Ask HN: Is speed the ultimate weapon for a startup? Let's discuss - <AUTHOR>

In the opening paragraphs of this First Round article http://firstround.com/review/speed-as-a-habit/, Dave Girouard, CEO of Upstart and former Google Exec, states:
==== "I've long believed that speed is the ultimate weapon in business. All else being equal, the fastest company in any market will win. Speed is a defining characteristic — if not the defining characteristic — of the leader in virtually every industry you look at.
In tech, speed is seen primarily as an asset in product development. Hence the "move fast and break things" mentality, the commitment to minimum viable products and agile development. Many people would agree that speed and agility are how you win when it comes to product.
What they fail to grasp is that speed matters to the rest of the business too — not just product. Google is fast. General Motors is slow. Startups are fast. Big companies are slow. It's pretty clear that fast equals good, but there's relatively little written about how to develop the institutional and employee muscle necessary to make speed a serious competitive advantage." ====
A few sentences from this excerpt stood out to me, particularly the "fast equals good" statement. Is this a generally agreed upon belief in the community here? If you do believe in it, can we provide some more evidence beyond what's provided in this article, and if you don't believe in it, why not? <comment><USER2> Speed is only an advantage if what you're building has value. If you're building a crappy product that nobody wants, building it faster isn't going to help you make money.

Also, the generalization that "startups are fast, big companies are slow" is a bit misleading. In many cases, big companies are building vastly bigger things than some startup trying to put out their first MVP. For example, if a big company like Facebook wants to roll out a new feature, it has to be built at a scale where it can be used by a billion people - which takes a lot of engineering. If a startup wanted to build a product to directly compete with Facebook, they'd have to deal with all the problems that Facebook deals with, and probably wouldn't have a speed advantage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good points.

Sometimes value added becomes much clearer after a product or feature has been built and people are using it, in which case we don't have the option of choosing how fast we go by how much value we're providing. I think 'speed' is a subjective concept and 'fast' will be different depending on who you ask. For me, this makes it hard to think about what 'speed' actually means.</comment></comment>


Ender's Game is Already a Reality for the U.S. Military - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/enders-game-is-already-a-reality-for-the-us-military/?utm_source=techalert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=110713 <comment><USER2> Is it just me, or does this article (and the people it talks about) get fixated on the technology?

"I almost think it's passé at this point ... Ender's Game is happening. It's already done."

The technology is not what I remembered Ender's Game for.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, it's all the movie is memorable for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> \-----SPOILER ALERT-----

Children are being tricked into unknowingly fighting wars for the US military? Really?

<comment><USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toys_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toys_\(film\))

<comment><USER6> A Buzz Lightyear RTS would sell. If it was done well, it would even continue to sell.

<comment><USER7> Toys is a different film from Toy Story.

<comment><USER6> Whoops. I'm not so sure a Robin Williams based RTS would sell. (Though he's been in enough movies, you could probably have 3 entire factions based on his characters.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The title makes it sound amazing in a bunch of different and misleading ways, but all the demos look like cheap toys and video games.

<comment><USER6> JWARS was an amazing simulation system that the US defense department had in the 1990s. They could simulate entire theaters of war down to individual soldiers at 10000x speed.

The problem with good, accurate simulations in the defense department, is that higher-ups who do not like the results that come out of them will have them killed politically. This is what happened to JWARS. (This is also what happened to the war game where a 3rd rate power sank a US aircraft carrier. [http://wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/3793](http://wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/3793) )

<comment><USER9> The troublesome thing is when unpredictable things happen far outside the boundaries of the expected battlespace.

Who would have guessed that a small band of Islamic fundamentalists would

\- overstay their (legal) visas

\- do some flight training

\- hijack commercial aircraft to use as giant suicide bombs

In hindsight, it looks logical, but on Sept 10, 2001, who was thinking of this?

<comment><USER10> Tom Claney. In 1994. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_of_Honor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_of_Honor)

<comment><USER9> Good point, and you're absolutely right.

I'm guessing, however, this was not part of mainstream military doctrine or scenario planning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cheap movie promotion?

</comment><comment><USER12>
         raise the heavy rifle in my hands... an exact replica of an M16

An M16 is far from being a "heavy rifle." What other bits of this "reality" are unrealistic?

<comment><USER13> I think the author was trying to convey that it was an actual rifle in his/her hands, and not a plastic toy/digital.

<comment><USER12> My bad for conflating the meaning of reality in reference to the use of VR with the reality of my own experience.

<comment><USER14> I _think_ the point is more that "heavy" is relative. It feels heavy in his hands, not that it's heavy compared to a bunch of stuff that he doesn't know about.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Programmer came up with a hilarious way to shut down dangerous Windows scammers - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/telecom-guy-uses-bots-to-foil-microsoft-support-scammers-2017-2 <comment><USER2> Clickbait article of the already posted blog post by the author:

[http://jollyrogertelephone.com/i-am-going-to-eradicate- the-i...](http://jollyrogertelephone.com/i-am-going-to-eradicate-the-inbound- windows-support-scam/)

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a whole collection of people speaking to a different bot "lenny" here

[https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/](https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Hilarious. Not sure if the scammers outsource to regular call centers or have their own though. I'd rather connect the inbound scammers to the outbound scammers. :) Would be nice to see what they would talk about.</comment>


Critical thinking and why you shouldn't listen to Martin Fowler - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jamesflight/critical-thinking-in-software-development-the-word-should-and-why-you-shouldn-t-listen-to-563090144331 <comment><USER2> Articles like these often make me ponder the state of software engineering and especially the state of its leadership... I never have conversations that even remotely resemble (even a slightly less exaggerated version of) the opening example... Yet the author claims to have had them often enough to have noticed a pattern...

One thing that I have seen enough of to notice a pattern is articles like this... As someone who would self identify as an engineer, I find this to be a deeply troubling pattern in an _engineering_ discipline. And merely extolling the virtues of critical thinking (to, humorously, _engineers_ ) is probably not a solution.

Potential areas to address this are probably education and hiring...

<comment><USER3> I have these conversations all the time. Lately mostly about microservices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yet another person rediscovering cargo-culting.. the problem with software engineering is that everyone (me included) thinks they discovered something new and writes yet another blog post, but in fact they only rediscovered something that was discovered, written about, and promptly forgotten 20 years ago. Because we are all _so_ smart, and tech changes _so_ fast of course.

</comment><comment><USER5> Early in my career as a developer, I worked, at two different companies, on two major large-scale, high-stakes projects, both of which failed spectacularly.

That was without a doubt some of my most valuable experience as a developer. I learned that a lot of what is passed off as conventional wisdom is pure bullshit. I learned that a lot of people focus too much on the latest and greatest tools, technologies, methodologies, etc., and too little on creating and shipping robust, well-crafted software.

For the latter half of my career, I've been calling the shots, and I've shipped a lot of code, and made a lot of money for myself and my employer, by staying focused on results and not getting distracted by the never-ending stream of bullshit that plagues my profession.</comment>


Happy 55th birthday, NASA To celebrate, 97% of you get an unpaid vacation - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/01/happy-55th-birthday-nasa-to-celebrate-97-percent-of-you-get-an-unpaid-vacation/?tid=rssfeed <comment><USER2> If this leads to them losing track of the Voyagers, I'm gonna be pissed!

Seriously though, I know a lot of colleagues that are already stuggling with the 20% planetary sciences budget cut, so this can't be good news ...</comment>


Disabling npm's progress bar yields a 2x npm install speed improvement - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/gavinjoyce/status/691773956144119808 <comment><USER2> Doing GUI calls is a notorious way to slow down apps. I sped up an app (major software from major large corporation) by a factor of 10x a few years back by removing GUI updates. What you have to do is create a thread that refreshes the GUI periodically and not let your main worker thread ever work on the GUI. This particular app was an Eclipse Plugin (a source control app) and the Eclipse SWT to update the console log window was being called after every file operation (of which there were 10s of thousands). All I did was move the GUI refreshing into it's own thread, and call it only every 250millis or so. I was hailed a hero, and deservedly so, for speeding up our app by 10X and was one of my most satisfying accomplishments in my software career.

<comment><USER3> This strategy is also encouraged by best iOS development practices (main thread never works on GUI).

Edit: 'main' as in the one doing the one doing the work, in the same spirit of the original post. In truth, the true main thread that runs in main() is where all the iOS GUI work happens. Apologies for the confusing wording.

<comment><USER4> This is not only completely wrong, it's dangerously wrong. It is in fact wildly unsafe to touch the GUI from anything _except_ the main thread. It's all the non-UI stuff that you should shove onto another thread.

<comment><USER5> Depends on what you call "main thread" \- maybe he's saying worker thread that's doing the "main code" shouldn't be doing GUI

<comment><USER6> In other languages / frameworks, "main thread" may have flexible semantics, but in the land of iOS, UIKit defines the term "main thread" to have one specific meaning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Progress bar or not, npm has gotten extremely slow with v3, to the extent that someone is working on a performance-centered alternative called ied:

[http://gugel.io/ied/](http://gugel.io/ied/)

installs are literally the #1 thing npm needs to do well, and I really hope we see some improvement soon.

<comment><USER8> Even more important, npm doesn't reliably reproduce builds. Different runs of the same shrinkwrapped build could either fail or succeed -- which is odd given that builds should be deterministic. Additionally, shrinkwrap is also broken in the same way.

This is the first time I've heard of ied, a little competition could go a long way!

<comment><USER9> Could you expand on that? What causes it to be nondeterministic? I haven't had that experience but it's the second time I've read someone reference this behavior

<comment><USER8> I have a project that's shrinkwrapped. I check out a new copy of the project and run `npm install`. My co-worker does the exact same thing, his fails, yet mine successfully builds. An install of a shrink-wrapped should be deterinistic, i.e. either succeed or fail, but not both.

<comment><USER10> From that doc page it sounds like that _should_ be deterministic? Even without shrinkwrapping, a fresh install from package.json with empty node_modules should be deterministic.

> The npm install command, when used exclusively to install packages from a > package.json, will always produce the same tree. This is because install > order from a package.json is always alphabetical. Same install order means > that you will get the same tree.

> You can reliably get the same dependency tree by removing your node_modules > directory and running npm install whenever you make a change to your > package.json.

Maybe you're experiencing a bug, rather than some in-grained non-determinism in npm?

<comment><USER11> My understanding is that even when you fix your dependencies to exact versions, your dependencies probably haven't so without shrink-wrap you'll never know _exactly_ what gets installed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's a breakdown [https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/11283#issuecomment-1752468...](https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/11283#issuecomment-175246823)

<comment><USER13> I guess we're supposed to assume that V8 is smart enough to inline that sort of function definition, but it seems deeply weird to me that _drawBar()_ is defined inside the "hot" method like that. Also, I would have expected that streams would have been used for this. Logging is a very common "simple example" on node streams how-to pages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd also like to take the time to mention that the caching system when installing / other actions is extremely inefficient (for my times I have the progress bar turned off already and this is a project with around 80 modules shared between dev / prod):

[https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/10890](https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/10890)

I started on a very (I would like to emphasize very a thousand times over) basic proof-of-concept to show how much faster it could be in the order of magnitudes:

[https://gist.github.com/nijikokun/2f1f16325f8ffe14b1b3](https://gist.github.com/nijikokun/2f1f16325f8ffe14b1b3)

All this does is build a json of every package you currently have installed, and utilizes that as a lookup store the next time instead of rebuilding it every install; this was targeted towards installing / uninstalling existing packages. Not fresh installs.

Fresh installs would benefit from bulk lookups via the API imo.

<comment><USER15> Looks good. I wonder if it'd be too much scope creep to add extension points for LAN/proxy caching. I know of one small dev team who had a single ADSL connection shared between ~10 people - NPM downloads would have been painful.

<comment><USER16> I made an npm package that does this [https://github.com/vvo/npm- pkgr](https://github.com/vvo/npm-pkgr)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Some further details on the issue: [https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/11283](https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/11283)

<comment><USER18> Please refrain from adding unhelpful comments to the issue.

<comment><USER19> How is this unhelpful exactly? It's a link to another discussion that readers might be interested in.

<comment> X-Istence Op was stating you shouldn't follow that link and go "Hey, me too" or "+1" on the Github Issue.

Not that the link to the issue was unhelpful.

<comment><USER20> GitHub badly needs an "approve" system that is external to comments, like bitbucket has.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's all good, Laurie fixed it - [https://twitter.com/seldo/status/692192238445711360](https://twitter.com/seldo/status/692192238445711360)

<comment><USER22> Link to relevant commit?

<comment><USER23> [https://github.com/iarna/gauge/commit/a7ab9c906bb72aa0ed8996...](https://github.com/iarna/gauge/commit/a7ab9c906bb72aa0ed8996a00db2cd35a22d5992)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Two years ago, PHP's package manager, Composer, was sped up by disabling the garbage collector:

[http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2014/12/what-about- garbage.html](http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2014/12/what-about-garbage.html)

(Or more accurately the cycle collector. You can't turn off reference counting.)

</comment><comment><USER25> I posted this below, but I'll post again here for visibility. What the heck is up with npm install on iTerm 2? I had no idea something was weird until recently, when I did an install with Termial.

Here's a side-by-side video: [https://youtu.be/odoVfHHBYVM](https://youtu.be/odoVfHHBYVM)

<comment> Syrup-tan I had the same problem (and figured it was normal for a while), after some looking-into it I was able to fix it by unchecking "Treat ambiguous-width characters as double width" [0]

[0] [https://denpa.moe/~syrup/Screen%20Shot%202016-01-26%20at%206...](https://denpa.moe/~syrup/Screen%20Shot%202016-01-26%20at%206.39.12%20PM.png)

<comment><USER25> That did the trick, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The funky progress bar is about the coolest thing with npm. They could let it take a minute if they wanted too and i would keep watching it with amazement.

<comment><USER27> npm 2.x user here. Does anybody want to share a video of the 3.x progress bar? (Easy with QuickTime or CloudApp, btw)

<comment><USER28> [https://asciinema.org/a/9gt0i1kxbto41gj4796tjkdnt](https://asciinema.org/a/9gt0i1kxbto41gj4796tjkdnt)

<comment><USER29> What's the color scheme you're using for terminal? I'm also rocking agnoster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I work in China. Downloading from the outer Internet will never match the speed of writing to the console. Not too worried

<comment><USER31> Not to mention that when the binary you are downloading happens match particular keywords.

<comment><USER30> Oh, that's fine. You can just download it from one of those mirror sites that host their own copies of the files. You can trust that it's genuine because of that big green checkmark on the page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Could it be linked with the terminal being used?

Edit, reminds me of this, which is why I'm wondering [http://stackoverflow.com/q/21947452/923847](http://stackoverflow.com/q/21947452/923847)

</comment><comment><USER33> This makes sense. It's like when I'm solving a project euler problem, I don't use verbose output because it runs much faster without having to print everything to the screen. (Python)

<comment><USER34> That's exactly my experience. Once I wrote some naive PE solution in nodejs and added some logging at each step. After few minutes and far from a solution I stopped it and disabled logging. I got the solution within seconds. The diff was few orders of magnitude, which was pretty surprising for me.

<comment><USER35> Sometimes writing to the terminal can be the slowest part because it's unbuffered by default in an interactive prompt, so even just redirecting stdout to /dev/null (or even a file) can be faster. Had that happen some ten years ago, so my explanation could be out of date or misremembered but the effect was real.

<comment><USER36> Your explanation is correct. That is the semantics of Unix stdio buffering as implemented by glibc. So across a wide variety of languages, you'll see a significant performance difference if you are doing lots of writes to the terminal.

On the other hand if you _didn 't_ do this, then interactive terminal programs would be entirely unusable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I don't know the exact cause here, but I can say I'm thankful for my systems background that I've gleamed for years before moving into programming. Most sysadmin types know that displaying output on a filecopy slows down transfers greatly because the screen vsync holds up the operation.

When I write utilities today that do similar things, I only display output when writing and testing the program. Otherwise I'll write to memory then dump the results in a logfile at the end.

In this case since there is probably a less intensive way of providing status updates, and can probably be resolved by doing intermittent checks.

</comment><comment><USER38> Someone with more UI development can comment here , but i always thought progress bars where more like a signal to the user that "something is being done" , and not a representation of how much is done and how much is left.

<comment><USER39> The whole point of a progressbar is to show work progress (as a fraction of total work). The issue is it's often difficult to map "work done" to a linear percentage, so either you do it on the cheap and your progressbar is just a souped-up spinner with no relation to wall-clock work time or you do lots of extra work to get more precise estimates but you end up taking more time overall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I don't see this at all, what's more worrying is that npm 3.* is apparently way slower than npm 2.*

I did this test on a npm library I wrote, installs some test tools and also has to compile some gyp stuff

2.14.2

progress=false real 0m26.589s user 0m12.086s sys 0m3.362s

progress=true real 0m29.553s user 0m12.455s sys 0m3.486s

3.5.2

progress=false real 0m57.489s user 0m13.298s sys 0m3.421s

progress=true real 1m1.084s user 0m15.690s sys 0m3.644s

While I don't see any significant difference between progress bars or none for 3.x, what is 3.x doing that causes almost 30 seconds more churning?

<comment><USER41> It uses a very different dependency resolution algorithm, the biggest difference as I understand it is it will install dependencies maximally flat whereas npm 2 was much more nested.

I believe the reason it is slower is it can't do as much parallelism as npm 2. Also, npm 2 was susceptible to a lot of race conditions and non-determinism, especially with compiled dependencies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I used to joke, in the context of virus scanning, that I could give you a more accurate progress bar, but the scan would take twice as long...

</comment><comment><USER43> sbcl's compilation output is so verbose that the compilation instructions mention that it builds faster on xterm than gnome-terminal

</comment><comment><USER44> Yes, but, which download feels longer?

</comment><comment><USER45> Another product bitten by the dark side of progress indicators.

One of the most often underestimated areas of product development, though certainly not among the most important underestimates.

Easy to underestimate its cost and impact. After all, it's just a progress indicator.

</comment><comment><USER46> ...has he controlled for network speed? Unless he's set up a local NPM caching proxy, he's going over the 'net for these packages. It'll take more than 1 datum before I believe this hype.

<comment><USER47> Also the second run probably used stuff that was put in the npm cache during the first run. Not sure how good a test this is.

A good read: "Programmers need to learn statistics or I will kill them all" [http://zedshaw.com/archive/programmers-need-to-learn- statist...](http://zedshaw.com/archive/programmers-need-to-learn-statistics- or-i-will-kill-them-all/)

<comment><USER17> It yields the same results in reverse order and also when the cache is primed for both and cleared for both

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Screen IO is slow. A trick to speed up unzip speed, do unzip -qq. That skips all the screen output and make it flies.

</comment><comment><USER49> That's the biggest issue I have with the new npm. I wonder how many developer- days it has wasted already.

</comment><comment><USER50> Upon first seeing npm 3.x I immediately added `--progress false --color false` to my npm installs and never looked back. Color and terminal graphics are the work of the devil.

<comment><USER51> > _Color and terminal graphics are the work of the devil._

Or you know, it's 2016, and it's npm who does it badly.

<comment><USER50> I don't even want color and terminal graphics done goodly. I code with two monochrome terminals on the screen using vim and the command line.

<comment><USER7> Not everyone is you. While I agree that flashy graphics are silly in the command line, I find color-based highlighting to be quite useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Well-designed server platform.

<comment><USER53> Don't even get me started on the number of reasons why nodejs should not be running on servers, I'll be here all day. We're currently deploying a NodeJS app and we'll never do it again - the amount of problems with that ecosystem is quite amazing. As I tweeted earlier today "JS ppl tend to have marketing & UI/UX experience so JS crapcode gets popularised, becomes widespread, then we have to deal with the fallout".

<comment><USER54> I'm genuinely interested. I've been using nodejs for hobby projects and scripts, so haven't seen too many issues. But I'd like to know how things are and what issues you've been seeing.

<comment><USER53> Howdy, we've had lots of issues with single threaded performance, poor memory management especially around garbage collection, we had to modify our SELinux policies as it likes to execute memory off the stack, npm has been very unreliable and often unreasonably slow, error handling of the node index app server seems to have some interesting behaviour but I haven't dug into that one too deeply yet and the list goes on. As an experienced systems engineer it's very clear that this is browser technology that was never designed not fit to run on servers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Make America Singapore Healthcare - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/18/opinion/sunday/make-america-singapore.html <comment><AUTHOR> Singaporeans pay for much of their own care out of their own pockets, and their major insurance program is designed to cover long-term illnesses and prolonged hospitalizations, not routine care. The combination has produced genuinely extraordinary results: The island state has excellent health outcomes while spending, as of 2014, just 5 percent of G.D.P. on health care. (By comparison, a typical Western European country that year spent around 10 percent; the United States spent 17 percent.)

</comment><comment><USER2> This article basically says 'great idea but not going to happen here' (see: "They have their principles, and making America Singapore is simply a non- starter.") Seems as if the U.S. has these huge ongoing problems with healthcare but nobody can fix them... including tons of players/$ in health tech. Is the only thing that can effect actual change a huge policy overhaul?</comment>


Animated map and reduce - <AUTHOR> https://lambdabricks.github.io/animating-hofs/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi! I created some animations to explain what happens internally with the `map` & `reduce` functions. These functions are really important in functional programming. The code is open source, any feedback is welcome !</comment>


What Are Alexa and Google Home Missing? - <AUTHOR> Http://www.SidekicksCo.com <comment><AUTHOR> I tried buying a shoe using Alexa, and this idea was born... a holographic fun AI assistant... would appreciate your feedback:-)</comment>


PeepOpen: An editor-independent fast file opener. - <AUTHOR> http://peepcode.com/products/peepopen/ For those who haven't paid and are wondering: think of this as TextMate's Command-T only it works everywhere (emacs! vim! etc!)<p>See http://blog.peepcode.com/tutorials/2010/file-navigation-in-text-editors for the thinking that led to this. <comment><AUTHOR> Think of this as TextMate's Command-T, only better and available from any editor (emacs! vim! etc!)

</comment><comment><USER2> Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1263061>

[URL's differ by a trailing slash ( / ) ]</comment>


Pre-launch promotion in numbers, part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://swapped.tumblr.com/post/22485539186/pre-launch-promotion-in-numbers-part-1

<comment><USER2> Good post. How did you promote on Dribbble and Forsst? And what was the cost/subscriber?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have over 1000 followers on Dribbble, and people there are typically supportive of others launching things, so that helped too.

On Forrst, I used the promoted post option ($40 for 2000 impressions), but it didn't seem to matter much, because it started generating referrals after the promotion expired. And generally speaking what you want on Forrst is for your post to be upvoted by Kyle (the founder), because everyone is following him by default and his upvote makes your post show up in pretty much everyone's feed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I had the same experience with SU. Never again.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, I've had similar poor results from SU's paid discovery.

On the other hand, I've had great traffic from SU's organic stumbles. Too bad I can't really control those.</comment></comment>


Can You Buy A License to Speed? - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/can-you-buy-a-license-to-speed/ <comment><USER2> Let's just take a step back and note something:

This is about human lives. Once you eliminate birth-defects, car accidents are the _leading_ cause of death for people under 35. Particularly for young kids, who obviously aren't driving.

Car accidents kill 34,000 Americans per-year. That's like if 9/11 happened _once a month every year_.

And speed matters. Stopping distance and kinetic energy go up with the _square_ of velocity. A pedestrian hit by a car going 20 mph will almost certainly live. A person hit by a car going 40 mph will almost certainly die.

<comment><USER3> Speeding in a residential area is a lot worse, for the reason you described. New York City's speed limit of 30 is way too high (should be 20, without the 10mph tolerance). Most highways are underposted and should be 70-90.

Bizarrely, 40mph in a residential zone is a minor offense while 100mph on the freeway (which isn't exactly good, but not as dangerous as it sounds with a good car) with zero traffic can cost you your license in almost any state, and put you in jail in some.

<comment><USER4> >> Most highways are underposted and should be 70-90.

Maybe in the middle of Montana or Texas where it's 50 miles between towns, but not anywhere with off/onramps. People are very bad at merging and it'd be very difficult for many vehicles, especially trucks to get up to speed if 90 was the limit.

<comment><USER5> Don't trying going on the German Autobahns (motorways). Unlimited speed limit, and unlike USA bendy roads, and lotsa on/off slip roads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My grandfather is a retired police chief from a major metro. When I purchased my car (which has over 400 horsepower, so I like to... play), he told me to become part of the highway patrol or police charity organization. He told me when he was in law enforcement, any member of these organizations were treated "much more lightly" than others.

For only $25 or something like that, you can get a piece of paper you can put in your wallet to show you're a member. For around $2,000, you can get a license plate frame.

He said even with the piece of paper, if you're pulled over, you have a pretty good shot of being given a warning. You just need to make sure you show it to them when they pull you over.

With the license plate, he said he would never pull over someone with the license plate, because law enforcement doesn't have enough money as it is and they'd rather not piss off those who have money to donate.

I didn't really believe him (grandfathers and all), but I donated anyways (for a piece of paper, not the license plate). Now I see this article, and I'm starting to think he was serious.

<comment><USER7> If stopped by an officer, do you pull out the paper and say "by the way, i'm a member"? Doesn't seem smooth.

<comment><USER8> Hand them that card along with the license, registration, and proof of insurance?

<comment><USER9> With a $20, too, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Grew up with both parents in law enforcement. The one time I risked name- dropping my mother in another county about an hour away, I lucked out and the guy knew her and gave me a warning - and I was in a vehicle with out-of-state plates (had come up to visit).

Friend of mine is a county cop near Houston. He told me, "The bigger the stack of 'I Donated to the 100 Club' stickers or whatever on their back window, the bigger the chance they're going to be a dick and they'll get a ticket anyway."

I'd say that having a Texas Mason license plate (not frame), being polite, saying "Sir" or "Ma'am" as appropriate, and handing over my CHL (as required by law) with my license/insurance - showing that I've undergone a background check already - has more of a chance of getting me out of a ticket than any stack of stickers.

Unless I run into an officer that is anti-CHL - but so far, that hasn't happened. Had one ask me "Sir, do you have your weapon on you?" "No sir, I'm not allowed to have it on property at work." "Well, you never know when you might need it."

<comment><USER11> _> CHL_

Please don't use cryptic acronyms. Not everybody's from Texas.

<comment><USER12> CHL is the Texas concealed carry license.

<comment><USER13> My grandfather had at least two pistols on him on any trip out of town. I'm guessing that's the license he had considering he was 82nd (later 101st) Airborne and then head of an AP (Air Force MP) outfit.

<comment><USER10> You don't need a CHL to have a firearm with you while traveling in Texas.

Wikipedia explains it well: "Gov. Perry also signed H.B. 1815 after passage by the 2007 Legislature, a bill that allows any Texas resident to carry a concealed handgun in the resident's motor vehicle without a CHL or other permit.

The bill revised Chapter 46, Section 2 of the Penal Code to state that it is in fact not "Unlawful Carry of a Weapon", as defined by the statute, for a person to carry a handgun while in a motor vehicle they own or control, or to carry while heading directly from the person's home to that car.

However, lawful carry while in a vehicle requires these three critical qualifiers: (1) the weapon must not be in plain sight (in Texas law, "plain sight" and "concealed" are mutually exclusive opposing terms); (2) the carrier cannot be involved in criminal activities, other than Class C traffic misdemeanors; and (3) the carrier cannot be a member of a criminal gang."

<comment><USER13> Thought you'd say that. :) Oh my grandfather carried a concealed pistol or plural everywhere that was legal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've always wondered if it would be worth the government actually creating a "license to speed". The same as you can get a license to drive a lorry or a motorcycle, why isnt there a license with a proper test that trains you specifically on driving fast. Then when you're on the motorway only you can go up to 100mph instead of 70mph (UK), if the camera's get you, it first does a check on your plate to see if you have a proper license and then decides on that if you get a ticket.

Cars are the safest they've ever been and are only going to get safer, unfortunately i think that driving ability is getting worse because of technology that keeps us safe in cars but i think an actual test to demonstrate you are a good driver would help. Hell, even make it only valid for 1 year and you have to sit the test again, and the test costs £5,000. You'll STILL get plenty takers and hopefully make the road safer for the people that are going to speed regardless anyway.

<comment><USER15> I would be willing to take a stricter driving test and have my vehicle subjected to higher inspection standards if I could be permitted to drive faster than the speed limit. Sure, some people and some cars can't safely do it, but why not allow those that can to do so?

<comment><USER16> Probably lack of incentive to change the laws. Getting anything done in the government is tough and time consuming - Who's going to champion the cause of letting certain people with faster cars be able to drive another 10-20 mph faster versus other issues their constituents may have?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was really hoping that they had done a study to find out if it actually works.

They didn't.

<comment><USER18> I was hoping as well. It seems like you might be able to do it with a decent number of frames, a year, and some sort of OBD+GPS log to measure speeding.

It seems like it would be hard to do from say, data relating to getting pulled over by cops etc, since they may not pull over someone with one of these frames. But if you could compare frame owners vs everyone else, it could be interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think everyone is missing the real point:

> _The CHP 11-99 Foundation has donated over $21 million in emergency > assistance to the families of police officers, particularly officers killed > in duty_

Why do Police officers (and families) need donations to care for them?

Shouldn't their job/benefits do that?

</comment><comment><USER20> Anyone who is proud of speeding should come hang out and I'll throw punches near your head just out of range. It's cool I have it under control; it will bring me some pleasure and you will only be at risk if you get in my way or if someone dumber than me follows my example doesn't have as much control.

<comment><USER21> You do know that's a common practice in martial arts, right? Instead of face, it's your stomach, generally, but the point is still the same.

<comment><USER20> OK well when people need to do martial arts to get to work then we can talk. And btw in that world, speeders would be the people who swing unsafely fast while practicing with common folk.

<comment><USER21> No, speeders would be the people with /insufficient relevant training/ doing that.

If everyone were trained, it wouldn't be so bad... which leads me back to better driver's ed at high speeds, like in non US countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Since a lot of the discussion has moved towards the relative safety of speeding, I'd be curious to see a break down of accidents and fatalities, by absolute speed, by in-excess speed, and by roadway type.

If I had to guess (having been in a number of accidents caused by other people) is that accidents are more common at lower speeds (because they are at intersections and other conflicting right of ways where you are more likely to be going slow) but fatalities are more likely at higher speeds where the safety systems fail to protect those involved.

However high speed accidents are not automatic death sentences as some posters have implied. I was in a head on collision on a small two lane residential street with no other traffic. Both vehicles were going 35mph, so effective collision speed was ~70mph. I was on a motorcycle and the oncoming truck was on a cell phone. He veered into my lane, and I tried to move left but parked cars limited my ability to avoid him. After the collision, I flew for a distance, and on landing my head hit the point of the curb. The two things that saved my life was (obviously) my helmet--without it, by brain would have been on the street--and I had crash bars that were severely deformed after the accident, but they kept my left leg from getting pinned between the bike and the truck.

So relatively high speed accidents can be survivable, especially with modern technology. The only injury I had was a badly sprained hip.

</comment><comment><USER23> Wow, that's not even a rich people thing. $1,800 for a lifetime speeding license is a decent deal for anyone who regularly likes speeding.

<comment><USER17> Your basic ticket comes to about $400 with all the extra fees in California. If you were to get a few, it pays for itself.

<comment><USER24> Wouldn't your insurance rate go up as well after a speeding ticket?

<comment><USER25> If you're rich enough to spend $2500 on speeding ticket insurance, putting away $50,000 for an insurance deposit isn't a big deal, so no, that $50,000 deposit costs the same as it did.

<comment><USER26> That's a pretty slippery slope. You just lumped 20x as not a big deal.

<comment><USER13> Also anyone that can afford posting their own bond instead of lieu of an insurance requirement also has their own legal representation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I find it very likely that when the foundation issued these license plates they knew people would donate to get them in order to avoid some speeding tickets. This probably resulted in a lot more funds raised than if they gave away jackets, hats, or something like that. Thus, it was clearly in 11-99's best interest to do this.... And I don't even think it's a bad decision. Sure, some more people get off on speeding tickets, but the additional money raised allows 11-99 to better support the families of officers in times of crisis. At the end of the day, more of the latter seems a lot better to me than less of the former.

</comment><comment><USER28> Things like that only work to a point. I had a good friend who liked to drive fast and had a nice BMW with a purple heart license plate. He got out of a lot of trouble with that, until an incident where they revoked his license, and he couldn't drive for a few years. Right or wrong the police give preferential treatment to people who gave money, time, or blood to a cause they support, but only to a point.

Personally, I have a bronze star plate on my car, and I don't push my luck too much any more, but I also know for a fact it got me out of a ticket for an expired inspection.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't understand why reporters/investigators in articles like these bother asking such loaded questions to officials as, "Do officers give leniency to license frame bearers?"

I feel like, if you're in that person's shoes, even if you know damned well they do, saying "yes" would be equivalent to answering "yes" to, "Would you like to lose your job or at least be put on leave within the next week?"

</comment><comment><USER29> People go to such amazing lengths to avoid getting a ticket, but it's very easy to speed and not get pulled over.

1) Don't drive stupid. It's perfectly possible to drive very fast without driving badly. If you're swerving a lot, accelerating then stomping on your brakes, jerking from lane to lane... it's an indication that you're not planning ahead and are therefore driving badly. You deserve to get pulled over. And for heaven's sake, don't race unless you're willing to get pulled. Be a little grown up.

2) Go as fast as you want - but don't be the fastest car on the road. Always let a cop-catcher run about a 1/4 mile to 1/2 mile ahead (don't tailgate them, that'll get you pulled over for speeding _and_ being an ass).

3) Don't use a detector. They give you a false sense of security and will guarantee that if you _do_ get pulled, you get a ticket. Not only that, 90% of the time no officer is going to leave the radar "wide open" on all passing cars - which means your detector won't go off until _after_ you've been tagged.

4) Don't speed in residential areas. There's just no gain.

Bonus tips:

1) As much as possible, stay out of the left hand lane. That's just easy pickings right there. edit: that doesn't mean it's okay to zip around people on the right. Just don't sit there with the pedal on the floor. be there when you need to be - but don't be there when you don't .

2) When in an area that you can't see possible hiding spaces get adept at feathering your speed down a bit and letting a car (ok) suv (better) , van or truck (best) on the left side shield you from that spot. Edit: again to clarify this doesn't mean zip around on the right. You're actually going to be gong slower or matching these cars, preferably from two lanes away. If you don't have two lanes, don't do this.

3) At night it's especially easy. I don't know if it's the same in all staets ,but every one I've driven through cops have their headlights on while they wait. If you look far enough ahead - and you should be anyway otherwise you're driving poorly and deserve a ticket - you can see a copy waiting a half mile off or more.

4) If you think you've been tagged, don't slam your brakes. In addition to being a hazard, the cop has already tagged you - and the sudden flare of brakelights is a surefire giveaway to the fact that you _know_ you were speeding. (This one is the hardest for most people...)

In the 1980s "A Speeder's Guide to Avoiding Tickets" came out, written by a state patrol officer. I think most of what I do up there is a variation on what's in that book. If you speed a lot but are willing to do so intelligently and safely, you should get it. It's excellent and still as valid.

Anyway - that got long-winded. TL;DR: speed smart and safe, don't be an idiot, and pay attention and you don't need to spend money on a fancy license plate frame. (Or a FOP sticker in other states...)

\- Speeding ticket free (and driving fast and smart in muscle cars) for more years than I can recall.

<comment><USER30> How much time do you save by speeding? To me, speeding significantly, especially for short trips, is futile.

Say in a 20 mile commute, 14 miles is on the highway with a speed limit of 65mph, 3 miles is on a road with a speed limit of 45mph, and 3 miles is on a residential road with a speed limit of 35mph. Furthermore, to simplify this, let's say you only speed on the highway. Going 65mph will result in 12.9 minutes on the highway, going 80mph will result in 10.5 minutes on the highway. By speeding, you exposed yourself to financial risk, and yourself and others to physical risk in order to save 2.4 minutes.

Now, let's say you encounter 6 stop lights on your commute, each with an average red light time of 1 minute. Let's say on average, you get caught in half of them each time you make the trip and that there are no backups requiring you to stay at any given light for more than 1 cycle. So your average red light time per commute is 3 minutes.

You've now spent more time waiting at red lights than you have saved by speeding on your commute.

On long trips, speeding can save you hours instead of minutes, so it seems more justified. But for a savings of 2.5 minutes that can easily be negated by red lights or other drivers? Why put yourself and others at risk for such a small reward?

<comment><USER31> I imagine it's less about time saved, and more about fun. Most people don't go downhill skiing to get somewhere.

<comment><USER30> Then why not speed on a track, or some other closed environment?

I imagine that shooting guns at targets is fun too - but most people wouldn't find that to be an acceptable excuse for shooting guns at targets in a public park.

<comment><USER32> > Then why not speed on a track, or some other closed environment?

Because freedom.

> I imagine that shooting guns at targets is fun too - but most people > wouldn't find that to be an acceptable excuse for shooting guns at targets > in a public park.

What do you think the "we use them to hunt" justification is for the American love of owning guns? The overwhelming majority of people who trot out this justification aren't depending on a good hunt for any real productive purpose; they go hunting because it's _fun_.

<comment><USER30> I'm not saying there is anything wrong with driving fast or hunting/shooting guns - I'm just saying there is a context in which those activities are not acceptable, and that context is when you are acting unsafely and subjecting other people to unnecessary risk.

Note when I say park, I mean a city park, not a state park or wildlife park or wherever hunting is actually permitted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Yep, I thought this was general knowledge. Here in the northeast we have "PBA Cards" which can be given out by police to friends/family/donators that you are supposed to hand the officer with your license if you're pulled over.

Although to be honest I've found that just being nice (& maybe driving a real clean volvo) has gotten me out of a speeding ticket every time I've been pulled over

</comment><comment><USER34> Quebec used to have these stickers to place on your plate for registration (not anymore). And some police families were giving out plate stickers with VIP written on them, which as it was found out gave them leniency, as well as parking ticket immunity. Investigations happened, and as a result, no one has these anymore, at least as far as the general public know.

</comment><comment><USER35> The kind of drivers who would buy a license to speed are generally the kind of drivers who should have their license to drive revoked.

</comment><comment><USER36> I can recall a marketing call where I was asked to donate to one association or another and told I'd get a window decal or something to that effect, and while it wouldn't give me a free pass, it would certainly show officers on the road I appreciate them. I've got the exact verbage wrong, but that was the sentiment (this was several years ago). It was quite a hard sell from the solicitor, and I didn't go for it. I was frankly a little disgusted by the call.

That said, I've been driving for 20 years, and pulled over one time. That one time, an out of state cop (in my home town) pulled me over because the license plate frame (from the dealership I bought the car at) partially obscured the state name and he couldn't tell what it was. I suppose it could have been another state that ended in -nois, like lilinois, iiiinois, or something else, but more than likely, it was 5AM in a small town in Maine and I was circling around one-way streets looking lost or suspicious (I hadn't been back there in many years). The cop gave me directions to the street my grandfather lived on, and told me to enjoy my trip.

The secret here is surprisingly simple, and applies to most everything else in life. Don't be a dick. Drive around the same speed as other cars, and if you're the only one on the road, don't do more than 5-6 mph over the limit on the highway. It won't cost you that much time, and if you're the only one on the road it's probably dark and/or rural anyway so you SHOULD be more cautious, and in the end, you win either way, at the great expense of.. a few minutes time.

Another tip I've learned, is do as others do - especially on highways. Think about it, when you're driving across country, how many other cars around you are undertaking that length of a trip? It's far more likely most of them live in the area, and know what's appropriate - both for safety, and for cop- avoidance.

</comment><comment><USER37> You'll almost never get pulled over for doing exactly 11 over on any street with a speed limit of 50 or higher. Thanks to the law of cosines, a cop is likely to read you going 10 or less or less, and cops generally don't even bother with people doing 9 or less over, especially highway patrol.

</comment><comment><USER38> A forum discussing plates like these: [http://forums.officer.com/t124675/](http://forums.officer.com/t124675/)

> Those are just as useless, they actually make me want to stop the car to see > what the person is trying to hide...

<comment><USER39> I once read a book by a retired police officer about how to avoid tickets. (Protip: a new one comes out every few years)

His take was that organizations within the police department are just like fraternities on a college campus: You have people who are with them and people who vehemently dislike them. So you're taking a gamble. Still, it seems like it's worth it if you're a speeder.

<comment><USER13> Yup. One play might be to not display any affiliations or bumper stickers at all. If you have to advertise X, it seems like you're "trying too hard." Just as a non-cop, seeing NRA stickers is going to make me immediately assume irritable, gun-toting jerk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I would be interested in theories as to how many additional accidents and deaths this leniency has caused. The thought of a police force increasing the death rate on their roads in order financially support their coworkers is depressing to say the least.

</comment><comment><USER41> $20 dollars and make your own: [http://www.autoplates.com/store/custom_apps_a_FrameStandardB...](http://www.autoplates.com/store/custom_apps_a_FrameStandardBAK.html)

</comment><comment><USER42> In Russia you can buy a blue light bar and they will let you speed.

<comment><USER13> 🚨 Hilarious 🚨. (Sorry, I could only steal them in red today.)

✋ Don't leave me hangin', bro, it's Friday after all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Speaking from experience the 11-99 is as much a badge of bullshit honor amongst "serious" car enthusiasts.

Like I not only have a Porsche I have $2500 and I am a serious racer.

If pricenomics had presented one piece of actual data vs conjecture this would be compelling but barring that this is just linkbait and probably good marketing for more stupid vanity license plates just like the la times article they reference

</comment><comment><USER44> A police officer friend once told me, to put your hands out the window when you get pulled over, and leave them there, until the office tells you to stop. Then you casually say sorry and mention that an cop-friend told you to do it, to put their (the cops) minds at ease while they walk up. Anecdotal evidence on my end, suggests it works.

<comment><USER28> I have heard to just keep you hands on the top of the wheel, and when they ask for license and registration I say "Ok, my license is in my back pocket, and the registration is in the center console. I am getting the license out first." Then I move my hands off the steering wheel.

<comment><USER45> The trick with the other guy's thing is that he gets a reason to mention a cop friend. It's a conversation trick.

Situation 1: Cop walks up. You mention your cop friend. Trouble will ensue because you're obviously trying to say "I'm friends with policemen."

Situation 2: Cop walks up. Asks why you're doing obviously bizarre thing. Say it's because your cop friend asked you to so that police can know you're empty handed. You've now responded to a question and managed to mention that you're a friend with the police. He can't hold that against you because he's the one that asked.

<comment><USER13> Huh? Not sure if speeding counts as bizarre.

<comment><USER44> The "bizarre" thing, he was referring to is holding your hands out the window. Not everyone does that typically; and one of the most important things you can do is to keep your hands where the officer can see them as they approach. It's like a "social cue" that tells them you are clued in. They _might_ be a little more willing to let you go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I watched a friend get out of a ticket in California not by having a special license plate, but by being dressed in a suit, and being friendly. He was blatantly going 90+, and the cop seemed annoyed when he first approached the car. Then, I think "this is a rich kid!" clicked in his brain, and they had a nice chat.

</comment><comment><USER47> Can you copyright a license plate frame? I'd love to make a bunch of these things and go hand them out to low income minorities, those people deserve a break from the cops for once.

</comment><comment><USER48> I actually have a PBA card given to me by a police officer that will supposedly help me get of out a ticket. It has nothing to do with wealth.

<comment><USER49> "Either be friends with a police officer or pay us $2k for a license plate frame and you can get out of tickets" both very much has something to do with wealth and is incredibly corrupt.

<comment><USER48> do you really have to be wealthy to have access to $2k? While you can argue this is a corrupt system, you dont have to drive a high end two door sports car to have access to it.

edit: two door

<comment><USER49> Seriously? This is a pretty worrisome disconnect. Having 2k to blow on something like this is almost the definition of wealth to me and is very certainly not fair or productive to society to have things like this.

<comment><USER48> > Having 2k to blow on something like this

If this is as trivial as you're making it out to be then why is this story worth reading and discussing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> These work. Very much discussed in SV car clubs. Many spotted in my local Audi club.

This + LIDAR jammer = no tickets.

<comment><USER13> In California VC Section 28150, a LIDAR jammer in of itself can result in a ticket. Best to coast and switch it off very quickly. In my experience only about 20% of patrol cars used LIDAR, the majority seem to be using K or Ka band RADAR. X band is so prone to false alarms and never had an actual alert on it that wasn't a speed sign so, disabling it is common.

<comment><USER50> Actually, more than a ticket. They can impound your car.

However, most systems have an "alert then disable after X seconds" system - giving you time to slow, then disable the jam, allowing the LEO to get a 'speed' eventually (and chalk it up to his crappy LIDAR gun)

Take a look at the grilles of some exotic / fast cars. If you see devices inset that look like IR blasters -- those are LIDAR jammers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> If a 11-99 license plate frame were an effective protection against speeding tickets, the obvious question would be "why not counterfeit one?"

The cost of making even one frame would be far less than $2,500. Even better, why not make a batch of them and sell them illicitly?

The economics don't seem to add up.

<comment><USER52> Did you read the whole article? People are doing exactly what you're saying.

<comment><USER51> Yes, that's why I said the economics didn't make sense.

<comment><USER49> It's a charity organization. It's not about the economics making sense. It's intended to be a gift for donating money, not a +EV speeding ticket helper.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Paul Graham's Infatuation with the Concept of Hacker - <AUTHOR> http://xahlee.blogspot.com/2010/04/paul-grahams-infatuation-with-concept.html <comment><USER2> >I really hate the word "hacker". Imagine, what Dijkstra will have to say about "a lang designed for 'hacker'?" LOL.

That was a pathetic criticism of pg's "infatuation with the concept of hacker".

But I do agree that educators should not be spreading the myth of "the hacker". I see people who solve far complex problem than I face in my job, people who can store immense amount of information in their head, people who can abstract out the details from a problem, model complicated real life problems on paper struggle to solve their problems using a computer. Is it because of the tools that we give them? Is it because of some kind of cognitive dissonance? Is it a totally different mental model than they have been accustomed to? What would be the basic skills to become a good programmer? How do you develop interest and skills to solve more complicated computation problems using them? How do we make people appreciate the immense power of computers and the abstraction layers that we have to solve problems?

I do not know the answers to these questions. But I strongly believe that spreading this myth of a hacker, who are almost born with these magical skills,is not helping. Everybody should program computers. Everybody can program them.

<comment><USER3> _Everybody should program computers. Everybody can program them._

I was with you up until this point. I don't know that everyone can program computers, and it's quite possible that many people cannot.

Observe: some people cannot, as programming requires intelligence and some people are in fact no more intelligent than vegetables, usually due to brain damage. If we progress further we have people that are capable of simple thought, but cannot even recognize themselves in the mirror. Somewhere down the line of progression (since we cannot really rank intelligence, let's assume we are progressing in whatever "direction" of intelligence leads to the ability to program [if there is more than one, pick one arbitrarily]) we can choose a brain which gives people the ability to construct rudimentary programs. I admit the line here is extremely fuzzy, because programs can vary in complexity: the least you need is to be able to remember two words: "print 'hi'". At this point our knowledge goes to hell, it's not really clear what functions of our minds are necessary to construct and understand varying levels of program complexity, or whether anything special is required at all. Simple statements like "everybody can program", or "only some can program" gloss over extremely complicated neurological (possibly psychological, as well) issues that won't be resolved for some time, and have no known answer.

We may believe it to be true, but I would say such a belief is _heavily_ influenced by our own experiences, as well as our own socialization with people that share that experience. We can program, why couldn't others? It's tempting to believe that because it was true for us it's true for everyone, but sadly (or not so sadly) this really isn't always true. Stating as fact that everyone can reeks of bias and optimism, because honestly it just isn't that simple.</comment></comment>


"Whale Fail" - Google Books' Error Page - <AUTHOR> http://books.google.com/googlebooks/error.html

<comment><USER2> It's interesting that the whale is becoming the international symbol of "fail". I fully expect Greenpeace to get up in arms about it.

<comment><USER3> I've seen a 25' Baleen whale dead in a river up in Alaska and I can safety say that a dead whale is about as big of a fail as you will ever see. I might have missed the birds carrying it there, but when I saw it they were snacking on him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hate to say it, but I think hackernews has officially jumped the shark. :-(

<comment><USER5> You have two options-- you can submit great stories or you can complain.

Choose wisely.

<comment><USER4> ...or I can find somewhere else to spend my time. :-)

<comment><USER6> scholar.google.com

Citations == Upvotes, Abstract == TLDR, and content is far, far more superior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> SuperNews! did an awesome parody of Twitter and their Fail Whale (4:28 long): <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN2HAroA12w>

<comment><USER8> that was four minutes and twenty eight seconds of pure enjoyment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am more prone to seeing that damned "I'm Sorry..." but we think you're a bot or some dick sending automated queries and now we are killing your access for 24-72 hours.

<comment><USER10> Seriously. Excuse me for enjoying the service so much that I make dozens of quirky queries.

<comment><USER9> See below. There's been a fix.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Turns out the page is a reference to a certain Fail Whale -- <http://www.whatisfailwhale.info/>.

The thing that's bothering me about the fail whale -- all the strings that hold the whale are curved. Is this physically possible? (Assuming the birds can hold the whale in the air). Shouldn't at least one of the strings be a straight line?

<comment><USER12> If the strings have any mass of their own, they will be curved.

<comment><USER13> Not if their starting point is directly above their ending point and there's no wind...

<comment><USER14> Their starting point obviously isn't above their ending point, though.

mansr is right, I've been looking at this all wrong because I assumed the weight of the strings was small compared to the weight of the whale. But if the strings are dense they will curve under their own weight. So we're not looking at a super-light whale, we're looking a regular whale supported by super-heavy strings.

(Where do you get strings so dense that the mass of a short stretch is comparable to the mass of a whale? Why, the same place you get those goddamn birds, of course.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Don't miss the original Fail Whale artist's page - <http://www.yiyinglu.com/>

</comment><comment><USER16> You'd think for a Books fail, one might have had the whale be white. Even better if you have Ahab attached to it with a harpoon, but that might be a little grisly for an error page.

</comment><comment><USER17> Humorous, sure, but I wonder what percentage of Google Books users will get the reference. If I didn't know about Twitter's fail whale, "Whale Fail" might seem totally random.

<comment><USER18> The rest will simply laugh at the Herman Melville reference.

<comment><USER19> No, it doesn't make sense, even if you are familiar with Moby Dick. How is the whale failing? How is there _any_ "fail" associated with the whale? The wording _only_ makes sense if you are already familiar with the Fail Whale meme.

 _Edit:_ Thanks for pointing out the color of the whale. That does make more sense. But still, I object to the unprofessional and derivative wording. Having _any_ sort of whale on an error page is homage enough, without beating anyone over the head with it or confusing people. "We're having trouble locating that whale book" would make more sense, IMO.

<comment><USER14> Note the colour of the whale and the dejected expression on Ahab's shoulders.

"Not another fricking black whale", he's saying. "Whale fail!"

<comment><USER20> fwiw, even the term "fail" alone is still pretty subcultural. i don't entirely agree with alanh, but they are definitely right that many of those who understand the reference are letting their understanding blind them.

this type of blindness is rabidly (albeit understandably) common among technology companies in general. given that that Google reaches _all_ types of users and an error page is meant to inform, i'm not sure the reference is worth the risk.

that all said, i personally find the reference obvious, thus boring. but that's just my opinion. :)

<comment><USER14> _fwiw, even the term "fail" alone is still pretty subcultural. i don't entirely agree with alanh, but they are definitely right that many of those who understand the reference are letting their understanding blind them._

Sure, but it's not necessary to fully understand the page in order to get the message. An error occurred. Why is there a whale involved? Who cares?

The only people I can imagine who _might_ get confused are people who encounter this while trying to read Moby Dick.

<comment><USER20> i never suggested the reference was detrimental to the page, but it is a risk. proven even just by the fact that it's debatable. it is an error page; the person likely got here because they are confused in the first place. this is especially notable given the huge spectrum of Google's audience.

i don't feel strongly either way on the execution. however, i do feel strongly that it would be negligent for the deciding party to not _at least recognize_ that it is a risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if someone will raise a fuss over the harpoon? It would actually not surprise me.

</comment><comment><USER22> google is so going to buy twitter.

<comment><USER23> No.</comment></comment>


So you want to be a consultant? - <AUTHOR> http://twintechs.com/so-you-want-to-be-a-consultant/ <comment><USER2> I don't want to get too caught up in quibbling over definitions, but I do feel like there's a point worth making here: There is a difference between a "consultant" and a "contractor", and I think it's worth being aware of. It may or may not _matter_ to any given individual, but to some it will. And to be fair, some of this is subjective, but here's the way I've observed it over the years...

First of all, what do I mean by "difference between consultant and contractor"? Well, if you go off as a freelance / solo developer, your business card may say "consultant" but you'll still be "just another developer" in the eyes of most clients, and in that role you're really just a contractor. That is to say, you're contract labor... just a cog in the machine, another brick in the wall if you will.

If you're on a 6+ month engagement where you show up every day from 8-5 and write code in a cubicle all day, you're probably more contractor than consultant.

OTOH, a "consultant" is seen as having valuable and highly prized insights and knowledge, and is paid to help solve a problem, or work through a situation... which may or may not involve writing code.. if it does, it would probably be _highly_ specialized code that only a small number of people _could_ write. But ideally, if your "consulting" you would be doing just that - working with a high level executive (CTO, CIO, VP) or at least a mid-level manager, and providing them knowledge and insights to deal with a situation.

If your work product for an engagement is a report or presentation of some sort, and one or more recommendations about what the firm should do, or what choice they should make between a set of competing alternatives, then you're in more of a "consulting" role.

Anyway, that's my take. Like I said, some people won't care about any of this. But it matters in that a "consultant" (per the above definition) is seen as more of a colleague / peer to management, isn't necessarily sitting in a cube from 8-5, and generally isn't seen as "hired labor". If that kind of thing is important to you, I suggest specializing in something where you can be paid to sharing your insights, not just for writing code.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure if I see your point as it relates to the article. Are you saying that you think I should be describing another path apart from the ones I have listed?

I get that the difference between the level of services you're describing for a "consultant" vs. a "contractor," but I think that has more to do with the capacity of the individual contractor/consultant than the label itself.

<comment><USER2> No, not making any comment about the content of the article... it's a great article. This is just more generally addressed to people who are thinking about going into "consulting" or "freelancing" or "contracting" or whatever one wants to call it. I just want to point out that people should be aware that just because they refer to themselves as a "consultant" doesn't mean that they will necessarily be treated as such.

And again, a lot of people may not care about the distinction. For someone who is used to sitting in a cube 8-6 as a W2 employee at Initech, they won't be any worse off if they're sitting in a cube from 8-6 as a C2C freelancer. But for people who think that going freelance is the route to more respect, more freedom, and less of that "cog in the machine" feeling, then I advocate spending some time thinking about how to make that leap to "consultant who gets paid for sharing insights" as opposed to being just another (apparently fungible) nameless, faceless coder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> BTW, two fun books for consultants, and would-be consultants, to read are _House of Lies_ [1] and _The Firm_ [2].

Both are more about "management consulting" (aka, McKinsey, Deloitte, etc.) than what most of us probably have in mind, but they are both entertaining reads in their own respective right.

 _House of Lies_ is a sort of retrospective "tell all" from a former management consultant, and inspired a TV program of the same name. At times it's hard to tell how serious he is, and the TV show is clearly not meant to be a completely accurate documentary (although it may be more truthful than you'd think) but it's a fun read.

 _The Firm_ is basically the history of McKinsey, and while that might sound pretty dry and boring, it turns out to be fairly fascinating. Lots of interesting characters involved, and some fun drama and what-not. And it's interesting to see how McKinsey grew from basically nothing, to being the behemoth it is today.

[1]: [http://www.amazon.com/House-Lies-Management-Consultants- Stea...](http://www.amazon.com/House-Lies-Management-Consultants- Steal/dp/B001QFY1SA/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1396981696&sr=1-1&keywords=house+of+lies)

[2]: [http://www.amazon.com/Firm-McKinsey-Influence-American- Busin...](http://www.amazon.com/Firm-McKinsey-Influence-American- Business/dp/1439190976/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1396981759&sr=1-2&keywords=the+firm)

<comment><USER4> Since we are talking about Consulting a must read is the work on professional service firms by former HBS Prof. David Maister. His website is super ugly ( [http://davidmaister.com/](http://davidmaister.com/) ) but his advice is timeless, esp. since his writing is a lot about building the long-term client- consultant relationship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Question for author and others on HN:

How feasible is it to have remote employees when most of your work is on embedded systems?

I recently started a software consulting group with a couple of partners, and we are starting to hire. I'd like to offer remote positions, but since most of our work is on embedded systems (e.g. medical devices), I don't think this is really feasible. For any given system, there's so much pain in wiring, setting up and debugging a test and development environment, etc. that it doesn't seem worth it. However, maybe I'm overestimating the difficulty and underestimating the benefit. Anyone else have success with remote work that is not primarily on web systems?

<comment><USER3> Is it cost-prohibitive to ship test devices to each of your engineers?

I have worked on an embedded systems team where some of the employees were remote. The biggest challenges were with sharing details for reproducing specific issues, but emailing videos and lots of conference calls made it a functional environment.

<comment><USER5> No, for most of our projects, the test systems are small enough so that it's not cost-prohibitive to ship. I just know that every time we bring up a new system or board, there can be days of debugging stupid problems, and that's with everyone and all our electronics gear in the same building.

You say the environment was "functional". For you, did the advantages of having the larger applicant market outweigh the disadvantages?

<comment><USER3> For me, it's hard to say because a lot of other issues led to problems. The project had poor management overall, and we were also dealing with language barriers and vastly different timezones. I think in our case it wasn't worth it because were located in San Jose and there was plenty of talent we could have hired locally.

So, if you're based somewhere crawling with tech talent and the nature of your product already attracts it, then it very well might be a net-negative to operate your team remotely.

Otherwise, I think you'll find it's worth navigating some of these setup issues to be able to hire the best from wherever you're based.

<comment><USER5> Fair enough. We are in Orange County (CA) so there is enough tech talent here to justify keeping our candidate search local. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am the author of this article, and I'm happy to answer any questions about tech consulting right here.

<comment><USER6> Just a question on #1. What are the opportunities for a new grad going into one of these companies like Accenture, Deloitte or IBM? Do you just take a spot as a cog in the machine, or do you actually get valuable consulting/client experience?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have interned at PWC and Deloitte and then after graduation, I worked at Deloitte for 5 years. I found that I was able to do valuable work right after joining and even as an intern. As an intern at PWC I did ethical hacking and had a good deal of oversight, but was able to own writing up documentation and participated in client calls. For a later project that summer, I had direct client contact and was seen as a strong contributor to the team. At Deloitte, my experience was similar as an intern but with slightly more ownership. Once joining Deloitte after graduation, I was holding one on one meetings and design sessions on a regular basis with the client about 4 months in. Initially, my project was more focused on data analysis and while I did have interactions with the client, they were limited as I did not need to interact with them much. Experience will certainly vary from person to person as the responsibility given to someone will change by project and also with how well management knows you, at least earlier in your career. After about a year or two, it is not uncommon to be owning an entire piece of the project and it goes up from there. They probably wouldn't hire you if they didn't feel they could put you in front of a client early on.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the reply - I asked because I'm considering an offer for entry- level consulting at a big IT firm, and I wanted to have a sense of what I'd be doing. My background is in petrochemicals, so I figure I'll be in that domain for a bit. Ideally, I'd like to move around in different domains and see what I like best. Do you think an entry-level hire would get a decent chance to explore?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I went through a placement person for my time as a consultant. He handled the accounting, medical insurance, taxes (all withholding), and paid me 70% of the bill rate. If you went full up 1099 he passed on 90%. It was a pretty nice arrangement for me at that time in my life.

Do remember, many of the employees you deal with will think you are a member of the true oldest profession (Genesis 3:1).

<comment><USER8> Do you know how you would go about these days to find a placement person?

<comment><USER7> No idea, I happened into to it by being invited by a friend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Some comments and questions as well here (total noobie):

1) I can't comment on the viability of getting great clients by going big consulting firms, but it feels quite indirect. And probably can't expand developing experience as noted.

2) Seems very ideal and in fact something I'm trying to pursue right now, but I suffer from the classic chicken-egg problem where I can't get clients without having prior clients.

3) Seems more like a natural extension once you grow your network enough

4) Sweet spot. I'd love to find a small consultancy, you'd get the best of both worlds, steady flow of clients, but nearly the same flexibility as being an independent consultant. Are there resources to finding those unicorn consultancies? I'm doing mostly Rails/full-stack work, but most consultancies seem to be either local or not that flexible with part-time/remote

<comment><USER3> "Are there resources to finding those unicorn consultancies?"

Great question. AFAIK, there are not.

I have tended to only find out about them by word of mouth after spending some time in a particular area of specialization. Back when I was doing Flex, Universal Mind and Digital Primates were well-known in that arena. You tended to see them in conferences, and some of their employees were the ones who authored the best known technical books on Flex. So there is one idea: find out where some of the renowned bloggers, authors, and developers in your field of interest do their consulting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm a technical project manager now (used to be a web stack developer). Does this advice apply to PMs as well?

<comment><USER3> I am a tech lead & developer who wrote this based on my own experience, so I can't guarantee that all of it does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Could anyone point to some good resources for drafting contracts (templates, apps, ect.)?

<comment><USER2> [http://www.amazon.com/Consultant-Independent-Contractor- Agre...](http://www.amazon.com/Consultant-Independent-Contractor-Agreements- Stephen/dp/1413316220/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1396981975&sr=1-3&keywords=contractor+nolo)

[http://www.amazon.com/Service-Agreements-SMB-Consultants- Ser...](http://www.amazon.com/Service-Agreements-SMB-Consultants- Services/dp/0976376024/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1396982054&sr=1-2&keywords=consultant+agreements)</comment></comment>