PHP Fog's Add-On Platform: MongoLab and NewRelic - <AUTHOR> http://blog.phpfog.com/2011/12/07/php-fogs-new-add-on-platform-mongodb-and-newrelic-support/

<comment><USER2> Anyone know what the experience is like moving from the free tier to the premium one? Do they redeploy the app and then do a seamless DNS switchover, or is there down time, etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our automated migration process is roughly like this:

* back up your code and data on shared infrastructure

* deploy app on a new dedicated app server

* copy uploaded data into place from the backup

* point our load balancers at your new server

* decommission the app on shared infrastructure

Routing is managed via the load balancer, so there is no need to update your DNS. We avoid downtime by pointing the load balancer at your new deployment before decommissioning your deployment on the free tier.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why doesn't Slack have single sign in? - <AUTHOR> It really annoys me that I have to maintain an account per each Slack community. Honestly it has actually put me off from using Slack. It's too much work. And the increased internet footprint bothers me, I'd like to be able to instantly vanish from all Slack communities in one click.<p>Single sign in seems like a no brainer to me. Why do they insist on new accounts? <comment><USER2> I think it's likely that it's because organisations can manage users by their domain name - it's possible to have a blanket rule that allows users to create an account for a team if they have an e-mail address from that organisation.

That said, I'm surprised they've not let users associate all of your Slack team accounts with a single account.</comment>


Ubuntu magazine sells well in Japan because of the front page - <AUTHOR> http://ubuntu.asciimw.jp/elem/000/000/010/10163/

<comment><USER2> I googled some more and it seems that the girl on the cover is a gravure idol. There's more detail and some page scans here [nsfw-ish]:

[http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2010/06/03/linux-for- lolicon-u...](http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2010/06/03/linux-for-lolicon- ubuntu-loli-service-delights-fans/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Are Ubuntu users in Japan supposed to be considered loli-con?

</comment><comment><USER3> Really? What is so special about the cover?</comment>


From Serverless to Elixir - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/coryodaniel/from-erverless-to-elixir-48752db4d7bc <comment><USER2> Excellent and balanced read.</comment>


Ask HN: Where do we discuss the mass surveillance problem? - <AUTHOR>

What are the currently available hubs/places on the Web to:
1. publish all issues about mass surveillance,
2. submit proposals for solutions (and fragments thereof) to the problem,
3. up/downvote the issues, comments and proposals?
The idea is to have 1 place on the web which is not limited to technological questions and most of all where the entire process is respected:
Breaking news -> Turns into outrage -> To be turned into activity -> Ultimately solves the problem.
(If we stop after the 2nd step and accept to remain victims, every revelation was in vain; resulting depressed moods will make people resolve to turning a blind eye to the issue at stake.)
The Western World may be about to become a "castrated democracy" and this problem is so important that it needs an all-including central hub.
Where is it? If it doesn't exist yet:
Where are parts of it?
Where could it be in the future?
Are you interested in building (or contributing to) something like this? <comment><USER2> Set up an IRC channel?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm thinking of a solution that would enable good content to _remain visible_ (and actionable and improvable and trackable, also for its progress).

For example, on HN, discussions mostly end when posts leave the front page (and obviously, nothing really results from the good input, except a bit more awareness). A few hours later, a similar post appears and all the questions and answers come up again and some people get upset (probably also b/c they see it as a "political post").

In chats, good content gets lost, buried, etc, even more easily I'd say.

EDIT: "content" such as [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6153044](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6153044) (but of course also the discussions themselves)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also, if there is 1 hub to represent everything that's going on (be that protests or online activities),

\- there will be reinforcing spill-over effects from every activity to the other ones

\- the media can more easily refer the all activities (since they're easily accessible in 1 place)

\- the movement will gain more visibility and credibility

\- the movement will grow quicker

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you know people at some organization which could become the sponsor of such a project, please let them know that there are interested developers out there!</comment>


"Let America Be America Again" by Langston Hughes (1935) - <AUTHOR> http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15609

<comment><USER2> Nice summation of opposing forces in society, holding out hope for a future that only gradually comes into being.

</comment><comment><USER3> Moving and prophetic.. even today and probably tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER4> Beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's funny that your most popular symbol is the Statue of Liberty.</comment>


DarkMarket: The Silk Road successor police can't shut down - <AUTHOR> http://metronews.ca/news/toronto/1017866/darkmarket-the-silk-road-successor-police-cant-shut-down/

<comment><USER2> You won't need to shut it down. Just go where the money flows and arrest anyone selling illegal goods/services. Eventually, when sellers know that it's too risky, they just won't sell there anymore.

<comment><USER3> The point is that hunting people down protected by TOR and privacy laws in the postal mail system, one of the few practical privacy laws left, is still technically possible, yes...but it is expensive, time consuming and requires sophisticated police work.

The drug war is already failing without these huge roadblocks. It will always still be possible to exploit endpoint security. Given the resource limitations of law enforcement, maybe we should focus those resources hunting down important crimes such as creators of child porn or people engaged in violence crime?

<comment><USER4> _The point is, hunting people down protected by TOR and privacy laws in the postal mail system (one of the few practical privacy laws left) is technically possible...but is extremely expensive, requires sophisticated police work, and is time consuming._

Good old-fashioned police work involving the postal system was how some Silk Road vendors were nabbed. It won't matter how secure your market is, if the authorities want you bad enough and you don't know how to do secure mail drops.

<comment><USER3> They cherrypicked a few out of thousands and Silk Road was a tiny tiny percentage of the drug market. What will happen when they are 10x the size? Will that type of law enforcement scale?

<comment><USER4> Since the legwork was done on a local level, yes, it could scale at first. You'd just need a Federal level agency to forward information to the right locals. You don't have to nab all the perps, you just have to nab enough of them to change the expected cost-benefit equation.

Also, adding levels of indirection only increases enforcement work linearly.

What you'd end up with are just a few organizations with the resources and expertise to outcompete other operators in terms of opsec and secure fulfillment, while wannabes and new operators serve as fodder for enforcement. Somewhat like today's situation.

Also, since enforcement depends on local enforcement, local corruption will increase.

<comment><USER3> Great point. They federal level infrastructure is pretty far from having that capability at the moment. As long as systems like one linked in the article are coming, the only natural response by the state is to establish an large- scale NSA-style hacking and network forensic agency working domestically.

There is no way they'll let digital black markets exist without creating a super-expensive heavy handed machine to attempt to stop it. Whether it is practical or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The title is just silly and unrealistic.

People said the same about silkroad, and look what happened.

Saying something like this can't be shut down is like saying there's an unhackable system out there. And really, historically, these online drug markets have been much more short lived than AFK drug enterprises. They have really lived by the rules of startups in that sense. ;)

<comment><USER6> Did the media industry shut down Bittorrent yet? Nope. Did the IT sec community was able to shut down Conficker after it went peer-to-peer? Nope. So going peer-to-peer is actually pretty invincible with today's methods I would say (although I am not an expert!) The question is whether or not they can implement the details well enough in this peer-to-peer market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This site has already been discussed three days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7655457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7655457)</comment>


Students who cheat on a simple task are more likely to prefer public sector jobs - <AUTHOR> https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20150029 <comment><USER2> Actual title: Dishonesty and Selection into Public Service: Evidence from India

The link title: "Students who cheat on a simple task are more likely to prefer public sector jobs", implies that this is a global phenomenon.

One might expect that the nature of the public sector in a given location might have an influence over the kinds of people it might attract.

In a place where baksheesh is commonplace, and a small fortune can be amassed out of "facilitation payments" by a low-level civil servant, it would come as no surprise that such a position would be attractive to nefarious individuals.

In a place where public sector workers earn marginally less than their private sector counterparts, and have no means of topping up that income, other than by taking a second job, one might imagine that such a position would be less attractive to cheaters, and more attractive to people who value mission over money.

If I let the assumption of good faith slip, I would say that the link title has been deliberately crafted to cast aspersions on all public sector employees worldwide, or, at least in the OP's home country.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is an 80 character limit on titles. The title I used is an abbreviated version of the first line of the abstract:

        Students in India who cheat on a simple laboratory task are
        more likely to prefer public sector jobs. This paper shows
        that cheating on this task predicts corrupt behavior by civil
        servants, implying that it is a meaningful predictor of future
        corruption. Students who demonstrate pro-social preferences
        are less likely to prefer government jobs, while outcomes on
        an explicit game and attitudinal measures to measure
        corruption do not systematically predict job preferences. A
        screening process that chooses high-ability applicants would
        not alter the average propensity for corruption. The findings
        imply that differential selection into government may
        contribute, in part, to corruption.

The OP is familiar with several countries, and he is an economist with Ph.D. in experimental economics. As such, the OP understands that researchers with limited budgets may choose to carry out their research in countries where smaller amounts of money can have salient effects.

The OP believes the distribution of human capabilities and preferences is independent of national or racial origin, and understands the appeal of government positions to people who like to have power over others without being accountable.

<comment><USER2> > The OP believes the distribution of human capabilities and preferences is > independent of national or racial origin,

The OP has misinterpreted my comment as a racist attack on Indians.

My point was that corruption (or perception thereof) in an organisation, sector, or industry breeds (or at least sustains) corruption, as corrupt individuals are attracted to it. Conversely, an apparently "clean" organisation, sector, or industry is less likely to attract corrupt individuals, and is more likely to stay clean.

Looking at Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index: [https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_percept...](https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2016)

In (e.g.) India, Turkey, Serbia, one would expect the test cheaters to be attracted to the civil service. In (e.g.) Russia, Iran, Mexico, even more so. In (e.g.) Denmark, New Zealand, Finland, one would not expect them to be attracted to the civil service.

In those countries with less government corruption, one would expect corrupt individuals to be attracted to different sector.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> the "Evidence from india" part is important.

<comment><AUTHOR> > the "Evidence from india" part is important.

Why? The theory is independent of racial or national origin:

        Economic theory predicts that civil servants often shirk
        responsibility or take bribes because it is difficult for
        central governments and citizens to monitor and subsequently
        punish these bad behaviors ( e.g., Banerjee 1997, Shleifer and
        Vishny 1993, Di Tella and Schargrodsky 2004, and Olken and
        Pande 2012) . This implies that variation in the ability to
        monitor or incentivize civil servants may drive the observed
        differences in corruption across countries, across agencies
        within a country, or even across the types of tasks for which
        public servants are responsible. However, not all civil
        servants engage in the same level of corrupt behavior, even in
        the same position or role. Besley (2005) and Prendergast (
        2007) posit that this may be potentially due to different
        government workers having different preferences over engaging
        in corruption. As such, it follows that the types of
        individuals that select into government may help explain
        variation in corruption levels.

<comment><USER2> It is independent of racial and national origin of the individual concerned, but not independent of the nation of the civil service being examined.

> This implies that variation in the ability to monitor or incentivize civil > servants may drive the observed _differences in corruption across countries_ > across agencies within a country, or even across the types of tasks for > which public servants are responsible.

> As such, it follows that the types of individuals that select into > government may help explain _variation in corruption levels._

As I stated in my comment on this, where bribery of public servants is the norm (with this statement comes an implied "and typically goes unpunished", otherwise it wouldn't be the norm), one might expect corrupt individuals to be attracted to those roles where they can pocket the most bribes.

In countries (or agencies within a country) where such bribery is rare, and dealt with seriously if it does occur, what would be the attraction for a corrupt individual?

It could well be true that test-cheaters are attracted to the public sector, regardless of how corrupt that particular public sector is, and only exercise their naughty side in countries/agencies/positions where they can get away with it, but supporting evidence for that assertion (against the assertion that test-cheaters are attracted to positions where they can exercise their naughty side) would only be found in places where they are less likely to get away with it.</comment></comment></comment>


How A Dancing Cat Doubled Our Conversion Rate - <AUTHOR> http://blog.striking.ly/post/41770910572/how-a-dancing-cat-doubled-our-conversion-rate

<comment><USER2> THIS IS DOG

</comment><comment><USER3> Cats always do the trick</comment>


Photonic Ising Machines Go Big - <AUTHOR> https://physics.aps.org/articles/v12/61 <comment><AUTHOR> An Ising machine is a photonic computer capable parallel computation and well suited to search problems like traveling salesman.</comment>


Can These Glasses Help the Colorblind? We Put EnChroma to the Test - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/can-these-glasses-help-the-colorblind-we-put-en-chroma-1739433668 <comment><USER2> Years ago I applied (and was accepted) to a special assignment in the US Marines that required perfect vision including color vision. I took a few weeks leave, went to Canada (so there'd be no US medical records) and got lasik and ChromaGen contact lenses. Passed all the vision tests. For me this was the only thing that stood between me and a very cool assignment.

Edit: I eventually passed the Ishihara test (colored dots) where I previously failed it.

</comment><comment><USER3> My God. That video of the monkey compulsively pecking away at that touch screen for rewards...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEeU8CV_3Mo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEeU8CV_3Mo)

That video hits so much closer to home than it should. I see a lot more of myself in that monkey than is comfortable.

</comment><comment><USER4> > _But there's still the concern that wearing a colored filter while taking > the D15 test will alter the relative brightness of the chips, providing a > context cue that can help subjects score higher._

I'm confused about this statement: isn't the whole point of these glasses to provide such clues? I may be more knowledgeable about the subject than the average Joe (I like reading about it), or I may be completely wrong (I'm no pro), but it's obvious to me that real color vision is indeed impossible without gene therapy -- you can't show to the brain what the eyes can't detect, at least not _through_ the eyes. Do they claim it provides real full color vision? I don't even think this is testable, for that matter (qualia etc).

<comment><USER5> Our eyes essentially convert incoming light into three scalar values (one for each of our three cones, S, M, and L). The specific color blindness that this article is talking about is not really color blindness, but rather two of these cones overlapping more than usual. In theory, by filtering out the wavelengths of light in these overlapping regions, you can improve the wearers ability to perceive differences in color. Of course, this also affects percieved brightness, and their is no good way of knowing if the user is telling the difference based on the fact that the signal is being picked up by different cones, or the fact that it is being picked up as a different brightness.

<comment><USER4> I thought they were talking about dichromatism, I missed the part where they say it fixes anomalous trochromatism only. It makes sense now, thanks.

<comment><USER6> Deuteranomaly/protanomaly are between them something like 2.5 times as common as deuteranopia/protanopia (other color vision deficiencies besides those four are very rare). So this should still be very helpful to most "colorblind" people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm looking forward to the day that people with "normal" vision are able to see currently invisible colors.

It doesn't look like this technology would allow that, but perhaps gene therapy or some other technology might.

We might even naturally evolve that capability, and there has been some evidence that already there are some people who have that mutation.

There was a RadioLab episode about that,[1] which included discussion of the possibility that in Homer's time humans did not have the ability to see blue.

[1] - [http://www.radiolab.org/2012/may/21/sky-isnt- blue/](http://www.radiolab.org/2012/may/21/sky-isnt-blue/)

<comment><USER8> I didn't listen to the episode, but I'm a little sceptical. Traditionally, in Japanese there was no word for _green_ , only blue (aoi in Japanese). The forest is blue, the ocean is blue, the sky is blue, etc. Green (midori) was only added to the language in recent times. Even now the green light on a traffic light is called "aoi" (blue) in Japanese.

It's not that Japanese people are not able to distinguish between green and blue, it's that linguistically the colours are broken down differently. If you have a discussion about the colours of the forest, for instance, even now many people will insist that the deep, dark green of pine needles is "aoi" (blue) and that midori (green) is more on the yellow end of green (for example new shoots).

So you might be tempted to think that maybe it is the same -- they couldn't see blue and therefore green and blue had the same name. However, the kanji for geen, 緑, has existed for thousands of years and is used in many Japanese words. For example, 緑茶 means "green tea" (as opposed to oolong tea, for instance). So even though the concept of green existed and there was a character for writing it, if you were to ask people 100 years ago (or just ask older people now) what colour "green tea" is, they would say "blue".

So I think it is entirely possible that Homer simply didn't use the word "blue" because he categorized colour differently. It's not necessarily the case that he couldn't see it. Well... I guess Homer was blind.... but you get my point ;-)

<comment><USER9> More about "grue" in other languages: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_of_blue_and_green_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_of_blue_and_green_in_various_languages)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting to note that the 2-parameter space of colors we see (basically, 3 RGB minus one parameter for overall brightness) is completely a consequence of humans only having 3 cones. Since you can basically have an arbitrary spectrum (i.e., arbitrary strength at each frequency), the "fundamental" space of physical colors is vastly larger.

<comment><USER11> Some humans have 4 cones: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Human_tetrachrom...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Human_tetrachromats)

<comment><USER12> Interesting subject matter. A tech article which summarizes current research on retinal tetrachromat genotypes can be found here:

URL: [http://glimpsejournal.com/index.php/Glimpse/pages/view/2.3-K...](http://glimpsejournal.com/index.php/Glimpse/pages/view/2.3-KAJ)

Notice how standard test results suggest to one research group that the color processing among tetrachromats is defective while to another the same results suggest such subjects exhibit higher sensitivity and simply see things differently.

Also curious, toward the bottom of the article is the wide evenly spaced European Starling tetrachromat probability peaks chart with sensitivities well above 300 nm. Hypothetically, it would be interesting to feed output from a Starling retina into an interface with the sophisticated human occipatal lobe and learn what qualial configurations are synthesized in the conscious workspace. Maybe new color qualia would show up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3qkr7e/iama_colorblin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3qkr7e/iama_colorblind_guy_who_has_been_using_enchroma/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm colorblind[0] and already knew about the professors in Washington state doing gene therapy on this. I'm eager to join in the human trials when they begin, but my understanding from friends who are scientists that the legal hurdles of such a thing is enormous. My mother found out when as a child I said "wow the grass sure is red today". I've never really seen green grass other than in a painting. Grass varies of course, but it's closer to a reddish for sure though on average. I can't really tell when it's brown and dying very easily either. It's pretty difficult to explain to someone that you "don't know" what color something is really.

I'm not interested in Enchroma though, you can't add lost information. I'm sure it helps differentiate between shades. Just as you can't upscale a 640x480 image to 4K without adding the missing information. I'd like to try them on to test, but without that I can't send these people ~$400 for something that seems dubious to begin with.

I did just learn this from the Enchroma page- "something as ordinary as peanut butter, which should look brown, appears to be green for someone with color blindness!" I had no idea peanut butter was brown. I remember seeing a Sesame Street episode as a kid in the mid 80s where they showed a peanut butter factory, noting the color as a child. I always thought it was greenish/tan.

I would love to see the world how it is to everyone else before I die at least.

[0][http://enchroma.com/test/result/strong- deutan/?completed=1&r...](http://enchroma.com/test/result/strong- deutan/?completed=1&result=strong+deutan&pts=1.32&dts=1.32&tts=0.225)

</comment><comment><USER15> If you enjoyed this article, I recommend the PBS series, The Brain with David Eagleman. You can watch all the episodes on their Roku channel or their website[1]. The episode "What is Reality?" covers how everyone's brain creates a unique internal model of reality.

[1] [http://video.pbs.org/program/brain-david- eagleman/](http://video.pbs.org/program/brain-david-eagleman/)</comment>


KDE is considering a migration to GitLab - <AUTHOR> https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/53206 <comment><USER2> Looking forward to this</comment>


Things Most Americans Don't Know About America - <AUTHOR> http://postmasculine.com/america

<comment><USER2> These are all excellent points. Having lived for long periods outside the US, I can vouch for them. Taking the other side of the question, two areas where the US tends to be better than many countries are: much less tolerance for bureaucracy and a greater individual sense of the need to improve/change oneself.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think these are great insights, especially about comfort not equalling happiness.

I think a major factor behind it is that the US has no historical culture, just a popular culture. I think American's don't realize it at all unless they spend time outside the US to see how the important the historical context is. There was no USA 200 years ago, while many countries have thousand year old cultures.

</comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps the author confuses what our media says we're interested in, vs what Americans are actually interested in. Most of us are interested in a job, getting to work, finding a spouse, paying our mortgage. Just like everybody else.</comment>


Qualities of a good cofounder - <AUTHOR> http://www.teabuzzed.com/2009/11/a-good-cofounder-is/

<comment><USER2> I think this is very wise and bears repeating:

"Complementary. If you have an idea they expand on that idea. If you're a bit too liberal they're a bit too conservative. Complementary should not be confused with diametrically opposed. There is such a thing as too different to get a long. A good example of a complimentary founding team would be the two Steves of Apple fame."</comment>


Free. Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?currentPage=all <comment><USER2> Dup. See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122811></comment>


An API for hosted deep learning models - <AUTHOR> http://blog.algorithmia.com/2016/07/cloud-hosted-deep-learning-models/ <comment><USER2> The history of machine learning startups is littered with companies that thought a hosted web service was a good idea. The problem with this model is that big data, by definition, is costly to move. So if a managed service is not generating and storing the data you need to process with machine learning or deep learning (as you might conceivably with AWS), then you probably don't want to move your data to those algorithms or models. All you'll get are small-data users. The models and algos need to go to the data. That's the most efficient approach, and it means you have to go on prem... Fwiw, that's what we're trying to do with Skymind and Deeplearning4j.

[https://skymind.io/](https://skymind.io/) [http://deeplearning4j.org/](http://deeplearning4j.org/)

<comment><USER3> My understanding of the post is it would host learned models. You'd train them wherever, but host the learned model in algorithmia, which exposes it through an api, making it easy for others to use your model.

<comment><USER4> It takes big data to train but that trained model can work on "small data" _or_ big data. One-off uses for apps really do lend themselves well to a hosted solution like this IMHO. If you need to classify lots of data – then you are probably at a point to either train your own model or buy it from the developer via this site, I'd think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As an algorithm developer and manager I have thought of business ideas similar to what Algorithmia is pursuing. There are a few reasons why I think "algorithms as a service" will not work so well. In most products / services that rely on non-trivial algorithms, the core algorithms are often the "secret sauce" of the business. They are what gives you your edge over your competition. And you need to fully understand and control your secret sauce. You need to know where the core algorithms work well and where they don't work so well. With an outsourced service, your core algorithms are basically a black box outside your control. Another problem: for most real world algorithms it is pretty rare to be able to take an off the shelf algorithm and have it "just work" well enough for your problem. Often there is a bit of parameter tuning and domain specific knowledge that must be incorporated to get the best results (this is how people like myself get a lot of consulting work). If a generic algorithm does work quite well for your problem, your competitors probably already know about it and you have no real edge over them. A third problem, and this is really the main one: one of the main benefits of developing an advanced algorithm is that once you have it, you "own" it and can deploy it as you see fit. You amortize your costs upfront and are able to use this sunk development cost over and over again without extra cost. But with a service like Algorithmia, you are never able to take full advantage of the tremendous leverage that algorithms can give you. The more you use the algorithms, the more you pay. And if you start paying a lot to use an algorithm you're going to at some point find it to be better to develop your own implementation and stop paying someone else for the service.

<comment><USER6> So you can use Algorithmia as only a component of your ML pipeline, or you can use it to try out various out-of-the-box algorithms before taking the effort to run your own. Finding the best setup takes lots of experimentation, anything that can speed that up is useful. We should have easy access to the best performing models in all categories of data: image, video, audio, text, decision making (RL).

Also, these guys could offer support for these models on private cloud servers, to enable privacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "Using GPUs inside of containers is a challenge. There are driver issues, > system dependencies, and configuration challenges. It's a new space that's > not well-explored, yet. There's not a lot of people out there trying to run > multiple GPU jobs inside a Docker container."

Er, Nvidia itself has an official Docker application which allows containers to interface with the host GPU, optimized for the deep learning use case: [https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-docker](https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia- docker)

Training models is one thing that can commoditized, like with this API, but _building_ models and selecting features without breaking the rules of statistics is another story and is the true bottleneck for deep learning. That can't be automated as easily.

<comment><USER8> Algorithmia founder here. nvidia-docker is helpful but does not address all the issues with running GPU computing inside of docker. There are driver issues on the host OS, and the real challenge is running _multiple_ GPU jobs inside of separate docker containers and sharing the GPU.

I agree that building models is still definitely a big challenge, but the tooling and knowledge is getting better every day. Either way, our goal with Algorithmia is to create a channel for people to make their models available, and create incentive for people to put in the effort to train really solid, useful models.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. I brought up a system with nvidia-docker last week for a computer vision application and while it works, it seems fragile. There are more pieces than there should be and it seems easy to break. I also don't know if we can use multiple containers on one host, but it doesn't sound like it.

It is not the final solution for containerized GPU applications.

<comment><USER10> Author of nvidia-docker here. You can definitely have multiple containers on each GPU if you want. If you find a bug or if you think the documentation was not great, please file a bug!

<comment><USER9> Awesome. Thanks for the reply and I apologize for suggesting something incorrect.

It does strike me as tricky needing to match driver versions between the host and the container. Do you know if there is any effort to eliminate that requirement?

Also while we're chatting, is there any hope of NVIDIA open sourcing their linux drivers? How would such a move affect nvidia-docker?

<comment><USER10> You don't need to match the driver version between the host and the container. Actually, you shouldn't include any driver file inside the container.

All the user-level driver-files required for execution are mounted when the container is started using a volume. This way you can deploy the same container on any machine with NVIDIA drivers installed.

We have more details on our wiki: [https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia- docker/wiki/Internals](https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-docker/wiki/Internals)

Concerning your last question: I don't have any information on this topic, but anyway it would not really impact nvidia-docker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not a big fan of taking the openness in machine learning and making it a web based product, for me the "whoa" moment from the new approachable machine learning frameworks is that I can train a Tensorflow network on my computer then embedded it in an Android/iOS app that'll work offline.

Also, much more minor grievance but I really dislike websites that don't work on my 15" laptop, what's going on here? [http://i.imgur.com/q13lCLK.png](http://i.imgur.com/q13lCLK.png)

<comment><USER12> Thanks for pointing out that share button issue. Should be fixed now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How does this compare in price to AWS GPU instances?

<comment><USER14> The service operates at a higher level than EC2, and pricing is calculated on a per-second of compute basis. Comparing prices is going to depend a lot on the specifics of your workload and your affinity for managing infrastructure.

<comment><USER13> So, "more expensive than AWS".

<comment><USER14> Speaking strictly of infrastructure costs, stripping away any other value of our marketplace and platform, ignoring an on-premise deployment of our platform that uses your own AWS instances, and given a sustained workload that saturates system resources for the lifetime of your instance(s): yes.

For workloads where you aren't making full use of system resources at all times, then the economy of scale provided by our compute cluster often results in compute-per-second being more cost effective even before considering the costs of managing your own infrastructure. It fits into the "serverless" trend, FWIW.

Each algorithm in our marketplace has a cost calculator that breaks down the price using a per-API-call estimate. If you have a specific workload in mind, feel free to reach out and we'd be happy to further discuss the pricing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cool idea. I spent sometime playing around with it. Found that some of the Algos are a bit buggy and not working.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does anybody know if these "free APIs" are actually used to get "free training" for the API owner's models? I mean, is it free as in free beer or as in facebook?

<comment><USER17> I was under the impression that training data needed to contain the answer to the question to be effective, while users of these models would be using them to answer questions.

Unless the users of this service then feed whether the answer given by the service was correct back into the service, I don't see how it would help to train their model.

Happy to be corrected by someone with a better understanding of the space.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A Website for HTTP Status Codes - <AUTHOR> https://statuses.now.sh/ <comment><USER2> How is this better than [https://httpstatuses.com/](https://httpstatuses.com/)

<comment><USER3> I think you mean, how is this better than [https://http.cat/](https://http.cat/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Even I can't tell if it is :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> As an exploration of Svelte (v3.svelte.technology), I designed and build this fairly simple website that solves a problem I have often - quickly finding HTTP status code info.

It's pretty simple, but I think it can actually be a fairly useful tool in my workflow and I hope the workflows of others. I'd love to hear some feedback!

It's easy to use and super fast, especially considering my previous workflow was:

\- Encounter a status code in some code

\- Find the Wikipedia article on HTTP status codes

\- Press Ctrl-F

\- Type in the status code

\- Hit return

\- Read the explanation

Now it's much quicker for me. I might also make a Visual Studio Code extension to make the process even faster.

I'd love to hear some feedback!

<comment><USER4> Nice! It looks like it reduces your steps to:

\- Encounter a status code in some code

\- Go to [https://statuses.now.sh/](https://statuses.now.sh/)

\- Type in the status code

\- Read the explanation

That's 66% of the steps. It's harder to remember that URL than wikipedia though. You could remove a step if you could easily put the number in the url without having to remember the "code" query param. Just go directly to [https://statuses.now.sh/418](https://statuses.now.sh/418).

I live in the terminal. If I'm investigating a status code then I have a terminal open. That's not true for everyone, but it'd be super cool if I could `curl [https://statuses.now.sh/418`](https://statuses.now.sh/418`) and get plaintext information about the status right from my terminal! You could implement that by checking the user agent to see if it's curl/postman/etc.. or requiring a .json or .txt extension at the end. Either way, it'd cut my workflow down to three steps:

\- Encounter a status code in some code

\- `curl [https://statuses.now.sh/418`](https://statuses.now.sh/418`)

\- Read the explanation.

It also allows me to set an alias/function in my bashrc so that I don't have to remember the url.

As for the svelte part, I haven't used it and don't really do frontend dev very often...but I bet you'd get more specific feedback on the code itself if you listed a git repo people could use to check things out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, you don't have to type in the url if it's a bookmark ;) But same with Wikipedia But then it makes it as easy to remember

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This assumes I care about a status code in isolation when, in fact, they are grouped or related.

If selecting a status code, or if faced with one, I want to see that relationship.

It's a fun project but it might be a bit over engineered. I think it'd have to be at least as good as a list.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do also love status code lists or references (like MDN), but this site is really for a quick reference.

For example, I'm communicating with an API in JavaScript and it gives me a status code - I can just go to the site and type it in, and I get a little bit of info right away.

I might also add a MDN or Wikipedia link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hi, permalinks might not be working at the moment (I tried with a 204)</comment>


Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/18/atlassian-acquires-agilecraft-for-166m/ <comment><USER3> I've been really unimpressed with atlassian over the last few years.

We started with bitbucket before it was acquired, it was super robust, then once atlassian got it slowly small bug after small bug kept making it into production creating mini headaches and they never seem like its super important to them.

We also have Confluence, which is okish, but again, small bug after small bug keeps creeping in, like at the moment, they have a bug with putting markdown into pages (it's completely broken ). Their attitude is it's a low priority fix and they have no idea when it will be fixed.

Bugs happen, sure.... but this kind of thing says to me that they must be so overwhelmed by bugs that fixing documented features of their product is just not a priority if it's deemed to be too fringe. Maybe they are just getting too big and too removed from their customers? Either way, for me it's triggered a search for alternatives.

<comment><USER4> They just don't seem to care. You research something - after hours you'll end up at their bugtracker, where you can read the desperation of others (often some issues are not fixed in 10+ years). I don't understand their priorities. There is to date still no way to restrict visibility of work-logs on issues - a usecase basically every smaller shop has because the client is often participating directly in the JIRA. Service Desk solves that problem but it's quite expensive and you can't mix software projects with service desk projects. So you have to create linked-issues and have yet another layer of indirection :/

We end up syncing projects with another plugin on the same instance :/

Confluence lacking some robust text-only markup (like markdown or asciidoc or whatever) is also more than lame. It shouldn't be that hard because most macros can be configured by text attributes anyway... Expose that Wiki in a readable markdown format and have me let git... like github gist would be more than enough. I despise using Confluence at the moment...

Gitlab could eat their lunch but they also seem to have their priorities off

<comment><USER5> You mean we're not going after Confluence or JIRA?

Wikis are certainly not a priority for us. I think if you don't separate the proposer from the person who accepts the proposal the wiki tends to grow stale. So we're betting on static websites with GitLab Pages.

There is a large market for wikis but you would have to use something easier than markdown, which is hard for us to get away from.

We're going after JIRA. In GitLab you can have a service desk on a project with an issue tracker. Do we solve the work-log issue too?

<comment><USER4> Ohh, I really have to stop making snarky comments here :)

So I actually looked at migrating to Gitlab due our JIRA pains but it's not really possible if you have some already grown setup (it's not exactly easy to solve so no blame to Gitlab here)

\- no JIRA import (it's possible with some REST-API fighting), but something easy would be nice: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ee/issues/2780](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/2780)

\- The work-log issue is not solved as far as I understood the documentation, it's possible to have external users to hide internal projects but once you are on a project time-tracking information is visible.

\- From a quick glance over the docs it looks like reporting on tracked time is also not possible out of the box - and probably not across projects - <USER2> use Tempo Timesheets on JIRA for that, the slash commands /spend /estimate are probably okay for devs but we also have other users that can deal with the fields in JIRA.

\- It looks like the whole custom fields on issues is still in the works (we use that quite heavily) and there is no concept of workflows (we also have some custom setup there)

\- Servicedesk looks neat through.

Don't get me wrong - this reads like: I want all JIRA features in Gitlab - maybe that's a stupid idea, for a new project I'd probably just use Gitlab and see how are I come.

<comment><USER6> Sean already did a great job responding to each point here. Just want to add one more quick one. We are working on key-value labels right now, and we think it will solve many of the problems of custom fields. Feel free to take a look and add some comments. Thanks!

[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ee/issues/9175](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/9175)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> All this advanced tracking/planning stuff from companies like Atlassian seem to me like some kind of weird, dystopian "C-Suite-Porn."

The going narrative seems to be this idea that companies have, throughout the history of business, been guided completely by the whims and emotional fancies of the leadership team and/or CEO. And now we're adding tools to surface more and more status tracking information up to the C Suite, which is going to directly lead to better decision-making that moves the company forward.

This seems like nonsense to me. Imo, leaders set the culture, network outside the company, and guide longer-term strategic vision, while directors wrangle the people and manage alignment with higher level goals, and team leads make the projects happen by empowering and supporting the IC's who do the actual day to day work.

I just don't understand the value proposition for a company as a whole to putting more data on the plate of higher-ups at any level above team leaders (1st level management, with all-IC direct-reports). We need analysis and summary tooling that doesn't add _any_ overhead to team leaders and ICs, not more overhead on the people actually getting things done. We need _better_ information on the desks of leadership, not _more_ data points. We need _more efficient_ communication tools, essentially "better nozzles," as opposed to higher flow rate in the company-information-firehose.

These products seem to play directly into the psyche of the typical narcissist CEO who wants to know everything that is going on at the company, right now, and micromanage everything directly. The incentives don't seem very well- aligned with things like "servant leadership" and "cross-functional knowledge," because, how do you make those into a Jira ticket that will be tracked towards your performance reviews? If it's cross-functional then which functional task-board does it belong to?

<comment><USER8> This is a great comment. I'd go further and say that it can actually be harmful to a business (or government organxation) to put too much "raw" data in the hands of people who lack the context or training to effectively evaluate it. the analyst who generated/cleaned the dataset is going to have a much stronger basis for knowing when to trust the data and when to discount it.

Once the boss has thrown it through a pivot table and generated their own conclusions you're now not only fighting to get the correct conclusions forward, you have to fight management's ego when you tell them they've missed some important aspect in their analysis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > a service that aims to give enterprises plan their strategic projects and > workstreams

???

Interesting software. My spidey sense tells me that your team will need at least 1 FTE just to massage whatever kind of workflow is required to get stuff in Jira to play nice with this. These tools that promise insight into what is actually happening within prod/eng teams are always really great on paper but in actuality I have never seen one work.

"Yeah so there is a dusty old EC2 instance running on so-and-so's old IAM role (who is now terminated, but we can't kill their IAM or things will break) running this .jar which tries to take our JIRA stuff from these 3 projects and merge it into a pseudo "fake" project named "KPI BOARD DO NOT EDIT" that gets sync'd with a lambda function every hour to AgileCraft via a Google sheet. If this box isn't running then the KPI reports don't get generated in metabase and the board is going to lose their shit. Make sure to check the disk with df next time you login because it fills up ocassionally."

<comment><USER10> For the uninitiated in Enterprise-talk, FTE stands for Full Time Employee. _flies away_

<comment><USER11> FYI it's Full Time _Equivalent_. E.g a new feature may require 1 FTE for 1 week. That doesn't necessarily mean 1 person 1 week. It may be 2 people 2.5 days each, etc.

<comment><USER12> Or 9 women to birth a baby in a month.

I don't like being reduced to a quantifiable amount. You end up with crappy managers who have secret multipliers for every employee to try to make their crappy estimates work.

Nothing makes your colleagues dislike you more than it accidentally slipping that your manager sees you as worth 2.5 of them.

<comment><USER13> Truth. Even saving their bacon, time and again, doesn't help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Much like Oracle or IBM; they're a company that had some very interesting products and ideas in their day, and eventually just decided (or was forced, for internal reasons) to rest of their laurels. Today, they produce products that are purchased by people who don't actually use them, because the people who use them hate it. And, well, they pursue growth by acquisition. It's honestly a sad story, because they could have been so much more. Maybe they still can, but my faith dwindles every year that goes by.

I have more and more respect for Microsoft, who had every opportunity to go this route (and, really, did for quite a while), but was able to right the ship and continue to produce products that people actually want to buy. Sometimes they're buggy, and bloated, and strange to use, but they listen to their customers and continue to push improvements. That's why they ate IBM's lunch back in the day and have become the world's most valuable enterprise software company.

</comment><comment><USER15> After using Jira for the last 2 years, Atlassian has struck me as the 800 pound gorilla that's resting on its laurels.

On my dashboard, I'm consistently annoyed by being shown the option of creating a new user account and having to decipher the UI to choose wether my ticket is a bug or feature during mission critical moments. Just give me one big button that says 'Create Ticket', we'll figure out the rest later. Secondly, why aren't tickets shown on the dashboard by default? When I log in, I'd expect to see what's going on, not have them tucked away in the nav menu.

Recently during a mission critical ticket, email responses to Jira threads were not creating new messages in Jira, creating massive delays in communication with the team until we figured out messages weren't posting. Diagnosing the issue later, it seemed to be due to file attachments in the email responses.

<comment><USER16> What's Voltron? Their SEO must be poor because Googling "Atlassian vs Voltron" brings up TFS as the top hit and a page full of Atlassian spam.

<comment><USER15> Doh! Thanks for asking. Voltron is a white labeled version of Jira (which I did not realize when writing my post). Edited.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Contrary to some of the other commenters, I've been quite happy with Confluence over the past 8 years. We use Confluence heavily at our institution (higher-education) and it's been well-received by both technical and non- technical staff. It functions extremely well as a knowledgebase and is part of the daily workflow for dozens of staff. I also use a separate Confluence Cloud license for my personal knowledgebase and journal--I find it more productive than my previous Markdown+Git workflow for notetaking.

The only negative experience so far was the big price jump a few years ago for the higher-education license that forced us to reduce our licensed user count.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't read a lot of TechCrunch, but did anybody else find this article quite poorly (perhaps hastily) written?

(My apologies to the author for the flippancy of that question)

An incorrect word in the opening sentence, a few places where tenses are mixed or incorrect, and generally long-winded sentences... Is this usual for TechCrunch?

Regardless, interesting news to wake up to - I'll be interested to watch the direction of both product suites after the acquisition.

<comment><USER19> It looks to be a lightly-edited press release. Very common for journalists in a hurry to make quota or get the first link up.

<comment><USER20> It may be common for other journalists but I don't think that's the explanation in this case. Every acquisition I've been part of, we've briefed journalists beforehand (almost always someone at Techcrunch), they were under an embargo, and the article was pre-written.

<comment><USER19> > _a service that aims to help enterprises plan their strategic projects and > workstreams. The service provides business leaders with additional insights > into the current status of technical projects and gives them insights into > the bottlenecks, risks and dependencies of these projects._

These are not words I would expect a journalist to spontaneously generate. This is presser fluff.

<comment><USER20> You seem to still believe that Techcrunch is journalism? I thought everyone learned a decade ago that it is a PR content farm thinly masquerading as journalism.

Almost certainly the journalist for this is known to someone on the Atlassian media relations team[1], assured them friendly coverage in (unstated, quid pro quo) exchange for future access and exclusives, and then the PR team provided them some copy as "background" for the article.

[1]: We can check this guess by looking at his previously publications about Atlassian:

\- He announced the "next generation of hosted Jira Software"

\- He announced new & improved integration between Jira & Github

\- He announced the acquisition of OpsGenie

\- He announced the launch of Bitbucket Pipelines

He's almost certainly been "friendly" with Atlassian marketing for at least 5 years, based on his publication history. So they call him whenever they have something new to announce and he publishes some click bait. It is win-win. After all, this is the article that made it the front page of HN...not any other article about the acquisition.

<comment><USER19> Are we angrily agreeing? Because I feel like we're angrily agreeing.

<comment><USER20> I'm not angry. Are you angry? Let's sing kumbaya till no one is angry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Atlassian today announced that it has acquired AgileCraft, a service that > aims to give enterprises plan their strategic projects and workstreams.

Whatever happened to editing in Journalism?

<comment><USER7> delta in ad impressions for being first to publish >>> delta in ad impressions for having poor copy-editing

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> My view of Atlassian's project management tools and services is that they can allow terrible managers to become mediocre managers (which is not great but still an improvement) but no matter how much they try, they can never turn a mediocre manager into a good manager.

The value proposition of Atlassian is that their software can give a manager more visibility over the technical/engineering processes within their company; but this improved visibility is useless unless the manager has both a clear vision and a deep technical understanding of their project.

No amount of tooling can match the value of having technical understanding of the project. For example, Jira can generate a lot of pretty charts and workflow visualizations which create a great illusion of progress but this illusion typically comes at the expense of real progress.

</comment><comment><USER23> "The price total of the acquisition is about $166 million, with $154 million in cash and the remainder in restricted shares."

Is it normal to have nearly the entirety of the acquisition be cash? I would have assumed the standard would be shares with a new vesting schedule to incentivize the founders to stay on board. To my uneducated self, this seems like the founders can basically immediately walk away with very little money left on the table.

<comment><USER24> Typically if a firm has the cash lying around, it may as well deploy it.

They get around the founders leaving issue by adding earn-outs and various contractual clauses to make it in the founders' best interest to stay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I feel like all Atlassian products I've used so far have been made for winning feature checkbox comparisons. They all get the job done somehow, but nobody I know would actually choose them over tools whose makers actually care about their users instead of users IT departments.

<comment><USER26> Genuinely curious - what would you choose over Jira for agile/product planning and work item tracking?

I've been increasingly falling out of love with Jira, but all the alternatives lack core features.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Quitting in a month, what to do next? - <AUTHOR> hey folks, I'm going to quit my current job end of this month and I'm not sure what to do next.
I have a couple of options:
1.Full-time Open Source Developer - I've been following projects like Moby (Docker), Kubernetes & CNCF friends, Redox, Blender for a while now and am familiar with their codebase but haven't had the chance to contribute. I am not sure how this'll pay me though.
2. Join one of the big software companies - I have a few offers at hand but am not sure if I'd  enjoy any of those. The pay is really good but the work probably isn't going to be satisfactory. I cannot discuss the offers here because of NDAs.
3. Wild Projects - Twitch streaming my programming experiences, tech podcasts, etc. I think this'll go well with Developer Advocate / Tech Evangelist roles and I've been wanting to do this for a while but I'm not sure how to start and if they pay as much as pure software engineering roles.
Hope the HN community will help me out. <comment><USER2> 4\. Build your own product/service and market it. Could dovetail nicely into #3 and #1. How entrepreneurial are you?</comment>


Ask HN: Any open source alternatives to Intercom? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Check out Mautic.org. Quite polished for OSS marketing automation platform.

For some reason maintainers insist that form submissions are a working substitute for events, but otherwise it's interesting.

Anyhow, check it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I will check it.</comment></comment>


A Supercomputer in Every Backpack - <AUTHOR> http://speirs.org/blog/2011/8/28/a-supercomputer-in-every-backpack.html

<comment><USER2> The RMS anecdote is worth calling out:

 _Incidentally, this was the first time that I have ever been actively heckled during a talk. Despite conducting a rather loud personal conversation at the back of the hall during most of my talk, then giving me a massive thumbs-down gesture as I wrapped up, Richard Stallman decided he had heard enough and proceeded to take over the Q &A session for a bit of a dyspeptic rant about the 'iBad' and how Apple was subjugating children everywhere for their own evil ends._</comment>


FBI chief Mueller says spy tactics could have stopped 9/11 attacks - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/13/fbi-mueller-spy-tactics-9-11-boston

<comment><USER2> The operative word here is "could" as in "maybe" or "possibly" or "nobody knows if".

They didn't stop Boston. That is a fact.</comment>


What's wrong with startup culture: A video - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2017/08/22/whats-wrong-with-startup-cu.html <comment><USER2> I'm a big fan of Dan's book, this video is worth checking out. (Although I will say his take on things is not for everyone. It can be overly harsh if you listen to it / read it without a sense of humor.</comment>


GrubHub, Doordash accused in suit of pushing prices higher - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-13/grubhub-doordash-among-delivery-services-facing-antitrust-suit <comment><USER2> You can have price fixing, or liquidity. Choose one.</comment>


The math behind RSA encryption - <AUTHOR> http://sevko.io/articles/rsa/

<comment><USER2> Needless to say that textbook RSA is insecure, so please, for educational purposes only ;) If you want to learn why, I can advise "Introduction to modern cryptography" by Lindell and Katz, or "Modern cryptography" by W. Mao.

</comment><comment><USER3> CIS160 anyone</comment>


Why the obsession with EXIT strategies? - <AUTHOR>

http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/14/7-more-critical-questions-for-emerging-entrepreneurs/<p>There is such a big obsession with EXIT strategies, why is that? I can absolutely understand this obsession from the investors prospective.. However, entrepreneurs?! Why?! Business ventures are not the same as war ventures.... ideally there should not be a finish line... Instead, shouldn't we be obsessed with building great companies with great products/services and knowing that our customers love us, cause we treat them like no other, cause we simply care. <comment><USER2> Once an itch is scratched it turns into a scab. And new itches appear.

Seriously though, businesses change over time. Are people who are great at getting things going the right people to run them long term? In some cases yes, in others no. In my case I plan to be involved in one of my companies for a long time, but for another I am involved in we are building to exit.

<comment><AUTHOR> For the second company, did u plan for an exit right from the start?

<comment><USER2> Yes, we are building to to be bought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here's a Planet Money podcast on manufacturing (<http://goo.gl/rEg8>) in which you can hear how the world changed around a button maker, but he did not evolve to match the changes.

Also, in my unstudied opinion, the theory seems to go that those who are best at launching a new venture, are not necessarily the best to run it long term. These require different skill sets. To profit most from your entrepreneurial skill set means getting out once that skill is no longer required by your business.

And finally, in the recent (last two decades) business environment research has shown the most likely new companies to survive are those that are 'disruptive', one set of criteria is considered to be cheaper and poor quality - so as not to incite the competition to try it your way (forgive the lack of citation). The theory suggest that working towards sustainability (that is, not looking for an exit) is statistically a doomed strategy. Just like they say about stockbrokers though: past performance does not guarantee future results, so take that theory cautiously.

</comment><comment><USER4> If investors are obsessed about it, entrepreneurs have to at least have an interest in exit strategies, and one picked out to placate their potential investors.

Don't take investor money if you want to work on one company for your entire career.

<comment><USER5> > Don't take investor money if you want to work on one company for your entire > career.

So investors don't like companies like Microsoft, Oracle, or Google, where the founders have stayed on long-term? I can see investors not wanting companies with no liquidity events, but that doesn't require the founders to literally exit the company.

<comment><USER4> >Microsoft, Oracle, or Google

All IPOs, which are getting scarce. Certainly some founders are kept around for a long period of time, but if you never take investor money, who is going to force you out?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I understand all the reasons for the exits and I realize that proper exit strategies must be planned ahead of time. The reason I opened this thread was to ask whether the effort and popular obsession with exits is something that needs to be done/thought of prior to starting to work on the startups? Is proper exit strategy is a deal breaker for starting a company... I believe there might tons of reason for an exit once the startups becomes a sustainable business (as many of u pointed out)... But unless u are a investor or a seasonal entrepreneur is it something that u need to be obsessed with when planning your startup?!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The fact that the person that founded the company might not be the right person to run it after a certain period, I think it is a very valid point... Still, in my humble opinion I personally think that thinking or discussing the exit strategies before u actually found a company is a disservice to yourself.. sort of demonstrates that one is obsessed with the "desired" outcome and not so much with the opportunity to make something better, which makes the loyalty to the startup idea somewhat questionable.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you're starting a business doing something you love _so much_ that you'd be happy in it all your life... sure. Don't worry.

But it's rare that you'll have that kind of certainty. If you don't, it's best to have a plan to get out, so you can move on to your next fun. You can always change course and stay longer if you want.

</comment><comment><USER7> Exit strategy is an element of startups designed to scale rather than those intended as hobbies or lifestyle businesses.

Startups which scale is what Ycombinator is looking for and therefore of interest to many HN readers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think there are many other factors that will attribute to scaling and growth beside the exit strategy.

<comment><USER7> I completely agree. Exit strategy becomes more important once you start taking other people's money. Something which occurs with high frequency among startups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Most people don't know what they really want, so they fixate on a huge payday.

Only a few people truly want the huge pay day.

You can tell whether they truly wanted it after they get it -- I've met a whole lot of long-in-the-face founders after their babies were sold.</comment>


California wants to tax text-messaging - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/12/11/omg-now-california-wants-to-tax-text-messaging/ <comment><USER2> If you read the actual thing instead of this stupid clickbait article the idea is to tax revenue from text messages in a similar manner to taxing revenue from phone service, so if you think taxing phone service isn't horrific then neither is this. The article is just super confused as it is like "this will probably be a flat tax, not per message" as if that is up in the air: it is a tax on revenue, so how it would seem in the end to a user would be related to how the user was being billed (per message or a flat rate for unlimited messages). Honestly, cell carriers are probably making tons of profit off of text messaging in specific that they don't deserve to make and it isn't clear to me they can pass more cost like this to a consumer as I bet they have already optimized for "what is the most we can charge", so I would be surprised if this even gets passed on to consumers at all.

<comment><USER3> > _if you think taxing phone service isn 't horrific then neither is this_

I don't think taxing incomes is horrific. That doesn't absolve politicians of justifying raising taxes. This is a money grab. Given how wastefully California burns through cash, I'm not sure why (a) more money is needed or (b) this, specifically, is the way to do it. Why not a gas tax? Or a carbon tax? Or a tax on water-wasting crops?

<comment><USER4> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_tax_revenue_by_state](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_tax_revenue_by_state)

(2015) California Revenue per capita is $10,408. Texas, the second largest state by economy in total money, is $10,204 per capita, the average is $10,234. Incidentally, California is very slightly "better" at 16.6% GSP than Texas at 17.1% GSP, and further better than the average of 18.3% GSP.

If this is a "money grab," they've got room for it, compared to other states -- say Delaware or most of the South, for example.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets)

Meanwhile, California spends $4,636 per capita on the state budget, ranking 15th lowest of the 50 states. So again, not really "burning through cash."

As is mentioned every time California's or blue states' budget and spending are brought up, blue states tend to give more federal money whereas those fiscally conservative red states tend to take in more federal money.

As for if this is the way to do it; yeah, seems a little like extra taxes on faxes home phone service at this point -- diminished returns at best.

<comment><USER4> *faxes or home phone service

oops

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here is a link to the raw proposed decision: [http://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M238/K227/2...](http://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M238/K227/238227359.PDF)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for that, the articles I've seen haven't linked it. Seems like the surcharge could be like MTS surcharge. The carrier is _permitted_ to apply a surcharge up to a defined maximum, ostensibly to defray the cost of mandated "Universal Service", emergency service, etc., but the funds are not collected by the state, and are instead kept by the telco. My MTS surcharge is about %20, before sales tax, btw.

I infer that media coverage calling this a "tax" might be sort of a telco lobbying submarine.

Edit: The more I look into this the less I know. I have had a lot of trouble finding details on who manages which fees. FCC has apparently designated several non-profit corporations to manage universal service fee funds, while some states have their own funds.* I can't find an authoritative answer to whether other surcharges are outside the scope of government management or not. Customer service won't talk about it (I tried once), and the legislation itself seems to describe what is _allowed_, but doesn't usefully summarize what is actually occurring. If anyone knows where to find more authoritative information about this sort of thing, I would like to know.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund#Adminis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund#Administration)

<comment><USER7> Why would the telcos be _against_ a rule that allows them to tack on a surcharge, blame the state, and keep the money?

<comment><USER6> What I mean by this is that I suspect that telcos are drafting this sort of legislation, and promoting articles to "Business Friendly" news publications that call surcharges "tax" in order to deflect blame. That is more or less what I think happened with the MTS surcharge.

<comment><USER7> Oh, I see. I was thinking in terms of calling it a "tax" to kill it, since people generally hate that word. I guess they'd rather keep it quiet but that may not be an option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "A dense California Public Utilities Commission report laying out the case for the texting surcharge says the Public Purpose Program budget has climbed from $670 million in 2011 to $998 million last year. But the telecommunications industry revenues that fund the program have fallen from $16.5 billion in 2011 to $11.3 billion in 2017, it said."

So you lied and said it was a charge to help poor people have access to phones and collected almost 25x the amount needed and used it as a slush fund. Now the slush fund is less profitable although still 11x the amount needed and you want to refill the slush fund. How about no.

<comment><USER9> Politicians love to earmark tax revenue to specific projects that people will support. I call it the "puppies are great excuse".

The reality is that all revenue is part of giant slush bucket. Some expenses are discretionary and some not, but the bucket to pay is what it is.

This is just the way politics and false promises work.

<comment><USER10> I seem to recall there's term for when tax revenues are strongly linked to tax expenditure. Like when you tax road vehicles and use that exact tax to maintain the road network. But I can't recall the term right now.

Seeing more of that thing, whatever it's called, seems like a desirable thing. The 'pooled funds' approach to tax/spending does lead to a lot of whacky outcomes.

<comment><USER10> I may have been thinking of 'direct tax' here, but it's perhaps conceptually slightly different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is so California. I really hope this doesn't pass.

I also wonder the implications on messaging apps like WhatsApp / FB Messenger. Because if this did pass, as a Californian, I'd just switch to that full time

<comment><USER12> Can you opt out of texting to avoid said tax. If so I'd just move over to google Voice

<comment><USER11> ooo, that's a great idea! I do have Google Voice, so could totally do that..

<comment> time-domain0 Most of the world uses WhatsApp to end-run around telcos (even though it's insecure and PRISM-friendly).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> After you get past the clickbaity headline, it doesn't seem THAT controversial.

The tax "would be billed as a flat surcharge per customer — one of those irksome fees at the bottom of your wireless bill — not a fee per text".

It would "help support programs that make phone service accessible to the poor".

<comment><USER14> Slap a business tax on the telecoms and they can get tax credits for providing discounted phones to poor people. Seems inefficient to have people pay taxes to a phone company who then gives it to the state who then gives back to the phone company.

<comment><USER15> It has to be done this way so everyone involved gets to grab a little of the vig.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > In today's decision, we determine in principle that the Commission should > assess Public Purpose Program surcharges and user fees on all text messaging > services revenue. Text messaging services consists of both Short Message > Service(SMS) and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). SMS allows a cellular > customer to send and receive messages of up to 160 characters to and from > another cellular service customer[1].

> MMS is a newer service a customer can use to send text, photos and other > information along with the message[1].

So this (dumb) proposed law would only cover true SMS/MMS texts, and not Signal/WhatsApp/Snapchat/Viber/WeChat/Messenger/Telegram/Hangouts/KiK/Skype/or any new apps coming out daily? The things most people are using now over regular text?

[1] [http://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M238/K227/2...](http://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M238/K227/238227359.PDF)

<comment><USER8> Probably because it would be challenging to tax services that are or could be located out of state or even out of country but easy to tax telecom with physical operations in state.

Also people pay nontrivial sums for telecommunication services. Easily $1200 -> $3000 per household. Taking a small portion of that money is still a lot of money. Facebook by contrast makes a lot less per user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If this is legitimate, this could _easily_ be classified as a violation of the first amendment.

Yes, kind of shocking that such ideas are even being suggested, but I put low odds on this ever seeing a vote.

<comment><USER18> First amendment? That's a rookie move buddy. Ex post facto laws are explicitly prohibited by article 1 of the US constitution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "But the telecommunications industry revenues that fund the program have fallen from $16.5 billion in 2011 to $11.3 billion in 2017, it said."

Is that because people spend way less time making actual phone calls these days?

<comment><USER20> i think its because my cell phone bill used to be ~$120/month now its ~$80/month

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The cynical part of me thinks they'll end up pushing people towards iMessage, Facebook Messenger, and Whatsapp...coincidentally services owned by Californian companies.

<comment><USER22> My thoughts exactly. This will push everyone to use WhatsApp or other 3rd- party tools. An unintended consequence of this would be less SMS spying by government agencies.

<comment><USER23> SMS is already ludicrously expensive compared to data rates, if consumers were price-conscious about this they would have already switched.

<comment><USER24> I don't know how you can determine they are expensive. They are unlimited and included in the plan. There is a cost of course but if I send one or one hundred thousand, it's not going to cost more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Isnt there already a tax on mobile phone service plans for this?

</comment><comment><USER26> Then once people stop texting they can tax: \- Telegram \- Whatapp \- Wechat \- etc. etc. etc.

Good luck!

<comment><USER27> While that's not quite how it is, I tend to agree. Also, why don't they just raise the taxes for mobile phones in general. It's an obfuscation as a money grab plain and simple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> California is being taxed to dead. It really is time for another round of Prop 13.

</comment><comment><USER29> "California just doesn't stop trying to get money out of you," Gutierrez lamented. "What's next?"

Stop encouraging them!

</comment><comment><USER30> Also retroactive to messages sent in the past 5 years haha what a joke

</comment><comment><USER31> Doesn't California have a massive surplus?

</comment><comment><USER32> California always wants more and more.

</comment><comment><USER33> California should tax email as well.

</comment><comment><USER34> They just discovered specific tax for communication, which has been existed for 19 years in Turkey. And not specific to texting.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is the most california thing Ive ever heard.

<comment><USER36> A new law and a new tax is right up their alley, but this is the thing that got me:

> But they add that under the regulators' proposal the charge could be applied > retroactively for five years — which they call "an alarming precedent" — and > could amount to a bill of more than $220 million for California consumers.

Edit: I just wanted to point out: As someone else mentioned in another thread on this article, there's an idea of "ex post facto" laws in the US constitution[1]. So considering this "an alarming precedent" when the authors of the constitution already knew of such a thing and prohibited it is a statement about our generation.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_One_of_the_United_Stat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_One_of_the_United_States_Constitution#Section_10:_Limits_on_the_States)

<comment><USER37> The ex post facto provision is normally interpreted to apply only to criminal laws, not to civil penalties or taxes.

<comment><USER38> > The ex post facto provision is normally interpreted to apply only to > criminal laws, not to civil penalties or taxes.

FWIW, the precedent distinguishing prohibited ex post facto laws from permitted retrospective laws was established by the Supreme Court when ink on the Constitution was practically still wet, in Calder v. Bull (1798).

<comment><USER39> It has also been rolled back. I do not remember the specific case, but it dealt with the SOR requirements being extended on people long after they has been convicted and sentenced due to a change in SOR laws. The courts ruled that it did not violate ex post facto. If that doesn't violate it, then taxes definitely wouldn't either.

I think there is an applicable quote about defending scoundrels that would apply here.

<comment><USER37> You're probably thinking of _Smith v. Doe_ from 2003.

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

An interesting side note is that many state courts have continued to strike down similar provisions, and some Federal courts have apparently also concluded that certain rules about sex offenders are "punitive" and so constitutionally invalid as outside of the _Smith v. Doe_ rule. So this example is hard to summarize in a simple way, not least because many other courts have been trying to narrow this rule.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This reminds me of the time in the mid-90s when the USPS wanted to charge the price of a stamp for "email". I believe this was because the word mail was used in electronic mail.

<comment><USER40> [https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bill-602p/](https://www.snopes.com/fact- check/bill-602p/)

<comment><USER22> I was referring to an effort during the years around 1993-1995. I was in a 3rd world country doing humanitarian work from 1999-2000 where I had no internet access so the email chain referenced by Snopes is new to me. If I recall, the idea really was floated around/tested but, of course, never implemented because there was so much backlash.</comment></comment></comment>