Ask HN: How to find advisers - <AUTHOR> As a bootstrapped solopreneur with a full time job, I am increasingly aware of my limitations.
It's pretty hard juggling different tasks on a part-time basis. What I realize is that building a product that users like is hard when you don't have the domain knowledge. This is where having an adviser can help a great deal.
This brings me to my question, how do other hackers/solopreneurs find advisers that can help them grow? Networking events? Any success story with Linkedin?
Thanks in advance.
Jerry <comment><USER2> Depending on what you're building, see if you can turn a customer into an advisor. For a product I once put together for other businesses, one of the earliest users ended up being very helpful as an informal advisor: giving feedback on the app, introducing me to other folks who'd potentially be interested in using it, and giving me insight on that field because I had none.

I've found that if you have someone on your hands who was one of the first people to use your product and they were especially enthusiastic about it, they'd be happy to serve in that role (even if just informally).

</comment><comment><USER3> A lot of bloggers, site owners, entrepreneurs and other people you've heard of are surprisingly approachable, and are happy to respond to email, phone calls or requests to take them to lunch. Many are quite generous with their time, especially the less-famous ones -- and there are many, many less-famous ones.

Give it a try, what can it hurt?

<comment><USER4> The problem is finding the less-famous ones. Try hitting up the Inc 5000 for owners of similar firms. Maybe start in the 2k-3k range.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's damn good question, and I can't really help you, only sympathise.

Yes maybe you can find advisers with your best interests at heart by ferociously networking. But in my experience it's a long shot. Why is some (essentially random) guy with lots of experience gonna help you for free? Unless there are real mutual synergies - i.e he'll get from you something equivalent - it's never going to happen. And even if you can pay for it - that's probably not _quite_ what you're looking for as a small start-up.

If you don't have these connections to start with, I'd plan for not having them at all. The best you can probably do is - whenever it is you get around to commercialising your product - is hire a lawyer. They'll be able to offer you sound business advice.

<comment><USER6>
      Yes maybe you can find advisers with your best interests at
      heart by ferociously networking. But in my experience it's
      a long shot. Why is some (essentially random) guy with lots
      of experience gonna help you for free?

Ego. When you tell somebody "I value your opinion and want your feedback" it's an ego boost. Everybody likes to feel valued, and everybody like to talk and give their opinion. Look at us, just now, answering this question. We're not getting paid for this, right?

And some people simply like helping other people, for whatever reason. Maybe somebody loaned them a hand when they were first starting out, and now they feel a need to reciprocate by helping others. Maybe there's no such thing as pure altruism, but there _are_ people who derive pleasure from helping others and sharing information and advice.

Finally, you can always offer equity in your startup. Some reading I've been doing lately suggests that it's normal to offer a small chunk of equity n exchange for a more formal relationship / commitment from an advisor.

<comment><USER5> Sure. I love helping people, I really do. And yes I might yap away at some meet to some guy and give him the best advice I can. But am I going to enter into a long-term relationship with him? A long-term commitment? Highly unlikely. This is only going to happen if there is some personal connection.

Edit: and re our discussion here, on this thread: a couple of passing minutes to spit out a comment is not exactly in them same league as committing to being a company's adviser.

<comment><USER6>
      Edit: and re our discussion here, on this thread: a couple
      of passing minutes to spit out a comment is not exactly in
      them same league as committing to being a company's adviser.

Well clearly there are degrees of commitment. I think you might be surprised how much people are willing to help, for free. But, as I said, there may come a point where you have to compensate an advisor if you want a certain level of commitment. But for startups, depending on exactly how much you're asking of your advisors, you may be able to simply give them a fairly small equity stake, in exchange for their help.

      This is only going to happen if there is some personal
      connection.

Well, yeah. Of course. But you have to meet somehow and form the initial connection, in order for that deeper connection to grow. Maybe your advisor becomes somebody you met while networking 3 years ago (of course, pointing that out probably isn't helping the OP much) and formed a friendship with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Try my site <http://EveryMentor.com>. It might be a long-shot, or a little off of what you ideally would like, but you might just find someone. You can create multiple accounts to match up with several people too!

</comment><comment><USER7> Have you considered speaking with 'consultants' rather than formal advisers? I often advise my friends on web usability, UI, and their online strategy. I don't charge a fee and love giving out advice and answering their questions.

Any time they e-mail, I'm there to answer, but I don't consider it a traditional 'mentor' relationship.

</comment><comment><USER6> I just came back from lunch with a guy that I consider an informal "advisor" and who I hope may agree to join my advisory board later. We met at a LinkedIn themed networking event, aka "LinkedIn Live." Not sure if those happen all over or not, but here in the Raleigh area, there's a guy who hosts a networking event about once a quarter that's targeted at people in this area who are connected to each other, through him, on LinkedIn.

I find those kind of events valuable, but you have to separate a lot of chaff from the wheat, ya know. That is, in a given night, you might meet 70 people and collect 50 business cards, but maybe only one or two of those people will actually offer any kind of mutually beneficial connection in the future.

As for LinkedIn itself, yeah, I occasionally get cold contacts from people who said "I saw your profile, looks like you're interested in some of the same stuff I am, let's meet" or "Looks like you're an entrepreneur, I like meeting people like that, let's grab coffee." Some of those connections have been some of the more interesting / useful ones I've made, to be honest.

Other thoughts: leverage former co-workers or classmates. Want to meet a professor who teaches a certain topic, because you think he might have useful info or be a potential advisor? Maybe a coworker graduated from that school and knows him/her. Don't be shy about calling around and asking people. Maintain a big list of connections, even if they're "weak ties" Weak ties can be very useful:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_ties#Weak_tie_hyp...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_ties#Weak_tie_hypothesis)

Also, Barcamp or similar events. If your town doesn't have a HN Meetup / Open Coffee Club or something similar, start one. If there is one, join it and attend. Join "business development" related Meetups on Meetup.com, if there are any near you.

There's potential to meet people all over the place, look around. Does a local community college or university offer free seminars for entrepreneurs? Attend those, even if the content isn't all that interesting, just to meet the other people. Go to a Startup Weekend. Hang out in the "business" section at Barnes & Noble or Borders and strike up conversations with random people. If you see somebody reading an interesting book in the cafe at Barnes & Noble or Borders, strike up a conversation.

Edit: another thought on LinkedIn. Use it to find and connect with people from former employers, who worked in different departments, even if you didn't know them well. In my experience, most people will accept link requests if you actually worked at the same company at the same time, even if they don't really know you on a deep level. So, if you are, say, a techie, and looking to make some biz dev connections... go back to a former employer, link with the marketing / biz dev / sales people from there, and message them and arrange to meet for coffee or drinks or what-have-you. Even if they can't help you themselves, the'll likely have other contacts they can refer you to.</comment>


Show HN: Bootstrap 4 Editor – Online editor that can ease your front end design - <AUTHOR> https://www.itwonders-web.com/tools/about-bootstrap4-editor/ <comment><AUTHOR> It provides you:

1\. Snippets to insert with ease (Using shortcut key Ctrl + Shift + F)

2\. Change output in real time as you type in the editor.

3\. Customizable code editor.(Theme, Line numbers..)

4\. Moveable output.

5\. Responsive options to change output's window size.

6\. Emmet enabled.

Any comments are appreciated. Thanks.</comment>


Ask YC: What is the best lighting source for a room with no windows? - <AUTHOR>

We moved to our new offices, and they are great, except for the fact that I now work in a room with no windows.  There is only an overhead fluorescent light.
I usually program for 10-12 hours a day, and have now noticed that my eyes hurt, and I am getting bags under them.
What is the best way to light the room so that my eyes are happy again? <comment><USER2> I've heard about this problem repeatedly before. Why are people apparently seriously building and renting offices without windows outside of Western Europe? I mean, you're spending 10-12 hours a day on sophisticated things of (hopefully) very high value that is (hopefully) rewarded accordingly in the marketplace---and yet, such a simple and essentially free thing as daylight is outside your scope? Why is this? What's the point of windowless offices? This is just quite obviously a serious factor for potentially making your people suffer in subtle ways. In tech, you don't want them to suffer, no? What am I missing?

<comment><USER3> I didn't even know that anyone besides sweatshop workers and miners worked in offices without windows.

Sounds totally unthinkable to me, I would never get anything done.

Guess I'm lucky working from my boat with 22 windows and a view of the sea wherever I look :-)

<comment><USER4> I used to work for a fairly well-known manufacturer of disk drives. In their typical paranoia, they intentionally ensured that our labs had no windows to mitigate the possibility of corporate espionage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Somewhat related:

Has anyone ever experimented with RGB LED's and some sort of controller hooked up to a PC? That way you would be able to change the colortemperature of your lightning source, and get a really cool way of lighting up your office or home. You could even attach some light sensors so that the ambient light level stays the same. When the sun goes down the lights slowly turn on to compensate. Would be cheap in electricity too.

</comment><comment><USER5> They make floor lamps that point up to the ceiling and reflect light off of it... I personally like those the best. They're inexpensive and usually have 3 settings.

<comment><USER6> These are awesome, but be careful and place them strategically. Lighting affects mood, and if you place them around a lot of plants, you'll end up casting a lot of distracting shadows and productivity goes kaput.

On that same token, if you opt for these kinds of lights, it's best to place them in a room with brightly colored walls that wont absorb the light, and you'll only end up wasting money both on the lights, and on your energy bills just trying to keep your office bright.

Otherwise, they are awesome fixtures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A reciprocating saw should get you through to daylight soon enough. They just don't build offices like they used to.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ah yes, I know exactly what you need.

I too programmed for an uncountable number of hours in a similar setup at my university dorm. What I did is keep those bright lights on while wearing a baseball cap. This is very easy on the eyes and keeps you alert.

Why is this the best setup? Studies have shown that having lighting from the sides but not the top, simulating somewhat of an artificial sunset in the horizon, keeps people awake and alert for longer periods of time. Plus, that narrowed field of vision seems to help with concentration. Don't dismiss this until you try it.

I did have a window but I put my back to it. The view was pretty depressing anyway.

</comment><comment><USER9> Full spectrum lighting, used to treat Seasonal Affective Disorder, is a decent sunlight replacement, though it's sort of expensive.

<comment><USER10> You can source a generic 6500k light (try to get close to 98 color rendering index) for pretty cheap at most local hardware stores. My guess is this is all what these "full spectrum lights" essentially are, re-branded and marked up.

I use 2 6500k lamps as a bias lights (reference white) when coding and also for watching movies. The light will appear a bit "blue" at first (compared to most other lights), but you will get used to it. Color temp is like you are always working outside in the midday sun, its great.

</comment></comment><comment> patrickg-zill You should have at least 3 different light sources in the room. Try to have diffuse lighting, as diffuse as possible.

</comment><comment><USER11> Skylight. You don't even have to be near the outside, e.g., "Solatube".

</comment><comment><USER12> Yep get more sleep. Take a nap in the middle of the day

</comment><comment><USER13> Time to look for a new job?</comment>


This is why online video piracy happens - <AUTHOR> http://www.tnl.net/blog/2013/01/12/internet-vod-2012-movies

<comment><USER2> I was surprised at how thorough the article was. I went in assuming the article would be an ideological argument, but after reading it seems fairly straightforward (spoiler alert: the basic argument is that people will pirate entertainment they want when it's unavailable for purchase (I.e., when recent movies are only available on DVD, fans will look for torrents), which seems like a fairly uncontroversial position)

</comment><comment><USER3> From the submission guidelines:

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or > linkbait.

<comment><USER4> To be fair, the original title isn't very good either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The stats for online streaming would look even sadder if one steps out of US. :/</comment>


The Edison of Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/the-edison-of-silicon-valley-07272011.html

<comment><USER2> This sounds basically like pumped up MIMO, nothing that is not already known, just not implemented due to limitations of devices. As an example from the whitepaper:

"AP 1 and AP 2 both transmit their respective radio signal waveforms simultaneously."

The most difficult part here is the syncing of the transmission. It really has to be precise almost to the sample level (10-0.1ns time window for the transmission to start on both devices depending on the bandwidth used). And syncing clocks on remote devices to this precision, not to mention maintaining the sync is very, very hard. And this is just one obstacle this guy has to solve.

In addition if the users move the waveform has to be recalculated, on worst case even if the users do not move the radio environment has already changed (due to other things moving) before the old optimized signal has been sent. This makes it necessary for the signal calculations to be local to the device as latencies to remote devices are way too high in order to update the waveform fast enough. However on stationary receivers this problem is not as bad as on mobile ones.

These were just few of the problems with this guys approach which sprung up to my mind when reading the whitepaper.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not entirely convinced (of course the article might be missing several key points since it doesn't seem to be that tech oriented). Won't this sending of multiple signals actually increase the interference. Also there might be passive devices (like ovens etc) whose transmission might be too sporadic to predict. I really wish they spent more of the 6 pages on actual explanation of DIDO instead of.. well every thing else.. :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Great article. Though I would compare him to Nikola Tesla instead of Edison because he seems more interested in changing the world rather than improving upon existing technology and creating moneymaking widgets.

<comment><USER5> Read more about Edison then: [http://www.atomicacreative.com/images/ACG_EdisonAsIKnowHim.p...](http://www.atomicacreative.com/images/ACG_EdisonAsIKnowHim.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article says of the Atlas Shrugged character Rearden that he, 'gets the girl'. Well, only temporarily. As I recall it is Galt who ultimately ends up with Dagny Taggart.

</comment><comment><USER7> I imagine that some patent trolls are getting ready to file a patent application for a communication device that analyses interference and transmits an optimal signal based on all the currently present signals. That way, when Perlman has done all the work of bringing this to market they'll be ready with their hands open to receive their share.

</comment><comment><USER8> This could have great potential to bring broadband speeds to the countryside.

Right now there are really two America's with a large swath of the country limited to 28.8 at best over aging rural phone wires.

But it's really hard to say if this could be truly the solution without knowing the economics.

<comment><USER9> Here's the white paper mentioned in the article: <http://www.rearden.com/DIDO/DIDO_White_Paper_110727.pdf>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Honestly, with the recent NPR story and discussions as of late, I thought this was going to be about patents.

</comment><comment><USER11> > In other words, the shared spectrum capacity is not subject to Shannon's > law.

Crackpot dead-giveaway</comment>


Don't Make the Demo Look Done (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/12/dont_make_the_d.html

<comment><USER2> For anyone who saw that the fuzzy link in the article was broken:

<http://www.ai.uga.edu/mc/WriteThinkLearn.pdf> (I think this is right)

and here is the wayback machine bookmarklet to make your life easier :)

<http://www.gyford.com/misc/wayback.html></comment>


WordPress Launches Google Adsense Alternative, WordAds - <AUTHOR> http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/wordads/

<comment><USER2> I was hoping that this turns out to be something really classy like Deck ads[1].

Turns out the underlying technology is provided by the Federated Media[2], the same company that provides ads for AppleInsider[3] and Boing Boing[4].

There's still a chance they'll do something different, but I'm guessing that most innovation is going to be on the pricing and revenue splitting side, not the eyeballs-viewing-ads side.

That is valuable, and having more competition for Google is a good thing. But oh well. Looks like we'll still be seeing the same ads.

[1] <http://decknetwork.net> [2] <http://www.federatedmedia.net> [3] <http://appleinsider.com> [4] <http://boingboing.net>

<comment><USER3> Speaking of Deck, are there any non-invitation services that serve ads at a similar quality level to Deck?

<comment><USER4> If there is, I haven't found it.

I believe the invitation system is precisely _why_ the Deck ads are of the quality they are. Removing that puts you back in the realm of DoubleClick and AdWords.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the people who named one of their updates "Django", here is "WordAds".

Is there some kind of creative dearth at Automattic?

 _(Thought I was kidding about that "Django" part? I shit you not; here is your moment of zen:<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2254299> .) _

<comment><USER6> I think there's a much better case – practical and even legal – for 'WordAds'.

'Django' caused a pure collision with another community project: rude, confusing, time-wasting for keyword searchers.

'WordAds' fits naturally with 'WordPress', is non-identical, and far less likely to generate confusion or search collisions. And, Google's money gusher can defend itself if it there is a legitimate trademark complaint; similar for-profit competitors should push every possible avenue for attention. (It's not nice to step on the toes of a free community project, but it's often heroic to step on the toes of a near-monopoly.)

<comment><USER4> Heroism aside, it's still a little reminiscent of "OpenOffice" and "Office Open XML".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is actually pretty interesting. Federated Media recently bought Lijit[1] which has a pretty solid ad exchange. Federated also has an exclusive deal to rep WordPress sites[2]. Combining these two things will allow buyers to access a huge swath of long and mid tail inventory programmatically through the Lijit exchange.

Its nice to see small publishers getting more options in how to monetize their sites. A healthy ad ecosystem is required ensure we all continue to get access to quality, free content.

[1] [http://www.federatedmedia.net/about-copy/press/federated- med...](http://www.federatedmedia.net/about-copy/press/federated-media- publishing-to-acquire-lijit-networks/)

[2] [http://www.federatedmedia.net/about-copy/press/fmp- partners-...](http://www.federatedmedia.net/about-copy/press/fmp-partners- with-automattic-to-provide-exclusive-representation-for-wordpresscom/)

</comment><comment><USER8> "for bloggers who would like to earn money from their blogs by showing high quality ads from brand advertisers" Does this mean less targeted ads from more well known companies?

<comment><USER9> Probably. But I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

In my personal experience, most of the AdWords I see on small blogs have comically bad targeting.

</comment></comment><comment> mkr-hn " _Creative minds aren't satisfied being digital sharecroppers on someone else's domain_ , and you want to carve out your own piece of the internet and have a space that you're proud of because it's so… you.

If you're going to have advertising on your site, it darn well better be good, _and beginning with our partnership with Federated Media we're ready to start rolling out WordAds here on WordPress.com_ "

They'll need to make this available to people who use self-hosted WordPress before these two paragraphs are compatible.

<comment><USER10> You can host your blog, on your private domain with WordPress.com. It's a premium feature <https://en.wordpress.com/products/> though.

<comment> mkr-hn That doesn't change anything. You can't host on wordpress.com—whether it's a subdomain or your own—if you need to do any kind of customization beyond CSS tweaks, and you can't use affiliate links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I host my WordPress powered blog on my own server.. apparently I'm not eligible. What's that about?

<comment><USER11> I asked the question on the linked blog [1] The official reply was " For now, we are starting with WordPress.com users but look forward to working with folks like yourself who are self-hosted. "

Sweet!

1 - [http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/wordads/#comment-143...](http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/wordads/#comment-143819) (that # href doesn't seem to work too well, do a seach for 'grecy' and you'll jump to my comment and the reply)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have no intention to enable this. My blog exists primarily (I hate this term) to promote my personal brand. It's something to which I can point to demonstrate my knowledge and skills in my professional areas of expertise, plus occasionally a soapbox. I don't want to monetize that directly because that would turn me from "the friendly dude who knows about X" to something more like a streetwalker, and I don't want that.

Speaking just for myself, of course.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is basically for wordpress.com users who purchase something from Automattic (domain) to sell something to the world (Ads). There is no indication on what you, the blogger on wordpress.com, may be earning in return for this transaction, but Automattic certainly knows what they'd be earning. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER14> I love WordPress but I will take bets on how long it takes them to change the name, given the obvious competing trademark: AdWords.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is a trademark lawsuit waiting to happen.

<comment><USER16> I'm launching a blog platform called PressWord - want to be an advisor?

<comment><USER17> I hope it has a "BookFace" feature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It took me a minute to realize this was for WordPress.com and not for the open-source WordPress platform (WordPress.org).

</comment><comment><USER19> Any one know the reasoning behind this move? ie why wasn't AdSense good enough for them?

<comment><USER20> I'm going to vote for: money.

As others have suggested, this will probably be pushed out to the .org community through jetpack with the unstated goal of supplanting AdSense/AdWords for blog installations.</comment></comment>


Worse than the 1930s: Europe's recession is really a depression - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/08/20/worse-than-the-1930s-europes-recession-is-really-a-depression/

<comment><USER2> Summary:

      "It's a policy-induced disaster. ... eurocrats  .... the euro is standing between them and recovery ... Europe is stuck with a fixed exchange system that doesn't let them print, spend, or devalue their way out of a crisis"

There's no source or data for any of these claims, so you can skip the article. IMHO, it's just an anti-euro rant. Why wouldn't Europe be able to print money like the USA does? Article doesn't say.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's not a pretty picture of the European economy.

I'm not an economist, so I may be totally wrong here. But I think the article omits a lot. For example, "creative destruction". Europe has committed to lifetime employment (yes I know that's not absolute). Which means that in a downturn companies can't easily cut overhead. Because they're carrying many superfluous people on payroll they have less money to invest in growing their business. And so GDP doesn't grow. And young people face 25% or 50% unemployment.

I'm not advocating simply firing people. I think there needs to be some sort of safety net. But even the USA, with very flexible labor laws and very accommodative monetary policy hasn't had much of a recovery from the Great Recession. So I'm not surprised that things are worse in the Euro countries.

BTW the article says "Europe" but I said "Euro" above. That's because the article doesn't make it clear, but I assume that places like the UK, Norway, Denmark, etc that don't use the Euro aren't as hostage to Draghi's ECB as the Euro countries are. But I'm not at all clear how that monetary policy stuff works there when multiple currencies are involved, so I could be completely wrong.</comment>


Ask HN: How can hackers help Nepal earthquake? - <AUTHOR>

- Electricity and Communication Problem: From the reports, it seems like some mobile networks and internet services are working, but the lack of electricity makes hard for people to stay in contact. Once their battery on their phone is dead, they are out of contact from the rest of the world. Is there any way we can help?<p>- Travelers: Foreigners in Nepal are trying to return to their home country after the tragedy. However, many of them are stuck in Nepal because there are only limited number of charter flights operating in Kathmandu at this moment. Maybe it could be a good idea to create an website where people can share information about flights and ways to get out from there.<p>- and more <comment><USER2> Send them solar phone chargers?

In the short term at least, the ones who know best are the relief agencies like Mercy Corps, Doctors Without Frontiers and the Red Cross. Donate money to them, they'll buy what they need.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi, We would want to establish a solar cell-phone charging system in Kathmandu and affected areas. If anyone got any ideas of how to proceed (who would donate these, who would transport these), please contact us at email@example.com [ Nepalese Young Professionals in New York (NYPNY) ]

</comment><comment><USER4> What about using SMS or a voice call API - this would save battery!</comment>


Ask HN: What concept marks your boundary of knowledge in your area of interest? - <AUTHOR> Even experts have a limit to their skill set and knowledge base. I'm curious what concept you consider just beyond reach of whatever skill you are honing, hobby you are learning, or existing area of expertise. <comment><USER2> I posted this elsewhere today here on hacker news, but my Discrete math teacher once said to our class that to learn something you basically have to already know it so in that sense I see a lot of things as barely if not far out of my reach. I also understand he kind of meant by this that knowledge in theoretical fields like Mathematics comes in steps. So I never think oh I could never do that. Currently actually grasping linear algebra. I never took a course for linear algebra in my CS curriculum I chose the least math involved emphasis I could in CS and I turned out to regret it because once I got to the funner abstract math I actual found out I enjoyed it. I've felt Linear Algebra is just outside my reach so machine learning has been something hanging over my head for a while now, because I haven't put my time into it yet because I haven't meet the necessary prerequisites. But honestly I'm kind of just trying it anyways. I have a decent enough Math background at the moment that I can just go for learning machine learning but I haven't yet. I keep circling around it but I think analysis paralysis is getting to me. Self learning is a bit hard for me when it comes to dedicating my time solely to one thing because there is so much I want to learn across the CS discipline.

<comment><USER3> I believe your teacher. People take courses because such courses are mandatory or for credits. Unintended consequence is learning. Even if your goal is to master, you have to scratch the surface first time. Later, you can go back and establish new connections between problems and topics, and see the history behind these problems. Then you will know the depth of ignorance (or things one doesn't have knowledge of).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The concept that I consider to be unachievable is being successful.</comment>


Amazon wins the right to use .amazon - <AUTHOR> https://www.icann.org/resources/board-material/resolutions-2019-05-15-en#1.c <comment><USER2> I think it was expected as they have more money</comment>


Show HN: Oyster Alerts is live and looking for testers in London, England - <AUTHOR> Hi everybody,
I am happy to share my latest side project in the hope of gaining some value first users and feedback.
If you use railways in London you will (or maybe not) be aware of the concept of "incomplete journeys". If you forget to tap in/out of a station with your travel card you will get charged the maximum fare. To rectify this you are required to manually log in to the TFL website and check for a refund. I find that awkward and time consuming.
I decided to built Oyster Alerts to check for incomplete journeys and thought you might also find it useful.
The site is very much an MVP now but does function and you will be alerted of incomplete fares.
It would be awesome if you could check it out and give any feedback.. http://oysteralerts.com
Thank you <comment><USER2> Congrats on the launch. How does it work on your end? Are you using an official API or doing it another way?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's screen scraping as TFL don't offer an API for this unfortunately. Would that put you off?</comment></comment>


Bitcoin's 9M% Rise This Decade Leaves the Skeptics Aghast - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-31/bitcoin-s-9-000-000-rise-this-decade-leaves-the-skeptics-aghast <comment><USER2> > Projections for the next decade abound. In the 2020s, mass adoption is > surely to take off, they say. Blockchain technology will revolutionize and > solve every problem in the world. On the other hand, regulatory scrutiny is > likely to intensify, with central bankers paying closer attention than ever > before.

The thing that makes Bitcoin so confusing for many people is that it solves problems most people don't consider problems - yet. It's a form of electronic money without a state or central authority - the first and most important example. Its existence means that it's possible to do things with money that were previously impossible.

Whenever a new technology makes something possible that wasn't previously, pundits note how poorly-suited it is to do things that are already being done with other products. They tend to be blind to those things that can now be done that weren't previously possible.

Bitcoin doesn't require mass adoption as a payment network to succeed. It just needs to fill one or more niches that no other form of money can fill.

Given the increasing normalization of mass surveillance and sanction-driven US foreign and domestic policy, it's not that much of a stretch to see the role Bitcoin will play in the world ahead.

Censorship-resistant money is going to be a very big deal by 2030, and Bitcoin is currently positioned to be the center of that universe.</comment>


Behaviors resembling ADHD may be linked to increased entrepreneurial behavior - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200812164926.htm <comment><USER2> This actually has nothing to do with ADHD. It's badly named and badly thought out.

It's actually reporting on a 2nd order effect sleep deprivation has via impaired executive function on impulsivity.

Should be titled 'Sleep deprivation may be linked to increased entreprenurial behavior'.

It reads like low-quality, hot garbage.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Seems very likely to perpetuate the myth of ADHD sufferers as being gifted with neurological superpowers when actually the "ADHD-like" symptoms they describe are debilitating for many.

<comment><USER2> The premise is just warped from the start. "Hey kids, impaired executive function may make you more likely to succeed in life."

I mean... what?

Starting a company (or three) because your impulse control is shot is statistically more likely to financially ruin you than it is to make you succeed. Not to mention how useful properly functioning executive function is in actually running a company that has a chance of succeeding. Take it from me...

<comment><USER4> But think of all the possible benefits of sleep issues! The amount of growth we could have if everyone just slept a little worse. /s

<comment><USER5> That point is what really gets me going. This experiment is badly designed from the start. Experiment 1 is especially useless, as it tries to correlate answers that people gave while being sleep deprived to their general sleep patterns and assumes that the outcome is the same. What?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have ADHD (and chronic sleep issues) that were undiagnosed until I was in my early 20's.

With a less than stellar childhood under my belt with an abusive, narcissistic father and enabling mother, I ended up being a social recluse and only recently in my mid 20's have I figured out that I'm severely lacking in my "executive functioning" skills (along with other ideal skills like social skills, people skills, etc.) thanks to finally seeing a psychiatrist about it... (5 years seeing them on and off and I'm still working through my issues - for those with problems, please stick with your mental health care, it helps a lot even if it doesn't seem like it most times)

It's insurmountably hard to dig out of the hole I've dug with numerous issues (ADHD, anxiety, depression, chronic issues with restful sleep since a young age - not helped by my obesity and my apparent "ability" to convince myself not to exercise even though I think about doing it - and get angry when I don't do it \- fairly often)

I guess I can congratulate myself that I was able to make it through college and have a full-time job in Engineering making somewhat decent money.

I get angry at myself pretty much almost daily for the things that I've failed to do, awkward situations I've been in, things I regret doing or not doing... It's taken (and is still taking) a very big toll on my mental health and I don't think any medication will help me with that. It gets to the point where I'm so frustrated, I'll make angry "noises" out loud (when alone - that's weird to do publicly) in a way to try and help get what's bugging me out because I can't talk to anybody around me about it.

Now, with that MASSIVE tangent - I can see the paper making sense in that ADHD will allow people to take more "risks" without thinking of the consequences too much, which could be interpreted as "entrepreneurial", however I think it's just renaming/re-badging something that should be addressed and corrected/adjusted, not celebrated...

<comment><USER7> Nonsense. We need to create a society that allows people outside the narrow band of "can sit focused on a narrow set of tasks" for 8 hours to have successful. Careers. Create space for the risk takers to take risks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A lot of people in the comments appear to have a misunderstanding of ADHD and sleep disorders. It is possible to have both conditions simultaneously, and likely very common. ADHD is a condition defined by a sustained period of symptoms, not underlying causes or biological tests. It is 100% consistent for someone to have ADHD in one environment and not in another. This is how it is viewed in psychiatry. If you spend many years as an accountant focusing on detailed work in your job, but you can't focus to complete your work, you may be diagnosed with ADHD and treated with medicine. If you then change careers to be an artist in a creative field, but face no dysfunction or difficulty in completing your work, you would no longer be diagnosed. The same applies to having a sleep disorder and then getting it treated. Though it is not clear if sleep disorders in childhood cause irreversible changes to the brain.

<comment><USER9> Just to be clear, your diagnosis may change, but you're not any less ADHD (assuming you actually were in the first place). ADHD is a product of the brain developing in a different way. It's not contextual, even if it's most obvious symptoms might be.

<comment><USER8> I'm sure there is disagreement among some doctors over this, but ADHD in the current medical literature is not defined by brain function, it is defined by sustained dysfunction in life situations.

<comment><USER9> The brain forms differently in ADHD individuals. Certain regions have slower or stunted growth. If you'd like to know more, it's explained in the beginning of this lecture: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SCAGc- rkIfo](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SCAGc-rkIfo)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As an anecdote, some of the brightest founders I've met, and have had the pleasure of working with - would certainly fall into this category.

Some of these folks have expressed their challenges in functioning optimally in traditional structured 9-to-5's, open-office environments and the like. Perhaps they are motivated by creating an environment that works for them, rather than being a product of a one-size-fits-all approach.

We need to embrace neurodiversity, not stigmatize it.

 _"Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they're not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do."_

<comment><USER11> >We need to embrace neurodiversity, not stigmatize it

I probably have ADHD as I've been told by everyone since 5th grade.

I feel normal and function fine. I have an engineering degree and IMO perform better than most.

I'm pretty anti medication ever since I got addicted to caffeine. Since then productivity plummeted when I wasn't on caffeine. On a similar note, I found myself addicted to weed because it made me extremely productive and I was using that after work. (I'm off everything, and not very productive)

My point is, drugs should be the last resort. Once you start them it's nearly impossible to go back. It seems this is the first step with every Physician.

<comment><USER12> They are highly effective, fairly cheap, and usually well tolerated. I'm not saying that a few years of learning coping mechanisms won't help, but as you've experienced... Without the executive function to put it in practice, or the memory to compare, it's rough going.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> ADHD makes normal life/jobs/college harder, which leaves entrepreneurship as a viable option. It might be less chosen and more that you don't fit as well into regular societal work expectations. That was my case. Worked out well for me, but when I failed grade 12 and then failed out of college it didn't seem great at the time.

<comment><USER14> I have seen this pattern in the vast majority of successful entrepreneurs I know personally. Fail at school, fired at work, fail, fail, fail, something works, focus, convince everybody that they are actually a genius, tres commas. Prior to success, they have seemed indistinguishable from the many others that ended up just plain failing and going nowhere.

Personally I was a reformable failure in that I once had 'entrepreneur' potential but succumbed to just enough conscientiousness to chase a traditional career path from behind.

Maybe there is hope that someday I will screw up badly enough in the traditional path to force myself into doing something great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anecdotally, most of the people from my high school who went on to be entrepreneurial definitely had a naughty streak in them.

I think there is an overlap in the two personalities for sure

</comment><comment><USER4> So what about stims like amphetamine or cocaine? They provide even more impulsive tendencies and hyperactivity than a bad nights sleep.

To be honest its sound to me like they are getting the effect backwards.

<comment><USER16> this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how ADHD affects adults and what amphetamines do. Amphetamines (in appropriate doses) do not make you impulsive and hyper, at least not if you have adhd. They make you focused and better at finishing what you start. Little miracle pills.

<comment><USER3> This is true, and the same is true of other stimulants in ADHD sufferers. For example, it ticks a box in ADHD diagnosis if a patient reports having had a paradoxical reaction to cocaine (drowsiness, focus, a feeling of quietness), because although the pharmacology is, to say the least, not as precise when compared to e.g. lisdexamfetamine, the impact is the same: both block the reuptake of dopamine in the brain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What does ADHD have to do with sleep deprivation?!?? Why are we conflating poor sleep habits with ADHD unless someone is abusing ADHD medication and not getting enough sleep? Why do I let poorly written articles bother me so much?

<comment><USER8> Poor sleep is not just caused by poor sleep habits. Sleep apnea, as an example, is a disability that causes poor sleep and often goes undiagnosed. ADHD is not a disability per se, it is classified by the symptoms and is not classified by any underlying cause.

<comment><USER17> I totally agree and that is why I dont understand why it is linking ADHD and sleep deprivation.

<comment><USER12> Because many people with ADHD have poor sleep habits, and it's a recognized symptom.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Three New Longevity Startups - <AUTHOR> https://www.leafscience.org/three-groundbreaking-longevity-startups/ <comment><USER2> Hi, I'm co-founder of Underdog and the scientist who invented the drugs we are developing. Cool that this community has taken an interest. I agree with a lot of the insightful comments here. If you're interested in diving deeper into the toxic cholesterol that we're targeting I've just published a review article all about its biology and all the aspects of aging and disease that it's involved in: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221323171...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213231719311759)

To touch on a couple of the other points that have been raised here, no our drugs aren't enzymes. We at SENS were working on an enzymatic approach for many years. There is still potential to engineering enzymes for this, but I designed our cyclodextrins to be a faster/cheaper/easier path to the clinic. Well, not that much cheaper. It's still very expensive. And yes, we are well aware of the hearing loss issue. It's avoidable, we believe we understand what caused it, and we're engineering around it. We'll be able to test whether we are successfully avoiding hearing loss in a very sensitive system in the next 9 months.

How long will we last? 16 more months with our current funding and burn rate. By then we need to have moved into series A so if anyone has any pharma VC contacts I'm definitely looking for warm intros :)

<comment><USER3> What is your opinion of using a monoclonal antibody against 7KC instead of cyclodextrin since mAbs are very well understood from a regulatory and PK/PD point of view. In your review I only see that you discuss 7KC antibodies as a method of screening for people who could benefit from your therapeutic idea.

<comment><USER2> Great question. Two problems with making a therapeutic antibody against seven KC. One is that we are not sure how good the seven KC antibodies are yet. We are working on this. The problem there is that 7KC only differs from cholesterol by one atom. The other problem is that the 7KC that we are worried about is inside of cells, so our drug is designed to mechanically pull the seven KC out, which antibodies can't really do. Also, cyclodextrins are very well accepted by regulators, it's just that they are usually used as excipients rather than as Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs). There are two examples of cyclodextrin APIs already, however, one approved and one in late stage clinical trials.

<comment><USER3> Cool, thanks for the reply. Are the approved use parenteral? Have you considered aptamers?

<comment><USER2> Yes, we are looking at IV, as others have done already clinically. We aren't looking at aptamers or other clever ways of binding small toxic biomolecules. I hope that other groups are!

<comment><USER3> This is a pretty interesting paper: [https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/8/333/333ra50](https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/8/333/333ra50)

Is there a chance that you are developing CD that target 7KC but at the end of the day, it dissolved chol-containing plaques inherently and that's where you'll derive the benefit from?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> More on Underdog Pharma: [https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2019/11/an- interview-wit...](https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2019/11/an-interview- with-matthew-oconnor-as-underdog-pharmaceuticals-secures-seed-funding/)

"We've taken a well-known and extremely safe compound, and have created novel derivatives that can specifically target the toxic biomolecule that drives the development of atherosclerosis, the cause of most heart attacks and strokes."

I'm excited for this one. Seems like a reasonable possibility for success addressing a huge killer.

<comment><USER5> > The company is focused on a class of molecule known cyclodextrins, and have > candidates capable of efficiently binding and sequestering > 7-ketocholesterol. This form of oxidized cholesterol is of great importance > to the progression of atherosclerosis, and possibly other age-related > conditions as well.

The thing is cyclodextrins have been linked to causing deafness, in as little as a week. As per [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5676048/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5676048/) and [https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/deaf-or-death-in-drug- trial...](https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/deaf-or-death-in-drug-trial- parents-weigh-life-vs-hearing-loss-1425267002)

Heart disease or hearing – tough trade-offs. Here's to hoping that they've engineered a novel compound without any of the downsides.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think longevity is vastly underestimated. Besides the natural innate desire to live longer, every extra year of healthspan is an opportunity to reap benefits on long term investment in friends, family and financial instruments. Knowing that you may live to 150 changes how you might approach investing and spending your time in money and skills development. People with the conscientiousness and forethought to apply themselves to important but not urgent tasks might experience compound interest the likes of which we have never seen before. Imagine if Warren Buffet was only half way through his healthspan.

<comment><USER7> > I think longevity is vastly underestimated.

Many people would give up their entire life fortune, any inheritance to their children, just to live for a few more years. People have been killing and dying searching for the fountain of youth for centuries.

Everyone is going to die eventually, yet the extremes people go to extend life is unlike any normal supply and demand curve.

I'm not sure there's anything more overestimated and over-hyped than longevity.

<comment><USER8> There is not enough funding or investment in longevity to consider it over- hyped. Compare it to, say, AI and VR. Or even meat substitutes.

<comment><USER7> > There is not enough funding or investment in longevity to consider it over- > hyped. Compare it to, say, AI and VR. Or even meat substitutes.

You're very much mistaken.

The National Institute of Health gets $31B of government funds every year for research. The NSF gets $8B, NASA gets $20B, and DARPA gets around $3B. So healthcare research gets roughly 50% of the entire U.S. public research budget, and that's not including private investment.

It's difficult to pull accurate numbers, but meat substitutes, VR, and even super-hot AI get far less every year, it's nowhere near healthcare research.

Extending life has been a priority of the US government for many years, largely because it's politically popular. Everyone rich or poor wants to live longer.

<comment><USER9> That is "traditonal" healthcare, where the target age is 70-80ish, with basically no means to get past that.

This is very different from what longevity research (like in the article) is tackling, and almost non of that money (public or private) is invested there.

<comment><USER7> > That is "traditonal" healthcare, where the target age is 70-80ish, with > basically no means to get past that. This is very different from what > longevity research (like in the article) is tackling...

If you're searching for a cure for cancer, heart failure, or any of fatal health ailment, you are by definition trying to extend people's lives. The entire purpose of healthcare is to extend both the length and quality of people's lives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reading this article makes me very glad that I've been donating to SENS for some time now. They are doing awesome work:

[https://www.sens.org/get-involved/donate/](https://www.sens.org/get- involved/donate/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I learned a lot through this, thank you for sharing.

I run a sperm freezing company (YC S19) incubated at Harvard and we've always thought about freezing sperm as an extremely logical pairing with any life extension technology; sperm can be frozen indefinitely with no loss in quality (as far as we know), you could have 30-year old sperm frozen for us when you're 130.

Since sperm develops mutations over time (~1 every 8 months) and DNA fragmentation is associated with all manner of congenital conditions like autism, younger sperm is generally speaking healthier.

Just wanted to share since it's something we talk about internally quite a bit. What does it mean to live forever if you lose all your family members along the way? How will society change to accommodate?

</comment><comment><USER12> Longevity is a interesting one because there are so many studies out there that have looked into calorie restriction as having a large positive influence on healthy aging...

</comment><comment><USER13> At what age would these treatments be applied? How often?

<comment><USER14> this is mostly research. there are a lot of things you can do to slow down aging right now - almost orthogonal to your age: sleep 7+ hours per night, hit the gym (mix of cardio+strength), eat high quality food - the less processed the better - also try to eat a plant based diet, reduce the level of stress in your life, properly hydrate yourself, hang out with people you like, get a pet, get a side project that is a work of love, learn something every day, read books, reduce your social media (and media in general) consumption.

<comment><USER15> > eat a plant based diet

I agree with everything else you've said, but the jury is definitely out on this one.

<comment><USER16> The current life expectancy for Iceland in 2020 is 83.07 years, a 0.18% increase from 2019. [1]

Life expectancy for Hong Kong is 84.7 years. [2]

Based on a comparison of 158 countries in 2013, Maldives ranked the highest in fish consumption per capita with 166 kg followed by Iceland and Hong Kong [3]

Hong Kong also beats most countries in beef consumption, out-eating Americans by nearly 50% per capita. [4]

So of the countries in the top 10 for life expectancy, we see a lot of meat in the diet. India has the most vegetarians of any country (at 38%). And their life expectancy ranks 133rd at 69.4 years.

[1] [https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ISL/iceland/life- expec...](https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ISL/iceland/life-expectancy) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy) [3] [https://www.helgilibrary.com/indicators/fish-consumption- per...](https://www.helgilibrary.com/indicators/fish-consumption-per-capita/) [4] [https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-consumption-per- capit...](https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-consumption-per-capita- ranking-countries-0-111634)

<comment><USER17> Some big confounding factors there. Hong Kong and Iceland are also very wealthy compared to India.

<comment><USER18> There is a fortunate coincidence here. There are wealthy vegetarian castes in India, and India tracks demographics by caste, so it's likely that the data is out there for us to figure this part out.

An alternative is to do something like follow second-generation Western people of Indian origin. I know at least one study of Tuberculosis in the UK tested the effect of vegetarianism there and used the British Asian sub-population to do so, so there's probably some info there too.

I don't know of any other large vegetarian groups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wonder how long they'll last...

<comment><USER14> the whole point of these spin-offs is that the majority of them will not survive. there are a lot of ideas around aging and it's really easy to get carried away to the point we throw everything against a wall and see what sticks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm interested if there is much anti-longevity sentiment here. I admit I'm very much against further moves to artificially increase human lifespan.

Am I quite alone in this?

<comment><USER21> You're definitely not alone - though I disagree with your view, I've been in enough back-and-forths about it on HN to know that plenty of thoughtful people here are against life extension, for various reasons (that can't all be just reduced to Stockholm syndrome).

For instance, there's worry that life extension will vastly worsen economic inequality. Another problem is that a lot systems in society (e.g. retirement, insurance) is implicitly based on current average lifespan, and a sudden extension of it could cause such shockwaves in the economy that it would create more suffering than it would save.

I mention these two because I acknowledge them as real risks, but despite them, I'm 100% in support of life extension. I sincerely hope that one day humans will be able to extends life indefinitely, while retaining full capacity (i.e. no everlasting life in a body of a 90-years-old).

<comment><USER20> Interesting. I'm also interested in how you imagine your indefinite life. Do you suspect that whole new avenues of existence and thought will open up? Or do you view it as essentially more and better of the same?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Love of life is not the same as fear of death. If the latter is what drives the search for longevity then it will never be enough. So long as longevity isn't used to find peace with life and death, and transcend our limited perspective on life then I see it as just a frantic attempt to delay the inevitable. Resisting death at 150 will be just as painful as resisting it at any other age. If on the other hand it will give people more time to gain wisdom and perspective on what life is about then that's a whole different story.

<comment><USER23> Assuming it's like any other product or service, the people that implement longevity (if they do) will be a tiny fraction of the general population, and certainly not a random sampling thereof. Most people who end up being able to make use of longevity treatments will have had nothing to do with those who implemented them (except by working for company A which made product X which was used by company B to make ... which was one of the components the longevity researchers used); I think it'll happen regardless of their opinion about it (well, I guess if they violently opposed it, maybe they could stop it).

So, it's less a question of what drives the search for longevity than what we'll do with it once it arrives.</comment></comment>


Red vs Green: The Musical, A Startup Odyssey - <AUTHOR> http://aaronblohowiak.com/red-vs-green-the-musical-a-startup-odyssey

<comment><USER2> Thought this would be a musical about the Red Green show... I'm so disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER3> My shell doesn't support color ;-)</comment>


Intel 'Stunning Failure' Heralds End of Era for U.S. Chip Sector - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-25/intel-stunning-failure-heralds-end-of-era-for-u-s-chip-sector <comment><USER2> Not a failure, just disrupted by a business model of 'build everything here'. This is how the economy is supposed to work to improve people's lives.

Also, China has just poached over 3k TSMC engineers with govt. funding (>3x salaries!), so we will see if TSMC is disrupted by China's chosen winner.

<comment><USER3> Wow! How can TSMC survive that decimation?

One answer may be that 5nm was pretty much the end of miniaturization anyway, and TSMC would be stuck there with a dwindling moat until competitors caught up.

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/thousands-of-taiwanese-chip- ex...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/thousands-of-taiwanese-chip-experts- moved-to-china-for-better-pay-reports/)

<comment><USER4> >One answer may be that 5nm was pretty much the end of miniaturization anyway

There is 3nm in 2022, 2nm GAA in 2024 and 1.4nm in 2026.

<comment><USER5> Nope, Moore's Law is over.

We run into wavelength-of-light issues around 400 nanometers. There's really no practical way to go beyond that. I can provide tons of citations from top engineers stating we're done here. You might have some processes with e-beam lithography, but it's just too expensive and slow for anything outside super- specialized uses.

Fortunately, that's gotten us to the 200MHz Pentium Pro, with 5 million transistors. Seems like that's plenty good enough for what most people would want to do with computers.

<comment><USER6> I think it's more accurate to say that die shrinkage is over. Moore's Law still has a fighting chance, we just have to wait and see what the clever engineers at AMD, Intel, Qualcom, et al. do about it.

Of course, with 5 million transistors of pure power, I also see no need for further improvements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The 7nm delay shoudnt surprise anyone who's been following their 10nm debacle.

Potentially farming out some products to third part fabs is a little surprising, but seems pragmatic. It could even benefit them to compete with AMD, NVIDIA, and Apple for the limited number of leading edge node wafers coming out of TSMC.

</comment><comment><USER8> Bob Swan, a non-technical bean-counter, is famous for running a social club rather than a serious Board of Directors at Intel. It is a big threat to national security if Intel goes totally fab-less, or hits some other performance benchmark of severe management failure. Money alone can't fix this, only replacing Bob with a real technical leader will do, preferably sooner rather than later.

</comment><comment><USER9> Can't help draw a parallel To Boeing where both used to have a very strong engineering led culture

</comment><comment><USER10> Eventually, the US government will prop-up Intel. For the Security Apparatus, is inadmissible to use chips made in China or Taiwan.

<comment><USER11> If money could fix Intel's problems they would have none.

The only thing that might help Intel would be the CIA or NSA engaging in some more espionage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The "stunning failure" and "end of era" are good clickbait phrases for a headline, but it's made by an analyst. Gotta consider the source.

It's definitely not surprising to see the competition close in on Intel, but it's also not the end of an era.

<comment><USER13> > It's definitely not surprising to see the competition close in on Intel, but > it's also not the end of an era.

TSMC's 7nm process is mature and superior to anything that Intel can currently produce in volume, and their 5nm process has nearly double the transistor density of 7nm (and over 4x the density of Intel's mature 14nm process). Samsung isn't far behind.

That Intel's CEO is telling investors that they may be manufacturing cutting edge products elsewhere is a clear signal that they're getting ready to pivot. This is on top of the earlier steps that Intel took to make their processor architectures more portable between manufacturing processes.

Semiconductor manufacturing, especially at the leading edge, requires massive economies of scale to be sustainable. While Intel didn't explicitly say they were bowing out, the steps that Intel's leadership is taking clearly point to them recognizing that they have no viable path forward as a leading-edge manufacturer.

Within the next 3 years, barring a government bailout, or TSMC/Samsung's 5nm processes failing in a similar fashion (which at least for TSMC, seems unlikely), I expect Intel to spin off its manufacturing business into a separate company and go fabless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Swan said on Friday that Intel's products are still the best, despite the > manufacturing delays.

LOL WUT?

AMD's chips have twice the performance for half the price. The only people still buying Intel are name-brand fanboys or institutional buyers that need platform consistency. Anyone who cares about performance is already looking hard at AMD.

Intel has painted itself into a very dark corner by resting on its laurels. Somehow I'm thinking that it's going to be the BlackBerry of the semiconductor world.

<comment><USER15> I guess you could lump all server folks into "institutional buyers" but is that what the market is really like?

Searching it looks like amd has 5% server market share and 18% desktop.

(personally I think intel chips are better)

<comment><USER16> Because market share indicates performance...?

The Intel-beating AMD chips are quite new, so them having less market share is to be expected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Were these people around during the last days of p4? "Core" is a pretty good run...</comment>


Introducing the Gartner Programming Language Index for 2014 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.gartner.com/mark_driver/2014/10/02/gartner-programming-language-index-for-2014/

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting to see Dart up there with F#, Erlang and Go.

EDIT: Dart & Swift also made huge jumps in the TIOBE index: [http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....](http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html)</comment>


The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html <comment><USER2> In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often practically at launch, and finally the decline of quality and coverage of Search (more spam and more older sites dropping out).

Google like no other tech giant always relied on the credibility among the tech people. Whether it's a new end-user product or a new programming language, it would go full avalanche with minimal marketing effort.

Losing our support, on top of poor product management and inability to innovate will be more and more difficult for them to handle. Rolling out poorly designed and poorly targeted products is already a sign of a disconnect from reality. They are slowly becoming less and less relevant and most importantly, less respected by the tech community. In a way it's the Microsoft of the 2000s when the revenue figures still weren't bad but the signs of the decline were apparent.

Yet unfortunately there's no competition to Search on the horizon and "google" is still a commonly used verb that will be very difficult to remove from the language. Microsoft seems to be happy with Bing's position today, which looks and feels like Google Search and maybe internally even mimics all the stupid and "evil" things Google Search does judging from their search results.

I think it is time (if not a bit too late) to try to challenge Google Search with something new, a new perspective on how the information on the Internet can be indexed and searched. I bet a lot of people are constantly thinking about this, but the window of opportunity may be now while Google is putting a lot of their time and effort on ML/AI. I doubt you can compete with them by building a ML-based search, so it must be something else both in terms of technology and possibly even the UI.

I don't know what the bottom line here is. Google is not dying any time soon, but the time to challenge them could be _now_.

<comment><USER3> "back then Google was still admired by the tech people" "Losing our support"

why do you generalize 'tech people' as 'we' ?

I'm in tech and I've been for 30+ years. I still admire Google.

Sure some tech people don't like Google anymore or even never have.

But I wouldn't generalize my case nor should you generalize yours.

And it's not all or nothing: I want to believe most tech people are mature and educated enough to not treat Google as a single block, hate everything they do or love everything they do. There are nuances and shades of gray in life, as we all learn when we grow up.

In the end, what matters is the silent majority not the chatty loud ones that have a personal grudge against some big corporation.

That "Google is evil" is highly overrated and over hyped. I always question the agenda of people promoting this.

<comment><USER4> People who think carefully then call Google 'evil' may as well be the same people who used to call it 'good'. Corporations aren't good or evil. They are powerful.

Being good is many things, but a key part of that is restraining the self from acting improperly. Corporations can't do that, they will sooner or later do whatever makes money. Or they get replaced sooner or later by a corporation that will. At best, there are stylistic differences around the edges that are simultaneously important but minor in the grand scheme of things. Sooner or later a corporation will be thinking primarily in terms of 'profitable' and 'not profitable'.

Calling Google 'evil' is trying to articulate something else - Google are powerful and dangerous. Any entity harvesting and directing the flow of information at that scale is. They have an unprecedented capability to cause harm; and sooner or later it will get used by someone to do exactly that.

<comment><USER5> How about insidious? It's the banal sort of evil that doesn't realize the harm it's causing, or doesn't see a way to survive without causing that harm.

<comment><USER6> Well, maybe, but that's the human condition also. All of our actions — even the most well intentioned ones — can have unexpected and even disastrous consequences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> People used to sit on a couch and watch TV for hours and also spent hours on the old phones talking about the most exciting shade of nail polish. Shopping is also fun.

Now all that activities largely moved to Internet. Thanks to omnipresence of smartphones the hours dedicated to those activities had also increased. Of course share of general Joe Doe's website got smaller as said website does not always cater to few most popular people's activities.

That does not mean that the total amount of Joe Doe's websites decreased. It is growing, just not as fast as the amount of my cat videos.

Sure big companies may try to subvert the Internet but I think that creative type of the populace will always find ways.

<comment><USER8> Except that it's drowning in noise. The SNR is definitely dropping.

<comment><USER7> Well I would say that web search takes good care of SNR. So far no troubles finding interesting stuff.

<comment> VvR-Ox "Finding interesting stuff" maybe. But finding a lot of the things I used to find some years ago is just not possible anymore.

Somehow searching changed as well as the ecosystem of the web itself. The big global players dominate nearly every inch of the web and many sites look like clones of each other.

There is a lot more effort being put into censorship and also more threats to ordinary users in my opinion.

When I loved to use the web it was like a big playground and it seemed that the most people there where extremely curious and open-minded.

Today there is so much hate - no real discussion (this community is a rare anomaly considering this argument) and I think it's not about discussions for these people who spread hate. Also it's all about the money. In the earlier days people used to write blogs and create sites just for fun but today everyone wants to get some money or measurable attention (likes, views, followers etc.).

Constantly you are being bothered by advertisement which gets more invasive from time to time, cryptominers and other malicious software that creeps into your system if you just click on the wrong link. Don't remember that from the beginnings and I'd love to experience that again some day.

<comment><USER9> All you have to do is be the change you want to see in the world. There's plenty of us out there still living the dream of the 90s. Your descriptions sound like you're still stuck on the big platforms where money rules everything. Just stop. Start hosting your website from home. Code it by hand. Don't care if anyone but you likes or sees it. It's the best you can do.

<comment> VvR-Ox I've been there & have done that, thank you ;)

For my own services it's okay to host them from home but "the web" just doesn't work like this anymore.

Do something big and you'll want to get things like DDoS protection - talk to customers about projects and just realize that they won't scale on your mini server at home while the internet connection is much too slow and unreliable.

I have started like you describe it and I learned some things on the way but the industry and the web have changed. Of course there is tiny companies who can still get their static website from a freelancer guy but this guy has a lot more responsibility and tasks to fulfill nowadays.

In my opinion back in the 90ies you could play around in a naive way without getting hurt or hurting anyone seriously. Today it's about a lot of cash, there is more laws, censorship and other malicious entities (go back in time and tell the people about bitcoin-mining in their browser and DDoS attacks against centralized services like CDNs that bring down half of the WWW).

Put a server on the web that isn't hardened properly and have a look at the logs - this is some new level in comparison.

<comment><USER9> >Put a server on the web that isn't hardened properly

It's easy. Just don't do/enable dynamic things. There's no need for anything more than a static webserver in 99% of cases with personal websites. And static webservers ship very secure by default. There's not a lot of remote exploits in nginx or the like. It's much more risky to use a web browser with javascript enabled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> FTA: "GOOG and FB ceased competing directly, focusing on what they do best instead."

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices" - Adam Smith

Some things never change.

<comment><USER11> I think Smith is almost right, a _conspiracy_ is likely in the broadest sense but he's wrong to suppose it will necessarily be against the public.

So, the CAB is maybe a useful contrasting example. The CA/Browser Forum (CA/B or CAB for short) was a meeting that happened as a mixture of conference calls and email lists back in 2011 or so. This is where Extended Validation (the green bar) comes from, but ultimately CA/B metamorphosed into a standing (in the sense of ongoing, not you can't sit down) meeting, still going on today, for the Certificate Authorities and the Browsers (today in practice the Operating System vendors, but with Mozilla standing in for the Free Unixes) to get together to figure out what the rules are.

Because of what Smith notes, the CA/B's rules are explicit that discussion about prices, product offerings and so on is prohibited, if you want to conspire to raise prices you'll have to do it somewhere else.

But plenty of _good_ things can be agreed this way. Contrast the many years it took to get rid of MD5 from certificates (which happened before CA/B existed) despite collisions being known - against SHA-1 where CA/B was able to co- ordinate industry wide discontinuation of SHA-1 with only a handful of minor defections before even a single proven collision of the hash was published.

More broadly I'd argue that the IETF, and certainly the thrice annual IETF physical meetings (the most recent was in Singapore last week) are exactly "people of the same trade... meet together" and you could characterise plenty of the work done at many Working Groups (obviously DPRIVE and QUIC but I don't see any reason you couldn't make this claim for KITTEN for example) as a conspiracy, just that it's only "against the public" if you think global surveillance was what "the public" wanted...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't think it's accurate to count stuff like youtube and google cloud as part of the %. It's gigabyte heavy but attention light. Just raw data about cat videos.

Compare it with say whatsapp traffic - that has a crazy high amount of attention crammed into each gigabyte.

Doesn't really change the message/conclusion but the metric used here seem flawed.

<comment><USER13> I had the same reaction. Bandwidth is only one metric of interest. I think time spent is a better proxy to the true metric of interest, which you rightly called out as attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's a fundamental error, or at least assumption, in this piece that really needs to be called out. The author states it this way:

"Any website aspiring for significant traffic depends on Search and Social traffic."

This is stated in the context of a discussing of what the web was and might have been.

Let's be clear: when the web was tiny, having "significant traffic" wasn't a particularly difficult target to met. Get yourself on the netscape "What's New" list, and that's more or less the end of it. But the web (really, the internet) is now unimaginably huge compared to the days referred to at the beginning of the article. Having "significant traffic" now is not a realistic goal, or even a worthwhile goal, unless you define "significant" in a way that isn't strongly related to simple numerics.

If you're interested in and/or aspiring to the sort of web that seemed possible/desirable in 1994, then you're not really interested in building sites that attract "significant traffic" in the sense of huge numbers. Attracting the right people is a much more important goal, and that still relies on the same basics of "how to write a good web page" that existed in 1994.

In short, the dominance of "the trinet" in driving web/internet traffic only restates what could have been before computers: most of what humans do is related to commerce and mass entertainment, and attempts to do other stuff may succeed but will never be as visible or dominant as those two.

</comment><comment><USER15> >The Web's diversity has granted space for multiple businesses to innovate and thrive, independent hobbyist communities to grow, and personal sites to be hosted on whatever physical servers can host them.

A few months ago I was feeling the same way, especially about personal websites. I tried to find StumbleUpon as that seemed like a good alternative to see random unique websites. However, I was saddened to see it had shut down or transformed itself into a kind of Pinterest like clone.

Given that StumbleUpon was gone, I tried to quickly recreate the core functionality - click button get random website, at [https://stumblingon.com](https://stumblingon.com) \- there are still a bunch of small, personal, interesting websites out there. We just need a good way to find them.

<comment><USER16> First result was a coolie cutter website selling seo services The creative web is truly dying

<comment><USER15> I don't see anything wrong with trying to sell services. I wouldn't want a generic, fraudulent, big business, or cookie cutter site in there though.

If you recall what website it was (or check the history after reloading stumblingon) and let me know the URL I can reconsider whether or not it belongs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are probably soon going to dictate what traffic can or cannot arrive at people's end devices.

This was the money quote for me. FANG may kill the web, but the idea that ISPs (in my opinion some of the scummiest corporations out there) get to decide what content they serve me and what they don't has the potential to kill the Internet as we know it.

<comment><USER18> Naw, with the coming of 5G it will destroy their monopolies on the communication lines which should open the door to more local competition.

<comment><USER9> No. The modulation and time sharing built into 5G only offers 15-20% increase in bandwidth available, MHz for MHz, when compared to 4G LTE. This is not a significant increase. It is not at all like the 3-4x increases in bandwidth, MHz for MHz, that the jump from 3G modulations to 4G LTE did.

Almost all of any potential increase in total speed will have to come from using new parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. To that end the FCC is kicking out old users from the 3 GHz range and auctioning it off to the mobile telcos. This includes both the traditional backend media distribution role and completely eliminating the amateur radio alloacations (ref: [https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-360941A1.pdf](https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-360941A1.pdf)).

But even with stealing bandwidth from you, me, and the normal media companies it won't replace an ISP with wire. Why? Every single wire or fiber has as much bandwidth to itself as the entire electromagnetic spectrum useable in freespace. And you don't have to share. Wireless, no matter the modulation, can never replace wired ISPs simply because there's not enough spectrum for everyone to use it at once.

Additionally, the 3-4 GHz spectrum really doesn't have that good of propagation characteristics. And mm-wave, well, that's about as effective as a light post light in terms of coverage area.

No, 5G will not destroy any monopolies. That's silly.

<comment><USER19> Smaller cells do wonders. A LimeSDR with <200$ of general-purpose CPU/assorted components to work between the USB3 SDR and Gigabit Ethernet (and some <50$ antenna + GPS-clock) is enough for a small 5G cell, where small primarily refers to single-channel and limited reach due to ~4mW output power (on each of the 2 antennas).

The reach can be increased for <50$ to at least a few hundred meters radius.

<comment><USER20> I don't understand, are you advocating for hobbyists to make their own 5G cells, or carriers?

Why not use Wi-Fi at this point?

<comment><USER21> I assume Namibj is suggesting a switch from our current hub-and-spoke ISP model to a peer-to-peer mesh networking model.

Radio technologies have strengths and weaknesses. While WiFi works great in a home, other radio types are better at transmitting data long distance. The best solutions combine a mix of radios to leverage their strengths.

<comment><USER9> Unfortuantely it's not the radio technologies that allow the cell network to work. It's the cell network paying the big bucks for height above terrain on various towers, buildings, and the like.

This is the problem mesh networks have to solve: height. Everything else is cheap and easy. But without height above terrain and line of sight it simply won't work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've always the held the somewhat cynical position that this sort of stuff would push [the interesting] people towards other, decentralized Internets. I'm a big fan of new projects like IPFS and DAT, and GNUnet had a great call to arms on their about page (which seems to have been moderated a little) [1] saying very similar things to the article. Maybe the internet of things will save us after all, by finally providing the vast, dense network of interconnected wireless devices that is needed to provide a robust structure to a really distributed net.

[1] [https://gnunet.org/en/about.html](https://gnunet.org/en/about.html)

<comment><USER23> > [the interesting] people

I don't think those people have to leave. We just need to collectively realize that, just like with old media , there is a 'mainstream', people who mostly _use_ the internet (the facebook crowd, who are now the bulk of the web traffic), and the more eclectic crowd who _care about_ the internet (largely, the pre-FB mass of the internet).

These are two distinct crowds. Considering that the FB crowd contains mostly people who did not use the internet before, and don't really know its culture, it's going to take a decade or more until this mass of people is replaced by younger internet-natives. Until then, the net is living in a transitory phase

<comment><USER22> That's interesting, I like the idea that digital natives will have more of a vested interest in caring about the internet, but I'm not sure if it will play out, especially if there continues to be such a strong focus on things like Instagram and tiktok which are largely disconnected from the net at large.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I am learning Japanese. I am spending an increasing amount of time searching for things in Japanese, and am starting to notice how often a 'trinet' website even comes up on the first page. Virtually zero. I wonder if the 'the web is dying' mentality is only restricted to English? I would be surprised if English websites made up even half of all internet traffic

</comment><comment><USER25> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15584456](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15584456)

</comment><comment><USER26> Actually, the web began dying in the late 90s.

<comment><USER27> The eternal September was 1993. I remember that change well and the earlier flavour I remember nostalgically. And it was tied to the rise of the web. There's a good argument to say the web killed the internet.

But all things change. Every phase has good and bad points. IMHO

<comment><USER28> I'll take 2000-on to the 1993 web/net any day.

I get:

* an up-to-date encyclopedia

* all the music referred to by said encyclopedia (Napster)

* an impressive number of books referred to by said encyclopedia (Demonoid)

* 2010s bonus-- a lot of the scientific articles cited by said encyclopedia (Scihub)

* 2010s bonus-- a searchable cache of stupid questions to do an end-run around the pain of interacting with the asocial gate-keepers who wish the internet wasn't so full of people (StackOverflow)

* an archive of all the stuff you're nostalgic for (archive.org and Google's copy/paste of usenet junk)

My internet is like O'Brien to your Winston from _1984_ \-- its mind _includes_ yours.

Edit: clarification

<comment><USER26> OK. But most of that stuff is noncommercial, and not part of the neo- AOL/Prodigy thing that the Web has become.

In my alternate history, the Web would have all that. And so much more like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The next consolidation will be cleaning up the plethora of apps for mobile. User's interactions can be simplified with a few well-designed multifunctional apps. WeChat probably points the way in this regard.

</comment><comment><USER30> Interesting article that's somewhat ruined by a click-baity title that it can't support. I first got on the web in 1994. There was far more difference between 1994 and 2014 than from 2014 to 2017. And that's the crux of it: just because it's different doesn't mean it's dying.

<comment><USER2> The difference between 1994 and 2014 seems more quantitative though. Here we are talking about the ownership of the referral traffic and how those companies who own it try to benefit from it. Nothing that happened between 1994 and 2014 comes close to it in terms of the impact on how people see the Internet and by extension how they see the world today.

<comment><USER30> I agree with most of what you're saying, but disagreeing with this part of it. The change between 1994 and 2014 is the difference between the internet growing to global dominance in everything from social connections to . . . well, is there anything about our lives that hasn't rested somehow on our usage of the internet since well before 2014? It seems to me that the internet of MSDOS 3.10based computers and dial-up modems to online shopping and the creation of billionaires is more different than what's changed from 2014-2017.

<comment><USER2> It is true that online shopping and online ads alone have created a whole new industry in a very business sense of the word. The change happened some time towards the end of the 1990s.

However, imagine you discover a new continent with vast resources and invite everyone to share the land and start producing and trading. When all land grabbing is done you begin to notice the rise of some powerful players who buy out or simply squeeze out smaller land owners. At one point your whole continent and the traffic within it becomes either directly owned or dependent on these giants to such an extent that you simply die if you don't play by their rules. Your continent now more looks like a conglomerate controlled by only a few powerful corporations rather than a free republic. And we can't even be sure they didn't make arrangements between them behind the scenes. So it's the ownership that's different now, which is nothing new really, we all kind of know about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> What is "Web"?

Side note: both FB and Google cannot be accessed from China.

<comment><USER32> Uhh... I think it's http. Or maybe it's just any data that a web-browser can handle. Definitely a few OSI layers above the internet.

<comment><USER33> No question about HTTP. However I'd argue that when HTTP is used for weird purposes that aren't directly related to serving hypertext pages (often to go around draconian firewall policies), or to run arbitrary code (JavaScript), then it's not the Web anymore. (Yes, this means that "Webapps" is an oxymoron.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Google is interested in building an AI that is designed to turn people into its products.

What do you do with a product when you're done with it? What do these people become?

All you need to do is search google for weight loss advice or anything that could remotely have a commercial interest and what pops up? Pages and pages of irrelevant clickbait. If you ever wanted to build an encyclopedia of nudges, persuaders, and other such exploits of the human mind, now would be a good time.

The entire game is forcing you to take actions, like answering "yes" to a sales guy over and over to build the habit so you'll agree to the sale. It's taxing on the mind, and like television, it got to the point you had to see 30 minutes of garbage ad's for 20 minutes of entertainment, that it's no longer worth it.

The "Trinet" is dieing because it has become useless; something far more useful will come along to replace it because people are viewing the recent infestation of marketing people as damage and are routing around it.

</comment><comment><USER35> Wait but goog fb and amzn have been aggressively trying to capture global markets. They have been increasing the footprint, does not that count for % increase from 2014 to 2017 ?? Does not make sense ..point about web is dying is opinionated. Today I can watch Netflix, order from doordash and connect with my family through FaceTime. All via web.

<comment><USER36> Yep. Author is romanticizing the "democratic" web of the time before facilitating companies simplified the process of getting and being online. The reality I remember is that it wasn't a democracy; it was a technocracy and the barrier to entry was high. It still is; hosting one's own full-fledged web server that is secure and reliable has only grown in complexity in the past decade, improvements like Docker notwithstanding, and it's no wonder average users have flocked to Facebook, Google, and Amazon for simplicity of access.

To take Facebook as example, people seem to often forget that the primary feature Facebook offers the average user is simple low-cost blogging of small thoughts and reliable auto-aggregation of those blogs. No fussing about with running one's own RSS feed or managing RSS subscriptions.

If the "web is dying," it's dying like a wooly mammoth---ill-suited to a changing climate. The mentioned companies created an ecosystem where the fundamentals of communication, location, and commerce can be accomplished without the technology getting in the way. It's no surprise users flock to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Great analysis; highly-recommended reading.

I want to bring attention to the followup article Staltz wrote about what we might do about the problems he enumerated in the OP:

[https://staltz.com/a-plan-to-rescue-the-web-from-the- interne...](https://staltz.com/a-plan-to-rescue-the-web-from-the- internet.html)

</comment><comment><USER38> Small pet peeve: why do some people write GOOG, AMZN, etc instead of Google and Amazon when the context has nothing to do with the stock market?

<comment><USER39> I'm guessing to easily refer to the parent company (not sure if these collections are still called companies, english is not my native language). Instead of GOOG one could probably use Alphabet but differentiating between Facebook and FACEBOOK might be a bit confusing and for Amazon that might just be to be consistent with the rest of the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> So what's changed in the two years since?

</comment><comment><USER41> Traffic is just so hard to measure if you equating page views or hits, or packets with relevance, economic value, importance, etc.

</comment><comment><USER42> In 1994 I was junior in high school and took as many years of auto-tech as possible. In the end we were rebuilding engines and air-conditioning units. And yeah, our high school had welding, cnc, woodworking, auto-cad, and even lumber-jacking as electives.

But I took a lot of auto-tech, three years of it. And the funny thing is I have never gotten my license. I'm nearly 45 years old and have never been able to legally drive a car.

But I was living with my sister at the time who was 18 and our landlord had a weird crush on her. Our landlord also owned a ton of properties in Eugene. And he would have me mow as many lawns as I wanted for 8 bucks a hour. Most of his rentals were to elderly people. I was making double the minimum wage and had no shortage of work. But I also had a girlfriend and skateboarding and bowling league to attend to. I did the minimum to maintain to healthy balance. If I needed new shoes I would mow a extra lawn. Skateboarding is hard on shoes. I would go through a pair a month.

But eventually I found myself doing auto stuff for people after mowing their lawns. I would get scheduled for oil changes, filters, plugs, brakes.. Eventually I was mostly doing auto maintenance for people and I charged significantly more. I had a lot of cash for a kid in high school with a Operation Ivy T-shirt.

Enter the internet.

My buddy Billy went to the University and could get me a cheap computer. This was back when Apple had serious discounts for students. I got a Performa 6214, Stylewriter 1200, and 14" Multisync monitor for about $900. A significant discount.

And Bill gave me his dial-up info into his university account. He gave it out to a lot of people. They didn't check if multiple people were using it. Back then we mostly looked up stuff about how to make LSD and mortal kombat fatality codes. It was Amazing. And a lot of very slow loading scans from porno mags.

But a person that was exploring this new thing that was non-commercial with me had a forward-thinking father. He was a real-estate agent and thought the internet was cool. So he wanted to put his listings on the internet that nobody would ever possibly use for looking at houses. Images were brutal since dial-up was the norm. And we used tables since css wasn't a thing back then.

But we made a commercial site. A site for a real-estate agent. And we hosted it on the university's of Oregon's site since we didn't really know how to get a domain name or find hosting. But it was pure HTML.

He paid us well to update the site with new listings. But then the dot.com thing happened and I got a job at a movie theater and wouldn't touch the internet until 2002.

edit :: I forgot to add that I think I might have been responsible for making the internet worse.

<comment><USER36> Helping someone do legitimate commerce online isn't making the internet worse. Quite the opposite.

<comment><USER42> That misses the point. I wish the internet was never used for financial gain. Just the sharing of information.

<comment><USER36> > financial gain

> sharing of information

... These features aren't really extricable from each other in any society where money exists

<comment><USER33> Wikipedia?

<comment><USER36> I mean in general, not for any specific agent involved in the sharing of the information. But where information is flowing, _someone_ is turning it into profit.

I am 100% certain that people have made significant revenue facilitated by their ability to look things up quickly and efficiently on Wikipedia. I know it has certainly helped me do my job. The fact that that revenue hasn't flowed directly to Jimmy Wales's institution is because nothing about commerce guarantees that everyone involved gets a cut of the money flowing.

Imagine how much money they would make if they started running ads though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The web has never been particularly robust.

</comment><comment><USER44> Why on earth is he naming them "GOOG", "FB" and "AMZN"?

<comment><USER45> It is ticker symbols of their stocks in the market.

<comment><USER44> Oh help, you can't be serious that he uses those on purpose.

<comment><USER46> It's a neat trick: it emphasizes that they are amoral companies required to do nothing but make money, and simultaneously that they're _only_ companies like the thousands of other gyrating tickers on the stock market. This same author frequently uses the term "Microsoft Github".

<comment><USER44> Thank you, it's framing. Now that makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> It makes me sad the web isn't what it used to be.

</comment><comment><USER48> The web 'began dying'? What does that mean, Boomer?

If you were to ask when it began being _corrupted_ that would be more to the point. How are children corrupted? What is the cure? After PCs came along it was all fun and games until people noticed there was gold involved. Stir in some greed and ego. Old forumula.</comment>