Training Rats as Traders - <AUTHOR> http://sites.google.com/site/artmarcovici/rat-traders

<comment><USER3> My first thought was, is it April 1st already?

"Since I did not want to make it too complicated, I only used the USD/EUR future to make the rats experts in this specific market segment, but other rats can be trained in other markets as well. I trained the rats for about 3 months, starting with 80 Sprague Dawley laboratory rats, 40 males and 40 females with the intention to cross the best of them to genetically create the best traders through select breeding."

Sounds like a pigeonrank algorithm to me...

<comment><USER4> Considering the rest of the website, this is probably social commentary, not a real experiment...

<comment><USER5> It's clearly not a real experiment. The social commentary angle is interesting, although personally I'd tend to lean more toward elaborate hoax. The only thing I don't understand is why it has so many votes. It's not like it's at all insightful or illuminating when viewed as a thought experiment, so people must just be falling for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Essentially, he made a more complicated version of a moving average quant system.

The more interesting part was breeding top-performing rats to see if they are able to improve their "trading" genetically. You can do this _exact same thing_ using evolutionary algorithms with trading systems that help you to adapt to the market.

Quant finance is fun when you're doing it for yourself, not a bank.

<comment> cool-RR I'm not sure that what you say is right. What makes you think that it's the same?

<comment><USER6> He assigned pitches to how fast the market was moving, and trained the rats on those pitches. The speed of the market can be measured using averages.

<comment> cool-RR Obviously a positive return cannot be made from moving averages. But how do you know that the rats don't develop some sort of intuition that can make a positive return?

<comment><USER6> First, moving averages do play a role in some (profitable) quant systems.

Second, I never said that the rats couldn't create a positive return, but you could model the rats behavior quantitatively and develop a system, but that's just bringing it back full circle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Well Keith Chen @ yale showed that capuchin monkeys show the same fundamental behavior as humans. By the end, they were trading jello beans for sex and creating their own bubble economy. <http://tinyurl.com/au5hq>

Comment from a buddy of mine Kartik, that I figured I'd share with the thread.

<comment><USER7> Cool article, maybe you should submit it. There was a similar article some months ago, but it seems to have gone unnoticed:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=248613>

The NYT article you cited is way better, although I don't think there's much that one can say about either of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fascinating. I'm extremely skeptical, of course. The thing that bothers me most is that they list percentages (perhaps this is the percentage of time that the rats guess correctly?) rather than $ amounts.

Even if the experiment fails, explaining the fact that the later generations performed better could lead to some really interesting science.

<comment><USER8> Percentages rather than dollars are worthless. There are skewed bets; you can predict "up" rightly 70% of the time and lose money on the bigger downward 30% of the movements.

<comment><USER9> Be that as it may, if the rats cannot do better than a coin toss, what use is it?

<comment><USER10> Your response indicates that you did not understand the parent post.

Assume I have some system where I guess right only 25% of the time, but if I guess right I get $5. If I guess wrong I lose $1. My expected return is (0.25 * 5 - 0.75 * 1) = 0.5, which is 50 cents.

So, I'm doing worse than a coin toss, but still making money.

This is what the parent poster meant by a "skewed bet". The payoff for guessing "heads" or "tails" is not the same.

You can't just look at the results of the coin toss (correct guess, incorrect guess). You also have to look at how much you get paid for a correct guess, and how much you lose for an incorrect guess.

In most real-life situations, the payoff is not symmetric (equal win and loss amounts). This is why your "if you can't beat a coin-toss" comment is meaningless (and usually incorrect).

<comment><USER9> I still don't get it:

A. I guess correctly 25% of the time (via some method) and make money because of the skewed payoff. (0.25 * 5 - 0.75 * 1) = 0.5

B. I flip a coin and guess correctly 50% of time and make EVEN MORE money because of the skewed payoff. (0.5 * 5 - 0.5 * 1) = 2

Why should I ever go with option A?

Furthermore if your method lets you guess correctly 25% of the time, why don't you simply make the opposite trade and now you are guessing correctly 75% of the time!

Are we are talking about something fundamentally non-binomial? (buy, sell and do nothing or something even more complicated?)

<comment><USER10> Ah, ok. If there's a skewed payoff for B, then yes, you're correct. I read your post to mean that you were not considering the payoff, and only the probabilities.

As for the rest, what does "opposite trade" mean? For instance, going short versus going long carries very different risks. It's unlikely that your payoff would simply be mirrored.

<comment><USER9>
      > I read your post to mean that you were not considering
      > the payoff, and only the probabilities.

Ultimately, the payoff is just acting as a constant offset to the break-even point (assuming the payoff doesn't vary with some other parameter). The skewed payoff may mean that you only need 25% accuracy to break even or it could mean that you need 95% accuracy to break even. It doesn't matter. Either way, you can effectively ignore it and consider, for a given payoff schedule, how your prediction algorithm will perform.

If we live in a universe where you can under-perform a coin toss and still make money because of how the bet is skewed, then I can do better by flipping a coin!

If the bet is skewed the other way, then we will both lose money but my coin toss will lose less.

Let me restate that: you can completely dissociate your prediction algorithm from your cost function

      > As for the rest, what does "opposite trade" mean? For
      > instance, going short versus going long carries very
      > different risks. It's unlikely that your payoff would
      > simply be mirrored.

Here my (lack of) knowledge of the various types of financial transactions that can be made puts me at a disadvantage, but the way the "article" describes it, the rats were trained to press a green button (long, betting prices were going to go up) or a red button (short, betting prices were going to go down).

There are only four outcomes here (as I understand it):

      * Predict Up, Moves Up
      * Predict Down, Moves down
      * Predict Up, Moves Down
      * Predict Down, Moves Up

It's possible that you can better predict upward movements than downward movements, but lets assume for simplicity that you (or the rats) are equally bad at both.

If you were able to predict at 25% accuracy, I would take what you told me (up or down) and flip it-- because you are actually performing at 75% accuracy, you just don't know it. Then I would make a trade. I don't know what the most clever trade that could be made based on that knowledge, or what the various payoffs associated with them are, but as I showed above, it doesn't matter for the analysis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Issues with this that I see (aside from the obvious lack of statistical rigor) are that he gives the rats repeated input. Effectively, he is selecting for the rats who best memorize tracks 1-600.

<comment><USER12> _aside from the obvious lack of statistical rigor_

I think we've found a very fun story problem for a Statistics 101 class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder how this compares to using a neural network. I see no comparison to using other methods to predict the market, though he claims to outperform humans.

<comment><USER14> It is a neural network though, isn't it?

<comment><USER15> Exactly. It just isn't an _Artificial Neural Network_ ;-) After all, though rats are super disgusting, they were created by Nature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Excellent social commentary.

The rather neat dynastic results table at the end show percentages but no legend; does anyone know what they represent?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The study is very eye opening to say the least. Results are based off of and emotion-free instinctive approach to choosing outcomes based on (to a degree) fundamental investment principles. Pavlov's application to investing. I agree with the thread, the most fascinating aspect is the generational improvement throughout the experiment.

</comment><comment><USER17> Awesome!

Spoiler alert, predicting a self aware system like the stock market not so much possible in the long run.

But profiting from the lucky guesses of rodents in the short term - <USER2> and awesome. (As long as it's not your money on the line.)

<comment><USER18> > "predicting a self aware system like the stock market"

Please elaborate on why you think the stock market is self-aware!

<comment><USER17> The market makers, those tend to be human beings who buy and sell stocks, watch the market and continuously adjust their actions based on their observations of the market.

No elaborate theory here, just stating the oversimplified obvious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I would say the % means that out of 100 investment decisions, the rats have been correct at x-percent. I have seen this before and it looks like work in progress, but maybe more art then science, the man is an artist...

</comment><comment><USER20> Isn't it forex, not stocks?

<comment><USER6> He traded forex and futures, not actual stocks. Headline misleading.

<comment><USER21> How is the headline misleading? It says 'traders' not 'stock traders' specifically.

<comment><USER20> It got changed later, earlier it was stock traders...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A neural network, whether software-based, hardware-based, or wet-ware based (rat in this case, or human for that matter), can only spot patterns in a given set of data which are there. No patterns in the data means no predictability. You can have the coolest, most hyper-intelligent system ever devised, but that cannot see patterns which do not exist. Of course market data has patterns (sell on Friday, for instance), but it is always limited. Generally, I think you could even in principle never get more than 80% accuracy with any kind of neural network, because of the lack of complete patterns in market data, whether we are talking about a rat or a human or a whatever kind of neural network. Which brings me to a second point, since 100% accuracy or anywhere near that is not possible even in principle, applying electric shocks to test subjects when they are wrong is simply cruel and irresponsible.

</comment><comment><USER23> We don't want HN to get hammered, please don't submit this kind of "fluffy" stuff.

Save HN! :)</comment>


How to Count Past Infinity[video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrU9YDoXE88 <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting extra refs on large cardinals mentioned by the video:

1\. Large cardinals: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large_cardinal_propert...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large_cardinal_properties)

2\. Berkeley cardinal ( _larger than any described on the video_ ): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_cardinal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_cardinal)

3\. Presentation for those looking for a TL;DR: [https://math.berkeley.edu/~jhicks/links/SOTS/cskipper112613....](https://math.berkeley.edu/~jhicks/links/SOTS/cskipper112613.pdf)

4: The upper attic, ( _how far can we take this?_ ): [http://cantorsattic.info/Upper_attic](http://cantorsattic.info/Upper_attic)

5: Kunen inconsistency ( _it seems we can take it pretty far_ ): [http://cantorsattic.info/Kunen_inconsistency](http://cantorsattic.info/Kunen_inconsistency)</comment>


Ptpython: Interactive Python prompt with syntax highlighting, code completion - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jonathanslenders/ptpython

<comment><USER2> Pretty cool! Has a lot of the same features as the IPython notebook but with a few extra things that make it stand out like syntax validation and tabs.</comment>


Puzzle: Sort Vector - <AUTHOR> http://idiomatic-fu.appspot.com/puzzle/2006/view <comment><USER2> i believe its cut off. 'read more' doesn't finish the sentence.

this reminds me of the pancake sort problem, except there you can only flip a contiguous subarray at the beginning. i got this in an interview once and then used it a few times when i had to interview folks. some people seem to get it right away... others... well, they don't

<comment><USER3> It was cut off on Safari but not Firefox (for some reason). Here is the full text:

 _You're given a vector V containing a permutation of the integers 0 to n-1. For example {0,2,1}. You're also given an integer N which is greater than or equal to 2 and less than V.size(). You can reverse N contiguous items in V at a time. For example V = {0,2,1} and N = 2 you can reverse the ints located in V[0] and V[1] to give V = {2,0,1}. You can also reverse the ints in V[1] and V[2] to give V = {0,1,2}. Write a function that takes V and N as parameters and returns the minimum number of reversals needed to sort the vector increasing. If it's not possible return -1. For example V = {0,2,1} N = 2 returns 1. (reverse V[1] and V[2])_

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Okay, here's my quick solution with A* : <http://cs.stanford.edu/~fra[REMOVE> THIS]nkel/listsort.py

Pass Astar a sequence and the reversal length. I'm a total Python noob so I may have done something stupid and/or inelegant (in which case please tell me so that I learn :) ).

Example:

      >>> result = Astar([1, 4, 2, 3, 6, 5], 2)
      >>> result.path
      [[1, 4, 2, 3, 6, 5], [1, 2, 4, 3, 6, 5], [1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 5], [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]]

result will just be -1 if there was no path.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow. A site with 4 algorithmic problems. Without any means of testing/comparing solutions.

Just go to <http://spoj.pl>, <http://online-judge.uva.es/>, or <http://acm.pku.edu.cn> to name the three largest online judges.

</comment><comment><USER4> One naive solution is to realize that you can move (remove/reinsert) any element with two reversals. For example, given:

[1 2 3 4 5 6]

You can reverse elements 1-5 (if indexing starts at 0):

[1 6 5 4 3 2]

And then reverse elements 1-4:

[1 3 4 5 6 2]

This moves the element in position 1 to position 5. Generally, to move the element in position x to position y (shifting everything else to make room for it), do the following:

      def move(v, x, y):
        v.reverse(x, y)

        if y > x:
          v.reverse(x, y-1)
        else
          v.reverse(x+1, y)

        return v

Given this ability to move/insert elements, you can implement several sort algorithms. In fact, it's easy to see that there's a O(n * x) sort here, where x is the runtime of the reversal operator.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it works that way.

 _You're also given an integer N which is greater than or equal to 2 and less than V.size(). You can reverse N contiguous items in V at a time._

So, you always revert the same number of elements in the vector. In your example, you revert 5 elements and then 4.

Your example would give the following sequence:

      [1 2 3 4 5 6]
      [1 6 5 4 3 2]
      [3 4 5 6 1 2]
      [3 2 1 6 5 4]
      [5 6 1 2 3 4]
      [5 4 3 2 1 6]
      [1 2 3 4 5 6]

For that case (6 elements and N=5), it looks like not many vectors V have a solution... but I'm too tired to keep going :)

<comment><USER4> Whoops, you're right, I didn't read it correctly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Could do a Breadth First Search. Add a memo table to make it faster. The memo table key would be the vector changed into an int i.e. (2,1,4,5,3) -> 21453\. The memo table value would just be a bool... true if we've already seen the current permutation of the vector, false otherwise.

<comment><USER4> Why would you use a blind search rather than A*? It's not hard (edit: actually, maybe it is) to come up with a heuristic for this problem.

Also, your memo table wouldn't work for large vectors...

Edit 2: Even worse, the branching factor of that search tree would be O(n!).

<comment><USER6> Right about the larger vectors. I don't know A*. What's an example heuristic for this puzzle?

<comment><USER4> It's actually not easy to come up with an admissible heuristic for this, because of the reversal operator. I'm about to be late for dinner at a friend's so I don't have time to come up with something now, but if no one has by the time I'm back I'll think about it.

Edit: How about the sum of the differences of adjacent elements - n - 2? This seems to capture the notion that something reversed but in order is okay. I still don't think this is admissible though.

Well, here's an admissible one. Count how many adjacent elements are not the element to the left + 1, and divide that sum by 2. Pretty sure that'd work.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Markdown API for Medium - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/danielireson/unmediumed <comment><USER2> Needs to pre-populate a default on the demo site to make it easier to see how it works.</comment>


Bitcoin, blockchains, and national security - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sia.tech/bitcoin-blockchains-and-national-security-d2f8c65c671b <comment><USER2> If the Great Firewall of China started blocking Bitcoin transactions, which could happen at any time, most of the mining power would go offline and transactions would stop. Or Bitcoin would fork to China and non-China chains.

Bitcoin is much more centralized than is generally supposed. The top three mining pools in China control Bitcoin, and they have a small number of large mining installations each. It's much more concentrated than AWS.

<comment><USER3> The Chinese miners keep their nodes outside of China, actually. And I believe many of them have non-internet relays (think point to point wifi, satellite, etc.) for communicating with their nodes if China shuts down the internet.

Further, even without these protections there is enough hashrate outside of China that the blockchain would not grind to a halt, you'd still get blocks every 30 minutes or so.

China shutting down miners has been a topic of heavy discussion for a while, and most I think are not concerned.

<comment><USER2> No, they're not outside of China. Locating a Bitcoin farm in China allows paying for power, equipment, and staff in yuan, while generating revenue in dollars or euros, legally.

Northeast China mine: [1] Another China mine: [2] Mine in Kangding: [3] BW Pool and Antpool, in Inner Mongolia: [4] OxBTC farm (possibly in Ordos): [5]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8kua5B5K3I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8kua5B5K3I) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3-7X80DXzY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3-7X80DXzY) [3] [http://www.afr.com/technology/lisa-kangding- story-20160706-g...](http://www.afr.com/technology/lisa-kangding- story-20160706-gpzx7e) [4] [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=969823.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=969823.0) [5] [https://www.facebook.com/oxbitcoin/videos/921660704629104/](https://www.facebook.com/oxbitcoin/videos/921660704629104/)

<comment><USER3> The mining is in China but the nodes are outside of China. Then they have multiple means of talking to the nodes from the mining farms.

<comment><USER4> I think I get it. So 1) the computing power happens on hardware in China, but then 2) the message can, if need be, relay the message of, say, a new mined block to non-internet points that are able to escape The Great Firewall, then 3) outside of China it connects those messages to the internet. Is that right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bitcoin is taking away the biggest power that the governments have: printing money from thin air. They need it especially for paying their military. There may be a time in the future when it may worth for a government to protect Bitcoin for their people, but that time is not now.

</comment><comment><USER6> How many Internet exchange points do I have to take out to bring the entire Internet down for all practical purposes, including the Bitcoin network?</comment>


The 37 signals of 37Signals - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/manifesto

<comment><AUTHOR> Filled with amazing ideas and insights!</comment>


Pac-Man Creator Reflects on 30 Years of Dot-Eating - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/05/pac-man-30-years/

<comment><USER2> _Wired.com: Why did you stop making videogames after that?_

 _Iwatani: After that, I became a producer. Namco was a small company, and because the organization expanded, I was promoted to section chief. Someone had to coordinate the younger developers that we'd hired._

Maybe this has to do with Japanese business culture too? If your supervisor asks you to do something (like, become one of the managers) it would be rude to not comply. "No thanks boss, I'd rather stay coding games" as an answer would be acceptable in western cultures, but maybe a bit problematic in Asia.

Probably he also got a salary raise and higher social standing as a manager; from how he talks about it I get the sense that he wasn't opposed to that.

</comment><comment><USER3> _When you think about things women like, you think about fashion, or fortune- telling, or food or dating boyfriends. So I decided to theme the game around "eating" — after eating dinner, women like to have dessert._

Fascinating. I had no idea that was the inspiration. When I first read this comment of his, it sounded so sexist to my Western ears. However, coming from a Japanese maybe it was far more matter-of-fact. My second thought was, "think of the trouble you could get into in the politically-correct UK, America, Canada, or Australia if a man said this in mixed company." Thoughts?</comment>


Apple has a readable, brief Terms of Service - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/us/genius.html <comment><USER2> Admirable. Assuming this is legally sound, I think its existence should recast multipage byzantine TOS as intentional attempts to obscure and deceive.

I do note that one of the permitted uses is _Provide recommendations regarding products and services to other users._ and postulate: What if an RIAA enforcement contractor is a user and the recommendation is that they sue user X for having a copy of as yet unreleased track Y? Does this document adequately forbid this? Would an 8 page homage to fine print do so?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is solely for _one_ ITunes feature ('Genius' recommendations). It's 326 words.

At the bottom of the page, a link to the web site's 'Terms of Service': 3,258 words. To the right, there's ~40 links to other terms/policies.

There you can find the ITunes Store Terms and Conditions: 17,807 words, for US users.

When you launch the ITunes installer, you have to accept a License Agreement of 4,053 words.

So I don't see Apple doing any better than others here.</comment>


The Enchiridion, or Manual, of Epictetus - jj-abram http://www.ptypes.com/enchiridion.html <comment><AUTHOR> This translation of the Manual isn't very good, in my opinion. I've only heard of it as being called the handbook of Epictetus and not the manual, also. The word handbook has a lot different connotations than Manual, so I have to say I really don't agree with the decision to translate it that way. I'll refer to it as the Manual for the sake of consistency with the title, though.

My favored translation of the first line is: Some things are up to us, and some things are not up to us.

The Manual is a great introduction (and perhaps largest contribution) of the Stoic school of ancient philosophy. It's also by by far the most practical of any philosophical document that I've ever read, though it's a bit light on pragmatic responses and, perhaps, realism.

After reading the Manual, it's hard not to live by its suggestions. In particular, my favorite suggestion is to relish good moments by pausing and remarking to yourself explicitly what makes the moment good. I believe the example Epictetus picks to illustrate this concept is a child, but perhaps it's a bowl or woman in actuality; when Epictetus notices the positive emotions that looking at his child/bowl/woman gives him, he stops and professes something along the lines of, "my child/bowl/woman is wonderful, and I am happy to have experienced my time with him/it/her. I love this child/bowl/woman."

It's a good way to appreciate what you have, and to reject negativity when it's not something you can control.

The primary hazard of Stoicism is passivity, of course. A trend of declaring some things as up to you and other things as not up to you can feed onto itself, leading you to write off responsibility when it isn't directly and unmissably yours. Conversely, a control-freak would endlessly fret about the things that are "up to him" when in reality they might be only tangentially or abstractly so.

I definitely recommend everyone read the Manual. At a minimum, it's a new and orderly perspective on how to experience life and deal with the good and bad. There's some conceptual overlap with Buddhism from what I understand.

<comment><USER2> _The word handbook has a lot different connotations than Manual_

You really think so? The former is just an anglicization of the latter. _Manus_ is Latin for hand, and you can still hear this in French _main_ Spanish _mano_ etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Manual" implies stuffy reference material to be referred to only when there is a malfunction.

"Handbook" implies action, portability, and usefulness.

<comment><USER2> These are highly personal associations which I don't share with you at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> By the way, next week is Stoic Week, an online event (a course) organised by Exeter University, about applying Stoicism to daily life. More details here:

[http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/stoicismtoday/stoic- week-2014/](http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/stoicismtoday/stoic-week-2014/)

</comment><comment><USER4> A classic, to be sure. Epictetus' style still served as a model for "guide- books" 16+ centuries later. Two of my favorites from the second millenium which bear such influence are Thomas à Kempis' _The Imitation of Christ_ (~1420) [1] and Lorenzo Scupoli's _The Spiritual Combat_ (1589) [2], both classics in their own right.

[1] [https://archive.org/details/imitationofchris012486mbp](https://archive.org/details/imitationofchris012486mbp)

[2] [http://www.ecatholic2000.com/combat/spirit.shtml](http://www.ecatholic2000.com/combat/spirit.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER5> Wonderful book. Epictetus is the man. If you enjoy this sort of stuff, also look up Seneca "Letters of a Stoic", Marcus Aurelius "Medtations", Admiral James Stockdale "Thoughts of a Philosopher Fighter Pilot", and Buddhist philosophy/teachings.

</comment><comment><USER6> ok... uh... It was a different time?

XL. Women forthwith from the age of fourteen are called by the men mistresses (dominae). Therefore since they see that there is nothing else that they can obtain, but only the power of lying with men, they begin to decorate themselves, and to place all their hopes in this. It is worth our while then to take care that they may know that they are valued (by men) for nothing else than appearing (being) decent and modest and discreet.

<comment><USER7> When I first heard this, I took it as something along the lines of:

"Men have a low opinion of women, and women perceive this, and see no path to achievement in their own right, bound as they are by the perception of their gender, so they remit and play the game, decorating themselves and seek achievement by association with a man (e.g. any number of political wives, often from more successful families than their husbands). We would be better to advise them to reject this line of thinking." I took it as implicit that women who chose the "descent and modest and discreet" path would then preserve a (subversive) path to achievement.

Not exactly a progressive feminist view, in the modern context, but I imagine consistent with what he would tell his own daughter. The Stoics would have been aware of notable female leaders and thus would consider themselves foolish if they did not admit that a women could be equal if not superior to men within any given group, in terms of intrinsic reasoning capacity.</comment></comment>


Automate one-on-one Obama advocacy by embedding your arguments into a reddit-like Chatbot. - <AUTHOR> http://chatbotgame.com/?query=obama&cmd=chat_u&user_id=1

<comment><AUTHOR> While one-on-one advocacy in person can be quite effective, automating one-on- one advocacy by way of a chatbot allows you to reach more people.

BTW, "one-on-one" here refers to the one-on-one conversation between the chatbot and a human. The chatbot's rules come from many people, so it's not one-on-one between the rule submitter and the person chatting with the bot.

<comment><USER2> Nice. It won't be long before the chatbot will be the most electable candidate! (All soundbites, zero thought. Perfect politician)

<comment><USER3> Adam Selene:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycroft_Holmes_%28computer%29>

(Hey, YC! A bug here: if I copy and paste the URL

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycroft_Holmes_>(computer)

the forum software should include the parens and the word computer - I had to tweak the URL by hand to make it work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sigh. This is why we can't have nice things -- whatever cool thing you create, sooner or later somebody is going to show up and use it for boring political arguments.

Well, that or porn.</comment>


Medicine works, why are smart people still drinking out of control? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.dxrxmedical.com/rss/ <comment><USER2> Link seems to be broken.</comment>


How to escape a monster (using calculus) - <AUTHOR> http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/october12013/index.html <comment><USER2> Excellent explanation of a fun problem!

Amazing that the optimal path to land creates a perfect "J". It's solutions like this that leave me in awe-- another felt connection to mathematical truth through an emotional reaction to simplicity. It's empowering to understand a piece of it, but humbling to know it's only part of a larger system that I can't fathom. I think that's the loop that beckons mathematicians.

<comment><USER3> I think the "perfect J" comes from the fact that we are solving the instance with the critical value K = 4.60333... If K were any greater than this, we couldn't escape.

If K were less though, an "open J" path (like Path #2) would also work.

<comment><USER4> You can recover the "perfect J" by phrasing the problem as "find the path that results in the monster having been waiting for you at the shore for the least time, or if he's too slow, that results in the maximum distance from the monster when you exit the lake". The best path is always the best path.

What really bothers me about the solution presented is that the (optimum) angle of escape is clearly _exactly_ pi / 2, computed as the arcsine of 1. That's going to be _exactly_ 1, but it's computed here as 4.603339 cos 1.351817, which is only approximate. There must be a solution that gives you the exact value; that's the one I want to see.

<comment><USER5> The 'exact' answer for the angle you need to row (alpha) is Sin(alpha)=KCos(Phi).

Yes, the 'exact' answer is the tangent. If you want the relationship between K and Phi, then:

K = Cos(Phi) + SQR( (pi+phi)^2 - sin^2(phi))

The derivation of both of these is contained in the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> continuous time games are very messy. Defining the correct notion of Nash equilibrium can be very hard since a player might "respond" to another player's strategy epsilon time after that player "moves". Of course when there is a Nash equilibrium that makes sense, it's all the more interesting.

</comment><comment><USER7> I first saw this puzzle when it was the monthly "Ponder This" challenge from IBM Research. If you like it, you might enjoy looking through their archives: [http://domino.research.ibm.com/Comm/wwwr_ponder.nsf/pages/in...](http://domino.research.ibm.com/Comm/wwwr_ponder.nsf/pages/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> In the middle section, what prevents the monster from running clockwise, and thus making paths 2 and 3 suboptimal?

<comment><USER9> It's not clear, but the assumption is that the monster is already running. Once the monster picks a direction (assuming instantaneous acceleration and whatnot), Path 3 is the limit for which turning around makes sense for the monster. So you row the boat in tight circles getting the monster going until you get to the circle of safety, then you can choose from anywhere between Path 1 to Path 3 to get to the shore before the monster can make it to you, with our without running in the opposite direction.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, so the solution to the problem ignore the rule mentioned on the 1st paragraph of the page about it always going the shortest route or doing the most clever thing or something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This was fun. I thought I could work it out, but this was neater. Let's have a whole school based on such puzzles!

<comment><USER3> Okay, I'm on it ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice! I worked out something much more basic for how to outrun a crashing spaceship: [http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2012/06/how-to-outrun-a- crash...](http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2012/06/how-to-outrun-a-crashing- alien-spaceship/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I feel like a zigzag pattern would work here as well. Keep the monster switching directions. Essentially, the monster is balanced perfectly on the opposite side of the lake from the one you are headed towards.

<comment><USER5> The monster is a smart monster. He knows that, once you leave the safe circle, he has a higher angular velocity. So, as soon as you pass that threshold, he will start to run around the lake. It does not matter which direction he initially takes, but once moving is committed to that direction (if he were to reverse direction, he would end up, in the future at the same point he was once at, but at a later time, and you would be nearer your goal; he's too smart to let that happen). Once you are outside the safety circle, he will run, and not stop running in that direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This problem is similar to the one OP had to solve in his interview: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583580](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583580)

DAMN..

</comment><comment><USER15> Did anyone else figure it out without any calculus?

<comment><USER16> How? You mean you intuitively understood, or you can prove it your solution without calculus?

<comment><USER15> Just intuitively. Geometrically... Maybe it's from playing online games. I would kite it one direction, then escape in the other. The natural way to do that is a J shape.

<comment><USER17> I just thought in a spiral at first and then run, not exactly a J but something close.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> An animation of the solved path would be awesome.

</comment><comment><USER19> umm another naive solution for this would be to go from the center to any arbitrary end, do not cross on to the lake just wait around 2-3 meters from the bank and wait for the monster. Once the monster reaches the bank just in a straight line to the other side.

This way you will have to cover 2 _r distance where as the monster will cover 3.14_ r (pi*r ) distance .

You will be able to out run a monster around 1.57 times your speed. Sure it is not that good enough but if your calculus isn't that good (To be honest calculus is the last thing on your mind when a monster is chasing you) and the monster is slow then you will be able to out run him.

</comment><comment><USER20> Where's the calculus?

<comment><USER5> The calculus is used to determine the maximum ratio of speeds.</comment></comment>


Why is the AWS Lambda Node.js so old? - <AUTHOR> There's just so much JavaScript functionality not supported in AWS Lambda - it's a real pain.
http://whatdoeslambdasupport.com/
Anyone got any idea when there might be a version of Lambda node.js with modern V8 engine? <comment><USER2> have you considered using babel?</comment>


Ghostbuster: Detecting the Presence of Hidden Eavesdroppers [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://synrg.csl.illinois.edu/papers/ghostbuster-mobicom18.pdf <comment><USER2> Anyone interested in this should read the book Spycatcher[1]. It covers a bit of this and was even banned in certain countries.

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

<comment><USER3> The Thing [2] is also worth reading. Soviet Union was well-aware that RF/LO leakage was being constantly monitored by the NSA, so they made a passive eavesdropping device in 1945, that didn't use a power supply. Instead, when eavesdropping was needed, an agent near the field would transmit an unmodulated carrier wave at 330 MHz, which was received by The Thing with an antenna and tuned circuit, thus activates the device. The recording is then rebroadcasted at a higher harmonic frequency. When the device is inactive, it's almost impossible to detect.

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_\(listening_device\))

<comment><USER4> I remember when i first heard of this, i was so amazed at the cleverness of the whole thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Basically, using side-channel RF leakage to eavesdrop the eavesdropper who uses your side-channel RF leakage to eavesdrop you... Reminded me the old "radar-detector-detector detector" hoax edit from Wikipedia ([https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/4a3tfm/in_1982_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/4a3tfm/in_1982_the_us_military_funded_a_project/)). But unlike other EM side-channel attack, RF local-oscillator leakage is a historically known attack vector since WW2.

> _This RF leakage, however, is extremely weak and buried under noise and > other transmitted signals that can be 3-5 orders of magnitude larger. Hence, > it is missed by today's radios. We design and build Ghostbuster, the first > device that can reliably extract this leakage, even when it is buried under > ongoing transmissions, in order to detect the hidden presence of > eavesdroppers._

</comment><comment><USER5> Would just putting the device in a little faraday cage mitigate this?

<comment><USER6> I too have the same question.

But even if it were to work in a Faraday Cage, the real life application would be really tough to implement. Owing to the fact that →

1) We don't know how big the Cage should be.

2) There could be possibly many benign gadgets in the Cage's sphere which could be unnecessarily affected.

<comment><USER3> Good question. What if the eavesdropping device has TEMPEST certification, or is it possible to design one...</comment></comment></comment>


Twitter Acquires Social Analytics Startup Hotspots.io - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/16/twitter-acquires-hotspots-io/ <comment><USER2> With acquisitions like this and backtype, I wonder if Twitter is exploring offering an enterprise service for analytics. It provide a revenue alternative to the (still) annoying in-feed promoted tweets.

<comment><USER3> Am I the only one a little disappointed backtype disappeared?

With twitter's search function as poor as it is + google no longer indexing their database of updates, it's incredibly hard to find any tweet more than a month old or so.

I was hoping with the acquisition of backtype, they'd at least integrate the service into the native twitter interface/service.

<comment><USER4> I thought Backtype now powers search.twitter.com, is that incorrect? But yeah, it's still really limited.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure that it does.

Backtype seemed much more powerful than twitter's search function currently is. I would be surprised if it regressed that much (although, I really don't know).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I see things like this, it makes me feel like some people create startups as a way to get a job at a big companay.

<comment><USER6> To be completely honest, if all you want is get a job at a big company, directly applying is probably more efficient than creating a startup.

You don't get the same welcome package, though.</comment></comment>


Impact of Shared Code on Vulnerability Patching - <AUTHOR> https://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~tdumitra/blog/2015/04/15/impact-of-shared-code-on-vulnerability-patching/

<comment><USER2> Is it similar to "ReDeBug: Finding Unpatched Code Clones in Entire OS Distributions" [1] ?

[https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~dbrumley/pdf/Jang,%20Agrawal,%20B...](https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~dbrumley/pdf/Jang,%20Agrawal,%20Brumley_2012_ReDeBug%20Finding%20Unpatched%20Code%20Clones%20in%20Entire%20OS%20Distributions.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> FYI: this doesn't seem to be about what most of us would think of as shared code - the same .so or .dll mapped into multiple processes' address spaces. Rather, it's about code that's _copied_ between programs, or between versions/instances of the same program. Still interesting, but perhaps not quite what people would expect.</comment>


The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read - <AUTHOR> https://zwischenzugs.com/2019/11/27/the-first-non-bullshit-book-about-culture-ive-read/ <comment><USER2> My experience as a Development Manager for the past ~year (YMMV):

1\. I'm playing chess; senior management is playing checkers. No, not because I'm some sort of genius and they are simpletons, but rather they talk about interchangeable "resource units" and I know these FTE's as "Tom" and "Amy", each with specific strenghts and weaker areas. Big strategic plans cannot differentiate but we front-line managers need to figure out how to position and leverage individuals.

2\. Actually, genuinely, caring about your direct reports goes a very long way towards solving a lot of culture problems but...

3\. Dev Managers need to put a lot of effort out into their teams to drive change and it is often (most of the time?) not returned. Your biggest enemy is not active sabotage, it's apathy at all levels of the organization. I started pushing for some specific cultural-ish changes about this time last year and, while I was given passive approval & support and lots of latitude to make change, it has been physically exhausting. If I was in an organization that didn't even give me this much freedom it would have been exhausting and pointless.

4\. A Dev Manager can make localized changes when not all teams want or can reciprocate, but I'm not convinced yet that the requisite firewalls you need to erect aren't ultimately harmful in the long run. It is a very delicate balance.

In the end my take-away is you need space and time to make any meaningful change, and even that is limited by the crushing inertia of the organization. For me personally it has been physically consuming and I have 6 month & 1 year goals, plus an overall 3-year plan that I'll either complete in the coming year or look for an new opportunity elsewhere.

<comment><USER3> A few thoughts.

If you want a better analogy that doesn't belittle senior leadership, try Go instead of Checkers.

One of the keys to successful management and leadership is understanding sustainability. Incremental changes over a period of time beat a huge lift followed by burnout and stasis.

<comment><USER4> I actually think current "leadership" is on its way to being extinct. It will be replaced by algorithms and best practices, along with better tools. If you're not contributing to code, there will be very little room for them in the software company of the future. The concepts that non-technical leaders have to learn are trivial compared to the advanced techniques of software development.

<comment><USER5> If leading people is so goddamn easy compared to software engineering, why do so few engineers want to move into people leadership, and why do so many of them absolutely suck at it?

I think you are severely discounting the skills it takes to lead people, and you are also making an extremely optimistic assumption that companies in the future somehow would be magically more meritocratic than existing companies, when there's no evidence of the sort. On the contrary, people with great interpersonal skills will continue to advance off of the labour of the people with only great technical skill.

Your glorious engineer's revolution will probably not come to pass if history is any indication.

<comment><USER4> Maybe I should have clarified, but leadership will have to be an additional requirement on top of knowing how to develop. If you look at the history of software development in enterprise, software developers have increasingly had to work multiple overlapping roles, the more recent of which, in my experience, is making developers be testers as well. It used be QA was a separate role, but now it has evaporated because there are so many tools surrounding this discipline that require knowing how to code, so exclusive testing roles are not favored as much anymore. I don't how many years from now this is, but I really believe that everyone will have to know how to code to a great extent in order to use the software tools of the discipline.

<comment><USER5> If you look at the history of software development in enterprise, somehow, engineers never seem to be rewarded according to their actual contribution to the bottom line.

Somehow, the managerial class and the investor class insert themselves between the fruits of the labour and the engineers performing said labour. And if you think that's suddenly going to stop because the nature of the labour changes, then I think you're mistaken.

Enterprise structures rewards rent-seekers, because they are built by, and controlled by rent-seekers, utilizing disposable labour. The only way a power structure like that can be flipped, is through revolution. Or by forming your own company, out-competing these enterprises.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This reads like a commercial, but I'm not going to downvote it. I read the book and liked it, along with about a hundred other books on culture over the years. There is a similar pattern: a problem, an old way of doing things, a hero, a change, and a beautiful sunset with our hero riding off.

I think there are really, really good things in these kinds of books, especially if you identify with the problem and hero. At the same time, having gone through a bunch, there's a tendency for them to be like self-help or diet books: lots of great feelings while you're consuming them, energetic talking about the ideas with your friends, then a slow die-off until the next book.

Years ago I started collecting news articles and bits of information on culture. (IT culture). It's a fascinating topic because it intersects hype and measurable reality. Unlike a self-help book that promises "Be a happier you in 3 weeks!", your job is something that either gets better or doesn't.

For what it's worth, my best choice so far is "The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups" I read this book and thought "That son of a bitch! He's stolen all of my research material!" There is a bunch of anecdotes, stories, and research in there. I am still thinking over many of the ideas in the book I hadn't considered before.

This is important stuff. If it's something you're concerned about, don't give up. Read as much as you can. Just step back a bit from the hype cycle as you do so.

<comment><USER7> > then a slow die-off until the next book.

I'm curious if you think that it's actually possible for a book (or perhaps more generally, a school of thought) to actually break out of the cycle, or whether it's just the natural order of these sorts of things.

What I mean is, maybe what we get from these sorts of "self-help" pieces of literature/philosophies/whatever is less like a mantra that's one and done, and more like food satisfying a nutritional need, and just as you can't expect to eat a perfect meal and never be hungry for the rest of your life; when you get hungry again, you just need to find the next thing to eat.

I ask because I've gone through a number of these sorts of cycles in my own personal development over the last decade or so, and I'm finding that success tends to lie in seeing things in the latter light.

<comment><USER6> Like you describe, I just kept sucking it all in, consuming as much as I could. I have self-taught through a few of these subjects. I don't have an answer for you, but I have an answer for me. Perhaps sharing my answer might help you too. I hope so.

These are unsolved problems, that's why the material keeps getting produced. I think if you can find inspiration or a good "nutritional meal" to last for a while, it's a good thing. If nothing else, it serves to motivate. That's a big plus.

I'm pretty dense and hard-headed, so I have the hand-grenade theory of teaching myself: I just keep lobbing book-after-book into my own ignorance over time until I make progress. The vast majority of my attacks on my own personal ignorance are ineffective in the long run, but you know what? Little pieces here and there tend to stick. Maybe nobody's said it before or maybe it just takes the right author in the right context to get to me. I suspect the latter. After enough pieces stick, I can start actually working the problem of making myself better.

People who want to help in areas like this (unsolved domains) will BS one another in a heartbeat. I suspect that it's all so contextual to each of us we're just not aware of what we're doing. I don't know. But it means that personal recommendations of material should make you wary, especially if they come with heavily-laden emotional terms. ("Fight the evil corporate management structure!" or something like that) Like an organist that rests on the pedals too much, you get a long ways with books like this by making them emotional. Once again, motivation is great. If that's all you get, that's still a win for many.

So now we get to the heart of it. The real problem is coming up with _evaluation criteria_. Everything is great until there's a feedback loop and a way to fail, so your long-term job in trying to learn is setting up faster feedback loops and clear criteria to indicate success or failure. From there you can begin sorting out the "good" parts of the material from the fluff.

But that's just me. Until I had a good, solid way of evaluating whether something failed, a criteria that could point me to consuming smarter the next time, I was just going meal-to-meal.

<comment><USER8> An unsolicited advice that might cut your learning time in half:

 _Every book gives advice, every advice is an answer to a question. Ignore the answer, but scrutinize the question._

For example: "embrace remote work, go remote-first even!" says one book, "face-to-face is the only thing that works in the face of inevitable confusion and complexity" says another. Not helpful, right? However, consider that the first author got good result with remote work, and the second one got great results in-office. The two may have had different circumstances which they fail to describe for the reason you're describing the air you are breathing - being very immersed in something makes that something invisible. So a question to ponder then: under what circumstances is remote work possible, and if/how can one modify those circumstances?

Scrutinizing the question is a lot more work than getting excited with the first answer that came your way, but it's that much more likely to yield applicable result on top of a bout of enthusiasm.

Also, thanks for [The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups] suggestion.

<comment><USER6> I both strongly agree and strongly disagree with your comment. Not sure, I think this makes me a consultant (smile)

Yes, it does boil down to questions. However questions drive out language, so simply saying that "scrutinizing the question" is the real work is both true and incomplete.

It is an important point, though. Thank you.

<comment><USER8> > I both strongly agree and strongly disagree with your comment. Not sure, I > think this makes me a consultant (smile)

It may or may not, naturally.

> questions drive out language

What do you mean by this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> " _This makes me wonder whether a good way to make needed change as a leader when there is no obvious crisis is to artificially create one so that people get on board…_ "

Yes.

You cannot fix people who don't admit that they are broken.

As someone who has been called into broken projects often, I've had this conversation often. If you "help" a project that is floundering, it will just continue floundering, wasting money and time. You have to wait until it's completely broken and an admitted crisis, and you can ask, "Would you like me to take it over?" and not have interference.

I've never had to artificially create a problem, though. That sounds like agent provocateur stuff.

<comment><USER2> I don't intentional break things just to create crisis, but I have pushed for change that I know highlights problems and forces us to address them. For example, after many acquisitions by our company you could still identify the old companies by the insular cultural characteristics of siloed product teams; I pushed very hard to restructure teams and this required learning how to cumminicate and collaborate with new people. Now we've acquired more companies and (while in hindsight I guess I should have seen this coming) I'm learning this is an ongoing challenge that I treated as a one-off project.

<comment><USER10> It's crazy how long mergers and aquisitions can be seen in IT infrastructure. There are always little warts here and there, and if someone was around for it they can say, oh yeah, we had to deal with such and such a team's way of doing things. And the naming, always you see random names of things that basically no longer exist, but the names live on because some script names some report based on a system that existed 10 years ago.

The archeology of IT systems is part of what I liked about supporting legacy systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Turn the ship around" is one of my favorite books too; most leadership books follow the same formula- everything is broken, the consultant arrives with a magic fix, and voila! Unicorns start flying.

"Turn the ship around" is unique that it shows the problems with the author's approach- how it failed at first, how he had to work around it, how he tweaked the approach.

A very honest, no BS book. Highly recommended

<comment><USER12> If you like that you should read "About Face" by David Hackworth. I have not read it but I've hear about it via the Jocko Podcast.

<comment><USER13> I cannot recommend "About Face" enough. However it is a long read and covers the whole life story of Colonel Hack.

Instead you might want to check out "Steel My Soldiers' Hearts" where he focuses specifically on the time when he turned around the worst fighting battalion in Vietnam.

<comment><USER12> Yeah heard that was good too. Thanks for the tip. I feel like that would give you the real details that one would need to know for a situation like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> To some extent, I'm no longer curious about "leadership" ideas about organisational culture.

I understand that culture counts for a lot, but modern organisational cultures are getting complaints that "leadership" is not going to solve at scale.

Maybe motivation/attitudes can be improved and a naval hierarchy can work better, but this is not the typical issue in corporate culture.

I'm curious about structural answers. A lot of culture comes down to how success and failure work. If a company culture is bad at risk-taking and internal entrepreneurship, a "culture of openness" can't fix it.

To get genuinely failure tolerant and opportunity seeking, organisations need to structure for successes and failures.

How are resources really allocated in the company? How are successes and failures really determined and what are the real ramifications.

So... (a) organisations need some formal/mechanical processes governing the pertinent decisions: resources and goals. Formal processes can be examined more honestly and biased to (or against) risk.

(b) If you really opportunity-seeking, risk taking culture... then you need "money-where-mouth-is" mechanics. It doesn't need to be fully "market-based," but someone needs to be throwing themselves behind opportunities because they think that they'll be successful.

The problem that runs through both Google (eg) and the naval ship is a culture of "do enough, and no more." The solution is usually to raise the "enough" bar somehow... motivation, discipline. That works when what you want from employ/organisations is "enough."

If you want more than enough, I think the structure needs to change.

<comment><USER15> >I understand that culture counts for a lot, but modern organisational cultures are getting complaints that "leadership" is not going to solve at scale.

I'm not sure if I agree or disagree with you - on the one hand, this statement seems wrong, but on the other hand, everything else you said makes a ton of sense to me.

Everyone seems so caught up by culture these days that they forget the other big part of the leadership battle: _process_. Nobody on HN likes to hear it. It's unsexy, and, to a creative type (like a designer, PM, or, to some extent, SW engineer), threatening.

At the end of the day, though, people don't scale. _Processes_ do. I believe good leadership has a lot to do with setting up good processes.

Edit: maybe I'm wrong, but _tons_ of companies humbleblog on HN about their brilliant cultures. Very few of them open the kimono on their processes. Largely, I think, because those are what really make their businesses money.

<comment><USER16> How would you approach customizing the process to the individual or to a given circumstance?

For example, I had a situation where I had a story to write functional tests for a piece of our software. The story's scope had creeped (there turned out to be disagreement between different levels of leadership over what the tests should cover), but I had reached a point where I had implemented roughly 80% of the tests that we needed. I submitted a pull request for the progress that I had made so that it could be "locked in" and I could get it out of my mental overhead. However, the person who reviewed the PR refused to merge it because we apparently had a policy that each story could only have one PR. Ultimately, the overhead of trying to get everything in all at once resulted in the story not being successful.

Although maybe that example illustrates your point about the importance of process, because I had been asking for weeks for us to actually have sprint planning so that I could break up the story, but it kept getting canceled because people felt that they were too busy.

<comment><USER17> When people follow policies strictly to the exclusion of work getting done, that's not something to be solved with another policy. In a well-functioning environment, people are very willing (too willing, if you ask most security teams!) to ignore or override annoying policies that stop things from getting done. If people are working to rule, that's almost always a protest action, and the only real solution is resolving the protesters' frustration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Culture can't be broken, any more than complexity can be the cause of failure".

Am I in the minority thinking that "complexity is the cause of failure" may in fact be a useful and actionable statement? Start analyzing where complexity resides, cope with failures caused by inevitable complexity…

Of course, qualifying the sources of unnecessary complexity would be even more helpful, but even merely pointing it out may be more strategically useful than "X and Y caused an error". (So you'll fix X and Y; then Z will start causing trouble.)

It's a tangent, I agree that "culture is broken" does seem like a useless statement.

<comment><USER19> > Am I in the minority thinking that "complexity is the cause of failure" may > in fact be a useful and actionable statement? Start analyzing where > complexity resides[...]

I think the spirit of the original statement is exactly that: complexity is the cause of failure is an awful conclusion to reach.

What you're saying sounds like you think it's a good first intuition to start going deeper and reach more specific conclusions.

<comment><USER20> Even if you can reach a more specific conclusion, that wouldn't necessarily rule out complexity as the cause of failure.

It's a question of how far you zoom in or out.

In the micro-level you can find the particular bug that causes failure, while on the macro-level it's still complexity that's causing failure (because it causes bugs like that to occur more frequently).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> All good points, although "rather than just punishing, he spent 8 hours discussing with his team"...? There needs to be less punishment as methodology out there, but an eight-hour discussion IS a form of punishment in my book. And for everyone else, too.

<comment><AUTHOR> They discussed for 8 hours because they had to figure out how to avoid a repeat in a practical way. The discussion was not with the offender, but among the leadership team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This book has had the single biggest influence on how I motivate and lead engineering teams[1]. It's an easy read, and the main thought on delegating decisions down hold very well for software engineering, and on how to create a culture of high-autonomy, high-performance.

[1] [https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/a-team-where-everyone- is-...](https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/a-team-where-everyone-is-a-leader/)

</comment><comment><USER23> I've worked at all sorts of companies but it's actually been the same company over and over it's the broken top down hierarchy mixed with control dramas and disempowerment where initiative is punishable and the only way to get ahead is to strike a deal with some kind of clique at the expense of the client

It's refreshing to know this book exists and I'll certainly look it up but I have zero hope for so called corporate culture because it's lemmings all the way down and lead follow or get out of the way is blocked by some callous know it all opening their yawning pie hole to dish out googlisms

<comment><USER24> The problem is that many people believe "empowerment" means "do whatever the fuck I want." At any company you are going to have objectives and goals, and empowerment means getting the responsibility to make the hard trade offs yourself.

It doesn't mean you can do something outside of the corporate goals, and it doesn't mean you can just ignore some of the challenging parts of the job like delivering a working product to customers in a timely fashion.

<comment><USER25> The problem is theres's no natural distinction between "what" and "how." Every aspect of how you do your job is meaningful in some way. You have to have a good understanding with your boss about where you have discretion to follow your judgment and where you don't.

<comment><USER24> That's probably one of the most important things a good boss can do: give exactly that clarity. Define the lane you can run in, and point to the place we want to get.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Here's the "Non-Bullshit Book on Culture" book this post discusses:

Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders, by L. David Marquet

Also here's a great speech given by the David Marquet (with drawings!) on the same topic:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psAXMqxwol8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psAXMqxwol8)

</comment><comment><USER27> Is it very narrow minded of me to think that, even for HN, recognising "culture" as "company culture" demonstrates a very blinkered view of the world?

<comment><USER28> I think it's okay to recognise the shorthand and not feel bad about it. The author of this article clearly doesn't think he's describing all culture. I didn't from the link title.

We're humans, we cut corners. We all understand the intent.

<comment><USER29> I didn't understand the poster's intent until I read some of these comments. I thought the article was going to be about human culture in general.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The fact that headline points out that it's not bullshit makes it sound like bullshit.

When a pitch answers a question that no one asked, it's a pretty good indication that something's wrong. Like when an employer says they're looking for "team players", it means they have an aggressive workplace with a lot of backstabbing. If a restaurant specifically advertised that it was clean, and had a sign saying "clean food and kitchen" in the window, would you eat there?

<comment><USER31> Well, we don't really have a choice in Seattle / SF; they hang those signs in every restaurant.

<comment><USER32> But the sign's content is chosen by external audit right? That's different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I had my hopes up, but this is about Team Culture (not Culture)

<comment><USER34> Ferengi Rules of Acquisition #239: Never be afraid to mislabel a product.

Also, exquisite irony serving up a "non-bullshit" book with the requisite amount of bullshit to make up for it. After all, the total amount of bullshit in the universe can never be reduced, only increased.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Does anyone have book suggestions on leadership and management which aren't just pop-business BS?

<comment><USER36> I rate 'High output management' by Andrew Grove (founder & CEO of Intel). He has clearly lived a lot of the experiences he wrote about and the advice was pretty timeless.

<comment><USER37> Review by Ben Horowitz:

[https://a16z.com/2015/11/13/high-output- management/](https://a16z.com/2015/11/13/high-output-management/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This book explained a lot about a boss of mine. Ex-military, tried to run our department like a battalion, took pride in "battlefield repairs" of code, never let anyone think for themselves or contribute.

Only communicating through superiors...Micromanaging at its best, it was an all-out terrible way of doing things.

</comment><comment><USER39> Wonder if anyone on here has read Ben Horowitz's latest book on culture "What You Do Is Who You Are"?

I skimmed through a bit of it but find the war analogies to be a little over the top so far...

<comment><USER40> It's worth sticking with. Later on he draws more on some of his personal experience (similar to THTAHT) and there are some hilarious anecdotes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> wishfully, I read this as a "Book on the Culture". Does anyone know of such a thing, aside from the actual Iain M Banks novels?

</comment><comment><USER42> I will definitely read this book. I recommend Leadership is Half The Story.

[https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Half-Story-Followership- Co...](https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Half-Story-Followership- Collaboration- ebook/dp/B00T9Z29NS/ref=sr_1_1?crid=122I85SFS55J&keywords=leadership+is+half+the+story&qid=1575036651&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&sprefix=leadership+is+half%2Caps%2C137&sr=8-1)

</comment><comment><USER43> as @gexla mentioned down below, I prefer looking for leadership/culture advice on historical / biographical books.

For example, "Making of the Atomic Bomb" was recommended to me, for examples of how on earth did the US manage to get a bunch of primadonna scientists to finish a megaproject on time (though this is not the main scope of the book) -- I haven't read it yet, but I would it put forward as a suggestion.

<comment><USER44> "primadonna scientists"

Feynman's shenanigans at Los Alamos are famous due to his memoirs, but at the time, he was not an important person, was he? Is it possible that peoples' viewpoints are distorted by this?

Also, the Apollo program seems more impressive and worth studying than the atomic bomb to me. Like, in one case, they produced unprecedentedly large explosions, and in the other, they did that _and_ balanced people on top _and_ got them to the moon and back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> @ianmiell awesome post. Part of the issue: The word "culture" does not fully describe the intentional "Org OS" choices that need to be made to optimize how people can better work in a knowledge economy. [https://drodio.com/creating- an-open-source-culture/](https://drodio.com/creating-an-open-source-culture/)

</comment><comment><USER46> There's a really great animation done on top of a talk by David Marquet which summarizes the book, I believe.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm4mCn5x5iM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm4mCn5x5iM)

</comment><comment><USER47> I recommend The Rise of the Creative Class.

</comment><comment><USER48> people need to be told what to do loop people wait do only what they're told; people need to be told what to do; if people don't have to be told what to do, exit; end Deming made this observation 50 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER49> Some good pirate ship techniques in a Navy submarine.

</comment><comment><USER50> leader-leader only works if the commitment and incentives are relatively uniform.</comment>


Color Labs And Bill Nguyen Sued By Ex-Employee Alleging Retaliation - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/19/color-labs-and-bill-nguyen-sued-by-ex-employee-alleging-retaliation-emotional-distress/ <comment><USER2> _In or around late 2011, [then Color CFO Alyssa] Solomon began noticing discrepancies in Color's finances. Upon information and belief, Defendant Nguyen was spending corporate funds on numerous personal items, such as charging personal items on Color's American Express card and putting his family's nanny, Sally Orr, and his family's Lake Tahoe‐based ski instructor, Hillary Governer, on Color's payroll._

If this is actually true, this is a Really Big Deal (tm). The IRS (and relevant legislation) is very serious about these things, and I can't imagine anyone running a high profile company who has a career at stake actually doing this of their own accord.

This isn't just about ethics. It's an allegation of embezzlement, which carries a penalty of imprisonment for up to twenty years(!) Doing that to save some money on a nanny seems absolutely insane to me.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure about the legality of it

But the ethical aspects, together with the crash and burn of Color are hopefully more than enough for him not to get a single penny out of VCs any more

There are lots of serious people out there looking for funding, save the investments for them instead for the loud bozos

<comment><USER4> The allegations seem to cover just about the same things Dennis Kozlowski is in prison for right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bill Nguyen seems like a relatively young guy who would seem to have more punches left in him in the form of starting more companies. But given these allegations, are investors actually going to back him in the future?

Maybe this is just who I am, but if I were a VC, I'd have serious reservations about investing in a man who has demonstrated serious character issues and is known to create a dysfunctional corporate culture. In fact, I would _never_ invest in anyone who bullies or torments their team members no matter how much of a track record he has. I wonder if thinking like this automatically disqualifies me from ever acting in such a capacity.

<comment><USER6> If you also examine his track record, he seems to start companies, make big exits, and then those companies tank / die. I imagined that would raise some red flags.

But apparently not, at least with Color's investors.

<comment><USER5> Well "investors" probably don't care much about what happens after a part of their portfolio gets a "big exit" since that's the end goal. :(

<comment><USER7> Well, they certainly didn't get a "good exit" from Color, which was an unmitigated catastrophe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A fascinating read, for sure, but do take the accusations with a hefty grain of salt. As an employer who has dealt with his share of totally-irrational employees in the past, I've learned never to believe everything you read in an employee complaint/lawsuit -- especially when there is so much personal animosity/family stuff going on here.

That being said - I emphasize that I've learned never to believe _everything_ you read. Not anything :) I'd be willing to bet at least parts of this are based in truth.

<comment><USER9> Right. The mob mentality of the internet often jumps to conclusions when accusations are leveled like this. We have defense attorneys and such for a reason. If these accusations are true, let's get some evidence and a trial together.

I'm willing to bet this will be settled out of court and the details will not be publicly available.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Its probably NSFW but items 18, 31, 32, 33, 44, 45, 47, 49, 81, 98, 100 are pretty enlightening about the behavior of Bill Nguyen (I guess I should add 'if true')... very sad.

<comment><USER10> The gun parts in 44 and 47 are strange and don't seem to have much meaning except to enhance the perceived threat of the _actual_ threats which are mostly legal/non-violent/career-centric in nature.

<comment><USER11> The allegation is apparently that Nguyen invited someone into the office environment, with a visible weapon, and called attention to that. That would certainly seem to constitute a "threat" to most people. I don't really see why you wouldn't think so.

I'm going to guess that you feel this is an infringement on "Dunphy's" right to carry that gun. It's not. The right to bear arms doesn't extend to the unrestricted ability to use them as a means of intimidation.

<comment><USER10> >The allegation is apparently that Nguyen invited someone into the office environment, with a visible weapon, and called attention to that.

This is the part I would have qualms with. The problem is that the presentation of context in the filing isn't great. I saw a one-liner that mention Nguyen telling somebody else about Dunphy having a Glock or something.

>I'm going to guess that you feel this is an infringement on "Dunphy's" right to carry that gun.

Please _no_. Not what I was getting at. I'm mostly concerned with the dissonance in what the filing is trying to convey versus how it might be perceived.

Mentioning that somebody carries a firearm _in itself_ isn't a threat, it's heavily contextual. I have little trouble imagining that Nguyen was mentioning it in a threatening manner from what's provided in the filing though.

<comment><USER12> There are different laws for concealed carry vs open carry, and "brandishing" a weapon is a crime.

It is very much a relevant issue to determine the context in which a gun is mentioned. Connecting a firearm mention to an otherwise unrelated statement is quite reasonable interpreted as an implied threat to use the firearm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are also direct allegations on the Board ( except Doug Leone) that they were complacent, and did nothing in spite of being privy to all the alleged shenanigans of Bill Nguyen. This is serious stuff.

<comment><USER14> Worse than nothing, they compromised the integrity of their investigation by leaking allegations and identifying the source of the claims. (Allegedly, per items ~48-54, and 67-68)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Brilliant purchase there, Apple. The concept of meritocracy is well and alive.

I can't imagine why they would break-even the VCs that had so clearly failed in fulfilling their role as board members. They could probably have easily snagged all the engineers, given the dysfunctional work environment and well ... failure.

<comment><USER16> I suspect it is way cheaper to buy an engineering team (and IP/patents in this case?) as a unit rather than chase every engineering hire separately and try and construct a team afterwards.

<comment><USER17> In ¶ 64 it says that "there was no space in Patrice Gaultier's [sic] group at Apple for Witherspoon."

According to <https://www.linkedin.com/pub/patrice-gautier/0/14/139>, Patrice Gautier is VP of Engineering, iTunes Store and iCloud.

So maybe that is where those engineers will turn up…

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And here I've been trying to get my _Schadenfreude_ under control ...

<comment><USER18> Reminds me of this clip: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WAwuSK36Gw>

      "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffin' glue."

I wonder if that dates me, or if "Airplane!" is a movie that is still relatively well-known with a younger crowd.

</off-topic>

<comment> X-Istence It dates you. 24 year old here :-)

<comment><USER19> I'm 27 and consider the movie well-known.

<comment><USER20> Counterpoint: I'm 27, know the movie, but definitely consider it an older movie that most people don't know. I know it through older cousins who insisted on showing it to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Obviously we can't be certain all or any of this is true, but if it is the board members should be ashamed of themselves. Failing to act for so long on the reports against Nguyen as employees were fired for standing up to him, and giving the guy a free pass because of his past successes is despicable.

I think it also shows some failings in employment legislation. His ability to apparently fire people at will wouldn't be possible in many other countries.

<comment><USER21> Only difference between "firing" and "getting to quit" is in the severance package.

That said, this guy seems like he may have preferred firing over getting employee to quit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Outsiders perspective - SV culture is becoming more and more just like Wall Street. Sad.

<comment><USER23> This is ONE startup out of 100s in Silicon Valley.

<comment> mkr-hn People were falling over themselves to sing the praises of Color when it came out.

<comment><USER24> I do not remember this. People were shocked at how useless it was and how much money was sunk into it.

<comment> mkr-hn I meant when the news of Color came out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm curious what department this guy was Dunphy guy was in the OIG office of -- OIG isn't an agency, it's a role within larger agencies (like the internal police for each department of government, the equivalent of internal affairs in a PD).

I have zero problems with firearms, but if the guy was breaking the law, using official status, etc. to help his friend, that I have a problem with, and I imagine any agency would as well.

<comment><USER17> Based on the document located at [http://www.nalcbayarea.com/PDF%20Files/Rong%20Arbitration.pd...](http://www.nalcbayarea.com/PDF%20Files/Rong%20Arbitration.pdf), it looks like as of 2007 Corey Dunphy was a Special Agent of the United States Postal Service's Office of Inspector General.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> More proof that charismatic CEOs with Narcissistic Personality Disorder are bad for business. Don't be blinded by charisma.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/01/11/why- narci...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/01/11/why-narcissistic- ceos-kill-their-companies/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Cue DHH tweetbombs.

</comment><comment><USER28> According to the legal papers, Bill Nguyen had a friend who is an OIG Agent (apparently with the US Postal Service) involved. That sounds kind of fishy, as generally those agents investigate internal matters, not external law enforcement. The US Postal Inspection Service deals with most outside matters like postal fraud. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Inspection...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Inspection_Service)

<comment><USER17> Why is it fishy?

I am sure this agent will testify that he is a personal friend of Nguyen, that he stopped by the Color office to meet with his friend about a personal matter, and that he knows nothing about the company's bizarre office politics.</comment></comment>


How A Half-Broken Halloween Promotion Smashed Revenue Records - <AUTHOR> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/11/01/how-a-half-broken-halloween-promotion-smashed-revenue-records/

<comment><USER2> Once again Patrick has made me think twice about what I can and should be doing with my webapp customers. These show-and-tell type posts are worth a lot more than face value...

<comment><USER3> I don't know. I appreciate the transparency of it all, but my take away was that his halloween sales smashed revenue _despite_ his promotion efforts, not because of them.

Looking at the promos, it looks like he got 15 (mini site) + 15 (email) sales, which appears to be around $700+ in revenue. Percentage-wise it seems notable, but in absolute numbers, I wonder if the time could be spent better in other ways.

<comment><USER4> He smashed in sales because of all the other ways he's set himself up for success. Patrick has a multi-pronged approach to his business, where even if some of his efforts fail he can make a pretty buck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Our email newsletters are incredibly reliable sales generators. If we felt we could send them every day, we would.

Do yourself a favor and build in link tracking/image load tracking to your processes as soon as possible. The historical data is valuable when determining how frequently to email an individual. Generating as few spam reports as possible is important, as these _will_ cost you time and money.

</comment><comment><USER6> Do you have a staging environment where you can test changes like your SSL change? Is there a way you can incorporate a QA cycle into your larger changes? Waiting for lower sales and traffic months is one way but it seems like you want an environment that mimics your production environment as closely as possible to work out issues like this.

<comment><USER7> BCC doesn't have a staging environment, owing largely to being cobbled together with bubblegum from back when HTML written in Notepad was cutting edge web technology for me. I also use a lot less testing than is considered ideal in the Rails community. Getting a staging environment is probably worth doing, but the level of coverage with Selenium tests I would need to catch things as obscure as "had an image delivered over HTTP on the landing page" strikes me as not likely to have the highest ROI of all things I could be doing.

(I've been interviewed about what I do for reliability before. The short version is checklists and automated warnings when stuff goes wrong. I've set up some automated things to catch issues spiritually similar to the ones described in this post already.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have always been hesitant to utilize email campaigns, mostly because I (like Patrick) consider myself an email newsletter hater, and I don't want people to hate me too. But I think Patrick brings up a good point, that people will be less likely to hate you for emailing them if they remember who you are and why you're bothering them. I get a newsletter every month from Dreamhost, so I'm never surprised or irritated when it shows up, because I expect it, and they're usually at least a little funny.

<comment><USER9> Exactly. And the average web user does not have the aversion that we (techies) do for email. Most people don't use RSS or Twitter so email is their primary medium for online communication.

<comment><USER7> This was brought home for me vividly last year. I sent an email out for Halloween to a few hundred people, neglected to send one out in November, and got an email from a lady in Kansas asking if I could please resend the November newsletter because her Yahoo must have eaten it. People _like_ getting emails?! People like getting _my_ emails?!? The newsletters are nowhere near my best writing: here's this month's holiday, you should play bingo, here's how. But at least some people miss them when they don't get them.

I swear, there is so much we don't know that we don't know about our customers.

<comment><USER10> Thank you for pointing it out again. We are _not_ our customers.

I'm now heading towards mailchimp to finish and put online my email collecting form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Next year, how about NOT running a promotion at Halloween to see if you actually get the exact same number of purchases, and make even more money.

My guess is that people who need Bingo card software at Halloween will just pay whatever your price is because they are buying the time they are saving.

How much time is $5 really?

<comment><USER12> I think that's the same conclusion Patrick reaches in his postmortem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As always, some great take-aways here-- the first of which (download and read Rob's book) I'm in the process of doing now.

<comment><USER7> I particularly recommend the chapter on virtual assistants. I haven't actually used one yet but that is on the list of things to try.

<comment><USER13> Thanks, I look forward to it.

And, come to think of it, you seem to be the perfect use case for virtual assistants-- I imagine the discrepancy between the return you get from one focused hour of attention versus the cost of one hour of a VA handling some routine task must be off the chart.

<comment><USER7> I have at least one consulting client who has projects that are essentially unlimited billable hours if I wanted them, so an hour saved from doing drudgery could get converted fairly easily into my hourly rate with him. Suffice it to say that that compares quite favorably to what VAs make. (You can get them from single digits in low-wage countries to $20 ~ $40 an hour for higher end stateside VAs.)

I've had huge, huge successes previously with outsourcing content creation and web design, and now that consulting has given me something of a cushion, I anticipate doing more things where I really add value to the business and less grunt work. I think it is highly likely that next year I will hire a front-end developer, which is currently showing up very high on the list of "spending lots of time for less than spectacular results" at the moment. That would be a pretty big step though.

<comment><USER14> _I think it is highly likely that next year I will hire a front-end developer..._

Why not just use a contractor instead of hiring?

<comment><USER7> I have someone in mind for who I'd use, and there exist reasons why I'd prefer to hire him as opposed to having him contract, but those are not mine to share. I might consider contracting with someone else as a plan B though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> TBH, I was hoping to hear about Minecraft's release yesterday. Someone get Notch on HN...

<comment><USER16> I hope so too. Regarding halloween though, I'd wager that people who bought Minecraft over the weekend probably did it because of word-of-mouth excitement over the halloween update (in other words, they bought it because they heard about it from other people who were excited about the halloween update, and not because they were waiting for the halloween update themselves).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Patrick, congratulations. I'll check out the book soon. I wonder if you'd get any traffic looking at nation-specific holidays. November 5th (Bonfire Night) is pretty big here in the UK. I'd be surprised if there's much competition, but don't know about the search volume.

</comment><comment><USER18> Patrick: so you got $370 from the promotions, but $6024.45 in sum? That seems off. Where'd all the other money come from? Were people just searching for "Bingo Cards" and bought through your normal site, or something?

<comment><USER7> [bingo cards] is not a huge fraction of my business (4%ish) -- [bingo card creator] (with both brand & generic intent), [bingo card maker], [make your own bingo], [custom bingo cards], yadda yadda yadda, and then I start getting longtail searches from about a thousand activities which cover most of what an elementary school teacher could want in a lesson plan. Obviously, most of them don't contribute a sale in any particular month -- heck, 80% of them have yet to contribute a sale ever -- but the aggregate economics work out to staggeringly efficient. This is one of my Big Ideas, see the greatest hits section on my blog for it done to death several times over.

Every reason people have for buying bingo cards in September is a reason to buy bingo cards in October, plus the various promotional activities, plus my AdWord spend goes vertical after around October 15th.

Normally, my AdWords performance is constrained by inventory: I could literally buy every click available for sale from Google for the keywords I care about at prices which make sense to me. When I don't bork the heck out of my conversion codes, I'm also inventory-constrained during Halloween, but inventory levels are much higher than usual.

<comment><USER10> Didn't you depleted prospects pool reachable by use of your current marketing channels?

It may be the time to think about other means to reach new sets of prospects.

<comment><USER7> If you have any suggestions, I'm always willing to hear them. But no, there is no way to square the hypothesis that I've depleted prospects available with my current marketing channels when the sales chart keeps going up and to the right.

Organic SEO (and by extension AdWords) is like a river: water goes by today, either you get it or somebody else does, but there will be water tomorrow. The total market is far, far larger than my capability to service it. (There are 3 million elementary schoolteachers in the United States. I have 3,500 customers.)

The nice part about email is that it lets you "store water" if you follow the analogy, since loss to evaporation is just obscene in my business. 80% of people who signed up last October never logged in again after 48 hours from their signup. Many never logged in a second time.

<comment><USER10> I'm fully aware that you didn't reach substantial part of your total market yet.

One suggestion: a means for your customer to tell or email a friend to get a discount for both of them (by Dropbox example).

<comment><USER12> What does it mean to give someone a discount after they've already paid? Are you paying them money?

<comment><USER19> Some companies do, especially if the referrer has an account for the service. This might be hard for one-off sales, but discount codes for additional or add on software could be an option.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What should I do next with a million? - <AUTHOR>

I sold my startup for close to a million. what do you think I should do next from your experiences ? Sorry, I cannot disclose my startup details, so I have created this throwaway account. <comment><USER2> Take half and invest it in a safe and boring way so you don't have to worry about day-to-day expenses for a while even if your next venture fails horrifically.

Pay off any outstanding debts. Help your parents out if they need help with anything (within reason).

Take 20K and spend it on a four month vacation where you don't have to stress about anything and unwind from running a startup.

Use the rest of the money to start a new project where you don't have to raise any money until you have a solid proof of concept or even positive cash flow. Or don't. jwz bought a nightclub instead of staying in software, and he seems quite happy with his decision.

Read Derek Sivers' blog post on what he did after selling cdbaby: <http://sivers.org/laboratory>

Just because you had one startup exit successfully doesn't mean your next one is guaranteed success.

Just because you have no guarantee of further success, does not mean you should not try again.

Congratulations, and good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> You haven't given us enough information to even try to answer your question. How old are you? How risk averse are you? Where do you live? (In Palo Alto, $1M pre-tax is close to $700K post-tax and will get you one-third of the way toward one of the cheaper single family homes. Not exactly a fully funded retirement.) Of course this also may be a troll.

</comment><comment><USER4> Money is a resource that buys you time. Time to think about what you want out of life. Time to think about what you want to do next.

This brings up an interesting question, what would you do if you didn't have to worry about money? Let's assume you're set for life and can live whatever lifestyle you choose for the rest of your time on earth. What do you do then?

</comment><comment><USER5> I would take at least half use it as down payments towards multi-family properties. Or find a commercial real estate investor and he may be able to lead you into some safe investments.

</comment><comment><USER6> I would suggest stash most of it safely.. under 250k in different banks. Take a holiday, tour the world. Who knows you may get some idea. Come back and start afresh. Real estate appears to be in a froth so I might just wait.

Congrats and ATB for future venture.

</comment><comment><USER7> With a Million invested in real-estate, you can find yourself close to financially independent right away :). Then work on your next big success

The relevance of this answer might depend on your location though

</comment><comment><USER8> Invest it in real estate. Buy a 4 family house, and that should give you enough income to survive, and work on whatever you wish.</comment>