Low Startup Capital Requirements: Blessing or a Curse? - <AUTHOR>

Most people in the startup world know that, compared to other industries, you need very little capital to start a startup. If you want to start a restaurant, you'll probably need hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy the building, buy the equipment, hire the staff, etc., before you're profitable. Starting a startup can often be done for no more than the cost of the founder's living expenses. This might seem to be great for a founder.
However, one of the fundamental laws of economics is: there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. In a competitive market, any advantage which is freely available to all of the participants doesn't benefit any of them, because it will simply cause new people to enter the market and make things more difficult for everyone. Suppose there are two cities, A and B, and people in both have a taste for ice cream. People in A are willing to pay $1 per scoop, but people in B are willing to pay $3 per scoop. This might seem to benefit ice cream sellers in city B. However, what will happen is that ice cream sellers will move from A to B until there is no more reason to move (ie, expected profits in both cities are equal). In other words, even though prices are higher in B, so many people are selling ice cream in B that any one ice cream store will have relatively few customers, canceling out the benefits.
The same goes for the world of entrepreneurship. There are lots and lots of people who have, or can get access to, $5,000. There are many fewer people who have, or can get access to, $500,000. Hence, many more people will try to start companies in fields where the capital requirements are only $5,000, and so the market in these fields will be flooded with new entrants. The flood will continue until the difficulty of competing with all the other entrants equals the difficulty of getting $500,000 (assuming the expected reward and risk are equal).
If we look at the Internet, this is, in fact, exactly what we see. The capital requirements for starting a website (whether for profit, for fame, for the heck of it, or whatever) are so low that millions of people have done it. Someone once quipped, "Type in, 'Find people that have sex with goats that are on fire,' and the computer will say, 'Specify type of goat.'" This is great for Internet users, because they can find information on practically anything, and a huge variety of applications, at no cost to them.
However, the flip side of this is that there are so many people competing for Internet traffic that you either have to be really skilled, or really lucky, or spend a ton of money on advertising, or do deals with a bigger partner, or something else extraordinary to get a decent amount of traffic. For every YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace, there are a hundred applications out there which will never have enough users to pay the founder's living expenses.
So, to everyone who would say that the low capital costs of startups are a boon for founders: you are not avoiding pain through low capital costs, but merely switching from one kind of pain to another, like a person who chooses to work for a big company for twenty years and invest the money to get rich instead of starting a company at all. <comment><USER2> The expensive part of a web startup is Engineer salary. for nearly all web startups, everything else is comparatively free until they get fairly big.

The thing is, Engineers are pretty expensive. around here, once you get through benefits you are probably looking at $120-$200K+ per head, for upper mid-range people (assuming you aren't paying for office space and have minimal hr overhead; it's more otherwise)

So yeah, if you talk 3 or 4 friends into taking a year off to work on a startup, guess what? You've just got your $500K in investment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Most startups pay early-stage people primarily in equity. You sound like you're not from the US, but that's mostly how it works here. Startups are also founded mostly by younger people, who have much lower salaries and cost of living requirements. It might work differently elsewhere, in which case my argument doesn't apply, but I was talking specifically about the US startup industry.

<comment><USER2> I'm saying that you can look at the engineers working for equity as investors; they are. Your Engineers getting tired of eating ramen and leaving for real jobs is a lot like investors not giving you the next round of funding.

Also, even mediocre engineers in their mid 20s are going to be making $85K or better plus benefits here in the sf bay area. add in benefits and you start approaching the lower end of what I suggested; and all other things being equal, you are going to have a hard time if all your Engineers are mediocre.

<comment><AUTHOR> "I'm saying that you can look at the engineers working for equity as investors; they are."

Not in the barrier-to-entry sense, which is the one I was discussing. It's a _lot_ harder to get a VC to invest in you than to get some guy you know from college to help you write a piece of software.

"Your Engineers getting tired of eating ramen and leaving for real jobs is a lot like investors not giving you the next round of funding."

Hence vesting.

"Also, even mediocre engineers in their mid 20s are going to be making $85K or better plus benefits here in the sf bay area."

I know several full-time software engineers in the Bay Area who are 25 and making that much, but they're all a). extremely smart and b). have degrees from top universities, so I really don't think "mediocre" people make that much. Still, you're right that top people are reasonably expensive if you pay them in cash rather than equity.

<comment><USER2> "Hence vesting."

Your equity only acts as an incentive to stay as long as it looks like you have a chance of winning. Just like investors will eventually stop throwing good money after bad if you don't meet your numbers, your Engineers will start looking for paying work.

Getting good people who have other options to work for free for any period of time is no mean feat. Personally, I've gone the other direction; I hire inexperienced people and train, but that only works because I am experienced myself.

(of course, I've never seriously tried to get VC, so I have no clue how difficult that is.)

My point is just that as long as you have your Engineers, you can cover infrastructure with beer money (at least, until you get really huge.) which I guess was your point, too, what with saying the barrier to entry is low.

I'm just saying; keeping a few really good engineers happy without money is not as easy as it sounds. And, it's not as hard as you think for Engineers to come up with money. I spent almost $60,000 on servers last year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I get what your saying, but you're looking at it from a purely economic point of view. Actually, when I started reading your post I thought to myself, "seems like this guy just finished his chapter on Perfect Competition".

Even though there are benefits and differences to high capital vs low capital requirement markets, you have to look at the human aspect of it. There are failures on both sides, and probably a higher failure rate for web startups. But the main difference is that regular people have the opportunity to actually strike it rich. High capital requirements tend to mean you need social connections to people with money. In society, this means political, industry, venture capital, and business connections. If you're the wrong race, sex, religion, or just don't fit the profile of someone who tends to be able to have access to money, you won't get it.

Low capital requirement markets means anyone can play; everything is more competitive, all products are higher quality. The discriminator is the market, and thats fair for all. If you take these into consideration, than you see low capital requirement markets are in fact a blessing, regardless of the economic returns of high capital markets. They are two completely different beasts.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Actually, when I started reading your post I thought to myself, "seems like this guy just finished his chapter on Perfect Competition"."

I will admit to being an economics student, but I've known about this principle for years, I didn't just learn about it yesterday. I made this post because five people on a forum I frequent were all talking about how great it was for them that startups required very little capital.

"But the main difference is that regular people have the opportunity to actually strike it rich."

Regular people have _always_ had the opportunity to strike it rich, and for most of the US's history, it was _easier_ than it is today. The idea that technology startups are some sort of fundamental shift in US social mobility dynamics is a _harmful, dangerous lie_.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie>

[http://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Thomas- Stanley/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Thomas- Stanley/dp/0671015206)

"High capital requirements tend to mean you need social connections to people with money."

You need those connections _anyway_. Or, at least, you need to be part of the upper third of society. It's not an accident that Bill Gates's father was a name partner in the largest law firm in Seattle. Why do you think Y Combinator has so many applicants? It's because they provide the connections people need, and the applicants know that.

"than you see low capital requirement markets are in fact a blessing,"

Low capital requirements are good _for the customer_ , and I explicitly stated that fact. What I was saying is: they aren't necessarily good for the entrepreneur.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I look at it like this: up front capital requirements are more of an artificial barrier to your success. It doesn't matter how good you are: if you don't have the money, you can't get started. Removing this artificial barrier is a good thing: it makes the market closer to a meritocracy.

Although anyone can stick up a website, not anyone can make a good one. But if you've got the skill, there's nothing standing in your way.

<comment><AUTHOR> "up front capital requirements are more of an artificial barrier to your success"

This isn't necessarily true. In markets requiring a high degree of sales skill, like enterprise software, ability to raise capital is highly correlated to business success. However, I will agree that it is true in some cases.

"Removing this artificial barrier is a good thing: it makes the market closer to a meritocracy."

It's a good thing for Internet users. The point is that it's not necessarily a good thing for founders.

"But if you've got the skill, there's nothing standing in your way."

If you have _arbitrarily good_ skill, there's nothing standing in your way. This is not a good argument for whether you should go into the startup industry, anymore than "if you're Michael Jordan, there's nothing standing in your way" in the sports industry or "if you're Harrison Ford, there's nothing standing in your way" in the movie industry. Most people aren't Michael Jordan or Harrison Ford.

<comment><USER4> Well, I don't see why a person without the requisite skills should expect to succeed. Sorry, if you're no good at basketball, don't expect to play in the NBA.

So, by all means, if you're no good at creating websites, it's not a good idea to start one. But I'm thankful that there aren't any arbitrary walls standing in the way for those people that do have what it takes.

<comment><AUTHOR> False dichotomy. There is a linear continuum of skill, from "completely unskilled" all the way up to "world-class rockstar". In some fields, eg. medicine, if you have median skill for people in the field, you'll do pretty well. In other fields, including programming, sports, movie acting, and math, if you have median skill you'll never get anywhere. Your argument was, "If you have world-class rockstar skill, you don't need to worry about succeeding". This is, in fact, true. However, this does not apply to the 99.9999% of us who do not have world-class rockstar skill. And it does not refute my argument that, given lower capital requirements, there is going to be more competition, making it more difficult for the 99.9999% of us without world-class rockstar skill.

<comment><USER4> You're putting words in my mouth. I'm not at all suggesting that you need "world-class rockstar skill" to succeed. You do need some skill (I suspect less than you think), and the more you have the more likely you are to succeed. And that's the way it should be - success determined by skill rather than your ability to raise capital.

That's why I think low capital requirements are an advantage. Not because they make it easier to succeed in some theoretical sense, but because they make things more fair. I'll take the level field with more competition, as it rewards talent and effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I agree that removing barriers to entry means more people can get in, but isn't that the point? I can see that, from the perspective of someone who would be in the market either way, more people is bad: you'd rather be one of 10 than one of 100. But what if I'm one of those 90? I'd rather be one of 100 than excluded from the market entirely. And it forces everyone to compete on innovation, rather than using market incumbency and competitive moats to keep up profits by keeping out competitors.

<comment><AUTHOR> "I'd rather be one of 100 than excluded from the market entirely."

No, you wouldn't; that's the whole point. Suppose that there are two options: an open market and a closed market. If it's a closed market, there's a high barrier to entry, and so only ten people are in the market. If it's an open market, anyone can join who wants to, and so there are a hundred people. However, you must not be able to _benefit_ from joining the open market, or else more people would join and drive wages down. And, if you were one of the ten people in the closed market, you _still_ wouldn't be any better off, because the high wages of the closed market would be counteracted by the difficulty of getting into the market (see: "medical doctor"). There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

EDIT: Your reply is potentially valid, but only if the market we're talking about is so large that opening it up will raise salaries outside of it. The startup market is only ~0.1% of the US economy, so I don't think this applies.

<comment><USER5> Distribution of wealth isn't necessarily the same in both situations, though, so things can really be materially better in one situation vs. the other for different sets of people. The closed-market situation leads to more divergent outcomes: you have wealthy people who are in profitable markets, and non- wealthy people who are kept out due to high barriers. Reducing market barriers makes that rigid in-v-out dichotomy harder to maintain, which is better for the people who would have been out in the closed-market situation. They can still only profit a little, but before they couldn't profit at all.

Markets where capital is a requirement also tend to result in rich-get-richer effects, where you have to have money to enter profitable markets, which then make you more money. Low-barrier markets make it harder to get a return out of capital, and force people to get returns from other things, like their tech skills. (Of course, tech skills are probably correlated with wealth too, but not to the same extent that literally having piles of money is.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another aspect is that expensive startups require more planning and careful attention to profit and business strategy. If you're investing $500k, you will spend more time figuring out what you are going to be selling and how it's going to work out. I think that is planning that a lot of dot com startups could really use. "Minimal possible product" often winds up being quite underwhelming these days.

</comment><comment><USER7> In our business Intellectual capital is more valuable than real money. To me that is the real barrier to building great businesses (and not money as in traditional business context)</comment>


Show HN: DoddleMail – Manage your email and to-do list in one place - <AUTHOR> http://doddlemail.com/ One of the biggest problems I've had is keeping track of my emails and to-do list, so DoddleMail is my shot at solving this problem.  Check it out, and let me know if it helps you stay organized :-) <comment><USER2> This looks great! It's familiar yet simplified! First thing I noticed was a hyperlink wasn't auto-linked to the address (may be intentional but figured I'd mention it). For example an email appeared with a link like "[http://www.google.com"](http://www.google.com") but I couldn't click on it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> One of the biggest problems I have is managing my email and to-do list. DoddleMail is my shot at solving this. Check it out, and let me know whether it helps you stay organized. I'm looking for feedback. Thanks!</comment>


Microsoft's master plan to beat Apple and Google - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/17/technology/microsoft-windows-8/?source=linkedin

<comment><USER2> A ton of assumptions peppered with a pretty glaring lack of substance. So "Microsoft is making radical changes"? You mean different from the last "too little, too late" campaigns they had?

Reads like an ad for investors. Like something that is promised for the future and we will enjoy if we only hold out and believe. Sounds like the tune Microsoft has been whistling for decades now.

> _That's the world for which Microsoft is building Windows 8. It can run > everything from a touchscreen app like Angry Birds to resource-intensive > software such as 3-D games and video editing tools. That sounds simple, but > it's an all-in-one approach Microsoft's rivals have chosen not to pursue._

No, actually that sounds almost entirely meaningless.

<comment><USER3> _> it's an all-in-one approach Microsoft's rivals have chosen not to pursue._

They haven't persued it because nobody _wants_ an "all-in-one solution". My desktop is not a tablet, and my tablet is not a desktop.

<comment><USER4> I _do_ want an all-in-one solution, like outlined in the article.

A smartphone with enough power to run "regular" applications and a dock I can plug it into for charging, peripherals and a monitor.

Of course the current smartphone OSes are not suitable for that task, as is demonstrated by the Transformer series, among others.

<comment><USER5> A smartphone that is able to hook up to a keyboard and monitor and run a simple word processor and spreadsheet; and some calendar / scheduling software; and some email thing (either cloud based web client or traditional server client) - that's a smart phone that many people would buy.

Supporting it in the enterprise environment would be tricky. You don't want users loading their phones with malware and then bringing that infected phone inside the network.

And, really, I'd be happy if the phone was decoupled from the rest of it. A phone and something like Raspberry PI would do me fine.

<comment><USER6> _Supporting it in the enterprise environment would be tricky. You don't want users loading their phones with malware and then bringing that infected phone inside the network._

This happens today even with corporate laptops. If they're allowed outside, they will get infected. Working in information security, I send a few form emails each month telling someone to call the helpdesk and get their computer reimaged. If the company has a good enough network team to know how to properly segment a network (and/or implement a reverse proxy) and a security team with enough resources to monitor network traffic, the risk becomes acceptable.

Basically what you describe is BYOD, and it gives me job security :) For the record, I would totally buy the same desktop on three form factors if the same apps and same data could be synced across all of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _"All the reviewers point out a key question mark hanging over Windows 8: Developer support."_

Of all the things Microsoft does, the one it clearly does better than Apple or Google is support developers. And all that support helps facilitate what is almost certainly the largest development community among them.

Metro turns every corporate developer into a potential mobile developer. I doubt adoption by developers will be the issue.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't hold any love for any of them, but I downloaded Windows 8 and it recognised my 8 year old pro audio interface and it just worked, legacy hardware is a big deal, people don't all have money to throw out all their stuff.

</comment><comment><USER9> For years Microsoft has failed to deliver the great UX we've come to expect from devices like the iPad and iPhone, and apps like gmail. I've heard Windows Phone is pretty good, but it's hard to imagine Microsoft offering serious competition to Apple and Google while they still think stuff like this is a good idea: [http://gizmodo.com/5835814/th-new-windows-8-explorer-ui- look...](http://gizmodo.com/5835814/th-new-windows-8-explorer-ui-looks-like-a- mess)

<comment><USER10> I like what they did to the xbox 360 dashboard. I don't understand why they went with flat tiles in windows 8. (actually I do, but it's a shame that they don't have an option to switch into it like aero) The depth and 3D elements on the 360 made for a slick interface.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhBWbRXqIOw>

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

 _we're in a "post-PC" world_

 _in five years, the PC won't be what it is today._

Allow me to be skeptical. Those statements sound just like 'the novel is dead' from the 60's of the past century. It's now fifty years later, and we can still buy books; and desktop PC's, desks and chairs won't disappear anytime soon.

<comment><USER12> Believe it. Everything without a touch screen is broken to the next generation of users, and the entire PC industry is changing is big ways already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The thing is, Microsoft can integrate with its own products as much as it wants, but I will never have _only_ Microsoft products. If it doesn't integrate well with other products not controlled by Microsoft, I think their strategy will fail. And let's face it, they've got a terrible track record in that area.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not so along ago (probably still now) Windows had the best software & hardware compatibility. Apart from that, who's going to have an iPad/iPhone and a Windows 8 laptop? Or a Macbook and Windows 8 tablet/phone? At least for the Apple side it's pretty clear to me. Finally, part of what you mention is also developers' responsibility rather than Microsoft itself; as someone says above the company's investing quite a lot in getting developers aboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If Microsoft is aiming for an all-in-one situation than they're doing it right. I don't understand why I'm not yet able to have a truly unified experience with all of my devices including smart appliances. I think a hardware maker will have figured it out when they are able to deliver products that provide a consistent interface, delivering smart-content on demand without having to have a gazillion apps. Build devices so they are connected with each other out of the box, not after downloading the remote app and TV guide app and remote desktop app...

</comment><comment><USER15> _Macs integrate with iOS devices, but there's a clear schism in Apple's world view: Mobile devices are for content consumption, Macs are for creation_

Yeah, this is true. But I don't think that Android, let alone Windows Phone, are any different. Are developers going to start writing apps with their phones? No. At least not anytime soon, and definitely not with Windows Phone.

</comment><comment><USER16> Almost anything can be shed a favored light upon. Being slow and late can just be called being patient.</comment>


Ask HN: Domain Registrar to Switch from Moniker? - <AUTHOR>

I've been using Moniker for about 10 years, everything was fine. But I can't live with their new UI. It end up with charging me twice because of that shitty UI and numerous errors. Finally, now it shows that I have no domains at all. So I can't set my IPs, DNS, update records, etc. Ticket submitted, but the quality of response is ultra low. What domain registrars do you use? <comment><USER2> I really couldn't recommend Hover enough. I switched from Gandi (who I was very happy with - and still am, in fact, they're a great registrar too). Their interface is great - incredibly clear, simple and fast. Their support is even better.

The only downside is the email hosting. I was used to free email hosting from Gandi so it's annoying having to pay now - $10/year/mailbox.

Huge advantage of Hover: if you have domains elsewhere, you can give them your credentials for the old registrar and they'll log in and transfer your domains over (and DNS, etc). Saves a bunch of time.

Finally, if you don't go with Hover, go with Gandi. Their interface isn't nearly as nice but the support is good and they won't screw you around.

<comment><USER3> Hover are a scumbag registrar and should be boycotted the same degree as godaddy.

ICANN rules _require_ registrars to support DNSSEC for clients, but hover use their "reseller wholly owned by the registrar" status to avoid consequences for not implementing support for DNSSEC.

To add insult to injury, they claim they "support" DNSSEC because you can submit a support ticket for them to manually upload the required data, at a cost of $500 per time per domain.

<comment><USER2> Whilst that may be bad, I hardly think it puts them in the same tier as GoDaddy. In fact, it seems your problem is mainly with Tucows, rather than Hover. Nevertheless, the problem with GoDaddy isn't the feature set or product offering, it's the way they treat their customers. Hover could certainly bring the price down on DNSSEC support but that really doesn't make them a "scumbag registrar". Do you really think that's fair?

<comment><USER3> Tucows own hover. Several staff even work on both the wholesale and retail teams.

They responded to customer queries about DNSSEC support for four years with "yes it's coming soon". It was only when someone filed an ICANN complaint that they admitted they are not and were never working on support, and have no plans to.

They specifically market themselves as "no upswell, no hassle" \- so yes I think their behaviour warrants being called scumbags and any number of other less polite names too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use name.com and I've bene using them for what feels like a decade?

They're fine, nothing special—but that's what you want, right? I register domains there, and the name-servers automatically get set to my defaults, so I don't interact with them much.

Importantly, they aren't obnoxious about up-selling, they send 2-3 email notifications before a domain expires (1 month out, then again in the days before expiry), and you can mark individual domains as auto-renew or not.

</comment><comment><USER5> Amazon and Hover are worth a look.</comment>


The Pixel 4a Is New and Interesting, Once You Open It - <AUTHOR> https://www.ifixit.com/News/43537/the-pixel-4a-is-actually-new-and-interesting-once-you-open-it <comment><USER2> I upgraded to the 4a on Fi with the pre-order. The interesting part is that the tear-down doesn't go into the audio design, or perhaps I missed it. The pixel 4a is by far the loudest phone I've owned from the G1 on - I run calls with the volume turned most of the way down, most of the time, whether on speaker or not. I can't quite figure out how they generated that much volume from such a small enclosure, but it's a revelation for someone with hearing damage and mirrors the near-perfect execution of the rest of the hardware/software stack, like bluetooth, wifi, and the display. I can read smaller text on a smaller screen than I could with my previous pixels. The design team really deserves all the kudos they receive. I'm happy Google took the extra time to nail it.</comment>


F|R Crib Sheet: The Term Sheet Glossary - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2008/05/24/fr-crib-sheet-the-term-sheet-glossary/ <comment><USER2> A question...

From the page:

"Bear in mind: liquidation multiples and participating preferreds are most common in high-risk, troubled company situations. If your VCs are using these terms, be careful."

I understand the risk and why VCs would use those terms. What can entrepreneurs do/react when these terms being asked for?</comment>


Prediction markets - <AUTHOR> http://www.gwern.net/Prediction%20markets

<comment><USER2> It's not clear what parts the author modified last month, since the bulk of the article is from the past. A separate, additional article would be interesting to hear author's recent views and experiences.

For something upcoming, [http://www.augur.net](http://www.augur.net) is an attempt at a decentralized prediction market.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fun historical fact. One of the few prediction market companies to get VC funding was a UK company and their product HubDub.

But the team saw the direction of their business and decided to switch everything they were doing and go into same-day fantasy sports. And that's how FanDuel began. (Roughly $1bn in market cap later)

Also, Inkling Markets was a YC W06 company and they do prediction markets as a service. While I don't think they raised any significant VC funding, they're still operating.

</comment><comment><USER4> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6489135](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6489135)

</comment><comment><USER5> Pivit is making some interesting strides in this market, it's been years since VC dollars have gone into to trying to dislodge the space. Derivative impacts of having a highly liquid prediction market are incredible.

<comment><USER6> Please elaborate. Having some difficulty understanding what your second sentence even means: Are you talking about derivatives markets? or about impacts that derive from...? And why do you think this is so?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This doesn't seem to mention one of the more interesting prediction markets: [https://www.predictit.org/](https://www.predictit.org/)

<comment><USER8> Would you mind going into why it's more interesting? My cursory glance of predicit made it seem to be an intrade clone.

<comment><USER7> Intrade doesn't seem to exist, so I think by definition it's more interesting than that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> People don't seem to like the actual prediction markets which have been tried because they were biased. However if that's true, and you know it, then it means you can effectively use them as a free money pump. E.g. just bet for whatever Nick Silver predicts.

<comment><USER10> Nate Silver, not Nick.

There are problems with liquidity and volume, and the general difficulty of getting money in and out given that these services tend to be banned in the US.

I once saw a clear opportunity for arbitrage on Intrade, when the currently- bid odds that 8 particular Republican candidates would win the general election added up to more than the odds that _any_ Republican would win the election. But acting on it would have required getting a large amount of money to Ireland for the opportunity to make a small amount of money, and fees would have eaten all the profits.

In fact, some of the bets were clearly stupid on their own, and yet you couldn't really profit by betting against them. Someone would be bidding 1% odds that a candidate would win the election when that candidate had already dropped out and endorsed someone else. If dropping out didn't send their odds to 0, what would? You could make 1% profit but it could take until the election to collect it, so you might as well just put that money in a savings account.

But, yes, if prediction markets were popular, high volume, and legal in the US, then you could make money off of some of their biases.</comment></comment>


MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and animations - <AUTHOR> https://scratch.mit.edu

<comment><USER2> We have been teaching kids Scratch for 3 years in a weekly free class in downtown Oakland. The response has been wonderful. It unleashes the creativity in kids, and some children that are utterly silent and shy open right up when they have questions about how to make their game do this or that.

I have literally heard kids shout out "Oh! That's why we learned those x y things in school!" when learning how to move sprites about on a grid. They have no idea they are learning math, and they generally have a spectacular time making even the simplest game, like a scrolling shooter, or moon lander.

My favorite discovery during our three years has been seeing how kids name their games. It's never "David's Moon Lander." It's always something more like "David's Super Awesome Cat Launching Space Lander With Flame Throwers." It's like watching kids draw anything they want with crayons: they get to theme and tweak games however they see fit.

As a volunteer organization, we can always use more teachers to help us spread Scratch to the masses. Our classes are free and offered to kids ages 8 to 14, and we do a simple game each week.

[http://www.themade.org](http://www.themade.org)

<comment><USER3> I'm also looking at using Scratch in a school curriculum starting with children from grade 4 through grade 6. Are there any course ware, workbooks available for those grades?

How old are the children in your class?

Can you give any other suggestions about other programming languages that can be used as kids grow older?

<comment><USER4> Scratch is totally awesome, but the huge conundrum has always been where to go "after Scratch". Python isn't it, because its too textural and you can't easily share graphical games unless the recipient also has pyGame installed. Javascript hasn't been it for a lack of appropriate on-ramp, and many of the available resources (eg, CodeAcademy) are too vocationally-based and lack the fun of Scratch.

But there's now a free online tutorial system aimed at "Scratch kids" who want to take the next step. [http://s2js.com](http://s2js.com) \-- tutors kids through the bits of Javascript they need to know in order to write graphical games that'll run on their smartdevices. It's tutorial, simple development tool, private image storage, and deployment facility all in one.

It's "Javascript as told to Scratchers", and the goal is to provide a bridge that gets them from the delights of Scratch, onto something else that will take them on their journey. S2JS isn't the destination, it's the "enthusiasm transfer tool".

<comment><USER5> Why not Smalltalk? It was, after all, designed for kids (and look where _that_ got us... Java - pffft!)

Squeak has a comprehensive ecosystem; here's an excellent book for high- schoolers: [http://www.apress.com/9781590594919](http://www.apress.com/9781590594919)

The complete pdf can also be downloaded from the associated website: [http://rmod.lille.inria.fr/botsinc/](http://rmod.lille.inria.fr/botsinc/)

Now imagine this combined with hardware robots...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Scratch was my introduction to programming, around 6 years ago. Since then, I've graduated with a degree in CS and co-founded a successful (and growing) software-house startup. Without having discovered Scratch, I'm not sure I would have decided to do Computing at A-level. No A-level, No CS degree. No degree, no startup.

In my case, it was the perfect way to learn about some of the important principles that underpin programming, without necessarily realising that it was happening. Scratch just allowed me to be creative with ideas for simple games. You can take away a lot of the cornerstones of imperative programming (loops, variables, booleans, conditionals) but also evented programming concepts; which will make sense straight away in a language like Javascript.

My father is a Head Teacher at a primary school in the UK and has introduced it into the ICT curriculum to great effect. There are primary age children (< 10 years old) starting to experiment with Ruby and Python at school, as a result of positive experiences with Scratch. It's is also how I interested my younger brother in programming and he in turn took A-level computing and has applied to study CS at University. I don't think Scratch was as much of a factor in his story, but it was certainly his starting point.

Overall, I think it's a fundamental stepping stone that children should have the chance to try at school. It represents the opportunity to find out whether you enjoy programming. Until I picked it up, it had never crossed my mind that I might.

Hats off to the Scratch team!

</comment><comment><USER7> Two things:

1) I have neither a computer science nor a teaching background. (I'm a self- taught web-dev hack) but I am interested in introducing local kids to programming. I helped run a couple Hour of Code sessions last week at my kids' elementary school, and I think I could get support there to start up some kind of after-school program. But I'm a bit lost as to what a good curriculum would look like. Anyone here have any pointers or suggestions?

2) I believe that Blockly ([https://developers.google.com/blockly/](https://developers.google.com/blockly/)) was the engine behind the Hour of Code exercise I used last week. It's available as a client-side library to include in your web applications, but I couldn't track down its license. It looks like, if one were to nail down a good curriculum, you could use Blockly to build a learning environment to accompany it.

<comment><USER8> (Member of the Scratch team here)

1) There's a super useful Scratch Curriculum guide - made by the folks from ScratchEd. [http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/resources/scratch- curriculu...](http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/resources/scratch-curriculum- guide)

2) Blockly seems to be under the Apache license ([https://github.com/google/blockly](https://github.com/google/blockly))

<comment><USER9> (5-year Scratch veteran here.)

Even though Blockly (and it's predecessor, "App Inventor") is made by Google (the great and the powerful), I have to say, I would rather be introduced to code by Scratch than by Blockly. Scratch is much simpler-looking, it has a beautiful interface, and (most importantly) it has one of the friendliest communities in case you need help or want to show off a project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We use scratch and its clones phratch/snap/bingo at our local coderdojo to great effect. Today I discovered Dr Scratch [http://drscratch.programamos.es](http://drscratch.programamos.es) which does an analysis on your code.

<comment><USER11> I teach a game programming club for kids in grade 6-8

I'm split on scratch. On the surface it was easy to get the kids to engage, but I didn't really feel it led to much understanding of programming as a whole. And it did not seem to hold their attention for very long.

I switched to C# XNA, with a good number of my own convenience libraries and boiler plates that allowed the kids to dig in and they haven't looked back. It's just very sad that Microsoft dumped XNA, and also that it's locked to windows which caused a lot of problems(basically only 30% of the kids had access to a windows PC and the club basically had to provide the kids access to a windows PC lab to work, which prevented many kids from being able to work on their games outside of the lab).

I'm continuing to look for another framework like XNA that has a sufficiently easy barrier to entry(with a good amount of guidance from teachers/club leaders), while really introducing the kids to programming.

For reference, here is a github snapshot of an example project I took the kids through with great success a few years back: [https://github.com/zeewheeler/space_shooter_vgpc.git](https://github.com/zeewheeler/space_shooter_vgpc.git)

<comment><USER12> My son and I have been having some fun with Gosu ([https://github.com/jlnr/gosu](https://github.com/jlnr/gosu)). No problems so far running it on Windows and Ubuntu.

<comment><USER13> Gosu is good, and Chingu on top of that is even better. [https://github.com/ippa/chingu](https://github.com/ippa/chingu)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A few years ago I looked up what's available to make a kid interested in programming when I found this. I ended up spending quite a few days doing my own little project... that I'm almost not ashamed to link here ;-).

[http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/941811/](http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/941811/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Scratch is a great project. For those of you looking for a gentle intro to programming for your kids, I highly recommend checking out [http://tickleapp.com](http://tickleapp.com), a recently Kickstarter-backed Scratch implementation for the iPad.

</comment><comment><USER16> I love Scratch, but it is irresponsible of them to still not be using SSL.

<comment><USER8> Almost there with SSL - we will be rolling it out for testing by the community in the next month, and we hope to get the entire site SSL only by summer 2015. Sorry it took so long.

(One of the annoying things when we tried rolling SSL out a while back: we got a bunch of reports that users with OS X couldn't access the site - turns out the OS X's parental control blocks SSL sites by default unless explicitly allowed in the whitelist: [http://support.apple.com/en- us/HT201813](http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201813))

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is it on github?

<comment><USER18> [https://github.com/LLK/scratch-flash](https://github.com/LLK/scratch-flash)

<comment><USER17> must admit I am a bit skeptical about somethings longevity in 2014/2015 being built on flash...</comment></comment></comment>


A man, a vision, and the swimming pool he built in his garage - <AUTHOR> http://www.urbanitebaltimore.com/sub.cfm?issueID=70&sectionID=4&articleID=1174

<comment><USER2> Not many stories actually make me laugh-out-loud, this one was an exception. I think it was the picture of his four daughters smiling in the picture that took me over the top!

I thought I was doing good with creating a square-foot-garden with my kids (<http://www.toddalewis.com/square-foot-gardening.aspx>)... hard to compete with an "indoor" swimming pool.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely. My projects tend to be pretty dumb and over the top...but this rates right up there.

I actually worked building pools during one summer[1], so I would have went a more traditional poured concrete route. I probably would have also had a plan to fill the pool in and cap it with concrete if I planned on selling the house.

Kudos on the indoor garden - I was just thinking of building one, but spring is near.

[1] Caveat - I worked almost every variety of job during high school in a small town...so the 'experience' factor is minimal. Mechanic several times/several farm jobs/baker/librarian/general contractor/factory/etc

<comment><USER4> You can't fill in the pool, unless you want a few foot difference from road height to the height of the garage.

There was no digging involved when putting in the pool, he just put it down on top of the old garage floor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Totally awesome! Too bad if the city ever find out, he'll be in trouble - sometimes government is a little too rule oriented.

And this makes we want to put one in my basement - I get water in there anyway, and the concrete floor is all cracked.

<comment><USER6> Yes, damn those governments and their insistence on rationality and safety and all that nonsense.

<comment><USER7> You seem to be being sarcastic. But a guy did this inside his own house. Do you really think the government should come in and save him from himself? Why?

<comment><USER8> The article didn't give a good description of the area around this guy's house... I, for one, would be concerned if I found out one of my neighbors had 3000 gallons of water in a poorly structured container in his garage. A collapse would most definitely affect me and my neighborhood. Aside from the inconveniences that would be caused, the neighborhood could very well end up stuck with the bill for repairing damage done to infrastructure (street, sewer, underground power lines, ...)

For what it's worth, I'd also be concerned if I found out my neighbor was: stockpiling firearms, making meth in his bathtub, keeping pet tigers, storing 3000 gallons of gasoline in a tank in his garage. I'm not trying to make a direct comparison, just hopefully illuminating the fact that it might not all be about the government "[saving] him from himself"

<comment><USER7> _Aside from the inconveniences that would be caused, the neighborhood could very well end up stuck with the bill for repairing damage done to infrastructure (street, sewer, underground power lines, ...)_

After criminal damage is done, the state can press charges. Everything else is a very slippery slope.

As an example, imagine your neighbor has a gas stove and accidentally leaves it on, unlit, all day. A pilot light turns on, and the house explodes, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage.

Should the government ban gas stoves? How about electricity?

Finally, stockpiling firearms, making meth in the basement, keeping pet tigers, and storing 3000 gallons of highly-flammable liquid is not the same as having a small swimming pool. The things you list are generally illegal in all circumstances, but having a swimming pool is never illegal. Also, water just isn't that dangerous. The pool collapsing would probably not cause any more damage than watering a tree and forgetting you left the hose on.

So, as I mentioned earlier, you are heading down a very slippery slope. Individual rights should trump the possibility of "inconvenience" to your neighbors.

If anyone should be upset, it's this guy's insurance company.

<comment><USER9> Building codes exist for a reason, simple as that.

<comment><USER10> So... once somebody creates a code that makes it perfect and right and unquestionable?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's the among the most naive bits of work I've ever seen.

Concrete carries essentially _no_ bending or tension loads. I'm amazed it's stood up to this amount of additional pressure.

<comment><USER12> The total weight of the pool is effectively meaningless. The load per square inch = weight of water at that depth. Thus the pressure at the top of the pool is effectively zero. At the bottom it's around .42psi/foot * 3feet = 1.3psi which is not all that bad. Anyway, I suspect the load is actually less than the average basement wall which often holds back 6 feet or more of soil.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If I were him, I would look very carefully every day for 45 degree cracks in the concrete below the pool. 45 degree cracks in the concrete indicate that a structural condition may exist (e.g. the load bearing of the concrete is significantly compromised) (other angles than 45 are ok).

<comment><USER14> The thing I'd worry about is that a collapse seems most likely when the kids are using the pool. It is irresponsible. He should have poured concrete, perhaps on bearings so the whole thing could be removed in the future.

<comment><USER15> Totally. If you're worried about water rocking back and forth, kids playing marco polo would seem like the most likely cause.

The author of the article seems to mention how heroically he ignored all of the educated naysayers. We'll see how heroic he sounds when his children are dead and he's in jail for criminal negligence.

<comment><USER16> OK, if you want to pick the dangerous part of this, folks, it is NOT the construction. It is the fact of there being a pool, itself. Standing water kills children. It is one of the most prolific killers of children in the United States -- not as bad as that noted scourge, plastic buckets, but almost there.

Seriously -- we have REALLY warped senses of what is dangerous. What is the scenario for the pool "collapsing" when his children are playing in it? A 60 pound girl waves her arm displacing perhaps 2 pounds of water at a few inches per second, which then pounds the surrounding concrete to dust, causing it to fly at supersonic speeds into the water, in the direction opposite the water pressure? I didn't exactly do so great in physics but I'm finding that sort of unlikely.

The most likely failure -- his pool springs a serious leak. The garage gets written off. Oh well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is even cooler than the guy that built a Lamborghini in his basement!

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350019>

<comment><USER18> Crazier, maybe. I'd say Lamborghinis are inherently cooler than swimming pools. (unless you meant thermally)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Paul" sounds like he stepped out of a Faulkner or Hemingway novel.

<comment><USER20> As a resident, I can assure you that your statement describes a fair number of Baltimoreans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Am I the only one who finds such stories depressing? It depresses me that so much effort has to be spent on living in some place.

</comment><comment><USER22> Any more pics? I can't really picture how it looks? I wonder why he didn't just get an engineer to help him out?

</comment><comment><USER23> Wow, haha. This story gives everyone hope!

</comment><comment><USER24> he's going to have a hell of a time parking his car in there...

</comment><comment><USER25> good luck passing a housing inspection there dude...presuming he wants to be buried in the house after this bit of idiocy, cuz he'll never sell it</comment>


Ask HN: How has your experience with AWS Lambda been? - <AUTHOR> I've been thinking about trying out AWS Lambda for my next project and would just like to survey the community: how are you currently using Lambda (i.e. current setup, the product, etc)? How has the cost, performance, and scalability been? Any issues or deal-breakers? Would you use Lambda for your next project?<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> In my experience so far (devOps and managing infrastructure) it is a great way to run one-off scripts in Python, JS and now Golang to invoke other services (eg. step functions, or other lambdas), publish to SNS topics or describe tables in dynamo, you get the gist. The advantage is that you only get charged for the time you use it, and their free tier is generous, so our bills from Lambda are negligible.

The paradigm I use is that of treating Lambda as "glue" between services, and it has worked out amazingly well for that. Quick invocations, seemingly infinite scaling. CW logs (monitoring) could be better, but tools like Apex help with parsing them.

</comment><comment><USER3> AWS lambda should be thought of as functions that can be scaled independently.

I can write the functions in any one of the languages that are supported and they are all interlace-able through an interface. If I need to use ML and prefer python libraries, I can do that and call python from a nodejs function or vice-versa. All this without having to worry abt keeping a server up and secure and scaling.

There are issues with loading times and cost, but easily the best thing that happened for me as a single dev proving out a product MVP.

<comment><USER4> Am curious to know why this comment was downvoted

<comment><USER4> Am also curious to know why this comment was downvoted. Enter recursive spiral of downvoting. Would love a justify your downvote feature on HN. People hide behind their downvotes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> shady-lady I tried using API Gateway and Lambda to create some dumb endpoints late last year (most just return static data with some returning updateable data).

All endpoints/operations exposed through API Gateway.

Thought it would be a lot simpler to set up than it was. It's pretty convoluted doing API Gateway -> Lambda, especially when you make changes.

I had thought it would be way simpler. single click define endpoint, then just write some code.

The AWS UI most definitely got in the way trying to accomplish this.

</comment><comment><USER5> Background: I just started a systems integration project that leverages Lambda pretty heavily as part of a messaging API. Behind an API Gateway Lambda functions will be responsible for processing initial message requests, routing the requests to certain SQS queues based on certain criteria, and then making requests to other systems as messages come into the various queues. Each of these parts of the process have their own set of functions that will run independently. I'm writing my Lambda functions using C#/.NET Core 2.0 (I started with Go initially but I've used C# before and find that I personally prefer it).

So far I think the development process has been good. Deployment has been okay, and I've found it easier to deploy my .NET functions vs the old Go functions.

Logging/debugging is a bit of a chore but not awful. Cloudwatch alarms are fairly useful for knowing when something critical happened, but you still have to dig in fairly deep to find the relevant error information.

Performance wise, Go was really fast even with the smallest amount of memory. Cold starts were around 1s and requests after that were around 30-40ms on average. C# is substantially slower unless you bump up the memory.

All that being said, overall I really enjoy developing Lambda functions and not having to worry about containers, etc., because I'm not a DevOps person. I would definitely use it again for other projects, and probably will.

</comment><comment><USER6> We've been using AWS Lambda function to asynchronously render PDFs, transform data or execute on different pipeline triggers with success for a few years now. The horizontal scaling that avoids having a pressured queue during high- traffic spikes is pretty nice.

Another case we've had success with is transforming and relaying webhooks from different services (relaying events into Datadog for services that don't have a native integrations) or acting on occasional webhooks that don't happen too often (creating a default set of labels on a new Github repo).

If you're doing anything asynchronously, it's pretty nice. Be aware that the amount of memory you allocate to your functions is directly proportional to the CPU amount (and price) you're given. There's also the caveat that invocations perform _at least once_ but not necessarily once. A few months ago we saw a significant increase in repeat lamdaba invocations/retries even when the original execution was successful.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm also curious about it. My friend who have used it told me it's difficult to debug. Is it true?

</comment><comment><USER8> The idea looks good on paper but in practice it is pretty pricey and impractical. You get free sandboxing, scaling, and stateless deployment out of the box but are charged by the second. It's really optimized for simple web apps (or microservices) - think backend for form processing or resizing a picture. Anything moderately complex e.g. python scientific software is impossible due to the 50MB compressed app size limit (including all your dependencies), if your app takes more than a couple seconds of compute time, it will burn a hole in your pocket.

Usage: Algorithmic trading, Alexa voice apps, Brokerage price matching

[http://KloudTrader.com](http://KloudTrader.com)

<comment><USER3> 50 MB size limit can be overcome if you upload the zip package to S3 first.

<comment><USER9> It's limited to 50MB on S3. You're thinking of a much lower limit.

<comment><USER6> The 50 MB limit on S3 is on the .zip/.jar upload but you can have up to 250MB if it fits inside a 50MB zip file [1].

[1] [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/limits.html](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/limits.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Started using Lambda 2 years ago now and my thoughts of it have evolved over time. I was initially frustrated by it but a lot of the pain points have disappeared over time (especially no Python 3 support; now supports 3.6).

Some random thoughts and gotchas in no particular order:

1\. Don't do your own deployments. Use Serverless.js ([https://github.com/serverless/serverless](https://github.com/serverless/serverless)). It's in JS but that doesn't lock you into the nodejs lambdas, it can deploy to any of the runtimes.

2\. Use Zappa if you want to host a "serverless website". But frankly, serverless websites are only for hobby projects right now.

3\. CPU vs Memory scaling sucks. You have to scale both at once; you can't do high CPU/low memory. This hurts the wallet for compute-intensive tasks.

4\. 5-min hard timeout on all functions. Don't use Lambda for long-running tasks.

5\. Low-CPU lambdas (128MB tier) are terrible at cold starts if you have lots of stuff to import (which WILL BE THE CASE for Zappa applications!). If a cold start exceeds your timeout (which defaults to 30 sec), your Lambda will never complete and never get out of cold start.

6\. If you're playing with S3, PUTs will hurt your wallet. A common application of Lambda (the famed "resize images" example) has a workflow that looks like this: GET on API gateway, PUT to s3, triggers an event which fires a Lambda, lambda processes payload, PUTs result back to S3. If processing your payload is fast, the PUTs in this case could be the most expensive part of your flow.

7\. X-Ray is atrociously confusing.

8\. No cloudwatch metrics for memory usage. Had to do my own using log metrics. Dumb.

9\. There's a cool versioning system for the code artifact, kinda like ECS has. It's really nice to use except that unlike ECS it doesn't have native lifecycle rules, which means you have to do your own cleanups. _Dumb_.

10\. Lambda patterns can be implemented more cheaply and more efficiently using tasks queues and autoscaling EC2s. Amazon's "efficient" compute allocation is outweighed by the margins on Lambda pricing. As with other Amazon services, you're paying for the system to be managed.

11\. Aurora Serverless is super interesting, but FWICT nowhere near ready for prime time.

12\. API gateway is a solution looking for a problem. If you have to use it (eg. you _must_ trigger your lambda through an http request and you don't want to run a web server), use it in proxy mode.

13\. Golang lambdas are very promising. I want to try them out.

14\. There's a native canary system in Lambda/APIGW nowadays. Also want to try it out. Had to roll my own before it existed and now too scared to touch the production system.

15\. If you hit concurrency issues, your problem might not be load, it might be throughput. Is your DB slower than usual? Common pattern: Increase in Lambda requests hitting your DB, slows your DB down, which in turn slows your lambdas down, which causes you to hit concurrency limits. All these metrics are tightly related.

16\. Your tests should not assume a Lambda environment unless your app actually depends on the lambda environment (it generally shouldn't).

17\. Use this thing: [https://github.com/lambci/docker- lambda](https://github.com/lambci/docker-lambda) \- Among other things, you can use it to build binary libs/dependencies you want to run on Lambda (cairo for example).

18\. Use this thing: [https://github.com/spulec/moto](https://github.com/spulec/moto) \-- And also this thing: [https://github.com/localstack/localstack](https://github.com/localstack/localstack)

19\. Cloudwatch logs suck. If you want your app to be debuggable, make sure you know how to find logs for individually-triggered lambdas (eg. if you're thumbnailing, you should be able to trace the logs for that one thumbnail back into cloudwatch easily)

20\. Use Sentry. [https://sentry.io/](https://sentry.io/) \- You can use the Sentry extra context parameters to help auditing various things (lambda environment, aws api results you get at runtime, etc)

<comment><USER10> That's a great list of gotchas, could you specify some main reasons why you'd still choose lambda with so many small issues vs "traditional" hosting?

<comment><USER9> It's not either-or. I wouldn't replace "traditional" hosting by Lambda, but among other things it is very suitable for the following use cases:

\- You have a mostly static site that needs a couple of dynamic views (eg. comment or payment processing), but the site doesn't get enough traffic to put a webserver behind it.

\- You are continuously processing sub-5min tasks and don't want to have to be doing the up/down scaling yourself _and_ you're willing to pay a premium to have the scaling be managed.

\- You want an easy way to run a piece of code from various AWS triggers without having to set up webhooks in between.

\- Your next employer is a buzzword vulture and you have an idea for a serverless virtual reality blockchain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> jonathan-kosgei I used API Gateway and Lambda to serve 20M API calls last month on ipdata.co for a little over $100.

Something to note, latencies decrease with increased usage due to fewer cold starts. I've seen latencies as low as 17ms in our busiest region with ~40ms in less busy regions.

</comment><comment><USER11> I never really understood why people would want to build "applications" on top of Lambda. I have always been under the impression that the primary function of Lambda is to assist in programming the AWS environment (in conjunction with SNS and SQS).

</comment><comment><USER12> Expensive, especially if you are utilizing API Gateway. Otherwise, it's amazing.

</comment><comment> d--b I gave it a shot because my api was fairly simple and I really did not want to go through the hassle of setting up a server. The overhead turned out to be massive, like half a second per query. So I ditched it for node.

</comment><comment><USER13> Running a pretty simple app on Lambda: take DMARC reports, parse them, ship them off to somewhere useful. Same app deploys to Lambda+SES and Google App Engine.

Lambda app: just keeps chugging. GAE app: perpetual disaster.</comment>


Long-range communication with devices that consume almost no power - <AUTHOR> http://www.washington.edu/news/2017/09/13/uw-team-shatters-long-range-communication-barrier-for-devices-that-consume-almost-no-power/ <comment><USER2> We need to talk about the security implications of low-power devices broadcasting data. I cringed when the article talked about broadcasting "medically relevant data" for kilometers, in the clear. That's not OK. Everyone needs to be clear on the fact that that's not OK.

I'm ecstatic at the possibilities this has for reducing the power cost of communication[0]. Please use the savings on some (at least half-decent) crypto.

[0] Seriously, can this work for a consumer handset communication network?

<comment><USER3> Encryption is a easy. I doubt this will be a problem.

<comment><USER2> Encryption is easy on platforms with plenty of power and transistors and well- established libraries, which are the exact opposite of what we're talking about here. Encryption on very low-powered systems is a well-known problem.

<comment><USER4> Encryption for low data rate systems is actually a very easy problem. I have sensors in the field which transmit a 64 byte package once a day only 18 bytes of which is data and is encrypted. the encryption an one time pad in ROM which lasts the life of the device (8 years) the device does not receive.

I agree encryption is totally necessary for medical/sensitive data or two way devices but for other cases (such as irrigation data) no encryption or an encrypted ID is just fine and a problem that does not need to be solved.

<comment><USER5> Seemingly trivial data can be combined to form a detailed picture of someone. Regarding irrigation: How is the farmer's business doing? What kind of seed are they using and what is their schedule? Is the homeowner home? Are they following local water use laws or guidelines?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm concerned with the environmental impact of:

"...farmers looking to measure soil temperature or moisture could affordably blanket an entire field to determine how to efficiently plant seeds or water. "

Littering chips all over the place?

<comment><USER7> And largely these sensors are unnecessary. Such "precision agriculture" efforts are just doubling down on a broken agricultural paradigm.

<comment><USER8> What does that even mean? Plant seeds, water, temperature is just how nature works. What other "paradigm" of agriculture is there?

Maybe you mean everyone growing their own food? That's not sustainable.

<comment><USER7> Two things:

* Sure, seeds germinate with water and warmth. But that's true today. In the words of an Australian farmer quoted in a research paper a few years ago: "Mate, we don't need a chip to tell us the soil's dry."

* There are other paradigms of agriculture that are actually sustainable. Agroecology is a good example of an alternative scientific paradigm for agriculture, one that thinks of agriculture in ecological terms.

<comment><USER9> I'm not convinced by the Australian farmer.

Microclimates are a thing. Water is not evenly distributed across any sizable plot of land. Being able to tell where the water is (or more importantly isn't) can surely help deploy resources more efficiently.

But, I'm a desk jockey, and hope to never, ever be a farmer.

<comment><USER10> You are right. I've been working a bit with the software for water management (although related to measurements of humidity over the day). Local management of resources does increase yields and sometimes just saves the crop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, the old-time KGB would have _loved_ this:

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

(A passive resonant bug presented in a gift to the US Embassy in Moscow in 1945, designed by Léon Theremin, ancestor of today's RFID devices.)

The _modern_ bugging applications don't even bear thinking about ...

</comment><comment><USER12> I didn't see Mhz one time in the article and frequency only once with no numbers.

2.8km... is that line of sight?

This article is beneath HN.

Link to the paper: [http://longrange.cs.washington.edu/files/loRaBackscatter.pdf](http://longrange.cs.washington.edu/files/loRaBackscatter.pdf)

<comment><USER13> You can't look at that trace antenna and guess the frequency?

Obviously it's ISM band, and these researchers are in the United States.

Does it really need to tell you that it's ~900MHz?

<comment><USER14> Yes, actually, it does.

The green PCB looks more like a 2.4GHz antenna to my eye. The epidermal patch is much longer so looks like 900MHz to me. And there is also 27MHz for ISM. The lower the frequency, the further it tends to go.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> dupe-ish: _LoRa Backscatter [pdf] |[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15201692](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15201692) (1 day ago)_

> ac29: _900MHz is heavily used in the US and describing the noise as > "background" or "random" is disingenuous at best._

> Nelkins: _There has been some prior work on this:_

> junkcollector: _Active RFID. The same technology in any meaningful sense._

\--

related: _LoRaWAN packet received at record distance of 702 km |[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15201692](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15201692) (7 days ago)_

> aw3c2: _From a balloon in almost 40km altitude._

<comment><USER16> That's the same link twice...did you mean to post two different HN links?

<comment><USER15> Oops, my bad -- the first link to the dupe should have been: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15246659](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15246659)

Thanks for double-checking. Serves me right for trying to be helpful on my phone!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This stuff has some really cool implications but...

> For example, flexible electronics — from knee patches that capture range of > motion in arthritic patients to patches that use sweat to detect fatigue in > athletes or soldiers — hold great promise for collecting medically relevant > data.

Sorry this just sounds lame, whenever people try to suggest applications of new technology they almost always seem to be A) not particularly useful and B) unimaginative.

> sweat to detect fatigue in athletes.

Really? don't you think it might be simpler, faster, cheaper (better in every single way) to just _ask_ them?

<comment><USER18> To play devil's advocate, there definitely is a disconnect between when you think you're fine and when you're dehydrated

<comment><USER19> It took me some 15 years to realize I had been chronically lacking sodium.

Fixed that problem; running is better than ever.

Sometimes you know you're not fine, but the cause isn't obvious. An athlete who is dehydrated might feel something is off, but not pin it on dehydration. Maybe just a bad day, or not enough sleep, or recovery from some earlier workout or whatever. That's a problem: even if the body tells you something, the message isn't always interpreted right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Some Standford students seem to have done something quite similar already. [https://web.stanford.edu/~skatti/pubs/sigcomm15-backfi.pdf](https://web.stanford.edu/~skatti/pubs/sigcomm15-backfi.pdf)

<comment><USER21> That paper is referenced in the paper cited in this article. Number 52: [http://longrange.cs.washington.edu/files/loRaBackscatter.pdf](http://longrange.cs.washington.edu/files/loRaBackscatter.pdf)

<comment><USER22> The Washington guys are definitely the leaders when it comes to backscatter stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm late to the party, I've been doing work instead of keeping up with HN, but this was discussed yesterday:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15246659](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15246659)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, hadn't seen that! Didn't mean to double-post, and the original title was too long so I had to modify it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Finally something that might create a commercial incentive for a lowered RF noise floor!</comment>


Robotic surgery is causing deaths heart surgeon warns - happy-go-lucky https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/11/08/tougher-rules-demanded-robotic-surgery-catalogue-errors-leads/ <comment><AUTHOR> > The surgeon had never had any one-to-one training in using the device.

> The surgeon, Sukumaran Nair, was dismissed from the Freeman Hospital in > Newcastle after it emerged he had turned down opportunities to train on the > Da Vinci machine. Despite this, the doctor had vociferously lobbied > superiors to be allowed to perform the mitral valve repair in 2015, the > first of its kind with the aid of a robot in the UK.

Misleading title and article. Surgeons that are unfamiliar with new technology are blaming it when things go awry.</comment>


Startup Opportunity Check it out - <AUTHOR> https://www.dropbox.com/s/0imibk50we1brqp/Ad%20For%20Project%281%29.pdf?dl=0 <comment><USER2> If this is a job post, it should be posted in the official thread that will appear on Monday (read the instructions about the format or details).</comment>


Ask HN: What would you do with http://startup.io? - <AUTHOR>

I recently acquired http://startup.io , I am looking to contribute it to a great project.  What would you do with it? <comment><USER2> I'd say..how about a directory of sorts, for people who've got ideas, and are looking for feedback, or other people to help build it? Just a thought from the top of my head.

<comment><USER3> This has been done already (rather well, in my opinion):

<http://www.builditwith.me/>

<comment><USER4> Last time I used that (a year ago)- didn't get replies from many people. It seemed like a zombie app to me.

<comment><USER5> second that

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> become a platform where people can contribute startup related content. For example, legel things vary from country to country. For someone in US, HN might help. What about Chinese/Indians etc? Extrapolate this. Marketing gyan can be shared.

If you can create a platform where things are grouped properly, it would be valuable for people who want to startup :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Sell it, because I can't think of a good way to make money with it that I would also enjoy to do for a long period of time.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a possibility, but looking to see if anyone has a great community project that would be great for it. What you mentioned is a reason I am not looking to be the main project maintainer though I might contribute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Isn't it obvious? Kittens or porn.</comment>


Ask HN: Will taking a boring job for higher pay put me at a disadvantage later? - <AUTHOR> I joined a FAANG company recently. The work is very boring and there are enough politics. I feel a bit sick of all this to be honest.
My previous job had more interesting work with half the pay. The company also had good enough brand name.
I feel if I stay in my current role, I will not be as sharp as I was. But I will easily be making 100k more per year which is a lot for me as a single bread earner. <comment><USER2> There's 112 hours in the week where you're awake.

Working at your overpaid gig only consumes 35-40 of those hours. Take the money and do whatever they hell you want with it on the side. If you want more interesting work... there is no more interesting work than the work you find for yourself.</comment>


The Request for the Startup Has Been Filled - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gmail-waiting-for-reply-e/gndkgfemgakbnilhjaenkhdpkaiemaif

<comment><AUTHOR> Posted this earlier today

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7326188](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7326188)

Just spent 10 minutes creating the google app

Source is in the gist:

[https://gist.github.com/cjbarber/9297034](https://gist.github.com/cjbarber/9297034)</comment>


Black Friday death count - <AUTHOR> http://blackfridaydeathcount.com/ <comment><USER2> This my site. I would have submitted it here, since I frequent HN way more than Reddit, but I thought /r/WTF was more appropriate.

The real-time pane of Google Analytics has been pretty entertaining: [http://33c4d819db899251066f-11ab2606b95aca1e296d8d1ea376f411...](http://33c4d819db899251066f-11ab2606b95aca1e296d8d1ea376f411.r17.cf1.rackcdn.com/7955.png)

<comment><USER3> There an RSS feed or any other way to poll the site for updates?

<comment><USER2> I don't think it's really necessary, since there's only one day a year that I can update it.

Quite a few people have been calling it a 'real time' service, which is a bit silly once you actually think about it.

<comment><USER3> Touché :) I'll just check it out on Saturday. Fingers crossed no one dies this year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In the years covered in this list (2012-2006), there have been 238 fatalities due to lightning strikes.

[http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/statistics.htm](http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/statistics.htm)

<comment><USER5> Ok, how many times does lighting strike the US every day? How many Black Fridays are there every year?

Let's just assume that this level of violence is constant, and there's a Black Friday every day of the year (which doesn't make much sense at all): Multiply those 4 deaths by 365 and it's not hard to see that this is more fatal than lightning. However I think the nearly equally disgusting part is the fact that people are getting hurt at all. You're lining up to spend your money, calm down.

<comment><USER6> Apparently you don't know much about lightning if you are multiplying by 365.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _My new metal band_

</comment><comment><USER8> Here is an excerpt from the citation provided for an incident in which 2 of the deaths were reported.

> The violence erupted on Black Friday, the traditional post-Thanksgiving > start of the holiday shopping surge, but authorities indicated the shooting > wasn't related to a shopping frenzy.

Anyway, 4+63 over a period of 7 years for the entire population, statistically the probability of getting killed/injured is almost 0. Do we even need such analysis?

<comment><USER9> I think the commentary lies more in the fact that it's even happening, and will likely only get worse if the trends continue. Black Friday is not a real holiday, but we [as in the U.S., mainly] have let marketers create it out of thin air, giving them our attention until they whip us into a feeding frenzy of consumption.

Obey. Consume.

<comment><USER8> The visible trend in the data provided, 2011 was the worst with over 40 injuries and 1 death. While, the preceding and succeeding years have be rather quiet.

Besides, marketers creating trends is neither a new phenomenon nor is it localized to the US, for example, marketers in India have popularized a holiday tradition in the past few years, Akshaya Tritiya, where purchasing gold is supposed to be auspicious and brings about good luck. Though it is loosely based on a religious occasion, it isn't a real holiday. Besides, the surprising bit is the prices aren't shot down to boost sales as in Black Friday, instead the prices shoot up as a result of the demand caused by the shopping frenzy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there any comparison to other days?

<comment><USER11> Good question. I imagine the incidence of shopping/consumerism-related deaths and injuries is a lot lower for the rest of the year, but it would be interesting to get some numbers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would say this is something that should be brought to people's attention... but somehow I don't think the kind of people that do these things would care.

<comment><USER13> What? The 4 deaths and 63 injuries? Over 6 years? Doesn't seem like it _is_ something worth caring about, especially when participation is entirely optional.

<comment><USER14> I think optional participation _once you 've been properly informed of the risks, however small_ is fine, but uninformed participation should be discouraged.

<comment><USER15> I'm willing to bet that more people die in auto accidents getting to the store than have died at the store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord Remember, November 29th is Buy Nothing Day.

[https://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/bnd](https://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/bnd)

</comment><comment><USER16> Wikipedia has a somewhat more detailed summary for those interested: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(shopping)#Violenc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_\(shopping\)#Violence)

Although, the site linked here does do a more rhetorically effective job.

</comment><comment><USER17> How sad is that I'm stunned death / injury counts are so low? I assumed 1+ people trampled to death every year.

</comment><comment><USER14> I actually told international students here (who are really uninformed about black friday and the kind of mess it can be -- they have only heard about the great deals you can get) that they'd be best advised to just order stuff online because of things like this.

<comment><USER18> Well, they're best off ordering online not because of "stuff like this" but that hopefully they have much better things to do with their time than standing in line and dealing with chaos when they don't have to. For whatever small savings I might find on Black Friday I can't imagine going through the hassle.

<comment><USER19> If one's time is effectively worthless (which may be the case if one is unemployed or a student), one might be able to get below-cost deals by camping out by a Best Buy for a day or two in advance. But one should only do this if there is really nothing better to do, or if the recreational enjoyment of the event (perhaps by camping out with one's friends) makes it worth it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So how does this compare to the rest of the year? How does it compare on a per shopper basis over the rest of the year? Less than one death per day, and about 10 injuries per day. What are the statistics for other events that draw large crowds?

</comment><comment><USER21> Macabre. Effective.

Perhaps should reset the headline counter each year, with prior-year counters (and all-time since launch) somewhere below for reference.

<comment><USER22> That seems dramatic. I was struck by how _low_ the numbers were.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> That's actually a lot less than I was expecting.

</comment><comment><USER24> Well that's a lot lower than I thought.

</comment><comment><USER25> Seems like best to stay away from Walmart.

<comment><USER26> Good advice in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> South Park fan, I assume? :)

</comment><comment><USER28> Black Friday or not, there are deaths and injuries everyday...</comment>


Who owns copyright to a freelancer's work - Kirby heirs claim Spiderman and more - <AUTHOR> http://thresq.hollywoodreporter.com/2010/03/kirby-marvel-lawsuit.html

<comment><USER2> At the very least, they will need to share Spiderman with Steve Ditko.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ditko#Creation_of_Spider-...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ditko#Creation_of_Spider- Man)</comment>


Show HN (German): Automatic login script for KDG free hotspots - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/msmuenchen/6376644

<comment><AUTHOR> This script bypasses the stupid automatic redirection for session start/renewal on Kabel Deutschland WiFi hotspots; it might come in handy if you either live in range of one of these (like me) or are travelling in Germany.</comment>


Ask HN: Why does Microsoft make it so hard to disable Web Search/Bing? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Timeless principle: Follow the money.</comment>


A social networking site is not an open access repository - <AUTHOR> http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/12/a-social-networking-site-is-not-an-open-access-repository/ <comment><USER2> On a wider point, I often see Facebook cited as an example of the 'Open Web'. However a lot of it's content is in Facebook groups, which requires a FB registration and membership to access. It's not open or publicly searchable. I can't think of a better example of the deep or hidden web. Previously a lot of that information might have ended up on more widely accessible forums.

<comment><USER3> Calling facebook part of the deep web - interesting proposition!

<comment><USER4> Facebook perfectly fits the original definition of the term [1], but unfortunately media confusion has turned it into a synonym for Tor and hidden services.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_web_%28search%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_web_%28search%29)

<comment><USER5> Are you not thinking of "dark web"? I see that a lot, but I've not seen "deep web" used by the media at all (though I won't deny that the media misusing technical words is entirely believable...)

<comment><USER4> "Dark Web" is indeed the proper term, but it's been conflated with "Deep Web" in the media. See the section "Terminology conflation" in that Wikipedia article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The chart is great! Dead simple side-by-side comparison.

I especially like how they call out Academia and ResearchGate as for-profit companies that bombard you with emails. The open access movement needs to be not-for-profit, motivated by sharing the worlds academic discoveries with the entire world. Full stop.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> An interesting related read is "On leaving Academia.edu" published by a professor who is going to leave the social networking site: [https://imgur.com/NUBD8nn](https://imgur.com/NUBD8nn)

Edit: the original at [https://www.academia.edu/s/f0001df3b6](https://www.academia.edu/s/f0001df3b6) was taken down.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the archive. Super hard to read the text, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right. An ASCII version is here [http://pastebin.com/axGrNhAk](http://pastebin.com/axGrNhAk)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's great they're going so far with it. Requiring harvesting to be allowed prevents scammy half-measures like Elsevier(?)'s scheme of letting their subscribers publish link to individual articles that might satisfy a few use cases but still allows them to shut down access whenever they like.

</comment><comment><USER9> We have the OSI model, which allowed a great length of innovation for getting people connected, not matter which hardware both parties are using, or where they physically are.

Networks must be connected in order to keep moving forward, and social networks are just another type of network.</comment>


Taking control of a 36 year old NASA spacecraft using GNU radio - <AUTHOR> http://www.dodgycoder.net/2015/05/taking-control-of-36-year-old-nasa.html <comment><USER2> Yeah, it was too bad they could not course correct it, but the telemetry is also cool. I agree with the author that it really boggles the mind that we have the ability to use our laptops, tethered to a phone, to send commands to an ancient satellite, to turn on its sensors. If that isn't the hook of an alien invasion thriller I don't know what is :-)

<comment><USER3> I might be wrong but aren't you missing the giant radio telescope they used to send the commands?

Still awesome. I love how NASA helped with advisors and gave their okay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Best quote from the story: _SSH-ing from the third row of DEFCON into the laptop at Arecibo to send commands to the space probe that was about to fly past the moon_

<comment><USER5> That sounds like hollywood technobabble. It is not. It is gloriously, awesomely not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As an aside, Risky Business podcast is a fantastic podcast if you're interested in infosec. I've been listening to it for over five years, and can't recommend it enough, both for the quality of the content, and for the laughs they have. It comes out weekly on Fridays (Australia time). I've met Pat at some conferences and had a beer with him - he's a great guy, both on and off the podcast. Highly recommended! The website is [http://risky.biz](http://risky.biz)

/plug

<comment><USER7> Have to agree here. Your mileage may vary on the sponsor interviews at the end of the podcast, but the guest interview each week is generally pretty awesome, along with the news chatter. Great podcast, highly recommend giving it a try.</comment></comment>


Instacart (YC S12) Scores $220M Investment - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2014/12/30/grocery-delivery-startup-instacart-scores-220-million-investment/ <comment><USER2> This company does the little things right, and people notice. I think faster internet + smartphones are necessary but not sufficient in explaining Instacart's success.

I live in a place with an entrance not visible from the street. The first time I ordered, I directed the shopper over the phone. Every subsequent shopper has found the entrance without a problem. I assume the shoppers share accurate notes. Literally every other delivery I get requires a phone call and directions. These little things make a huge difference, and are where similar companies with the same potential technology fall short.

Congrats to the team. Well deserved.

</comment><comment><USER3> Congrats to the Instacart team! I love what they are doing. Their app has a great user interface and the service is fast and easy to use.

It's definitely interesting to see that the world is finally ready for something like this, because Webvan (I know it's brought up a lot) didn't do so hot back in the day. We obviously have the technology now that we lacked 10 years ago to make something like this a major success.

<comment><USER4> Is the difference technological or cultural? In other words, what different technology do we have now that would have enabled Webvan to succeed? To me it seems that the most marked difference is the consumer culture and comfort with online buying.

<comment><USER5> Let's not forget the most simple and obvious answer: browsing the internet was _slow_ back in the day. When I was living in NYC during the Kozmo/Urbanfetch era it would be 20-30 seconds or so to load a product page, then you'd have to add something to the cart, which took awhile, and so on. Images were crappy and small, pages took forever to load, websites just in general didn't work all that well, core principles of UI/UX we take for granted now hadn't really been settled yet. And I had DSL, most at the time had dial-up.

Ordering things online back then was really annoying, and the grocery type order, with lots of little things that are kind of hard to browse and sort (a problem Instacart still struggles with today to be honest) made it especially annoying for this kind of service. And I was a tech minded person who wanted it to work and wanted to use it.

Online browsing and buying was really tedious, it's easy to forget just how much so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> $100m revenue is impressive. But what are the gross margins on that?

<comment><USER7> Obviously hard to tell, but you can extrapolate a bit.

At $100mm in revenue, and an assumed $60 order price, you've got 1.6mm orders. Assuming 25% of people pay for faster delivery, you've got gross revenue per order of $4.50, or gross revenue of $7.2mm. If Instavart takes a 30% share (similar-ish to Uber and iTunes), you're looking at $2.2mmin revenue after paying contractors.

So that would leave you with 2.2% of sales as your margin after contractors. This obviously changes if they mark up the groceries or if the assertions are different.

Out of interest, a 15 P/E on 2bb would correspond to a 60x grow in their market (ish). They currently represent about 100mm of Whole Foods 15bb take, or about 0.67%. A 60x increase would take them to managing 40% of Whole Foods orders, given no expansion into other grocery chains.

This is a lot of hand-waving, so please take it with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER8> They do mark up the groceries

<comment><USER9> They say they don't for "most" stores

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8707904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8707904)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As someone moving from the Central Valley in Ca to Portland in the next few months...this is exciting to hear, I've been pretty excited to get to use this service.

<comment><USER11> Instacart is still fairly expensive here in Portland. If you're living in the city proper you should have a grocery store located < 5 blocks from where you live. Just in the pearl I have walking access to Safeway, whole foods and food front.

If you're in the suburbs it might be worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow, congrats! I'm a big fan (and customer).

</comment><comment><USER13> That's great new! Going to grocery store is such a pain. Instacart delivers you to the grocery store and bring you back after you've done shopping.</comment>