The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/magazine/201203/burt-helm/a-silicon-valley-tale-of-humiliation-and-revenge.html <comment><USER2> It seems to me that the lesson to learn here is to be careful about agreeing to vesting. Pre-series A, the three founders owned most [1] of a company which had a $6M pre-money valuation and was "on track to hit $1M in revenue" for the year. Post-series A, they each owned less than 3% of the company outright, with the rest of their shares vesting over four years [2]. What sort of idiot takes a deal which reduces them from owning stock valued at $1.5M to owning stock valued at $300k and an employment contract which gives them $300k/year of stock if they stay at the company?

Obviously if you're running out of runway, you take whatever terms you can get, since your company is worthless if it goes bankrupt; but if your company is profitable and your only concern is about allowing it to grow faster, why the heck would you take a deal which is practically begging your investors to fire you?

[1] We're not told how much Cambrian Ventures took, but for $250k it presumably wasn't a huge amount. I'm going to arbitrarily guess 25%.

[2] Based on the way the numbers work out, I'm guessing they kept 20% of their stock outright and gave back the remaining 80% to be four-year vested. This fits with the fact that the company was about a year old when they took the funding.

<comment><USER3> I don't know... You should probably subject everyone to vesting everyone at incorporation - to keep people from ditching early with a huge slug of equity. Good investors know this, and will often rightfully insist on some sort of vesting reset - depending on circumstances. It doesn't make you an idiot to take that deal. It makes you a part of the VC machine. It's just how it works.

That said, I've seen people raise (smaller amounts) of money without any vesting provisions at all (i.e. the founders owned their shares outright). That, to my way of thinking, makes the investor the idiot.

EDIT: I don't mean to imply that resets are a given. Only that they make sense in certain situations, both for founders and investors. There is no "standard", but there are "ways things are often done" for a reason.

<comment><USER4> Our series A investors wanted vesting and we said no. They were cool with it. Vesting for founders is insane. Never accept it. Vesting for execs is mandatory and has saved me once already, ironically because our investors demanded it.

Once again I'm surprised at how very very few founders have a thorough knowledge of what they're signing up for and how to get what they want. It's your company. Act like it. You don't need permission and nothing is "standard". Also think hard before you get into bed with A level VC's and angels and make sure you are on your A game because the worlds most skilled investors come with a heavy premium.

If you're bringing real value, there's nothing wrong with saying no.

<comment><USER5> Wow, disagree. Team of 3 founders, no vesting, one walks in month 6, the others stay for 4 years, build company; in the end, all three are compensated the same way.

That's a terrible way to allocate equity.

Resetting the vesting clock to zero at funding sounds insane, but if you need the money, the people offering it do set the terms. I know a lot of people who've gotten institutional VC rounds for companies; I believe all of them vested. You're right that it probably can't hurt to push back.

<comment><USER2> I think the point you're trying to get at here is the same as what I was saying: Vesting should occur over the same time period as the vestees are making a significant contribution to the company. The situation when a company is founded (founders will be building it in the future, and vesting is appropriate) is completely different from the situation where a profitable and rapidly-growing company takes investment (founders have already made a large contribution, and vesting is either inappropriate or should be limited to a relatively small proportion of their shares).

<comment><USER5> That is part of my point.

The other half of my point is that in some transactions, "should" and "fair" don't matter. Either the terms make sense for them, or they don't. Terms that make sense aren't fair? Can't reasonably accept them? Ok. No deal.

VCs are professional deal makers. They can't code, they can't round HTML corners, they can't even write copy. Their one skillset is optimizing the problem of allocating other people's money in small companies for optimal return.

Parent commenter is right in that you should push back and negotiate as hard as you can. If you're a better bet than any of the 10 other prospects they're prepared to fund instead of you, you might win. Otherwise, nope. But there's no sense getting angry about it; nobody can reasonably say that a venture capitalist is _obligated_ to fund anyone, on any terms. The sole moral obligation of a VC is to obtain the maximum return for their limited partners. Some of them bend over backwards to try to make things better for company "operators"; in a very reasonable way of looking at things, the VCs who do that may be the ones who are acting unethically.

<comment><USER2> _The other half of my point is that in some transactions, "should" and "fair" don't matter._

I'll give you "fair", but I think "should" has a very real meaning: If for every deal X which does not have property P there is a deal X' which does have property P such that for every participant utility(X') >= utility(X), then the participants should negotiate a deal with which has property P. To take an example I ran into recently: You should never simultaneously buy a life annuity and life insurance (on average they cancel each other; but you have to pay two risk premiums).

This may sound trivial, but it's useful for recognizing dishonest actors: If someone wants a deal which doesn't have the properties you think it should have, their utility function isn't what you think it is. In the above example, if your financial advisor is trying to convince you to buy both a life annuity and life insurance, it tells you that they're thinking about the commissions they can earn, not about optimizing your finances.

 _Some [VCs] bend over backwards to try to make things better for company "operators"; in a very reasonable way of looking at things, the VCs who do that may be the ones who are acting unethically._

I agree: They're sacrificing the current fund's returns (by making deals which are suboptimal for them) in order to improve their reputation (a personal benefit) and allow themselves to get better deals in the future (thereby improving future funds' returns).

An angel can spend his money to be your friend. A VC shouldn't spend his clients' money to be your friend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did anyone else get the impression that this guy is a major slime ball? I'm sure YouSendIt has issues at the top, and it does sound like Kumaran may be a little glory hungry.

But when you happily engage in vengeful DDOS attacks, shitty app spam, and flip apparently stolen websites, it paints a pretty clear picture of your character. I know I sure wouldn't want a guy like Shaikh working for me. Not in a million years.

<comment><USER7> Ditto. The guy bled for the company yeah, but the reason why I feel sympathy for him is not because he was kicked out despite working so hard. Even though he might have bled for the company and worked with executives with questionable integrity and technical appreciation, he deserved to be kicked out as soon as he stole the switches and put them up on eBay.

No, the reason why I feel sympathy for this guy is that he was so socially inept that he couldn't figure out how to talk with other people, build business relationships, build team relationships, and manage others without being a two-faced jerk (don't take it personally, Mahler, I want to prove to Koon that I care only about success and will sacrifice anyone for it?). The guy was just too out of his element for the battles he needed to face.

He may have been technically very good, despite being socially awkward, and some jerks may have taken advantage of that. But that in no way justifies or accommodates the bad decisions he made. He's essentially taking the stance that two wrongs make a right, and so I think he has a really poor sense of right and wrong.

<comment><USER8> This is very close to what I feel. While I sympathize with how socially inept he was, he did make those mistakes himself, lack of skill is not excuse.

After all, there are many socially inept people who manage to live happily as they are; there are many more people who made mistake and learned from them.

"The man of pity, must have his share of blame"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really don't get why you'd take money off the table while at the same time growing like crazy _and_ diluting the stock significantly.

Porsches and houses worth well over a million $US within 6 months of picking up $250K funding in a year when revenues were _projected_ to hit 1M makes absolutely no sense.

They should have simply matched growth to income and ridden the growth-curve instead of diluting and splurging on luxury goods.

Lots of bad decisions here, including vesting for founders, a culture of blame and so on.

<comment><USER10> Totally agree but this is an unfortunately common behavior. During the dot-com boom many people picked up hugely expensive homes based upon the the perceived value of their shares. We all know how that turned out for most.

Even now I hear of people buying homes way out of their means because they have some stock in the currently hot company of the week that has some assumed paper value.

<comment><USER11> How do you avoid these pitfalls? Just assume and act like you're still poor (or not rich) until you sell your stock?

<comment><USER12> Uh, yes? Spending money you don't have -- I'm not talking about lines of credit here -- is stupid. There's no way to soften it up, it's just a stupid thing to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow. Who would have known this would all happen at a file sharing site like YouSendIt. It makes you wonder about all the stories out there that you'll hear or know about.

A really nice read. Worth every word. I wish everything were written like this. Straight and to the point. Constantly progressing, no BS, no filler. The writing was transparent and didn't get in the way.

</comment><comment><USER14> > _He says his termination agreement prohibited him from contacting them > [other employees]_

That pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the management and board. The clowns probably included a one-way non-disparagement clause as well, which is quite humorous in light of this article.

BTW: Standard etiquette in the valley is for the employees to contact anyone who has just left the company, usually in email from the company, so there is a written record of who initiated contact.

<comment><USER15> The worst company I have ever worked for, Device Anywhere, tried to get me to sign a one-way non-disparaging agreement as a condition on my receiving a 4K severance. I refused.

The CEO was an asshole and was having the company pay for his candy red porsche as well as taking a hefty portion of the sales commissions whilst laying people off due to lack of funds.

I hated that company. Never sign one of these agreements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> 1) Who the fuck were their lawyers?

2) This seems to be the inevitable consequence of third-tier investors, weird family politics, and founders with less than fully developed ethical sense (which is fine; I would expect young founders and first time founders especially to learn somewhat what things are considered ethical, starting from a personal moral framework -- that's what advisors, lawyers, investors, etc. are for).

3) The Mahler character's first instinct (this will end in tears and disaster) perhaps was right; gut instinct is a good check on decisions like that. Necessary but not sufficient.

4) Wow, now I remember what it was like when people still built stuff on windows. Using linux (or bsd) was a huge competitive advantage 1998-2005 or so; I guess like having the Internet was in the early 1990s. Macs for desktop/laptop use became this in the mid-2000s; what is the current unfair advantage held by anyone competent? Maybe the cloud, and devops vs. individual system sysadmin? Single-command deployment?

<comment><USER17> > what is the current unfair advantage held by anyone competent

I hate to say it given how much time we waste here, but it's probably reading Hacker News. People here know about node.js, about client-side MVC frameworks, about MongoDB/NoSQL, and the like. Some of those things we even think of as old hat, from way back in 2010 or 2011. Some of them we think of as trendy and without staying power.

But we actually did take the time to look at these technologies, evaluate them, and reject them -- or sometimes, accept them.

Now think about the guys who still think Java is the standard, who might just now be getting around to learning Ruby...all when Ruby is itself fast becoming Blub and the new hotness is actually node + coffeescript (or a more FP language like Haskell/Clojure/Scala).

That's exactly the equivalent of the guys who ran Windows because they just didn't know any better. For better or for worse, competent hackers read Hacker News.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I can't help at being annoyed at the part where he has a group of programmers churning out 5 iPhone apps a day.

<comment><USER19> Background:

[http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/03/apple-bans-app- stores-3rd-m...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/03/apple-bans-app-stores-3rd- most-prolific-developer/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Oh, how I wish it were mandatory for everyone to include a "view as single page" button, instead of planting a bunch of tiny clickable digits at the bottom.

These days it happens more and more often that I will not read an article if I can't get it into Instapaper.

<comment><USER21> In this case I think that Inc paginated correctly, there are 5 pages, but each page is a decent size (15-20 paragraphs), so it's a good compromise between maximizing ad revenue and annoying readers.

But yes, the next page buttons should be bigger for touchscreen users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Honestly, this whole thing looks like a big clusterfark. Lots of mistakes.

Fundamental to them all is the idea that being "funded" equals "arrival." It doesn't. Revenue and customers equals arrival. Ideally it would be best not to be "funded" at all, since OPM == debt.

<comment><USER14> Yes. The fact that people "celebrate" a funding event is really bass-ackwards when you think about it.

It says that the company couldn't figure out how to grow without bringing in a bunch of financiers, who have a low hit rate (3 go north, 3 go south, 4 turn into the living dead), who provided negative 10 yr returns even with Google in the portfolio, and who take 2-3% + 20% of exit from their own investors.

Definitely an excuse to drink, but not for reasons of celebration.

<comment><USER22> Yay! I'm an indentured servant to a bunch of overstuffed douchenozzles! Umm... wait... (scratches head)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wow what a great example of "the law of attraction" E.G. negative people bring negative things, positive people bring positive things. It was clear from the story that he had serious integrity issues and was not great at dealing with people. When I got to the part where they started buying Porches and 700k houses I was like oh great this is going to go downhill FAST. I think that if you're only in it for the Money/Ego I think you might as well become a Lawyer at least then you're just doing what's expected of you.

</comment><comment><USER24> Ecellent read because it provides an alternate (and ugly) perspective of the often glorified (read techcrunch-ified) world of startups in the Valley.

Shaikh has obviously made some big mistakes but take a minute to feel for the guy. He literally bled for the company to save some money so I can imagine the emotional rollercoaster he must have been on.

Well written piece Inc.

<comment><USER25> I thought the bleeding part was gratuitous pseudo-symbolism. I cut myself fixing the washing machine the other day, but I would never say "I literally bled for the cause of clean clothes."

<comment><USER24> Symbolism or not, I think there's no denying the fact that he worked very hard during the early stages. My point is to highlight the fact that in light of his struggles, I can appreciate his frustrations. While the attacks are not justified, I can at least see the path of events that led to this act.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Great read. I feel for the guy. It was a foolish decision, but I sympathize with his continued struggles and wish he and his family all the best.

<comment><USER27> Can't help but feel some sympathy for him, but it's tempered by the fact that he doesn't see the big deal with attacking servers to bring down a company. Not even going into the whole part of flipping stolen websites and the app spam.

Ethics seems to be more of a problem for him than the social awkwardness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> So, in theory, he is fired for stealing from the company. But then this happens:

"Eventually, after months of negotiation, Shaikh says, he got a $50,000 severance payment. He agreed to sell his 317,000 shares in the company for $73,000, less than a fourth of what they had been worth in the Series A round."

Does this mean the company was uncertain about whether he was really stealing? I don't think it is normal to pay someone a severance payment when they've been fired for good cause. I think one would have to conclude that the company was unsure of how much it could make stick, and therefore paid some small amount simply to make him go away. Or possibly the severance was in exchange for his agreement to sell his shares at a discount? That would make more sense to me.

The FBI was not involved over this incident. Instead the FBI was involved over this:

"So, on a chilly Tuesday morning in December, Shaikh ran a piece of testing software, called ApacheBench, that flooded YouSendIt's servers with traffic. The servers keeled over immediately. Later that day, a sentence appeared on YouSendIt's Wikipedia page: "Looks like the company may be out of business, their site is down." (Shaikh says he didn't write it.)"

The FBI took this very seriously, and got a friend of Shaikh's to wear a wire and get him talking.

I appreciate that the FBI needs to look into any incident where there has been hacking, but it strikes me this cooperation between the FBI and the various corporations is open to abuse.

I once had a bad breakup with a company, and the ending was frightening to me. This was in 2009.

There was a fellow acting as impresario for a startup. He called himself the CEO, though he also ran a small investment firm, and he had multiple investments that he had to keep an eye on.

The goal of the startup was to build something like Quora, but find a way to get people pay for information (they would pay to ask questions).

The CEO lined up 4 investors who put in a total of $100,000 to get the operation going. 4 programmers were hired, including me. 3 of the programmers were remote, and I was in the New York, where the CEO and project manager were. The other 3 programmers were in the USA and Europe.

We worked hard during the spring and early summer of 2009 to get to the point where we could launch.

Half way through the summer, the decision was made to hire an Indian firm to do the development. They were much cheaper. I would be the technical point of contact. We relied less on the programmers in the USA and Europe and more on the team in India. However, we had very serious problems with the quality of the code coming from India. Almost every time something got checked into Subversion, something broke. I raised my concerns to the project manager, and I cc'ed the project manager on several emails to the team in India, where I tried to educate them on the mistakes they were making. I was inclined to get rid of the team in India, although the CEO and the project manager liked how cheap they were. I suggested we find a different company in India. We all knew that firms in India were of uneven quality -- some good and some bad. If you want to hire a team in India, one often has to do a lot of digging to find a good team.

I tried selling the project manager on implementing unit tests and functional tests, and he suggested that we wait till the site was launched. There was an attitude that we could clean things up once we launched.

There was some funny business with the money that I never fully understood. I was working as a contractor. I was billing at the end of each month, and the company had 30 days to pay, so it was a 60 day cycle from start to finish (from the 1st of one month to the end of the next month).

They only paid me for June at the very end of July, which made me wonder about their money. However, the project manager and his wife invited me to their house upstate, and we spent a week working together, and the project manager assured that there was enough money to pay me. They cooked some wonderful meals and it was a pleasant week and we got a lot of work done. At that moment, I thought of the project manager as a friend, and our work relationship seemed very positive. I was single at the time, and his wife said she had a friend that she wanted to set me up on a date with.

Still, I was suspicious about the money, so half way through August I stopped putting in billable hours. I trusted the project manager, but I did not trust the CEO.

As of September 1st and they had not yet paid me for the work I did during July. This was in violation of the work agreements that we had signed.

I demanded to know whether they had the money to pay me. I wrote to the other contractors and asked if they'd been paid. None of them had. Most of them were only owed small amounts. At this point, the company owed me $10,000. I had been the main programmer for most of the summer.

September gave way to October. For awhile they made vague declarations about paying me part of the money. I began to suspect that they had no intention of paying. I found out that they were still using the team in India, and apparently the team in India was being paid.

In November I had my lawyer send them a letter, urging them to send me the money. I notified the other contracts in Europe and the USA of what I was doing.

After that, everything changed. They had their lawyer write up a counter letter that basically said that all of the bugs on the site were my fault. There was a suggestion that I had maliciously tried to undermine the site, and that I had interfered with the team in India and damaged their ability to move the site forward. The CEO was apparently especially angry about the fact that I'd contacted the other contractors in the USA and Europe, and their lawyer's letter referred to this as tortious interference with their contractors.

The purpose of that counter letter was to frighten me, and to some extent it worked. I realized that if I wanted to get my money, it would involve an ugly fight, with a lot of ugly accusations. I gave up the fight.

I never got paid.

After reading this article at Inc, I have to wonder how far the company could have gone, if they had wanted to take a very aggressive approach with me. On the personal level, I could wonder: If they had made accusations to the FBI, would the FBI have investigated me? What would that entail, and would I have the prove the bugs in the code were not my fault? But aside from the personal level, there is the general issue: companies with aggressive lawyers could potentially use these aggressive tactics to get out of paying contractors. I wish that I could have faith that the folks at the FBI are smart enough to avoid being suckered by these companies, but I don't really have such faith.

<comment><USER29> It's not an ugly fight. You file with your labor board. They hold a hearing. There's no lawyers involved. The state will collect a penalty for every day late they were in paying you.

<comment><USER30> > _You file with your labor board._

Excuse my ignorance, but there was no union involved far as I can tell. What does this comment mean?

<comment><USER31> Nothing to do with unions, that's a reference to the state labor board that oversees the labor laws. Basically, if you are someone's employee with an agreement that you will do work for compensated, but then do not receive the compensation, the state can help get your wages.

Here's Colorado's, the states are all similar:

[http://www.colorado.gov/cs/Satellite?c=Page&cid=12493913...](http://www.colorado.gov/cs/Satellite?c=Page&cid=1249391304206&pagename=CDLE- LaborLaws%2FCDLELayout)

<comment><USER32> Since he was a contractor, not an employee, labor laws may not apply.

<comment><USER33> PLus the aspect that he doesn't have citizenship

<comment><USER28> I think WalterBright was responding to what I wrote about my own experience. I think you are talking about the Inc article, where Shaikh lacked citizenship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The takeaway from this for me was:

"The three co-founders would each be left with less than 3 percent of the company."

Yet they hired an advisor to guide them through the raising stage? Is this normal?

</comment><comment><USER35> Single page version.

[http://www.inc.com/magazine/201203/burt-helm/a-silicon- valle...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/201203/burt-helm/a-silicon-valley-tale- of-humiliation-and-revenge_Printer_Friendly.html)

</comment><comment><USER36> This was a good read. I try to read one or two startup horror stories for each startup fairy tale I hear. Though I've not yet considered simply abandoning startup life, so perhaps I should up the ratio? :-p

</comment><comment><USER37> >"Once you break even, to me, that's the best point," he says, "because at that point, you have complete control over your own life."

My favorite line.

</comment><comment><USER38> The real joke is YouSendIt's servers were brought to their knees by running apache benchmark off of one machine.

</comment><comment><USER39> A mixed bag of lessons including hiring, funding and wrestling with inner demons. Enjoyed it.

</comment><comment><USER40> One of the very few looong HN stories i read completely. :) Nice read,feel for that guy.

</comment><comment><USER26> It would make a great screenplay for a tragic comedy (with a happy ending of course).

</comment><comment><USER41> Thanks for the read and ditto on the 5 pages needing to be viewable in just 1 page.

<comment><USER21> The full article is close to 100 paragraphs. Putting that all on one page would intimidate and lose a bunch of readers. Even choosing to put 15-20 paragraphs on a single page makes it a "wall of text" that will put off many readers.

Of course, the real problem is the short attention span of the Internet age but it's hard to fault them for trying to avoid scaring off users.

<comment><USER41> Someone should split test this :D

Half view the pagination version, half view the 1 page version – and see % of the users that actually finish the article.

<comment><USER42> Wrong metric. They should care about the number of ads viewed and the click through rate. And the amount of viral sharing and facebook likes and that kind of stuff. They aren't a charity remember.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Nice read.

</comment><comment><USER44> It would have been valuable to Shaikh if he had someone he trusted who could counsel him to just chill and not shoot himself in the foot. What happened to him at YouSendIt doesn't seem fair to me, but sometimes life is that way. Now he could learn from his experience and give it another go. Good luck to Shaikh and his family.

<comment><USER45> I get the impression from the story that his second wife was trying to give him exactly that sort of counsel, but he didn't listen. If so, the moral of that story is, when someone you trust advises you to just chill and not shoot yourself in the foot, listen to her.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> _(Kumaran recalls telling the investor he couldn't speak because of confidentiality and antidisparagement agreements.)_

Memo: when writing an antidisparagement agreement, the first rule of antidisparagement agreements is that you agree not to disclose the existence of the antidisparagement agreement.

<comment><USER47> In fact couldn't it be argued that admitting that there is an antidisparagement agreement is in fact disparagement because you acknowledge that something happened to cause said agreement to be entered into?

IANAL.

<comment><USER48> I don't think you'd easily win the argument, unless the parties involved generally didn't sign non-disparagement agreements.

I was once laid off from a company that gave me a small (but significant to me) severance check in exchange for signing a non-disparagement agreement. I did jokingly refer to that check as my "hush money", but I had no actual issue with the company or any of my former coworkers. That company did it simply as a matter of course, I imagine to make the laying off process more predictable.

(And I was pretty appreciative of the check itself; between it and my left over vacation days, I made it pretty comfortably to my next position.)</comment></comment></comment>


Zeocode - Make your home address look simple & beautiful and easy to share. - <AUTHOR> http://www.zeocode.com/ <comment><USER2> What does this do exactly? I couldn't figure it out from the comic.

<comment><USER3> Seconded...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Moving from OS X to a remote virtual dev environment - <AUTHOR> I'm currently running a 2013 Macbook Air for mostly ruby web development work. I've been wanting to upgrade for a while but I'm just not that fussed on Apple's latest laptop offerings. As I work from home I don't really need a grunty laptop anymore.
So far I've been managing my Air's 8gb memory limit by running work's dev vm on a headless PC so I'm considering upgrading that PC so it can handle more VMs to try get a fully remote development setup working.
Does anyone have any good advice on a fully remote virtual dev environment?
My big question is how others best to handle working with code remotely on a VM. I know some people who ssh in and vim away but I'd rather work in Sublime if I could. <comment><USER2> I highly recommend the new amazon linux workspaces:

[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-linux- workspaces...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-linux-workspaces/)

You get a full virtual/remote Linux Desktop that works really well. I even access and use it via my iPad.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an interesting option... I'll grab a VM and have a play on that. Thanks</comment></comment>


iCloud Services Down - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/support/icloud/systemstatus/

<comment><USER2> The WSJ was right then! New MBPr is crashing the intertubes! [http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2012/06/11/cios-beware-new- macbook-...](http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2012/06/11/cios-beware-new-macbook-pro- will-be-a-bandwidth-hog/)

Somebody reset the Internet Switch, quick!

</comment><comment><USER3>

<comment><USER4> offtopic: Ok how can one make an empty comment?

<comment> chao- Various unicode control characters do not show up. The list of unicode characters that can be used in an obnoxious manner on internet forums is so long that it is almost impossible to do right.

My go-to is the Cyrillic Millions sign, which is intended for use in bi- directional text. For an example, copy the line below and paste it into a browser text area and try typing off the end:

"This is ".ti od ew woh

<comment><USER4> I can't even copy it, let alone type at the end of it. When i reach a little less than halfway through, it breaks off and selects the other half. This is interesting. I am guessing, there is a hidden unicode character that breaks of the selection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Besides anecdotal evidence, how could I check the status of the service?

EDIT: It seems I wasnt clear enough... How could I check by __myself __if the service is down, if I depend of it...

<comment><USER6> Did you click on the link?

<comment><USER5> And it seems I was not clear enough on my previous comment; How can I test by __myself __the status of the service. I don't know, maybe an API endpoint, what host to ping, something, to be able to discard network connection problems, etc.

<comment><USER7> If an Apple-owned website says that an Apple-owned service is down, I'd take it on faith that the service is down. I wouldn't consider it mere "anecdotal evidence".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


U.S. Reviewing Proposed Design of Miniaturized Nuclear Power Plant - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/13/509673094/miniaturized-nuclear-power-plant-u-s-reviewing-proposed-design <comment><USER2> There are lots of small and medium sized reactor schemes.[1] As of 2014, there were four from the US alone, and 36 worldwide. Nuscale is covered starting at page 80 of that study.

NuScale wants to operate their reactor modules in a water pool, with all the reactors at a site sharing the same pool. If anything goes seriously wrong with one unit, the pool gets contaminated. Then all the units, and the spent fuel pool, are inaccessible, and repair becomes a huge problem.

The only reason NuScale is supposed to be cheaper is optimistic safety assumptions. "The NuScale Emergency Planning Zone (EPZ) is expected to be as near as the site boundary rather than the current 10 miles required by large traditional plants in the U.S." \- IAEA. NuScale's design focuses on emergency core cooling, with their water pool approach. But other things can go wrong. Such as leaks. There's a long history of nuclear reactor leaks.

[1] [https://www.iaea.org/NuclearPower/Downloadable/SMR/files/IAE...](https://www.iaea.org/NuclearPower/Downloadable/SMR/files/IAEA_SMR_Booklet_2014.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Installing partitions in the pool to isolate each reactor should be a very minor expense. They need not even be self-supporting, just watertight enough to prevent mixing.

Builing a larger or more partitioned pool shouldnt even enter into the cost equation imho. Water and concrete are rather cheap given the context.

<comment><USER4> Why have a common pool in the first place? To save the cost of individual pools? That can't be much compared to the overall costs.

More likely you share a common cooling system between reactors. And maybe containment?

<comment><USER3> I think that nuscale approach means there is no cooling system. The reactors are small enough for the pool to passively cool them if so needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It sounds like a neat idea, and potentially safer(?). But I don't understand why they're claiming it'll be cheaper:

> But one company thinks that by going smaller, they could actually make > nuclear power more affordable.

And later in the article:

> The company believes that 570-MW project can be completed for less than $3 > billion. By comparison, a new 1,150-MW reactor at Watts Bar in Tennessee > cost around $4.7 billion and began operation in 2016 after years of delays.

Based on those numbers, the construction cost of the modular reactor system is almost 30% more expensive per MW. Are they anticipating the operational costs to be lower, thus saving money in the long run? But the article claims they're trying to save on the construction costs:

> Companies such as NuScale hope to offset the higher costs by saving on the > cost of construction

Which isn't true, based on the numbers the article quotes.

On a related note, I wonder if refueling these modular would be more difficult/costly because of their smaller size and the submersion design?

<comment><USER6> The savings would likely kick in as they manufactured more and more of the vessels.

<comment><USER5> > The savings would likely kick in as they manufactured more and more of the > vessels.

Maybe, but I would have thought that would have either factored that into the quoted cost estimates, or that they would have said something like "and similar future plants would cost X". (where X is lower).

<comment><USER7> Those cost savings won't be immediate, and will likely have to wait until production facilities are expanded once there are sufficient orders to warrant it. And not just immediate orders, but ones for a few years out as well.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but surely they can make some sort of estimates, depending on quantities, typical economies of scale, etc. Of course, I don't know accurate they'd be in the end, but it shows they've thought about it in more detail than "oh yeah, it'll totally be cheaper later on."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This was described in depth in a recent Nova program called "The Nuclear Option"[1][2]. In it they referenced multiple other more safe methods than the most common type of reactors in use today which use technology designed decades ago. Sodium based reactors were new to me entirely and appear much more safe than existing designs, also capable of using depleted uranium.

Note: I'm not a nuke supporter just a curious guy.

[1]: [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/the-nuclear- option.html](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/the-nuclear-option.html) [2]: [http://www.pbs.org/video/2365930275/](http://www.pbs.org/video/2365930275/)

<comment><USER9> I watched it too and can elaborate a bit on this since I'm in the SFR business (anyone want one?).

When an nucleus fissions, not all the heat comes out at once. Roughly 7% of the energy comes out later, distributed in time as a decaying exponential [1]. The really key safety challenge of nuclear is cooling that after the chain reaction is stopped (because 7% of 3 billion Watts is 210,000,000 Watts). So if the power goes out (like in Fukushima), traditional plants rely on active cooling systems like diesel generators, fuel cells, steam turbines, etc. to run pumps that cool the fuel, preventing the fission products from emerging.

There are some nuclear reactors that can handle the decay heat without active cooling systems. They're mostly low-pressure/exotic coolant systems, including liquid sodium metal, molten salt (FLiBe, NaCl, etc.), molten lead, etc. These can just naturally circulate and dump heat thorough ambient heat exchangers outside. And some gas-cooled Pebble Bed reactors can do it too because their fuel can get hot enough to just conduct it out.

Worldwide, we have by far the most experience with sodium-cooled fast reactors (400 reactor-years). As pointed out in NOVA, two weeks before Chernobyl, the small sodium-cooled EBR-II in Idaho demonstrated station blackout conditions without scram and it just shut itself down and cooled itself.

But sodium metal has a problem. It is quite reactive with air and water, so dealing with it can be an operational challenge. We know how to deal with sodium leaks in sodium-water steam generators (arguably the most "exciting" component in a SFR) and sodium fires, but they can still be expensive. The French SuperPhenix SFR suffered a series of political and weather-related challenges that ended up giving it a terrible operational record. The Japanese SFR Monju has a bad history too with some 10 year outages and whatnot. But EBR-II and FFTF in the US operated fantastically until Bill Clinton finished shutting down their funding following the long slowdown of nuclear research that came after the failed and super-expensive Clinch River Breeder Reactor Project, and the Russians now have the best and only commercial SFRs.

So there's still hope for SFRs as Gen IV nukes. The French are working on a huge program called ASTRID to make a better SFR. The Koreans have KALIMER/PGSFR that's very far along in design. The US has TerraPower's Traveling Wave SFR, the Indians are turning a big one on now, China is operating a sodium-cooled test reactor (CEFR). The Russians are building another awesome SFR test reactor (MBIR, to replace BOR-60) and continue to operate and sell their BN-600/800, etc. series power plants.

[1] [https://whatisnuclear.com/physics/decay_heat.html](https://whatisnuclear.com/physics/decay_heat.html)

<comment><USER10> Great post, now let's cut to the chase: Would you buy a house a raise a family across the street from a 3 billion watt reactor?

<comment><USER11> Yes. (1) because you ask that question, it means land is going to be cheap. (2) my lifetime radiation dose will be lower then if I live anywhere near a coal plant. (3) my respiratory health will be a lot better then if I live anywhere near a coal train line.

(4) you could also argue I'm just saying this because asked - but I live in Sydney with a primary science degree. One of the places I really wanted to work was the Lucas Heights Research Reactor.

<comment><USER12> I'm sorry that I'm off-topic, but let's have a cultural minute here: while you're there, I've never succeded to locate the industries when I lived in Sydney. Does Australia get much of its energy from nuclear? Where are the plants located in NSW? Do you also have some petroleum industries like refineries? I've never seen refinery-type landscape (kilometers of stack chimneys). Do you have industrial landscapes in Australia, like we have in Europe with kilometers of factories, low-income workers, areas which are monitored for huge industrial risks? My question is as much about the geography of NSW as about the industrial sector of Australia.

<comment><USER11> Australia get's literally none of it's energy from nuclear - the Lucas Height's reactor is a research reactor (60% enriched uranium core) which manufactures medical isotopes for our part of Asia and supports research.

We have some of everything, but I can't think of anywhere where I'd say we have long industrial landscapes. NSW is quite agrarian, a fair bit of high tech industry, but you can still live in towns which run near coal transport lines (2um particulates are a big health concern for residents from the dust). I live in Sydney near the center, so it's pretty much all commerce.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nuclear reactors have been used on submarines for decades. McMurdo base in Antarctica was powered by a nuclear reactor for 10 years which ended in the 70s.

<comment><USER14> For comparison, the reactor described here outputs 50 megawatts, and is 15 feet in diameter and 76 feet long (~54,000 cubic feet).

The S6G reactor in Los Angeles class submarines outputs 150 megawatts and is 33 feet in diameter and 42 feet long (~144,000 cubic feet).

<comment><USER15> I'm getting bleary eyed from a day that has gone on too long, but how does something approximately 33x33x42 feet equal 140k ft^3? Same question with the first one too. The cubic-feet measurement is including something else, right? What might that be?

<comment><USER14> Oops...thanks for the catch. Used diameter instead of radius when calculating the volume of each cylindrical object. So, the cubic footage is off...but for both.

So, corrected:

For comparison, the reactor described here outputs 50 megawatts, and is 15 feet in diameter and 76 feet long (~13,500 cubic feet).

The S6G reactor in Los Angeles class submarines outputs 150 megawatts and is 33 feet in diameter and 42 feet long (~35,000 cubic feet).

<comment><USER15> Yeah -- I figured that out after I caught a little shut-eye. If my brain had been operating at all, I would have seen that and not even asked. Sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have seen this company slowly mature over my past 6 years living in Corvallis, Oregon (original location for NuScale). I was excited when I first saw the design and started to look at employment opportunities at the company. At the time, they only were looking for experienced engineers (15+ years) with knowledge of the Nuclear Regulation Commission (NRC).

Even after 6 years, they just now have submitted the application to NRC. It is depressing how much Nuclear has been over-regulated.

<comment><USER17> What makes you think it's more than necessary given the consequences?

<comment><USER18> I think it might be easier to answer that question if you outline which consequences you're most concerned about.

<comment><USER19> A single accident can kill thousands, cause cancer for several hundred thousands more, cost billions of dollars in clean up usually tax payers pay for, nuclear plants have no concept of proper disposing and dismantling a reactor, have byproducts with unacceptable half lives, are potential targets for terror threats, use other harmful chemicals (people like to ignore) etc. etc. etc.

<comment><USER20> Chernobyl-style reactors are a thing of the past, modern ones don't do all that.

Even Fukushima didn't kill anyone, just some contamination that will cause some statistical level of cancer increase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not sure if I've got apples to apples here, but...

This thing fits on the back of a semi truck, and is supposed to be 50 megawatts capable.

The Hooper solar power plant in Colorado's San Luis valley is also 50 megawatt, and spans 320 acres.

Edit: Well, apples to apples for actual "energy density" vs photo voltaic cells. Not making a statement about which is better either...just an interesting comparison.

<comment><USER21> Nuclear power plants have very large "clearing areas" for safety and security reasons. In fact, one of the reasons Elon Musks cites for investing in solar rather than nuclear power is that the power area density is actually comparable. Here's some criticism of that claim, but it agrees that it's within about an order of magnitude (which is impressive given that nuclear is probably dozens of orders of magnitude denser in power at the scale of the reactor).

[https://carboncounter.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/a-book- recomm...](https://carboncounter.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/a-book- recommendation-for-elon-musk/)

<comment><USER22> tyingq lists Hooper at 50MW/320 acres, or 156kW/acre. The Paluel nuclear plant is 5200MW (4x1300MWe reactors) over 400 acres ("160 hectares" according to [https://www.edf.fr/groupe-edf/producteur-industriel/carte- de...](https://www.edf.fr/groupe-edf/producteur-industriel/carte-des- implantations/centrale-nucleaire-de-paluel/presentation)), or 1300kW/acre, so it's within an order of magnitude yes.

As long as we only consider nameplate capacity and ignore capacity factor of course, which greatly favours solar as it has a much lower capacity factor than nuclear. If you factor that in the difference grows by ~4x (PV in dry southern US states has a capacity factor of ~20%, US nuclear plants are around 90%).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> 50 MW is small for all the red-tape necessary to operate a nuke plant. 1500 MW is nice if you're going to need over 1,000 staff. I'm not sure how much headcount they could eliminate with a better design.

<comment><USER24> I'm assuming the plan is that a 15x50MW install isn't going to use 15x the 1x50 personnel and site prep. Otherwise there'd be no way they're viable except for smaller requirement installs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Are thorium plants not viable? I remember hearing so much about them, but nothing ever happened, it seems.

<comment><USER26> The Wikipedia article[1] on thorium reactors lists the following disadvantages (quoted from the article):

\- Breeding in a thermal neutron spectrum is slow and requires extensive reprocessing. The feasibility of reprocessing is still open.

\- Significant and expensive testing, analysis and licensing work is first required, requiring business and government support. According to a 2012 report by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, about using thorium fuel with existing water-cooled reactors, it would "require too great an investment and provide no clear payoff," noting that "from the utilities' point of view, the only legitimate driver capable of motivating pursuit of thorium is economics."

\- There is a higher cost of fuel fabrication and reprocessing than in plants using traditional solid fuel rods.

\- Thorium, when being irradiated for use in reactors, will make uranium-232, which is very dangerous due to the gamma rays it emits. This irradiation process may be altered slightly by removing protactinium-233. The irradiation would then make uranium-233 in lieu of uranium-232, which can be used in nuclear weapons to make thorium into a dual purpose fuel.

/end quote

I do wonder whether some of these issues are significantly different from the problems of uranium fission reactors. The benefits of thorium are huge: can't be used to produce nuclear bomb material; easier to prevent meltdowns; enrichment of fuel not needed.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium- based_nuclear_power#Po...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium- based_nuclear_power#Possible_disadvantages)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> How does this compare to what the Y Combinator backed UPower is doing?

<comment><USER9> I believe UPower reactors (no renamed to Oklo after the spontaneous chain reactions that occurred in Africa 2 billion years ago) are even smaller. My guess from the rename is that they want to make shippable modules that are entirely self-contained, i.e. you just set it down and plug stuff in. Could be useful in very distributed markets. NuScale can ship lots of parts but you still have to build out a big site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> _" NuScale is already partnering with a consortium of Utah utilities to build a 12-module power plant on land in Idaho owned by the U.S. Department of Energy."_ \-- I wonder if they would run all the wires over the border to a giant data center right there on some DoD owned land. :-) [1]

The TRIGA reactors are similar [2] although much smaller. I'm surprised they would share a pool though I'd think having them in separate pools would provide both better encapsulation if something was to go wrong and easier maintenance and disposal.

[1] Actually the NSA's data center is south of the Great Salt Lake so it would be a fairly long run of wires for that.

[2] [http://www.ga.com/triga](http://www.ga.com/triga)

</comment><comment><USER10> When you spend 5 Billion on a reactor how does the cost break down?

R&D, construction, permitting and regulatory?

It's hard to understand why it can't be done less expensively without big safety compromises.

<comment><USER9> Depends on the reactor, but very roughly:

$500M on R&D $3000M on construction $1500M on permitting and regulatory

Construction delays and supply chain issues have been known to bring construction costs way up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder how the energy density of one of these compares to a traditional reactor. That's what I would intuitively correlate with safety. Solar and wind, for example, are very safe mainly because they has such a low energy density.

<comment><USER3> Safety is in the eye of the beholder. Turbines do fail, sometimes with fire and explosions. When so spread outt, hundreds of turbines, forest fire is a risk. A nuke plant, being smaller, can be better covered by safety systems than an expansive wind farm. But the practical differences between the two techs are so great that direct comparison is probably pointless imho.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> You all have heard that we can harness energy from the light of the sun and convert it into electricity[1] with the risk of contaminating the environment which sustains us[2] coming only from the production of the tools to harness that energy from light, right?

Aside from the context of space travel beyond where collecting this underutilized resource, "Light From Stars" is viable, why is this even a conversation?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and_radioactive_incidents)

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm pessimistic that this proposal will go very far in the face of sustained opposition by groups like Greenpeace or Sierra Club. Another tragic remainder of the harm caused by undereducated misdirected environmental activism.

</comment><comment><USER19> Why? This is pure lobbyism.

There is a cheaper, safer and abundant alternative. Solar energy. Just do it already.

<comment><USER32> > McGough says the company envisions the modules also could be used in other > ways. For example, he says, they could be installed near wind turbines as > backup when the wind isn't blowing. Or they could be used by the military to > power bases that need electricity even if the grid goes down. About a dozen > clients in the U.S. and abroad are looking at the technology, he says.

<comment><USER19> Renewables is the way to go. No waste problem, vastly reduced risk. Why bother with this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> With current and foreseeable low cost of natural gas in the USA, nuclear tech will never be economically competitive. In addition, the nuclear industry asks the government to legislate liability caps.

<comment><USER34> Is the foreseeable future greater than 16 years? In 2001, the entire energy sector looked unrecognizable when compared to 2017.

<comment><USER33> Foreseeable until something changes.

Utility companies are making long-term capital expenditure bets in a uncertain political and economic environment. If they can get cheap gas and cheap gas turbines, why would they consider risky, expensive, unproven technologies?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Stop looking at nuclear. (Maybe read up on the nuclear disasters so far and think about that when they install a nuclear power plant in your neighborhood...)

Also, again, why bother?

[https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-much- renewa...](https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-much-renewable- potential-does-the-u.s.-have)

Vote this down all you like, it doesn't change the facts.

<comment><USER9> Nuclear reactors are extremely safe and disasters are very unlikely. Obviously Fukushima and Chernobyl come to mind but so do famous plane crashes. This doesn't mean planes aren't incredibly safe. Net, nukes have saved 1.8 million lives by displacing air pollution deaths.

Nuclear is very small footprint. There is 2 million times the energy in a handful of nuclear fuel than in a handful of fossil fuel. If you got all of your primary energy from nukes (electricity, heat, transportation) as an average american for 80 years, you would require 1.5 soda cans of fuel and generate 1.5 soda cans of waste.

Comparing that to fossil fuels is a non-argument, nuclear is a clear winner. Comparing to renewables is less straightforward, but consider all the manufacturing and process to build out the facilities to harvest all that unbelievable magnitude of wind and solar. Magnets in turbines and semiconductor additives in solar PV have to come from somewhere, and currently scaling to world-scale is nearly infeasible. Once thin-film solar can be done without rare-earths it might become doable, but will still have a huge huge footprint. Now start asking about energy storage. Imagine a northeastern US winter on one of those icy and cloudy cold nights. Now imagine that lasts a week or two. The storage and/or long-distance transmission is unimaginable. In these conditions, nuclear chugs along beautifully, 24 hours a day, rain or shine.

In desert sun with no nearby cooling water, solar kicks ass whereas nuclear is challenged.

Renewables and nuclear are both essential to responsibly power human civilization.

<comment><USER35> I think the problem is the historical fact that cost of negative externalities of nuclear projects don't get built into these projects are borne by tax payers and people with significantly disrupted lives in very short durations. The two big meltdowns Fukushima and Chernobyl have left large areas necessarily depopulated and certainly have raised cancer risks. No one seems to have a realistic end of life plan for nuclear sites and the next generation inherits the problem.

If we mandate nuclear plants buy enough insurance cover to deal with Fukushima/ Chernobyl type disasters, they would likely be completely uncompetitive with other power sources.</comment></comment></comment>


WICG spec: virtual-scroller (virtualized scrolling for the web) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/WICG/virtual-scroller/blob/master/README.md <comment><AUTHOR> As per Chrome Platform Status [1], this is currently in development.

[1] [https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5673195159945216](https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5673195159945216)</comment>


Quantized Exciton Energies in Monolayer WSe2 Under Strong Magnetic Field - <AUTHOR> https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.10.021024 <comment><AUTHOR> >The groundbreaking discovery of an optical version of quantum hall effect (QHE).... QHE is a difference in mechanical voltage that is created when a two-dimensional semiconductor is placed in a large magnetic field. The magnetic field causes electrons to move in such a way that current no longer flows through the entire semiconductor, only on the edges.

[https://phys.org/news/2020-04-first-of-its-kind-discovery- qu...](https://phys.org/news/2020-04-first-of-its-kind-discovery-quantum- technologies.html)</comment>


Chuck Forsberg has died – author of Zmodem - <AUTHOR> http://www.anewtradition.com/obituaries/obituary/12060_Charles_Alton_Forsberg <comment><USER2> My teenage impression of the Kermit and Zmodem protocols, written in the mid 90s:

here's my impression of how kermit works

client: here is byte number 1 server: i have received byte number 1. the checksum was 3. client: i agree that the checksum was 3. server: ok, we're done with byte number 1. client: I agree, we're done with byte number 1. client: here's byte number 2. server: you know, it's not easy being green

now zmodem zmodem goes something like this:

client: I'm gonna send you about 200k now, and you're gonna bend over and take it server: thank you sir! ( … ) server: ok, got 200k, checksum was 523 client: DID I ASK YOUR FUCKING OPINION? server: NO SIR! SORRY SIR!

<comment><USER3> That's Kermit in its very basic version, which is slow but has the advantage of working just about everywhere under extreme constraints. If you have an urge to send data from your C-64 or Tandy CoCo to a Burroughs B5500, there is or was probably a version of Kermit for each that would let you do it. Later Kermits had large packets, sliding windows, and ways to specify what characters needed special encoding.

<comment><USER4> Yep. A properly configured, later version of ckermit was typically as fast or faster than zmodem (at least, as I remember from the mid-1990s).

<comment><USER5> Yeah, but getting Kermit properly configured required the blood of three chickens and a wizard. Z-Modem had sane defaults right out of the box.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of my first contract development jobs came in '96 when a research group in Norway was going to do a demo of their autonomous underwater mapping submersible for some US navy brass. Problem was the tiny tracking boat that was following the submersible on the surface to receive the data (via an accoustic link..) would not hold everyone who was going to be in attendance, so they needed a way to stream the data from the tracking boat to a US navy ship to display it on some Sun workstation there.

For some reason they'd decided the best option was GSM data. 9600bps should be fine - the mapping data feed was about 2400bps. Problem of course was both of these ships would be out in a fjord, far from any cells, and in motion.

So I ended up writing a little proxy that they'd connect to and feed data that'd do automatic redialling and then layered a variant of the zmodem protocol on top of that to handle re-sending of data, and tuned it for specifics of the app to minimize delays in catching up to the live feed.

I'd used zmodem a lot in my BBS days before, but that was the last time.

<comment><USER7> I think Chuck would be quite pleased with your story!

It's always sad to lose someone so talented - or anyone for that matter. One of the few consolations is that it gives us a chance to tell great stories about them.

BTW for anyone like me who often just reads the comments here, take a few minutes to read Chuck's obituary. It's a wonderful celebration of his life and work.

"Having his own company allowed Chuck to be Chuck. He got up when he felt like it (usually in the afternoon), he worked when he felt like it, and wrote the software he wanted to write. He was a guru in the fullest sense of the word."

<comment><USER8> RIP. My only memory of zmodem involves Slackware, minicom and dial up in 1996.

That is one really well written and comprehensive obituary! They managed to keep it both real and amusing. Recommended read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh this is truly sad news.

I first started my online journey with a 300bps Hayes modem and an original 4.77mhz IBM PC, connecting with a service called The Source in 1981. I soon moved on to Compuserve and then, of course, BBSs.

The first protocol I remember using was _not_ Zmodem, but Xmodem, which as I recall, had a really nasty habit of losing its place in the middle of a 2 hour download, forcing you to start completely over.

Remember, Compuserve costed $5/hr(!), so these disconnect/restarts were not only really annoying but quite expensive.

Zmodem solved this problem very nicely...it was smart enough to restart downloads at the point of disconnect, and because of this, Chuck was a hero of my youth.

Rest wel...NO CARRIER...

</comment><comment><USER10> RIP. Zmodem was so amazing. It was a huge step forward. I got started in 1980 with an old Hayes 300 baud modem on the Source, and graduated to Compuserve and BBSes in 1986 when I got a 2400bps modem. When I got a 9600bps modem in ~1988, that's when things really took off for me online.

Early BBS culture was really something else--we'd do meetups at the local Godfather's Pizza on Saturday afternoon and knew each other by our handles. We'd trade notes on new BBSes that had cool downloads or interesting message boards, and give each other advice on which companies had the best long distance plans. I remember doing math to calculate how many 3.5" disks worth of data I could download from a given BBS in another area code--IIRC it was something like $5 per disk with a 9600bps modem. I didn't even try downloading full games until I had a fast enough modem because downloading a floppy at 2400bps meant you'd blow out your daily time allocation before the download finished. What an era.

Thanks Chuck.

<comment><USER11> Ahh the good old days. I remember downloading a 4 floppy game overnight, because some BBSes would give you unlimited time after 10pm or something like that.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> In the pre-internet-for-everybody days (and even quite a while afterwards) zmodem and other file transfer protocols were pretty much the only way short of mailing floppy discs to get a file from one place to another, and there wasn't a terminal package or a BBS system that did not support it. Even today plenty of terminal programs will happily respond to the download initiation sequence.

<comment><USER12> File : zmodem general Version : 1.02

(C) Mattheij Computer Service 1994

I recently stumbled upon this in the header of a ZMODEM implementation in C, thinking you were likely the author. Now I have no doubts that you are ;)

Any stories to share regarding this implementation and how it came to be?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but for very obvious reasons not in this thread. The most abbreviated version of that story would be: I indirectly owe Chuck Forsberg all of my wealth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I used to "collect" file transfer utilities back in my BBS days. When I found source code on some old floppies, I decided to publish them on GitHub for future generations:

* [https://github.com/cpeterso/jmodem](https://github.com/cpeterso/jmodem) (1990, Richard B. Johnson)

* [https://github.com/cpeterso/sealink](https://github.com/cpeterso/sealink) (1987, Thom Henderson, System Enhancement Associates)

* [https://github.com/cpeterso/wxmodem](https://github.com/cpeterso/wxmodem) (1986, Peter Boswell)

* [https://github.com/cpeterso/zmax](https://github.com/cpeterso/zmax) (1990, Mike Bryeans, Micro TECH Systems)

Other utilities for which I have MS-DOS exes but not source code include: BMODEM, BiMODEM, CMODEM, Leech, Lynx, Puma, TMODEM, YMODEM, and others. Leech was compatible with X/Y/ZMODEM but it would fake a transfer abort after the last byte was downloaded so the BBS would not count the file download against your quota. >:)

</comment><comment><USER14> Back in 2005 we had a really bad issue with ZModem to a barcode terminal over an USB2Serial adaptor and Chuck helped us as a consultant.

I've just dug out the old emails we've exchanged back in the day and I remember how great it felt when after only two days, he solved the problem we've been working on for weeks.

I was so happy to finally see our problem go away.

</comment><comment><USER15> He was a prolific Usenet poster. One easy way to find his posts is to search for this ham callsign, which he signed off with:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/WA7KGX$20zmodem](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/WA7KGX$20zmodem)

</comment><comment><USER16> ZModem and a ZyXEL was all you needed to BBS like a boss even on the crappiest phone lines. Golden times :)

<comment><USER17> Not only Zmodem was cool, it was also open source back then, and very easy to integrate into your program.

In fact, little known fact, it's still very useful _today_ ; if you ssh into a box that has it installed, and you have it installed locally, you can quickly send yourself back a file with it, across the current connection...

Just to 'sz <file>' on the remote side, and do <return><tilde>|rz<return> to tell you ssh client to start 'rz' locally and zoom, zmodem the file over.

Works the other way too...

<comment><USER18> or just use scp, which is part of openssh

<comment><USER17> Try that thru a double connection? ie, ssh-ing to a machine from an already open ssh session?

I'm amazed I get -1 for that post; scp is clunky as hell when you already have a shell in 'that' directory; and it'll only work if you have /direct/ access to the machine you are logged in, and that's rarely the case if you first connect to a front end machine.

I'm an embedded dev as well, and I use zmodem everyday. I have boards that have no network, just a serial port, and I can upload an executable, download the log from just the debug console.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's interesting how tcp/ip is pretty much taken for granted. Of course you _could_ run SLIP over that serial port ;)

Just the other day I was bitching about how it is easier to drive a printer than a relay from a present day computer, the answer I got back was 'can't you use an arduino?'...

<comment><USER17> Hehe you'd be /amazed/ how much smaller the kernel gets it you don't put in IPv4/6 -- and let me tell you, when you upload via uart, every little helps :-)

My fav method is to build a kernel with just busybox using my minifs [0], making sure I have kexec support in that kernel.

Once booted, I can upload a new kernel via zmodem, and kexec straight into the new kernel. Rince, repeat!

You can also use zmodem to upload new binaries to a system, even if it's an initramfs, without having to do a full rebuild/reboot. Quite handy.

[0]: [https://github.com/buserror/minifs](https://github.com/buserror/minifs)

<comment><USER19> I wonder if I could use zmodem via VirtualBox's serial port... I mean, I have PXE for loading new kernels but this seems cooler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I attended several BBSCon which was a BBS conference sponsored by BoardWatch magazine. It later morphed into ISPCon.

Chuck Forsberg was a featured speaker from the beginning at BBSCon. Here's audio of him talking with Ward Christensen, inventor of XModem as well as CBBS which was the world's first BBS.

[https://archive.org/details/93bbscon- bbshistory](https://archive.org/details/93bbscon-bbshistory)

BBSCon was a small and intimate conference and I got to meet Chuck, John Dvorak and Peter Tattam who were all heroes of mine.

<comment><USER21> Too young for BBS, but was able to catch up watching "BBS The Documentary" on YT

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgE-9Sxs2IBVgJkY-1ZMj...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgE-9Sxs2IBVgJkY-1ZMj0tIFxsJ- vOkv)

[http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/](http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is very sad.

If you're not old enough to remember late nights dialing into BBSs you really missed a very interesting time in computing. Most BBSs were pretty tight communities. ZModem was an integral part of the technology that made this happen.

</comment><comment><USER23> My brother and I discovered BBSes in at the peak of our adolescence. Someone had given a copy of Procomm that we could use with our 2400 baud modem and a list of BBS numbers and it didn't take us too long to learn that some of those BBSes hosted porn. We had some friends with modems and it wasn't long before we started a porn collective where we'd coordinate downloads and share images via floppy disk and bicycles.

Because most of the BBSes would only give you 30-60 minutes a day, time was of the essence. You'd quickly log in, scan the list of files with the most promising sounding name, start your download and wait an agonizing 5-6 minutes counting the seconds until it was complete.

There were a few dilemmas you had after downloading. You could disconnect so you could view the picture right away, but you risked not being able to get back in because some other guy called as soon as you hung up.

ZModem was a godsend. Not only was it faster, it supported resume after abort when your line got disconnected. Soon after, the terminals and picture viewers were getting so good you could shell out and view images while you were downloading.

<comment><USER24> I can't remember the name of it, but I had a terminal emulator that would let you view JPEGs and GIFs while they were downloading.

<comment><AUTHOR> Either Qmodem or Telix iirc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Zmodem inspired me to rewrite the CP/M BIOS routines for reading the floppy drive on the computers we sold at my first job. The floppy format had a sector interleave of 4, which meant 4 rotations to read an entire track. 300RPM is slow enough without cutting it to 75 effective RPM.

The interleave was a throwback to the programmed-I/O days of older systems; the CPU couldn't setup to read the next sector right away, so they solved that problem with an interleave. But the new systems had a DMA controller, so I made the BIOS interrupt-driven and read the sectors out of order but into the correct RAM buffering address. Instant hot rod floppies. Everyone on the team bitched that I "wasted" two days "over optimizing a non-core feature". You know what though, they all smiled most every time they had to sneaker net something to a different department.

</comment><comment><USER26> Zmodem was awesome. I remember the transition from Xmodem or Ymodem to Zmodem. Zmodem was fully duplex and was so much faster than the other protocols, until BBSes died due to the Internet. I'm hopeful he lived a very great life.

<comment><USER27> That is, until SModem killed the ZModem star ;-)

Good times. Sad to hear Chuck has passed away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> What a great write up of someone that was very influential in the BBS world for pretty much all users. My ZModem memory is downloading the 5 zip files for Duke Nukem 3D.

We had three BBSes (Tat's Box, Blind Man's Bluff, Microcosm) in the mid 1990s where I lived in East Texas and would have regularly monthly meetings at a local pizza place. It was a special time that I wish more people could have experienced.

The conversations about politics, religion, and computing in general are similar to what I see on the web today, but back then it felt like everyone was more aware of the fact that there was another person on the other side.

<comment><USER29> In college ('89-'92) our local BBS meeting was called "Swap/Meet the Sysop". Lots of diskette swapping and good conversation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Posting to +1 only because of my username for the last 25 years. Godspeed.

</comment><comment><USER19> Specification: [http://gallium.inria.fr/~doligez/zmodem/zmodem.txt](http://gallium.inria.fr/~doligez/zmodem/zmodem.txt)

Clarifying StackOverflow Q&A: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9611000/understanding- the...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9611000/understanding-the-zmodem- protocol)

</comment><comment><USER31> Without zmodem... I wouldn't have downloaded the huge number of floppies required to install SLS Linux back in the early 90s. The download took forever. I can't imagine how long/hard it would have been without it! Instrumental in my getting into Linux!

Sad news :/

</comment><comment><USER32> I never knew him or was aware of him, but apparently I loved him.

From the wikipedia page on zmodem: This design limits the feasibility of ZMODEM to only reliably transfer files that are under 4GB in size.

Haha, I remember waiting 30 minutes for 200k and that seemed like forever. How anyone would have gotten to 4gb back in those days and would even have a way to store that much data makes me chuckle.

</comment><comment><USER33> Brings back memories. I used the official Omen Technology software externally on my BBS because it was better than the software's built-in implementation.

Omen also had a terminal client that was equally as cumbersome to use, but quite powerful. I used it for a few months until the richness of Terminate pulled me back.

</comment><comment><USER34> Back in the 90's I ran a 24 line BBS that used Zmodem and a Telix script I wrote to mirror itself to 20 systems worldwide. Zmodem was the only way I could reliably transfer files to those systems via dialup. Chuck was always my hero for writing such a solid protocol.

</comment><comment><USER35> At some point in Finland we got smodem. This was huge improvement. You could upload, download and chat at the same time. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMODEM](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMODEM)

</comment><comment><USER36> Well, God bless him! I'm thankful for his work on Zmodem. It was such an advancement over X/Ymodem. His work had a positive impact on helping me learn more about computing, and become more fascinated with it, which I am to this day.

</comment><comment><USER37> Alas, even the omen.com domain is for sale. See: [http://www.omen.com](http://www.omen.com)

Chuck Forsberg was the kind of optimizing engineer we just do not see much anymore.

</comment><comment><USER38> Very sad news. Ran a BBS in the early 90's and it was a wonder to move to Zmodem. I still use it every day. lrzsz and built in zmodem in ZOC. Superfast simple file movements.

RIP.

</comment><comment><USER39> "Many people study and work at learning computers and engineering. Chuck Forsberg just knows."

After Chuck Norris and Bruce Schneier memes, now we can start Chuck Forsberg memes :)

</comment><comment><USER19> I tinker with embedded hardware in my spare time, basically anything I can get serial out on. It seems like I could learn a lot from zmodem - but where do I start?

<comment><USER22> Someone posted a link to the spec above (or below?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I used ZModem in the late 90's before getting on to the internet. BBS's and gaming at the time were my play grounds as a teenager.

</comment><comment><USER41> +++ATH0

RIP, Chuck

</comment><comment><USER42> What an awesome obituary.

</comment><comment><USER43> I remember Zmodem. Very impressive protocol. Btw, when I saw the title of this link I knew it had to be a jacquesm post.</comment>


Show HN: Deploy and Retrain Cutting Edge ML Image Recognition via REST API - <AUTHOR> https://modeldepot.io/percept <comment><USER2> Hey Everyone!

Harsh and I built ModelDepot with the goal of empowering everyday developers to use Machine Learning simply and quickly.

After having thousands of engineers use ModelDepot, we learned that many teams need a simple and effective way to deploy our models and use them for both inference and further training. Deploying should be easy, fast, and on your terms, and training should be effective with less data.

With ModelDepot Percept, you can deploy cutting edge pretrained Image Classification models with just one line on any infrastructure you choose. The model can be used immediately for predictions, or can be effectively trained on your own data with just a few training samples. Interacting with Percept is easy using a REST API, and as cheap as the infrastructure you choose to deploy it on.

We've launched ModelDepot Percept with state of the art image classification, and quickly are moving to include other use cases as well.

Let us know if you have any questions or comments! We're more than happy to chat!

If you want more training and prediction free credits, reply here or tweet us your username @ModelDepot :)

</comment><comment><USER3> I really think these types of services miss the big picture. The hard part of creating these services in-house is not wrapping things up in a single discrete unit of deployment like a Docker container, and it's not even following research or tutorials for how to actually train a fine-tuned or transfer-learned modification to a popular pre-trained model.

Those are the easy parts that it's not that interesting to pay someone else to do.

The hard parts are always

(1) your own data cleaning, pre-treatment and ingestion pipeline to get the data ready in the first place and into a conformable and reproducible state for tracking trained models and experiments; and

(2) [most important] writing the acceptance testing and model checking plumbing code to validate that trained models are working as expected on custom use cases with custom KPIs or metrics that business stakeholders want (e.g. basic accuracy metrics built in to most modeling tools only matter to the team training the model -- other people could not care less; they want summarization in 'business' terms and demonstrations of accuracy that reflect exact customer or stakeholder use cases).

Because of (1) and especially (2), you still need to employ expensive in-house machine learning staff to understand how to evaluate your models, even if those models are consumed from a third-party service like this one, or like Google's AutoML or AWS Rekognition.

It's why this idea of "machine learning for people who don't know machine learning" seems so silly and cost-ineffective to me. You still have to pay the salary cost to have in-house modeling experts who can understand diagnostics, bugs, training errors, etc., for these third-party models and who can understand any methodological issues with data preparation and pre-treatment, and who can translate machine learning diagnostic jargon into meaningful metrics and demos for specific stakeholder use cases.

Finally, you also still need some mix of machine learning infrastructure expertise to understand if the cost-per-request of paying for these third party services is actually worth it, especially when adjusted for the level of accuracy you need for your specific application (something that is always suspiciously hard to get information about on the pricing pages of these services).

Often times you don't need to offload for the sake of autoscalability features, and you do need to verify if the latency and throughput of the third party service are acceptable for the performance constraints of your specific problem, as well as what overall cost they equate to in terms of supporting your expected throughput for your traffic to the service.

Basically, it seems like the value add these services want to advertise is that you can outsource the problem of developing a machine learning model, even when you need to provide your own data for fine-tuning.

But you can only outsource the _tiny_ amount of work that would have been the implementation of some training code and the execution of some training regimen to arrive at the deployable model artifact (e.g. a trained model wrapped in a Docker container).

This is probably only 10% of the work at best, and it's also the "fun part" that the machine learning engineers you still have to employee are going to be grumpy about outsourcing rather than keeping their skills sharp and tailoring the model more uniquely to your specific business problem.

The other 90% of the work, particularly understanding model diagnostics in an acceptance testing sort of way that ties directly to a real use case, is still there and fundamentally cannot be outsourced unless you're prepared to just fully pay for an entire third party consultant to do the entire project.

Either way, I just don't see why this type of service would be valuable to companies. They might get fooled into thinking if they have a precocious general engineer who can sort of figure some stuff out, then they can offload for the remaining effort, and save a bunch of money on the cost of headcount for expensive machine learning engineers.

But I think they'll quickly get burnt by that idea, and have a weird situation where they thought they paid for a service like this for scalability purposes, but where the lack of in-house machine learning expertise is what really limits scalability, and they end up with a very nasty form of vendor lock-in.

<comment><USER2> Hey! I think all of those points are 100% valid and I understand where you're coming from.

I'd like to preface that the product you see today isn't the end goal we're trying to reach, it's very much just the beginning of the vision of easy to use ML we want to accomplish, and we hope to meet the rest of the pains you've outlined in the future.

1\. Data cleaning is the most important and painful thing we experience, and all the companies we talk to experience as well. "Data cleaning" is often a very broad term and can mean a lot of different things across different companies. It's something we absolutely want to tackle, but it's not on the immediate roadmap (it's still a bit vague of how to bring all the different problems companies face together).

2\. This is something we hope to move into in the short term, we understand that production does not mean "ML runs on sever and returns requests that look right". We know that it means that the model scores well on offline validation data, online data, and is able to notify appropriately of shifting distributions of input data. We hope to have tools in place that can allow teams to understand the performance of the model both in an offline and continual online setting, and be alerted when the model is failing due to unseen feedback loops or drastic difference between training and inference distributions.

Where we think this stands today is that any engineer on any team can get started quicker with validating a ML PoC and get it deployed into production faster. While I understand there's a ton of nuance to "production", sometimes "good enough" is fine for the short term (and there's a lot of tools that can support them with the problems outlined above as well!), while we work out how to support customers in the long term even better.

As for accuracy, one of our core values is transparency, you can read about the technical workings here: [https://medium.com/modeldepot/percept-whats- inside-the-ml-co...](https://medium.com/modeldepot/percept-whats-inside-the- ml-container-1e71f5ee2747). This should arm a team with the appropriate terms to search for and understand if our product is the right fit for their use case. We hope to only expand the capabilities and options customers can tune as well if this exact solution won't work for them out of the box. Additionally, users are free to experiment around with how to understand the accuracy of the model (beyond a single accuracy metric), we even go a bit into this at the end of our guide here: [https://medium.com/modeldepot/apples- oranges-a-machine-learn...](https://medium.com/modeldepot/apples-oranges-a- machine-learning-classifier-baf549451502)

As for performance, since it's deployed on your own infrastructure, you can scale horizontally as much as you'd like without hitting arbitrary rate limits. In our own internal benchmarks we can get around ~6 sustained QPS on a c5.4xlarge and about ~12 sustained QPS on a c5.9xlarge. If you'd like to learn more, we can go more into details about p90s and whatnot across various concurrent connection settings.

I hope you have a chance to check out the product and leave us more feedback, we're striving to be different than other MLaaS offerings out there with more transparency in what we do, to empower engineers to leverage ML in a more meaningful way.

<comment><USER4> How do you enforce request limits when the code is not hosted on your server? And why should I pay tiered based on number of requests if I'm the one paying the infrastructure cost anyway?

(Sorry if I'm misunderstanding your pricing model, only had a quick glance)

<comment><USER2> The pricing model is to help support our continual development costs of the platform, it definitely takes a bit of time to develop the tech, and continually test it with our users and refine the experience so that it's easy to use out of the box for you. We have a pay-as-you-go structure to help make it easier for users that aren't sure about their usage yet to try it out at a very low cost, and decide if it'll work for them, we didn't want a steep initial pricing structure to be a barrier of entry for people exploring ML. The requests are loosely enforced through our central key server (though there is no request rate limit). While absolutely no training/inference data leaves the container, we do occasionally send back usage metrics to help keep track of usage. If you're interested in a totally isolated solution, we can talk about having on-prem deployed key servers so that your cluster can be completely isolated.

I hope that clarifies everything, let me know if you have any feedback or further questions :)

<comment><USER4> Usage based pricing seems very misplaced for a self hosted solution. Questions of enforceability aside (all I need to do is remove the telemetry code to get it free), the issue is that usage based pricing is meant to scale your revenue alongside costs. When your customer is hosting the infrastructure, you have the same costs regardless how many requests they make, so as a customer, it doesn't feel right to pay you for each request that _my own servers_ are solving.

A competitor can easily undercut you here. I would also be interested in hearing of any other company that charges per-request for self hosted software, because it's certainly not a model I've heard. Typically the way to approach this is a licensing fee for running the software self-hosted.

<comment><USER2> I don't think usage based pricing is esoteric, if you look towards products in the enterprise space (Gitlab, Splunk, Mongo, etc.) They're all based off of a usage metric of some sort (in our case API requests). We're making on-prem ML accessible at SaaS prices (try negotiating a on-prem contract at other MLaaS). Our costs are continual as we continue to improve the product over time, and those improvements will be passed down to you as a user.

If you're interested in running the product on a licensing fee instead of pay- as-you-go, feel free to shoot us an email at email@example.com :) We found that licensed pricing model to be more restrictive for new ML users and increased barriers to entry. If you're not interested in using our paid product, you can check out our primary pre-trained ML platform at [https://modeldepot.io/browse](https://modeldepot.io/browse) and hopefully find a ML solution that works for you without paying a cent.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>