Cold Does Not Increase Odds of Catching Cold (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/19/upshot/repeat-after-me-cold-does-not-increase-odds-of-catching-cold.html <comment><USER2> The studies mentioned are great, and they don't come close to approximating real life. Here are two mechanisms I could think of that weren't addressed by the article:

I just spent 5 minutes in the cold and my nose started running. People with a runny nose are likely to wipe it with their hands and then touch a doorknob or something, facilitating the spread of disease. Runny noses are far less likely in warm weather. And secondly, by the article's own admission rhinovirus replicates faster in cold conditions, while our own cells (and presumably immune system) are suppressed in cold conditions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Counterpoint: [http://www.nature.com/news/cold-viruses-thrive-in-frosty- con...](http://www.nature.com/news/cold-viruses-thrive-in-frosty- conditions-1.13025)

 _[...]low temperatures dampen natural defences against rhinoviruses, the leading causes of seasonal colds, in mice and in human airway cells[...]_

<comment><USER4> Thanks for that article. It also links to this study from 2005 showing a correlation between accute cooling of the feet and the onset of cold symptoms in humans. The studies on cell apoptosis were attempting to show why (according to the nature article). Interesting that the original article doesn't mention this 2005 study.

[https://academic.oup.com/fampra/article- lookup/doi/10.1093/f...](https://academic.oup.com/fampra/article- lookup/doi/10.1093/fampra/cmi072) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16286463?dopt=Abstract&h...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16286463?dopt=Abstract&holding=npg)

<comment><USER5> > Interesting that the original article doesn't mention this 2005 study.

But it does and even links to it. (As does the article in folli's link.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another counterpoint (from a centre investigating the common cold): [http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/common-cold-centre/the-common- cold](http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/common-cold-centre/the-common-cold)

 _Can a chill cause a cold?_

 _A study at the Common Cold Centre in 2005 took 90 students and chilled their feet in cold water for 20 minutes and showed that the chilled group had twice as many colds over the next 5 days as a control group of 90 students whose feet were not chilled._

<comment><USER7> Pretty much impossible to blind that study, though: the subject definitely knows whether or not his feet have been in cold water for 20 minutes.

<comment><USER8> You could sedate them, I suppose. Although I wouldn't be surprised if that would overcast entirely the suppressing effect of the water.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am probably wrong, but my understand has been that being cooler longer-term, say living at 50 degrees reduces peripheral circulation. This provides a place for the virus to replicate with less immune interference.

It seems like many of the studies to disprove cold temps -> rhino are just acutely exposing people to more extreme cold temps. I also wonder, what we colloquially refer to as colds is a superset of rhinoviruses, any study should prob. test all the common cold viruses?

Also, a probably controversial tangential anecdote, my wife and I started taking 3 Vitamin D (2000 IU Summer, 3000 IU Fall/Spring, 4000 IU Winter) a year ago and neither one of us has gotten the cold or flu since _knock on wood_. This is not only surprising considering numbers of sick co-workers, but also an anomaly historically for us. I know Vitamin D has an effect on the passive immune system that lowers TB and influenza infection rates, I wonder if this same is true for rhinoviruses....

<comment><USER10> the problem with 'studies' is that they try to treat the world as binary, when its all systems.

the vitimin d thing is interesting, cold = dont go out = dont get vitimin d. try sleeping in a cold room with no clothes/blanket. will wreck your immune system fast.

<comment><USER11> Honest question, do people really find sleeping in cold rooms with little/no clothing to cause illness? I'm probably an outlier (last illness was food poisoning in 2003), but I sleep through the winter in boxers, covered in a light sheet, with the heat set low (65F, higher if I had a GF at the time and she was sleeping over).

Is it the shock to the body for those unaccustomed to it, or just another area where I'm at outlier?

<comment><USER10> i think 65 with a sheet is within the optimal sleeping range :) i should have quantified, <60 = cold

<comment><USER9> A lot of people don't realize too warm is bad too, less restful sleep, elevated cortisol etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cold weather increases odds of catching a cold because it makes us more likely to stay indoors with other people, some of which may be sick and contagious.

Also, burning wood in a fireplace is very bad for your lungs and respiratory system and can make you more susceptible to infections.

Get outside and you probably won't catch anything. Norwegians let their babies nap in sub-zero temperatures and they're fine!

[http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21537988](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21537988)

<comment> semi-extrinsic FWIW, we generally bring the babies inside for naptimes once it drops below -10C (14F). Otherwise they nap outside all year, true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My understanding is that its not _technically_ the person being cold that increases the odds, but the fact that the air is generally drier when its cold outside. This allows viruses to travel further, and also causes the nasal passages to be drier, letting bacteria enter more easily.

<comment><USER14> I catch most colds when the weather is humid, so the cold air can creep underneath my clothes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Meanwhile, history buffs might appreciate that we're still using a 16th century[0] term to describe a disease that is being studied 60+ years after etiological discovery[1] for which available remedies are modestly effective and not without risks [2][3].

[0] [http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=cold](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=cold) [1] [http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/2013/09/fighting-the-cold- wa...](http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/2013/09/fighting-the-cold-war-david- tyrrell-and-the-common-cold/) [2] [http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article- abstract/185731...](http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article- abstract/1857319) [3] [http://retractionwatch.com/2016/12/29/jama-article- zinc-comm...](http://retractionwatch.com/2016/12/29/jama-article-zinc-common- cold-retracted/)

</comment><comment><USER16> A few years back I saw a study that reported that cold viruses survived longer outside the human body in cool temperatures than in warm (not below freezing, but the equivalent of refrigerating them.)

That makes sense, and since you won't get a cold unless you pick up a viable cold virus, this would imply that the chance of getting a cold would be higher in cooler weather, because there are more cold viruses on the surfaces around you that haven't yet been denatured by heat.

I don't know if this hypothesis has been explicitly tested, but it seems to me as though it could explain why people get more colds in winter than in summer but are not usually made sick by playing in the snow or taking a plunge in frigid water. The cold doesn't do anything to the people, it just preserves external viruses longer making the environment "dirtier".

<comment><USER17> Although, ICU and emergency wards at most if not all hospitals are kept cooler than other places in part to slow the rate of growth of bacteria, viruses and other similar organisms that can spread infections.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My experience has been that going outside in the cold (-15C) with only minimal layers of protection did not cause a cold. I did however notice how, if I was sitting in a hot bus next to the cold window, such that only part of my body was cold (like the right arm), I would start to feel ill.

</comment><comment><USER19> Anyone have bright ideas on how to convince someone that this is true? My wife absolutely believes that not dressing warmly enough will make you sick, and it drives me mildly crazy.

<comment><USER20> I'm afraid it's probably just too rooted in tradition. My parter and her mother are Russian, and Russians hold to this theory like you wouldn't believe - if the two of them had it their way, I'd be bundled up and ready to go to Oymyakon even if it's 5C out. :)

I appreciate their concern of course, but it's just one of those long-lasting ideas that has little sway, despite my partner getting sick far more often than me while dressing up with far more during cold snaps than I do.

On the plus side, борщ every day once it starts getting cold.

<comment><USER19> My wife is Chinese and the Chinese seem to have a crazy amount of medical superstitions. This is the one that bugs me the most, but there are so many bizarre rules she tries to follow.

It's interesting because her family is, for the most part, educated, rational, and sane. But certain things.... I guess it's tradition, like you say. Makes me wonder what crazy stuff I believe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> You are more likely to catch a cold when the weather is cold, because people stay inside more, viruses live longer in living spaces during dry winter conditions, etc.

You are _not_ more likely to catch a cold when you yourself get cold or chilled, as shown by the 1958 randomized trial and other experiments.

The article's title ought to be amended to make it clear that the latter situation is being discussed.

</comment><comment><USER22> Here are some assumptions I've made that make me think being cold does increase the chance of illness:

• Feeling cold increases stress. ⇒ Stress weakens the immune system.

• Being cold expends energy. ⇒ Fighting a virus requires energy.

• Being cold increases blood pressure. ⇒ High blood pressure is not conductive to good health.

• The cold reduces circulation. ⇒ Reduced circulation is detrimental to health.

<comment><USER23> If only someone had reviewed the actual research on the subject and written an article about it.

<comment><USER22> The research isn't conclusive. The research about stress, blood pressure and circulation is much more so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I used to have cold mostly in winter for years. But i self-discovered that it was allergy which started with a couple of sneeze and went to take the form of cold and cough in couple of days. So, now whenever I feel like I am about to get cold(disease), I take allegra and boom it doesn't go further than that sneeze.

<comment><USER25> Do you know against what you had the allergic reaction? Because most season based allergies are during summer with grass pollen and the like.

I'm asking because my daughter also has allergy in winter, but they didn't discover against what (no dust-mites or anything like that)

<comment><USER26> I would suspect first, in the winter, mold/mildew -- including the foods list in link here. [https://www.achooallergy.com/learning/mold-allergies-in- wint...](https://www.achooallergy.com/learning/mold-allergies-in-winter/) . Tho, i'm sure you tested for that as well... hope you find the trigger.

I have also found that most typical minor "cold" symptoms for me stop immediately by taking Claritin D. I suspect its drying out things in the sinuses, and reducing some inflammation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> For me it is usually cold dry air that seems to cause post-nasal drip. Once I get that, it's a good chance I will get a sore throat, and it goes from there.

Being outdoors is usually fine, but sleeping under a strong AC or driving in the cold with windows down is almost a sure fire way to get this started.

</comment><comment><USER28> I absolutely don't know if this is true: but my doctor once said that your nose and cavities are having their 'period' every 6 weeks or so, just to clean up. Most people don't even notice this. But this is when you are most vulnerable to viruses.

Maybe someone know if this is true.

</comment><comment><USER29> Part of the perception might be that people do get runny noses and sneeze more in cold weather (at least I do). That feels a bit like having a cold so our minds might connect them and subconsciously feel it's the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER30> I thought it was basically that your body is spending more energy keeping your body warm, and not as much defending yourself from cooties. So you get sick from lowered immune system response.

</comment><comment><USER31> ah ah, this sound paradoxal! But it just because in english a cold is called a cold and not something less connoted like nasopharyngitis.

<comment><USER32> Not just in English. In Russian it's called "простуда" (coldness). In Japanese it's "kaze" (wind). Spanish "resfriado" (cooled). And so on.

<comment><USER33> Polish "przeziębienie", which would roughly translate to 'state of being thoroughly overcooled'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> i find cold increases your immunity. whenever i feel getting sick, i jump in a cold bathfor abbout a minute. it is something i been testing for past few years and i can say it seems to work about 80% of the time.

sometines you just need to put some shock on your body to wake up your immune system. i feel this is an area we haven't researched enough.

</comment><comment><USER35> From the article:

 _It has been postulated that when it's cold, people tend to congregate inside. This behavior makes it easier, of course, for viruses to be spread from person to person_

I've always thought this to be the case, and if true, then cold _does_ increase the odds of catching a cold.

</comment><comment><USER36> Is there any work showing correlation with Vitamin D status?

</comment><comment><USER37> Rousseau said the same thing in his book Emile.

</comment><comment><USER38> Go outside on cold day. Don't dress for it. Come home. Have cold.

Think have enough data.</comment>


How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ <comment><USER2> I have to appreciate the humour this shows. All in the name of progress, and it certainly made me laugh.

SpaceX has somehow managed to turn landing a booster from space into something almost mundane, but it bears remembering the failures that got them there.

<comment><USER3> You try and fail. And try and fail. And try and fail. And then one day you have learned enough to try and succeed.

Learning how to NOT land it is learning how to land it.

<comment><USER4> As there is a definite Monty Python feeling to the video, I'd suggest this is appropriate: [https://youtu.be/aNaXdLWt17A?t=20s](https://youtu.be/aNaXdLWt17A?t=20s)

<comment><USER5> Did the Month Python music and quotes gave it away?

<comment><USER4> Congratulations on... noticing the same thing I did?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can't help thinking that the captions would make excellent Culture ship names.

e.g.

ROU _Sticky Throttle Valve_

Edit: In case anyone is wondering about about the connection to the Culture, the SpaceX "Autonomous spaceport drone ships" are named after Culture ships:

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

 _Just Read the Instructions_

and

 _Of Course I Still Love You_

<comment><USER7> Was there ever a ship called _It 's just a scratch_ ? That's sounds like a good name too.

<comment><USER6> Apparently not according to:

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

Rather like 'Look, that's not an "Explosion"' as well... :-)

Edit: I'm hoping that the first manned ship on Mars will be "The Ends of Invention".... ;-)

<comment><USER8> > Edit: I'm hoping that the first manned ship on Mars will be "The Ends of > Invention".... ;-)

Problem with Mars landings is the high turnaround time - while you can see what failed and fix it in a matter of days to weeks on Earth, with Mars you're looking at months to years of having another attempt.

Wonder how they'll get it done - practice on Moon first?

<comment><USER9> The Moon is not a super useful analog. It lacks any sort of atmosphere. Mars has just enough atmosphere that you have to deal with it, but not enough of one to be especially useful (parachutes buy you a little, but not much).

In fact, some of the best data and tests we have about landing big things on Mars come from SpaceX's first stage booster landings. The burn that the first stage does at the edge of space to slow down is in an environment very similar to that of the Martian atmosphere.

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

<comment><USER10> The Moon isn't a useful analogy precisely because the Martian atmosphere does make a significant difference. Just not enough to allow parachute-only soft landings. I've seen the 'thick enough to be annoying, too thin to be useful' meme before but it doesn't really match reality.

For example Pathfinder decelerated from 7.3km/s to 0.4km/s purely using it's aeroshell, before it even deployed the parachutes[0]. Now 0.4km/s is still pretty fast, but a saving of 6.9km/s dV is absolutely enormous.

Red Dragon was only possible because, with modifications to the capsule aerodynamics, the Martian atmosphere would brake the capsule enough for it to soft-land on the SuperDracos. There's no way a Dragon could usefuly soft-land on the Moon. It's just way too heavy for it's size. All that thick capsule hull is just dead weight for an airless environment. Given it's high dry mass the rocket equation demands huge amounts of fuel to compensate. The parameters are all wrong for the Moon because it's designed to use atmospheric drag to do most of the work.

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

<comment><USER11> It's great and useful for smaller probes but as we've sent larger and larger probes the thin Martian atmosphere has been less and less useful. One of the major issues is that the mass keeps going up but the surface area of the heat shields we can reasonably bring along doesn't scale as well. There's some hopes in inflatable technologies though.

<comment><USER10> That is a good point. Red Dragon was only feasible by adding an asymmetric sled under the capsule to provide lift, so it could spend significantly longer braking through the atmosphere. Also the ITS video and presentation shows it using it's lifting body design to maximise time up in the atmosphere. At that scale straightforward aeroshells don't cut it, but you can still get a useful effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice compilation, definitely some segments I don't remember seeing before.

With those out of the way though... they've attempted 10 landings so far this year and all have been successful. Third flight of a reused booster is planned for early next month.

...and fingers crossed for seeing all three cores from the Falcon Heavy test- flight making successful landings.

<comment><USER9> > definitely some segments I don't remember seeing before.

I'm bummed there isn't a better video of the March 2016 SES-9 failure (the only shot in this video is the droneship on the horizon).

That was the landing that punched a hole in the deck of the droneship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My god, finally something that explodes as easily as all cars do in the movies.

<comment><USER14> I thought the same thing when that rocket slowly tipped over and still completely self-destructed. I understand rocket fuel is volatile, but wow.

<comment><USER15> Are we sure those are not intentionally/automatically triggered explosions?

<comment><USER16> The grasshopper flight that flipped sideways then exploded was blown up by the flight termination system. The rest of them are just pressurized tanks of propellant rupturing in the presence of fire and/or red-hot metal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Landed orbital rocket boosters are all alike; every unlanded orbital rocket boosters is unlanded in its own way.

</comment><comment><USER18> "I didn't want to be the CEO of SpaceX, I wanted to be a Lumberjack." \- Elon Musk

<comment><USER19> Skidders and trucks in the mud vs rockets and barges. Same difference. The toys he gets to play with are just different. Probably way less dick jokes, facial hair and steel toe boots on a SpaceX job-site though.

<comment><USER9> > Probably way less dick jokes, facial hair and steel toe boots on a SpaceX > job-site though.

You don't think these folks are wearing safety tipped shoes and cracking dirty jokes from time to time?

[https://www.gannett- cdn.com/-mm-/caac49d6e3f44d10409a91a8bb8...](https://www.gannett- cdn.com/-mm-/caac49d6e3f44d10409a91a8bb8b6a96db8e03f7/c=206-0-3060-2146&r=x1443&c=1920x1440/local/-/media/2016/05/10/Brevard/Brevard/635984826027372461-SpaceX- at-Port-Canaveral-17.JPG)

<comment><USER19> There's an direct relationship between ease of oversight and joke PCness.

Twenty dudes in the middle of nowhere turning trees into a piles of logs are gonna be way more fun to hang around with than a team who's supervisor's supervisor could easily drop by.

Follow some people who work odd hours on Snapchat/IG. Way more screwing around happens on 3rd shift than 2nd or 1st.

IMO the morale boost of allowing people to screw around (relatively speaking) during normal operations offsets the material decrease in productivity because people are more willing to work hard in cases where you need maximum productivity.

<comment><USER20> On other threads about Uber and SoFi I think they call that a "frathouse culture" which must be cleansed by fire.

<comment><USER19> > I think they call that a "frathouse culture" which must be cleansed by fire.

The culture needed varies based on the nature of the work.

What works in an office doesn't necessarily work on a jobsite and vise versa. Even then it varies by the nature of the job. The typical "condom full of acetylene" would probably not go over well in a workplace that specializes in something highly regulated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Full video here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ)

</comment><comment><USER22> It reminds me of the collection of failures film in the Redstone and Mercury projects. That said, it also shows how closely managed the release of this video was, after all when you just had a tweet from Elon and no pictures and lots of questions, all you got were crickets.

I am glad they finally made it out, if only in partial form, for folks to see. Landing _is_ hard, and there was a lot of things that didn't work. And it is way more open than Blue Origin and their less successful flights.

</comment><comment><USER23> They make it look so easy now.

In 20 years time we will be saying in amazement "you mean they used to just throw away the boosters after each launch?".

Bravo spaceX.

<comment><USER24> I remember first hearing about it and thinking it was science fiction, unable to really be achieved.

Glad to be wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> April 2015; this one looks good enough... then it explodes too.

<comment><USER9> It had a _lot_ of lateral movement at touchdown. A "sticky" valve slowed the engine's response to throttle commands. That led to a feedback loop as it got further and further behind (you can see it gimbaling significantly back and forth).

<comment><USER25> But it was almost slow enough to not explode.

<comment><USER9> Once it tipped over, it was going to explode. You can see the cold gas thruster at the top trying desperately to keep it upright, but it was just too off-axis, and had too much lateral momentum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Now I would like to see them attach 7 boosters together in a hexagonal pattern and get them all to land safely.

<comment><USER27> The Falcon Heavy is basically attaching 3 boosters together in a line. Unfortunately for your vision, the Falcon Heavy boosters separate and land one-by-one as individual boosters.

Your idea does make some intuitive sense. While lifting the single booster and even with just one of 9 engines turned down to minimum throttle, when the payload is gone and the tanks are near empty there's an enormous excess of power. The minimum thrust-to-weight ratio is still like 2:1. This means you have to run a "hoverslam" profile which reaches zero velocity precisely at the deck, otherwise you'll take off again. And it means you come in terrifyingly hot and fast, resulting in the explosions in the linked video.

With 7 boosters strapped together, you'd think there could be a more appropriate ratio of power and mass, which would enable a more controlled, sedate, hover-and-land profile. If the current 40% throttled down single- engine, single-booster TWR is 2:1, 3 engines would give you a 0.86:1 to 2.14:1 TWR. They could even turn on 3 engines at the outer corners in an equilateral triangle, and use both gimballing and differential thrust to control your descent.

It should be easy. You'd just get some struts and select hexagonal symmetry...oh wait, no, that's KSP. In reality, landing 7 boosters at once with a near-unity TWR would be much more expensive in terms of fuel. You want a hoverslam profile that's almost too fast to control, because then you can get your payload higher and faster. Right now, with the single 9-engine booster, they sometimes burn 3 of the 9 engines to land (giving a >6:1 power- to-weight ratio). They do this when they're short on fuel because for every second that they are airborne, they're suffering a 9.8 m/s hit to their delta-V. They want to come down as fast as possible to minimize time in the air.

<comment><USER26> my plan would be to separate the boosters too, you just need them stuck together at launch.

or another plan would be to keep them together all the way to mars, and you have a habitation unit above the boosters which is their combined surface area.

when you launch the habitation unit you can later land another one next to it the to tile them together.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> They seem very fragile?

The one at 0:49 exploded just from tipping over.

Perhaps because they're huge i guess.

<comment><USER29> Every pound of weight you add to the rocket is a pound of payload that you can't put into space.

<comment><USER9> It's not technically 1:1 on the first stage. It varies a bit from launcher to launcher, but it's in the ballpark of 4:1 (you lose a pound of useful payload for every four pounds you add to the first stage).

Your point is spot on though. Don't waste mass to account for failure modes that you can just avoid in the first place by landing upright.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There's now a high res version at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ) . Could a mod update the URL for this story?

</comment><comment><USER30> Direct link to video for fullscreen view:

[https://scontent- frx5-1.cdninstagram.com/t50.2886-16/2173252...](https://scontent- frx5-1.cdninstagram.com/t50.2886-16/21732525_713249985525933_1412086930828427264_n.mp4)

<comment><USER31> that's only the first minute. robin_reala has a full-length youtube version that's also high definition.</comment></comment>


Want to make $10k per month blogging? 4 things stopping you - <AUTHOR> https://wordsbyevanporter.com/blogging-gets-harder/ <comment><AUTHOR> >"Part of the reason it's hard to grow an establish blog (or at least, it "seems" hard), comes down to the numbers.

When your tiny, little seedling of a blog gets 50 pageviews per month, then the next month gets 250, it feels amazing!

You just grew by a factor of 500%!

But when your site has dozens or maybe hundreds of articles, and gets tens or hundreds of thousands of pageviews per month (and makes good money), it's REALLY hard to see that kind of growth.

If you're able to add 200 extra pageviews in a month to that kind of blog, you'll barely feel it — an increase of maybe a quarter of a percent?

While it's still technically growth, it'll be relatively invisible in your data and it'll feel like you've completely stalled."</comment>


Is CSS Turing Complete? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2497146/is-css-turing-complete <comment><USER2> One of the answers towards the bottom linked to an incredibly interesting read on programming using nothing but Procs[1]. I found it to be incredibly fascinating, and it even goes into implementing FizzBuzz under these constraints.

[1]: [http://codon.com/programming-with-nothing](http://codon.com/programming- with-nothing)

<comment><USER3> That blog post is basically explaining untyped Lambda Calculus and Church Numerals with the ruby lambda syntax. If you liked that you maybe interested in the real thing. The best introduction I know is a really great book on Type Theory called: "Types and Programming Languages." It is great because after Lambda Calculus the author shows how to build really useful programming languages and type systems using the lambda calculus formalism. Definitely a must read if you are interested in understanding the underpinning of modern type systems.

[1] [http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/](http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/)

<comment><USER4> I read that book years ago in a Theory of Programming Languages. I recall learning a lot from the process, but I'm probably due for a refresher, now that I'm building more things in Scala and trying to learn me a Haskell for great good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm coining it now, Guenther's law, corollary to Atwood's law:

Anything that can be implemented in CSS, shouldn't be.

<comment><USER6> I really hope that's sarcasm. Otherwise we will have people ripping out CSS, like how some people don't optimize because premature optimization is evil. I also don't want to go back to font tags.

<comment><USER5> Did we even read the same post?

I'm joking that people shouldn't write Turing complete code in CSS. Add style properties for days, more power to you, but if someone posts an implementation of Git in CSS next week I will promptly jump off a bridge, laughing all the way down.

<comment><USER7> Your phrasing of the proposed law isn't quite right. According to it, red text should not be implemented in CSS since it can be implemented in CSS.

<comment><USER6> Bingo!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The easiest way to prove that CSS is _not_ Turing complete is to demonstrate that every CSS "program" terminates, therefore halting problem is solvable for CSS. Indeed, a proper CSS engine will process a set of CSS rules in finite time, or display an error. Therefore CSS cannot be Turing complete.

<comment><USER9> Where's this proof?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> More importantly, can it be expanded to the point that it is able to read mail and, if not, when will it be replaced with something that can?

</comment><comment><USER11> This is called a Turing tarpit ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tar_pit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tar_pit)): where a system is technically Turing-complete, but in reality is too awkward to do anything useful with.

</comment><comment><USER12> So who's going to be the first to write a full blown web-framework in CSS? I'm mean who really wants the _unnecessary_ bloat of a dependency like JavaScript?

</comment><comment><USER13> Can someone explain how the demo proves that it is Turing Complete? I haven't taken automata yet.

<comment><USER14> It doesn't. As someone pointed out, Tic Tac Toe can be implemented in Finite State Machines [1], which have less computational ability than Turing Machines [2].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite- state_machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine)

<comment><USER15> Isn't the only difference between a finite-state machine and a Turing machine whether the memory is finite or not? Then you could argue that nothing has ever been made that is Turing complete because everything can be simulated by a finite-state machine because of memory limitations.

<comment><USER16> There is a difference, though, between a finite state machine and a Turing machine with a finite amount of memory. An FSM cannot recognize context-free languages, but a Turing machine can--even when it's implemented on a computer without infinite memory.

(Actually, you only need a pushdown automata for context-free languages--I forget what the next step up in the hierarchy is, the one that does require Turing completeness)

<comment><USER17> A Turing machine without infinite memory can't recognize context-free languages. Take the standard example of recognizing the language of balanced parentheses. With finite memory, there's a limit to how many parentheses you can keep track of. That limit is going to be _gigantic_ for any reasonable amount of memory, but it's still a limit. The language of balanced parentheses with a depth limit is no longer a context-free language, but a regular language, and as such can be recognized by a FSM.

It's trivial to demonstrate that a Turing machine with finite memory is equivalent to a FSM. Enumerate all possible memory contents. This number is, again, large for any reasonable amount of memory, but it is finite. For each possible memory content, enumerate the Turing machine states. Each memory state plus machine state becomes one FSM state. The Turing machine defines a transition from one state to another plus an action on memory, which becomes an FSM transition to the state that encodes both the new machine state and the new memory state.

<comment><USER3> Not at all true, the language of balanced parens is not regular and cannot be matched by a FSM no matter how much memory you have.[1] It can be matched by a Push Down Automata PDA.

The primary difference between a PDA and an FSM is a PDA has a stack which acts as memory. Thus, a PDA can remember how many parens it has seen before. Every time it sees an open paren it will push it onto the stack, when it sees a close paren it pops. When the stack is empty it matches if the input has been consumed.

The difference between a PDA and a Turing machine is the stack is now a read/writable tape which can move in either direction. Notice how in both formulations there is no limit on the memory (the PDA stack is could be infinite as can the Turing machine tape). In contrast a Finite State Machine doesn't have any memory. The finite refers to the number of states not the amount of memory. Indeed, Turing machines are traditionally formulated with finite states as well.

Thus, a FSM can never match the langauge of matching parens but a Turing machine can. It will either match or consume all of its memory if memory is limited. Memory limitations are not a statement on computational power but rather a statement on feasibility.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumping_lemma_for_regular_lang...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumping_lemma_for_regular_languages#Use_of_lemma)

EDIT: Your second paragraph is of course correct - you could encode every possible stack as a FSM if there is a bound on the stack. HOWEVER, if you have a limit on memory but it is essentially unknown (you know memory is finite but you don't know exactly what the limit is) a PDA or a Turing machine will of course be able to match things your FSM cannot (because they can take advantage of the memory your FSM cannot assume it has in its states).

Memory limitations are in some sense an implementation detail. We could design a computer to pause while we buy more ram. Then it could use as much memory (in theory) as the human race could produce. That sounds like infinite for some definition of the word.

<comment><USER17> I'm deeply puzzled as to how you can say that my second paragraph is "of course correct" yet continue to argue that there's a difference.

No, the language of balanced parens is not regular and cannot be matched by a FSM no matter how much memory you have. That's completely true. However, it also cannot be matched by a Turing machine with finite memory, no matter how much memory you have. That is because, as I showed and as you agree is "of course correct", the two machines are equivalent in their capabilities.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I apologize for the parent comment. I realized I had misread your comment after I had posted and did the edit to try and rectify the situation. I left the original because I thought it might clarify some of the differences between the machines for people who don't know anything about the subject.

I guess I felt that the memory limitation was a misleading way of discussing the machines. Turing machines and PDAs are usually discussed with infinite memory. In practice the input really determines how much memory the machine will use.

Furthermore, I believe that the encoding scheme you suggest will use far more space than the equivalent Turing machine or PDA it encodes. Because, for every state in the machine you have to encode every possible memory configuration for that state. That means you have an exponential explosion in the number of states. This gets to the heart of the matter for me: when memory is bounded using the finite version of a PDA will let you match a deeper nesting of parens than a FSM because it will use memory more efficiently. You have to put the states of the machine somewhere and that place is either memory or hardware which are both limited.

<comment><USER17> You're absolutely right that there's a vast _practical_ difference between the two things. This is, of course, why our actual real-world computers are modeled on Turing machines with finite memory, not on pure finite state machines. To model a machine with 1GB of RAM, an FSM would need 2^1024^3 states, multiplied by however many states are needed to model the CPU.

However, the difference is purely in practical terms when it comes time to actually build one. In the theoretical world they are equally capable and can recognize the same languages.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


After Firefox wins borwser wars, what next for Mozilla? - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=2725&blogid=14&pn=1

<comment><USER2> If it wins... I am seeing more and more people switching to Chrome now :)</comment>


Addition on Turing Machines (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://jeapostrophe.github.io/2013-10-29-tmadd-post.html

<comment><USER2> Neat article! But one point: Turing machines aren't exactly what modern computers are based on so that's why you won't see many attempts at solving problems using Turing Machines. Computers are based on the RAM model of computation which can be shown to be equivalent to Turing Machines.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random- access_machine#Turing_eq...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random- access_machine#Turing_equivalence_of_the_RAM_with_indirection)

Brainfuck is essentially a Turing Machine based programming language but I doubt useful problems will be solved in practice by rethinking problems in terms of Turing Machines.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough re: practicality, but I think the point of the blog post is to explore the idea of Turing Machines by thinking about how they can be implemented and programmed, which is a good way to explore the science of computation.</comment></comment>


The love-hate relationship developers have with Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://margaretannestorey.wordpress.com/2013/11/27/the-love-hate-relationship-between-developers-and-twitter/

<comment><USER2> No developer mentioned about promptly cutting down features on the same API that made people adopt twitter as a medium? Bullshit.

I do not get why I shouldn't be able to consume their information using the universal RSS.

Guess that this issue was not included on the survey.

<comment><USER3> Right, it didn't turn up in the exploratory survey or in the interviews. Well, also we wanted to know how developers _use_ Twitter ... the API I guess wasn't that important at least to the people we talked to. Some said in the initial survey that they had switched to App.net though, but it was only a tiny fraction that we weren't able to talk to. As we say in our study, our results are not generalizable, so there may still be several other issues lurking that we didn't catch in this study.

<comment><USER2> Then again, RSS is how "tech savvy" (incl developers) would _use_ twitter. Sorry I digress, maybe I do take RSS too seriously. But for me it is really important to draw a distinction in how a service is consumed. Using a website often means the possibility of being unconsciously engaged, thus spending there more than the desired time.

<comment><USER3> Well, most of the developers we talked to were _professional_ developers, so they probably were tech-savvy. Maybe the removal of RSS happened so long ago that nobody's really frustrated by it anymore -- either you use a client (CLI if you want, "t" is neat) or you move on to something else?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Situation Normal, Everything Must Change (OSCON 2010) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Oyf4vvJyy4&feature=youtu.be

<comment><AUTHOR> Simon Wardley's quote at the end is just priceless

 _There are huge markets to be taken: go take them, go disrupt them, and go build the golden age of open source_</comment>


Software error exposes the ID numbers for 1.26M Danish citizens - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/software-error-exposes-the-id-numbers-for-1-26-million-danish-citizens/ <comment><USER2> TFA: > See also: 10 dangerous app vulnerabilities to watch out for (free PDF)

Ha! Oh wait, that's not intended to be a joke...</comment>


The Customization Curve - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-customization-curve/ <comment><USER3> The graph looks wrong, no? Doesn't the independant variable typically go on the x axis? The sustainable cost line intersects the graph randomly. If you swap the labels of the graph then it kinda makes sense, only I disagree with the shape of the curve in that case. A little customization goes a long way. The curve shouldn't decrease until the midpoint.

<comment><USER4> The graph is written as "giving how happy I want my customer base to be, how much customization will I need?"

And IDK why the middle is lower than the left side.

<comment><USER5> No customization presents a simple tool that, hopefully, just works and can be accepted with its flaws and limitations. Once customization starts being added in, it's easier to see annoyances and "why isn't this feature present".

<comment><USER6> Not sure why this got down voted -- no expectation of customization does seem to lower the threshold of satisfaction. Yours seems a solid explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Being overburdened with customizations can be an indication of failure in the product management team/processes. Customer problems are rarely as unique as they believe them to be. Great product managers will hear the request but find the underlying need behind the request and build a solution to address that need rather than just writing up the customer request and passing it to the engineering team. It's over-quoted, but Ford's line about his customers asking for faster horses is apropos. Hear the need behind the request and intelligently address that and you'll arrive at a coherent product rather than a collection of one-off features.

</comment><comment><USER8> One of the dangers of Paul Graham's now famous startup advice "do things that don't scale" is when you no longer are on a path to a scalable product or service. The whole point of a product company is to achieve scale, this should not be forgotten. Customization is fine, it's when your attention is split across different types of users that you can get into trouble.

</comment><comment><USER9> I even witnessed a company who started with a product and then went down the road of customization, 15 years later arriving to a point where they are a custom development shop using all the same product simply as form of advertisement (proof that they are competent). Just by continuously taking the offers of enterprise clients to customize their product to their needs - <USER2> quickly turned out that it made a lot more money than selling the product. Then, these clients started to hire them to do unrelated things, and recommend to other clients to do unrelated things as well.

Their last license sold was about 5 years ago.

But probably making more money than they ever planned to make with the product (the product was planned as a lifestyle business, not a startup - say they never tried to look for any funding).

</comment><comment><USER10> The graph really should be U-shaped.

There is a bit of manufacturing philosophy that I find relevant here.

You can build an efficient factory that makes a large number of identical widgets at a price competitors can't beat, or you can make a factory that makes small batches of custom order widgets at prices competitors can't beat.

However, when you try to build a factory that does both well, you'll end up with a price point that is no longer competitive.

In software, it is very similar. You can stick to a model, or you can spend your time customizing, but if you try to do both you'll end up with an unmanageable code base. This will eventually lead to rising costs and a lost competitive edge.

<comment><USER11> I think the graph is trying to describe an idea rather than be a reflection of reality, they do mention it will look different in specific cases. Though, I think as you point out, the graph could look drastically different for certain kinds of businesses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> That graph is so bad people are going to discuss it more than the article itself.

<comment><USER13> It's a Bezos chart.

<comment><USER14> What is this a reference to?

<comment><USER15> A quick search suggests a trivial conspiracy ...

[https://twitter.com/jsnell/status/481863414180896769](https://twitter.com/jsnell/status/481863414180896769)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not sure what to think about this because it's difficult to characterize "customization". Most software has some amount of toggles, options, and so forth. And some have things like plugins or built-in scripting. What counts as "customization" and what doesn't?

Is chromium too customized for example? There's lots of toggles, options, command lines switches and a whole web extension subsystem.

</comment><comment><USER17> Rotated the graph!

[https://i.imgur.com/a7ds0fr.png](https://i.imgur.com/a7ds0fr.png)

</comment><comment><USER18> The graph shows customization required as a function of happiness.

Low happiness --> low customization

Medium happiness --> minimal customization

Infinite happiness --> infinite customization

High happiness --> moderate customization

With the interesting bit being the balancing act around "moderate customization", "high happiness", and "sustainable amount of work".

</comment><comment><USER19> "2\. Customizations that are software features are easier to build than customizations involving people processes."

I am not sure this is true at all for any scale of organization. It's certainly much easier to prototype a service and provide it to a customer than modify and release code for just one customer.

</comment><comment> FLUX-YOU Just build a plugin/extension system.

Then you have a base product you market to new customers and a developing marketplace of plugins which you can likely sell for a lot if your product is focused well enough.

<comment><USER20> I really don't thing this is a good answer by itself. For a start it's taking a punt.

Before deciding to build a plugin system, you need to decide in which dimensions it will allow extensibility. The answer to that should not be 'all of them', because then you've just badly reinvented a general purpose programming language without the tooling and with more awkwardness (c.f. Spring).

Plugin systems also increase code complexity. Extensible software is usually slower and less reliable than software which doesn't, _even before you actually add any extensions_.

Lastly, software has to have a big enough market of developers to create and maintain the plugins. So this works well for e.g. Emacs, but for each success story they are more specialized or less popular tools with a failed plugin ecosystem.

Consider Mediawiki as a cautionary tale. It's a big, popular piece of software with a lot of extensions. Most of them are unfinished, unmaintained, untested, insecure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I can't make heads or tails of that graph. Which is supposed to be the independent variable?

<comment><USER22> A certain amount of customization is cheap, easily supported, and makes customers very happy. A little _more_ customization is very expensive and doesn't make customers much happier (quickly diminishing returns).

<comment><USER21> That's nothing like what the graph is depicting.

<comment><USER22> I thought you couldn't figure out what it was depicting? :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Blockchain to Revolutionize the Coffee Supply Chain - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2017/10/24/blockchain-coffee-bext360/ <comment><USER2> Using blockchain as an uncountable noun like that is like saying "database will revolutionize the ______ supply chain."

They aren't talking about Blockchain technology as a whole, though - rather a specific Blockchain.

I wish the Fortune editor thought this through and added an "A" to the title.

Rant over.</comment>


Websites That Did Really Well on Flippa (and What We Can Learn From It) - <AUTHOR> http://www.sparklewise.com/7-websites-that-did-really-well-on-flippa/

<comment><USER2> Flippa has a lot of sales listings of somewhat questionable value. However the "Just Sold" section ordered by descending price is a good place to look for valuable business niches, as it filters out a lot of the spammier listings : [https://flippa.com/just- sold?sort_col=price&sort_dir=des...](https://flippa.com/just- sold?sort_col=price&sort_dir=desc).

The Experienced People forums are also a treasure trove of information about dodgy website sellers : <http://experienced-people.net/forums/forum.php> .

<comment><USER3> I dont know, even the link you provided... the first few are something about "rx" sounds like cheap knockoff drugs from Mexico, "clickbank affiliate", affiliate gambling site, "makecashtakingsurveys.biz"... These all sound like the scum of the internet type of sites to me.

<comment><USER2> You're absolutely right, there is still a lot of dross in there without a doubt - probably because very few people sell their decent, stable, money making sites.

I use it as more of an idea generator and its one of the few places where you can get some indication of revenue levels for particular types of sites .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've sold a half dozen sites on Flippa (and the SitePoint Forums before Flippa was spun off from that). The largest single sale was $90,000 for a site selling a WordPress plugin I developed.

It doesn't matter how much junk is also for sale on Flippa as it's all very filterable and searchable, and those filters and searches can be saved. I have them saved as daily e-mail alerts so I just skim the new listings matching my criteria once a day.

<comment><USER5> Awesome to hear that you're making good use of filters & saved searches... we'll be making those even easier to use going forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great article. I love to see what sites do well on flippa, but some of them boggle my mind. Perhaps it's because not all buyers or sellers are rational, but I have to also think that there are schemes and scams that I'm not aware of at work there. I'd love to hear explanations for some of the sales I see there.

Flippa is a marvelous wasteland of make-money-fast sites being marketed as make-money-fast schemes themselves. Although there are diamonds in that rough, surely there is another place where people go to buy or sell more established, traditional web-based businesses. Where is that place?

<comment><USER7> From my brief browsing in the past its pretty obvious to me there's a lot of 'rough' and hardly any diamonds. Avoiding the scams is a skill in itself.

I don't think there is much possibility of making a success of a similar site for bigger cap web businesses, Thy are far less liquid assets and private sales would probably always be preferable to all parties involved once you're past a certain value threshold.

I really am not a fan of flippa, they have a great concePt and executed well yet they took the easy and (short term) more profitable route of allowing any old crap in. It's much like a lot of new online advertising platforms, there's a serious trust issue with all of the one ive seen where filtering out the scams, junk and misrepresentations is so time consuming and riskier it becomes not worth the time. I want to see flippa for quality small liquid sites (do they even exist and if thy do why would they be sold anyway?) and advertising platforms I can trust. Then I can start using these services.

<comment><USER8> Tom, as a long term watcher of website marketplaces, and the owner of the experienced-people forum, I completely agree with your assessment. Flippa did go down the route of quantity (more profit in listing fees) rather than quality. We did advise them when they started up that this would affect trust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Crazy to see how much these sites are going for... I'm always interested in finding some niche sites for sale but Flippa always seemed so..spammy to me. It seems like all of the sites on there are for article writing/spinning, reverse telephone look up, link building, spyware removal or some other cheesy, no value-added type of site. I'm sure people are making money on them but I just don't feel comfortable adding another one of those sites to the internet... maybe it's just me.

<comment><USER9> _Crazy to see how much these sites are going for._

If you look at the time it took to sell the numbers are actually pretty dismal depending on how much effort and money the owner put into the sites. But for me and the time I spend on projects 30k over 8 months or $200k over 6 years is a horrible return for efforts. That being said, I build very custom web-apps where these may be build a site and get traffic kind of sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> In the UK we have a saying, where there's muck there's money!

It's an interesting article - I wrote a more indepth version of the same thing three weeks earlier

[http://www.flipfilter.com/blog/2012/02/22/lessons-in-fast- gr...](http://www.flipfilter.com/blog/2012/02/22/lessons-in-fast-growth-for- internet-businesses/)

Flippa has good and bad, but I doubt it would be any other way anywhere else. It goes back to the idea of what's value for one person isn't necessarily value for another.

We run the A-List Newsletter which reviews sales of web businesses both from Flippa and from private brokers (<http://www.flipfilter.com/a-list>) with a value generally above $10K. Each month I look at the top five sellers for that month (in terms of sale price) and the most active (in terms of bids). The top five can vary wildly; in February it seemed they were all Clickbank Sites that sold products in the MMO niche and followed the same formula of launch to a pre-established list, marketing the hell out of upsells and downsells, selling the business then using the initial list (now much larger post launch) to do it again.

The most active however are pretty much always sites that sell Internet Marketing Services - for example, a site which sells Facebook likes or one which offers Social Bookmarking services. Their final selling price is always around the $1 - $2K mark and they often end with in excess of 50 bids despite only being a few months old and having no real barrier to entry (ironically, the same sellers will often sell the same templated site again under a different banner a few weeks later). IMO, the sad part is the people who buy these sites tend to be new to the industry and no real information to tell them that this isn't a the easiest way to get a return on their investment.

There's going to be good and bad at every price range, and likewise types of sites which tend to do well (Adsense with earnings history, Clickbank affiliate sites, Email Newsletters, anything with a big list in the MMO industry) and things that don't (Web Apps with complex backends, Ecommerce with physical products, News sites which require 'real' journalism) but that doesn't mean the sites which don't sell well aren't worth something to the right buyer.

This isn't defending the truly bad stuff or the sometimes fraudulent sellers that you occasionally see on there - it's going to happen for reasons that probably boil down to resources, but if even 10% of Flippa listings based on the 1,000s it has are 'good' then it still has more to offer than a site with 80% good but only 15 listings.

</comment><comment><USER11> I put CenterNetworks on Flippa about 15 days ago - starting bid at $10k. So far no bids, 13 people "watching" the auction. I've had a few private messages about stats but that is it so far. There are still 15 days left in the auction.

</comment><comment><USER8> Thanks to sheff for mentioning my non-profit experienced-people.net forum which discusses website purchases and sales. This site has sent us a fair bit of traffic yesterday :-)

Flippa is one of the many avenues one can use to sell a site or find one to buy. It has a high profile but in dollar terms accounts for a small proportion of online businesses sold. However, it's a popular location for webmasters and lower end websites and I recommend the flipfilter.com site for stats on the Flippa marketplace.

My own analysis is somewhat different. As I commented in the sparklewise blog (the OP link), figures you see in Flippa are deceptive. The $200K site mentioned at (D) in his blog post was sold a month later by the same seller for $40K. The chances are the first sale didn't go through. That's not an isolated case. I would advise that readers exercise caution, it's easy to get carried away with the large figures :)

I've been doing my own analysis of some Flippa stats (<http://experienced- people.net/forums/showthread.php/6331>) and the numbers are just not adding up for me.

</comment><comment><USER12> I could see a market for information like that. Some form of subscription service, where current Flippa auctions are evaluated on the basis of M&A factors.

<comment><USER8> I tested the demand for this and my experience is that there aren't enough buyers willing to pay for the kind of expertise required to curate listings based on some basic due diligence checks, filtering out obvious fakery, and using standard business valuation models to suggest a price range for sites being auctioned in Flippa. You've got to bear in mind that it's very time intensive work to get to the real figures. For example, most sellers don't deduct a nominal cost for their own time. To "normalize" their accounts you'll have to first decide how much of time/expertise is required to run their business and what that would cost.

<comment><USER12> It really depends on the level of sophistication. The target market could be anything from people looking to become self employed all the way towards more serious investors who might want to consolidate multiple sites under a common theme.

I personally love for example reading the monthly updates on <http://www.dnjournal.com/domainsales.htm> . They are quite helpful to get a realistic approach towards the domain market. I am missing something like this for projects and would be even willing to pay some fee for "hard facts".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> God damn it, when I was ~14 years old I had a very popular anime website (~3M+ uniques every month), but I shut the website down because I got bored. God damnit, I wish I knew about flippa back then! I don't even own the domain anymore...

<comment><USER14> I had an Anime site a few months ago that we listed as the management was contemplating selling due to PIPA/SOPA. We got no bids. We were getting similar stats. Now one of the original 4 Executives is the only one in charge and he merged the site with another site.

<comment><USER13> Damn, unlucky man. What do you think about Crunchyroll? I heard Shinji made a few million dollars last year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Could there be more elaboration on the $200,000 sale for list-of- companies.org?

I know that highest sale value doesn't make it the "best" of the lot, nor is that what the OP is saying...but I don't get what value there is in that site except perhaps as a search-engine-flytrap...it doesn't seem to have much use for humans.

For example, here's a list of luggage companies: <http://www.list-of- companies.org/Luggage_Bags_Cases/>

And it appears to be an aggregation of websites claiming to sell luggage, with no rhyme or reason to the order.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey danso, OP here.

The evaluation is a bit light for some of the websites I've covered. If this one sold for $200.000, it means there are other kind of directories that can be very profitable, either as your only website or as part of a portfolio of niche earners. Not something your average software developer will think of I guess. However, I imagine directories can be a bit labor-intensive (I don't have one myself).

I wanted to show that for software developers it's also possible to make websites that are not traditional webapps. There are lots of profitable websites out there.</comment></comment>


Almost all plastic in the ocean comes from just 10 rivers - <AUTHOR> https://www.dw.com/en/almost-all-plastic-in-the-ocean-comes-from-just-10-rivers/a-41581484 <comment><USER2> No, this article is wrong.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19910371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19910371)

> It's "of 57 rivers, 10 contribute 93% of the plastic of those 57"

> Schmidt and his colleagues dug up published data on the plastic > concentration in 57 rivers of various sizes around the world. ... > The > results, published last November in Environmental Science & Technology, show > that rivers collectively dump anywhere from 0.47 million to 2.75 million > metric tons of plastic into the seas every year, depending on the data used > in the models. The 10 rivers that carry 93 percent of that trash are the > Yangtze, Yellow, Hai, Pearl, Amur, Mekong, Indus and Ganges Delta in Asia, > and the Niger and Nile in Africa. The Yangtze alone dumps up to an estimated > 1.5 million metric tons of plastic waste into the Yellow Sea.

Plastic in the ocean also comes from industrial uses as well as from rivers - about 50% of it is fishing nets.

</comment><comment><USER3> What's conveniently missing from this article is that most of those rivers run through countries we are or have been shipping our plastic waste to, in order for them to recycle it. But they didn't. And it's not like we didn't know that for years already. But the trash was gone and it's a cheap solution, so why stop?

<comment><USER4> > we

A handful of companies on both sides of the trade enrich themselves through fraud (promising recycling), and "we" get the blame. Why do you think people bother separating plastics from the rest of their trash, if they know it'll all end up in the ocean?</comment></comment>


Hyperspeed effect with .js (hint: press HS button to go hyperspeed) - <AUTHOR> http://treksit.com/?sp <comment><AUTHOR> And calming brown noise.</comment>


Mozilla Security Blog: New Security Logging in Firefox DevTools - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2013/09/04/a-new-focus-on-security-in-the-web-console/

<comment><USER2> Really nice. Here is how I think about security automation in the future. On top of web security in the web console, Plug-n-Hack (PnH) is a Mozilla initiaited protocol allows security tools to interact with the browser as if you were making an API call to a web service. ZEST is also a Mozilla-driven scripting engine that allows security developers to "replay" an attack through a ZEST script. When you combine all these things with Minion and other security tools, automating and debugging web security will be a lot easier and more powerful.</comment>


Tesla is laying off 'about 9%' of its workforce as it 'restructures' the company - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2018/06/12/tesla-layoffs-workforce-restructure/ <comment><USER2> I am waiting for my scheduled HR meeting along with several hundred other co workers in a few minutes. I am an outside, in-home residential solar salesperson hired by Tesla long after the Solar City aquisition. I have relied on the leads generated by the Home Depot employees. I am salaried and most likely going to get my walking papers today. It is apparent they don't see value in the proactive approach process to sales.

<comment><USER3> Sorry to hear that, man. You going to be alright?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _It means that Tesla could let go over 3,000 employees in this round of > layoffs._

> _The CEO also confirmed that Tesla didn't renew its contract with Home Depot > to sell its energy products at their stores.

Tesla energy advisors were supposed to be at 800 Home Depots across the US earlier this year._

If they had 3.5 employees per store, and a team of 200 managing the entire effort, these layoffs could be attributed entirely to the lost Home Depot deal.

<comment><USER5> I wasn't even aware they HAD a contract.

My local Home Depot has zero mention of any product Tesla makes.

<comment><USER6> I was approached by a Tesla contractor in Home Depot on a few days ago. It was honestly not a good experience.

For one, I was approached cold. I too had no idea that they had this agreement, so I was looking at something when someone came up and asked me something like "what type of project are you working on?" So I naturally just described what I was doing and before realizing this was not a HD employee.

He asks me if I thought about solar and whatever, but it wasn't relevant to my situation (roof slope orients E/W at the 45th latitude, so not great for solar). He goes on his way.

It was just a weird experience. I wasn't in a department related to electricity or solar, and they had no displays indicating a partnership with Tesla or that you may be cold-approached by a Tesla employee.

<comment><USER7> I still can't believe retail establishments think it's a good idea to degrade the customer experience by letting third-party salespeople rove their stores. I know Home Depot et al are making money from it, but I can't imagine there are many customers coming away with positive feelings from these come-ons.

<comment><USER8> Is this a regional thing? I've never seen any 3rd-party sales staff in a Home Depot here in Chicago, or anything like this in any other big box store I frequent.

<comment><USER9> I've seen it here in Ohio. Sams Club and also Menards. Usually some guy at a aisle or back of the store trying to sell satellite tv. It is annoying...

Just shopping for whatever you needed and some random guy asks what you have for television.

Also seen a woman trying to sell perfume and wanted to spray some on people at another store, kinda pushy near where the cash registers are. Aren't some people allergic to that stuff? I think it would be better to have samples next to the actual perfume for when someone is actually shopping for that.

<comment><USER10> >Just shopping for whatever you needed and some random guy asks what you have for television.

I've had that in Costco, trying to sell me cable TV service. Then they act completely flabbergasted when I say I don't watch TV and don't care about cable.

<comment><USER7> Haha, I had the same response from a door-to-door cable pusher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Musk tweeted out the layoff email he sent:

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1006597562156003328](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1006597562156003328)

<comment><USER12> Wow, that fake crypto scheme tweet under his official tweet had me fooled for a second.

<comment><USER13> The fact that Twitter cannot put a single person up to delete a few dozen scam tweets every time a off celebrity tweets and ban a few accounts speaks volumes about how much they don't care about their users.

<comment><USER14> Fully agree and that's something I really don't get. Why don't they pay a small team of 5-10 people that monitors the top 200 accounts, and check if replies like that happen.

Hacky solution, but it would just work.

<comment><USER15> (And FYI, Elon is #87 for followers [https://friendorfollow.com/twitter/most- followers/](https://friendorfollow.com/twitter/most-followers/))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if some of this is finalizing the digestion of solar city.

How many accountants, tech, and office workers did the combine company have that were redundant? Have there been layoffs from the merger (if there were I missed them) - I'm curious to see if this is the end result of that combination.

<comment><USER17> There were some pretty massive layoffs with the merger already, leading into it, at least according to someone I know who was part of those lay offs.

<comment><USER18> And according to this article:

> After the acquisition of SolarCity, Tesla had another round of layoffs to > restructure and remove duplicate positions from the acquisition, which > resulted in about 20% of SolarCity's workforce being let go.

<comment><USER16> Other than the article I can't find anything that points to redundancy being the cause:

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/25/16545956/tesla- solarcity...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/25/16545956/tesla-solarcity- layoff-firing-elon-musk)

Is the only other reference that I have found and articles around this time frame don't make it clear the redundancy was the cause.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Given that Tesla has never made an annual profit in the almost 15 years since we have existed, profit is obviously not what motivates us."

<comment><USER20> Quotes taken out of context are really powerful, aren't they?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Claims no production staff were affected. Don't know the employee breakdown but imagine production is a huge portion of it. Hard to believe entire other divisions weren't completely eliminated if production not touched.

<comment><USER21> Given they admitted to over-relying on automation, I doubt they'd be cutting production staff now. It's not difficult to find 9% of the workforce in other departments: sales, marketing, operations, engineering, etc.

<comment><USER22> I think most companies would have a hard time finding 3,500 people to fire and not have it effect anything. Especially ones that describe themselves as a "growth company".

<comment><USER23> Most companies would have a hard time finding that many people to fire because they weren't that big. Most companies would have no problem finding 1 in 10 to fire in a downsizing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> They should also sack the execs who made the shitty decision to hire these guys, being approached by salesmen ruins any shopping experience IMHO and the whole debacle has probably lowered Tesla's image even more in the eyes of most people.

<comment><USER25> That exec was probably the SolarCity CEO at the time, who is Elon Musk's cousin, so that might be a little awkward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That Home Depot/Powerwall partnership was just announced in February 2018:

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/2/16964154/tesla-home- depot-...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/2/16964154/tesla-home-depot-stores- solarcity-powerwall-solar-panel-roof)

Were home installations ever projected to be a growable part of the company?

<comment><USER20> At the start, industrial installations of Power Pack were expected to be 80% of the battery business, but an alarming number of people outside of Tesla appeared convinced that retail Power Wall would be the thing. Guess what?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just reading the first few comments.... I really don't get the Tesla hate. Is it hacker-ish contrarianism? Have they done something? What's the deal HN, why are we cheering against the home team?

Overall Musk has been pretty straightforward and explicit with what he's doing.

Tesla (and spacex) set extremely ambitious goals, like none of their competitors do. They take big risks. They're not interested in reducing risk. They're interested in a business plan that leads to a mass migration of icbs to electric (or humans to mars). The nature of ambitious goals is that sometimes you don't hit your marks. The nature of risk taking is that you might fail, and have to do fast paced adjustments to recover.

Riskiness also means (literally) that Tesla comes with some chance of total failure. If they lose two or three big bets in a row, it could be game over. There are no cash cows or guaranteed income streams. Tesla is not Toyota or Microsoft. If you own Tesla, you need to be ok with that risk. Don't like it? Perfectly reasonable. Sell.

Personally (not an investor or customer), I think these companies are awesome. If GM disappeared tomorrow, nothing that I care about changes. If Tesla disappears, this could set back electric cars by 5yrs. If McDonald Douglass rocketry disappears, someone else will launch rockets for the US military. SpaceX... that hurts our chances of landing people on the other worlds anytime soon.

None of this risk profile stuff would even be controversial if Tesla was a fund. A fund manager can be as risky as she likes, provided that's the stated investment goal. Why doesn't Elon get this amount of rope? .. at least on hacker news?

Seriously, what has he done to deserve this negativity?

<comment><USER27> Interestingly, I see this from the exact opposite view. I'm surprised it's taken this long for the rubber to meet the road. Tesla sells the most electric vehicles, but it's hardly the sort of delta you describe ("extremely ambitious goals, like none of their competitors do"). Nissan and Tesla both hit the 300,000 car mark in January/February of 2018. And let's not forget the recent NTSB report, which revealed that "Autopilot" is just a better-marketed version of the lane-keeping everyone else is doing.

As to SpaceX--it's an extremely interesting attempt to tread a well-worn path. Commercial exploitation of space travel is a really neat concept. But again your comparison is completely unmoored from reality. SpaceX disappearing will "hurt our changes of landing people on other worlds anytime soon?" Who exactly do you think got us into space, then to the moon? Who is responsible for almost all the progress in space exploration to date, including developing the RP-1 based rocket designs that SpaceX is refining half a century later? It was U.S. defense contractors! It's worth keeping in mind that the Saturn V developed by Boeing/NAA/Douglas _in the 1960s_ could hurl three times as much weight to the moon as the Falcon Heavy. To date, the only _proven_ model for treading _new ground_ in space is large defense contractors spending gobs of State money.

The real question is: why does Tesla/SpaceX generate so much sophomoric positivity?

<comment><USER28> _the Saturn V developed by Boeing /NAA/Douglas in the 1960s could hurl three times as much weight to the moon as the Falcon Heavy_

True. At more than an order of magnitude higher cost.

<comment><USER27> Achieving an order of magnitude cost reduction for proven technology is impressive, even given the intervening half century of progress. But similar achievements are routinely made in other industries. It doesn't justify the breathless fanboyism Space X engenders.

<comment><USER28> Maybe because people think space is cool and there's been close to zero progress for decades before they came along? Or maybe because the goal is something more than just making money, something that clearly set them apart from the other entities in the field, at least when they started.

<comment><USER29> >Or maybe because the goal is something more than just making money

Maybe they view their payoff date in a longer term fashion, maybe the way they will make their money is 'cool' but Space X isn't more charitable than any other company.

<comment><USER28> Unless you have unique insight into Elon's mind, I don't see how you have any idea about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> A 9% adjustment isn't bad against a business that is running as hot as Tesla...

<comment><USER22> Are they running hot? They're in serious financial trouble and have been unable to meet self-imposed production levels. Now they're laying off thousands of people.

<comment><USER31> They are not in financial trouble. Most people are only skeptical if they can do it without raising capital.

However everybody agrees that they both have many costumers waiting and would be able to raise capital.

Nobody believes that Tesla is in real real serious troupe.

<comment><USER32> > They are not in financial trouble. Most people are only skeptical if they > can do it without raising capital.

Take a few minutes and read [https://priceonomics.com/porsche-the-hedge-fund- that-also-ma...](https://priceonomics.com/porsche-the-hedge-fund-that-also- made-cars/). The moral of that story was, if you're "fine as long as you can raise capital", then you're actually in a very precarious position. And it was even another luxury car company to boot!

Not that Tesla is making the same speculative financial shenanigans that Porsche was, but the point is, access to capital has a tendency to dry up right when you need it most. If there's a recession in the next 18-24 months (which, glancing at yield curves, is looking increasingly likely) and lending tightens up, Tesla might not find it as easy as you think to raise capital right when they need it to avoid running out of money.

<comment><USER30> And Tim Cook is waiting for that moment to arrive, so that he can put an apple on every Tesla.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Why is Tesla doing this? It is riding high on the success of its electric cars and Elon Musk is so famous and is considered a visionary.

</comment><comment><USER34> Friendly PSA: always negotiate severance. Companies can always be forced to restructure like this or even just choose to on a whim. Pressure from the board, hiring a new CTO who wants to bring in his or her own people, etc. etc.

Always make sure you are happy with what type of offsetting compensation you'll receive in this eventuality _before_ taking the job, and consider it a huge timesaver if an employer passes on you because you asked to negotiate a competitive severance package.

<comment><USER35> Easy to say for those of us with highly-demanded skillsets. My hunch is that a large portion of that 9% didn't have that luxury.

<comment><USER36> Looks like the 9% were mostly management in redundant roles, not production.

100% of the articles I have read about Tesla have been completely fabricated hit-pieces, or like this one, completely misleading. I think that at this point, they deserve the benefit of the doubt unless you're willing to actually read the article.

<comment><USER37> How is it misleading?

They purged contractors not long ago and are now laying off lots of people. Those are facts.

They reported that "production associates" are unaffected by the layoffs -- which doesn't mean that people working in production aren't impacted. It just means that they aren't laying off hourly employees in production. The editorial at the bottom of the article rationalizes the decision and reflects that it is ultimately good for the company.

IMO, it was a pretty balanced article that delivered potentially bad news in a fair way.

<comment><USER36> Misleading in that, when you hear layoffs, you immediately think "financial trouble" because that's usually the context that you hear about layoffs.

These articles you hear about Tesla are sometimes factual, but they're not published because they're factual. They're published to do damage and affect stock prices in a way that make specific people rich. It's the equivalent of playing poker, and affecting your neighbor's hand by distracting the dealer.

Every week there's a god damn article about Elon's "fall from grace" (what?) or about how he's trying to prevent unionization (you mean the fake unions that Ford has been trying to start, but workers aren't interested in?) or about subsidies (which are still a fraction of oil subsidies).

As a result, he made the mistake of criticizing the ethics of the media. So start expecting him to get the Gamer-gate treatment as the media pile on him even harder than before with fabricated news.

Every time I read a negative piece about Elon or Tesla, I worry "oh shit, is this the one?" and I look into the article and it's absolute bullshit. At this point, even if I read an article and it appears to be factual, I'd say the burden of proof is on the naysayers, and not on Musk or Tesla, given past performance.

<comment><USER37> You think "financial trouble" in this case because there is plenty of it. Tesla is a company with 6 months to either get cash or become insolvent.

Elon Musk is an amazing innovator and amazing PR guy. Few people can turn an idea into reality as well. But... he's running a high risk business whose rich valuation can go poof at any time. Because his personal name is inseparable from the firm, he's going to get heat for it.

The financial press has an obligation to talk about this stuff. Investors deserve to be informed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Still waiting for my site visit for the $1000 I put down a very long time ago for my solar roof.

</comment><comment><USER39> Somewhere along the way I have come to appreciate that as a society we need to optimize better for psychological, financial and physical wellbeing of people prioritized by proximity: employees, community, humanity. It will definitely slow down innovation. We might go to Mars 20yrs late, no self driving cars for 10 more yrs, walk around the city some more before electric scooter land etc.

Of course it is in conflict with innovations in humanity impacting products like cure for cancer, malaria etc. It would be nice to figure out a solution that provides a good balance.

<comment><USER40> >It will definitely slow down innovation

It will definitely slow down innovation. Some projects / aspirations will come off the table completely. Mars? Forget about it. All your mars money will be treating AIDS/Malaria/Cancer/Whatever. All NASA and space exploration money will go to feeding poor people and refugees and all manner of charitable causes, these causes will only ever multiply ad infinitum. I think there is really only money for one or the other. You can have a comfy easy welfare state life, or you can explore and reach for the stars.

You can't do discount Mars, or space exploration on the cheap, you basically can't have both. Your welfare state will make it so that you don't ever really have enough money to actually do any kind of space exploration. Sure you can send cheap drones locally within the solar system, but that's all space exploration will ever be from now on.

<comment><USER41> Maybe instead of NASA, the money could come from the war budget instead? [1]

[1] [http://www.newsweek.com/how-many-trillions-war-has-cost- us-t...](http://www.newsweek.com/how-many-trillions-war-has-cost-us- taxpayer-911-attacks-705041)

<comment><USER40> That won't happen. I don't think 'regime change' is going to come off the foreign policy menu, nor is paying back all the debt that is owed. So the space money is going to be eaten by debt payments and more 'regime change' initiatives around the world. I forgot all about foreign policy, I thought there would be no money before, now i KNOW there will be no money for any of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Again?

</comment><comment><USER43> This is definitely the move of a company in the process of scaling up production of their mass market vehicle that their valuation hinges on. Definitely not about managing cash flow.

<comment><USER44> There's no need for sarcasm. Have confidence in yourself that you can speak plainly and the import of your comment will be undesrtand.

<comment><USER45> I appreciate the sarcasm, adds spice to the discussion. Nothing to do with confidence, that's just your attempt at putting the guy down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Tesla and SpaceX are businesses and I never understood the public fandom behind them and Elon Musk. 3,500+ people losing their jobs is pretty significant for a leader who touts altruism as one of his top motivators.

<comment><USER47> You are not going to count all the jobs he created in the first place, and the years of gainful employment those 3500 people had? It's just all negative in your estimation?

<comment><USER46> What an oversimplification of my comment. I'll oversimplify it for you so you can't misinterpret it: "This decision he just made is poor and Elon is human just like everyone else"

<comment><USER48> > "This decision he just made is poor and Elon is human just like everyone > else"

How on earth could you _possibly_ know that? It's entirely possible (likely) that not laying off those 3000 people would endanger the ability of Tesla to continue employing the other 30,000 people. Life (and business) is sometimes messy...

<comment><USER46> No, the company has been operating in the red forever. He is bowing to the public markets to make the company's life easier. It was never going to die if he kept these employees.

<comment><USER49> Those same public markets were recently trading at 87-88 cents on the dollar. (See [http://markets.businessinsider.com/bonds/tesla_incdl- notes_2...](http://markets.businessinsider.com/bonds/tesla_incdl- notes_201717-25_regs-bond-2025-usu8810laa18) for verification.)

If the markets were assuming that they would recover half of what was owed in bankruptcy, that corresponds to about 1/4 odds of bankruptcy in the next few years. Given that historically markets have been more accurate than any individual commenter, the risk of bankruptcy was quite real. No matter how many Monday morning quarterbacks like you think otherwise.

<comment><USER46> Sorry, to clarify I am talking equity. Please provide examples now.

The snark in this thread is unbelievable.

<comment><USER49> Here is a quick explanation of how markets work, and why equity is the wrong thing to look at to answer the question asked.

Equity prices give you a share in future success. They therefore predict expected future value, pro-rated by the odds of getting there.

Bonds give you back money if the company remains in business, and nothing more. Therefore they represent a prediction of odds of going out of business, with no regard to how wonderful the possible upside in the company might be.

Tesla's combination of high equity value and low bond value represents a company that has a real chance of becoming dominant in its sector, and also a good chance of cratering instead. You shouldn't invest in a company like that unless you understand why there is a real risk, and are willing to take it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Tesla's market cap is $55B

If you do a quick math let's say they sold 400,000 Tesla (which they haven't yet) at an average of $100,000 each (which is probably lower) its net worth comes around $44B. I feel like company is way over valued and there is lot of fluff in the evaluation.

<comment><USER51> That's not how people typically evaluate companies.

The "standard" way to evaluate a company is to take the price of the stock, and divide by the profits. There are some details like "historical PE" vs "forward-looking PE", but that's the basic metric.

The PE ratio represents the number of years it'd take for a company to make back the price you paid. And for most people, PE of 15 to 25 (15 years to 25 years of profits) to make back their market-cap is reasonable. Some companies like Amazon have PE-ratios over 100, as they're considered to be in "growth mode".

Tesla never has made a profit however, so its PE ratio is negative, at least historically. So evaluations are most likely based on expectations of future profits. Assuming Tesla is "worth it" at $55 Billion market cap or so, then Tesla needs $2.2 billion of consistent PROFIT / year (not revenue) to get to ~25 PE ratio.

Anyway, that's analysis from just one metric. There are other metrics out there, but I think PE ratio is the most common, and one of the simpler metrics to understand.

<comment><USER52> if you can just invest based on simple metrics like that it would be very easy to make money in the market.

<comment><USER51> I'm not saying "invest in simple metrics". I'm explaining how a typical evaluation is done. The original poster's evaluation is fundamentally nonsense.

> If you do a quick math let's say they sold 400,000 Tesla (which they haven't > yet) at an average of $100,000 each (which is probably lower) its net worth > comes around $44B.

This line just doesn't make sense at all. There's no metric I'm aware of that matches this methodology.

<comment><USER4> The original poster appears to be confusing revenue and profit. Also, the math is imprecise or incorrect - 400,000 cars sold at $100,000 each would be $40 billion.

In lieu of profits, is there any way to use revenue to estimate a company's valuation?

Tesla has $28.6 billion in assets, according to NASDAQ[0], yet their market cap is nearly twice that. Is that a normal ratio?

[0] [https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/tsla/financials?query=balance-...](https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/tsla/financials?query=balance- sheet)

<comment><USER51> > Tesla has $28.6 billion in assets, according to NASDAQ[0], yet their market > cap is nearly twice that. Is that a normal ratio?

No. Ford has $257 billion in assets for example but a smaller market cap than Tesla.

One could argue that "Market cap" is a poor metric of size and that "Enterprise Value" is better. Teslas numbers move in the right direction if you're looking at Enterprise Value, but its still kinda bad in terms of classical evaluation.

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment>---

Ultimately, the only way you square the round-hole of Tesla's balance sheet is imagining future earnings, future assets, and future growth. Alternatively, you invest because you believe in the cause and not because you plan to make money in the stock. Arguably irrational. But the world isn't really about money. I generally respect people who make that kind of decision, as long as they don't become an annoying fanboy.

<comment><USER52> Ford also has $222 billion in liabilities

<comment><USER51> Note that enterprise value takes into account liabilities. Which is why I mentioned it.

Also note that of Tesla's $28 Billion in assets, Tesla has $24-billion in liabilities. So the company is overall +$4 Billion in assets, while Ford is +$35 Billion in assets.

So Ford is 9x bigger than Tesla by assets, and is also 9x bigger by (Assets - Liabilities). In either case, the metric suggests that Ford should be bigger than Tesla, and yet both Tesla's market cap AND enterprise value is larger.

Clearly, no one investing cares about Tesla's current size relative to Ford. At best, people are speculating on Tesla's future growth.

<comment><USER52> I personally just want transition to electric cars to happen faster so my small investment in TSLA I pretty much consider to be a charitable donation to a worthy cause :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> In other words, Tesla is being approximately, literally decimated: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_\(Roman_army\))

<comment><USER54> Except that it's not random, noone is being killed, and they are getting severance and stock vesting.

<comment><USER55> And - Musk said something about allowing them to move to other groups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I'm sure this is at least partly tied-in to their ongoing, illegal efforts to crush labor organizing at their plants.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-nlrb/worker- testifi...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-nlrb/worker-testifies- that-tesla-stopped-him-from-organizing-union-idUSKBN1J803Z)

<comment><USER57> >> illegal efforts

Yet to be determined by a court. Precision in language is important, no matter how heated you are about a situation.

<comment><USER58> This itself seems like an imprecise argument. If there are well-known laws against doing something that has gone unpunished so far, is it then legal?

<comment><USER59> It is illegal to trespass, but you can also acquire the property you trespass upon by adverse possession.

If you can trespass for 20 years (varies by jurisdiction) without getting ejected, it's legal. And you now own the property.

If you don't enforce a trademark, it is void. There are statutes of limitations on a lot of crimes and torts, including those involving violence. So there is quite a lot of precedent involved in unenforced, flagrantly- violated laws becoming void.

One way around that is to elect government attorneys that will prosecute those laws, and government cops that will investigate suspected violations of those laws.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Not happy with Agile, but why? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jonasbandi.net/2014/02/not-happy-with-agile-but-why.html From a developers perspective: what went wrong with Agile and why? Criticising and pointing out problems is easy. But finding the root cause for being unhappy requires more reflection. <comment><USER2> 1\. Agile requires trust - Large enterprises have politics and generally lack trust. 2\. SOX Compliance has lots of documentation and rules. 3\. Agile is about self management which conflicts with large bureaucracies at its core. 4\. Most enterprises value production stability over changing directions. A 3 month manual QA regression is hard to iterate over. 5\. People are biased. Mangers hear the benefits and not the downsides like no long term estimates.</comment>