Two creators are not always better than one - <AUTHOR> http://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/2-founders-are-not-always-better-1 <comment><USER3> Critical detail beneath the fold:

> The research is based on a survey of creators for thousands of Kickstarter > projects between 2009 and May 2015.

It would be crazy to generalize from this to most VC-backed (or seeking) businesses... and another thing still to compare the massively larger set of small businesses started by individuals without major external funding. Different kinds of firms face incredibly different pressures and failure modes at every stage.

<comment><USER4> Exactly! This headline is totally misleading!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the reason Y-combinator and others like to see two or more founders is that at least those two people are willing to work with/for each other. It is a rough filtering mechanism, and probably a very useful one, especially if your philosophy is that technical people make great business founders.

More honestly it is "Technical people can make great startup founders, but first filter on if they can recruit one other person to work with them." In any team of two, most of the time there was one person that had the idea and drive and asked the other to join them. A technical person with this type of skill, that is willing to spit the ownership of a company with someone else, is much more likely to have the skills and talents to run a high growth startup than someone who has not recruited their first person to join them.

I would imagine that when interviewing a pair of founders, whether consciously or not, people place one of them into the CEO role and the other into the CTO role. Don't most startup teams split up work like this pretty quickly?

<comment><USER6> I think it is affirmative action for non-technical cofounders if you ask me.

The non-technical cofounders who become VCs want to support people who remind them of themselves in the past.

This is why founder dating is like dating at a tech school. There are many non-technical cofounders who bring nothing to the table except the desire to make a huge amount of money. That is something to work with, but it is by no means enough in a world where billions of people are hungry.

<comment><USER7> Paul Graham had a great article on Lisp. In his view, Lisp programmers love Lisp because it offers extremely powerful features in a way that other programming languages don't. Those who don't understand Lisp are (rightly) skeptical. Their thought process goes something like, "I don't need these features, and I do my work just fine". In other words, they don't know what they're missing out on, and so it appears useless to them.

I've found this pattern of human thinking to repeat itself in countless places in my life. From politics to programming and everything in between, systems look like unusable chaos when you don't understand it and have not been able to derive a controlled benefit from it. Once you learn how to use it, everything falls into place, and you immediately see how blind others are to the system as you now understand it (the curse of knowledge).

Working with people effectively is a skill, and one as rare as competent programming. And when you don't know how to do it, it looks useless or arbitrary.

<comment><USER8> The problem is there's no easy way to know which things will actually make you more productive and which won't. Will switching to lisp make me more productive or will it just mean I have to re-write 30 libraries from scratch that aren't written in lisp? Will that productivity multiply as I hire more people or will the fact that it's hard to find lisp programmers mean my options to expand will be limited? Does lisp work well on large teams or does the fact that it's typeless and every programmer makes their own DSL macros mean that it's actually harder to share knowledge?

Will switching from framework X to framework Y really increase my productivity? Is it a matter of not understanding how Y is so much more efficient to build thing than X or is it just hyperbole/marketing/cult. Switching to different product management software, different game engine, different 3d software, different wiki system, etc etc .. How can I know. If I believed everyone I'd be switching every week.

<comment><USER7> For Lisp in particular, you're probably right about many of the tradeoffs. You won't benefit from a large ecosystem, you won't find as many job candidates (albeit likely a higher quality of average candidate), and it's probably not the best language for large decentralized teams that need to coordinate development (although, what language is?).

The lack of knowing you reference is exactly what I'm riffing on here. There are people who have leveraged Lisp features to huge benefit, and there's just no easy way to explain those features to people who don't use Lisp. "There's no way to say it in that language". To outsiders then, Lisp looks like a back- patting cult with no tangible benefits and yet an air of elitism. Similarly, those with "people skills" can't always explain the mental framework and skills they've built up to make themselves excellent at working with other people, but they can easily recognize those skills in another.

EDIT: Here's the article. [http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html)

The whole thing is well worth the read, but for what I'm talking about here, you could skip down to read about the Blub paradox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm a teaching assistant for a class called Entrepreneurial Finance at my alma mater, which always has a good draw of entrepreneur and investor guest speakers.

One of the recent speakers was Kent Collier, CEO of Reorg ([https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/reorg- research#secti...](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/reorg- research#section-overview)), an information service to the buy-side that focuses on arcane and opaque information, particularly bankruptcy. They are a smash hit that only took $1.3M in financing that now does $1M a week in revenues.

His view is that solo founders and preferable. The reason he gave was that it takes such a clear and unambiguous vision, with total dedication to that vision, that any space between multiple founders creates drag and can kill the startup.

<comment><USER10> > takes such a clear and unambiguous vision, with total dedication to that > vision

This is very true. For most startups building a product is not just an ongoing engineering/business development task as much as it is an ongoing product development task. Your vision of the product (if you have one) is something that is most difficult to share with others. I think a great entrepreneur is closer to being an artist than to anything else: imagine two painters trying to create one painting at the same time. At times it can get as absurd.

That is not to say you don't need co-founders but maybe, just maybe, sometimes one of the founders needs a slightly dominating position in defining (and refining) the product in the process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> From the article:

>The research is based on a survey of creators for thousands of Kickstarter projects between 2009 and May 2015.

From the paper:

>This suggests that the taken-for-granted assumption among scholars that entrepreneurship is best performed by teams should be reevaluated, with implications for theories of team performance and entrepreneurial strategy.

The claims in the paper are pretty limited and based on a questionably representative sample. Extrapolating to "solo founders are better" seems like a leap at this stage. The results seem interesting and worthy of further evaluation, though!

<comment><USER12> How many high-growth companies came out of Kickstarter? The ones that jump to mind are Oculus and Pebble, but I can't think of others.

<comment><USER10> Interestingly enough, both Oculus and Pebble were started by sole founders. Others even though officially titled "co-founders" joined later if I'm not mistaken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Two founders are better than one when one of the key problems you will face is hiring. One founder hasn't proven they can recruit. Two founders have proved they can convince at least one other idiot to join them.

This is important for VC businesses, where hiring quickly is the only way to grow. But it's not important for smaller businesses, where cash management matters more.

<comment><USER14> Is being able to recruit the most important trait? I think it is overall selling that matters. Why can selling potential not be demonstrated by other means? Playing with human relationships can come later.

<comment><USER15> I'd argue that "recruiting" is a form of selling. Especially in the beginning, when you're selling the dream...

<comment><USER14> In the initial phase, we can only sell to people who trust us. Becoming a co- founder is a big commitment and a challenge to long-term relationships. Why can't it be something like, get five customers you know using your product/service. I have been through a bad co-founder divorce and I think it is bad advice that co-founder will increase your success chances. I think the mostly one co-founder gets a free(er) ride. Werner Vogels in his startup school lecture says "Have you seen a group with one head monkey and a leiutenant monkey?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think most of the research like these are pretty much useless. This is because they assume that the success of a startup has correlation with the founders/co-founders - there well might be, but imo the biggest correlation with success is time.

Some startups go bust when they are launched in an unfavourable climate - sometimes the tech is too raw, othertimes the market is just not ready. Move them a couple of years before or after and they take off. Lots of startups which take off, dont keep the momentum - market forces disrupt startups a lot more than the other way around.

When a startup takes off, often for no fault of the founders/co-founders - <USER2> creates a strong incentive for the founders to keep aligned and work together. If a startup does not take off it creates a strong incentive for founders to NOT work together.

Often when a startup takes off - or if it raises a big round from a huge VC it creates a strong signal for co-founders to get on board. Case in point is dropbox - they got accepted into YC and it allowed the founder to 'hire' a co- founder.

<comment><USER17> You're right but the investors and founders can't control for time.

so you optimize for the variables you CAN control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am a solo founder. And I didn't see any mention of actual income value of the "successful" businesses in this article. I suspect you can easily get more successful very small businesses a leg up in sheer numbers alone just from personality conflicts wrecking multi-founder businesses.

I had a partner very early on, and it didn't work out. And it was really nice having someone on board that really cared about success the same way I did. Not an employee, client, friend or family member. But another "me" as part of the group.

If I could go back in time, and truly fix the problems, I would rather have kept my co-founder.

Also, they end with this, so maybe there is more to this story.

> _...are already working on their next paper, which looks specifically at co- > founding teams, and what factors determine their success and failure._

<comment><USER19> In your view, why didn't it work out?

<comment><USER18> Personal problems with co-founder. I wasn't mature enough (I really had a lot of personal issues myself) to truly help that person overcome their issues. Eventually he stopped being productive and just played video games. He knew he was screwing me over, but he simply couldn't get out of his own personal funk. (it was the days of Everquest and large group raids, it was really bad)

In retrospect, I really really wish I had been more patient and actually tried to encourage him and get him back on track.

I learned a valuable lesson from this though, to not let my temporary grief blind me to other people's distress.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The title of the article should be: "2 founders are not always better than 1 _for Kickstarter_ "

Also, they didn't define success. I bet it was just getting the project funded. The bar for VC success and Kickstarter are very different. Kickstarter doesn't have growth and ROI requirements. This might be a proxy for a lifestyle business, but _not_ VC funded companies.

<comment><USER21> > Also, they didn't define success.

It's mentioned in the paper. [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3107898](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3107898)

> First, we examine continuation of business operations at the time of the > survey (The options were: "Still in operation as an ongoing for-profit > business," "Still in operation as an ongoing not-forprofit, artistic, or > other type of endeavor," "Still in operation, but acquired by/merged with > another organization," "Not operating as a result of being acquired > by/merged with another organization," "Not operating, temporarily stopped > operations," "Not operating, permanently stopped operations," and "Not > operating for another reason.")

> We also used reported non-crowdfunding revenue based on a 12-point > categorical scale ranging from none to over $10 million, using this as a > direct measure of company success.

> The first model is an unconditional model, and reveals that solo founders do > no worse with respect to average income than teams of three or more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you're lacking a skill, hire an employee, don't invite a second founder. He who manages the accounting controls the company.

If you must have a co-founder, makes sure he works as long/hard as you do.

<comment><USER23> This. I hate hearing all this co-founder stuff all the time. While I'm sure it works for some people, I've found the whole co-founder thing to be a terrible idea. The only positive benefit I've found is having someone to talk to about what you're working on, but I haven't found co-founders to be helpful other than that in the cheerleader department.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What I wonder (and search for "hours" had 0 hits) is the number of hours solo founders put in vs 2+ founders. I founded a company with 5 founds, 3 of which were in daily operations. It was a lot of work and I can't imagine doing a lot of that early work by myself (until there was enough revenue to support hiring).

<comment><USER25> As a solo founder of a SaaS launching next month, I tracked my time and am at 1350ish hour in the past 10 months. This is my first startup so I made some mistakes along the way with future creep so deadlines got pushed. I worked around 35 - 40 hours outside of my full-time job a week. Felt really burnt out so skipped one month of work 3 months ago but finally trying to get into the mindset of sales and marketing.

I do think though this is all entirely dependent on the scope of your project.

<comment><USER26> so you've been working 80 hours a week for almost a year now?

<comment><USER27> This is the norm in any high-growth startups, or at least it was for me. A few people seem to fall into things that don't require working all the time, but 16 hour days and two day weekends seem completely normal to me now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Having gone through the solo founder -> co-founder -> back to solo founder route with my latest (bootstrapped) startup, I can honestly concur that:

* The most _contentful_ working time for me was when I had a co-founder. It was good to bounce ideas off someone, and having another person with equal share in the business increased accountability and my motivation to keep pushing.

* The most _effective_ working time for me was as a solo-founder. I felt that I wasn't compromising every decision I made to keep my co-founder happy, and that I could make decisions much more quickly and change direction whenever I wanted.

I think the main problem with the time with a co-founder was that we were too similar. We worked great together and got on well, but there wasn't that spark that pushed the business forward. Since being on my own again and pushing against the limitation of my own personality and abilities, I have managed to grow the business trifold since my co-founder left.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think VC prefer two founders because it's simply easier to have leverage on them than on a single guy.

<comment><USER14> \--TRUTH--

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'll share my story.

Solo technical founder. Hired my first sales employee long after I established a product-market fit, got a few paying customers and $300K in annual revenue. I gave him a co-founder title, but we were never equal. It was one of the best decision that I have made. The company would not have been able to survive if 2 of us were equal - we would have gone out of business. Instead, 1 year after I pushed him out we had a moderately successful exit (8 figure).

I think that having a solo founder is beneficial AS LONG AS that one person is great. Otherwise you, as a VC, kind of bet that at least 1 of them will be great and it will all work out.

</comment><comment><USER31> Based on success rates, 1 founder is best. Then 2. Then 3. Etc. One founder that's in their late 30s (ie, 15-20 years experience and effectively retired due to savings).

The trend of having 2+ founders is a compromise and a result of BS mumbled by VCs.

</comment><comment><USER32> Am a solo founder of a bootstrapped business. One advantage is that you only need half the profit for the equivalent income to each founder. This gets even more important in small niches.

A downside is during those times when you work less, little happens.

</comment><comment><USER33> "Solo founders are twice as likely to succeed in business as co-founders" by research from Jason Greenberg, PhD '09, and Ethan Mollick, PhD '10 and MBA '04.

:-)

hmmm... co-researchers to research on NO need of co-researchers/founders...

</comment><comment><USER23> The reason YC is always talking about finding co-founders is because Paul Graham had co-founders. Had Paul Graham gone at things alone, YC would probably be preaching the virtues of flying solo.

</comment><comment><USER34> I wonder if this has more to do with what level of success is sufficient for individuals vs teams. If you're doing this for money, teams need to be 2x+ as profitable. This would track with the result that larger teams are more likely to start have a non-profit.

In a world where you're swinging for the fences, this model would still argue for teams.

</comment><comment><USER35> A startup has three main functions:

        - define the product
        - build the product
        - sell the product

As long as you can successfully execute all those functions, it doesn't matter how many people you have doing it, and it becomes the matter of resource availability.

</comment><comment><USER36> Besides rare exceptions (that do exist!), there is nothing a co-founder can give that you can't hire.

<comment><USER37> Apart from input and challenge that you have to listen to. That might sound like a bad thing but there are plenty of successful founders who would have gone off the rails early if they didn't have someone else asking, "do we really need to do that"?

<comment><USER14> do we really need to build a company?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The most important part of the article is that is shatters the myth of having a co-founder to succeed. The stats don't say that two founders are better than one, it fact is the opposite, more than one is WORSE.

So what would be my take-away; if you are thinking of pursuing a business, and have the energy, contacts and network to make it, go ahead. However if having help from a valuable co-founder who you trust is possible, then compromise, and get a helping hand. Otherwise is better to go it alone.

</comment><comment><USER4> Lol this is a hilarious way of defining success. This data proves that if you want to have an "ongoing company" a few years after starting, you're better off going solo. But how many people, when starting a company, dream of reaching "ongoing" status? Why are they ignoring the data from the most valuable, most impactful, and most innovative startups?

</comment><comment><USER39> Check out my article on it, too [https://medium.com/@haftrm/successful-solo- founders-5c7f60ef...](https://medium.com/@haftrm/successful-solo- founders-5c7f60ef6a0e)

It is true in many ways, not just Kickstarter.

</comment><comment><USER40> Even though the method can be challenged, I think it is great that people are trying to understand entrepreneurship based on data. Most founder and startup advice is not based on any data. YC could have a great impact here I believe with the vast amount of data they should have

</comment><comment><USER41> When you think about how 80% of startups fail because of founder issues, this makes a lot of sense. However, to some of the other points made here, investors like to see that you are able to convince at least one person to go all in with you.

</comment><comment><USER27> Ten cynical reasons why VC's like to see multiple founders:

10\. Sometimes (perhaps rarely) a better idea comes from a group.

9\. There really is a lot of work to go around.

8\. If one of the founders is willing to sell, take more investment or worse terms, perhaps they can apply pressure to the ones who are reluctant.

7\. Most humans like to be around other humans, so cooperation is the norm among people who self-group.

6\. Expertise can be complementary and allow a natural division of labor in the early days.

5\. Hard feelings are more evenly distributed as the founders get pushed out or diluted one-by-one; push out the weakest contributors and least resistant first.

4\. More founders = reduced risk and decreased dependency on one possibly loose cannon

3\. If the board stops getting along with one founder, perhaps another will be a better fit. (see: Twitter)

2\. Multiple complementary founders are rarely of one mind, and therefore it's easy to split control.

.. and the number one reason why VC's like multiple founders:

1\. Extra founders cost them _nothing_

</comment><comment><USER42> > Two creators are not always better than one

Agreed, but I want more than one _Elon Musk_

</comment><comment><USER43> Is anyone aware of similar data on the YC company set?

<comment><USER44> YC pushes against solo founders. Dropbox was a notable one (even though Drew Houston added a "co-founder" right about when they were accepted...)

<comment><USER45> Investors in general prefer multiple founders, and they want the founders to have roughly equal equity too. In part this is because they want the ability to push a founder out if he/she isn't working out.

<comment><USER46> I also hear that it's protection against a founder quitting. Though this to me seems dubious as I would guess that sole founders are much less likely to quit prematurely (for obvious reasons) than a co-founder.

<comment><USER47> Really doubt that this is true.

<comment><USER28> Speaking from nearly 40 years experience over several businesses - this is VERY true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Every best practice has an exception

</comment><comment><USER49> But are solos happier?</comment>


Automata: Like the Game of Life, but with violence - <AUTHOR> http://www.automata.website/ <comment><USER2> This game is quite different from Conway's Game of Life because it's not deterministic. During a turn, cells will rely on Math.random to find whether to move or divide; the direction that the cell move into is also randomized.

<comment><USER3> I agree, you can call it cellular automata if you want but it is false advertising to draw any comparison to Conway's Life. Still, it is fun an interesting but I would have found it more compelling if it didn't have a random component. That's part of the magic of Conway's life that complex results arise out of simple, deterministic rules.

FYI: There have been many competitive versions of Life written over the years. Here's one: (Life As War)[[http://www.ctrl-alt- dev.nl/Projects/LifeAsWar/LifeAsWar.html](http://www.ctrl-alt- dev.nl/Projects/LifeAsWar/LifeAsWar.html)]

<comment><USER4> "There have been many competitive versions of Life written over the years."

Mistaking "Conway's Game of Life" for "Cellular Automata in general" can produce sub-optimal results. The same thing that makes Life so interesting is that from its simple rules, extremely surprisingly things result. In some sense it is in the class of maximally interesting "suprisingness" as it is Turing-complete. But this same surprisingness and the wolly, humanly- unpredictable way it manifests make it almost entirely useless for game playing.

The general idea of cellular automata can be turned into game form, but you're better off defining your own rulesets, which can produce things like [http://chir.ag/stuff/sand/](http://chir.ag/stuff/sand/). I also remember playing a game that actually resembles the linked page, but where each player moved a mouse cursor around, the cells tried to follow each corresponding player's mouse cursor, and the various blobs would eat each other. Probably one of the most clear examples of a game I god good at (relative to my opponents) and couldn't even begin to verbalize my strategy, even though I had one.

<comment><USER5> The Powder Toy, more or less the state of the art in falling sand games now, has a raft of Life rulesets. I found it quite interesting to pit them together; they have no particular rules for directly interacting with one another, but the way they take advantage of life and death and empty space nonetheless can produce some fascinating interactions anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cool to watch, though this is a fairly straightforward model of complex contagion on a finite grid. It's similar to Conway's Game of Life in that there's a grid and local rules, but beyond that, the nature of the rules results in a different kind of behavior.

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

[http://www.ladamic.com/netlearn/NetLogo4/DiffusionCompetitio...](http://www.ladamic.com/netlearn/NetLogo4/DiffusionCompetition.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Selfish feature requests:

+Better color scheme by default makes it easier on the eyes than full- saturation RED, GREEN, MAGENTA +Pick from existing colors to draw new cells +Time-series charts of per-color population counts +Draw on chart with default pointer instead of text select +Reset to default button

Overall this is really interesting to look at. It doesn't really seem like it's that close to Conway's Game of Life, but it's an interesting nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER8> reminds me a lot of an old multiplayer network game called "liquid war"

[http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar](http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj65vUy3rK8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj65vUy3rK8)

<comment><USER9> I loved that game! I must've sunk countless hours playing against the AI's. For being so simple, it's remarkably fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Offtopic, but ".website" is pretty much the worst TLD conceivable.

<comment><USER11> Why so?

<comment><USER10> If it's used for a website, it's redundant. If not, it's inaccurate.

<comment><USER12> So it's the same as www in front?

<comment><USER13> I disagree. "www" (just like ".com") denotes a URL. Something.anything doesn't look like an address unless you put "[http://"](http://") in front, which is too technical for most people. I think "www" and ".com" are here to stay.

<comment><USER14> "www" is generally taken to mean (world-wide-)web server (as opposed to ftp, gopher, telnet, smtp, imap or just "mail" server). So you could say needing both "http(s)://" and "www" is redundant.

Similarly, [http://ftp.company.com](http://ftp.company.com) is a bit of a misnomer -- if it was an ftp server, you'd have to use "ftp://" \-- but of course a single host might run several different daemons, or a daemon might speak several different protocols.

I can appreciate that for many people "www" and ".com" 'denotes a URL', and also agree that without context, "Something.anything" doesn't really look like an URL. I fail to see how that's a problem within the context of hypertext (where the expected behaviour is clicking a link).

[Ed:spelling]

<comment><USER15> [http://ftp.company.com](http://ftp.company.com) makes perfect sense. It is the http listing of the files stored on the server, linking to the actual files served using FTP. FTP isn't made for dynamic content and the file list is just that. The main role of the domain is FTP serving, though.

<comment><USER13> Good example!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Seems as if pretty much every state is a steady state. Would be interesting if some were predators and others prey, with some feature that allows them to "starve"

<comment><USER17> Watch longer. I drew a small block of pink and it took over a quarter of the board, then red swept everything.

I spent an unreasonable amount of time rooting for pink.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I coded nearly the same game as a Java desktop application in 2009. Can't find the binary anymore though. It's lots of fun if you can tune some parameters, like make one species more fertile (reproduces every time, while others reproduce only 50% of the time into empty space, etc), more aggressive (can consume when surrounds an enemy from only two sides), or more strategic (tries to make sure not to get its fighting line broken up by a lucky enemy).

</comment><comment><USER16> I made a video on how to "win" at Automata with minimalist moves:

[http://youtu.be/hQhXFHmXDaA](http://youtu.be/hQhXFHmXDaA)

</comment><comment><USER19> The big surprise to me is that stability is possible in this game. Most of these games end in less than 60 seconds. The first several games I let run had unstable dynamics: one side gained an advantage and grew and grew until it took over the whole board, usually in less than a minute. But later, through experimentation, I found that stability is possible.

The corners seem to be especially stable. I waited until the game had consolidated to 3 colors, then I created 4 new colors and added them to the corners (I slowed the game down to 500,000 milliseconds so I could have time to paint the corners, then I went back to 30 milliseconds). With 4 corners held weakly by 4 colors, and 3 large colors holding the center, the game is remarkably stable. I watched it, in the background, for several hours. One of the corners disappeared, but the other 3 corners held on. I went off to bed. In the morning, 2 more of the corners had been swallowed, but 1 of them still survived. These 4 surviving colors have been battling now for over 24 hours. The game has reached equilibrium.

</comment><comment><USER20> Hmm in some scenarios the colours would really benefit from forming an alliance... :) It's fun to watch how different stories unfold.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you put a 4 x 8 purple block in the center of each color, the outcome will always be purple taking over the entire map. It seems like a fairly complex, and similar tactics in Go can achieve victory (victory being purple overtaking the map).

<comment><USER21> That could be true, I won everytime I played the purple stones in Go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting. In this simulation, fighting on multiple fronts is optimal because then no single enemy can surround you. Funny. Leads to drawing along the borders being more significant than drawing within a solid colour block.

<comment><USER23> Interestingly, being surrounded (the 4x8 rectangle others have posted about) is much stronger of a position than I expected. I thought my 4x8 rectangles would be quickly consumed, but instead they expanded into enemy territory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sugarscape is another interesting cellular automata model.

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

<comment><USER25> I implemented sugarscape some years ago and my findings contradicted the thesis of the book; instead of having some robust emergent results (like a Pareto distribution of wealth, IIRC), the results presented in the book could only be produced by carefully tweaking some parameters of the simulation. Furthermore, when implementing sugarscape I realized that the book didn't even specify what values were used for those parameters. While that shouldn't matter if the effects were robust, they were not. Unfortunately I don't remember the exact results, but I hope to look into this again when I have more free time. In sum, I thought the book was very interesting, but was quite disappointed when I tried to replicate (and extend) the experiments. Such is science... :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> There is something wrong with the game, the sum of the number of cells of each color is not constant.

Also it for some reason got almost impossible to paint the board one color; beginning was easy enough. A splash was enough. Somehow the "end-game" is nearly impossible to complete. The very frustrating input method does not help the least.

Otherwise, nice idea!

<comment><USER27> Is: "Cells surrounded by three or more cells belonging to the same opponent are consumed", not the reason for the non-constant # of cells?

I imagine that is the author's language for the fact cells get captured and turned. In fact, I don't see how it would possible for the # to stay constant; how would anyone color ever "win"(take over the board) if such a requirement was maintained?

I also may not be correctly following your questions logic...

<comment><USER28> There are xxxx number of cells.

The number displayed in each color block on the left is like a score, the number of cells it has.

Adding together those numbers != xxxx.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Ooh! Awesome :)

I've got some similar demos for rileyjshaw.com/terra that I haven't thrown up yet, I'll see if I get a chance to this week. One fun advantage of doing this in Terra is that it supports periodic boundaries (meaning that there aren't any "safe" edges)

</comment><comment><USER30> The same effect could be achieved by taking a low resolution image and each turn, making each pixel the color of a random neighbor. The only thing this has to do with the Game of Life is both can be simulated by copying one array to another and applying some simple rules.

</comment><comment><USER31> It would be a neat feature to allow us to upload an image of the right size as a seed for the game

<comment><USER32> That's a nice concept. Seeing how various seed images play out could be really interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's interesting dumping groups of cells into different parts of the board and seeing how it reacts - a group in the middle of one color gets absorbed quickly, a group along the border of several colors hangs on for much longer, etc.

</comment><comment><USER34> Nice! I made something similar except it was more about how people are influenced by ideas of people around them and less about violence. link: [http://goo.gl/H0Wqxo](http://goo.gl/H0Wqxo)

</comment><comment><USER20> Without pausing, just by rapidly adding pink cells at the borders between two colours, it is possible to make one of them go extinct.

[http://i.imgur.com/q2OIJNh.png](http://i.imgur.com/q2OIJNh.png)

</comment><comment><USER35> Practise starting revolutions: colour the whole board white, and see which minimal combinations of black will eventually take over the board.

</comment><comment><USER36> A bit like A. K. Dewdney's idea of the " _voters_ " simluation (as seen implemented in the old _xlockmore_ program mode "voters").

</comment><comment><USER37> Interesting - red got blue and green into a corner, had time to gobble them up for itself, and then went on to defeat black!

</comment><comment><USER38> Surprisingly interesting to play and watch. I would like more tools to add cells(mspaint-like)

<comment><USER39> Indeed; I found that trying to help a side by adding to its numbers near to its borders typically resulted in that side dying off faster... unexpected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Every time I add (pink) cells, they are always immediately killed. Is that intended?

<comment><USER41> Pause it and add a blob. My pink blob made blue go extinct ):

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Needs population count as a live graph.

<comment><USER37> And an API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> 5 minutes:

The hordes of Lime Green grow stronger every second. We face a growing threat from the Blacks and the Blues to the east. I shall fight for a few more minutes.

10 minutes:

We face complete annihilation from the unstoppable growth from Blacks. Lime Green horde is nearly decimated, it was only a few minutes ago they seemed unstoppable.

15 minutes:

Lime Green have been completely annihilated! We are caught between the epic battle between Blacks and Blues. I rest for a few minutes.

20 minutes:

We are caught in a stalemate with the Blacks. The eastern front bears the crushing weight of Blues onslaught of attacks and raids. The night is getting cold, we are tired.</comment>


Horizon – realtime open-source back end for JavaScript apps by RethinkDB - <AUTHOR> https://horizon.io/ <comment><USER2> That might be interesting, or it might not be. No way to tell because this is a sign-up link for an email list, not a product.

If you absolutely have to post things we can't play with, please at least include a detailed blog post.

</comment><comment><USER3> Only time will tell, signed up. I love RethinkDB. Keep up with the awesome work!

</comment><comment><USER4> This strikes me in a similar manner as those computer-generated CS papers. Like when I saw this page, I started thinking it's just some random technobabble attached to an email "signup" harvester. I dunno, for fun or something. The words there, anyways, mean nothing as far as anyone can tell.</comment>


Ask HN: Presentation Software? - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
What type of software do people here generally use for presentations?
I'm looking for something exceptionally simple and quick to learn.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Prezi.

Quick to learn and it's beautiful. however, it's not for everyone, limited features and it's not a go-to for every type of presentation. It takes 2-4x time to build effective presentations, but spacial movements allow for greater communication.</comment>


The hidden cost of Google App Engine - <AUTHOR> http://spotbloq.blogspot.de/2012/08/the-hidden-cost-of-google-app-engine.html <comment><USER2> I'm a summer intern at Khan Academy working on various App Engine projects. My uneducated guess is that we're one of the platform's bigger customers.

One of GAE's biggest downsides is lack of control: unlike EC2 where you get to mold vanilla Linux installations to suit your needs, your application must fit GAE's service model through and through. But by giving up some of those freedoms you receive a whole lot of awesome in return. Khan Academy has successfully leveraged App Engine to scale to millions of users without hiring a single sysadmin or spending too much time worrying about anything ops- related. We're able to handle traffic spikes like our 60 Minutes appearance and the launch of our new computer science curriculum (<http://khanacademy.org/cs>) with no sweat. To deploy the site, any developer (or our friendly CI bot) can simply run our "deploy.py" and wait a few minutes, then get back to spending time on the product. We haven't had to think once about whether or not the database can handle the write load we throw at it; the App Engine Datastore is uniquely worry-free in that regard. (Well, I'm sure Google SREs worry about it plenty, but we don't have to.)

The GAE platform is a moving target, which is a Very Good Thing because it demonstrates Google's investment in the product and indicates that the App Engine team truly understands developer pain points and is working to solve them. I'll point to backends and Guido van Rossum's work on the NDB datastore interface as features that give GAE developers a little more freedom to use the platform in the most efficient way possible. If you're going to complain about lock-in, you might as well go all the way and take advantage of everything you get in return. You might find that it's not worth your time to replicate all of that elsewhere, especially when doing so on top of an IaaS provider like AWS introduces its own set of inefficiencies and points of failure.

P.S.: If you'd like to come work with great people on great stuff without worrying about keeping the site up, we're hiring: <http://khanacademy.org/careers>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yay, always wanted to hear someone from Khan Academy talk about GAE :)

Of course you guys are already at the millions-of-users use case, but KA is a (the?) great example of an app where GAE worked out from start to finish, which I find encouraging.

<comment><USER2> Whether or not you use it, it's all about understanding the tradeoffs you're making. It's worked out for us :)

If you want more from us about GAE, our lead developer Ben Kamens' blog is full of good stuff: <http://bjk5.com>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> App Engine teaches you to do things right from the start. While it's true you may have a horrendously sub optimal design if you don't take care, there are nice profiling tools you can use to optimize the hottest paths.

As it would be with any platform, making the wrong assumptions about your data model will bite you, and do so a lot more painfully if you wait too long to correct them.

But, it has to be said setting up a similarity scalable infrastructure on a IaaS would also cost you a lot, even if you are not counting your own hours as the sysadmin.

Finally, if you succeed and your hosting bill starts to cost a fortune, you might as well roll out your own Typhoonae or Appscale.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm saving $100k+ a year by using GAE and not having to hire a fulltime sysadmin (or pretend to be one myself). When I hear 'my company had me switch to AWS/Heroku because of GAE costs'... I keep thinking... well, they could probably stick with GAE and get rid of you (and your manager) and save even more money.

A bit of sub optimal design expense is nothing compared with hiring employees and it is relatively easy to refactor code to fix parts of your app that are costing money. I'm sorry the OP has to actually spend a bit of time thinking about how much implementing this new feature is going to cost, but that sounds like basic sound engineering principles to me.

In the end, I'd rather focus on adding features to my webapp than getting paged in the middle of the night when AWS/Heroku goes down or my site suddenly gets a lot of requests. From that aspect, GAE has been a lifesaver for us. =)

<comment><USER5> Do you feel like GAE and Heroku make different trade-offs in this regard? I ask because the benefits of GAE you describe sound like reasons I like Heroku, but you see to be suggesting that Heroku is higher maintenance in some way.

Just curious as a Heroku user who wants to keep tabs on GAE.

<comment><USER4> Beyond the free tier of Heroku, I feel like it is significantly more expensive than GAE.

Recently I've been doing a fair bit of traffic and I'm still below the $2.10/week minimum. If I get even more traffic I don't have to touch anything to deal with it. Heroku doesn't auto-scale quite the way that GAE does, it isn't transparent. Yes, I know there are tools to help with this, but GAE does it automatically.

A key point for me is that Heroku doesn't have the GAE Datastore. This might be fine for you, but the hope for my company is to get as large as possible and the last thing I want to think about is replication, backups and scaling of databases. I've done that before and it sucks.

People seem to quickly forget about the recent outages on Heroku. That said the past year on GAE has been pretty darn stable. I think they've really fixed a lot of the issues they were having early on.

I do use Heroku for two apps running in the free tier and I can't complain because they are free and they wouldn't be possible in GAE. I have a NodeJS webpage scraper (which is controlled from RESTful hits from GAE) and a reverse nginx proxy so that I can serve up mapquest OSM tiles over https. =)

So, maybe it boils down to the needs of your application and your tech stack comfort level (there is no Ruby or PHP on GAE).

On a side note, I love your business! =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, you can't get thousands of bucks of costs in GAE if you don't set limits that high.

The way I do it: I've set the daily limit to something really high, but something that won't make me go bankrupt (like $100/$200, while I usually spend $5/day). I don't worry about spikes in payments - as the article says, it's not worth to waste my time analysing all the border cases. If a border case happens, I'll deal with it then.

It's much worse with Amazon Web Services which has no such easily set limits. I've heard about a guy getting slapped thousands of bucks bacuse of bandwith usage due to some bug.

</comment><comment><USER7> while it's true that appengine by nature insists on optimization towards roflscale a lot earlier in development than what we devs would normally prefer, I think that the pricing model is designed for a different class of app than what most people are building.

most people want that killer app that is offered for free to the millions of users and you figure out how to monetize it later after you get funding and eventually acquired.

appengines pricing model insists on profitability sooner. if you instead built that killer app for millions of users that pay $12/year, the amount you paid to appengine wouldn't nearly sting as bad.

to say the cost is hidden is almost absurd, the cost is staring you in the face every day you log in to the admin console. Every month you get an invoice in your email. I see this as a good thing. A developer that can deliver an application that can meet the scalability needs at a low cost would be a tremendous asset for any company looking to make money.

<comment><AUTHOR> the time spent on premature optimization is meant with 'hidden cost'. I think everything concerning money and billing transparency is handled pretty good by the GAE team.

<comment><USER7> i don't see it as hidden. if you read the docs, they make it pretty clear what the limitations are on things like the datastore and why. The api's start from the assumption that you will need roflscale. It can be a pain in the ass, but it's a pain in the ass that you know about going into it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My company was using AppEngine to host our product but we switched over to AWS (python, nginx/tornado, mongo) last year because of similar problems. On a small amount of load the problems you are describing can be high. On a large scale like we have these problems cost a fortune.

We new that some of the costs we were incurring were do to bad design on our part (We were all new to No-SQL databases when we started). But after going through our internal cost of resolving these issues versus rewriting our app to use Mongo we decided on the latter. We haven't looked back since...

</comment><comment><USER9> i used GAE for a project. never again. i learned the hard way there that you are going to use a PAAS service, choose one like Heroku that presents a standard application model and doesn't lock you in.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an interesting topic as well. I'm not yet sure how to value the incredible services you get against the lock in. Sad (and worrying) to hear, that it did'nt work out for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> He does make a good point about the mental structuring you should do for your projects. I remember reading somewhere the VP of Google had a 'line' of criticality. If it was above the line, work on it until it's below the line. Then even if it's unfinished, so long as it's below the line go and pick something else above the line.

If your hosting cost isn't yet an issue, ignore it then optimise when it is.

</comment><comment><USER11> _This can be solved with a slightly redesigned data-model. Go back to 2._

App Engine is premium service -- it's replicated across at least three data centers, scales automatically, and has a world-class team managing it. They provide a free memcached service, and the pricing model is designed so that you use it. If you design your app to use memcached from the start, you can eliminate much of your read costs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I know, but this is not the problem I was talking about.

I find myself implementing a caching layer for my models (this was pre-ndb) instead of the feature I intended to.

<comment><USER12> Be clever: write it once and for all.

This problem is nothing new in the world of programming. That's what libraries try to solve. GAE just happens to be a platform for which few abstractions exist because some of its technical choices render it slightly different than what the industry has been doing in other areas. If anything, this post is a scream for higher-level libraries targeting GAE.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't see how this is in any way unique to GAE. Sure, GAE requires some specific optimizations to get the most out of it, but so does everything else. Someone with a lot of GAE experience and close to zero classic LAMP experience could similary complain about how time consuming it is to learn all the optimization tricks of that stack, compared to how easily everything just works with GAE.

</comment><comment><USER14> For most of the websites, currently on the web, I don't think AppEngine or Heroku is the right choice - they enable you to grow from nothing to millions of requests in seconds - but I can't think of many sites that have this issue.

<comment><USER15> > For most of the websites, currently on the web, I don't think AppEngine or > Heroku is the right choice

Besides instant roflscaling, another advantage is that a site (basically) won't go down for the life of the PaaS. I can throw a site up and not worry about: logs filling up my server's HDD, forgetting to update my OS and exposing an 0-day letting people inject malware into my homepage, DDOS attacks, routing misconfigurations, shared hosting companies rebooting your server without notifying you (yes, I've had this happen), or other transient things. Heroku has a philosophy that an app should effectively run forever without maintenance on their platform, but I can't find a link to that now.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are there any markets for independent VR development? - <AUTHOR>
 Things like an App Store for VR, or a particular platform's portal to software sales for the VR market. <comment><USER2> Yup, there are quite a few.

Steam functions as the main one for the HTC Vive - obviously it's focused on games but also offers non-game utilities.

Vive has Viveport, although I honestly don't know how well that's doing.

And Oculus has Oculus Home: ditto.

I believe that GearVR has its own store too. Daydream does as well, but it's not accessible to most developers yet.

</comment><comment><USER3> We are building a co creation platform. VR can be a great addition to it.

Please check out www.crowdraising.co And pledge some time. Can you email firstname.lastname@example.com ? Would love to have you as a super user</comment>


Ask HN: Waiving my voting rights as part of employment termination? - <AUTHOR> I'm a co-founder of company that has had a small seed round. My other co-founders now want me out because now that I've finished the product for them they want a much bigger team and to raise more money. Getting 2/3 of my equity back as part of the clawback is a perfect way to do that without diluting the original investors and themselves.
However, they would like me to sign a release including waiving my voting rights that I would have as someone with significant interest given I have >10% in the company vested so far.
In return to signing this they would give me a modest severance covering a couple of months pay and also releasing my IP as open source. They also said they would facilitate selling my shares at the next round which could be worth half a million at that point.
I'm not so sure about this last point. The most important thing is that I secure a way for me to procure an exit. I know the investors would naturally want to buy me out to get rid of dead wood, but maybe by taking my voting rights away my 2 co-founders are ensuring that I don't get notified when they are investing and therefore won't be in touch to negotiate an exit at the next round. Since I would likely have to offer these shares at a discount to the investors it would essentially undercut any offer they would have. Since I would not have any voting rights maybe the investors would be less interested in buying me out in the first place.
Why do you think they want me to not have my voting rights? I'm considering continuing negotiations on that basis but insisting that we agree on stipulations that ensure I am notified of all investment, and perhaps even a stipulation ensuring that any investment round should include an x percentage of my shares - forcing them to include me but also conceding to them protection I guess they want to ensure the investors are not scared off by any eagerness on my part to sell. <comment><USER2> I don't see why you would waive your voting rights. It's not even necessarily a good thing for your co-founders, as they get diluted as compared to future investors (i.e. they might WANT your vote later).

Investors care about deadweight on the cap table from an economic perspective, much more than from a voting perspective. This does nothing to help that.

Yes, future investors will want you to sign a drag-along with respect to a future M&A transaction, but that might be perfectly fine. Maybe you can offer some form of agreement to a weak drag-along?

Is the company a Delaware corp? If so, maybe suggest the company agree to exchange your common stock for something like Series FF Preferred (or sometimes called Founder Preferred). If an investor may be willing to buy you out in a future round, this would be the best way for you and the company.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are you OK with this? I would not, and any decent vesting schedule would generally have an "acceleration upon termination without cause" clause that would make this impossible.

Do you want to leave?

I would assume your shares will not get bought the way you propose. Personally I would bind it all together into one agreement -- you can quit and forfeit 2/3rds of your unvested equity only IF and WHEN your remaining vested shares are purchased for $500k.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's pretty much exactly what another friend of mine said.

I was really excited about our future, and then they did this to me and it of course you can't really take this kind of action back.

Really regretting not asking before signing for that clause you mentioned. The other 2 co-founders were always closer, so I could of anticipated this better.

Unfortunately for trying to get one agreement - they 6+ months out until they raise and they want me out now.

<comment><USER4> I'd suggest getting a good attorney to take a look at your current agreement (if you'd like, email me at username over at gmail, I have a good one).

From what you have said so far, I would suggest to you that the fact that "they are 6+ months out until they raise and they want you out now" is their problem, not yours.

If they fire you now, without cause, don't sign anything and keep the negotiation documents as proof that there is no cause. You keep your current stock and most importantly, your voting rights. Go find another job while you settle this whole matter. Talk to a lawyer and start to negotiate for what you want, not what will help them.

If they don't fire you, tell them what you want and see if they will give it to you. Let them know you are willing to align your goals with theirs but that you want to be appropriately compensated for your prior risk. Keep it pretty business like. If you get into a sticky situation, don't be ashamed to call in the attorneys to help. It's what they are there for.

<comment><USER3> Agree with this. DO NOT SIGN AWAY YOUR STOCK, even if they fire you. And talk to a lawyer. In fact, I wouldn't even communicate with them anymore past the initial stage without going through a lawyer (i.e. let him communicate for you). I also wouldn't quit, unless they fired me.

Depending on the jurisdiction you are in, and the equity percentage you own, you might have certain rights they can't ignore (or you could enforce / make their life hell). Investors generally don't like a murky balance sheet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _now that I 've finished the product for them they want a much bigger team > and to raise more money_

Why they need to "fire" you to get more people?

> _They also said they would facilitate selling my shares at the next round > which could be worth half a million at that point._

Just assume that this will never happen. When they give you the money, you give them your shares.

</comment><comment><USER6> What do you mean "in return." Sounds like they want something for nothing. Your equity and voting rights are already yours. You are negotiating to stop working as an employee? You could do that tomorrow for signing nothing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Why can't they raise more money and get a bigger team with you in the picture. What's the complete story?</comment>


Planet 9 may be a black hole - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/planet-nine-may-actually-be-black-hole <comment><USER2> Massive discussion of the submission of the ArXiv link:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21078068](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21078068) (335 comments)

Another submission, this one from gizmodo, but with no comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21098129](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21098129)</comment>


Inequality could be lower than people think - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/11/28/inequality-could-be-lower-than-you-think <comment><USER2> This is the exact sort of ridiculously contrarian article that made me stop caring for The Economist.

>If you argue that income has shrunk you also have to claim that four decades' worth of innovation in goods and services, from mobile phones and video streaming to cholesterol-lowering statins, have not improved middle-earners' lives.

I don't see how the availability of better per dollar technology is an argument that income hasn't shrunk. Technology, for the consumer class, comes out of disposable income. Businesses (and their wealthy owners) are the biggest financial winners of tech. By a landslide.

What about the lack of(available) durable goods. I live around things that are older than me, but things made in the last ~30 years haven't withstood the test of time so well. That seems like a huge cost I've never seen accounted for.

I don't see them addressing the rising cost relative to inflation (as best I can tell) on necessities like food and shelter.

Maybe I'm just dumb and full of myself, but this reads like propaganda. The argument about pensions is decent but I think most people who care about economics were already aware of that, and even that is kinda sketch because the pensions are often managed by ultra-wealthy hedge fund managers who line their pockets.

<comment><USER3> The point they are making is that the inflation index doesn't properly account for increase in quality that these technological innovations are offering. In fact many measures treat a 1992 cell phone as an interchangeable good with a 2019 state of the art smartphone and in that basket of goods the cost of a phone has risen substantially. Never mind that the 2014 phone that's free with a contract can do stuff that in 1992 we didn't even imagine a phone doing.

Similarly, by treating health care as a single good and ignoring all the new treatments that get introduced we see the cost of healthcare is dramatically up. But the cost of getting a treatment that didn't exist in the time period was infinity. Regardless, patient outcomes are better too on a per condition basis so the treatment quality has gone up too.

I'm not sure many people would take the option to pay a 1970 price for a 1970 standard of health care if they could have that choice now. But the inflation indices treat 1970 healthcare and 2019 healthcare as almost interchangeable.

For education, my 2nd year undergrad course used a textbook that was a grad school book at MIT in the 1960's so the material being taught has advanced too. Again, interchangeable good in the index.

If inflation is wrong, then most measures of inequality are also wrong because inflation adjusted incomes are wrong.

<comment><USER2> I can't afford healthcare at all, but I have to pay for it regardless, either through fines or insurance. I'd take 1970's prices and service over today's if I could.

Your anecdote about education being better goes absolutely against what I've seen first hand. My parents, who went to College ~40 years ago, paid a fraction of what people do today even accounting for inflation, and the quality was far higher. Smaller class sizes and higher standards than today's student loan fueled universities, meant that getting a degree was a big deal, unlike today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Given that over half a million families file medical bankruptcies in the United States annually, I find the Economist to lack credibility on the issue.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/this-is-the-real-reason- most...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/this-is-the-real-reason-most- americans-file-for-bankruptcy.html)

<comment><USER5> That's a highly misleading statistic, based on assuming that anyone with medical debt who declared bankruptcy did so because of the medical debt. In fact, the rate is much lower: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5865642/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5865642/)

> However, the magnitude of the bankruptcy effect is much smaller than > previously thought: we estimate that hospitalizations cause only 4% of > personal bankruptcies among nonelderly U.S. adults, which is an order of > magnitude smaller than the previous estimates described above.

WaPo's fact checker gave that statistic three pinnochios: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/28/sanderss-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/28/sanderss- flawed-statistic-medical-bankruptcies-year/)

<comment><USER4> Per your NIH citation, you may be correct. FTA, "Overemphasizing "medical bankruptcies" may distract from understanding the true nature of economic hardship arising from high-cost health problems."

Healthcare costs have been rising faster than inflation since the 1970s. Health care consumed 4 percent of income in 1960 compared to 6 percent in 2013.

[https://www.thebalance.com/causes-of-rising-healthcare- costs...](https://www.thebalance.com/causes-of-rising-healthcare- costs-4064878)

And are expected to continue doing so into the near term.

[https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and- Systems/Sta...](https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and- Systems/Statistics-Trends-and- Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/Downloads/ForecastSummary.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I only encounter two groups of people in my life:

People with more money than they can sanely spend who nonetheless feel slightly as if they're behind the curve

People who are struggling to make ends meet every day and who are one or two pay checks (or dole payments) from significant hardship.

There hardly seems to be a middle any more. Nothing is more difficult than to be of modest financial ambition. I don't know how well graphs can plot this kind of imbalance.

</comment><comment><USER7> [https://web.archive.org/web/20191129144436/https://www.econo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191129144436/https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/11/28/inequality- could-be-lower-than-you-think)

</comment><comment><USER8> I live in a single-earner household, with 3 kids and 2 adults in the house.

My oldest son is in college. I really do not see the problem with college expenses, so long as the student abides by a few guidelines:

\- In the high school years, the student should recognize that their primary job is to line up scholarships. Nothing beats a good ACT score, and very good study books can be had at GoodWill for $1.

\- Once at college, eat at the caf. Every. Single. Meal. College kids have no business eating out.

\- Have a summer job, the primary goal is to make money.

\- Don't use Spotify, NetFlix, etc. No subscription services.

We fund half of what my son's scholarships don't pay, he pays the rest with summer-job money. It's working so well I expect the other 2 kids to graduate debt-free as well.

</comment><comment><USER9> Its never been this good for so many people.

<comment><USER10> That's progressively been true over and over again at most points of history (with various temporary local dips) but that doesn't justify the the status quo, or vindicate our current system as being acceptable.

Serfs probably had a higher standard of living than cavemen, but that doesn't mean that the system of nobility and kings ruling over them was objectively correct, and should be maintained as the one true way to run a society.

<comment><USER11> I would hesitate jumping to the "justify the status quo" conclusion because of a truthful comment saying things are better than ever.

The fact that billions have been lifted out of poverty in the last few decades is an important note and definitely deserves merit.

<comment><USER10> Maybe I'm being too harsh, but USUALLY when people say that they are silently implying "so our current system is justified".

<comment><USER11> Not harshly criticizing something does not mean you are defending it or completely supportive of it. Assuming this "implication" without any concrete statements is at the root of most disagreements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Or higher:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_Wealth_Inequality_- _v2.png)

<comment><USER13> What specifically in this graph invalidates a point in the linked article? And which point?

<comment><USER14> It directly invalidates the headline. Rich are getting richer whilst poor remain about the same. Inequality is rising by definition.

It also invalidates a 'specific point' about how the top 0.1% are only earning about half of the increase people thought they were between the 70's and 2012, because clearly the graph shows the top 10% is earning MORE than expected, so they ignored the other 9.9% which seems pretty important. In case you desperately wanted a specific point.

<comment><USER15> The article points out the data/calculations have been re-evaluated with new adjustments and the conclusions are different than before. It's a bit nonsensical to try to refute new conclusions by just pointing to the old conclusions again.

<comment><USER16> The fact that we have progressed in tech doesn't mean the equality (that is defined as a relative measure on some date) hasn't become lower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yes, maybe. But like saying Climate Change might not be as bad we think, what does the general population have to lose by working toward alternative energy sources and technologies or regulations and laws that lead to greater equality for most people?</comment>