical definition: always the same output for a given input) way is challenging, but it also promises an order of magnitude more possibility of correctness. The mathematical rigor of a pure functional language like Haskell allows deeper reasoning to be done, and thus more powerful abstractions to be introduced.

In practice functional programming is not the fastest way to solve many problems, but it is an excellent way to push forward the state of computer science as a whole. Think about the relationship between physics and math. We would not have the deep practical knowledge of the physical universe that we have today without the complex math that allowed physicists to reason about things well outside the realm of experimentability.

<comment><USER29> Here's the problem I have with this: nearly everything I do involves state. It's called a database.

Let's take a simple example, a to-do list. Abstracted out to its essentials (a piece of paper), the to-do list is exclusively state. Add a task, complete a task.

Now, I can write a program that manages a to-do list in a functional language. There are two options. (Let's assume this is a web app.) First, I can make the client manage the state. Each time they use the application, they bookmark the last page. This is obviously inconvenient, but it's pure. Every input has a distinct output. Send the entire to-do list and what you wish to add or complete as input, receive an update copy of the state in return. It's always immutable state. It's also inconvenient if you ever want to use this on another computer.

So, like most to-do lists, we use a database on the server side to manage the state of the application. However, you've lost the entire benefit of immutable state! You are not guaranteed to get the same output given an input. We're back to square one, aren't we? What's functional about mutable state?

Now, in a subset of programs, eliminating mutable state is beneficial. 99% of scientific programming would be best served by FP. However, I've never seen an answer to how we can still call any system functional once we add a database.

And at that point, why aren't we using a language that is bad at what we expressly need in the first place?

<comment><USER9> It seems you didn't read my post at all, because this is a complete non- sequitur. Look at the only sentence in which I emphasized a word and notice that it is exactly the same as the opening sentence your rebuttal.

This tells me that you are operating off of some mental model of what you've heard from FP proponents in the past without actually giving what I said proper consideration. The irony is that in your other comments you decry the religion of such debates with FP proponents, but in this case you are the one bringing a religious view. Nowhere did I say that FP languages are generally superior for real-world problem solving.

<comment><USER29> I'm not the one you replied to originally. You're right, it was a non- sequitur, but mostly because it was a question I'd had since I took a functional programming class in college, and never saw an answer that sat well for me. One of the other commenters gave one, so rather than contribute to the noise I just stayed silent and upvoted.

I was just taking advantage of a heated discussion to get an answer. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your infrastructure secret management solution? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking into following infra secret management solutions. Do you have folks have any recommendations and best practices? thanks.<p>https://www.vaultier.org/features/ https://square.github.io/keywhiz/ <comment><AUTHOR> Oh. I see this today nice. I always liked HashiCorp folks.

[https://hashicorp.com/blog/vault.html](https://hashicorp.com/blog/vault.html)</comment>


Justice Department Backs Broadcasters in Aereo Dispute - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2014/03/03/justice-department-backs-broadcasters-in-aereo-dispute/

<comment><USER2> Of course it does. When does the executive branch not side with the incumbents?</comment>


Leak Finder: a new tool for JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2012/08/leak-finder-new-tool-for-javascript.html

<comment><USER2> Only if you inherit every object in your application from their "goog.Disposable" super class and call object.dispose() whenever you want to get rid of it. This kind of negates the point of garbage collection. If you aren't removing event handlers when you destroy objects then it's your own fault.

</comment><comment><USER3> The title is misleading. This is a new tool for Closure, and _possibly_ other code if you rewrite your code base to work like Closure.

The built in developer tools are already good enough for finding leaks in most cases. I just use heap snapshots to make sure there are no ugly leaks.

</comment><comment><USER4> FYI waveform, you've been helbanned going on 17 days now.</comment>


N Reduce opens up as alternative to ultra-elite startup incubators - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2012/05/14/n-reduce-opens-up-as-alternative-to-ultra-elite-startup-incubators/

<comment><USER2> Take that in your faces "Elite" startups, you wouldn't be selected, you're not even "Ultra elite"!

More seriously though, I respect the initiative, but I would love to hear why this particular vocabulary is employed (from the website and the company's website): [ "ninja", "ultra", "elite", "brotherhood", "sisterhood" ]. I don't believe you say that randomly and you want to appeal to a certain population with these words but don't you think you'll only attract bozos and pretentious people?

For your website ( given in the comments) please no violent transitions like that, it's really bad for slow computers like mine. If anything I would have think that ninjas love discretion...

<comment><USER3> Key phrase is "alternative to".

About attracting bozos... maybe we will. We think that instead of trying to weed out the bozos, let everyone in and see how well they perform. If a "bozo" can ship and gain traction with their product, then they aren't bozos are they? But if the bozos flake out, that's ok too. What will be left is the "elites".

Yeah, we're joking around with marketing on our site. We figure it's better than being ultra serious. But I'm sure there's a balance that we're going to need to eventually get to.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for your answers.

I am genuinely interested by what words carry and in your case the kind of people they are going to attract. I actually write a bit on that. If you emphasize a lot on ninja/ elite etc... I would guess you will attract a lot of immature people who have ego probably bigger than their talent.

If you look at the phrasing of Y Combinator or even Facebook ads for developers you can see that even if they add some words to be fun they are careful about their use not to send the wrong signals.

Anyhow I wish you the best for your initiative!

<comment><USER3> Cool, thanks a ton for your feedback!

Maybe I live in a bubble (downtown SF), but it seems the best devs I've ever worked with on open source and consulting project tend to have a pretty weird (maybe immature) sense of humor. In most early stage startup offices here, it's not weird to see grown men (and brilliant devs) run around the office and shoot nerf guns at each other.

<comment><USER4> > it's not weird to see grown men (and brilliant devs) run around the office > and shoot nerf guns at each other

1999 called, it wants its startup cliches back.

<comment><USER3> Well, I was in high school in 1999. Very sad to have missed the previous generation of nerf time fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Kudos, I adore this idea.

You should see if YC will fund η-Reduce during the next cycle. I can imagine them getting a kick out of funding their own disruption.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can use the following link to sign up: <http://nreduce.com/#signup>

Sorry about the super cute hipster homepage :) We're cleaning it up and making it a bit better organized.

Thanks for the support!

<comment><USER6> What will be the likelihood of NReduce accepting single founders?

<comment><USER3> 100% likelihood of being accepted. We accept everyone who can ship products.

I'm sort of with PG on this one though. I've tried to do startups alone in the past. It's such an insane amount of work, stress, and pressure that doing it alone is quite a challenge.

But if you think you can do it, we'd love to have you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If your name comes from eta reduction, shouldn't it be "H Reduce", not "N Reduce"?

<comment><USER3> It's true. We messed up the capitalization

η-reduce is the correct name. Ah well, N Reduce looks a bit nicer so we went with it :)

<comment><USER8> You should change your logo to η , otherwise you're going to be getting this question over and over. At least the hint in the logo may forestall some of it, and if not you can point people to it and give them a little test.

<comment><USER9> I don't think it will matter. Google misspelled googol. Flickr misspelled flicker (that one was probably on purpose though). If N Reduce hits it big, no one will care about that and they will recognize it as a company that works.

Edit: I just noticed Chrome doesn't have googol in it's spell checker dictionary. I wonder if that is intentional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Right in the first paragraph it says "... they're introducing a new, more open ...". I don't know much about other incubators but can't really understand why YC would be considered less "open" or "exclusive".

My understanding is that powerful incubators form around influential and visionary people (with money or good connections) so it may not be a good aspiration model for startups.

</comment><comment><USER11> N Reduce? Y Combinator? Sure, why not.

</comment><comment><USER12> Well good luck. This looks like a great opportunity.

May you share an email address?

<comment><USER3> Sure, email us anytime at email@example.com

</comment></comment><comment> sasha-dv Do you want to join an ultra elite ninja brotherhood?

Hell yeah! Let me fetch my nunchucks.

I would like to see this project succeed, but the language used (too much enthusiasm?) makes me skeptical. Anyhow, good luck guys.

</comment><comment><USER13> great, an startup for building up startups.

It's like the circle has been closed.</comment>


Stupid Apps and Changing the World - <AUTHOR> http://blog.samaltman.com/stupid-apps-and-changing-the-world <comment><USER3> I've been thinking a bunch about why it's the trivial projects (Altair, the WWW, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, AirBnB) that change the world, and the change- the-world projects (Xanadu, WebTV, Chandler, WebVan) end up becoming trivial.

I think it's because of a quirk of human psychology. The value of a product to _us_ , as a user, is about how well it fits into our daily lives. "Fits into" is the operative phrase: to get adopted, a product needs to be nearly invisible, and fit into what we're already doing so well that it's just a seamless augmentation of our own capabilities. Such products naturally seem trivial.

By contrast, we judge the _importance_ of a project by a combination of a.) how difficult it was to do and b.) how many people it affects. Both of these are anticorrelated with how likely it is to fit into our lives. Difficult projects are usually complex; that complexity tends to spill over into the user interface and make it harder for us to make sense of how we would use the product. (Indeed, when moonshots like Google or Tesla succeed, it's usually because they manage to put a complex problem behind a really simple & familiar interface.) And aiming to please a large audience means handling a lot of corner cases, which again bloats the user interface and makes it harder for any one person to adopt it.

Once you've got lots of happy people adopting the product, they can serve as teachers and evangelists to bring a little more complexity to the wider world. But if you build something designed to change the world from the start, it tends to "bounce off" of the world, as it doesn't actually fit into the daily needs of any one person.

<comment><USER4> > I've been thinking a bunch about why it's the trivial projects (Altair, the > WWW, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, AirBnB) that change the world, and the > change-the-world projects (Xanadu, WebTV, Chandler, WebVan) end up becoming > trivial.

Selection bias, mostly. I mean, "change the world" projects also includes the likes of Apple Computer, Amazon, Edison's laboratory at Menlo Park and the World Health Organization. All of these have changed the world more than Reddit ever will. And whilst what Tim Berners Lee and Zuckerberg started off might have _looked_ trivial, I'm pretty sure they were motivated by a belief that they could change the way people communicated, and not simply _develop X for Y. scale. profit_.

There's nothing wrong with doing the latter of course, and a business that _revolutionises the world... of analysis of social media sentiments for digital marketers_ might well deliver far more radical improvements to the lives of its employees and early investors than companies with loftier and less well-defined aims. But the argument that this talent might have actually improved the world more by doing something as mundane and often-criticized as helping a fund pick stocks remains.

<comment><USER3> Apple Computer was also trivial when it started - it was a circuit board without a case, that hobbyists had to assemble itself, and needed an external TV to display any output.

Amazon had big ambitions, but they started selling books via Perl script. I remember when it first started attracting media attention in 1996, I wondered why the hell people could get so excited about selling _books_. If a similar startup launched today - say, call it book.ly - would you consider it a "change the world" company?

Edison's laboratory isn't a fair comparison: at the time it was established, Edison had already been inventing things for a decade. It would be like looking at Google in 2005 instead of 1995. (Google, along with Elon Musk's companies and Pixar, actually are the exception that the article talks about, where they seem crazily ambitious from the beginning.) Edison's first patent was for an electric vote recorder, which a.) sounds a lot less impressive and b.) didn't exactly change the world.

The WHO is an entirely different beast: it's an arm of an international organization, established under the umbrella of the United Nations. I would say it qualifies, though - it's under the "do something crazily ambitious" clause in Sam Altman's article. Indeed, even then it took 25 years to go from founding to the eradication of smallpox.

To find examples that actually contradict the point, you need to find companies that a.) appeared _to outsiders_ , not just their founders, as crazily ambitious b.) at the time of their founding and c.) actually did change the world. There are relatively few of these; there are some, but it's a definite minority. Most of the time, if you think of an invention as having changed the world from the beginning, it's because your "beginning" was actually several years into its development, and your perception of its importance is colored by events & adoption that have already happened.

<comment><USER4> Frankly "world's biggest bookstore" shortly after launch sounds more like a potential world changing company _today_ than much of what's coming out of Silicon Valley. And Bezos was bold enough to build it before many people had considered buying things online.

Sure, everything looks trivial to some people (bah! not another government- backed space launch vehicle manufacturer). But there's a big difference between companies that seem trivial to outsiders because those outsiders are sceptical about the founder's claims there's a mass market for the service, and companies that seem trivial because they're throwing VC money at incrementally improving existing platforms to capture a slice of a maturing market. Founders taking the Jobs/Bezos-type bet that things like consumer genetics and 3D printing are on the cusp of being ready for the masses evidently have world-changing aspirations even if many outsiders think the products will remain a toy (and even if hindsight proves them right). On the other hand it's already very well established there's a real and huge market for products which _improve click through rates on ads_ , but you'll struggle to convince anyone that doesn't work in marketing that it's actually a world- changing mission, no matter how gushing the press release is and how close they are to success. I think the criticism directed at SV for focusing efforts on "trivial" problems tend to be directed mostly at companies with the latter type of ambition than the former.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Facebook, Twitter, reddit, the Internet itself, the iPhone, and on and on and on—most people dismissed these things as incremental or trivial when they first came out._

I would say Twitter and Facebook in particular are still are incremental and trivial as billion dollar companies and always will be. The web is a dumbed down version of older hypertext systems and hasn't shaken that legacy in 25 years.

The real problem with the pace of innovation is these things weren't trivial to build, that's why the best we can do is incrementalism. And that comes from the foundation systems we use. When something near the bottom of a technology stack/pyramid offloads complexity to the top, it becomes a nightmare to get anything done.

For example, we don't have a natural language command line for regular/stupid users. Instead we have point and grunt GUIs. That means apps have to be monolithic. Apps can't work seamlessly with one another even if the underlying tech allows it.

And from that small bit of complexity we get billion dollar walled gardens.

More detailed read [http://pchiusano.github.io/2013-05-22/future-of- software.htm...](http://pchiusano.github.io/2013-05-22/future-of- software.html)

Instead of a simple standard interface for users to access various services we have [http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f0...](http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f000000-1200-924/craigslist%20andrew%20parker.png) which kills discoverability and creates a constant drag on people to learn a million UIs. And then we hope to fix all that with another layer of AI [http://whoo.ps/2015/02/23/futures-of-text](http://whoo.ps/2015/02/23/futures- of-text)

You can fool yourself about worse is better while making a few bucks. You can wall yourself off from the naysayers. But the real impact on the economy and humanity from eBay, AirBB and FaceTwitter is low.

<comment><USER6> Please give us some examples of companies you feel have "real impact on the economy and humanity"...?

Edit: Also, successful companies that started out with those ambitions?

<comment><USER7> To single one out, the Full Belly Project is a great example. Their Universal Nut Sheller has had a real, measurable impact on economies.

In general terms, several industries have had a real, measurable impact on economies. The scooter, the diesel truck, the steel hulled boat, the washing machine, the cell phone... There are many successful companies in these industries that have a real impact on humanity and make a profit too.

I find it astonishing that you couldn't think of examples of businesses that have had a bigger impact on humanity than Twitter and Facebook.

<comment><USER6> > I find it astonishing that you couldn't think of examples of businesses that > have had a bigger impact on humanity than Twitter and Facebook.

I never said I couldn't think of businesses with more (current) impact than Twitter and Facebook! I think my work history amply illustrates that (Google[x], Google Life Sciences, etc).

I was simply saying: A lot of really great, impactful businesses started off with more-modest beginnings; chiding existing upstarts for not being sufficiently ambitious borders on hubris.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The first piece of advice _" don't claim you're changing the world until you've changed it"_ makes sense.

A tiny minority of founders really work on products that change the world. Many just hope that their company is acquired and that is how most "successful" startups "exit". The so-called "exit" is a badge of honor (even if the company had been through a fire-sale or acqui-hire)

There are other good points in the column, but I think Sam is a bit too defensive when he says _" ignore the haters and work on whatever you find interesting. The internet commenters and journalists that say you're working on something that doesn't matter are probably not building anything at all themselves."_

If someone is a "hater", does it really matter if they are building anything else ?

Tesla has its critics, social-networking-for-cats will also have its critics. Both companies may assert that they are changing the world. However, I don't think it makes sense for the latter to use the former as an example of why its critics are all "haters". Of course, I don't mean to suggest that the latter deserves its critics. I'm just saying that there is no need to circle the wagons against these so-called "haters".

If you think your startup is worth it, just work on it. Most startups don't change the world in a big way, but that shouldn't stop you from trying.

<comment><USER9> > _If you think your startup is worth it, just work on it._

Isn't that exactly what Sam is saying?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you're accused of working on stupid, trivial things, and Facebook and Twitter are your best counterexamples, it's a little pathetic. It's very easy to conflate making a lot of money with doing something that matters. At the end of the day, they're ad-serving time-sucks that delivers CandyCrush and advertisements and an endless stream of selfies from our most annoying, narcissistic acquaintances.

Almost every founder, engineer, Stanford grad, and VC has been chanting "We're changing the world!" for the last eight years. Stop it. It's trite and annoying and it pisses people off. It doesn't piss people off because your current batch of products are half-baked and stupid. It pisses people off because your _very best_ products of the last decade are, at the end of the day, stupid and trivial and really _haven 't_ changed the world in a very positive way. It pisses people off because it doesn't hold water outside the myopic Silicon Valley bubble, where everyone tells each other "We're changing the world" often enough that they actually buy into it.

<comment><USER11> That's a rather blithe and shallow criticism of Facebook and Twitter. I could easily complain about email because of spam, but it would totally disregard its usefulness and impact. (As for Candy Crush invites and annoying selfies, Facebook actually provides tools to deal with those problems. RTFM?)

Facebook in particular has allowed me to keep in touch with a much larger social circle. It has made it easier to meet people, establish friendships, maintain distance relationships, and keep in touch with more of my extended family. It allows me to plan events quickly and on short notice, and get quick feed back on who will be attending. It helps me learn about new events or activities that I otherwise might have missed.

<comment><USER10> > _Facebook in particular has allowed me to keep in touch with a much larger > social circle_

For me, Facebook offered a false sense of being social. The more I used it, the more I craved social interaction, leading me to use it even more. It's possible, maybe even likely, that I was "using it wrong." But after I used Facebook's tool for dealing with this problem (the _Delete Account_ tool), I've become a more genuinely social person.

I do miss out on photos posted by my extended family. That is a genuine loss. I've probably also missed out on some events organized through Facebook. But then again, I'm making more of an effort to actively maintain relationships _offline_ , and it's probably been a net positive.

Of course, that's just my experience. There are 1.5B active users who might disagree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Warning, the following only relates to small remark from the article...

I really like the remark "noone understands hyperexponential growth". I've always wondered if it's possible to learn understanding this better. I'd like to think that most things can be learned and improved on at least to some degree so it might be worthwhile to investigate this.

I used to play online poker for a living and I feel it improved my intuitive understanding of limited chance events quite a bit (and taught me to think a lot more in expected value than in actual results which is very valuable imo). My hypothesis would be that a pool of (good) poker players understand something like every day variance better than a comparable sample with no poker background. There's some counter evidence that may be related (econ students routinely know very little about basic econ concepts) but these examples tend to be about theoretical and not practical knowledge. Not sure what other groups one could include, statisticians or people who use statistics regularly (data scientists, data centric QM, investment bankers maybe) Constructing an instrument (questionnaire?) to measure intuitive understanding of statistics is probably non-trivial.

+I'm already having nightmares of endless Frequentist vs. Bayesian debates.

Afterwards, the interesting thing would be to construct creative (I'm thinking games due to my background but it could be anything) learning environments where an improved understanding of (hyper)exponential growth is developed.

</comment><comment><USER13> I tweeted about this yesterday and I firmly believe the conversation around this would be a lot more fruitful if startups & founders would evaluate and focus their companies on _helping the world_ & stop with this "changing the world" bullshit. The latter is arrogant, presumptuous, and often not true; the former is a genuine desire and wish.

Few people and companies, in the history of our existence, arguably, truly change the world (i.e., make history and alter our lives for better). And none of them claim to be changing the world while they're doing so. Everyone else and every other company is a footnote but that doesn't mean it cannot help people and our world at large in some way while alive.

<comment><USER14> The main underlying difference between the two is:

Helping the world = focus on customers.

Change the world = focus on the company.

Part of the problem is the innate need of companies in SV to pitch themselves to VCs and in order to do that - they need to hyperbolize their mission - hence why you get a lot more "WE'RE GOING TO CHANGE THE WORLD" blathering.

<comment><USER15> "the uber of x" "trainers hate him" "you wont believe what happened next"

Those are all consequences of the current internet culture where everyhing is a product.

Some are really pitching to VCs, some are maybe good idea, most are just following the trends that works to generate interest.

The catch is curiosity doesn't mean conversions and while views generated by clickbaiting may seem good in a pitch value is mostly in the actual returning customers.

This had been know from ages, but today it is only the last bullet point of 'growth hackers', known today under minimise churn rate.

As the weight moved to virality and marketing views to revenue plummeted and at the current advertising cost per click to fuel the gtowth of apps with a 0.1% conversion or less you really need millions.

And here we get back to the main point: those millions to drive views to lure VCs for more millions to build more views are not actually making the product any better. Are making for big headlines at most.

And the fun part is, they call whose whom suceed unicorn because in this system of advertisement fueled growth means they're mostly pumping millions in ads on whatever, without any confirmation on the actual product sustenaibility beyond the growth spiral, and having to have a million user before discovering if the product is actually useful is a plan so retarded that it doesn't faze me chances of one of this suceeding are as good as winning the lottery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> These apps "change the world" only if your "world" is the silicon valley echo chamber. The real world is only moderately impacted, and only for a limited time, even by an anomaly like Facebook.

Seriously, to all the silicon valley startups and investors: get over yourself. You are not changing the world.

*EDIT: There are a lot of interesting and cool things going on in silicon valley, perhaps more than in any other place in the world. To that, I agree. The whole "changing the world" thing is a bit much, though, and I believe anyone who claims this is either overestimating their startup or underestimating the world (or both).

<comment><USER17> A third of divorce filings in the United States contain the word Facebook. People are writing whole books (or incite revolutions) on iPhones while they're on the bus. I'm not saying that Facebook is as important as genetically modified rice on a worldwide scale, but it's up there.

<comment><USER18> Genetically modified rice (golden rice) is a propaganda tool that can't change anything (you can't cure malnutrition due to poverty with genetically modified anything), so bad example.

What offends me about the claims is the difference between what could be done and what is done. In 1999 we learned via Napster of a fundamentally new type of entity, the digital good. This was an item with zero marginal cost - <USER2> literally costs nothing to reproduce on margin.

This fact should be fundamentally changing the world. A new type of economy is possible now, one that goes beyond capitalism, one where wealth can be shared instantly across the planet and multiplied infinitely the moment it is created.

This revolution was shot in the face by the DMCA and various other efforts, and that brilliant energy channeled instead into making a panopticon to allow better ad targeting.

Facebook did not change anything; Facebook is squatting on the corpse of real change.

<comment><USER17> > Genetically modified rice (golden rice) is a propaganda tool that can't > change anything...

Vitamin A deficiency is responsible for 1–2 million deaths and hundreds of thosands of cases of blindness per year. Even just basic Vitamin A fortified rice could literally change millions of peoples lives per year.

See this paper: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2682994/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2682994/)

And if I'm wrong and this has been refuted, please share your research.

> A new type of economy is possible now, one that goes beyond capitalism... > Facebook did not change anything; Facebook is squatting on the corpse of > real change.

Facebook made the internet usable by normal people for things normal people wanted to do. It is changing their lives right now. DMCA is shitty, but most people find a way to watch shows just fine.

<comment><USER18> Yes, Vitamin A deficiency is a problem, and Golden Rice can treat it. You know what else can? Pretty much any other food with Vitamin A. Why do we need to create an entirely new kind of fortified rice? Why not just, say, give these people carrots?

These people are vitamin deficient in their diets because they are poor. Making golden rice is solving the wrong problem. What we need to do is end poverty.

<comment><USER17> You are using a logical fallacy in your argument.

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

Should we work towards ending world wide poverty? Yes.

In the meantime, just like Canada added iodine to salt to prevent a whole host of diseases at the turn of the 20th century, so to can we add things like vitamins to very basic foodstuffs for the third world.

> Why not just give these people carrots?

Because that is extremely costly, difficult, and destroys local agriculture and has a host of other negative externalities. Furthermore many people are too proud to take a handout, but selling their farmers better grains is achievable.

<comment><USER18> It isn't costly at all. We can feed everyone on earth for a few paltry billion; food is not expensive. We choose not to. Golden rice has its own technical hurdles and is only solving a single nutritional problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _' Most of the "intermediate" companies, although it would take a separate long post to explain why, end up not having a big impact'_

This is something I can't quite accept at face value, though I'm open to convincing. It kind of depends on the terms you're think in, anyway. Sounds worthy of a long post.

I mean, how do we class twitter or whatsapp? World Changers. On one hand, they have that hyperexponential growth in users usefulness. They have had "political scale" implications. On the other hand, we can speculate that had these specific services not been started, other would have. Do they count as toys or hyperambitious endeavours at the start? Being network effect apps, they have that need/implication for lots of users. They are also "toys" in the sense that they are relatively simple apps.

I'd like to hear about the terms he's thinking in, basically.

Regarding the SV hate, I think this is more about (1) not understanding low probability, high risk than exponential growth and (2) the arrogance of saying you are going to change the world while being cashed up. IE, when investors pay $100k for a 1% of a company that may be worth $10bn at some point, that's assuming an awful lot of companies that failed to become worth $10bn. People see hundreds of companies reported on (or in person). Even if they're good at picking out potential, they see that effectively all of these companies are ridiculously unlikely to ever reach anything like that. Yet, they are talking in these grandiose terms. Sounds delusional and arrogant.

</comment><comment><USER20> The most important sentence in that article is the very last one:

> The internet commenters and journalists that say you're working on something > that doesn't matter are probably not building anything at all themselves.

I live by this approach. If you build something, you will encounter lots of critics. Most of them do not do anything meaningful and produce no value. Do not listen to those. Only take to heart what you hear from people that actually built something.

Actually, the most extreme example are todays "journalists & bloggers" — very few provide value. So if you get criticized by Ars Technica, you should think about what they said carefully. But pay no attention to what yet another news- regurgitating site wrote.

<comment><USER21> I don't think that's the best example of dismissing criticism (basically an ad hominem). Just like a car critic doesn't need to build cars, the Times doesn't need to build an Uber clone to comment on the fact that in the long term, Uber will likely lower taxi driver income.

<comment><USER20> So what is a "car critic"? Why would I value his/her opinion?

In order for me to value someone's opinion, that someone needs to earn my respect. People who have built something (anything!) get that respect automatically. And if you want to write about cars, you don't necessarily have to build cars — you just have to have built _something_.

There is too much criticism from people who built nothing, and provide little or no value. All they can do is criticize.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The language people use is just a function of the funding environment. With VC cash in the billions for the taking, the loudest, most arrogant and most self- deluded have a leg up on those that are quietly building something solid. So no wonder that environment tends to produce louder, more obnoxious people.

<comment><USER23> Great point. The most important VCs want to fund the most important companies, so everybody has to ego-inflate themselves into being the best in the world at _everything_ or else nobody will even look at you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have yet to see a working definition for "change the world." And if there is one, who creates this definition? VC? Journalists?

Once I see a workable definition, my next question is why "change the world" is a metric, a goal, or whatever it is. Given your answer, what does that imply? Maybe the phrase should be more truthful... something like "make a meaningful contribution".

Maybe this is just an American buzz phrase and I am not getting it? To be honest, I am getting a little tired of it.

There's that Woodstock generation song from the 60's with the chorus: "I'd love to change the world, but I don't know what to do..."

I guess software VC and tech journalists have now solved that issue?

Funny, but "changing the world" (in the idelistic sense of the song) today seems a much more daunting task than it did back then, even with the addition of cable TV and now another communication medium being offered by the telcos and cable companies. The world is better entertained and possibly better informed. The "change" it led to is some ridiculously strong monopolies that like to maintain status quo.

<comment><USER25> In Czech/Slovak Republic, it would sound quite preposterous and pathetic if someone claimed "and this will change the world" or "this will make the world a better place", so thankfully we do not usually get this nonsense, although generally the pathetic PR-speak continues to creep in into public communications. I recall there is a nice Czech song by the old group Nedvědi+Brontosauři with a verse going "...I wished to rebuild the world, yeah that happens, so many of us did and still nothing...".

<comment><USER26> And that's why you never will (change the world). Or the people who can will move elsewhere.

If someone in CZ would invent a new battery and claim it will change the world, they'd be ridiculed even if they can prove it works. But not in major tech hubs, most of which are still in the US. They'd get money.

In a world where exaggeration is the norm, it's hard to break through with understatements and even normal statements (like stating pure facts and refraining from saying preposterous things like "world changing").

"Aim for the stars and you'll land on the Moon" holds true for most businesses imo...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I am reading this with a grain of salt given that Ycombinator backed this "world changing" idea. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10032671](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10032671)

<comment><USER28> One way to look at it as world-changing is a reduction in STD spread and a reduction in unwanted conception. Condoms _are_ world-changers and this brings them closer to people who could make bad decisions because a condom is out-of- reach.

It's like Uber: taxi in an app. Think about all the lives saved because of the convenience of Uber when drinking. I was taxying about before Uber and it wasn't a pleasant experience: you always had to have cash on hand and 2AM calls were expensive. Now it's super convenient, no cash, no problems, _no_ excuses and it saves lives - it just wasn't obvious at the outset that this is where it would lead to.

There is definitely some shit that won't make a difference, though. Condoms on demand is not one of those things that won't make a difference; whether that startup fails or succeeds comes down to delivery (specifically: how fast).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> So, in 2007 I invented the first social alarm clock(sleep.fm) and wow people hated it. I always took a lot of flack for it ... even would come to read Hacker News back in the day and stumble upon others here ripping it apart randomly.

It hasn't gone mainstream just yet, but since it's invention 100s of developers, huge pop stars and Fortune 50/500 companies have created social alarm clocks.

<comment><USER29> Still getting downvoted years later or was it something else I wrote there?

<comment><USER30> What does your comment have to do with the topic at hand?

<comment><USER29> The author speaks of ideas that look stupid and are ridiculed when they are first published on the web, as mine was.

Nowadays there isn't any ridicule seen in the headlines, press and comments from users/prospective users after so many have been created.

It still hasn't hit the big time, but maybe it will. It just needs to be done properly so it truly makes the sound of your alarm clock ALWAYS wake you up with a smile or giggle or something informative/more useful then just your regular lame loud alarm tone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I would take Sam's final words of advice one step farther - don't claim you are changing the world just because you are changing one business industry. There is more to the world than that.

</comment><comment><USER12> I like the advice to not claim to change the world but it also seems that by and large to get VC you kind of have to claim exactly this (at least implicitly). Hypergrowth potential or go home. While this isn't the official mantra of VC it's probably a lot harder to get funding for a humble idea that you also pitch humbly.

Maybe a sub-YC with the explicit idea of "pitch your startup with no hypergrowth potential" would be an interesting experiment. Ironically I think YC is probably the best about not looking too much at hypergrowth potential and focusing more on execution potential but they are also the most likely to try a sub batch like this (based on the recent "superearlystage pitches only" and including non-profits etc.)

</comment><comment><USER32> It seems that there is a much higher threshold of "changing the world" applied to the private sector than to government or non-profits. I routinely hear people in relatively less influential organizations of the latter make such claims without coming off as arrogant.

This makes me think that people in Silicon Valley aren't arrogant as much as they tend to break an unstated social rule: One can't claim to be doing good while making a profit (even if what you're doing is in fact net-good).

<comment><USER33> This social rule has been elegantly hacked by no longer bothering to make a profit.

<comment><USER34> Or doing any real good.

Part of the problem is that markets don't distinguish between "screw the little guy (or the clueless VC) and make a quick buck" returns, and "have customers flocking to you because your product is awesome and it makes them awesome too" returns.

As far as markets are concerned, there's only money. Accountants and auditors know nothing about social value, and care less.

How can you measure social value when there are no accepted metrics?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The point with changing the world is you should change it for the better.

It's very arguable that Facebook and Uber, for example, are changing the world for the worse.

<comment><USER36> Honestly, I can barely stand HN and the startup world anymore, why not be up front about it already and say it's all about being rich and escaping the common folk disgusting lifes? How is Facebook an example of "changing the world" in any relevant way? How is Apple any different of other big corporation of yesterday like IBM, GE, Ford? To me this is startup gospel with zero substance("ohhhhh network effects! It's like special effects!"). This is mainstream culture, but I guess the "idealist hacker maker underdog" myth is just too good to let go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think the key here is that as long as your building something and are enjoying doing it in the process, who cares if its useful. Tinker long enough and you might fall onto something revolutionary.

</comment><comment><USER38> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8149162](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8149162)

</comment><comment><USER39> What's hyper-exponential growth supposed to mean? "User base doubles every month" (so 2^x) but then "the value is the square of the number nodes" which yields 2^2x, which still has the same properties as 2^x.

Mix a dash of math, a pinch halo effect from fame, and suddenly something meaningless sounds meaningful.

</comment><comment><USER40> Not a single app that sprouts from intelectual curiosity is "stupid". It's the use stereotypical marketing wording like "change the world" or "join the revolution" what makes a product (and its founders) look stupid.

</comment><comment><USER41> "The internet commenters and journalists that say you're working on something that doesn't matter are probably not building anything at all themselves." Mic dropped... exit stage left.

</comment><comment><USER42> "One, don't claim you're changing the world until you've changed it."

Indeed.

I daresay that would solve a good chunk of the perceived arrogance problem in one fell swoop.

</comment><comment><USER43> Good advice although somewhat contrary to YC's push to take on "world changing" projects! (Ahem fusion reactors ...)

</comment><comment><USER44> Send me a 'Yo' if you think this article is cool</comment>