Harvard researchers build $10 robot to teach kids to code - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/11/10-dollar-education-robot/

<comment><USER2> This really is absolutely fantastic.

I spend a pretty good amount of time teaching kids how to code, and one of THE BIGGEST things is giving them something that seems like more than just an exercise. Robots are totally perfect for this.

I help with a program in Phoenix called Mach1 labs (a hackerspace inside of a library), and there we have a bunch of these: [http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/Backorder-Shield- Bot-p-1380...](http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/Backorder-Shield- Bot-p-1380.html)

So far, this has been far and away the best thing I have found for getting kids interested in programming.

I usually start them with this sketch: [https://github.com/blhack/shieldbot/blob/master/shieldbot_st...](https://github.com/blhack/shieldbot/blob/master/shieldbot_stub.ino)

With super simple commands like "go forwards" and "go backwards", they can get the bot to do what they want really quickly. It is definitely the "ah ha!" moment of programming.

I've taught kids as young as 5 enough that they could make that thing drive to their brother, turn around, and come back to them.

Hands down some of my favorite moments working with kids have been watching them debug their way through writing a sketch to make the robot solve a maze.

The big problem with this bot, though, is that it's $70 + and arduino ($20ish). For a lot of parents, a $90 investment into something is a bit scary, especially for lower income kids, which really hurts :( (If I could I'd give every single kid I met a shieldbot and an arduino, and it sucks knowing that only the rich kids are getting them).

This thing being $10, not apparently requiring an additional board, or cables, or anything is just...freaking awesome. If this thing becomes widely available, it would call it a game changer for at least the things that I'm doing. If I can buy 9 of these for what was previously the cost of 1 sheildbot, that is a HUGE win (especially for lower income kids).

Totally totally awesome!

>Rubenstein says that for the bot's next iteration, the group is focusing on improving the curriculum and the software, eliminating steps in the installation process and ensuring AERobot is so simple that kids can learn how to use the thing on their own—without a teacher.

AH! No, screw that! Figure out how to mass-manufacture these things. Let the huge community of software hackers who are looking for stuff like this figure out how to develop pretty IDEs around it!

<comment><USER3> >Figure out how to mass-manufacture these things.

So what is involved with making a large number of these things? They have the design available. Is it just a matter of giving a board manufacturing company the design and a truckload of money and they will send you 1,000-1,000,000 boards(depending on size of truck)?

<comment><USER4> Toy companies specialize in making cheap plastic things with a little bit of electronics functionality, and making the money back on volume.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The project page has more details, including the schematic, PCB layout and BOM: [https://sites.google.com/site/affordableeducationrobot/home](https://sites.google.com/site/affordableeducationrobot/home)

The circuit is pretty simple, to keep the parts count low and, consequently, the price. An Atmega168 is the brain of this project.

<comment><USER6> What was specially interesting for me is how they achieved the low cost -- especially their use of _vibration motors!_ :

 _" There are four main designs features that help keep the AERobot low-cost.

1) The robot electronics are designed to use only SMD components which can all be placed using a pick-and-place machine, drastically reducing assembly costs. Additionally, all components are mounted on a single side of the PCB, cutting assembly cost in half when compared to a PCB with components on both sides. All remaining assembly steps are very simple and can be done by the student in a few minutes. The PCB also doubles as the main robot chassis, further reducing robot cost and complexity.

2) The use of vibration motors greatly reduces the overall robot cost as vibration motors are cheaper than standard motors, and don't use the extra hardware found in most robots such as gearboxes and wheels.

3) Using a USB interface built directly into the PCB removes the additional costs, incurred by most robots, of an external programmer and charger, which can easily double the cost of a complete robot system for robots at this price range.

4) AERobot uses purely optical sensors (the infrared transmitters and photodiodes) which have no moving parts, are generally lower cost than most other sensors, and are robust to dusty environments."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sadly, I don't think this (and similar things) will take off. Not because its bad, but because of public school bureaucracy. In my experience, teachers either have to pay out of pocket, or use "approved vendors" which, most likely, won't stock things like this. Heck, one teacher bought a bunch of arduinos but someone somewhere had a fit over sit-up and now there's a box of unused arduinos sitting in the corner.

Not just that either, in many public schools enginnering/Cs classes are "Blow off" classes, not due to the teachers, but the students in them.

This probably isn't true everwhere, but that seems to be pretty common.

<comment><USER2> You're looking at school wrong. There is a HUGE push right now in the library system to get these things, and they're getting funding for it.

<comment><USER8> It's funny. I know my high school robotics program took library technology funds to buy robots and parts one year. While the teachers thought the ROI was good, I'm still surprised that nobody villain-ified it as "robotics programs are stealing from textbook money".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks awesome and the visual programming kit makes it even cooler for kids. I have a six year old daughter and a three year old son and we've been doing WeDo LEGOs for just over a year now and I'm looking for the "next step." This seems like a good possibility.

Another option I'm considering is arduino so we can disconnect the LEGO usb hub from the computer and get a more autonomous experience. The hard part about that is that I don't know of any visual languages I could use with Arduino. If anyone has some ideas that might support this, I'd appreciate sharing.

I'm going to look into the project page link that hausen shared, really glad to see this!

EDIT: Does anyone know how practical it would be for someone like me to do this? I have 0 electronics experience, but they provide the plans for the board, is it easy to get the board built? Sorry for total newb question here, but I'm genuinely interested in doing something like this.

<comment><USER10> I just got a pololu zumo robot for prototyping an industrial application at work. My daughter is only 3, but if she were 5-12 it would be a likely gift for her this Christmas. Just snap an arduino uno on top and you are literally off to the races. Not sure about the visual options there, but the example programs are an excellent hacking off point.

<comment><USER9> Ok, that's pretty neat, going on _my_ Christmas list ;) Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is fantastic. My wife and I run an after school technology club at the school where she teaches. The school/principle are very supportive of what we are doing, but we have limited funding so try to stretch every dollar as far as possible.

I've found that the students respond most enthusiastically to any kind of programming that involves making something happen outside of the computer they are working at. That could be anything from writing code to send text messages to building robots and writing code to control them.

Thus far I've kicked in some of my own money to buy some Arduinos/Beagle Bones and various motors, servos, etc. Those things don't end up costing that much, but there is quite a lot of work to be done before the students can see any results, so only the more advanced students maintain interest. I think having an inexpensive platform like this that is ready to program for is a huge win.

The one thing I'm not thrilled about is it seems like this robot is programmed via a drag and drop graphical environment. I find that the students are perfectly capable of understanding simple code instructions and obscuring the programming with graphical elements just complicates their understanding of what's really happening. From another article about this robot it seems to indicate that code is being generated in the background, so hopefully that is easily editable, or the graphical environment can be ignored completely.

</comment><comment><USER12> Great project! It's interesting they use vibration motors for motion. And vibration motors are not touching the floor directly. How do they transfer the movement to the floor? Also, is it possible to go backwards?

<comment><USER12> Answering my own question. The robot is based on Kilobot that uses similar locomotion:

"The Kilobots move by controlling two vibrating motors, the same type as you have in your mobile phone and the movement is based on similar micro vibrations. The same principle is used when you leave your phone on a table and the vibrator goes off. The Kilobots actually jump forward, but the jumps are vertically so small that you don't see them leave the table surface. They actually fly for a little while. The robots accurately controlled motion to ensure that the locomotion stays energy efficient, conserving the battery for an extended operating time." [http://m.electronicdesign.com/boards/kilobot- swarms](http://m.electronicdesign.com/boards/kilobot-swarms)

And:

"Kilobot uses two sealed coin shaped vibration motors for locomotion. When one of these motors is activated, the centripetal forces generated by the vibrating motor are converted to a forward force on the Kilobot located at the motor's mounting location. The principle of converting the motor vibration to a forward force can be explained using the slip-stick principle… The slip- stick locomotion of a Kilobot was confirmed using high-speed video of the robot's movement. Due to the off-center mounting of the two vibration motors, as shown in Fig. 1, the vibration of one motor alone will cause a rotation of the Kilobot about its vertical axis, while the vibration of the other motor will cause an opposite rotation. By controlling the magnitude of vibration for the two motors independently in a differential drive manner, the robot can move in a continuous range from clockwise rotation, to straight forward, to counterclockwise rotation. This enables the Kilobot to move approximately 1 cm/sec and rotate approximately 45 degrees/sec." [http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9367001/Rubenstei...](http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9367001/Rubenstein_KilobotLow.pdf?sequence=1)

There's also "Analysis and Experiments on the Force Capabilities of Centripetal-Force-Actuated Microrobotic Platforms" article: [https://web.archive.org/web/20121021190224/http://nereus.mec...](https://web.archive.org/web/20121021190224/http://nereus.mech.ntua.gr/pdf_ps/tro07.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Congrats to the researchers. Looks like it has some potential.

I think using visual programming languages for teaching concepts is a good idea. They're great for establishing the logical constructs of computer science, but they are lacking in talking about data structures and state storage in general. I think a more advanced visual teaching language should place a lot more emphasis on teaching how data structures work, which is arguably more important to learn about computer science in the long run. But perhaps that's a bit advanced for such a simple application.

Again, nice work!

</comment><comment><USER14> Sadly, the promise of low-cost seems hard to fulfill using traditional distribution circuits (one single distributor and one single reseller by country), at least for the team's previous robot, the kilobot: [http://www.generationrobots.com/fr/201-kilobot](http://www.generationrobots.com/fr/201-kilobot) That's more than $150 per single kilobot. The kilobot is supposedly costlier, but we can still infer that this cheaper model will not reach $10 in stores if the distribution model is the same. An Arduino-like ecosystem with many clones might be better suited to very low cost robots.

</comment><comment><USER15> I usually get my electronic parts from china because of the low cost. A arduino uno clone for example, costs less than 5 bucks when bought online, and it works perfectly well. Add in breadboard resistors and all the other bits and pieces and the total won't even exceed 20 bucks. The only problem is getting them <i>into<i/> us/europe as the transportation costs are insane compared to china's. As much as I appreciate the job done by the Mit team, the reality is that there are plenty of low cost electronics readily available, the problem lies in getting your hands on it.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is the latest in a long line of such things, including the LOGO turtle, Big Trak¹ and Lego Mindstorms, to name but a few examples. It always seems to be a great idea, and certainly some people enjoy them in the intended fashion, but they never seem to take off in the way the creators envision. Maybe it is a question of cost, in which case this is the way forward – ever smaller, cheaper things.

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

</comment><comment><USER17> My sons school already has a robotics program using Lego mind storms. The kids love it. He's 6, and was allowed into the program early due to being adept at lego and strong in maths.

It's a public school. In the big scheme of things, a couple of mindstorms kits are not that expensive, the trick is finding teachers who are willing to go the extra mile and run these types of program's.

Still, I think this is a great idea.

</comment><comment><USER18> Where can I buy one?

<comment><USER19> I support this question and would also like to know or read some ideas of how it can be delivered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have a hardware team located in Shenzhen,China that can produce this in volume, not sure if this is license-able, if it's free to manufacture I can do it quick.

one thing is that if this requires FCC certificate etc, which may also take a while.

<comment><USER20> Ok it's under "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike" license.

NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.

That says no third-party can make it unless it can do it without making any profit, so this should be made by some non-profit organization I assume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Heh, except MIT actually won the challenge :-) ([http://robotics- africa.org/2014-design-challenge.html](http://robotics-africa.org/2014-design- challenge.html))

<comment><USER12> No, the article is correct. They did win in Software category. MIT team won in Hardware.

<comment><USER21> And MIT won in Curriculum. So out of the three MIT two firsts and a second, Harvard two seconds and a first. They didn't score an overall winner, I just extended the scoring to include that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is it open source (including the hardware)? Would love to see the sensors they are using and how they can get that price point. As someone looking out for my bom all the time, I am pretty curious.

<comment><USER23> There's a BOM and board files linked near the bottom of the page: [https://sites.google.com/site/affordableeducationrobot/home/...](https://sites.google.com/site/affordableeducationrobot/home/hardware)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder whether one could program them in assembly for teaching a Machine Code / Assembly Language class.

</comment><comment><USER25> This would actually make a fantastic small christmas gift, heh I'll take one too!

</comment><comment><USER26> looks much like lego brainstorms minus the price tag.</comment>


Japanese geeks offered smaller-than-Eee little laptop - <AUTHOR> http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/04/15/kohji_rolls_out_eee_rival/

<comment><USER2> Honestly, I'm starting to get to the point where I'd like to have an Eee or something like this as a "Glovebox" computer - I don't always like carrying a laptop, but sometimes it'd be handy to have something bigger than my phone to compose emails or SSH out somewhere to take care of something.

</comment><comment><USER3> Neat. I love my Eee, but it could use more storage. Would be nice to see this unit offered without the Windows tax.</comment>


Genuinely surprised that IE still sucks - <AUTHOR> http://blog.binarybalance.com.au/2012/07/13/genuinely-surprised-that-ie-still-sucks

<comment><USER2> Have you tried 10? I ran a speed comparison in my VM and noticed it was faster than Chrome on some pages (anecdotal not speed tested).

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't tried 10. But I'm hopeful about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It isn't surprising that IE still sucks. In part, it sucks for the same reason that Safari sucks, which is updates (or lack thereof). Google Chrome, when it was first released, was a crappy browser with an excellent update and installation infrastructure. But that's not the whole story.

All the little tweaks that have gone into Chrome have been through two versions of public testing in Chromium and other varieties, and they are mature. Even better, they come from an open-source ecosystem, where innovations aren't driven by corporate needs. Google Chrome absolutely sucks for some corporate applications, in some really simple areas.

Try slip printing from Google Chrome. It won't work. Internet Explorer on the other hand isn't just a browser, it's an infrastructure. One that is tightly integrated into the OS and where you can override everything. In the mid-2000s, one didn't see a lot of alternatives to either Firefox or Firefox, but the number of alternative shells to IE, some of which were even popular, were overwhelming. More than that, an incredible number of applications actually had IE running underneath, for whatever reasons. Usually to display information, such as a help browser, or to provide some way of integrating one's application with the WWW.

And that is the problem with Internet Explorer. It was never designed for add- ons. It was designed to be an add-on. It was never designed to be updated, it was designed to be integrated. It was never designed to have excellent JavaScript, it was designed to have excellent integration into things like DirectX and even AJAX.

There is a reason that IE was ahead, and still is in many ways. IE doesn't suck considering what it is. It may suck for the thing it says on the tin that it's being used for, but there's no reason not to use Chrome for web browsing. Internet Explorer may be a sucky browser, but it's some pretty good infrastructure as it happens. IE is plumbing, Chrome is something else entirely. And IE happens to be the only kind of plumbing out there in the real marketplace. It may be a curse, but there is no better alternative for many of the things it can do.

<comment><USER4> "It may be a curse, but there is no better alternative for many of the things it can do."

What things are those?

<comment><USER4> It's curious that a straightforward question has been voted down. The previous poster made some vague claims about IE being "plumbing" and the best alternative for some "things it can do" but doesn't mention what they are. Other than ActiveX integration which is not exactly a stunning recomendation.

<comment><USER3> Oh, I didn't downvote it.

I guess one main difference is that a plugin for Internet Explorer can do so much more than a plugin for Chrome can, and that the basic philosophy for IE is that it's a relatively thin wrapper around mshtml.dll, one of the most deservedly overutilised pieces of software of the past decade. Sure, you can embed Webkit in things, but it hasn't happened all that much quite yet. Webkit has even been designed for that, in some part.

But Internet Explorer has perfected it back in about '97, and that's the legacy that IE is still built on. It has been doing VML since '98, and that serves as the foundation of a canvas implementation that works even in IE6. XMLHTTP has been in the thing in '99. You could run ActiveX widgets in IE. That was the biggest feature of them all, probably, and it's still widely used. Maybe not here, but in China, IE's market share in May was 72%, not including IE shells. Not least of all because all the banks usually want some ActiveX plugin that keeps your keyboard entry more secure (whatever). Chrome and Firefox were 15%. Combined. South Korea, in July 2011? More than 92%.

Horrible a browser as IE6 was and still is, the target market was rich application software that could use things like DirectX and VML and VRML and XMLHTTP and all these kinds of outdated technologies that we've left behind once Mozilla arrived and gave us some fresh air.

Sure, IE didn't do much in the way of progress in terms of the Acid Test or JavaScript or CSS or HTML, but that was because the target market wasn't really the same. The target market for IE was business in the early 2000s. And it succeeded spectacularly, leaving a bad browser to drive oft-rotten legacy applications.

It has provided a stable set of features for almost 15 years. They may not be the best technologies... but the implementation was good enough. And all of that in a browser that had a 95% market share. There are so many hooks and places where IE can be extended that are a bit mindblowing. IE6 was a sucky browser around a fairly well thought out ecosystem that was settled. There are still things that can be done in IE that can't be done in Chrome. It was sucky, but it worked, and IE has a thousand features in the background that most people never even noticed. That, and group policies.

That said, I hate IE6 and IE7 as well as those F12 Developer Tools with a passion that will burn a thousand years. But it's not all bad.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree the browser is not all bad if you take into account the original target market. But I stand by my surprise that even after the writing has been on the wall for so long, times clearly changing even in the enterprise market, MS still hasn't made it a priority to improve the day-to-day experience for today's user.

Maybe I'm just expecting too much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I thankfully haven't been required to touch the monstrosity in a long while, but the overwhelming consensus in my community of web professionals is that ie's javascript engine will never be on par with V8.

<comment><USER6> I really don't think it's very important that it is though. Whether their JS engine two (ten?) times slower than another won't really matter for the majority of browsing.

They've really improved the rendering engine and standards support but the experience of the application as a whole is still way behind their competition.

Modern IEs failings come from a collection of bad/sloppy UX choices.</comment></comment>


The strange world of computer-generated novels - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/25/7276157/nanogenmo-robot-author-novel <comment><USER2> Reminds me of King James Programming - excerpts from a Markov chain trained on the King James Bible and Abelson and Sussman's Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

[http://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/](http://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/)

        3:23 And these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it,
        and all the abominations that be done in (log n) steps.

        45:5 Thine arrows are sharp in the heart of man to be ruler over my people,
        over whom I have no son to keep the procedure general,
        we express the process in terms of a physical analogy:
        Think of the diagram as a maze in which a marble is rolling.

<comment><USER3> Speaking of reminders, didn't Asimov write (as happens so often now, owing to the fact that we live in the future) a relevant short story about computer generated prose being widely adopted?

<comment><USER2> I remember reading this... EDIT: found it

[http://www.oldlibrary.net/ScienceFiction/Asimov42/27382.html](http://www.oldlibrary.net/ScienceFiction/Asimov42/27382.html)

I know Asimov resisted a word processor for years, and ended up switching to one from his typewriter and upping his revision speed a lot. Probably part of why he had such a huge body of writing and editing work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think it's in the book "Automate This" [1] that there is a section about a guy who has spent a lot of time building AI to write classical music. Apparently people can't tell the difference, and only criticize it after they're told it's written by a computer.

[1] [http://smile.amazon.com/Automate-This-Algorithms-Markets- Wor...](http://smile.amazon.com/Automate-This-Algorithms-Markets- World/dp/1591846528/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1417039508&sr=8-1&keywords=automate+this)

<comment><USER5> I think that's defensible. I'd find the exact same sequence of pitches more meaningful if they came from a human going through the emotional experience of trying to write it.

<comment><USER6> I see what you're getting it, but I think it's kind of odd. I'm curious: would the same sequence of pitches be more or less meaningful if they came from the brain of a specially trained dog?

<comment><USER7> > I'm curious: would the same sequence of pitches be more or less meaningful > ...

For me, Yes. The core of the issue is that the sequence of pitches is not meaningful on its own, like all communication. When I am listening to music, assuming a human made it, I explore and project meaning, emotion, and thought on to it as if expecting it to communicate something that would complete my mental model of the artist or environment. All in an effort to feel what the music was conveying.

If I find out it was just auto generated, I feel like a fool looking for meaning in tea leaves.

<comment><USER4> To me, it's not at all about communication. It's just experience, just like a mountain or a sunset. My enjoyment of it isn't contingent on how it was made.

<comment><USER8> You are heartless

:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ensuring quality when you randomly generate things is hard.

I made a word generator tool. In doing so, for just 6-14 letter words, I had to develop a large amount of quality regulation formulas that would detect unnatural patterns ("xamxo" for instance might be a questionable pattern to have in a word).

Anyway, the thought of coming up with a generator to make a whole book (at least one that is coherent) is an interesting one - and much, much more challenging.

<comment><USER10> Ah, your note reminds me of The Automated Curse Generator story on The Daily WTF...:

[http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Automated-Curse- Generato...](http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Automated-Curse-Generator)

<comment><USER9> Fun article, thanks - gave me a good laugh!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cool stuff - and anticipated decades ago in Roald Dahl's "The Great Automatic Grammatizator"!

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Automatic_Grammatizat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Automatic_Grammatizator)

</comment><comment><USER12> The world of technology and art is amazing right now, because it's like we just discovered linseed oil and are seeing people begin to create the first oil paintings.

There maybe some work to make it more... relatable? or communicable? expressible?

</comment><comment><USER13> Had to do a little digging to get from the article to the Github repos from last year and this year:

[https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo](https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo)

[https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014](https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014)

Love 'generated detective': [http://gregborenstein.com/comics/generated_detective/1/](http://gregborenstein.com/comics/generated_detective/1/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I find this really encouraging, as 8 to 10 years ago, I used a Markov-chain type strategy to complete a novel for me when I didn't have time to enter NaNoWriMo. I did a combined corpus approach with Project Gutenberg copies of Sense and Sensibilities and Thuva, Queen of Mars. Jane Austen is far more interesting when there's a sword fight every page.

<comment><USER15> It's very interesting, I've done much the same on [http://myrobotwrites.com](http://myrobotwrites.com) except I kept the texts generated short to keep a tumblr posting schedule :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's interesting that some generators take a bottom-up, textual approach and others a top-down, agent-based approach.

</comment><comment><USER17> Here's a site that generates short poems from lovecraftian texts. Generates pretty creepy stuff at times. I submitted it as a mini project at college.

[http://yushing.herokuapp.com](http://yushing.herokuapp.com)

</comment><comment><USER18> Does the novels pass the Lovelace 2.0 test?

The Lovelace 2.0 is an alternative to the Turing test. It tests the systems capability to produce creative artefacts, like novels.</comment>


Ask HN: Advice on single-member LLC for consulting or SaaS business? - <AUTHOR> Disclaimer: I will not, and you should not, use information in this thread to make decisions. This only serves a starting point for getting information, not a replacement for, legal and tax advice.
With that out of the way, how do you, as a single-member LLC run your SaaS or consulting business? I'm trying to compile information on how to bill clients (give EIN or SSN), how to do accounting, or any crucial tips you have for running a software related LLC.
Any and all tips are appreciated! <comment><USER2> A lot depends on the state in which the LLC is formed and in which state are you operating. For example, single member LLC's in some states are not as protected as a multi-member (or standard corporations C or S), but in other states they are equal. In IRS terms generally they are no different, but the operating agreement is critical.

The LLC's Operating Agreement is likely the single most important document to create, manage and maintain. So much is based on the operating agreement that without a properly defined one, I'd argue the LLC isn't really valid. If you don't have one, you need one and you need it to be specific to the state law that you are formed and also operating under.

EIN's are generally not obtained by an LLC unless you are a multi-member or employ a person that is not an owner of the LLC. Either one of those is typically the reason to file for an EIN, even if it is just the intent is to employ people in the next 12 months or whatever, usually you obtain an EIN. This dictates how you fill out tax forms for companies during billing.

Running consulting out of an LLC is a great way to go, I built 2 successful consulting agencies using the LLC structure even taking in some outside money in one of them to help us scale a product. LLC's are super flexible and while pretty easy to manage there are a few things to look out for, the operating agreement being the most critical piece IMO. The OA literally defines how you distribute funds, assets, allocations, voting, adding members, removing members, managing the business, dissolution etc. So without it the company isn't really legit in my mind. Most states don't require you file an OA and so people don't understand that it is so critical and without it you are subject to court interpretation and weird defaults depending on the state etc. Some banks require you to show them the OA before they will open an account in the businesses name, not super common, but not rare either.

Also, for any LLC or company, make sure you get your DUNS number and setup a couple of small credit accounts (even for tiny amounts) just so you build the credit as early as possible. This can literally help save your business later.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good advice. I didn't realize the OA was so important.

I haven't found any information online about SMLLCs that would lead me to think that it's important; what has made you think it's important? Lawyer, online resource, etc?

<comment><USER2> Yep, I have had multiple attorney's & accountants over the years affirm how critical the OA is to taxes and operational details of the company, so I've never been without one.

The OA is critical because without it you default to a set of rules that the state defines which may not be correct for your operation, and may not protect you from the business or the business from you. Also, from a tax perspective this could mean you default to the least ideal tax plan for your situation, so don't let that happen. A little to your point though, usually single member LLC's are pretty simple so it isn't as complex but you still need an OA as it deals with a lot of stuff outside of just distributions. As a single member LLC the OA is what separates your personal assets from the business, and defines a set of guidelines that if the business follows will keep you and the business protected.

Good part is there are templates for the OA's available online that you can just fill in all the key details for now. And when you have a few dollars run it past an attorney (and tax person) to clean it up and make sure things are good for how you want to operate. Obviously if you can do that immediately that's best, but that isn't always possible so as long as you have the basics in place then you are good.</comment></comment></comment>


Revolut to update their privacy policy - <AUTHOR> https://www.joe.ie/tech/revolut-issue-statement-regarding-privacy-update-686416 <comment><AUTHOR> I thought under GDPR, companies had to explicitly ask users to opt-in for any matter related to data protection and privacy. Why users are opted in by default and have to opt out?</comment>


Show HN: DiscoBit – Central Configuration Repository - <AUTHOR> http://discobit.com

<comment><USER2> "Distribution on demand ... Configurations are not pushed to the environments but fetched by them". To me this means this is not a distributed configuration system, but a centralised one distributed clients read from. I quickly scanned the docs and couldn't see anything about distributed deployments...

That said, the admin interface and the collaboration features sound awesome, I shall give this a spin when I get the chance :)

Also, couple of website-y thoughts: the home/logo link doesn't work on any page except the index. And please less of the font - the about text on the homepage is hard to read!

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be great to add a comparison with Consul[1] and Etcd[2]

[1] [https://www.consul.io/](https://www.consul.io/)

[2] [https://github.com/coreos/etcd](https://github.com/coreos/etcd)

<comment><USER2> From what I understand this isn't distributed, but clients pull from it? Docs don't mention anything about multi-server deployments...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How much is it? I clicked around a bit an couldn't find a price. Hard for me to forward this to our IT department without knowing a ballpark cost. Since that will be their first question.

Secondly, I think your font choices are workng against you. I would suggest trying out some others and see if you don't get a better response rate.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a stack-overflow-like site devoted to graphic design? - <AUTHOR>

I ask because as a programmer, I often want to do some Photoshop type task, and while Google often turns up an answer, I would really like a site with some reputation information and a concentrated repository of knowledge.<p>I imagine such a site would be useful to designers too. I can only imagine things get more and more arcane as you become a more advanced designer, just like with programming. <comment><USER2> As a designer, there is rarely a single, simple solution to a problem. The best thing you can do is talk to someone, get them to figure out your problem, and then help you with your niche task.

<comment><USER3> As a developer, there is rarely a single, simple solution to a problem. Stack Overflow is very helpful to share solutions about how _you_ solved a certain problem, when others run into that same problem.

I think this is a good idea. Perhaps Joel Spolsky or Jeff Atwood would consider adding another site to their collection, with a focus on general/print/web/logo design. I know I'd use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems to me that I saw a subdomain graphics.stackoverflow.com or something like that recently but I can't find it now. They do have <http://doctype.com/> which is for "web designers"</comment>


Why is this site named Antipope? - <AUTHOR> https://www.antipope.org/charlie/old/antipope.html <comment><USER2> And I was hoping it was named after the brilliant Robert Rankin novel The Antipope

The Antipope is a comic fantasy novel by the British author Robert Rankin. It is Rankin's first novel, and the first book in the Brentford Trilogy (which, as of July 2010, consists of 9 novels). The book was first published in 1981 by Pan Books, and from 1991 by Corgi books, an imprint of Transworld Publishers. Although typically found in the Science fiction section of bookshops, it is a difficult novel to categorise; Rankin himself joked that he wanted to create a new genre of fiction, called "Far Fetched Fiction", so that he would have his own bookshelf in Smiths.</comment>


Bullshit - <AUTHOR> http://www.stoa.org.uk/topics/bullshit/ <comment><USER2> Yeah, Penn & Teller started out debunking psychics and so on -- then they decided gun control and recycling are bullshit too.

I think one needs to be very careful about this business of "cutting through the bullshit" or whatever. It's easy to turn it into a self-righteous way of talking about whatever you disagree with. You're not just disagreeing, you're scoring a victory for the truth in a world full of crap, etc., etc. Also, it does nothing to analyze why certain social fictions are propagated and continue to function even if no one believes in them. You can just content yourself with thinking everyone is full of shit and stop thinking there.

<comment><USER3> I'm interested in their conclusions that gun-control and recycling are bullshit.

Was this a political thing for them, that they don't support these behaviors politically and so concluded after "examining" the resulting effects that behaving in this way (controlling guns or recycling) don't have the claimed effects?

<comment><USER4> My anecdotal understanding of recycling is that something like 90% (????) of waste is industrial, so any consumer efforts to recycle are largely futile in the big scheme of things (not sure if that was their angle, also not sure how much truth there is to it).

I'm of the opinion that most strong advocates of recycling also aren't aware of these numbers, and more importantly, _don 't care_, but maybe I'm wrong on that (but I doubt it from most of the conversations I've had).

<comment><USER5> I've always argued Amdahl's law when people tell me I should recycle. When that doesn't work, I start talking about job creation.

Yes, it's a disgusting job. But I imagine for the growing unemployed population back home in Europe that's still better than starvation.

Furthermore, I really really don't have room for three to four different garbage cans in my tiny apartment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A lot of what people call bullshit is necessary social grease/grace [0].

Trust and authority are currently centralised and because this is the case if you want to belong to society you will have to become more forgiving of bullshit.

Additionally I haven't met a single person yet (and I include myself in this wonderful category) that doesn't believe their own bullshit.

Whenever I hear somebody imply that they're always correct and never believe or act upon anything that can be empirically disproven I call bullshit at that or wonder whether they've ever risked believing and acting upon anything at all?

If you truly despise bullshit then do this: before you point the finger at others realise that you're likely one of them, and that if you really want to lessen it your best chance will be to start with yourself. This is called humility.

How might you do this? Well perhaps before or after you say something, you can turn to others and ask them what they truly think without imposing expectations or qualifications that they must agree with you. And remember even if they respond saying "yes, that sounds right" you _could still be wrong_ and trust me here _you will eventually be wrong_. You are only human.

If the cognitive dissonance of knowing that you will never be a perfectly rational being is too much for you, then continue believing whatever you want about your intellect and others quackery as the world will not stop you.

I guess we all need our egos [1].

      *   *   *

[0] Firstly, I define bullshit as the action of using higher social skills to offset lower domain knowledge. Secondly, my intuition is that belief in bullshit also stabilises large groups: I would be just as worried about a lack of bullshit as I would harm caused by bullshit.

[1] Our need to politicise and attack the bullshit of somebody with higher status shows our wish to have the injustice of not being the dominant re- evaluated by our group, while our need to attack the bullshit of those with lower status is a strategy to fight off perceived pretenders of our position. Resentment and contempt are after all two sides of the same coin, both used when we don't want to personally act on our feelings.

<comment><USER7> Oddly enough, _On Bullshit_ is itself bullshit. Half of the essay is just a line by line elaboration of Oxford English Dictionary definitions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Many of the example links in the article go to The Onion. (And there's _Thank You For Smoking_.)

Is the author trying to imply that irony, sarcasm, and satire are bullshit?

</comment><comment><USER9> 2500 years later, and we still have Socrates fighting the Sophists.

I'd be very careful with definitions here. Because many human endeavors can be observed and described from many different angles, the wisest course of action many times may be to emotionally disengage and describe one or many of the sides without caring about a discussion of universal truth. This does not make one a bullshitter, although by this definition it does.

</comment><comment><USER10> That's pretty much exactly how Neal Strphenson defines "bulshytt" in _Anathem_...

</comment><comment><USER11> Why is "bullsh*t" considered less objectionable than "bullshit"?

<comment><USER12> I never understood this type of logic. We all say "bullshit" when we read the title, not "bullshstart" or "bullshasteriskt". They're just f*cking words...

<comment><USER13> I dislike fasterisking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Any reason why the title here is censored? It's spelled out in full on the linked page.

Anyone who knows what the word means and is shocked by it will surely still be shocked even with the * in. I've never understood what partial censoring, intentionally done so that people can still read the thing, achieves.

EDIT -> Ah, the title has been edited now, it did say "bullsh*t". It's probably a good example of how to derail a potential useful submission by focusing on the wrong details when creating a title.

</comment><comment><USER15> _> Advertising, Public relations, Political propaganda, Education, Love, sex and romance, News media, Technology, Business, Art, Medicine_

Not religion? Aww...

<comment><USER16> Religion is bullshit for bullshits sake. Is religion not the only place where bullshit is acceptable, nay .. even required .. and that people know that before they get involved in one?

<comment><USER17> > Religion is bullshit for bullshits sake.

I'd rather strongly disagree with that. Because it appeals to a form of justification which makes verifiability in any decisive sense largely impossible, it is a fertile _venue_ for "bullshit" (in the terms used in the article) -- and for the same reason, for "liars", which the article distinguishes -- but it is not, either in principle or in practice, either exclusively bullshit nor "for bullshits sake". The purposes of bullshitting, lying, or truth-telling in religion are pretty much the same as they are in any other venue.

<comment><USER16> I think the point is that once a religion stops being bullshit, it becomes a science.

<comment><USER17> That simply doesn't work with the definitions in the article. If you are using BS to mean anything that's not taking an exclusively empirical approach to explore exclusively questions of objective fact -- which its pretty clear that some people _do_ \-- then, sure, that's tautologically true. But that's a completely different definition than is used in the article, so its not relevant.

Both truth telling and lying (both of which the article distinguishes from BS), as defined in the article, are quite possible in domains where the questions aren't subject to scientific exploration. Whether those domains are meaningful is a philosophical question orthogonal to the truth/lie/BS distinction that the article makes, though.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Idle Army: America's Unworking Men - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-idle-army-americas-unworking-men-1472769641 <comment><USER2> Stay-at-home dads explains 2 million of this article's main statistic. So even if the remaining 5 million of the "needs work", the employment number is closer to 89%.

Edit: there's a reason economists usually use "looking for work" for unemployment numbers: it's really hard to gauge why people don't look for work.

<comment><USER3> Stay-at-home by choice and stay-at-home due to inability to find gainful employment are very different demographics, though.

[http://www.npr.org/2014/06/05/319214546/stay-at-home-dads- on...](http://www.npr.org/2014/06/05/319214546/stay-at-home-dads-on-the-rise- and-many-of-them-are-poor)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is something that I'm worried about. I'm three years out of college and in my (very small) group of friends, two of us have full time ccorporate (middle class) jobs, one is starting his second masters degree, one is a part time personal trainer, and one is doing seasonal work at a farm. All of them have college degrees and all of them express interest in entrepreneurship and start-up culture. I think there is a problem with these guys (and myself) of being content with a bottom of the ladder corporate job. We all feel like we should be having more of an impact on our world and our jobs. I can't decide if this is a misplaced feeling of entitlement or a legitimate want of a "good" job that provides professional satisfaction.

<comment><USER5> I remember leaving uni in 2003, for 3-5 years everyone had shitty jobs, bottom of the ladder and then it suddenly just changed.

The first few years of work young people are usually a complete mixed bag, even if gifted. They need quite a lot of baby-sitting, tolerance and guidance from co-workers and bosses and make silly mistakes and usually are quite poor at communicating.

It's all part of growing up. I can look back and realise that in myself back then.

And then it changes and you start getting promotions and then it's all different.

So don't judge anything by where you all are now, give it another 2 or 3 years. I know it sounds trite and patronizing, but it's true.

It's one of the reasons I'm always surprised pg, Thiel, etc. pushed for people to start companies straight out of college or even while in college. Young people are often so utterly clueless that I think a lot of the mistakes they make could just be fixed by them working for someone else for a little bit, even 6 months. As well solving the tendency for hip young entrepreneurs to make incredibly basic HR mistakes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it truly a flight from work? I think most of those men would work jobs if they A) existed and B) paid better than disability.

<comment><USER3> > They tend to be: 1) less educated;

Unless they luck out and find themselves amidst a housing bubble circa 2006 where everyone and their brother is employed in constructing real estate, investing in real estateo, transacting in real estate on commission basis, underwriting mortgages for real estate or pitching dubious mortgages for others to buy real estate, there's not a lot of opportunities for under- educated males nowadays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Note that the article has the word "women" in it only twice (and in an inconsequential sentence); and the word "female" 0 times.

Discussing the unemployment levels of men in America without taking into account the vast sociological changes involving the genders in the last 20-30 years e.g. a lot more women in the workforce, societal expectations of more parenting involvement from men, etc.) is not much use unless you are trying on some sort of strange shaming tactic on men. FWIW I don't think the author is doing this intentionally.

</comment><comment><USER8> Vast majority of these "unworking men" are employed in the underground economy, working under the table, which provides a subsistence living. Perhaps only 10% are true NEETs with recognized disabilities/parents wealthy enough to carry them.

I don't see it as a good or a bad thing - society has reorganized itself and there is no place for these people anymore. With greater and greater levels of automation the problem is only going to get worse. 30% of people find it hard to do math beyond 8th grade, where would they fit in the modern economy? Furthermore if you start from the very bottom, some people will struggle and succeed, but most will give up - whats the point anyway? Living a minimalist lifestyle supporting your own limited needs beats working for Amazon and keeling over at 35 with a heart attack.

Seems as if success and fulfillment in modern society is on the edges of the distribution - either you're a minimalistic bum or balls to the wall businessman.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm really disappointed that the author didn't even try to analyze why these people weren't working and instead just went into a rant about how they're destroying society by living lives of pure pleasure.

How many are stay-at-home dads? How many are living with wealthy parents vs. how many are on welfare? How many of them were looking for work but eventually gave up after their efforts proved fruitless? How many of them have actual, legitimate disabilities?

These are all interesting questions. And for actual disabilities, I don't think living with cystic fibrosis and being unable to work is the life of pleasure the author thinks it is.

</comment><comment><USER10> The recent employment report was dubbed solid by many economists. 94,391,000 Americans not in the workforce is not good no matter how you try to slice or spin it !

</comment><comment><USER11> I have the impression the article got the cause and effect ordering confused.

It states for example on one paragraph, that the men not working, exacerbate family breakdown.

As someone in my 28s having lots of problems like in the article, I can personally claim, that for me, and all my friends, it is the other way around:

Creating a family in the current society, is almost impossible, two incomes is necessary, thus reducing time available to take care of kids, divorce is too easy, making it too risky for men (in my country, 72% of "no-fault" divorces were initiated by women for example), young women are not interested in serious relationships (instead they are interested in having fun, one-night stands, drinking, sex, etc...) because it gets in the way of having a career.

So, because of all this, starting a family, even if you really, really want it, is excessively hard.

So... why bother? Why put a massive effort to work your ass off, if you won't have anything to do with the money?

Alright, you go and work 60 hours/week, save money... and now what? Buy a house, to live in it alone? Buy a car, that doesn't fit your parents garage that has their car already? Or buy videogames that you can't play because you work 60 hours/week?

It is logical, that the thing to be done, is do the mininum necessary to support a loner lifestyle, this is not my case (far from it), but I've met people where their current simple non-creative jobs can pay for international trips, restaurants and prostitutes, but are still too far from supporting a family, so... why not just stay where they are, and enjoy international trips, restaurants and prostitutes? Why work so hard to not have any leisure time, if the result would be reach old age alone, rich, and with nothing to spend that money with and no friends?

EDIT: people are making some assumptions about me and understanding this wrong. So to clear things up:

1\. I am more of a exception guy, I don't like one night stands and whatnot, and don't go to bars or clubs, I look for women in my social circle, that is academia, workplaces (related to tech, always), and church. The women I described is what I saw there, maybe women elsewhere are different.

2\. I am from Brazil, sometimes I forget how confortable life in US is in general, many people replied that you don't need two-person income if you have a non-luxurious life, here in Brazil, the US "middle-class" life, of having two cars for example, is only for rich people, most of the population can't afford even a single car (I for example don't own a car, even if I summed all my income of the last 5 years, I would still not have enough for a car), here two-person income is necessary even if you are going to live in a favela shack with walls made of discarded wood and roof tiles, I just assumed this was the case for most of US too. I would love some detailed information if that is true, or not.

3\. From what I've heard, housing, healthcare, and some other basic necessities are very expensive in US in general, housing is very expensive in Brazil too, even if bad quality "supermarket" food is cheap, you can't start a family with a single income if you can't afford housing and healthcare, for example if your kids get sick, how you will pay for it? Even here in Brazil where the state gives completely free healthcare, people still consider it too risky to not have healthcare money, sometimes your kid need something _now_ and you don't have time to wait the state.

4\. Some people reading the text are assuming I am a NEET myself... that is not the case, I just find myself seriously tempted to do so though (because I am trying, very hard, to get money to start a family, yet I never got a legal job, and so far my total net worth is negative, some months I paid more in interest than the monthly mininum wage)

<comment><USER12> > young women are not interested in serious relationships

Where did you get those weird stereotypes from?

<comment><USER11> Well, it is what they told me and my friends, and what my younger sister and her friends tell to men interested in them.

Purely anecdotal, but as a guy 28 years old without a girlfriend, I would love to be proven wrong.

<comment><USER13> Young women get a lot of offers, they of course have to tell 99% of them that they are not interested - and to avoid hurting the guy's feelings, best to say you are against the whole idea of a relationship.

<comment><USER14> Right, so you can conclude three things. She isn't currently in a relationship, and isn't actually interested in one, or she is looking for something "better".

So, he should be figuring out how to keep these girls in his social circle, rather than considering it a rejection. Guys have time on their side, and maintaining contact with people has a way of moving them closer. Sadly, like anything else "playing the game" is how you win. Getting to know people has a way of overriding the initial physical attraction. Of course, it can go the other way too, physically attractive women can frequently be socially disgusting princesses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wages must rise. They have not risen for nearly four decades in real terms. Major life expenses are unaffordable to all but the wealthy, such as housing.

This single fact explains lots of things in the present. It appears we're trapped in a local maximum while journalists and politicians blithely ignore the plateauing of growth, wages and technology outside of computation.

If you think everything is getting better and better, you've taken your eyes off the road for a while now.

<comment><USER16> > Wages must rise

I would say that housing should be less expensive. These prices are impossible even with a good salary. You need two good salaries to buy one house and still have money for your other expenses.

<comment><USER17> I said this somewhere else in this thread but just move to the Midwest. There is plenty of space and depending on where you want to live houses can be super cheap.

<comment><USER18> There are many problems with moving to the Midwest. It's like someone suggesting moving to Puerto Rico to save on money since a place with a vastly different culture is not simply interchangeable (and I'm saying this as someone who has lived all over the U.S.).

Edit: for the downvotes lets remember that Puerto Rico is part of the U.S. and that Puerto Ricans are American (i.e. estadounidense).

<comment><USER19> You can have most of the amenities of coastal urban life in places like Chicago; which even has its own coast and doesn't have the outrageous COL that places like San Francisco, LA, or NYC have. Sure you're not going to make the same crazy salaries, but you're also not spending 5k for a 1br apartment in the Mission

<comment><USER18> What would you spend for a nice apartment by good transit?

<comment><USER20> My peer group just out of college in consulting paid $1000 - $1600 for nice places. Low end of the range would be shared with 2-3 others and maybe 40 min outside the loop. High-end would be for a 1BR 15-20 min out. You could also live in West Loop (think lofts) in brand new places for even less

<comment><USER18> I imagine that heating and electric adds a couple hundred though? (in CA I pay about $20/month for gas/electric, but remember paying hundreds when I lived back east).

<comment><USER21> > in CA I pay about $20/month for gas/electric

How the hell do you pay so little? I pay $25/month just to _have_ a gas connection.

<comment><USER18> I'm rarely home and have a small studio apartment. I don't have AC (most homes I know don't have it in Oakland), and there's almost no point in running fans when I'm gone.

<comment><USER21> That's my point. I could leave my house for a month, shut off everything that uses electricity and gas, and still have to pay more than twice what you pay just in connection charges. Do utilities in California just not charge flat rates for connections?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The recent employment report was dubbed as solid by many mainstream economist. 94,391,000 were not in the work force. That's not good no matter how you try to slice or spin it !

</comment><comment><USER22> Google link to get around the paywall: [https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwj23bGW7fDOAhUCgx4KHU15DbcQqQIIHzAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fthe- idle-army-americas-unworking- men-1472769641&usg=AFQjCNHk0rKbh-8VWT7QvcQJEyZA2JZ8qQ&sig2=1IpLylmM38cmnuOEaFR9gw)

<comment><USER23> Best used in an incognito window if you've already clicked the direct link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Early one morning I got a fare at a house at the southern edge of Chandler. It was a young family - Man, Woman, Infant. They were going to the airport...

The man said that he'd tried driving for the taxi company, but it didn't work for him. I had various other passengers who'd also tried their hand at taxi driving, and couldn't make money. The traditional model for running a taxi service involves leasing cabs out for 12 hour shifts. Drivers have to work as much of those 12 hours to maximize their income. The first couple hours pay for the lease. An hour or two pays for gas. The last few hours are when you pay yourself.

This passenger had started driving for the Venture Capitalists' "not-a-taxi" business, and he thought it was great. The venture capitalists' business taps into the vast hoards of people who aren't good employee material, and those who want to supplement their income. But the money wasn't really enough for this passenger - he was working on a way to increase his income. After expenses, driving for the venture capitalists is the same as driving for the taxi company: they're both low-skill minimum-wage jobs.

It was a very nice neighborhood... I imagined that this family had support from their parents to be able to live there.

When I was talking to my ex-wife yesterday, she pointed out that I value freedom more than anything else. This is why I was drawn to taxi driving, and why I stuck with it for so long. The taxi company had their dress code, and standards. They didn't care what I did with their taxi, as long as I paid them at the end of the shift. I could have found a regular JOB, but I _enjoyed_ the adventure of going new places every day, and meeting new people every day, and occasionally being sent to help someone who needed more than just a ride.

JOB is a backronym that stands for "Just Over Broke". My income from taxi driving was enough to finance my entrepreneurial ambitions.

The only "real job" I've had was working for Amazon [1]. I worked at a summer camp when I was 12 or 13. After I graduated from teh college with a "B.S." Computer Science degree (it is an expensive piece of paper that hangs on my father's wall), I worked at various family-owned businesses, and helped take care of my grandparents...

I am not well-suited to being an employee. Now that I don't drive around in the taxi anymore, I'm thinking about applying for the IT department at the local hospital... Recently I went to visit a friend in the ER, and this fellow was swapping out a scanner, so I struck up a conversation... It'd be a temporary gig.

[1] [http://www.taxiwars.org/humanitys-second-best- hope/](http://www.taxiwars.org/humanitys-second-best-hope/)

</comment><comment><USER25> This is an interesting opening, coming from the Wall Street Journal:

"Millions of young males have left the workforce and civic life. Full employment? The U.S. isn't even close."

If the USA is not close to full employment, then the USA does not have to work about inflation. And yet, in other commentary, the Wall Street Journal has been obsessed with the risk of inflation, for many years now. They have urged the Fed to raise rates to head off a surge in inflation. But if there is hidden unemployment, then rates can remain low longer, with little risk of inflation.

<comment><USER26> Inflation can still happen in sectors that have both investment-like and consumption-like qualities, such as real estate, when massive amounts of investment capital try to look for safe and/or high-yielding havens.

<comment><USER27> Or the stock market, which keeps hitting all time highs despite anemic economic growth.</comment></comment></comment>


HackCampus Internship Programme - <AUTHOR> http://hackcampus.io/internship/#hero

<comment><USER2> Are there serious startups in London solving challenging technical problems? I live in London [0] and the companies that I've seen at meetups and tech events are either startups with non-technical founders pursuing weak ideas, or financial consultants. The tech scene in London seems to be centred around self-promotion.

Look at, e.g. the Barclays accelerator. [1] The program seems designed to accept & promote marginal startups, and takes a large amount of equity in doing so (I think it's somewhere around 8% for £10k, which is far less than, say, YC). I'm working on a side project that I hope to turn into a startup in the FinTech space, and I'm not even remotely considering aplying for the program, because I'm not wiing to give that much equity away for so little investment.

I hope I'm just a cynic. I also hope that HackCampus does something cool with the internships. It would be nice to have a thriving, technical tech scene.

[0] Grad student in econometrics, interested in machine learning. If anyone's interested in grabbing coffee, please shoot me an email.

[1] [http://www.barclaysaccelerator.com/](http://www.barclaysaccelerator.com/)</comment>