Lessons Learned from our YC Interview (with Tips!) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pretheory.com/arch/2007/11/yc_interview_tips_1.php

<comment><USER2> The #1 lesson we learned from our interviews is to be prepared.

Pitch everybody you know on your idea, and have the smartest people you know poke as many holes as possible, and address them. Then do it over again.

<comment><USER3> I think that is good advice. If we had tried to show our demo to groups that had never seen the product before, we might have been better prepared. We'd be ready to anticipate and answer questions before they come up. We also would have probably learned about preparing our data so that anything not flattering isn't included.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My best piece of advice... 10 minutes goes by _really_ fast.

<comment><USER5> I was very thrown off by the YC interview during Summer 07. The unfortunate side effect of the 10 minutes is you end up answering YC questions the whole time and not only delivering your vision for the application. So the whole interview either becomes a test of how well you can perform interview acrobatics or how close YC's questions and first impressions are to what you want to tell them.

<comment><USER6> >how close YC's questions and first impressions are to what you want to tell them.

This really upset me at the time... We spent a lot of time answering the question "We're going to compare you to yahoo.com" and were rejected because they didn't see how we solved the essential design problem of our product.

<comment><USER7> I thought you had a gene splicing product. Why did they comapre you to yahoo?

<comment><USER6> We switched products rather drastically. The original product was a web service operating system for old people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For whatever it's worth to you, you will readily get more than 5 minutes of semi-solicited opinions about your prospects and strategy from any VC manager or partner you talk to. You may even score customer introductions.

The solid "yes" or "no" is a major feature of the YC process though.

</comment><comment><USER9> awesome insight on the interview process - thanks for posting this

</comment><comment><USER10> This seems to indicate that a fully-working demo is not what you want to present to YC. Since all you have is ten minutes, I would think you'd want a more focused form of presentation.

Put it this way -- are you a magician? If you present a demo that effectively says "pick a card, any card," you'd better be. If you're demoing Google (the site it is today) for YC, it's probably not the best sell to just let someone type anything they want into it.

When you only have ten minutes, you need to retain as much control as possible over your message. Present the article to sell the magazine.

<comment><USER11> Showing the sexiest, meatiest part of a working demo is probably a good compromise. Without a demo, you're left describing that same part, which is inferior, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> You could of directed them to comics by explaining that it was the what your alpha users had worked on. I think demo's are much better than pp, lets face it a demo proves you can actually deliver a product. Just make sure you take control and not get side tracked on uncompleted stuff.

</comment><comment><USER13> An interesting corollary might be "Lessons for YC". The extreme time crunch just doesn't seem conducive to making accurate evaluations.

Of _course_ the people with the money make the rules; it's not a question of power, but every process can be improved.

A 10-minute interview tests presentation skills more than anything related to the idea, technology, or founders' other abilities. This skews in favor of quick impressions and existing YC bias (towards ideas they already were waiting for someone to present).

I wonder if the median application received even that much (10 minutes' worth) consideration. It seems like a continuous process would work better, with staggered starts; looking at 20 applications every week rather than 500 in one week would allow a more thorough review.

Then instead of going to the same 10 weekly dinners, it would be a sequence of 10; e.g. weeks 31-40. The only real trick would be Demo Day; but that could be rescheduled for every 3 months instead of every 6 months (or monthly, and investors who are vetted get a card that gets punched every time and on the 11th visit they get kicked out if they haven't invested in anyone yet).

Now the acceptees have a couple months before the "official" start; other people might be ready to apply _now_ but it's a 6-month wait for the next batch to get in and 8 months to "start"! That's an eternity in Internet Time.

Another advantage would be allowing the continuous pool of acceptees to relocate to the #1 spot (Silicon Valley) regardless of the time of year. It's a little silly that the Bostonians have to move there afterward _anyway_ \-- it's like a conflict of interest for YC, "Help the individual start-ups by putting them in the #1 spot" or "Try to help the #2 start-up scene play catch- up via imports".

Of course I could be wrong about everything, it's up to you.

<comment><USER14> Read "Blink"... Thin slicing can work REALLY well if you do it right.

<comment><USER13> > Thin slicing can work REALLY well if you do it right.

Any "X" can work REALLY well if you do it "right". Doing it right, now there's the trick...</comment></comment></comment>


Non-Cooperative Games (1950) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://rbsc.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/Non-Cooperative_Games_Nash.pdf <comment><USER2> Seem neither Von Neumann nor Morgenstern were impressed by Nash's use of Kakutani fixed-points to come up with equilibrium solutions, they see it as impractical and difficult to apply, which it is because it assumes common knowledge of the each player's expected utility. Since then Nash's theory has been shown to be not very robust with uncertainty. Von Neumann was only interested in practical applications of math and had no patience for axiomatic formalist mathematics like that of Nash or Arrow-Debreu after being influenced by Godel's impossibility theorem (Before that point, Von Neumann tried to axiomize set theory and quantum mechanics).

[http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-triumph- and-f...](http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-triumph-and-failure- of-john-nashs-game-theory)

<comment><USER3> > Seem neither Von Neumann nor Morgenstern were impressed by Nash's use of > Kakutani fixed-points to come up with equilibrium solutions, they see it as > impractical and difficult to apply, which it is because it assumes common > knowledge of the each player's expected utility.

Von Neumann would have thought no such thing! Nash used a fixed-point theorem for an existence proof, which von Neumann himself had done in earlier work.

"Assumes common knowledge of each player's expected utility" doesn't make sense in this context.

> Since then Nash's theory has been shown to be not very robust with > uncertainty.

It's not clear which kind of uncertainty you're referring to here, but it doesn't matter. Nash's theorem is a mathematical theorem, and the proof is sound. It can't become less true over time.

<comment><USER4> > Nash's theorem is a mathematical theorem, and the proof is sound. It can't > become less true over time.

Nash proved the existence of the solution concept he defined. It is true that at least one Nash Equilibrium exists for all games (with every information structure). It is more subjective as to whether 'Nash Equilibria' are particularly useful or interesting to specific classes of games.

Indeed, VN-M had already proposed a different solution concept that they proved existed in a narrower range of games (best response equilibria in 2 player 0 sum games).

In games with asymmetric information structures, stricter equilibrium concepts than Nash Equilibrium are often used, because there are typically a large number of Nash Equilibria for any game.

For example, Bayesian Nash Equilibrium and Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium restrict agents to forming beliefs in a 'Bayesian' manner, whilst the latter also restricts their actions to also be BNE in subgames off the equilibrium path of sequential games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> More readable version:

[http://lcm.csa.iisc.ernet.in/gametheory/Classics/NCG.pdf](http://lcm.csa.iisc.ernet.in/gametheory/Classics/NCG.pdf)

<comment><USER6> it is also a bit shorter - what really gets me are the hand-written equations and constants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This reminds me of the scene in A Beautiful Mind when they are talking about Game Theory in the context of a group of men approaching a group of women at a bar.

<comment><USER8> It should remind you of A Beautiful Mind. It's John Nash's doctoral thesis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's part of what makes the Nobel Prize interesting and unique. you technically only need a single paper to win it

</comment><comment><USER10> Really quite hard to read based on, I guess, the poor scan quality.. I wonder if there is a better digitized version somewhere

<comment><USER5> This looks better:

[http://lcm.csa.iisc.ernet.in/gametheory/Classics/NCG.pdf](http://lcm.csa.iisc.ernet.in/gametheory/Classics/NCG.pdf)

<comment><USER10> Much better thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is very unintuitive to me. Most games have some sort of asymmetry built in. For example one player usually goes first. In the game of nim, a clever player can provably always dominate against any strategy if they move first. That doesn't sound like an equilibrium to me...

<comment><USER4> Your problem may be that the definition of Nash Equilibrium might not overlap with your intuition of what 'equilibrium' should be.

A NE is just a strategy profile for every player of the game such that no player would want to change her strategy profile if she knew the strategy profile of all other players.

If the second player loses to the first player's strategy profile whatever she does, that is still an equilibrium because she wouldn't gain from changing her action to something else that also guarantees loss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This really makes me appreciate TeX and friends. Writing equations, while just one of the strengths of TeX, just looks so much better.</comment>


No_color: Disabling ANSI color output in various Unix commands - <AUTHOR> https://no-color.org/ <comment><USER2> In the meantime, I have a janky (s)trip (c)olor function in my .bashrc to help with this:

      function sc
      {
        sed "s,$(printf '\033')\\[[0-9;]*[a-zA-Z],,g"
      }

<comment><USER3> This seems way more sane and Unix-y than wanting every program to add an option.

<comment><USER4> I disagree. It seems way more unix-y for programs not to break piping by spewing color codes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wish programs would not colorize. I find that I much prefer post-processing program output to colorize how I please, especially since I may want much better coloring/styling (e.g. mix of foreground/background, bold, underline, and more than basic red/green color choices). Of course, this requires that output has enough semantic clues in the text to colorize meaningfully; that's a good thing anyway, since it makes the command more flexible for any other purpose like chaining Unix commands.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have two functions I use to switch between color and no color. One function also fixes the terminal if I read binary by mistake. I guess I could call them color and nocolor. Edit as required. There's probably a better way to do this. Old habits and such.

        function sane()
        {
        LANG="C";LC_ALL="C";LC_CTYPE="C";export LANG LC_ALL LC_CTYPE;
        S_TIME_FORMAT=ISO;export S_TIME_FORMAT;
        TERM=vt102;export TERM;
        unset IFS;
        stty sane;
        tput rs1;
        echo -e "\033c";
        reset;
        clear;
        set -o posix;
        }

        function utf()
        {
        LANG="en_US.UTF-8";LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"; LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8";export LANG LC_ALL LC_CTYPE
        TERM=xterm;export TERM
        }

</comment><comment><USER7> And there I am wanting the opposite ;)

This is good, it should be submitted as an RFC + track implementation on upstream projects.

</comment><comment> nils-m-holm The amount of color in modern command line tools is annoying!

Sometimes TERM=vt100 helps.

<comment><USER8> TERM=vt100 should always work or the program is broken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good idea, especially for parsing program output. It's also not uncommon to find yourself accessing a server through some terminal that doesn't support ANSI colours properly and it ends up breaking.</comment>


Money Really Does Lead to a More Satisfying Life - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/24/business/money-satisfaction-lottery-study.html <comment><USER3> It isn't money. Its agency over your own life. Money is how we currently regulate and monitor the agency our citizens have over there lives and those around them. Finding better ways to grant and assert agency over one's own life is the key to happiness AFAICT.

<comment><USER4> We don't use money to "regulate and monitor the agency" people have over _their own_ lives. We use money as a medium of exchange enabling people to get _other people_ to do things for them. Money doesn't make you happy. Being able to pay a doctor to take care of you when you're sick, pay a private school teacher to heap attention on your kid, pay a chef to prepare nice meals for you at a restaurant--those things make you happy.

If all people wanted was agency over _themselves_ most people could do it-- living off the land in the middle of nowhere is still pretty cheap here in the U.S.

<comment><USER5> " _We use money as a medium of exchange enabling people to get other people to do things for them._ "

How does money get other people to do things for you? Well, there has to be this group of individuals who are just dying for that money and will do all manner of things to get it. That flexibility comes from desperation and _not having agency over your own life_.

" _If all people wanted was agency over themselves most people could do it-- living off the land in the middle of nowhere is still pretty cheap here in the U.S._ "

You mean if people wanted to trade nature having control of their existence for an employer having control over their existence, it should be easy in the US. Even that is hardly true - even subsistence agriculture requires skills that can't easily gotten and moreover, all land owners have to pay taxes so you can't have true independence, a best growing your own food and hopefully selling the surplus to pay your property taxes.

It's not that any of this is impossible. Rather, it's a "way out" but so is getting a lot of money so you're a labor buyer rather than the labor seller. But all this does add up to _lack of money_ actually being a force to "regulate and monitor the agency" of most people today.

<comment><USER6> Doctors are generally not "just dying for that money". It's pretty nice to have, though, and they still want to be paid for treating you. And if they're going to spend their time treating a patient anyway, why would they not spend it treating the patient who could pay them over the one who can't? (Barring the warm fuzzies of helping people who can't afford it...many doctors do in fact do volunteer work, but they divide that off into a separate block of time and spend the bulk of their time helping folks who can pay for it.)

<comment><USER7> The Mercedes and mansion aren't going to pay for themselves.

<comment><USER8> You should become an orthodontist or a specialized kind of doctor (like plastic surgeon, brain surgeon, heart specialist, gasteroentrologist, or some such thing). Ideally, own and operate your practice, because that's where the multimillionaire-money is -- otherwise, being a doctor in this age is not _that_ lucrative of a job. Some of my doctor acquaintances have trouble making the bill (whilst most of my software engineer acquaintances are doing exceedingly well).

<comment><USER7> Yeah, as Josh Frydenberg commented recently, "how does anyone survive on under $100,000 a year?"

Not _that_ lucrative … by whose standards?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Survey is of Swedish lottery winners. Results may not generalize.

 _By some estimates, two-thirds of lottery winners are broke within seven years._

[https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/lottery-curse-claims- an...](https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/lottery-curse-claims-another- victim-with-ontario-man-broke-and-in-jail-after-5m-win)

Nearly One-Third of U.S. Lottery Winners Declare Bankruptcy

[https://wolfstreet.com/2018/04/17/nearly-one-third-of-u-s- lo...](https://wolfstreet.com/2018/04/17/nearly-one-third-of-u-s-lottery- winners-declare-bankruptcy/)

<comment><USER10> I suspect the reason why many lottery winners end up broke soon is because most rational well adjusted people don't play lottery.

So it's not so much the winning that make people go crazy. It's just what happens when people who don't understand money get lots of it.

<comment><USER11> Something I've always wondered about, which HN might be the only possible place to get an answer to: Does the "lottery winners' curse" afflict founders of wildly successful startups? (Say, people who walk away from an acquisition with $10M+ -- on par with "winning the lottery".)

<comment><USER12> Not as much because the success of a wildly successful startup happens over a longer period which gives you more time to adjust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think denial is the only reason why one might find this result surprising. Everything else being equal, almost any life path will be enriched by extra money up to a certain point. That point is field-dependent, but it's rarely low.

<comment><USER14> > Everything else being equal, almost any life path will be enriched by extra > money...

I don't think so. If you have a lot of money, there will be constant pressure upon you about ways to spend it or invest it "wisely". And you ll always will have the fear of "ruining everything". If you choose to do nothing with it, you ll be blamed for not investing it or making it grow.

Not to mention that you will have a hard time differentiating associates who are just there for a piece of the cake.

<comment><USER15> I have a lot of money and none of what you mention afflicts me. I don't feel "constant pressure" to spend or invest it wisely, and I don't recall ever fearing "ruining everything." I doubt I would be blamed (by who?) for not investing it; even if I was I don't think I'd care.

This might come across as condescending, but everything you're saying sounds like the typical cliches about what it's like to have wealth from people who don't actually have it. It comes with its own challenges but I would not include the ones you've mentioned. Clearly some people with money do struggle with some of what you've said, but in my experience it's rare for it to be a dominating focus in their lives, and it's rarer still for it to cause the wealth to become a net negative on their health and well-being.

The reason why I'm saying this is because frankly I find it frustrating when speculation like this is promulgated so confidently despite its disconnect with reality. Of the people I personally know earning over seven figures in annual income, none of them struggle with what you've said. Your generalization has a very brittle foundation.

Unfortunately there are two obstacles in combatting generalizations like this: 1) most wealthy people don't talk about what their life, aspirations and challenges are _actually_ like, 2) hearing wealthy people say they in fact _are_ mostly happy and fulfilled makes for a boring story without a lot of draw.

<comment><USER14> > I have a lot of money and none of what you mention afflicts me.

Sure. Some people are afraid of public speaking. But some people on the other hand, can't wait to get in front of people. But I think it wouldn't be too off to say people are _generally_ afraid of public speaking.

So generally, the more you have to lose, the more you will worry. Simple. If you want to refute that, argue logically why it might not be the case, instead of just "I am rich, and you are wrong". Please.

<comment><USER15> If you want me to "argue logically", you should start with defending the points you've made for which the burden of proof is on the positive. My point is that you're generalizing without any substantive support for the generalization. For example:

 _> So generally, the more you have to lose, the more you will worry. Simple._

This is not simple and I don't follow that it's true _a priori_. Moreover I don't necessarily agree that it's the correct _characterization_ , either. I don't know anyone with wealth whose approach to thinking about wealth is that they have "more to lose." That strikes me as begging the question. I can understand why a _given_ rich person might feel that way, but I don't see why the _modal_ rich person would feel that way.

The essence is that you're asking me to refute a statement that you have not actually supported. Had you supported with something grounded I'd agree that my anecdotal reply isn't much of a refutation. But so far it's my direct experience and observations against something which boils down to intuition. Intuition is misleading.

<comment><USER14> >This is not simple and I don't follow that it's true a priori.

Is it not?

1\. Having something comes with the risk of loosing it.

2\. with risks comes the potential to add worry.

3\. People with more to lose have more potential to be worried about it

How is my reasoning flawed?

The only thing you cannot lose is your past. You might lose the memory of it, but that does not nullify it's existence.

<comment><USER16> 1\. Having more of something - gives one the tolerance to lose some of it without feeling the pinch.

2\. Again - the ability to take risks increases - this is one reason the rich get richer - they can make riskier investments while the poor can't make such bets

3\. People with more to lose - are the people who lose a greater percentage of their savings - a rich person losing $1000 vs a poor person losing $1000 - <USER2> poor person loses more

<comment><USER14> I am talking about prospect of losing everything. Not some of it...

<comment><USER17> But the probability of loosing your life savings is greater if you're poor (since the quantity is smaller), so you have more to worry about.

<comment><USER14> But loosing a million bucks is going to hurt much more than losing 100 bucks. Apart from that, it is much easier to sit on 100 bucks, not doing anything with it, than to sit on a million dollars. Doing nothing with money is less worrisome than taking risks with a lot of money..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I grew up without much money in a third world country. My memories from that time are much more vivid and meaningful than once I moved to the US and lived a well educated, middle class life. Money and comfort are good, but I seem to have lost something amidst the greater control and predictability of things here.

<comment><USER19> Youth produces vivid, seemingly magical memories. The time relativity of having had fewer experiences and how that amplifies every experience you do have. When you're 10, every year seems like a small lifetime. Small or simple things seem extraordinary. On top of that, we usually end up over-glorifying the past because most negatives and how they made us feel fade with time.

Not to mention having a lot fewer responsibilities and knowing a lot less about the world.

I grew up relatively poor in the US. My childhood seems magical compared to this bullshit. Now each day vaporizes in a blur, feeling not very memorable compared to any other. I love what I do work-wise as an adult, and it still just doesn't remotely compare to spending all day roaring down a snowy hill on a sled at ten years old. I'd probably struggle to recall something memorable from ~100 days ago, but I can recall a hundred memorable things from my childhood. I don't think it was money that made the primary difference, it was the nature of every new or semi-new experience and what it means to a younger brain.

<comment><USER18> It is something also about the lack of control. I have vivid adult memories of Afghanistan and trekking through the Tibetan plateau. I also have vivid memories of deep discussions during college that I have failed to reproduce under my own control.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think while technically true its not really the spirit of the saying.

Of course free money (from lottery winnings) is better than no money.

But for most people it's a choice between more money or a less stressful job, or a shorter commute, or less hours etc.

And then it's a much more complicated equation.

</comment><comment><USER21> _People are often reproached because their desires are directed mainly to money and they are fonder of it than of anything else. Yet it is natural and even inevitable for them to love that which, as an untiring Proteus, is ready at any moment to convert itself into the particular object of our fickle desires and manifold needs. Thus every other blessing can satisfy only one desire and one need; for instance, food is good only to the hungry, wine only for the healthy, medicine for the sick, a fur coat for winter, women for youth, and so on. Consequently, all these are only relatively good. Money alone is the absolutely good thing because it meets not merely one need in concreto, but needs generally in abstracto._

</comment><comment><USER22> "This research is able to reliably disentangle causation and correlation because a lottery effectively provides a randomized control trial."

False. The sample size is limited to those who buy lottery tickets. Of course people who buy lottery tickets think they will be happier if they have more money; otherwise they would not be buying lottery tickets.

<comment><USER23> Even if you criticize the _external_ validity of the results, the _internal_ validity of the randomization is still there.

<comment><USER24> I can see that's true, but what are you trying to get at?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> To quote my grandpa, who started out with nothing and retired as a millionaire, money doesn't buy happiness, but it sure makes it easier.

<comment><USER26> Or to quote Weird Al, money can't buy happiness but it can rent it.

<comment><USER27> To quote Daniel Tosh, jet skis are proof that money can buy happiness. No one has a frown on a jet ski.

<comment><USER28> Edit: My original post was irrelevant and not enough karma to delete. Sorry.

<comment><USER29> How is death by accident related to happiness? Seriously, I know many people who got injured doing a sport they enjoy and then immediately went back to it, without being particularly unhappy. I don't personally know anyone who died from an accident like this, but I imagine that someone can absolutely die while doing something that makes them happy. I'm not sure what I feel about this. On the one hand, it's definitely a kind of a Darwin award, but on the other hand, I see this as exemplifying living life to the fullest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think it depends entirely on how you spend your money. For example, if you buy a nice bed and get good sleep you are going to be happier. If you can afford healthier, higher quality food you will be happier. If money helps you spend more time with friends and family you will be happier.

</comment><comment><USER31> It makes a lot of sense in today's Sweden. Sweden is still a functioning welfare state, but egalitarianism is decreasing. A couple of hundred thousand dollars will be a major difference to your success rate in getting a good quality of life. Or to put it another way there is a lot of people in Sweden today who are denied opportunities because they don't have that kind of money. Which can be seen by the large amount of private debt.

</comment><comment><USER32> > (Free) Money (Awarded To Lottery Winners) Really Does Lead to a More > Satisfying Life

</comment><comment><USER33> "This research is able to reliably disentangle causation and correlation because a lottery effectively provides a randomized control trial"

This doesn't sound true. Many high earning workers never play the lottery, yet have the same economic power as those who only win hundreds of thousands like in the study. I imagine their lifestyle choices are different.

Lottery winners are an extremely small percentage of the population. They don't have the same responsibilities, anixities, or "golden handcuffs" that the majority of high earners have because they didn't need to go through that to achieve their economic level and don't need to maintain it.

</comment><comment><USER34> Given how often studies like this float around, here's what I've learned from past comments I've read:

\- Those who don't have money, and are therefore forced to be more self- reliant, generally would like the opportunity to have more money because they envision how it would make their lives easier.

\- Those who have a lot of money tend to downplay the importance of having money, generally because it's more about what the money gets you than the money itself - having options to not deal with things you don't have to.

\- Money is the vehicle to providing life-enhancing value for yourself in the sense that it can be exchanged for what you want/need. This is what provides happiness. I could have 1 trillion Zimbabwe dollars, but if I can't gain anything meaningful I want with it, then just the number alone isn't going to make me happy (aside from a blip of an ego boost).

</comment><comment><USER35> "Money can't buy happiness but it solves 95% of the problems that make you unhappy." ~ GSElevator

</comment><comment><USER36> "Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math."

[https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/240944-lottery-a-tax-on- peo...](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/240944-lottery-a-tax-on-people-who- are-bad-at-math)

</comment><comment><USER37> Our biological instinct when freedom is restricted is to resist the force binding us. Try having a young child watch a long movie or trap a moth in a jar. We all panic or bolt or wig out. Give a thing maximum freedom and the very opposite happens. That's what a ton of money does to humans...although those that are perverse or have extreme addiction or simply have odd personalities, are able to amplify those traits extremely so. This says nothing for those that lose all their money later as that is a separate concept which has nothing to do with financial literacy and conflates negativity with having large sums of money, which is idiotic IMO, like the sour grapes allegory.

</comment><comment><USER38> Well, now they tell me.

</comment><comment><USER39> Lottery wealth is a (tiny) subset of wealth.

It is possible that besides the material part there is some form of psychological effect, "I have won in a 1 to a zilion chance, I am better (or the fate, or God preferred me), I am special".

Inherited wealth or hard worked for wealth may well produce different happyness levels.

And of course whar happens in Sweden may (or may not) be "universal".

</comment><comment><USER40> A sample of lottery players is hardly a representative sample. I think people who don't enter lotteries, besides understanding statistics better, are more likely to believe money is not the source of their success and fulfilment.

</comment><comment><USER41> Money can't solve all your problem, but it will solve most of them.

</comment><comment> D-Coder Intuitively, this sounds correct. The class "Problems that can be solved by throwing money at them" is larger.

</comment><comment><USER42> Money is just another tool, we need to know how to use it as well.

</comment><comment><USER43> I found personally the best factor contributing to my satisfaction is to maintain a usual modest lifestyle with combined knowledge of being financially secure and not worrying about money.

<comment><USER44> Works great until it doesn't.

<comment><USER45> a "modest lifestyle" is one of the most likely ways to continue to be financially secure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Who plays the lotto? Idiots, that's who. Idiots who want to get rich.

So I'd say this is a flawed study with tremendous selection bias, we all know money can't buy happiness :)</comment>


The Stupidity of Computers - <AUTHOR> http://nplusonemag.com/the-stupidity-of-computers <comment><USER3> The never ending language learner (NELL) is able to build ontologies largely unsupervised with 87% accuracy from a base set of seed facts and access to the internet, indefinitely. [1]

Whilst it is unable to assign one symbol with multiple nouns, I think these are more engineering issues than anything. The overall architecture of NELL can be made smarter with horizontally scalable knowledge inference additions.

I think articles like this are going to be out of date fairly soon (if not already out of date privately).

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never- Ending_Language_Learning](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never- Ending_Language_Learning)

<comment><USER4> > Accumulated errors, such as the deduction that Internet cookies were a kind > of baked good, led NELL to deduce from the phrases "I deleted my Internet > cookies" and "I deleted my files" that "computer files" also belonged in the > baked goods category.

That is hilarious!

By the way, there is another intersting never ending lerner which is based on random images from the internet: [http://www.neil-kb.com/](http://www.neil- kb.com/)

<comment><USER5> Yes 87% is quite impressive, but that remaining 13% is all important. The errors sadly propagate (as above); more importantly, the errors tend to strike randomly also.

eg. A human might not be expected to know too much medical terminology, hence could easily get names/locations/functions of muscles and organs mixed up. Whereas a computer might be brilliant at that, but then suddenly not know what a door knob is (door handle? door knob of butter? etc...)

So ultimately to make a computer seem intelligent the problem is two-fold: Getting a high percentage of right answers, whilst also getting the "right" wrong answers.

Afterall, we don't criticize a human too much for not knowing something like the exact geographic location of a small African nation. But we definitely would if they thought that it was on Mars! It's exactly the same with computers, they're just far more likely to make wildly incorrect mistakes than understandably incorrect ones. So finding a way to mitigate computer mistakes, to make them milder, is every bit as important as eliminating them entirely - a potentially impossible task.

<comment><USER6> If you think about the way that humans learn, we get formal education that the computer doesn't get. We are getting corrected for our mistakes by other people. This work did not originally do that. The newer versions of it get corrected by people but that doesn't mean that it couldn't be corrected by more instances of itself that operate over different datasets via a consensus algorithm. The algorithm will also probably get flack that it is not unsupervised when human learning is actually partially supervised.

One could argue that humans have a similar problem of errors propagating. Areas that we feel strongly about can bias us against learning in fields such as religion, politics, and, of course, programming language design.

I think that it is possible that humans would make some similarly poor responses in areas that we don't talk about often.

<comment><USER5> I agree absolutely. I believe that future AI's will be educated in much the same way we educate children. Perhaps less education will be needed - <USER2> we could start them off at a higher age bracket for example. But ultimately I'm certain the first "strong" AI's will be educated/supervised to some degree.

My point was more that perhaps we're a bit too focused on the wrong metric for success. The current criteria set is {positives, negatives, false positives, false negatives}, and we try to optimise for high/low degrees of one or the other in order to determine whether a particular approach is successful or not.

What is then overlooked, is that perhaps we don't need to have a near-perfect positive rate, but instead achieve an acceptably-incorrect false positive or false negative rate. Where the answer may be wrong, but it's not too far wrong. Much like a human might pin a country like India in the wrong place on the map, but wouldn't ever put it in the middle of the Indian ocean.

In summation: Perhaps the key for computers to appear intelligent, is not to be perfectly correct, but to be not too disastrously incorrect.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps you can extend the F1-score[1] to be an F1,w-score that weights errors based on some measure of distance from correctness.

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_score](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_score)

<comment><USER5> Sounds like a good idea. Finding that distance heuristic will be a challenge though!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As an Aspie, I like the fact that my computer is "stupid".

It understands my commands literally and executes them exactly the way I specified them, down to the last typo. It doesn't try to second-guess my intentions, read my body language, or do any of the thousand other things that neurotypical people do to drive me crazy. After a full, stressful day of interacting with people, interacting with the "stupid" Terminal is a breath of fresh air. I'm sure a lot of other autistic people like computers for the same reason.

If my computer ever began to interpret my words and actions like an actual specimen of _homo sapiens_ does, I'd probably throw it on the ground and destroy it with a jackhammer. When I buy an Intel processor, it's because I want it to crunch numbers for me, not because I want a clone of that thing in the movie "Her".

</comment><comment><USER8> > Amazon also had your entire purchasing history, and its servers could > instantly compute recommendations you would be likely to accept.

I wish. I have long been surprised at how poor Amazon recommendations are given that they have a large pool of actionable data: things I have actually purchased. What else could be a stronger signal?

I have even informed them which purchases not to use as a basis for recommendations, or when recommendations they have made are not interesting (at least, those that are made from my page while signed in, no ability to do so with the emails they send).

I preorder plenty of technical books, so Amazon could easily suck more money out of me if they kept me informed on up and coming books by authors I have purchased from, or in the specific area I purchase in. Instead, I seem to get weekly emails about the latest "popular" books in a very general area (e.g. programming).

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I have a long purchasing history of sci-fi novels. But then I buy a book about UX and another about value investing, suddenly my recommendations are all replaced by Warren Buffet and web design books...

Sci-fi novels are an area where I need a large amount of discoverability to find new authors - recommendations are very useful. Not so much when I break my trend and buy a stock market textbook.

<comment><USER9> From personal experience I suggest you never buy a children's book on your own account.

There doesn't seem to be a way to tell Amazon "Hey this purchase was a one- off, don't use it for recommendations".

<comment><USER10> Sure there is, in the top left there is a link for "<your name>'s Amazon", click that, then in the toolbar in the middle click "Improve your recommendations". You'll get a list of all your purchases with a checkbox by each one to disregard it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good article but I disagree with his basic conclusion. To illustrate what I mean a couple of quotes:

"... will increase the hold that formal ontologies have on us. They will be constructed by governments, by corporations, and by us in unequal measure,..."

"We will define and regiment our lives, including our social lives and our perceptions of ourselves, in ways that are conducive to what a computer can "understand." Their dumbness will become ours."

I think the opposite is in fact happening, that academically for example there was a fixed system, in the UK for example you did GCSEs, A Levels, bachelor's degree etc., which was something like a formal ontology constructed by government - physics shall be divided form chemistry and both shall be graded from A to E. Now we have all kinds of new forms of education like online courses, Wikipedia and so on so you can pretty much find an educational form to fit what you want to do. We're moving more from a formal approved ontology to many competing ones where you can choose.

I'm not sure where posting on Hacker News fits into this. Maybe it is regimenting our lives, including our social lives and our perceptions of ourselves, in ways that are conducive to what a computer can understand!

</comment><comment><USER12> I've never heard of the magazine n+1, but if this is typical of it, I'm deeply impressed. Particularly, some of the author's conclusions are brilliant.

His only failure is when he tries to prognosticate. Ontologies are reductive only when they're not contextual, for example.

<comment><USER13> I generally like the magazine. It isn't mainly about technology, though, if that's what you're looking for: it's more of a literature/theory/politics/arts/culture magazine. Articles mainly about science/technology are maybe one per issue on average, though usually pretty good ones (with some misses).

Another new-ish magazine that I mentally place in vaguely the same genre is The New Inquiry: [http://thenewinquiry.com](http://thenewinquiry.com)

<comment><USER14> Mainly not about tech? It's such a perfect summaries of what's happening in the tech history for information processing. Like to see more of this kind.

<comment><USER13> This article is; I just meant that the magazine overall is not mainly about tech. Here's their latest ToC, for example: [http://nplusonemag.com/print- issue-18/](http://nplusonemag.com/print-issue-18/)

<comment><USER14> It's unbelievable. Even in the tech world, I haven't seen such good quality of reports so far. Why is it not that popular? Maybe because it's a paid service.

Thank you so much. Please introduce more to us later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > _Consider how difficult it is to get a computer to do anything. To take a > simple example, let's say we would like to ask a computer to find the most > commonly occurring word on a web page, perhaps as a hint to what the page > might be about._

Um, has the OP ever tried getting a _human_ to easily perform such a task?

<comment><USER16> Pointing out the problems with the proposition just illustrates the author's point about the semantic gulf. It's relatively easy for a human to not only see the problem but to point it out snarkily. But short of singularity we may not see a computer doing so in the near future.

Abandoning meta-snark despite it's pleasures, what is interesting is the way in which the semi-absurd example implied a relevant example which I now realize was why I wasn't bothered by the semi absurdity. I didn't really take the words literally.

What was evoked seems to have been the idea of how unlikely it would be that a computer could read the pseudo code and determine that it found the most frequent _words_ on a page without being given the answer ahead of time.

<comment><USER15> I wasn't (only) meaning to be snarky, but the proposition he makes is itself a bit of snark and, more to the point, begs the question. If you're assuming that, given a non-trivial webpage, all educated adult humans will agree as to what it's about...well, how can the computational scientist argue against that? If anything, the author himself should be keenly aware of how humans fail at general interpretation, even after having 12 years of education (K-12)...unless he's never had a comments section for his articles.

<comment><USER17> Meta: your comment finally solidified the proper meaning and usage of "begs the question". I'd sort of understood it, but hadn't seen it used in modern text like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I always wonder why computers should be intelligent. In essence they can add numbers pretty quickly. If you interpret the result of many such additions in a certain way you get a text, a video or an operating system. Wouldn't it make more sense to build a machine for thinking instead of reusing one we built for calculating?

<comment><USER13> That's one of the core high-level AI debates going back decades, whether a fundamentally different hardware substrate is needed for intelligent machines, or if it's instead more of a 'software' problem. Biologically-inspired AI tends to want to build things that look more like networks of neurons as the hardware substrate (among other things), while some other branches of AI find existing computing hardware to be generally fine as a substrate.

Imo it comes down to more of a pragmatic question than a philosophical one, though. Unless we actually discover a super-Turing computational system, any machine will be doing some kind of computation that in principle could be performed by any other Turing-equivalent machine. Of course not all Turing- equivalent machines are equally easy to build everything on top of, which is where the "equivalent in principle" part falls short. But alternate hardware models (assuming not super-Turing ones) don't in themselves get you anything that in some inherent or philosophical sense _can 't_ be done by a pile of NAND gates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> ELIZA was actually an AI platform, which made it possible to write all kinds of AI bots. The "doctor" program was a tiny example program, like a hello- world for the platform which was capable of much more. Here's a description of how ELIZA worked: [https://csee.umbc.edu/courses/331/papers/eliza.html](https://csee.umbc.edu/courses/331/papers/eliza.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> If you're like me and did not previously know about SHRDLU, then I highly recommend watching this demonstration:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo4RvYJYOzI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo4RvYJYOzI)

<comment><USER21> I've learned about it in a 1977 magazine about robots, when I was 6 (that I probably still have lying around somewhere), and I've been fascinated by computers ever since, and a great admirer of Terry Winograd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Humans have enough trouble understanding human language, especially in textual form. Context, body language, facial expression, shared experiences, cultural memes, power relationships, and internal motivations all play a role in how lanugage must be interpreted. Ambiguity, emotion, connotation, and double- meanings all play critical roles. It's highly unlikely (I would say impossible) that computers can ever be made to fully understand human language.

To the extent that humans and computers are able to communicate with each other, it will be via a cooperatively developed human-computer language that will be influenced as much by the computers as by the humans.

That shared compromise is true today via programming languages and the stilted way we must interact with Google Voice Search and Siri. And while those contours will change over the forthcoming decades, it will continue to be true for all time.

As humans augment themselves with digital computing power and as computer technology itself evolves, things will become very different, but the fundamental disconnect will always be there.

<comment><USER23> A human-computer language is an interesting idea, but it defeats much of the purpose of natural language. The convenience of being able to talk to a computer normally, or to process large amounts of text data that wasn't intended to be read by the computer. And there is so much data to learn from written in natural language and there would be very little in the new language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What about this?

Building Brains to Understand the World's Data (google tech talk):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y43qwS8fl4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y43qwS8fl4)

The result is [http://www.groksolutions.com/](http://www.groksolutions.com/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Surprising that the article doesn't talk about the modern day equivalent of Ask Jeeves:

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+old+is+President+Cl...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+old+is+President+Clinton%3F)

</comment><comment><USER26> Some coconut farmers use trained monkeys to harvest crops. I am sure a monkey would make a weak opponent in a fencing match, but they are pretty good with planning and motor skills in addition to being great climbers. In this sense, computers (and AI) of our time is very useful. Furthermore, computers and programs are super flexible and they do not have hard coded limits to their capabilities as humans and monkeys have. As humans, we might be the all powerful masters for now, but compared to the improving AI we'll soon be what the SHRDLU is to Watson.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is there anything that grasshoppers eat that isn't kosher? Maybe Watson is much smarter than we think.

<comment><USER28> My first experience with AI was playing against a chess computer in the 1980's and losing. I was young, didn't understand computers, and wasn't a very good chess player, but after I kept losing I had this eerie feeling about the machine, like it was an actual sentient being. I've been aware of the power of anthropomorphism ever since and noticed the readiness for humans to do ascribe feelings and thoughts to things that don't actually have them. The computer is the medium and tool for capturing the intelligence and data of the programmers behind it, so I think the right question is asking if Watson is self-aware. There is no evidence to support that and it is doubtful it will happen any time soon, but that's almost irrelevant. The combination of the user, the computer, the programmers behind them and the world's data working together is a new kind of intelligence and is almost frightening in it's power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The stupidity of computers is starting to get frustrating. As a software developer working on a distributed storage system, I've profiled my placement algorithm and after some thought have decided there is a better strategy based on a common use-case scenario. I create a branch in my repository and try out my changes. In the mean time my colleagues have made changes to the development branch I diverged from. My computer cannot seem to be able to run the differential of the profiling function against my diverged branches and tell me whether my changes validate my assumptions from a simple query (nor whether the combined changes would continue to validate my assumptions before I merge them... it couldn't even construct the profiling function for me).

Ontologies seem like just the tip of the iceberg.

It seems more likely to me that instead of a general-AI we're more likely to be able to map and simulate a human brain within a computer.

</comment><comment><USER30> Well written article. I wrote a long comment about my views, sat for a bit, re-read the article, then deleted my banter because it wasn't adding anything interesting, but I do want to say these themes have been on my mind lately and I appreciate seeing them discussed so well.

</comment><comment><USER31> _A reductive ontology of the world emerges, containing aspects both obvious and dubious._

Now I'm contemplating what an opposite-of-reductive ontology would look like (if that even makes semantic sense). An ontology that enriches rather than simplifies. It's hard to think about.

</comment><comment><USER32> What I got out of the article is that computers are good at doing what they are programmed to do. Problem is not bad computers, but rather the fact that we do not know how to program computer for general intelligence.

<comment><USER22> There are real, absolute limits on what you can program a set of transistors and logic gates to do. Changing those limits will require changing what a "computer" is. At which point, we'll probably call it something else.

<comment><USER33> What are these limits and how do you know they exist?

<comment><USER34> Can we create digital logic circuitry that embodies ALL the functionality of a neuron, including interconnections (and here you have to compensate circuitry limitations that the neurons don't have) in the same size? I think you can start from there to understand current technology's limitations.

I agree we will likely not be calling these things "computers", if we ever invent them.

<comment><USER22> Even if you remove the size restriction and the physical limitations of manufactured circuitry, we're lacking the perfectly defined model of how a neuron actually works. We have plenty of knowledge about neurons, but nowhere near enough to simulate them realistically. You'd need to be able to account for every possible state a neuron could ever be in.

But a neuron is more than just an input-output state machine, it's affected by levels of oxygen, glucose, and any number of hormones, proteins, and other chemicals in the bloodstream. An adult human's neurons are each individually shaped by their entire existence up to that point. Alcohol consumption, sun exposure, antidepressant medication, hydration levels, exercise levels. It all affects how they work.

And that's just one neuron. Simulating the brain as a solution to this problem is, I think, out of the question.

<comment><USER23> >An adult human's neurons are each individually shaped by their entire existence up to that point. Alcohol consumption, sun exposure, antidepressant medication, hydration levels, exercise levels. It all affects how they work.

Possibly, but why on Earth would you want to simulate that? Just simulate what the neuron is supposed to be doing or would be doing under ideal circumstances.

<comment><USER35> > Just simulate what the neuron is supposed to be doing or would be doing > under ideal circumstances.

We still don't know that either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'd like to place a bet, but unfortunately, there's no point in placing a bet stating that by a certain date AIs would beat median human intelligence by huge margins. It would be like placing a bet on a prediction of any other extinction event. Impossible to collect, even if the prediction is right.

On the other hand, just for the fun of it, a couple of other predictions. Here: "true, human level AIs would not be developed until 8Tb RAM sticks would become a commodity". Another: "true, high fidelity, multi-censorial brain- computer interface will never be built".

<comment><USER23> It is possible to bet on the apocalypse, though it's not very practical: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/ie/the_apocalypse_bet/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/ie/the_apocalypse_bet/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Computers aren't stupid, they're only really good at math. And trying to understand human language using math is hard.

<comment><USER38> Techically they are terrible at Math too. All they are good at is doing as they're told.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> My smart far-away and very old relative once said during the dot com boom: "computers are just tools, nothing else, people seem to see something magical in computers that is just not there". She was a very clever old lady. Still I love their logical magic and hope computers will never cease to amaze me.

</comment><comment><USER40> Hmm...

Wall of text.. ok, challenge accepted!

 _read_

 _scroll_

 _read_

 _scroll_

 _read_

 _scroll_

 _read_

MORE!?...

 _scroll_

NOT MORE I GET IT!

...computers are stupid but at least they don't give up!

<comment><USER41> Yep... really interesting article but just too long

<comment><USER42> After all, who has five minutes to spare these days to enrich their knowledge of the world around us?

Everyone knows that if the information is important enough, the author will find a way to fit it into 140 characters. Well 110, with 30 characters worth of tags.</comment></comment></comment>


Thousands of German researchers lost access to Elsevier journals - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/12/thousands-german-researchers-set-lose-access-elsevier-journals <comment><AUTHOR> So it did happen and about 60 institutes lost access to current subscriptions from Elsevier. The archive can still be accessed.

[https://www.projekt- deal.de/vertragskuendigungen_elsevier/](https://www.projekt- deal.de/vertragskuendigungen_elsevier/)

</comment><comment><USER2> "thousand of german researchers flogging to libgen/scihub"</comment>


Java for Yosemite - <AUTHOR> http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1572

<comment><USER2> Why are they still on Java 6? Oracle stopped supporting it in February of 2013 [1]. What's preventing the move to 7?

[1] [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html)

<comment><USER3> Oracle now delivers the latest Java versions for Mac OS X. [http://www.java.com/en/download/faq/java_mac.xml](http://www.java.com/en/download/faq/java_mac.xml)

The Java 6 by Apple is the last version created by Apple.</comment></comment>


Is open source experience overrated - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/04/is-open-source-experience-overrated.html

<comment><USER2> The power of working on open source projects for building job prospects is all in networking. You are increasing your luck surface area by expanding your network. The more seeds you plant, the better chance you have of one of those seeds bearing fruit right when you need it.

Your efforts might not help when you are applying for a job which is disconnected from that web which you have built. Expecting that a recruiter or HR person is going to be impressed by open source work you have done is like expecting that your months long study of Spanish will help you better communicate with people on your trip to Japan.

A college degree isn't enough by itself to guarantee you a job and neither is anything else most people could put on a resume or cover letter. Figure out the type of work that you would like to be doing and come up with a strategy for that area. For some areas, open source work just might not be very important. Be adaptable!</comment>


Ask HN: What consumer web apps do people pay for? - <AUTHOR> This is something I've been thinking about for some time. Prompted by the discussion on this thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2356292 - I thought I should ask the question to you all.
So, what consumer web apps do you or other people you know pay for, for personal use? Not for anything related to work. So, for example, paying for a time tracking app for your freelance work doesn't count.
I feel that consumers don't want to pay recurring fees for software. One-time payments, as in mobile apps, are OK, but asking even $9 per month for a really useful app seems to be hard.
I can only think of a handful of examples. Can you tell me more? <comment><USER2> I know of non-technical friends and family who use: dropbox, pandora, rdio, one or two w/ 37 signals products. I think many of them would pay for mint. Can't think of too many others.

I agree that people prefer the "buy once" option. Which sucks, because then it doesn't align the developers' interests of new revenue with getting updates pushed out to old users. Retraining users is difficult.

Your best bet may be to calculate your estimated product life cycle, charge that much up front, then giving them access for that amount of time.

</comment><comment><USER3> pinboard, usenet, and occasionally small community forums. soon picasa web albums, rhapsody, and a vpn provider.

I'll pay for anything that saves me a lot time, has a great interface, and/or replaces something I already use.

I'd consider paying for a very usable todo-list app that synced over dropbox instead of charging me a monthly fee (i.e. remember the milk), and had an amazing user interface over the free google task apps.

I'd also love to pay for mint if it similarly just worked over something more secure/local, and had an open backend (I had accounts that didn't sync at all correctly on mint). Maybe wesabe should be revisited.

not counting vps'es or anything as that's more of a hobby/entrepreneurship thing.

</comment><comment><USER4> For me, my thinking on one time fees vs monthly fees comes down to this: Once I buy something, every time I use it decreases the amount of money I spent on it per time I used it. But with monthly payments, every time I don't use it makes it more expensive for every time I use it. The latter forces me to use it more, which is a burden if it is not something I need to have.

I think you'll find that most of the webapps people pay monthly for are those things that they can't get with a one time purchse: generally new content, updated on a regular basis (Newspapers, Music, Movies, Television Shows,etc)

<comment><USER5> I will agree with this. I would rather pay more up front to use something on demand, than pay what amounts to a rental fee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I pay for Skype. Almost paid for Grooveshark but in the end decided to stick with the free version.

Good question btw. There are too many ideas for B2C web apps out there where the only hope of making money is from being bought out.

</comment><comment><USER7> I pay for: Dropbox, Spotify, Last.FM, CloudApp,

Certainly Spotify and Dropbox are no brainers "need these to live" expenses.

</comment><comment><USER8> Pricing doesn't have to be rental, or purchase. There is a continuum.

For example, Stardock has made a nice niche for itself in skins for Windows, among other products. Their flaship product, ObjectDesktop, costs something like $50.

For $50, the customer owns a copy of ObjectDesktop forever. Plus, they get a 'free' subscription to all changes and upgrades for a year. After that, the subscription automatically expires. The customer can renew if they like. Customers addicted to downloading the latest tweak or feature discover their subscription has lapsed, then decide to renew. Even if they don't renew, they can still use the software they bought.

Stardock is continually improving the product, adding cool new features, engaging users on its forums etc. etc. I suspect most of their buyers choose to renew their subscriptions, or decide to do so when a particularly neat new feature comes out.

Stardock started in the early 1990s as a university student part-time project and is now a multi-employee operation generating what I imagine is a very nice monthly cash-flow. The owner/founder clearly does whatever the heck he wants while keeping a tight focus on continuing to deliver value for paying customers. No VC money, no angels - just organic growth from revenues.

<comment><AUTHOR> You didn't read my question properly; I'm asking about web apps, not desktop apps.

<comment><USER8> Apologies, I'd not meant to appear thick. I'm just suggesting that there need not be a distinction. Pricing innovations in the desktop space can also apply to the web space.

Subscription means you have to convince the customer that enough value is being delivered consistently to make them feel comfortable paying month after month automatically. Single purchase means you only have to convince a customer that value is being delivered right now. The single purchase decision is a much lower decision hurdle.

In the real world, single purchase decisions vastly outweigh subscription purchases in both value and volume. So why do web apps, lemming like, aim at the higher hurdle? As the responses to your question suggest, unless you are netflix that is usually insurmountable. Even well proven physical subscription models (newspapers, magazines) are having a hard time making the subscription model work on-line. Hence the fallback to advertising revenue or hoping to be bought out.

If you can't give the customer something real, tangible and permanent now then you automatically assign yourself the tougher challenge of convincing them that the site will still be around, functioning and delivering value into the future.

Example: $20 gets you into our web app. All your needs met and delivered to you in Excel/OpenOffice/GoogleDocs format...whatever. This is yours to keep forever and you get one year free access to our fantastic service and all its upgrades.

I've a few more specific ideas, but I'm saving them for the day I decide to ditch my life as a well paid corporate drone.

Wait - just thought of another one. Its not on my list, suffers from a need to get physical and has probably already been done, but illustrates that a single purchase, subscription-like model is possible in theory.

webPrint.now Dump a digital image on webPrint.now and we'll get a high quality physical print to you overnight. A gazillion file formats supported. Sizes from tiny to gigantic. [Single purchases, but repeat customers will be the best business.]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Consumer Apps? There really aren't many out there. The ones that are fall into the new content/entertainment segment of news/music/video, primarily. Everything else has been made free so it can get pretty tough to get people to open their wallets. I know a few who pay for Flickr Pro, netflix, and that's it.

Me - Carbonite, some skype minutes here and there

What could your app possibly do for $108/year ($9/mo) that would be "really useful" to me as a consumer?

</comment><comment><USER10> I pay for DropBox, but that is almost like a "but once". I currently pay for Spotify but that is only because I am studying a lot at the moment and hate the adverts. I will cancel it for next month but reactivate next time I am studying. I also have money in my Skype account which I use occasionally. I don't think there's anything else I pay for as a consumer.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is probably not much help to you, but I pay yearly for Yahoo Mail Plus -- mainly because it allows me to use POP3.

<comment><USER12> I didn't know Yahoo charged for this. Any reason you went down this path rather than Gmail, which offers POP3 and IMAP both for free?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Flickr, Smugmug, Netflix, Dropbox, Skype, eFax, Wordpress, Typepad, Hulu Plus.

In my experience some people can't _imagine_ how willing _other_ people are to pay for things. If you're one of the people that hasn't even bought a $0.99 iPhone app you're very out of touch with a huge segment of the population.

</comment><comment><USER14> \- Smugmug Premium (Photos + HD Video)

\- Jungledisk+S3 (for off-site backup)

\- Skype minutes

\- Pinboard.in (as of 12 hours ago)

Being in a non-US location (Aka "Rest of the world") a lot of online content offerings including iTunes, Netflix and Hulu, are off-limits to me even if I wanted to pay.

</comment><comment><USER15> I pay for Freshbooks, Pandora, Grooveshark, Dropbox, Linode, AWS, Flickr, Github. Does Netflix count?

</comment><comment><USER16> Flickr, Github, Linode, Rdio, and a usenet provider. I would pay for gmail if I had to.

</comment><comment><USER17> Netflix and Grooveshark

<comment><USER18> and only these two

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> NetFlix, Rhapsody, Linode. If the free versions were not adequate (they are), I'd pay for mint.com, lucidchart.com and OKCupid.com.

</comment><comment><USER20> Not exactly web apps, but doing well as subscription services for the home, are the backup services: Mozy, Carbonite.

</comment><comment><USER21> Flickr, Last.fm, Pinboard, Instapaper, GAFYD.

I'd pay for DropBox but they keep giving me more space than I need.

</comment><comment><USER22> Dropbox, pinboard & last.fm

</comment><comment><USER23> Squarespace

</comment><comment><USER24> Chess.com.

</comment><comment><USER25> Spotify, Last.FM, Flickr</comment>


A successful Git branching model - <AUTHOR> http://nvie.com/archives/323 <comment><USER2> This article is _awesome_. I've tried to explain this before, this is how I develop in my startup, too.

> Unfortunately, I have not found a way to make --no-ff the default behaviour > of git merge yet, but it really should be.

        git config branch.<branchname>.mergeoptions --no-ff

I believe this is what you want.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thats a lot of writing to explain a diagram which explains itself perfectly well.

That said, it still looks like a great way to handle branches!

<comment><USER4> Agreed. I think Tufte would be proud of that diagram.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Someone should write a graphical frontend for git where you create and manipulate a graph like that.

<comment><USER6> You mean like Github's network graph?

<comment><USER5> Not for just visualization but for control also. You drag and drop and point and click to branch, merge, etc.

<comment><USER7> Real programmers use the keyboard ;-)

I use to joke Git was developed by people much smarter than me, for people much smarter than me. The fact we can use it to do our jobs is nothing more than coincidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My company is working on a - by now - quite large web application. Initially (2004), I began with CVS and then moved to SVN and in the second half of last year, to git (after a one-year period of personal use of git-svn).

We deploy the application for our customers - sometimes to our own servers (both self-hosted and in the cloud) and sometimes to their machines.

Until middle year, as a consequence of SVN's really crappy handling of branches (it can branch, but it fails at merging), we did very incremental development, adding features on customer requests and bugfixes as needed, often times uploading specific fixes to different sites, committing them to trunk, but rarely ever updating existing applications to trunk to keep them stable.

Huge mess.

With the switch to git, we also initiated a real release management, doing one feature release every six months and keeping the released versions on strict maintenance (for all intents and purposes - the web application is highly customizable and we do make exceptions in the customized parts as to react to immediate feature-wishes of clients).

What we are doing git-wise is the reverse of what the article shows: Bug-fixes are (usually) done on the release-branches, while all feature development (except of these customizations) is done on the main branch (we just use the git default name "master").

We branch off of master when another release date nears and then tag a specific revision of that branch as the "official" release.

There is a central gitosis repository which contains what is the "official" repository, but every one of us (4 people working on this - so we're small compared to other projects I guess) has their own gitorious clone which we heavily use for code-sharing and code review ("hey - look at this feature I've done here: Pull branch foobar from my gitorious repo to see...").

With this strict policy of (for all intents and purposes) "fixes only" and especially "no schema changes", we can even auto-update customer installations to the head of their respective release-branches which keeps their installations bug-free. This is a huge advantage over the mess we had before.

Now. As master develops and bug-fixes usually happen on the branch(es), how do we integrate them back into the mainline?

This is where the concept of the "Friday merge" comes in.

On Friday, my coworker or I usually merge all changes in the release-branches upwards until they reach master. Because it's only a week worth of code, conflicts rarely happen and if they do, we remember what the issue was.

If we do a commit on a branch that doesn't make sense on master because master has sufficiently changed or a better fix for the problem is in master, then we mark these with [DONTMERGE] in the commit message and revert them as part of the merge commit.

On the other hand, in case we come across a bug during development on master and we see how it would affect production systems badly (like a security flaw - not that they happen often) and if we have already devised a simple fix that is save to apply to the branch(es), we fix those on master and then cherry- pick them on the branches.

This concept of course heavily depends upon clean patches, which is another feature git excels at: Using features like interactive rebase and interactive add, we can actually create commits that

* Either do whitespace or functional changes. Never both.

* Only touch the lines absolutely necessary for any specific feature or bug

* Do one thing and only one.

* Contain a very detailed commit message explaining exactly what the change encompasses.

This on the other hand, allows me to create extremely clean (and exhaustive) change logs and NEWS file entries.

Now some of these policies about commits were a bit painful to actually make everyone adhere to, but over time, I was able to convince everybody of the huge advantage clean commits provide even though it may take some time to get them into shape (also, you gain that time back once you have to do some blame- ing or other history digging).

Using branches with only bug-fixes and auto-deploying them, we can increase the quality of customer installations and using the concept of a "Friday merge", we make sure all bug-fixes end up in the development tree without each developer having to spend an awful long time to manually merge or without ending up in merge-hell where branches and master have diverged too much.

The addition of gitorious for easy exchange of half-baked features to make it easier to talk about code before it gets "official" helped to increase the code quality further.

git was a tremendous help with this and I would never in my life want to go back to the dark days.

I hope this additional insight might be helpful for somebody still thinking that SVN is probably enough :-)

<comment><USER9> _What we are doing git-wise is the reverse of what the article shows: Bug- fixes are (usually) done on the release-branches, while all feature development (except of these customizations) is done on the main branch (we just use the git default name "master")._

I would just like to point out to git newbies that there is nothing special about the master branch in git except that it is a reasonable default. In terms of working on the release branch or working on master, there are no extra features or support from git, so the trade-off is only in what is easier for you and your team to remember.

<comment><USER8> exactly. I used the term master because that's what we are using internally. We could have called it foobar of course :-)

For the poster of the article, a stable (i.e slow moving) master was important, for us stable release branches.

The head of their master only uses as new releases are made. Our master moves constantly and releases are tagged on the release-branches.

It's really just a matter of terminology though.

Another point I wanted to make with my post was that you don't need as many branches as the original article for quite the same advantages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wish I could decipher my mental blockage with understanding git's model of development.

<comment><USER11> I think the mistake you're making is in thinking that git _has_ a model of development. It doesn't. It's an extremely flexible set of tools which you can build many development models and branching strategies from.

<comment><USER7> Or, to use a tired image, "There is no spoon".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Every time I see "daily" misspelled as "dialy" I read it like Bialystock and end up quoting _The Producers_. This kind of thing happens to me a lot. It's like my subconscious _wants_ wants me to be distracted easily!

<comment><USER13> I've fixed it for you. Sorry for the distraction :)

<comment><USER12> Heh, now my comment does not make any sense! Oh well. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You've given quite a high-level overview. Although it shows the advantages of branching and merging, re-writing history is where Git really shines.

> Unfortunately, I have not found a way to make --no-ff the default behaviour > of git merge yet, but it really should be.

No, it shouldn't. It's just your personal preferences. I can give you plenty of examples where --no-ff makes little sense.

<comment><USER15> Would you? As someone who is new-ish to Git the author's argument seemed pretty sound. I would be interested in counter points.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I didn't think y'all be so interested.

[http://www.perforce.com/perforce/conferences/us/2005/present...](http://www.perforce.com/perforce/conferences/us/2005/presentations/Wingerd.pdf)

<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-577744660535947210>

there's more tasty delight.

</comment><comment><USER16> Probably boils down to taste but after reading the article I still like this workflow better: [http://reinh.com/blog/2009/03/02/a-git-workflow-for-agile- te...](http://reinh.com/blog/2009/03/02/a-git-workflow-for-agile-teams.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> Slightly off topic but the Git model is generally interesting. I'd like to see it used for writing, publishing and sharing ideas (like it can code). To me it seems like it could be a great system.

<comment><USER18> Check out flashbake. It's a set of Python scripts for automating git and adding various metadata to commit messages, and was written as a personal writing tool for Cory Doctorow.

<http://wiki.github.com/commandline/flashbake/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you had to, how would you backport a fix onto an earlier release using this?

Or is that something that's not considered as necessary? (This is used for a website, for example?)

<comment><USER20> As pilif said, use "git cherry-pick". I do that for a web application I'm responsible for. It needs to support both MySQL and PostgreSQL, and due to a few inconsistencies (mainly, dates and enums) I'm currently maintaining two parallel branches of the application. If I do a bug fix that isn't database specific, I'll commit to the branch I'm working on, and cherry-pick that change into the other branch.

Yes, it's not as clean as I first expected it to be (and I'm working on merging the two into a single branch) but at least it's possible to do that with git.

<comment><USER19> Maybe pilif has a better example, but I don't think that necessarily applies to backporting a fix. Reason being that you can't cut the new release of the backported version on the master branch without doing a history rewrite. You could certainly have it on a separate branch off of the release version (of course), but then you have to keep that branch (which may or may not be a problem).

<comment><USER21> You could create that branch and then update the tags (IIRC, git-tag changes propagate). In general though, you're probably better off with separate branches for each major code change if you're business is obligated to support older versions (e.g. firefox-1.5, firefox-2.0, etc branches rather than relying solely on tags).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> That's great. My initial impression of the graph is that it looked over- complex. But it was explained well.

I guess you could take some shortcuts (e.g. commit hotfixes to develop and cherry-pick them into master) but the described flow is a clean way of doing it. (And the cheap branching etc means that such a shortcut doesn't really buy you anything.)

</comment><comment><USER23> Interestingly, we've implemented this model with SVN except:

* where he has 'develop' we use /trunk

* we've /tags/ where he has master (and git style tags)

Along with this; git-svn gives those of us who use it at least some of the benefits of git, like rewriting before pushes and stashing.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is approximately what the company I work at does, except for us "develop" is called "master", "master" from this diagram doesn't exist, and the tags are made off the tip of the release branches.

</comment><comment><USER25> I tend to rebase branches rather than merge. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

<comment><USER26> Yes: that you rewrite history. I find it not very useful outside private changes in topic branches.

<comment><USER8> I guess the OP was referring to rebasing before merging into the target branch.

This makes the history look much nicer.

While it's rewriting history, the only part of the history you change is the parent of the first commit on your branch and you are doing it on your private branch before merging it into the public one.

This is a totally standard practice and used by many people. In fact, at my place we have the policy of generally not doing non-ff merges into the main integration branch, so the history on the integration branch is always linear.</comment></comment></comment>


Proposal would keep Colorado on daylight savings - <AUTHOR> http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_27044142/proposal-would-keep-colorado-daylight-savings

<comment><AUTHOR> I've heard it said that if you don't hate DST you haven't been programming long enough.

DST is a huge on convenience with dubious benefits.

Of course I realize that keeping CO on DST would cause headaches as well, as with every timezone/DST adjustment.</comment>


How can we integrate security into DevOps pipelines? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-integrate-security-on-the-devops-pipeline-e36dea836d7b <comment><USER2> Hard paywall (account required). No thanks.</comment>


Show HN: Medium Style Wordpress Theme - <AUTHOR> http://cleanesto.com/ <comment><USER2> Where can I download this? It's not obvious from the page.

<comment><USER3> Apparently you can't download it but it seems you can email the author/developer and obtain a copy (last paragraph):

[http://cleanesto.com/2017/04/20/why-i-built-this- wordpress-t...](http://cleanesto.com/2017/04/20/why-i-built-this-wordpress- theme/)</comment></comment>


Database of all H1B petitions by company - <AUTHOR> http://visadoor.com/h1bvisa-database#.VFssBVPF-hE <comment><AUTHOR> I came across this link which lists in detail every H1B petition filed by an employer over last few years. One interesting thing is that they list the actually wage offered by a company for a given position to the beneficiary of each petition. This perhaps a more accurate representation of salaries in Tech industry than the glassdoor review.

<comment><USER2> Indeed! Thankfully, someone has compiled this data and made it easily searchable: [http://www.salar.ly/](http://www.salar.ly/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This just looks full of Ads .. more detailed Analytical analysis is here - [https://chartio.com/blog/2013/09/the-data- behind-h1b-visas](https://chartio.com/blog/2013/09/the-data-behind-h1b-visas)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure how I feel about the fact I was just able to look up my bosses salary.

<comment><USER5> In some countries we discuss openly about salaries.

<comment><USER6> But the US is not one of those countries, and this dataset is US specific.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can anybody tell me why wage offer and prevailing wage don't match up? Is there some kinda limit on what an immigrant can be paid?

<comment><USER8> H1-B workers can only be paid at or above prevailing wages in the area per Department of Labor stats. This is set in the law as to avoid displacing US workers.

<comment><USER9> Haha, having worked in the Indian offshoring industry for the last 9 years, I can only say that this is a joke. At least 100 of my co-workers have moved to US with wages much less than their American counterparts.

<comment><USER10> "Prevailing wages" is one of those statistics that can often be surprising. The bottom line is that some businesses, sample size and definitions of how the jobs are aggregated can drag the average down.

If you classify someone as a "Web Developer" then they will fall in bracket that is ~55% of the "Computer Programmer" bracket (this data is by County so it varies a _lot_ by geography).

AL programmers are paid from 61k to 95k. SF programmers are basically 20+k higher.

<comment><USER11> This can also be the reason you see a company having multiple disparate titles or changing them seemingly at random.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It doesn't look like applications from Google have been denied. Since the H1B visas are drawn in a lottery where there's three times as many applications as the quota, how are Google able to get all their application certified?

EDIT: Apparently 21/2436 have been denied. That's still nowhere close to 2/3 though

<comment><USER13> I can't find my own H1B in the database. I don't think the data is complete.

EDIT: I found another page that actually did have my own H1B: [http://h1b.myftp.org/](http://h1b.myftp.org/) . However, I believe it did show one H1B in my company as approved which is actually denied.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I haven't seen any tech company beating the number requests from IBM yet. Please post if you do...

<comment><USER15> Wipro has over 6,000 so far this year

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone know if I can get the raw data in any form without scraping the website?q

<comment><USER17> [http://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/performancedata.cfm#d...](http://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/performancedata.cfm#dis)

[http://www.flcdatacenter.com/caseh1b.aspx](http://www.flcdatacenter.com/caseh1b.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm wondering why my petition is not there... what could be the reason ?

<comment><USER19> I can't find some companies on there I know have done it too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you want more detailed information, companies that have Labor Certification Applications are required to maintain Public Access Files, to be presented for perusal on demand to anyone that wants to see it, both at the company headquarters and the facility where the nonimmigrant worker is working.

The LCA has to be included in the PAF, but there's other stuff in there, too.

Likely all useless to you unless you're an investigative reporter, immigration activist, or just masochistic statistician, but it's supposed to be there, nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER21> Some interesting outliers in there, for example Google's CFO, Patrick Pichette, at $650,000 in 2012

[1][http://visadoor.com/h1bvisa-2012-I-200-12121-384409/chief- fi...](http://visadoor.com/h1bvisa-2012-I-200-12121-384409/chief-financial- officer-and-sr-vice-president-google-inc-#.VFwaK_TF8QQ)

</comment><comment><USER22> I was surprised that India leads green card applications by such a huge margin. China and India should be about level since they both send about the same number of students to higher ed in the US and in similar specialties. Though I do see a lot more Chinese nationals in genomics/molecular sciences.

<comment><AUTHOR> A fair amount of those GC applicants are also the people who came here via consulting companies like Wipro/TCS etc.

<comment><USER23> I was wondering about that because I saw only one application from my employer, but a few dozen from an Indian outsourcer that we have used in the past. This town is small enough that it's likely 90%+ of them are in this company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> s/H1B/LCA

I'm in that data, yet I have an E-3, not an H-1B.

One unintended consequence of moving to the US that I wasn't expecting is that now my friends back home roughly know what my salary is. I understood when moving here that the LCA (which has salary details) would be posted in public spaces, but I didn't notice it was also a matter of public record which in this day and age, means global public record.

I work in a smaller city, so while I may have been relatively anonymous in somewhere like Silicon Valley, my location, company and role and year of employment is more that enough to uniquely identify me. Such is life.

<comment><USER25> Good news is: visas which don't require labor certification do not appear in the data. I'm on an O-1 and I'm not in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is there a similar database for L1a visas available?</comment>