Sinkhole of bureaucracy - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/03/22/sinkhole-of-bureaucracy/ <comment><USER2> I'm painfully familiar with some of this.

My favorite example of just how dysfunctional it all is was an agency which made a small fuss about how they were modernizing by allowing online job applications 10+ years ago.

Behind the scenes the applications were simply emailed to a shared mailbox then printed out and re-entered by hand into the actual position management system.

The position management system was so dated and overloaded that the folks entering data had learned how long they could expect to wait (measured in minutes to tens of minutes) when moving between a given set of screens. They would submit one screen then work on something else.

Eventually, the agency spent an enormous amount of money implementing some combination of systems from SAP to consolidate / replace everything.

Now the same folks who were retyping resumes are cut and pasting them into a series of webforms and emailing around spreadsheets of all the information that the system lacks forms for.

Hiring managers who had little or no input on requirements for new system don't even log in, they request printouts from HR.

\---

Having seen things like this play out a few times now I have a few ideas about what could help one of these projects actually succeed:

* Generate or at least inform requirements with honest information from people at the ground level. Those people toiling away filling up manilla folders and doing data entry know the actual process. The farther up the chain you go the story will move away from reality toward what's effectively nothing more than the way things are supposed to work.

Problem is, the layers of management don't want to allow that kind of access and will retaliate against their subordinates for being honest. Also, those low-level people are likely aware enough to know that they're talking themselves out of a job.

I think the former requires a powerful and attentive enough personality leading the effort to simply bulldoze the managers. I wonder if the latter can't be addressed by buying everyone out with generous severance or early retirement. It would puts a cap on the cost of these broken jobs and processes rather than continuing to cycle people ad money through them.

* As a rule, the technical and procurement staff of these agencies aren't competent to generate requirements or evaluate what's produced when dealing with outside contractors and implementers. At the same time, the agencies don't pay enough or move fast enough to maintain a competent internal staff.

This is really hard. Hiring outside experts seems to actually work against the goal as they will invariably work more for some particular vendor than the agency.

Big companies absolutely collude and actively work to hold down smaller competitors so "competitive" anything doesn't really work.

One idea I've been kicking around is a sort of a open source template for government system/project requirements. It would be a easy to follow "test suite" which proposals could be compared against. It would raise flags or fail plans and terms which don't meet the standard of contributors with domain knowledge.

I'd like to write more on this, but I've got a few things to handle this evening.

<comment><USER3> The 2010 US Census was a good example of this sort of dysfunctionality (I worked in one of the offices for it).

Hiring anyone for field jobs was a process something like:

* field operations clerks arrange application/testing sessions and get all applications in on paper

* administrative clerks (other side of the same office) enter all applications into the computer

* when the people running the field operations want to hire field employees, they fill out paper forms with manually selected criteria (local area, languages spoken, etc) and give them to the administrative fiefdom

* administrative clerks enter the form criteria into the computers, print out a paper list of matching applicants

* administrative clerks call down the list until they have enough who have said 'yes' to the job to match the form

* administrative clerks hand the paper lists with selected applicants on them over to the field operations fiefdom

* field operations clerks try to organize the data in an actually usable way, usually by manually entering the lists into Excel or Access

The most bizarre part was the "manual hiring forms" thing. Beyond the cargo- cult hiring practice of the forms literally only existing so that they could be filed away somewhere national in case of cover-your-ass legal issues, the Census didn't actually give us access to any resources for demographics... and so the only reason my area had anything like representative employees (important for getting into gated communities, dealing with different languages, etc) was because we had a set of people spend a week just comparing paper county tract maps supplied by the feds with locally-supplied city and county demographic info and writing up dozens of forms with criteria tuned for specific areas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, I've had a tendency to roll my eyes at the "agile" movement, and how much faith people put in it that it must be the best thing since slice bread. I've frequently said that a lot of it is just common sense, some of it is just needless process that just happens to be different, not worse or better, than traditional processes, and there are a couple of good points that agile methodologies have brought about.

But then I look at something like this, and I realize that common sense isn't necessarily so common in a big bureaucracy like this. They have tried three times to automate this, and failed each time? They've spent 7 years on one attempt, with absolutely nothing to show for it? I can't imaging going seven years without some kind of incremental release that you can use to gauge whether it's working or not.

I mean, why do they seem to think that it's necessary to solve the whole problem in one big, opaque project? You would think they could do it incrementally, automating the easiest pieces or automating one step of the process while leaving a fallback for manual processing for the more complex cases or the other steps.

<comment><USER5> The counterintuitive thing that many people don't understand about government software projects is that failure is the norm. There are relatively few "big" consultancies that win these projects, and their numbers include Oracle, IBM, Accenture, Computer Sciences Corp, SAIC, Booz-Allen Hamilton, and a few others.

Their goal in government procurements is not to deliver working software, it's just to win the contract, and then staff it with as many people as they can. We've known since _The Mythical Man-Month_ and other books such as _Peopleware_ that high staffing levels does not help most software projects, in fact it hurts them. But if the project fails, which most do, they all still get paid. And they will still win other contracts. Delivery of working software is just not high on the priority list--winning contracts and staffing them is.

There are all the usual problems with big software projects, and add to it that most government procurement is still based on the experience of building physical things (jet fighters, ships, highways, etc.) which really doesn't work for software.

But the big reason governments spend millions of dollars and waste years of time on software projects is because the contractors are not incented to deliver working software. In fact their incentives are to deliver failed projects, so that they can bid on them again.

<comment><USER6> Even crazier is that the government Often creates these situations by requiring that bidders bid the same number of positions, and then picks the one with the lowest rates. Lowering cost with fewer, better people just does not compute to them at all, because they have tried that strategy and been stuck with fewer just as bad people in the past. They then just use these people as staffing resources and attempt to manage the delivery themselves.

The major companies in the space (including many you listed) are trying to push incremental, iterative delivery, but the customers won't get out of their own way long enough to let it work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's easy to blame government bureaucracy but the real problem is the combination of lack of empowerment and policy which discourages hiring qualified staff in-house. Most agencies have been facing budget cuts for awhile and there has been congressional pressure against hiring staff because hiring contractors allows you to campaign on having shrunk the government, you can receive donations from contractors, and few reporters will actually do the homework needed to note that "saved" positions tend to cost more once you factor in overhead.

Even if you do get permission to hire techies, the GS pay scale limits who you're going to be able to hire. There aren't all that many jobs at the top end of the scale and even fewer will be non-managerial spots which means that your sales-pitch for putting up with bureaucracy and political meddling starts with a significant pay cut for high demand professions. (This is the same reason why regulatory capture is such a problem – we'd be much better off giving the SEC staff 400% raises than having them make decisions about likely future employers when they get tired of below-market pay)

If you do manage to make it that far, you can do some interesting things. I know the CFPB runs a far more modern IT shop because they were able to start without years of legacy-blinkered culture and hire skilled staff directly rather than relying on contractors through a procurement process which basically legally binds you to the least functional waterfall process. It'd be really good for the entire government if that became the model in the future – hire good people, give them autonomy to get projects done and responsibility to deliver.

</comment><comment><USER8> ""I used to chase people for months — literally — for one signature on one piece of paper. You want to talk about an egregious waste of taxpayer money?" recalled one worker who left the mine recently and declined to be named because of fears of retribution."

And of course if they _didn 't_ chase down every signature, we'd be reading an otherwise identical article from WaPo whining about "wastefraudandabuse".

<comment><USER9> Exactly. I work in a government town (although not for the government), and the fear of "gotcha" is the single biggest inhibiting factor for getting things done. There are hordes of politically-motivated eyes waiting for the smallest chink in your armour, so they can blow it into a huge story. It literally doesn't matter what people try to do - if there are checks and balances it's "waste"; if they try to do something innovative and interesting it's "recklessness" and so on.

The people have the government departments they deserve.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I second this, I've learned to phrase questions in such a way when dealing with government employees, where they can give approval, without having to either say yes or no - in other words phrase it in such a way that they dont have to say no - No with the government is the default answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm both horrified and comforted.

"The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty." -Eugene McCarthy

</comment><comment><USER12> > The root of the problem, he said, was that the system had trouble > synthesizing information from so many sources and calculations based on so > many laws.

So the gist of the article is that we pay these folks to do things with paper because the computer based replacements aren't flexible enough to handle the problem.

<comment><USER13> I can certainly imagine how that went. A monstrous Java Enterprise deployment, with thousands of classes and many more interfaces, and illustrous names like IRetireeAnuniatingSpecialCaseBenefitCalculatorSourceSinkBean.

Maybe the _whole problem_ is too complex to be able to solve it in one go, but thats why we abstract complexity away and return to solving the simple things, such as reliable digital document storage. Just digitize papers as they come in or are retrieved from "cold storage", and over time you have enough in the working set to get most of these poor people out of the mine and into some sunlight, jesus...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is exactly why many areas of government should be privatized. With zero competition and virtually no accountability, these bureaucracies have no incentive to become more efficient.

<comment><USER7> If you read the article again, notice how the fast majority of those millions of dollars have gone to private companies who failed to deliver working systems. Each of those companies passed multiple rounds of competitive bidding, too. The government staff processing things by hand can at least point to a ton of successfully processed requests rather than a complete write-off.

Outside of shallow libertarian magical thinking, privatization isn't a panacea. Anyone who has worked for or with a large corporation has stories which are at least this bad — the main difference being that you rarely about about the failures unless it leads to a major lawsuit. The usual argument is that you aren't required to do business with those companies but … just try to live without insurance, telecommunications, cars, etc. Markets allow you to select the least-bad option but it often takes regulation or changing the problem to make significant improvements. Before someone mentions Google: consider how happy you'd be if their QA-in-production / no live support mentality was applied to your retirement checks rather than your free email…

There are two real problems here: the first is the well-known fact that we're still figuring out how to deal with large-scale IT projects, which affects everyone, and the fact that government agencies are significantly blocked from doing things the right way. For the last couple decades, politicians have "shrunk" government by giving jobs to the private sector rather than hiring lazy government workers. What this actually means is that instead of hiring the same person directly they're hired at a significant markup – equal or greater pay plus the overhead costs of all of the contracting company's staff and profits – and all of the work is pushed into a procurement process which forces you into the worst possible form of waterfall.

You're not the first person to notice that things aren't efficient – and I'm certain that staff at OPM would agree, given how many of them were quoted saying just that. The solution is easy – allow them to hire good people in house at market rates and give them the needed support / autonomy – but that's politically dicey. This and your proposed solution are both likely to fail as long as Congress has a sizable contingent of people who benefit from problems, even those created by their policies, and everyone receives donations from companies which do business with the government. This also won't magically go away with privatization, as anyone who has seen large deals go to the company which bought the best lunch can tell you, but at least in the case of the government the details are public knowledge.

<comment><USER15> > If you read the article again, notice how the fast majority of those > millions of dollars have gone to private companies who failed to deliver > working systems. Each of those companies passed multiple rounds of > competitive bidding, too.

Those companies didn't fail of course, they were wildly successful at raking in millions of dollars. It's the government that's responsible for spending that money well, and it's the government that's failing at it.

> The solution is easy... but that's politically dicey.

Which is another way of saying the solution is not easy.

<comment><USER7> > Those companies didn't fail of course, they were wildly successful at raking > in millions of dollars. It's the government that's responsible for spending > that money well, and it's the government that's failing at it.

This is true but misses the point that the government really needs to develop in house talent. If you looked at every one of those contracts, I'm sure you'd find that part of the work to be performed was project management, design, etc. but the problem is frequently that the government isn't allowed to hire people who can evaluate the options. It's quite easy to make a project fail by giving the client exactly what they asked for…

> > The solution is easy... but that's politically dicey. > Which is another > way of saying the solution is not easy.

True – we're basically debating semantics but I would argue that the solution to this problem is easy but that's because the real problem is something else. As a country we tend to waste a lot of time talking about problems which are the product of other problems we've chosen not to deal with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If anything this shows there is a ton of low-lying fruit for the Feds to pick to improve operational efficiency. This along with the Pentagon's inability to do accounting should allow for big improvements. And due to budget constraints and more government services coming online (Healthcare) there might actual be a reason to push through some of these changes. Or at least that is my hope.

</comment><comment><USER17> 'Work in Progress' is a key form of muda or waste in lean philosophy. The key is to eliminate waste coming into the system. Employees need to be empowered to, send straight back incomplete paperwork and to update the forms & instructions coming into the system that are contributing to the waste.

Considering the gravitational mass of all these processes I would work on bringing lean manufacturing approaches in first before deriving a computer based solution.

As per all these things its going to take a lot of leadership to drive any type of real change.

Ref: [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing)

</comment><comment><USER18> These organizations seem almost organic, an emergent phenomenon that protects it's own existence. How _does_ one kill a bureaucracy? It's times like these I'm tempted to throw my support behind the "Eric Schmidt for CEO of America" stunt.

<comment><AUTHOR> This one seems to be trying to computerise, in order to be more efficient. It's just that every time they've tried, they've failed.

<comment><USER19> THe article didn't say much why they failed. There might be some subtle sabotaging going on.

<comment><USER20> The main point is the sheer mass of regulations and laws affecting and quite possibly contradicting each other.

Essentially you try to make a system that "fits all cases"... with every possible permutation. Bound to fail, actually.

<comment><USER21> Congress don't do sanity check. They just add new features to a hairball of a codebase, multiplying the bugs and complexity of the system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > "What is modern?"

Oh, well, let's not be too hasty in becoming efficient and up-to-date here. Obviously, having a sneaker-net is fast enough for you simply because the name has the term "net" in it. One of my old employers has a few vintage DEC VAXes if you want to start out on saving on your pencil budget.

I can confirm, though that the "chase the physical signature" game is still alive and well. /shiver

I would, however, like to be the pizza guy with a security clearance. Employment while it lasts :D

</comment><comment><USER23> This is how I imagine this department operates:

[http://youtu.be/fKRV40LZSuY](http://youtu.be/fKRV40LZSuY) (Brazil)

</comment><comment><USER24> I wrote an article about this having lived through it for a shilled called Why a hammer costs $5000? And it really all comes down to motivations being very badly lined up trying versus just doing the same. The link is: [http://www.followsteph.com/2011/11/22/why-does-a-hammer- cost...](http://www.followsteph.com/2011/11/22/why-does-a-hammer-cost-5000/)

</comment><comment><USER25> For $55M a year, this is cheap. The mistake was to repeatedly spend 100's of millions to try to automate it.

Go take a 35 yr old SF171 or such and scan, OCR and verify it. Get back to me when you can do that cheaply 10M times.

<comment><USER26> A 61-day processing period is not cheap for the person waiting for money.

You want to digitize old forms for retired people? This is entirely the wrong approach.

New data should be in digital form. Not even all new data, just one vertical at a time - new payroll data, new business expense data, new insurance claims data, etc. This shards the work into tractable, testable, measurable units. There will be a (long) period when processing retirement forms will need to pull data from both analog and digital sources. That time will eventually pass, and the analog gradually phased out.

<comment><USER27> Are you aware of time periods involved, though? When you say "new data" do you understand that this new data will only become pertinent in about 50 years, when the employee that just came in to system, retires. 50 years later. And meanwhile, you are processing paperwork for people that entered the system 50 years ago: on today, 1964.

(Ok, maybe closer 40 years, but the point is the very long storage time.) Even if all new data is digital today, what about 50 years later, how easy will it be to use digital files that were generated 50 years earlier. What if file formats change every 10 years. Then 50 years on, you got 5 different file formats you must be able to work with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> As a minimum, I think they could scan papers into a document system. We had this when I was in insurance. It still required review by a person but most files were digital.

This basic thing already exists. I don't understand why it is not being used for the federal retirement system. Insurance is probably just as bad as the retirement system: Policies have to comply with state laws in fifty different states and there are all kinds of SNAFU things that go on because of it.</comment>


Ghent Altarpiece: latest phase of restoration unmasks 16th century overpainting - <AUTHOR> https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/facelift-for-the-mystic-lamb <comment><USER2> [Funny, in a nice way, to see Ghent, the city I live mentioned here.]

Speaking of the Altar Piece by Van Eyck, soon (01-Feb to 30-Apr 2020) there's going to be "the largest Van Eyck exhibition ever"[1]:

 _In 2020, the Museum of Fine Arts (MSK) Ghent is organizing the largest Jan van Eyck exhibition ever. Only about twenty works of this Flemish master have been preserved worldwide. At least half of them travel to our museum. They are brought together with work from Van Eyck's studio and copies of paintings that have since disappeared. But also with more than 100 masterpieces from the late Middle Ages. No less than 13 museum rooms are being redesigned for this._

[1] [https://vaneyck2020.be/en/](https://vaneyck2020.be/en/)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're visiting Ghent I just did again yesterday and made a list of my favorite places: [https://dokomaps.com/map/381/the-medieval-city-of-ghent- belg...](https://dokomaps.com/map/381/the-medieval-city-of-ghent-belgium)

</comment><comment><USER4> It seems kind of disappointing to remove these additions. It's interesting by itself what all was added and thinking for what reason. At least the previous versions will always exist online for anyone curious, and it is neat to make comparisons before/after restoration.

<comment><USER5> While the history of the additions could be quite interesting and we should make sure to document them well, I fail to see what's disappointing about removing them. Contrary, I think it would be disappointing were they kept in place.</comment></comment>


WPA-PSK Rainbow Tables: 1 million passwords for the top 1000 SSIDs - <AUTHOR> http://www.renderlab.net/projects/WPA-tables/

<comment><USER2> This is why the first thing you do when you pull an wireless AP out of the box is change the SSID to something unique.

Some vendors (Apple and a few others) add the last 3 octets of the device MAC address to the SSID, which gets around this issue to some extent.

<comment><USER3> It is still quite surprising how predictable the chosen SSID is though. For example we generate tables for common surnames plus suffix numbers because one extremely common SSID is surname+house_number :)

So choose something definitely unique!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My SSIDs are in Greek and my passwords are all in Middle Welsh. Good luck with that.

<comment><USER5> Good luck with connecting from a phone ;)

<comment><USER4> Well, it's not so bad. I only use letters that are common to the Greek and Latin alphabet. My Nexus One doesn't mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is pretty old. The interesting part is how they generated the tables. I can't find the talk slides, but in short, a really expensive FPGA box. An fpga box that could brute force a WPA2 password in a short matter of time.

[http://www.blackhat.com/html/bh-usa-06/bh- usa-06-speakers.ht...](http://www.blackhat.com/html/bh-usa-06/bh- usa-06-speakers.html#Hulton)

<comment><USER3> Yep, really really expensive FPGA box. We (the company I work for) have a few, and they are stella but a little specialised (i.e. you can't trivially re- purpose them).

At the moment we are experimenting with CUDA as a cheaper (ish) replacement - with great success actually. It outperforms our main cluster (i.e. standard CPU processing cluster) by a large margin and is much more versatile than the FPGA solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone ekes surprised WPA PSK didn't bother salting the hash with at least, the network name or device serial? We had rainbow tables a decade ago for Windows when Windows had this same issue.

</comment><comment><USER8> That's a rather frightening amount of spelling errors.

      alot: 2
      APs': 1
      beta's: 1
      concievable: 1
      concieving: 1
      CPU's: 1
      did'nt: 1
      dicovered: 1
      DVD's: 3
      effecient: 2
      effectivly: 2
      equasion: 1
      fortunatly: 1
      implimented: 1
      nessecary: 1
      repetative: 1
      subsiquient: 1
      thier: 3
      was'nt: 1

For a grand total of: _26_. From a cursory glance, using Google Docs' crappy spellchecker to find them quickly. I didn't bother reading for grammar errors.

I am far from agreeing with everything Atwood says, but: [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/11/we-are-typists- firs...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/11/we-are-typists-first- programmers-second.html) and for God's sake, run a spell-check on your high- profile page.

<comment><USER9> Why? What does the author get out of it?

<comment><USER10> Credibility, for one...

Personally, I find it hard to take someone seriously if they have problems with basic spelling or grammar.

This is definitely a cognitive bias I possess. However, it has served as a very good heuristic, so I haven't worked on getting rid of this bias. I suspect many other people possess this cognitive bias.

<comment><USER9> So then, build your own supercomputer for making rainbow tables?

I fail to see how you liking the author affects him in any way. He made some rainbow tables. Click to download. Or don't.

<comment><USER10> I guess I thought you were trying to generalize - I certainly was.

I think you're right: in this case, there's not much gain to be had.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Perhaps I'm missing something here. The top 1000 SSIDs are mostly manufacturer defaults, like "linksys", "NETGEAR", and things like that. A lot of others are for public open systems ("Free Public WiFi", "tmobile", etc). Those aren't going to be WPA'ed anyway.

How often do people really know enough to enable WPA, but not bother to change the SSID? Purely anecdotally, I almost never see a secured network named "linksys".

I don't really expect this table to help access many things.

<comment><AUTHOR> In an apartment complex, you'll find a lot of wifi routers set up by ISP technicians. They come in, set up encryption for the customer, but leave the SSID something common/obvious, like the family's last name, or just "Bell".

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What tools you folks use? i use cowpatty <http://wirelessdefence.org/Contents/coWPAttyMain.htm>

<comment><USER13> We've used Pyrit in a cluster configuration like this: <http://beta.ivancover.com/wiki/index.php/Pyrit_setup> and a bunch of Nvidia cards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> the top 1000 SSIDs? so the top would be things like default, linksys, etc.

I'm willing to be that most SSIDs that have 'default' set probably just have the default SSID, but unique WPA settings.

unless things have changed since I last bought a router and routers ship with some default WPA settings turned on.

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone remember the article from a few days ago about how windows computers are passing the ssid "free public wifi" around?</comment>


Sandusky, Ohio, Makes Election Day a Paid Holiday – By Swapping Out Columbus Day - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2019/02/08/692771542/sandusky-ohio-makes-election-day-a-paid-holiday-by-swapping-out-columbus-day <comment><USER2> If one federal holiday had to be sacrificed for Election Day, this is the one I would choose.</comment>


Facebook Shutting Down Parse - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/28/facebook-shutters-its-parse-developer-platform/ <comment><USER2> Conversation thread here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10991729](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10991729)

</comment><comment><USER3> Did anyone who is actively using Parse see this coming?</comment>


Startup events in Dublin, Ireland? - <AUTHOR>

I'm new to the scene, anybody knows of good events I could attend here? Thanks <comment><USER2> Hi Benjamin,

Next month will be the Dublin Web Summit (<http://www.dublinwebsummit.com/>), it's going to be very interesting.

Also if you are looking for a hacker place, you can have a look at tog (<http://www.tog.ie/>), I've never been there but it looks pretty good.

Let me know if you want more details :) Cheers

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Martin,

Thanks for the answer :) The Web Summit looks pretty good indeed, I guess it's worth the investment (early bird). How come there's not more happening? Other capitals have a fairly active community, and Dublin is supposed to be among the best places to start a company... There should be a huge community!

<comment><USER2> Hey Benjamin,

I don't know why there is not more event happening... I also wanted to let you know that there's a tech meet up tomorrow (wednesday evening). See <http://paulfwalsh.com/dublin-meetup-on-september-28th/> if you want to join. I'll be there :)

See you! Martin

<comment><AUTHOR> Damn, I just saw your post.. how was it? Btw, I got my ticket for DWS, looking forward to it :)

<comment><USER2> Finally I couldn't make it to that event but I went to <http://groupspaces.com/WSJEurope/item/169398>.

Could you drop me your email at email@example.com, it would be easier to keep you posted when I hear about cool events :)

Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


His name is Dmitri Gaskin, he's 12 years old and here's his Google tech talk on jQuery - <AUTHOR> http://youtube.com/watch?v=8mwKq7_JlS8

<comment><USER2> Dupe (from three months ago): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=156863>

</comment><comment><USER3> <ready for down modding> anyone else think the only reason he is there is because of his age?, not a good speaker and not the smartest person they could find. Sorry just have to be honest

<comment><USER4> Perhaps you are right. But I don't see anything wrong with boosting the reputation of jQuery as easy to use by demonstrating that a 12 year old (who is not a good speaker or the smartest person they could find) can master jQuery.

Plus, it is kind of cool that a 12 year old can be invited to talk at Google. Makes me wonder if I might have some knowledge to contribute to other areas of thought...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Still interesting thanks!</comment>


Ask HN: good webapp's terms of service templates? - <AUTHOR>

While startups registered as an entity obviously get their legal work done as it should be, I was wondering what to do about ToS/pp when launching side projects, weekend projects. I'm speaking about the most basic ToS that even a small app should have.
google sent me to this http://www.bennadel.com/coldfusion/privacy-policy-generator.htm , seems ok? Any alternatives are also welcome.
second thing:
--
(from the generator)
8. Governing Law
Any claim relating to xxxxxxx's web site shall be governed by the laws of the State of yyyyyyyyy without regard to its conflict of law provisions.
--
if I'm from outside US, I replace the 'state' with 'country', and it'll be ok, yes? <comment><AUTHOR> clickable [http://www.bennadel.com/coldfusion/privacy-policy- generator....](http://www.bennadel.com/coldfusion/privacy-policy- generator.htm)</comment>


Political failure modes and the beige dictatorship - <AUTHOR> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/political-failure-modes-and-th.html <comment><USER2> Hard to argue with his conclusion. In the UK, the three main political parties are shockingly similar; I can't think of a single truly-significant policy difference. As an example, the 'left wing' party wants to restrict university tuition fees to £3000pa, whereas the 'right wing' party wants them to be £9kpa. Such things are the limits to our political discourse.

They even _look_ the same, like slightly-morphed versions of Tony Blair. Same suits, same accents, just different tie colours. Honestly, I find it slightly spooky.

If you agree with Mr. Stross that this is a structural problem (and I do), then remedying this _within_ the system seems pointless. So what? Trying to replace the system seems equally doomed, because as soon as your replacement structure gets any traction, the System will squash it.

The only way that I can see is to try and work around it - to create new structures and forms not as competition to the current system, but as subversive alternatives. Bitcoin is the best example of this at the moment, and it will be _very_ interesting to see how that plays out. Make no mistake, the prospect of growing BTC adoption is genuinely threatening to the Beige Dictatorship, and a crackdown seems inevitable - but its success less so.

<comment><USER3> > _If you agree with Mr. Stross that this is a structural problem (and I do), > then remedying this within the system seems pointless. So what? Trying to > replace the system seems equally doomed, because as soon as your replacement > structure gets any traction, the System will squash it._

I think it's a shame that guerilla gardening didn't take off more. Or that graffiti artists don't also clean up bad graffiti.

Or that there are not more voluntary home gardening schemes - there are a bunch of people who enjoy gardening but don't have gardens, and a bunch of people who don't enjoy that kind of thing (or who can't do it) but who do have gardens. There must be some kind of way to get them together.

Unfortunately, doing it within the system means insurance and criminal records checks (and the misuse of those) and etc etc etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Liquid democracy (delegative democracy) might be a potential alternative. It has its problems, but it would at the very least be an interesting experiment.

[http://wybowiersma.net/pub/essays/Wiersma,Wybo,A_global_advi...](http://wybowiersma.net/pub/essays/Wiersma,Wybo,A_global_advisory_parliament_integrated_with_the_social_web.pdf)

Liquid democracy is a hybrid between direct and representative democracy, that provides better incentives to vote. It was invented by G. Tullock in 1967, and it, and very similar ideas, are also named proxy voting, and delegable- or delegate cascade democracy. Its core idea is delegation. That is, citizens can either vote directly, or voluntarily assign their vote to a proxy that will represent them, similar to how this happens in stockholder voting. Also, as in stockholder voting, people can vote by themselves at all times. The selection of a proxy can either be pictured as temporarily passing on ones voting right, or as automatically copying the proxies vote onto ones own ballot paper. Another important property of TDD, and the one that makes it different, is that delegation is transitive, in the sense that the representative can, in turn, transfer his collected votes on to another proxy (...read the paper for more).

</comment><comment><USER5> Well, the guy has a obvious leftish slant in some of his opinions.

But excluding his pontual opinions on some issues, he is mostly correct.

And that is very unfortunate.

But what else can we expect?

Democracy, is only good as the people voting. Take a look at what happened in Egypt, people wanted democracy, removed the dictator, then the sunni majority of the country obviously elected those they wanted, a sunni guy.

Then he changed the constitution a little, the constitution is almost the same, and in most areas improved, there are one thing that is very questionable:

Instead of the laws being "inspired" by Sharia, now they are "inspired" by Sharia according to sunni islam.

Bang, there you are, the other half of the country, mostly non-sunni muslims and christians, are very upset, and screw democracy, now we want you to come out of power because if you don't we will throw molotovs in your palace.

EDIT replying the guy below, because I got seemly slowbanned or something (I am getting the message "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."):

Oh, I am from Brazil, to me US center is right...

(I say that US has two parties: right, and even more right).

But I am referring to gay marriage (it is a traditional point of the left, specially if you are a follower of Frankfurt School or of Gramsci) and drug decriminalization (Another point that the left likes more than the right).

I am personally against gay marriage (actually my opinions in marriage are quite complex) and pro decriminalization.

<comment><USER6> Out of interest what points would you say give it a "leftish slant"?

NB I'm not being snarky, I'm genuinely interested as it seemed fairly neutral to me. But then again I am the same nationality as Charlie.

<comment><USER7> > But then again I am the same nationality as Charlie

I would point out that the _Conservative_ party in the UK just voted 400-175 in favour of gay marriage.

<comment><USER8> Just to point out that the House of Commons voted that way - that's the combined vote of all parties eligible. The Conservative party was rather split on the issue, I think only a (largish) minority of the Conservative party itself voted in favour (although I can't remember the split offhand). That's still rather better than you would have got a few years ago, but then the Conservative party is now basically split down young/urban/secular-ish and older/rural/religious-ish lines and votes on these issues tend to be somewhat predictable.

<comment><USER9> Of 303 Conservative MPs, 139 voted against and 30 abstained. So 44% percent of Conservative MPs were in favour.

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9851322/Cameron- acc...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9851322/Cameron-accused-of- dividing-Conservatives-as-MPs-rebel-on-gay-marriage-vote.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the existence of a Political Class (which as Charlie points out, is an inevitable outcome of our current system) is one of the main problems.

Personally I would like to see a random election system whereby every X years a random group of Y people are chosen to be MPs for the next parliament. It would be a civil obligation, similar to jury duty. Each person would only be allowed to serve once. That way the MPs would not be insulated from the world outside of the political sphere.

<comment><USER6> In the UK at least there might be some, for me, rather undesirable consequences of such a scheme - for instance we'd probably get the death penalty back.

<comment><AUTHOR> Luckily they couldn't do that -- not without quitting the EU, which would result in an entirely different clusterfuck. (And I need to blog about the second-order consequences of that at some other time. For starters: the way the City of London would respond (mostly by pulling the eject handle and relocating to Frankfurt and Paris), the way the US multinationals who use the UK as an Anglophone business centre in the EU would respond (ditto), and how the Commonwealth would respond ("we only loved you because you were a cheap way to get our exports into the EU. Bye!") ...

<comment><USER11> The City of London cannot pull the eject handle and relocate. The City of London is a separate legal entity[1] with it's own laws and rules, and it's those rules that meant that the trading that took down Lehman Brothers was conducted in the City of London, because it couldn't have really legally taken place elsewhere.

[1] - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc>

<comment><AUTHOR> You're missing the point: the institutions that are headquartered there conduct a huge volume of Euro-denominated derivatives trading, which becomes impossible if the City loses its license to do so, and it's hard to see them retaining it if the UK leaves the EU. So those banks would have to relocate their investment arms to somewhere in the EU. That's got to be worth several points off the UK's GDP. Instant recession -- and it's _not_ recoverable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> One thing which is hinted at, but not explicitly called out, in this article is that some politicians are just batshit insane.

See for example the recent politician who plead guilty to perverting the course of justice. He got a camera generated driving penalty. He put his wife's name on the ticket, forcing her to take the penalty to avoid political trouble for him.

(<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21320992>)

His ex-wife is alleging some remarkable things about him too.

(<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21372250>)

Some might say that resigning is the honourable thing to do. But he did this ten years ago, has denied it ever since, and even when it went to trial he tried very hard to get the case dismissed. (That failed twice.) He only left when there was absolutely no option for him.

This kind of single-minded idiocy affects many politicians of all parties.

Blair and Bush saying that Iraq was connected to Al-Qaeda; Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; Iraq was ready to launch WMD within 45 minutes; Bush declaring "Mission Accomplished" in May 2003; these people are so disconnected from reality that it must be a pathology.

</comment><comment><USER12> This echoes a lot of things that Noam Chomsky talked about in Manufacturing Consent (both documentary film and book originally published in 1988) esp. the idea that one of the ways the status quo is sustained in a democratic society is to encourage vigorous debate but only within a narrow scope of acceptable opinions.

<comment><USER13> Oh good, I'm glad that I'm not the only one who got about a third of the way through the article and said "well, yes, this is pretty obviously the way things work if you've read _Manufacturing Consent_ or similar critiques."

The differences of opinion between different critters inside the Washington DC alternate-reality bubble are greatly magnified by how hard they pretend to fight over them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> While I agree with the general sentiment, we should remember that while things might seem bad now, the general state of things for the average middle-class Westerner is unquestionably better than at any time in history. Just half a century ago we a decade of crushing world war, and before that (in America) crushing civil war, and not that long before that kingdoms and tyranny, and things go way downhill past that.

Now that's not to say that everything is peachy, that things can't be improved, or that we shouldn't strive to do so. I guess Stross's question is, _can_ things be improved given the current system? I don't know. Some days I suspect that human pettiness, fallibility, tribalness, and forgetfulness will doom us to forever repeating a cycle of violence and revolution.

On a side note, sometimes I feel that America, despite our relatively prosperous position in history, is on the knife's edge of falling over into a blatant Minority-report-ish surveillance/police state. Look how fast it happened to other countries in history that _didn't_ have the overwhelming military power and surveillance infrastructure that America has in place today. What would it take for the country to tip over the edge? Could we stop it if it happened? _Would we want to?_ (Apropos: today on NPR they had a quote from Brennan at his hearing where he said, without a hint of irony, something along the lines of, "drone strike killings of Americans will never be used for people who have committed crimes in the past; only for people who pose a threat to America in the future.")

<comment><USER15> I'd love to have source and context for that last quote.. not because I don't believe you, but because it seems rather scary and vaguely important, and the more details the better.

<comment><USER6> Possibly this recent DOJ White Paper? [PDF]

[http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_W...](http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_White_Paper.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The "beige policies that nobody wants" reminds me of the reliance on "fairness" within debate at the moment. Raise taxes on the rich and cut services to the poor because you can persuade people that it is "fair". Everyone gets poorer but its okay because our society is so unequal who would even notice? They get away with policies that know one really wants because they are usually directed at someone else (richer or poorer than me). We have replaced empathy with simplistic politics.

</comment><comment><USER17> Beige politics is surely intellectually frustrating, but what if it is quite optimal from the utilitarian point of view?

Maybe we should not measure politics by how interesting it is?

<comment><USER18> Sometimes the middle-of-the-road option is worse than either the left or right options. Also, don't underestimate how important it can be to have definitive winners in debates. Compromises in heated debates can lead to prolonged foot- dragging and resentment that can be worse than both the disease and the cure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I like Charlie Stross essays, and I'm glad this one was submitted here, but when Stross writes,

"The range of choices available at the democratic buffet table have therefore narrowed until they're indistinguishable. ("You can have Chicken Kiev, Chicken Chasseur, or Chicken Korma." "But I'm vegan!") Indeed, we have about as much choice as citizens in any one-party state used to have,"

then I have to say no. Evidently Stross has no lengthy experience in living in a one-party state. I do. The range of choice for voters in the United Kingdom, and especially the range of channels for dissent there or here in the United States, far exceed the range of choice available to citizens in a one-party state. Been there, done that. (The one-party state I lived in during the early 1980s, Taiwan, still had rigid mass media censorship and political assassinations both at home and abroad, but even at that was rather benign compared to many current one-party states. Taiwan has transitioned to democracy. Throughout Stross's lifetime and mine, the U.K. and the U.S.A. have offered far more political choice to citizens than has any one-party state anywhere in the world.)

Stross is a science-fiction author by occupation, and maybe the next stage of his self-education for spicing up his science fiction stories is to learn more about political science, especially public choice theory.

<http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html>

[http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/pdf%20links/Booklet....](http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/pdf%20links/Booklet.pdf)

<http://perspicuity.net/sd/pub-choice.html>

[http://pileusblog.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/the-left-and- publ...](http://pileusblog.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/the-left-and-public- choice-theory/)

Stross's point is quite correct that people developing their careers in politics look for channels to increase their influence on the system, whatever their ideological proclivities. That is human nature--why work hard in political activism to NOT end up with influence? But the counsel of despair in the interesting article kindly submitted here is an exaggeration. There is still diversity of point of view in the system, and plenty of opportunity for activists to make meaningful changes, including the example he gives: "Marriage equality is a fundamentally socially conservative issue, but reflects the long-term reduction in prejudice against non-heteronormative groups." Choices still abound. Advocate for those that you desire.

<comment><USER17> When there is an important new policy change needed (think environment conservation) - then in beige politics it gets coopted by all or most of the parties. In this way they stay beige (and the green party never becomes important) - that looks boring and is intellectually frustrating - but it is so much better what happens in dictatorships (even when they are overthrown by revolutions and the politics become so interesting and exciting).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> He's not saying anything much different than what people like Vilfredo Pareto(of Pareto principle fame) and Oswald Spengler and others of German Conservative Revolutionary movement... they were right of course but they also provided an ideological basis for fascism.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilfredo_Pareto#Fascism_and_pow...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilfredo_Pareto#Fascism_and_power_distribution)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West#Democra...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West#Democracy.2C_media.2C_and_money)

</comment><comment><USER21> I hate cars analogies. But now I'm going to make one.

Sixty or seventy years ago, cars were unsafe, contaminant, ugly, heavy... add to this that they were driven mostly by (often drunk) males.

What has changed? How? Did some of the changes annoy big corporations?

That's it. What are the problems with democracy now? I'd say:

\- Defective control of party functioning: represenatives hiding behind party line, opaque lobbying, etc.

\- Bad representation systems. Winner takes it all that prevents new minority parties to enter the system.

\- Opinion created and spread top-down through media and representatives.

These are general non-partisan problems, couldn't they be solved on their own?

<comment><USER18> > Opinion created and spread top-down through media and representatives

I would argue the emerging long-tail media is reinforcing special interests and gotcha politics. Some of it is top-down but much of it isn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Hmm. Michel's "Iron law of oligarchy".

Summarized as: "Bureaucracy happens. If bureaucracy happens, power rises. Power corrupts."

See also Niklas Luhmann's[1] idea of autopoiesis[2] in modern social systems, the political system being an example of a modern social system. Luhmann contends that modern social systems are functionally differentiated from each other: legal, political, mass media, and so on. Autopoiesis is the idea that these social systems contain within them the means for their own continuation and effectively do not exist for anything other than to continue their own existence. In order for these systems to come into being one needs self- reflexivity, this is provided by language. No language, no autopoietic systems (this is my contention). "An autopoietic system is to be contrasted with an allopoietic system, such as a car factory, which uses raw materials (components) to generate a car (an organized structure) which is something other than itself (the factory)." The common natural example (of an autopoietic system) given is the biological cell. The primary function of a cell is to keep the cell being a cell. Sure, different cells do different things but they all use the raw materials of their environment primarily for their own upkeep.

Ok. So given the Iron Law and Autopoiesis how do we stop social systems from becoming self-serving? This is the challenge of our times. Luhmann is a pessimist. He contends that you _can't_. Should we be pessimistic? It is the nature of these systems. We have never been able to have a full participatory democracy because of the coordination problem. Does the internet change this? Can we show that the internet allows everyone's hand to be on the tiller so to speak? Another idea might be to go with the inevitable flow of the way systems "evolve" and "mutate" over time and come up with a virtue theory for social systems much like we have a virtue theory for human behavior. So we should 1) reject monopolies (in politics, single party systems; in commerce, single telecoms carriers, single os vendors, and so on), we should 2) prefer transparency over opacity (think wikileaks), following on from this we should 3) prefer freedom of expression over censorship (an example often given is the advantage protestant countries had over catholic countries because of the papacy banning certain titles thus handing economic advantage to protestant publishers).

Anybody else got any ideas? Sorry for the vagueness and haphazardness of my thoughts.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann> [2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis>

edit: clarification, elucidation, and grammar

<comment><USER18> I would add that long-tail media consumption reinforces the tendency toward special-interest groups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> _we haven't been on the receiving end of a bunch of jack-booted fascists or their communist equivalents organizing putsches_

This brings to mind a quote [1] from George Carlin:

"When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts, it will not be in jackboots, it will be Nike sneakers and smiley shirts. Smiley smiley."

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKQs-jDI7j8> (around 4:00.. though the whole thing, especially the end, is relevant here)

</comment><comment><USER23> The "beigeness" in europe was specifically engineered to avoid another world war. Everyone chooses a slightly different shade of beige in their own country and then sticks to it. Every couple of years they all go to an EU summit and sign a treaty that enshrines more "beige" as the way things are done.

Is moderate prosperous apathetic "beige" better than the alternative? The founders of the EU seem to think so, it's not like there are any great ideological alternatives is there?

</comment><comment><USER24> _"They concede that the opposition may disagree with the party in power on precisely how the state must operate, but agree that it should operate..."_

I don't get that sentence from TFA. Is the author really against _any_ kind of statism?

Even most libertarian don't argue that there should be no state operating at all. Only crazy anarchists advocate for no state at all, like in Somalia ; )

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not anti-statist. I was trying to set out the difference between systems that acknowledge a Loyal Opposition, and totalitarian/one-party/monarchical systems, where the centre of power explicitly rejects the legitimacy of other groups' aspirations and desires for how the state should be run.</comment></comment>


Opinion vs. Stupidity - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dilbert.com/post/129847513336/opinion-vs-stupidity <comment><USER2> An extended quote:

\---

During an American election cycle you will see a lot of "opinions" that looks like this:

"The Constitution clearly gives us the right to do X. Therefore, that's the way it should be."

That sounds like an opinion, right?

But it really isn't.

Here's why.

The Founders wisely made it hard to change the Constitution, but they did give us the tools to do it. And we have changed it in the past, e.g. slavery.

So it is stupid to hold the opinion that we should do what the Constitution says, no matter what, when the authors of the document had no such intention.

\---

I don't think he answered his question (That sounds like an opinion, right?). Say it isn't an opinion, then what is it? If an opinion can't be right or wrong, then an _interpretation_ can be. "the Constitution clearly gives us the right to do X," is an interpretation that needs to be supported by evidence if I'm to be convinced of it.

The author showed that the proposition "The Constitution clearly gives us the right to do X" is a stupidity and not an opinion. I think that's tangential to the more general point: interpretations need examinable evidence.</comment>


How a Berkeley Eccentric Beat the Russians–Then Made Useless, Wondrous Objects - <AUTHOR> https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/spring-2016-war-stories/how-berkeley-eccentric-beat-russians-and-then-made <comment><USER2> I'm a big fan of his book, The Cuckoo's Egg, and I've even called him up one time to chat with him about some of the stuff in it. He's a very interesting and friendly guy!

</comment><comment><USER3> What a well written article. Stoll is a great example of the Bay Area thinking before the whole tech bubble and tech bros came in sigh.</comment>


Ask HN: Obtaining initial users for a startup - <AUTHOR>

This may seem like a very basic question, but basic is where I need the most assistance. For tech start ups and social applications, or anything for that matter. How do most companies usually get their initial set of users?
An example to clarify my question: say you start a dating site for a specific niche. How do you get a good amount of users registered on your site, so that when you launch, you don't have people that register, see no activity, and then leave immediately?
I apologize if this is common knowledge ahead of time. <comment><USER3> Here are a few discussions/links to get you started:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512144>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1345095>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1478219> <\- Significant discussion

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1539359>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1702915>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2062285>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2193539> <\- Significant discussion

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly what I was looking for. Thank you

<comment><USER3> You're welcome - mostly found by this and similar searches:

<http://searchyc.com/submissions/initial+users>

(removed comment about upvoted - I made it in a moment of weakness and shouldn't've)

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually appreciate the up vote comment. Being a redditor and ex digg user, one of the first things I looked for was an upvote/downvote button on here but due to all of the information I've been taking in on this site lately, I've completely disregarded everything else and didn't stop to think that the tiny triangle was the upvote link.

So far HN has been an absolute goldmine

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For my site, Scribophile, it was a classic chicken-and-egg problem. You post your writing for critique, but must earn points by critiquing the writing of others first. This is what I did when I launched:

-Nobody will join a site if it looks like a ghost town, and sites always begin as ghost towns. So I had a lot of my friends create several accounts each and just futz around to give prospective members the illusion that the site was older and more active than it really was. I personally critiqued people's writing under several pseudonyms, and even though I don't write much myself, I sat down and wrote some stinkers just to post on the site to make it appear active.

-As I mentioned, you must critique writing to earn points, but you can't earn points if there's no writing on the site! So the first few hundred members got the ability to post their writing for free, without spending points. This seeded the site with some content--low quality content, but content nonetheless.

-I had a paid account option in place from the start (freemium model), but at first everyone who signed up got a free upgrade without them knowing it. That means they got to use the site to its full potential, and thus seed it more effectively, while I was growing the user base. They told their friends about this great new site with all these features... and once I felt that things were rolling along smoothly, I flipped the switch for new signups to start with a free account versus a downgraded account, so I could start getting paid. (I grandfathered in everyone who had signed up up to that point.)

-I spent a lot of time personally canvassing writer's blogs and offering them a free upgraded account if they were interested in joining and participating. Never mind that anyone who joined was automatically upgraded like I mentioned earlier! Writers write a lot (naturally) so finding blogs belonging to writers was pretty easy.

-I set up a few free writing contest with big cash prizes to launch the site. The catch was that instead of submitting your piece via email, you had to post it to the site using the points you earned from critiquing. So I basically "bought" early activity in that sense--both more writing to seed the site, and critiques, which is the most important thing.

-Along with relevant blogs, I also posted in forums telling people about my site. Turns out most forums aren't too interested in having someone sign up just to advertise their new venture and then disappear; so instead of advertising that I had launched Scribophile, I advertised the free writing contests I mentioned above. Seeing "announcing a free contest with cash prizes" is much more tempting than "hey guyz, come see the new web site I just made, pretty please use it!"

That's all I can think of right now off the top of my head. 3 years later and Scribophile is paying my bills and still growing strong.

Obviously things will vary greatly from case to case, but the takeaway is that it takes a lot of hard legwork, persistence, and maybe even cash to seed a site with users. Launching isn't the finish line, it's the starting line.

<comment><USER5> Very cool process - just wondering, when you flipped the switch to the free accounts, did you let people know? What sort of announcement did you create for that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In a mixergy interview, reddit's Alexis talks about how the whole team would post links all day until it had enough traction to move on its own.

Basically "fake it till you make it".

<comment><USER7> This can work in cases where gaining a critical mass of information/content/links is necessary for a critical mass of users, but what about gaining a critical mass for a product or service? It has to be something real that people buy, so faking it wouldn't work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's "chicken-and-egg" problem. You should go read Chris Dixon's post here [http://cdixon.org/2009/08/25/six-strategies-for- overcoming-c...](http://cdixon.org/2009/08/25/six-strategies-for-overcoming- chicken-and-egg-problems/)

</comment><comment><USER3> These from user "keeptrying" in item <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2239780>:

[http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/04/in-the- pursuit-o...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/04/in-the-pursuit-of- traction-have-you-considered-all-verticals.html)

<http://tractionbook.com/>

[http://cdixon.org/2009/08/25/six-strategies-for- overcoming-c...](http://cdixon.org/2009/08/25/six-strategies-for-overcoming- chicken-and-egg-problems/)

[http://viniciusvacanti.com/2011/02/08/how-to-get-your- first-...](http://viniciusvacanti.com/2011/02/08/how-to-get-your- first-1000-users/)

[http://www.quora.com/In-the-shortest-amount-of-time-whats- th...](http://www.quora.com/In-the-shortest-amount-of-time-whats-the-best-way- to-get-100-beta-testers-for-my-new-mobile- startup?__snids__=14203509#ans334713)

<http://betali.st/submit>

</comment><comment><USER9> 37 Signals has followed a "market by sharing" strategy since the beginning.

They have no sales force or advertising and yet manage to create entertaining, educational and valuable content in a variety of formats that gets spread throughout the web and garners them valuable distribution.

The idea is to share everthing that's in and around your domain. For instance, a small web design shop could create content on the following topics:

* How to write a killer proposal * How to close sales * Design tips for small businesses * Mobile strategy for small businesses * Is Groupon worth it? * Web site tips * etc

Most businesses will never achieve the reach that 37 Signals has - for obvious reason. Not all of us could invent Ruby on Rails. However, I think every small business and startup can implement the strategies used by 37 signals - <USER2> everything, including your secret sauces and recipes just like chefs do, and you'll increase reach and decrease user acquisition costs.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is actually a lot easier if you have a specific niche as per your example.

Without a niche, the whole world is your target and you will not have any good place to market to.

With a niche you are able to clearly say that you have a target market and then constrain your activities to just attracting them.

When I started a fixed gear cycling forum I didn't really know anyone, so I spent time researching where they hung out, and understand the problems with the tools that they already used. When I finally pitched my product to them it was by then as a friend rather than a cold-call, and they already knew me and I they... it wasn't enough to make revenue on day one, but it was the start of a snowball effect as they each invited others.

Niches are good. If you have one look to where those people already hang out... in the real world as well as virtually.

</comment><comment><USER11> Do not be ashamed of asking such a question. It's actually the #1 question that most entrepreneurs face once they are done coding. They suddenly discover that by and large, the world doesn't know and doesn't care about their site.

So allow me a meta question: I was just working on putting together a social media panel on how to gain traction, for the next Founder Conference. Who do you think would contribute most to such a panel?

Would you like a format where 4 entrepreneurs from the audience get coached, live, by the panelists? I think this would avoid dull presentations with no concrete actions.

Apologies for the plug. Current program is at <http://founderconference.eventbrite.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> If I understood the question correctly, how about using 4 recent start-ups that have gained significant traction and have the audience question them on how they did it?

<comment><USER11> Hum... That's kind of already included because most of the other speakers are succesful entrepreneurs, and they share their stories. But it always sounds easier in hindsight, so I was thinking that by using real testcases of startups that didn't take off yet, you'd understand the challenges better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Test cases would be very good. I've attended many events myself, Techcrunch50 being the last one and the questions that I ask here have helped me more because I get to ask the same people that have gone through the issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm exactly in the same boat right now. I have a great startup <http://UpOut.com>. I can tell you what we're trying right now:

1) Email sign up form (200+ users signed up with 60+ so far on the "Submit an Activity") 2) Funny videos about us (first one is posted) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSZMn-s3NZs> 3) Email every blog out there big and small to see if they're interested in covering when you launch. 4) Hiring people to write initial content. 5) Giving presents to advocates and good users of our beta.

We're trying everything right now to push it and get it viral. Any other suggestions anyone?

<comment><USER13> Nice work there on UpOut.com, congrats. To increase conversions, you might want to consider pulling an IP to geolocation thingie on the home page and say something (subtly) like Hi, welcome from <City>, <Country>. -HTH

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> on the web there are 3 basic user sources: search, social nets, news sites.

search requires lots of good content; if you are using large dbs as raw material are adding real value on any scale a long tail search strategy will make sense. no campaigning just make sure google can read your site and you have good stuff.

social will work if a dialogue between users is intrinsic to your product. a virus will take hold if you make a good facebook experience.

either of these are added to a more important factor: your users ongoing experience. this will not only create viral opportunities but will make all of your efforts additive.

save the news for last, once the others work you will be a news story effortlessly.

</comment><comment><USER13> While this does not answer your current question, I guess it could be of some use to you:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2232698>

</comment><comment><USER15> There are a few links gathered here about chicken and egg problems:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2126209>

Edit:

I will add that I was looking for similar info for a variety of reasons but I seem to suck at starting these threads. Some of my reasons: A) I have a number of tiny email lists that I can't seem to jumpstart and it annoys/frustrates me especially because B) I have a history of turning existing lists/forums from tiny little flames to bonfires of traffic, attracting wildly larger numbers of users C) I've wondered if there is a means to monetize that last talent and D) I have some websites that I want to grow and am not getting there.

Well, that last point is a little more complicated than that. I debate whether or not to grow them or just move on to something new. I have a long history of being very controversial, usually without meaning to me. I have spent a lot of time working on how to not get such strong (negative) reactions and part of the outcome has been that it has kind of left me afraid to say anything. I belong to some lists where I actively discourage the strong fan-fare type reactions and it seems to have left people not knowing how to talk to me at all, so people mostly don't, like they are afraid or something. I remain stuck, not knowing how to effectively move forward.

Thanks for posting this question. You obviously have more talent for asking a "good" question than I have.</comment>


Verified compilation of CakeML into WebAssembly [slides] [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://lorenz.leutgeb.xyz/paper/cakeml-wasm-viennajs-beam.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Lorenz Leutgeb at the JavaScript meetup in Vienna (video): [https://youtube.com/watch?v=qRkxbWRJQyc](https://youtube.com/watch?v=qRkxbWRJQyc)</comment>


Tweet crashes Mac Twitter client - <AUTHOR> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/02/you-doom-us-all-to-inhuman-toil-for-the-one-whose-name-cannot-be-expressed-in-one-hundred-forty-characters/ <comment><USER2> The offending tweet content:

          ه҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈ͫͬͩͮͨͪͯͥͥͫͪͧͣͯͪͨͣͥͬͪ ҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈ͪͥͨͪͫͬͭͮͯͥͤͣͥͨͪͧͣͯͬͪ ҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈ͪͨͪͫͬͩͮͯͥͨͣͥͫͪͧͣͯͥͬͪ

Edit: I've narrowed it down to the following byte sequence. I can't seem to remove any of the characters without it no longer crashing:

        00000000  d9 88 d2 88 cd a5 cd a8  cd aa cd af 20 d2 88 d2  |............ ...|
        00000010  88 d2 88                                          |...|
        00000013

Hixie's unicode decoder says this is:

        U+0648 ARABIC LETTER WAW character (و)
        U+0488 COMBINING CYRILLIC HUNDRED THOUSANDS SIGN character (҈)
        U+0365 COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER I character (ͥ)
        U+0368 COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER C character (ͨ)
        U+036A COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER H character (ͪ)
        U+036F COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER X character (ͯ)
        U+0020 SPACE character
        U+0488 COMBINING CYRILLIC HUNDRED THOUSANDS SIGN character (҈)
        U+0488 COMBINING CYRILLIC HUNDRED THOUSANDS SIGN character (҈)
        U+0488 COMBINING CYRILLIC HUNDRED THOUSANDS SIGN character (҈)

<comment><USER3> Interesting on chrome Version 24.0.1312.57 the tab crashes when i try to view the tweet but not here.

Can someone explain what is happening and why the tweet is affecting the tab and this post does not?

In the end both just render unicode characters. And it looks like only Firefox is able to display it correctly on OSX 10.8.

<comment><USER4> Chrome uses OS X's CoreText for rendering the tab titles, but uses its own text rendering engine for the site body. CoreText is the one that crashes on that unicode.

<comment><USER5> And apparently Twitter puts the content of a tweet in the <title> tag if you are on the page for a single tweet. Surprised that doesn't cause more problems.

<comment><USER6> > And apparently Twitter puts the content of a tweet in the <title> tag if you > are on the page for a single tweet.

Nope, Twitter uses a shortened, ellipsized version of the tweet as <title> ... </title>. Still, if there's Unicode in the shortened version, it might have the same outcome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is the tweet in html character entity form:

      ه҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈ͫͬͩͮͨͪͯͥͥͫͪͧͣͯͪͨͣͥͬͪ҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈ͪͥͨͪͫͬͭͮͯͥͤͣͥͨͪͧͣͯͬͪ҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈ͪͨͪͫͬͩͮͯͥͨͣͥͫͪͧͣͯͥͬͪ

<comment><USER8> Would you mind indenting that two spaces so it shows up

      like this

rather than breaking the page layout?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> And unfollowing only solves the problem until someone in your stream retweets it.

So I retweeted it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Rendering any typeable character(s) should never crash any engine... ever. That said, unicode seems to be the last frontier for the non-viral spread of glitches.

I'm somewhat reminded of this : <http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454>

</comment><comment><USER11> It also crashes Chrome's current tab on OSX: <http://imgur.com/vRn6Qid>

<comment><USER12> Weird, not for me. No crash with Chrome 24.0.1312.57 on OSX 10.6.8.

<comment><USER11> I'm using 24.0.1312.57 on OSX 10.8.2. Perhaps it is a Lion/Mountain Lion thing.

<comment><USER13> I'm using Mountain Lion as well, and no crashes.

<comment><USER14> Windows 7 - Google Chrome 24.0.1312.57m

It's a little laggy, but it's rendering okay. Might be an OSX-localised issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For at least one application, the crash is in:

        0   libvDSP.dylib                 	? + 117458
        1   com.apple.CoreText            	TRun::TRun(TRun const&, CFRange, TRun::SubrangingStyle) + 850
        2   com.apple.CoreText            	CTGlyphRun::CloneRange(CTRun const*, CFRange, TRun::SubrangingStyle) + 142
        3   com.apple.CoreText            	TLine::SetLevelRange(CFRange, unsigned char, bool) + 162
        4   com.apple.CoreText            	TLine::SetTrailingWhitespaceLevel(unsigned char) + 70
        5   com.apple.CoreText            	TRunReorder::ReorderRuns(TBidiLevelsProvider const&, TLine&) + 122
        6   com.apple.CoreText            	TTypesetter::FinishLineFill(TLine&, double, double) const + 142
        7   com.apple.CoreText            	CTTypesetterCreateLine + 131

I'm not familar enough with CoreText internals to guess what's going wrong, though. :)

</comment><comment><USER16> Is it simply zalgo text? <http://eeemo.net/>

</comment><comment><USER17> Is this a mountain lion issue or does this affect lion and SL as well?

<comment><USER12> Not seeing any crashes on 10.6.x ("Snow Lion") here.

<comment><USER18> It's "Snow Leopard". Apple isn't running low enough on cats to have to resort to mythological ones just yet ;-)

<comment><USER12> Hah, you are of course correct. I can never keep the order of OSX cats straight, so I had to look up which one 10.6.x was. But then I typed it out wrong even after doing so!

<comment><USER17> Unfortunately SL,L,ML doesn't suffice because Leopard (10.5) is also L :/

Though it should be noted that there is no other version that starts with 'S' ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone else see something funky at the top most comments?

<comment><USER20> I do. Some justaposition of random chars. I'm on an iPad, what's your machine?

<comment><USER21> I see it on my Macbook in Chrome running on Mountain Lion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ok, I narrowed down what kills Chrome.

minimalist example:

      data:text/html;charset=utf-8,
%D9%88%20%D2%88%D2%88%D2%88

It seems to be a problem with utf-8 vs. unicode + Times New Roman.

tested on: Chrome 24.0.1312.57 | OS x 10.8.2

Edit: also works with other fonts for example Arial

</comment><comment><USER23> Crashes Chrome on Mac (only the tab, not the whole process). Of course retweeted it!

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm sure they'll have a bugfix release out soon to fix this.

Nah, just kidding.

</comment><comment><USER25> Retweeted, of course.

</comment><comment><USER22> Really interesting, played around with it locally and it just kill two random neighboring tabs, while not effecting others.

Chrome 24.0.1312.57 | OS x 10.8.2

</comment><comment><USER26> No crash on either Chrome or Firefox on Arch Linux.

</comment><comment><USER27> Yeah my twitter client is crashing now when I switch to another account that's already logged in.

</comment><comment><USER28> This twitter account and tweet displays fine on TweetBot for iOS, but causes lag when scrolling.

</comment><comment><USER29> How do you type this on a Mac?

<comment><USER30> You could turn on "Unicode Hex Input" in System Preferences > Language & Text > Input Sources and type in the unicode characters one at a time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is crashing nightly webkit as well, so it is likely an issue there.

</comment><comment><USER32> Crashing for me too .. can't open Twitter.app ...

OS X 10.8.2 (12C60)

</comment><comment><USER33> It also crashes Sublime Edit when pasted.

</comment><comment><USER34> firefox 18.0.2 on osx seems to survive...

<comment><USER35> Though it does do unholy things to the tab/window title... :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> correct me if i'm wrong, but somebody is working right now to use this bug in some piece of malicious code...

</comment><comment><USER37> Aaaand i locked myself out of twitter.

</comment><comment><USER38> No crash on Chromium with Arch Linux

</comment><comment><USER39> Doesn't crash Tweetbot or Safari.

</comment><comment><USER40> Also crashes Tweetbot on the Mac

<comment><USER41> If it's a CoreText bug, which is sounds like it is, it's going to impact any iOS or OS X app that uses Core Text for rendering. That's pretty much everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Doesn't crash Safari on 10.8.2

</comment><comment><USER43>
ه҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈ͫͬͩͮͨͪͯͥͥͫͪͧͣͯͪͨͣͥͬͪ ҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈ͪͥͨͪͫͬͭͮͯͥͤͣͥͨͪͧͣͯͬͪ ҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈ͪͨͪͫͬͩͮͯͥͨͣͥͫͪͧͣͯͥͬͪ

Cool.

.

.

Edit: Apparently it is only the unicode

>ه҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈ͫͬͩͮͨͪͯͥͥͫͪͧͣͯͪͨͣͥͬͪ ҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈ͪͥͨͪͫͬͭͮͯͥͤͣͥͨͪͧͣͯͬͪ ҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈ͪͨͪͫͬͩͮͯͥͨͣͥͫͪͧͣͯͥͬͪ>ه҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈ͫͬͩͮͨͪͯͥͥͫͪͧͣͯͪͨͣͥͬͪ ҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈ͪͥͨͪͫͬͭͮͯͥͤͣͥͨͪͧͣͯͬͪ ҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈ͪͨͪͫͬͩͮͯͥͨͣͥͫͪͧͣͯͥͬͪ>ه҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈ͫͬͩͮͨͪͯͥͥͫͪͧͣͯͪͨͣͥͬͪ ҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈ͪͥͨͪͫͬͭͮͯͥͤͣͥͨͪͧͣͯͬͪ ҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈҈ͪͨͪͫͬͩͮͯͥͨͣͥͫͪͧͣͯͥͬͪ

.

.

.

How is this possible?

<comment><USER44> Your post corrupts the rendering of this page on my iPad (4 iOS 6).

<http://s20.postimage.org/6athqkm3h/image.jpg>

<comment><USER43> I know I see the same on Windows and OSX. Apparently it has something to do with Unicode scripts.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Script_(Unicode)>

Edit: It is slightly different looking on Win7.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> should it be considered as a new form of attack ? utf attack , or utf malware ( that's a question ).</comment>


Ask YC! What can I do to prepare myself to start a company. - <AUTHOR>

I believe that my career at a big software company is coming to an end. I am still a valuable member of the team that I work in and totally not motivated by the day to day job. I have several pet and personal projects that I work on at nights and weekends to keep my startup hopes alive.
I've dreamed about starting my own company for the last 10 years and that's the only single thought I carry with me every day, day in and day out.
I've recently visited a start-up in Los Angeles (where I live) for a job opportunity and I came back with the feeling that I can do a better job than what the founders were upto.
I am technical (software architect at my company) and can work on my own thing. It's just that currently I do not have any projects that I am passionate about.
My question for you guys and for which I need advice is:
I have 3 weeks of vacation that I cannot take and travel (my wife's work cannot give her vacation).
How can I best use it to start something on my own.
1) Work on a project 2) Travel locally, meet with fellow entrepreneurs and learn. 3) Attend seminars.
What would you think would be the best way to spend my time before I quit this job and start something.
Regards, Pras <comment><USER2> 4) Short answer: make something people want so much that they would rather have your product than their money.

Long answer: Ignore other entrepreneurs and start looking for customers. What you want to do is get face time whenever feasable. Find out how they can possibly get by without your great system and do your best to determine where that solution is letting them down or making them suffer. Adjust your idea accordingly and present it to them. There's usually some politics involved in any significant purchase so try and find out things like which people really stand to gain and lose when your customers adopt your product. Then try and find ways that will turn the losers into winners. Be sure and validate your assumptions about who the decision makers are for the kind of product you're planning by finding out what else those people bought into or vetoed in the past. Stay focused and do your best to really verify the market for your system is there.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. Network extensively. Not just with fellow tech entrepreneurs -- you should also make friends with the local small business community in general. They've done this the hard way, they've been where you'll be, and they have useful friends.

2\. Scratch an itch. If you can build a product yourself, you're in better shape then most of the funded startups out there. If there's something you want to do online, the odds are that you can both a) do it right, and b) find enough people on the the internet who also think that you're doing it right to make some money.

3) Figure out how to cut your expenses to the bone, now. Ideally, and this may be tough in LA, adjust your lifestyle down to the point that you and your family can live on your wife's salary. Sock the money away somewhere you won't touch it, but that there won't be tax consequences if you do.

4) Get laid off. Ok, that's a reach, but trust me, there's nothing quite like walking out the door with your finances already in order, your vacation paid out and severance in the bank, and still qualifying for unemployment to be able to bootstrap a startup.

</comment><comment><USER4> Advice given to me during my first startup by a very successful entrepreneur: To succeed, you have to be able to kill a puppy. Don't just think "yeah, I can kill a puppy," but imagine yourself holding a puppy underwater until it stops breathing.

The person dispensing this advice was not talking literally, of course. Starting companies that last until they succeed often means making tough decisions. The kinds of decisions that impact people's well being and future -- and not always in a positive way in the short term. It often means saying "No!" more than saying "Yes."

I was never able to imagine myself killing a puppy, but even going through that process and realizing that I couldn't do it taught me something about who I am and the kind of leader I wanted to be, which was the real purpose of the exercise.

<comment><USER5> Wise advice. Some of the things you have to do to succeed -- firing dud employees, saying no to early acquisition offers, telling girlfriends that work is more important than them -- are at least as hard as drowning a puppy.

Maybe the next round of YC interviews should have a qualifying event requiring a big tub of water and a trip to the humane society.

<comment><USER6> A better example might be shooting a terminally wounded horse or something. Killing a puppy for no reason is just messed up and _drowning_ it is really messed up.

<comment><USER7> If you are going to kill a puppy for no good reason, drowning is a relatively humane way to do it. Once you're at the killing a puppy for fun stage in your decisionmaking, most of the fucked up has already happened. Drowning doesn't make it more fucked up.

It's not like someone is gonna say "you killed that puppy for no reason. But you really crossed the line with drowning."

I can think of many cases where drowning would be a preferable alternative to other modalities of needless puppy murder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I left my job at IBM a year ago to start a company. For several years before that I did many things to prepare: brainstormed ideas with friends, built prototypes, did online and market research...

However, the only things that have since proven useful are: 1) Network: through the network I developed before I left IBM, I secured contract work in lean times and introductions that have now resulted in investment. 2) Save money: has helped hugely in lean times. 3) Hand in my notice. A necessary step!

Having said that, to answer your question well, we would need a better understanding on why you have dreamed of starting your own company for 10 years but this has not yet happened.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair question as to why I've been dreaming about a startup for long and not started yet. I was employee #3 at a decently funded startup in bay area from 2000 to 2002. That startup failed and I needed to take care of visa issues before I could do something on my own.

Any tips on networking with entrepeneurs? Los Angeles area is not so hot when it comes to tech meetups.

thanks

<comment><USER9> I am in a similar boat, and simply have started going to the events I can. Where I live there is not much happening.

Ultimately you reap what you sow, so with this in mind I select the key events and make the time and effort to go there and engage with people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Make sure you have at least 6 months expenses set aside.

Find a customer with his hair on fire with a problem you'd like to solve.

Hack away.

<comment><USER11> Read and re-read and then print out and frame this poster's words, it's solid gold:

"Find a customer with his hair on fire..."

You can't just follow a whimsical idea you "think" might be relevant. You want to find a market where people are hurting. Imagine someone with their credit card out of their wallet tapping it against their screen, frustrated that they can't find someone to give their money to.

Sell stuff to that person. I've been that person about a half-dozen times this week. Your challenge is to figure out how you can determine what I was searching for. (Or what the masses were searching for.)

<comment><USER12> > "I've been that person about a half-dozen times this week."

Easier still is to just notice when you are that person and then solve that problem. Whenever I find myself frustrated with something, that tends to be the most interesting (and possibly lucrative) idea.

If your own hair is on fire, then chances are someone else on the internet is suffering from the same affliction, and is willing to pay you for solving it.

Solving your own problem is much easier than trying to guess what someone else's problems are, and you are more likely to stick with it since you can be your own user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Definitely 1), but a combo of all three (and others suggested here). You really answered your own question

> "How can I best...start something on my own" ? A - Start something!

but if you want some more encouragement and guidance along the way, you'll find it here.

There were some good suggestions to a similar question made here <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=183128> that you should read as well.

</comment><comment><USER14> Get into a place financially where you can take some risks. One of the biggest things that will stop you from being an entrepreneur is you own bills. Essentially, you'll be able to work on your own projects for as long as you wish as long as your own personal finances don't implode.

After you have some saving built up and some room to roam financially, go ahead and do your own thing.

</comment><comment><USER15> Go find someone who could be your co-Founder(s). It takes two to sustain a fire and a third to light them.

</comment><comment><USER16> join someone else's startup that you are passionate about</comment>


If the FCC had regulated the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/2010/12/if_the_fcc_had_regulated_the_internet.html <comment><USER2> Does anyone else remember "Comcast Searchlight"? It was a slightly interactive cable channel, with a small selection of advertisers that Comcast had somehow duped into paying money to be on "Searchlight". That's what the Internet would look like.

The Internet wasn't a net gain - we lost Usenet, that was a shame, but Tragedy of the Commons rolls on. Prodigy, CompuServe and Delphi might still be around, making a small amount of money for whatever Immoral MegaCorp owns them.</comment>


Negative Income Tax - <AUTHOR> http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/NegativeIncomeTax.html

<comment><USER2> This is politically impossible because politicians would lose too much power and influence.</comment>


Benchmarking Phoenix vs. Rails vs. Sinatra vs. Express vs. Martini - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mroth/phoenix-showdown <comment><USER2> Elixir is Erlang with some Ruby-like syntactical sugar that vanishes when you look very close at it but makes the transition very easy. It's not like moving to Erlang or Haskell or OCaml coming from procedural languages.

I have experience with Sinatra and Rails and I did a small project with Elixir and Phoenix in September. My bet before looking at the benchmarks was Phoenix >> Sinatra > Ruby, and that's the way it turned out to be. I was curious about how Martini and Node would compare.

That said, I enjoyed developing with Phoenix and it's really similar to Rails in its structure. The differences are about having views+templates (decorator pattern) instead of Rails' plain views (which would be Phoenix's templates) and having first class handlers for websockets. The developers of Phoenix answered quickly to all my questions and to the issues I opened on GitHub (it's still 0.x software in heavy development).

Anyway I still can't use it to replace Rails in the projects I do for my customers. There many reasons for that, some about Phoenix and some about me.

1) There aren't enough developers and it won't be wise for a customer to become too dependent from me (or any other developer)

2) There isn't an ecosystem comparable to the Rails one yet. Example: it can take forever to develop a replacement for all the basic functionality a Rails developer gets for free from a gem like devise (everything that revolves around authentication).

3) There might be many useful tools from the Erlang world but it takes time to learn them and become decently productive with Erlang and Elixir. How to make decent money while going back so many years productivity-wise? Obviously this applies to any transition to any ecosystem.

4) Performances usually don't matter at all: most servers have to sustain only low loads and Rails is good enough for that. In 20 years I probably had to work with only two web applications were speed really mattered. One was done with Java, the other one was PHP+Java and it was constrained more by the db than by the frontend. However I would consider Elixir right now for any heavily concurrent server, let's say a game server with thousands of players.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Latency (ms): 4.54 Consistency (σ ms): 1.75

That is not to be underestimated. Many frameworks will provide better throughput but consistent low latency is harder to do and Erlang's BEAM VM does it. It is really a marvel of engineering and has been battle tested for decades.

<comment><USER4> Yep. This is a very important metric to keep in mind. It gives you a sense of what you might expect under heavy load.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For the ones surprised by Go's performance, remember that Martini in known to be slow as it uses heavily reflexion.

</comment><comment><USER6> Gin, a Go web framework similar to Martini, would probably performs 10 times better. Since the only purpose of using Martini is because it has a similar style than Phoenix, I would suggest changing the framework to Gin or another Go framework since Martini is not the only framework available.

</comment><comment><USER7> I would love to see openresty in there too.

</comment><comment><USER8> I feel like these benchmarks always put rails in a tough spot. Let's choose bare bones frameworks and compare it to a fully loaded framework. Oh wow, the bare bones ones are faster?! I'd be concerned for them if they weren't.

<comment><USER9> Elixir's goal is _not_ to be a micro framework. Perhaps it does less than Rails now but its philosophy seems to be more similar to Rails than Sinatra, see talk from the creator [http://www.confreaks.com/videos/4132-elixirconf2014-rise- of-...](http://www.confreaks.com/videos/4132-elixirconf2014-rise-of-the- phoenix-building-an-elixir-web-framework).

<comment><USER10> And we're already seeing people mixing up Elixir with Phoenix...just like Ruby and Rails. Good sign. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> reminds me of [http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/](http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Martini is slow, try again with Negroni which is the new lib by the author of Martini.

<comment><USER13> Aren't they quite different creatures, though? It's clear that language is not the only determining factor, since Sinatra is so much faster than Rails, and the Node example is so much faster in a cluster configuration. If the experience of programming for Sinatra, Phoenix, and Martini are very similar, it's fair to compare them (though maybe benchmarks may not be super useful, given that the database layer is likely to be the bottleneck in most large site deployments rather than simple routing and other stuff being compared here). If Negroni is very different (I don't know that it is, but a brief perusal of the site for Martini and the github for Negroni indicates very different experiences) then it's possibly no more useful a comparison than Rails to Phoenix.

<comment><USER14> Plus isn't Negroni made to specifically be more about middleware than a fully- featured framework?

If you say use Negroni, you might as well say use net/http (which is fair enough, since it's a low-level framework in itself).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how koa would fare.

<comment><USER9> Probably a bit slower than the express example as ES6 generators cannot be optimised the same way than callbacks can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Martini is not a good reflection on Go's performance (no pun intended). If you want a Go benchmark of a minimalistic framework, use Gorilla mux or even Beego

<comment><USER17> Also check out Gin which is very lightweight and performant with a great API.

[https://github.com/gin-gonic/gin](https://github.com/gin-gonic/gin)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is elixir just a different syntax for erlang, or are the semantic differences? Their website doesn't seem to make it very clear.

<comment><USER10> Elixir makes a lot of the syntax of Erlang (derived from Prolog) simpler and more familiar to people working from, say, a Ruby background.

It adds better support for UTF8, better metaprogramming tools for declaring custom constructs, a standard library for things like collections and streams, proper default setup for some use of OTP patterns, and various other things. It adds a few sane default conventions for things like documentation, testing, and private/public visibility in modules.

It in turn transpiles to Erlang, so has all the same performance characteristics.

<comment><USER19> Is it therefore possible to use Erlang libraries in an Elixir application, or to "drop to Erlang" in places where it could be advantageous?

<comment><USER20> Erlang and Elixir can call each other with no overhead.</comment></comment></comment></comment>