Ask HN: Getting depressed about money. How do I make a meaningful amount "fast"? - <AUTHOR> I am a software developer and like the company I work for. I am smart and capable but have few connections. I have a family and several people rely on my relatively high income so I can't drop everything and do a startup. I live in a place where cost of living is obscene and I have no option to move due to family. I am (finally) debt free, but projecting the rest of my life, I will be able to retire at 72-75. I want to get our early.
Every day I watch people get stupid rich. I know the startup route and have done that a couple of times, though the products didn't take to their markets. I've tried stock trading, crypto trading, investment, small businesses, various passive income schemes, etc. None of this seems to return any decent investment. My portfolio can give me a solid 6-8% a year return, but unless I already have a couple of million to gamble it will still mean a slow and steady investment over decades which still lands me at a ridiculously old age before it's enough.
Every day places like Softbank are giving away obscene amounts of money to mundane or straight up bad ideas. Banks and the government are moving unfathomable amounts of cash around, a bunch of which ends up disappearing to corruption. Bezos just made $13b in a single day during one of the worst economies of recent history. There is plenty of wealth out there to be had, but how to get a slice of it?
I am tired and losing hope. Even though I'm better off than most I am still struggling to support everyone who depends on me. I want to get rich and I no longer care about how (as long as it isn't illegal, completely unethical, and does not endanger anyone's life or health). I am not afraid of working hard and when I pick up a project I work on it obsessively until it's done and done right, but it feels like I am panning for pennies in a puddle. What is the best way to get a large slice of a large pie without abandoning everyone who is dear to me for several years? <comment><USER3> I can't really help you, but I just wanted to say that I've also felt the same way for a few months now. I'm not really in the same situation, but just seeing people make these outrageous amounts of money has been pretty depressing. What really gets me, apart from people like Bezos (like you've mentioned), is that there are literally children making multiples of a doctor's salary by peddling products to even younger children on social media. I guess it's always been similar, considering that child stars have existed for a long time, but there's just something so disheartening thinking about those people making these sums, while others work jobs that are central to our communities and earn a fraction of that.

At this point, I'm at the stage where I'm just trying to start as many projects as possible in my free time and just see what sticks, because frankly, I now believe that people's success is entirely driven by being in the right market at the right time, so you might as well maximize your chances.

<comment><AUTHOR> At least I'm not the only one :)

<comment><USER4> Count me in :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A few thoughts.

The people you see getting insanely rich often have decades of context (and a lot of luck) behind whatever made them insanely rich. I encourage you to not look at just the event that makes someone wealthy but look at the story that got them to that event. The acquired podcast does a great job of this when they cover company and founder history.

Nobody gets insanely wealthy selling their labor. Equity is what creates the massive payoffs.

Are there things you can do where you could own 100% equity? For example, are you an expert in systems administration? Can you write a book or Udemy course on it? Maybe it only makes you 1 grand in revenue but you may learn a lot about sales and marketing and promotion and other important business skills in the process. Those softer skills are just as important as engineering ability and there's no better way to learn them than jumping into the deep end

<comment><AUTHOR> I 100% agree with you on all of that. I know that it takes both luck and building up to having that luck and the ability to take advantage of it to land something like Amazon or Instagram. I am not aiming to create a unicorn startup. I could probably write a few books on various subjects and see what sticks. Worst case, I get my writing bug exercised. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The error here is comparing an upper middle class life of a software developer to that of banks and tech billionaires. You mentioned you have relatively high income, so aren't you and your family's needs met? Everyone wants to retire early, everyone would like a nice sum of cash fast. Perhaps it is worth exploring not increasing income, but decreasing expenditures and living more simply.

EDIT: like others have said here, money is a side effect of a passion. It is not an end in itself, unless you take up business and finance careers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not exactly comparing myself to tech billionaires, but more tech millionaires. Bezos was mentioned just because of the absurdity of his wealth, but I don't want to be that rich. More like, I wouldn't mind finding a way to part Bezos and about $5m of his money.

I have done projects of passion. Last one was completed in February and the business opened in March. For five days. Being a new business, it isn't even eligible for any kind of assistance, so what I did there was to sink a bunch of money and sign a lease so that I have the privilege of adding an extra $1200 a month to my expense list. Decreasing expenses is absolutely something I've been working on, but investing my wages will take decades to build enough wealth to be meaningful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wanting to get rich quickly is often a way to get poor. Be careful.

[Edit: Here's a quote I like. "Money is like gasoline on a road trip. You don't want to run out of gas on your trip, but you're not doing a tour of gas stations. You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn't be about the money." \- Tim O'Reilly]

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, absolutely. I am not after getting rich overnight. I am after getting rich in the timeframe of say 5-10 years. Quicker is better, but smarter is better than quicker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> how about you don't abandon everyone around you and be happy with what you have.

i've said this before on HN.

i chased that BS idea of being rich would make me happy and in the process, got a divorce, lost my pom, became an alcoholic and lost my career. i was making a very decent living, was married to the love of my life and had an absolute jerk for a dog... what more should a man want in his life.

life isn't about what you can get, it's about what you can keep. if you can keep a marriage for 50 years, you are richer than jeff bezos.

i really hope you take a step back, realize that no amount of money in the world is going to make you happy, start being thankful for what you have and enjoy your life. years comes quick and there is no reason wasting them.

a wise man once said that no amount of money can buy you happiness... well it can buy you a pomeranian so i guess it can buy you some sort happiness LOL.

<comment><AUTHOR> Money can buy me time, which is one of the most limited things we have on this earth. I know what you are saying and this is advice I've often given as well. But please consider that I never said that I was looking to buy happiness. I want money for practical purposes and I know what it can and can't do. I am quite happy in my personal life and money can only mildly enhance that. But I also am tired of budgeting for whether I need new tires or to get my moles looked at this month. Whether I should invest in a retirement fund or my kids' college fund. Whether I can go to a restaurant or buy a new pair of slacks and a couple of shirts. Whether to keep living in a house that's bursting because it's too small or sell my soul to a mortgage provider for a bigger one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Remember that Amazon is a 25 year-old company. Bezos quit his job, took funding from family, and has always run a low-margin business, always playing a long game.

<comment><AUTHOR> If I quit my job a bunch of people will be very negatively impacted. I can switch jobs and I can work on stuff in my spare time, but I can't go to zero income. Unlike Bezos, my family doesn't have anything they can loan me.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I'd be living in a van down by the river if I quit.

<comment><USER11> I own a van and have a river in my city, maybe you can bring the food?

<comment><USER10> I would, but my wife would leave me.

<comment><USER12> Life has tradeoffs – a lot of founders burn through marriages don't they?

<comment><USER10> True.

I'm stuck at my current job. I would have quit a few years ago (I've been miserable for 4 years) if I wasn't married. I'd probably move to my parents', do LeetCode and Hacker rank for a couple months, then land a high paying job to save as much as possible, and then retire early to a small farm in a low cost of living area.

<comment><USER12> Not that I mean to pry but that sounds like it benefits everyone involved if it meant the pay raise – get a few months in savings in then bootstrap from there. Easier said than done I know.

<comment><USER10> My wife says she will never move out of the area. She goes to work when I get home to watch the kid and spends all that money on horses. So I don't have any free time to do LeetCode and I am forced to stay here and pay all the bills.

<comment><USER9> Sounds like your problems aren't really income or job problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My friend, I'm very sorry to hear this. It seems like you are under a lot of pressure to be the financial backbone of your family. Without any knowledge of your circumstances, is there a way to have a frank discussion with some members to ask for their support? We tend to focus on thinking the soltuion to our money problems is getting more money/wealth. That is objectively true, but it might be at the risk of your mental and physical health. If you can get additional support from your family to contribute financially, please have that honest conversation and tell them how you are feeling.

Creating a winning startup is like the lottery. Lots of things have to go in your favor. It might be best, given the pressure you are feeling, to stay with the slow and steady market gains you are experiencing, as when we are under pressure we make bad stock market gambles.

I would also take a solid look at your budget/spending and see if you can cut anything at all. You'd be surprised with what you can cut out of your life.

Again, I am sympathetic to your pain and feel it myself.

</comment><comment><USER14> A thread like this is not likely to help much. Think of it this way, how many of the people getting "stupid rich" do you think would credit their success to starting a thread asking other people how to get rich?

Some valuable pieces of advice I've heard:

1) Owning your work is important.

2) Because few people succeed the very first time, waiting for The Good Idea (TM) to come to you before getting started is foolish. The more effective strategy is to keep trying different things that play to your strengths and learn as much as you can from repeated failure.

3) Try to develop an internal motivation to complete projects and avoid talking to others about your projects for validation. The very act of mentioning your next Thing to your friends can have a powerful demotivating effect, because it tricks your brain into a dopamine response as if you actually already did the Thing [1]

[1] [https://berkeleysciencereview.com/2013/04/when-telling- other...](https://berkeleysciencereview.com/2013/04/when-telling-others-about- your-goals-compromises-them/)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's possible I also just needed to rant about how tired I am of the rat race. You are right of course (though I might not 100% agree on your point #3; valuable connections often come out of spreading the word about your project and my motivation usually increases afterwards).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> While softwares are scalable. Problem is that you not the owner of those softwares, will you be able to negotiate with your employees to give you 1-10% of the total profit they generate. Unlikely! Yes, software developers make a lot of money but they still end up in category of "expense" not revenue generator in accounting. You'll only get paid what it costs to replace you.

You need to start a business where you own total upside and total downside. It's high risk and high reward game, if you get lucky - you'll be in the names like Bezos.

Having worked with software developers, they hesitate from charging too much as they don't understand the value of the work they are providing and are generally happy making stable amount of money over lifetime.

This is not bad if you value stability. But if you want more, you need to play with fire. Highly likely you'll get burnt but that's what it takes.

I quit my job to produce 3d printing filament and I am making 7000 euros a month as the business grows, I'll probably make more but see it's a limited scope process to make filament so it's very scalable. I expect upside to increase steadily over few years before I plateau and then I plan to move on to another opportunity.

Here's my project: [https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at- ho...](https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-home-for- cheap-6c908bb09922)

Just like me, pick a problem where people have money to pay and start finding how how to reduce costs and increase sales.

In business/sales/marketing you need to display confidence which often software developers lack (because they know of so many ways things can go wrong). Customer doesn't like this, customer wants to feel that your solution is flawless without any holes! That's where clever sales person come and sell the software solution for several multiples of what it costs to make it.

When you've enough money, you don't need to struggle - you need to do things that are fun for you and have upside.

</comment><comment><USER16> Based off your description, I would say the most pragmatic way to secure a slice of that pie and retire early would be to take up the Leetcode grind.

I was blessed to be in a position where I was able to spend nearly the entirety of my quarantine free time practicing Leetcode. Last week I signed an offer with an American FAANG level company and more than doubled my final TC. I realize this is a highly anecdotal, unusual scenario, but the possibility is there. Note that part of this was due to the weak $CAD, but regardless, the level of potential TC gains going from small startup or dev shop to FAANG level truly cannot be understated.

If you're interested in joining the rat race, Blind is a pretty good place to start.

<comment><AUTHOR> LeetCode looks like a bootcamp/school for software development. I don't feel like that's where my weakness lies. I am a productive software developer and am up to date on most of the latest tech. Teaching for something like that would probably be more my speed. Also, where I live there are no FAANG companies and relocation is not an option. I work from home and unless there is a local software company that is hiring, I am out of luck.

What do you mean by TC and what is Blind? The rat race is pretty much what I'm trying to escape.

<comment><USER17> Don't get discouraged. I found a good 100% remote role through HN by posting and reading monthly "who's hiring" and "who wants to get hired" threads. Unfortunately we don't have open heads right now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, I've had good luck with those in the past. Main problem: I am not making way below my market salary. I might be maybe $20k lower than average due to some job perks, but just switching from small software company A to small software company B won't make me a ton more money. Equity in a hot startup might, so I guess I'll be on the lookout.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would recommend redefining wealth in your life to be something other than money. We all die and life is short - find something that you're fulfilled doing while you're still alive. I don't anticipate I will ever retire, but I hope to do something I enjoy until I die so in a way it doesn't matter. I don't want to do software for the next 20 years just so I can retire for 20 years before I die.

</comment><comment><USER19> The age-old question. There's basically few ways you can do it if you are committed to keeping a job rather than starting a business.

1) Cut expenses significantly. (Conservative approach.) 2) Boost income, via new job search? (Riskier.) 3\. Put the rest of the family to work somehow.

Either way, a lot of it has to do with luck or connections, they can't be discounted. If there were a formulaic way to do it other than grinding it out, folks would be doing it already.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have seen a lot of these threads over the years on HN. Most give your two options, with an occasional "read pg, do a startup" type advice thrown in. Things I have considered:

\- Switching careers to work closer to where the money is. For example, working for a douchey hedge fund that can pay half a mil a year if things are going well.

\- Putting together a pitch deck, flying out to CA and pitching it to every VC who will listen. I have a decent idea for a dating app that solves a lot of the problems with the current crop of dating apps. A VC paying my salary for a year while I develop something like that would work well for me.

\- Networking my way up until I am rubbing elbows with the ultra rich and looking for opportunities to help them spend their money.

\- Playing the lotto until I'm broke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Understand that pursuit of this as a priority will likely have a negative impact to other area's in your life. If someone is 100% career focused, there will be personal and family implications. Working and thinking about work all the time is not healthy. Burnout is real, and the impacts to your dependants can be massive.

Whatever direction you go, try to find balance. Good luck.

<comment><USER21> This is always where I land. If you fail try try again, with effort and critical thought. But I just can't meaningfully dedicate the time to making more money at the expense of all the hobbies and other past times I love doing so much. I don't want to spend 20 years with hardly any enjoyment just to be able to retire at 55 instead of 70 or something.

It's a challenging decision to make and I also believe in most cases it isn't a decision that is "free" or without some form of consequences. All things come at a cost.

<comment><USER10> I hate my job so much that I would love to retire at 55. I've already had to give up or greatly scale back my hobbies when I got married and had a kid. I also had to give up my career advancement (watching the kid means I can't work 50-60 hr/week, which is expected in IT).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wishing to get rich quick is often a quick way to get poor. Also, it's near- impossible to give more helpful advice without more details (e.g. expertise, risk appetite, free time, moral compass).

But:

1\. Learn whatever it takes to work in the high-stakes financial world

2\. Buy an existing blog, product, plugin, and grow it fast

3\. Spend less

<comment><AUTHOR> For #1, can you provide any concrete info? What skills, where to get them, how to start getting into that type of work, what does it pay and how, etc.

For #2, again, any specific advice? Are blogs still a profitable thing? What platform do you use to buy/sell blogs and/or plugins?

For #3, yeah already working on that one. Pandemic doesn't help with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> How old are you? Do you have a lazy stock portfolio? It's the first thing everyone should be starting at 18. Parents should be setting it up the day you are born.

Investing gradually you would have enough money to not worry. Saving with compounding is the best way for the general public.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mid 30s. I have a small but slowly growing stock portfolio. If I keep going the way I am, in 5 years I might be able to buy a Model 3 with its worth. My family growing up invested in my education, not in a stock portfolio, so what I have is skills, not cash.

<comment><USER23> Then maybe add more because the market returns are suppose say 5%, but they are generally much more higher, around 10% over a 15-year period. Over 14-years that money doubles, but the market is performing at 10%, and even higher lately, so that's 7 years. So instead of buying that model 3 in 5-years if you continue adding small increments that Model 3 turns into a Model S in 7-years.

The issue is many people hold a savings account in cash but then inflation eats you up, or they store it in a savings account, but then you break even with inflation. Taking advantage of compound interest is huge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A wise man once told me "Never count another man's money" and I'll pass that on to you. Figure out what you want in life, stop comparing to the Adam Neumanns and Jeff Bezos of the world, that's a surefire way to lose your mind and self.

</comment><comment><USER25> You can work to increase your income by working towards a promotion or finding a new job. The other option is to reduce your outgoings. Who are you supporting and why are you supporting them? Why are you stuck living in a VHCOL?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am pretty much as high up in my company as I can be without being an owner. We don't use these terms, but effectively I am occupying the role of the CTO.

With the current pandemic I am doing very little going out. That doesn't mean my expenses are better off though. I am directly supporting two kids and my life partner who works but her career is very low paying. She takes care of most of her expenses but housing is on me. I indirectly support two other people because I care about them and their well being. I am stuck living where I am because I am divorced and my ex won't move. If I move I don't get to see my children, which isn't an option for me.

<comment><USER25> To me your goal should be a better payed role. I assume with your VHCOL that there are better jobs available. I would work on landing something better at big tech (FANG ideally).

Once you're there you can focus on your side projects or building your own SAAS etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Lets take inventory of your skills. Reason is that making money is a skill you can learn. You probably have some of the ingredients you need to make it work, but are lacking other key ones. So, list away.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point:

\- Software engineering. I am a full stack developer. I can and do program things from embedded devices, to medium scale web apps, to front end stuff. My graphics skills are sub-par, but I do UX well and can whip up a software solution quickly or architect a complex system. Hardcore comp-sci is not my core skill set as I didn't study it, so I won't be coming up with the next great ML algorithm or factoring large integers, but I can do lots of non- trivial things well nonetheless.

\- System administration. I grew up on Linux/BSDs and am pretty good at old school systems administration. I don't need to use Heroku to run my apps if I don't want to.

\- Electronics development. I am not an electrical engineer but I studied physics. I have manufactured custom PCBs that actually worked and am pretty good with a soldering iron. One of the products I was working on in the past required a custom enclosure and a Wi-Fi connected embedded system that ran on batteries for several years. I designed and put together prototypes from scratch on my own for this, though the product ended up not taking off for other reasons.

\- Leadership/management skills. I am good at organizing work and motivating people. People like working with me. I have led major projects in my career and feel like I can do that again. I would be happiest leading a team of 6-10 people if working in this role.

\- Communication skills. I connect with people easily and quickly, especially in person. I didn't start out this way (if this was a thing where/when I grew up, my parents might have had me evaluated as autistic for my inability to feel empathy; I have swung way in the other direction with lots of work on myself over the years). I can often convince people to do things for me even if it goes against their self-interest. While I know I can do that, I am very cognizant of this ability and try to find outcomes that are win-win for everyone even if that means a worse outcome for me. I am good at negotiating (salaries, prices, contracts, etc.). I have no problem approaching a stranger, knocking on doors, asking for or offering help, etc.

\- Interviewing skills. I am good at being interviewed (in my career I got many more job offers than been turned down). I am very good at interviewing others for jobs. I have almost always been able to tell who would fit in well and who wouldn't for any given situation.

\- Writing/public speaking/teaching. I am a decent writer and a good public speaker. I am told that I am a very good teacher/mentor. People who I have taught in the past have all been very happy with the time and energy they spent in my classes and most have gotten very good at what I was teaching them.

\- Photography. I am a decent amateur photographer. I mostly do boudoir photography with friends for fun, but can do portraits well. I have sold a few prints for several $100 each at a couple of art shows I entered on a whim, but due to the nature of what I typically photograph I don't think it has wide appeal.

\- Mechanical, construction, plumbing, electrical. I am not a professional in any of these, but have done enough work on my vehicles and homes I've lived in to know what I'm doing. I fix my own vehicles routinely and have redone plumbing for a whole house and have done some electrical work.

\- Woodworking. I'm learning how to do some woodworking, just for fun. I mostly make practical things, not art. For example, I built my own motorized sitting/standing desk from hardware store parts.

\- 3D printing and small scale manufacturing. It's a hobby, but I'm pretty good at it.

Probably a few others I am forgetting, but these are the main ones.

<comment><USER26> Selling, which is the biggest skill you need to have, is clearly missing. Which explains a lot of your frustations.

I strongly suggest you read Way of the Wolf by Jordan Belfort. Best sales book there is. Go buy it right now.

Read it amd email me when you are done.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will do. I have some sales experience though I never worked as a dedicated sales person. I've made cold calls that turned into paying gigs and I've done sales as an engineer: go present the technical aspects of the product and take potential customers from "who the hell are you guys?" to "how can I give you my money?". I also have a lot of negotiation experience and do quite well with that, but never a bad thing to get better at it.

<comment><USER26> Good, because you grasp the importance of my suggestion.

Emailing me to continue forward is also important. Otherwise you stay in the same place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If you didn't at least buy an S&P 500 index fund when it was tanking in March then investing might not be your strength.

Otherwise, as a rule of thumb, everyone who starts out poor and ends up rich does it in real estate. (That's not the same as saying everyone who invests in real estate gets rich.) There's a fundamental tenet of profitable investing that makes this so but you don't have to understand that in order to profit from a real estate investment.

It's not stupid to both rent the home you live in while at the same time buying a home to rent to others. This maximizes flexibility but with some extra effort.

<comment><USER28> The fist part is kind of garbage but real estate is true.

For whatever reason real estate gets preferential risk treatment in the US. If you pick a hot area you can double your leverage in 7-10 years that's typically a 500% return. You don't pay taxes on that gain and your downside is limited to 20% in most non recourse states.

That being said it would be hard to guess what a hot area is right now. Maybe Boise Idaho, and Bend Oregon

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> If youre focusing on the money youre gonna make a bad product... PG's essays really do explain everything so be sure to read them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but not focusing on money is how you end up building a business that sells dollar bills for $0.90. A few "for fun" startups have blown up in the past (Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube), but the reason majority fail is lack of business plan for how to actually monetize what they are working on. I don't consider focus on sustainability for a business to be a bad thing, though if a VC handed me $10m to spend trying to buy users I won't say no.

<comment><USER30> I think you should read The Black Swan. FAANG type companies are rare events. Nobody can plan a Unicorn company. They just happens. Look at the list of dead products that Google/Facebook creates every year. Even managers at FAANG don't know what is going to work.

You can focus on creating sustainable small software business. I don't know if you have read "Start small, Stay small" by Rob Wallings. It talks about creating a sustainable small business on the side.

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't seen that particular book and will give it a read, but I have attempted about a dozen lifestyle SaaS businesses. All went best like I was selling peanuts at an allergy sufferers' convention. I am always looking for more opportunities for something like this, but nothing so far has had the right overlap of profitable/my area of expertise/not requiring a stupidly high upfront investment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If you want to become a millionaire some day, then you're already on that path as a software developer. You can get top dollar by working for FAANG and working your way up the levels.fyi. That's probably the peak you can get by working for someone else.

If you want to make it to become a billionaire, then the only way is to not work for someone else, to become the boss (owner). Which means, taking a huge risk in starting your own company and working until it becomes big. You can try to become huge quickly, as a startup unicorn (which then will take many tries till you succeed) or go for a more traditional business and continuously build it over a long period of time.

If you want to go somewhere in the middle and make tens of millions, maybe hundreds, then you can switch from the software developer track to the CEO track (note that i didn't say middle-manager track). In that case, you essentially prove that you can basically be a mini-CEO, but within the confines of a very large company, by heading up a department. Then you keep on doing this with larger and larger departments, until at the end you're the CEO of the company. And then from there you leap frog from company to company, being CEO of larger and larger companies. Of course, it's often very difficult to get to those chances within a company, so succeeding as the CEO of a startup and then getting acquired (and becoming the mini-CEO of your newly formed department) is kind a way to jump onto that track from the outside.

Or, you could try switching tracks and going into finance. There, starting as an employee, there's a more clear path to make your way up the chain to partner. And since your salary is more along the lines of a percentage of revenue, as opposed to a flat salary, there's an order of magnitude more potential than as an engineer employee.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, this is one of the most helpful comments here. If I can ask for some details:

The CEO track sounds nice. I've done the middle management stuff before and was quite successful at it. In my last job I was heading up the software team for a software/hardware startup, as well as taking on partial management of the support team and the data entry team. I have been C-level at two companies but both were early stage when they went belly up so this is more a bullet point on a resume than something I can point to and say "look there it is". Currently I work for a small enough company that there isn't any more upwards mobility here. I am basically working as an individual contributor directly with clients. The projects are boring but the pay is good and the people I work with are excellent. How would you suggest making a leap from here to something bigger? I live in an area with lots of banks and insurance companies, but not much in the tech world.

On the finance side, again, how do you go about this? What kind of companies do you suggest and what jobs in them? Are hedge funds a good idea? Or do I need to commute to something like NYC and apply for something with a large investor? What qualifications should I focus on before jumping into this? Is mostly reliant on knowing the right people? Is it about technical knowledge of the subject? Or is it about impressing the right interviewer?

<comment><USER31> C-level at a startup is probably comparable to middle-manager at most companies, so like 10 reports. CEO track means you're in charge of like a hundred people minimum. You don't apply to jobs any more in the traditional sense. Companies hire executive placement firms to hire you. For your area, you probably need to find VPs from the big companies there and ask them about how their career path goes.

If you want to get rich in finance go to Harvard and get your MBA, and then just follow what everyone else around you in your class is doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's not fast, but check out Reddits like r/financialindependence

</comment><comment><USER32> One thing I'd encourage you to ask yourself is: what concretely are the things you would like to have in your life that you perceive as currently unattainable because you don't have enough money?

Your answer might simply be "a humongous bank balance" \- and if so that's perfectly fine; money is (one way) that people "keep score" in life, and some people are motivated simply by trying to bag that high score. We've all heard of people who spend all their time accumulating enormous sums while living frugally, and die without _apparently_ ever really getting to enjoy the fruits of their labor -- in many such cases I would argue that this is simply because it's the labor itself they enjoyed most, the chase after wealth, rather than what the wealth could buy them.

But let's be honest: many, if not most people who wish they were richer aren't looking at that bank balance as an end in itself. They want certain things from life, and those things vary a great deal from person to person. You might want to buy a big house. You might want to be able to indulge your expensive hobbies. You might want to travel the world. You might simply want to quit working and go lie on the beach and drink Mai Tais all day. Or perhaps it's the exact opposite: you have a big idea that you desperately want to work on you need the money to invest in that. Or you might actually not care so much about buying stuff: maybe you long for the feeling of having other people perceive you as rich, for example, or you want to exert power over other people in your environment.

I think it might be helpful to try to challenge yourself to identify what you would like to achieve, _without reference to money_. (Assuming you aren't one of those rare people for whom the bank balance in itself is the only goal - <USER2> so, ignore this exercise entirely.) Make a list, prioritizing it to the extent possible. Be honest with yourself (you're the only person who has to see this list): if, for example, the status of having other people perceive you as wealthy is important to you, write it down.

Then, go down your list and try to estimate how much money, realistically, you would need to attain each item.

Finally, go down the list again and, for each item, think about whether there are ways you could achieve it _without_ getting rich. Write down all your ideas, even if they seem ridiculous or impractical. For example, you might want to travel the world, and being rich would certainly make that possible in a straightforward way, but plenty of people throughout history have "gone nomad" on little or no money. It might seem unthinkable given your current situation, family, etc. - or it might be that your idea of traveling the world is first-class airfare, not hitchhiking. That's fine. You should still write it down as a theoretical alternative, along with the objections. If (sticking with the example) world travel is is high on your list, it's helpful to clarify to yourself exactly what is keeping you from "just doing it," that is -- in the extreme case of not being able to afford it -- wandering the world with nothing more to your name than a backpack and a willingness to do odd jobs and see where life takes you. Is it because that's not what you mean when you say world travel, or is it because you have obligations you feel you can't throw over, or is it something else?

You may find that there are alternative, no- or little-money solutions to many of your goals, at least some of which may not be entirely impractical. Lots of times, befriending the right people can get you access to resources and experiences you might otherwise have to spend a huge amount of money. Are there things on your list that you could attain this way?

Other times, you might find something that isn't within your personal reach achievable if you join forces with others. For example, you might really, really want a plane. That can be pretty expensive of course (not so much the purchase, but everything else that goes around it), but lots of pilots pool their resources and own planes jointly with others, or simply join a flying club. You mentioned woodworking; let's assume for the sake of argument that you yearn for a really well-equipped woodshop. That can be expensive (especially if you need to buy a bigger house so you have room for it!) But -- be creative. Is there a makerspace near you? If not -- what if you founded one? (Aside from the "joining forces" aspect, makerspaces can often attract valuable equipment and space donations.) Go beyond the obvious if you can: could you, say, wangle yourself into a part-time job teaching woodworking to students at a school with a well-equipped shop but no one to use it?

Even if one of your goals is "have others perceive me as being rich" \-- throughout the ages, lots and lots of people have been very successful at presenting themselves as much wealthier than they actually are. It's a skill you may be able develop, if that's actually what you want, what makes you happy.

At the end of the exercise, try to come up with a plan. You may have certain goals that you realize you can potentially attain via alternative methods. If they're important enough to you, you might even realize in the course of examining things that your best road is to disrupt your current life in a way that you previously thought unthinkable. You might have other goals that you decide aren't so important after all, that perhaps you're willing to abandon for the time being. And undoubtedly there will be some goals that are both very important to you and that you feel, realistically, are only attainable by amassing enough money - the amount that you estimated in your first pass over the list.

Arrange those goals in the order you want to achieve them - some things, after all, you might be able to delay for a significant time (e.g. tuition to college of choice for currently school-age kids), whereas others you might be unwilling to delay any longer. Try to assign approximate timelines for each.

If you plot these on a graph, you arrive at a very rough estimate of future expenditures. You now have a concrete target -- not just a single number, but a time series -- for the wealth that you want to accumulate. If you're lucky, this isn't overly front-loaded. If you need a million dollars for something you feel you just _have_ to have tomorrow, you might just be out of luck. (Although, depending on what it is, you _might_ be able to use appropriate leverage. Starting a business is your goal? What sources of credit could you potentially scare up?)

Best case scenario, your graph starts relatively low and trends up over time (that is, you can delay progressively larger expenditures for longer). Then, draw a curve based on your current wealth and investable income, projecting growth forward at a reasonable rate of return, and taking into account your projected future expenditures. If you're _really_ lucky, then that curve stays above the expenditure timeline the whole way. Then you're done -- no need to worry any more about getting rich, because by your definition of being rich (being able to afford all the things you want, when you want them) you already are. :-)

<comment><USER32> [continued] Seriously, that probably isn't your situation. Even after exploring alternative paths to your goals, there are expensive things you want that you will never be able to attain based on your current wealth and income. Assuming you don't win the lottery, receive an inheritance from a long-lost uncle, or find a giant bag of money on the street, you can't change your starting wealth, so project the curve forward again using various incomes. Don't forget to take into account the possibility of not changing your gross income, but increasing the proportion of it you can invest, if that is a possibility.

Eventually you should arrive at roughly the income that you need to be "rich" (in the sense of being able to afford everything you actually want). In my experience, _this number could very well be much smaller than you would have guessed_ before you did the whole exercise. It might seem much, much more attainable than it was when your only goal. This is important, because sometimes realizing your goals are more attainable than you thought is the thing that will propel you to take that first step.

What that first step should be? I honestly can't say. I don't have any real insight into how to get rich quick; I doubt anyone does.

For me personally, the process of assessing what I really wanted from life and how much money I'd need to do it led me, about ten years ago, to make a career change. It wasn't anything super-dramatic or risky, and I had no expectations of becoming wealthy. That wasn't my intent per se - what I wanted was a reasonable assurance, as I approached middle age, that I'd be able to achieve certain goals that were important to me. I left my life of genteel poverty (a.k.a. academia) and joined a small company, and did my best to help make it a somewhat larger company. I succeeded pretty well in that and made more than enough to achieve all the things on my personal list. The remainder, for me, has been gravy. To be fair, I've mostly avoided "shifting the goalposts," that is, wanting more and more expensive things as my wealth increased. That's a trap that is easy to fall into.

I think the average person, somehow seeing my bank balance toay, would class me as rich (not obscenely so by any means, but I'm definitely more than well- off). The point is: _I never set out to be rich._ Ten years ago, I would never have even dreamed of ending up where I did. I didn't join a small company thinking "startup, I might cash out and be rich." I thought it was just... a "small company." I didn't even know what stock options were when I got them - I threw them in a drawer and forgot about them. If they had never amounted to anything and I had just continued to draw my salary to this day... well, I'd probably be _just as happy_ as I am now. Why? Because I evaluated, ten years ago, what I'd actually need to be happy, and realized that I could make a few changes in my life and be fairly confident of being able to afford those things. If the stock-option windfall had never come, I might not be "rich" today by the average person's definition, but I'd still all the major things that I wanted from that list, and more. In other words, I'd be rich by my _own_ definition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Since you mentioned crypto trading, might I suggest you take a deeper look at what fundamentally blockchain can accomplish via smart contract and then invest in project that will be powering it.

One project I'd suggest you checking is Chainlink. Check out these reading and video:

[https://blog.goodaudience.com/chainlink-the-missing-piece- to...](https://blog.goodaudience.com/chainlink-the-missing-piece-to-the-god- protocol-fd455dde92ab)

[https://medium.com/@smartcontentpublication/accessing-all- bl...](https://medium.com/@smartcontentpublication/accessing-all-blockchain- environments-through-a-single-chainlink-integration-92c64a2fb541)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufVyX7JDCgg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufVyX7JDCgg)

Cheers to financial freedom :)

<comment><USER34> You're esssentially suggesting gambling to someone with money concerns.

<comment><USER10> Well yeah, the people without money concerns don't need to gamble because they already have money.</comment></comment></comment>


Historic NASA Project Files and Software Appear in Amiga 2500 EBay Listing - <AUTHOR> https://hothardware.com/news/nasa-data-and-fallen-astronauts-software-appear-on-amiga-2500-ebay-listing <comment><USER2> Something is seriously strange here. I work at NASA as a system administrator. That system should not still have the asset tag attached. Those are removed when an item goes through excess. Also, NO hard drives are to leave NASA with any data on them. I wipe all hard drives before I excess a system and I think the inventory people do it again. It's possible that this system was disposed of before that rule went into effect but that seems unlikely. I was able to zoom in on the photo on Ebay and get the asset tag number. That item is not in the asset database any longer, so it seems to have been legitimately excessed, and isn't stolen, but still, this is very odd.

<comment><USER3> I worked for a few years at a federal research facility that had some loaner equipment from NASA/JPL tied to the mars rover projects.

It only takes one mistake by the intern asked to surplus the pile of old junk on the shelf who doesn't recognize it for what it is...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _the system was used in NASA 's telemetry labs and is decked out with a NASA asset and inventory tags from 2005_

...2005, a time when "telemetry" hadn't yet gained its more sinister meaning of "privacy invasion", P2P meant you could find just about anything on the Internet, and computing freedom was pretty high. Of course, the Space Shuttle program was still active too. But for me, and likely many others, the word "telemetry" now has a negative connotation.

<comment><USER5> I made a living doing airborne telemetry and instrumentation for almost a decade. Those words, in my professional context, meant that I was an engineer who designed and operationally supported systems to gather data of all kinds (avionics buses, physical transducer readings), record that data, and transmit a crucial subset of that data to the ground for real-time monitoring by engineers.

But "telemetry" and "instrumentation" have meanings in the tech world, and it's sad that one of the meanings carried in the "telemetry" suitcase is "privacy invasion".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15848354](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15848354)

</comment><comment><USER7> this belongs in a museum no?

<comment><USER8> Depends. There's nothing special about the Amiga itself; there are many 2500s out there.

I DO think however, that the contents of the hard-drive need archiving and given over to archive.org - providing NASA are OK with that of course.

What scares me a little bit is that the seller has clearly performed some 'write' operations on the data - you can see him running LHA to extract an archive. If he's done that then there is no telling what else he's done and what may have been lost or contaminated in the process. :(

Looking at the price he's clearly just trying to cash in, and has no interest in it's real historic value.

<comment><USER9> Cashing in can be tempting, I can get that. But he should stay off the damn drive!</comment></comment></comment>


Building a fashion search engine with deep learning - <AUTHOR> https://blog.floydhub.com/similar-fashion-images/ <comment><USER3> This similar clothing recommender seems like something that Netflix or Amazon Prime will add to their pause screens on their original content - <USER2> viewers purchase similar things to what the characters are wearing right on screen. I remember searching for years for some dumb shirt that Owen Wilson wore in some dumb movie, but I was so happy when I finally found something like it.

<comment><USER4> That is how ASOS started, As Seen On Screen. Now doing over 2 billion in turnover a year

<comment><USER3> Not surprising at all! Instagram is probably next for this, then. Every single non-ad post could be a way to sell you the clothes or widgets that your friends are wearing/using in their fabulous lives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd like to see someone tackle sizing.

A 4X dress on Amazon will often wind up being the equivalent of an American medium because it's from a Chinese vendor. It's baffling to me that Amazon doesn't make their clothing vendors enter a basic bust/waist/hip set of measurements and let people search by those.

<comment><USER6> I worked on this problem a few gigs back at Polyvore! tl;dr: It's nearly impossible to solve.

As you may already know, "Standard Sizing" is a misnomer. There is no single standard for a size. US vs EU vs JP vs other are all the same number (size 4) but different nominal sizes.

Add to that the chaos of standard sizes between brands (brand A size 4 != brand B size 4 != brand C size 4) and even within the same brand (brand A product 1 size 4 != brand A product 2 size 4) and you find that there's no single answer to matching a human to a size.

Even your suggestion of measurements won't help without more data around it. Clothing shape and fabric type matter nearly as much as the measurements, since one may be a form-fitting 90cm and another may be a breezy and stretchy 90cm. Personal preference matters as well, so you may prefer breezy while I prefer form-fitting.

<comment><USER5> So I get that it's likely to be impossible to fully solve anytime soon, but I'd think at least requiring a couple of basic measurements would make a dent.

I've seen exactly what you describe - sizes varying between countries, between brands, between individual items in a brand. A lot of the listings on Amazon include a custom size chart now, but it's not _semantic_ data - it's just a screenshot in the product listing.

Example: [https://www.amazon.com/Beautifulfashionlife-Waisted- Pleated-...](https://www.amazon.com/Beautifulfashionlife-Waisted-Pleated- Cosplay-Costumes/dp/B01179J4S6/)

This one lists a XXXX-Large as a 34" waist, and a Large as a 28" waist. It shows up if you search Amazon for "plus size skirt"; if Amazon made vendors put in the waist measurements and let them be filterable based on that, someone in a US size 18 dress wouldn't be offered this as an option.

Again, I get the difference between a 90cm loose fit and a 90cm tight fit. I _should_ be able to tell a major ecommerce site "look, I'm 150cm... fuck off with the 90cm stuff".

<comment><USER6> That would be great to get as a measurement and filter by. It still won't solve the problem you want it to.

This is a product with 1 measurement, maybe 1.5 if you count length. Due to flare, waist position, ratio to waist, etc. the length is subjective even with an absolute value assigned. Providing those measurements in this one case will help, but then you have to deal with "skirts" as a whole category with many sub-categories. And your measurements need to apply universally, so you need style, waist, waist position, length, flare, hobble and more. Broad categories for any of them won't help you, so "> 150cm" is not going to help beyond an existing "plus size" filter. Where the skirt sits matters too, so 150cm is fine for [https://amazon.com/dp/B01G0YFAWM/](https://amazon.com/dp/B01G0YFAWM/) but not for [https://amazon.com/dp/B07HB2NXPY/](https://amazon.com/dp/B07HB2NXPY/) .

[https://amazon.com/dp/B01KXBI2VE/#g2s2SizeChartView_15496401...](https://amazon.com/dp/B01KXBI2VE/#g2s2SizeChartView_1549640103404) shows they have the data in some cases. There's a proper HTML chart with all the measurements as "Size Chart" in the pictures section. I would love infinite knobs to filter on every aspect, but most people (as proved per $ spent) prefer fewer simpler options for how to find products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Working in this area the biggest challenge is getting the details right. Small difference like cut-outs on a dress make a huge difference in terms of end- user relevance. Same for colors, millennial orange comes in many shades. Deep Learning is pretty bad with such details.</comment>


Encrypt Your Blog with GPG - <AUTHOR> https://pjbrunet.com/simple-blog-encryption-with-gpg/ <comment><AUTHOR> Works with LinkedIn posts too.</comment>


We need the eggs - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-04-17/eggs.md#readme

<comment><USER2> I'm actually starting to feel sorry for Ruby developers. It seems like any time you install something it can anonymously and unapologetically squash any other thing, whether it's a built-in method, an existing module, or what the meaning of "is" is. Honestly, I'd probably be too afraid to ever install a gem.

<comment><USER3> To be honest, reading Reg's posts lately you get the impression that this happens _all the time_. Obviously it does happen a certain amount, hence the various people (quite understandably) complaining about it, but probably not as often as one might start to think, given the number and volume of complaints.

<comment><USER4> The problem is that when it does happen, you are _screwed_ , hard, and _numerous other languages_ with powerful module systems and powerful metaprogramming and powerful everything-else-that-Ruby-does, and has as many libraries as Ruby (or more), provide a concrete demonstration that you _don't_ need monkeypatching to do awesome things.

Also, the mess only gets bigger as you have more and more people using Ruby. That's part of the seductive danger of the monkeypatching approach... it seems to work _so well_ when you have a small community. Unfortunately, it anti- scales; it gets actively worse the larger the community gets.

So, you are suffering these difficult and often effectively intractable problems (short of modifying other people's libraries which is not something you should need to do in the general case), and in return for this difficulty you get _nothing_ not provided by numerous other languages without such problems.

It's a terrible, terrible trade in the long run. (And the long run is here now.)

<comment><USER5> Why are you trolling Ruby for this?

There are safe ways to metaprogram Ruby very successfully in an extensible and readable fashion. That's why there's a movement in the Ruby community to kill alias_method_chain for one.

Nor is this a problem that scales with community size. There are bad programmers everywhere. If using their libraries causes your project to explode, don't use their code. Rails is fully admitted to be too clever for it's own good, which is why the push to Rails3 and cleaning out the kludges in the Rails code base is so important. That's why the Merb project was getting so much attention in the first place.

Never the less, this is still about getting numerous different packages to work together. It's a package dependency problem. Granted Ruby's ability to reopen classes anywhere it likes makes this problem more difficult, but i hardly see this as an indictment of any use of the language.

So yes, package management is hard. People should metaprogram responsibly. But that's true in other languages as well. :p

<comment><USER4> "Nor is this a problem that scales with community size." - The more people you have writing libraries, the more monkeypatches are made in a library, the more likely it is that the monkeypatches will collide. That's so obvious I don't even know how to argue for it.

"Granted Ruby's ability to reopen classes anywhere it likes makes this problem more difficult, but i hardly see this as an indictment of any use of the language."

I do, because other languages manage to provide features and libraries without causing this problem. A problem that is unique to the monkeypatching languages (also Javascript) can be laid at the feet of the design decision to permit it and the community decision to roll in it.

If the community is indeed walking away from monkeypatching.... that doesn't prove I'm wrong, it proves I am and was right about the dangers involved. I don't feel inclined to give the community much credit for coming around to the realization that unfettered monkeypatching is a bad idea two years later than I did.

If you like monkeypatching, you should be listening to Raganwald. He's looking for a way to reap the benefits without paying the price, and I think such a thing could be constructed.

Version control is a separate problem indeed. It should be pointed out that I was responding not directly to the original topic, but the posts that are the parent in this chain. This is perfectly valid.

Oh, and stuff it with the trolling accusation. I'm not looking for flaming responses, I'm hoping to safe someone from stepping into the monkeypatching tarpit that at least historically the Ruby community has advocated so hard for people to leap into. Again, if the community is walking away from that tarpit too, are they "trolling" when they do that? Trolling means something, and it isn't "having strong opinions with reasons given".

<comment><USER6> This is not a monkeypatching problem, per se. It is a problem of scope- independent class definition. There are languages wherin you can monkeypatch the class definition (or the definition of a single instantiation of a class) wherin those patches only are in effect in certain contexts.. so you have a scope to your monkeypatching. I think that this would allow for Interesting Things, while being "safe".

<comment><USER7> Sometimes monkey patching is good actually. I use Soap4r all the time, and I preferred the debug xml to appear in the console rather than created as a separate file, it was really easy to make a monkey patch that fixed this, without modifying the actual distribution... that way other projects wouldn't be affected.

Another time, there was a small bug in Hpricot, rather than fix it directly in source, I patched it in my code, and removed the patch when the fix was in the production stream.

At least it's nice to have that option available...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Been bit by that more than a few times, that's why I always freeze rails now. It is the only way. Things should be simpler and more reliable.

ps. I love that you're running your blog through github. Very ingenious.

</comment><comment><USER9> if i am not mistaken, you can get into similar trouble in javascript with object.prototype. it's interesting that you don't hear much about that, but maybe people just don't expect as much from it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Mere coincidence that the Python's gem-like packages are called eggs?

<comment><USER11> I wondered that, also: I didn't think Python's eggs solved this problem... do they?

<comment><USER12> No, eggs are just an unofficial, "convenient" method for distributing Python modules.

However, AFAIK, Python itself "solves" this problem simply by giving errors whenever you try to import a different version/instance of a module, but I could be wrong.

<comment><USER11> If you're talking about the native Python modules, I'm pretty sure Python simply ignores repeated imports (and there is no version number in most module names).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nexus.js: A multi-threaded JavaScript server platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.nexusjs.com/ <comment><USER2> It's almost as if Nexus.js _wanted_ to ignore all the lessons learned by everyone who worked with threaded vs event-driven architecture.</comment>


100 growth hacks in 100 days – 1 to 10 - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/RobinYjord/100-growth-hacks-100-days-1-to-10#! <comment><USER2> When I was in NYC, I rented these Citi Bikes. The terms say:"After you purchased your 24 hour code, you get the bike for 30 minutes. If you return it late, there's a late fee added. 4$ per 30 minutes late." – "Fuck you", I thought. "What an annoying business model."

A few days later, I was in Washington DC. I rented these Citi Bikes that are called different there. The terms say:"After you purchased your 24 hour code, you get the bike for 30 minutes for free. If you want to keep bicycling, there's a small added cost of 4$ per 30 minutes for extended bike rental." \- "That sounds fair", I thought.

This slide deck would be so much better, if it was called:"100 ways to improve your UI" instead of "100 Growth Hacks". Because they aren't. Only one out of ten is. And it's not even clever. Everybody does it. All others are marginal improvements to the UI and most of them don't even have data that support their effectiveness on growth / increased signups / decreased churn. They are interesting, but they aren't what they're advertised as. So I feel cheated although the "product" is good.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your feedback. Not all of them are UI stuff, e.g the survey, the open-source warranty and the email where I asked why users had canceled. And these was the first 10, now I'm at day 36 and all of them are not about just UI. But I see your point, and the problem is mostly to be able to pull off one hack each day, many would have to be simple and easy to do, and therefore lower quality.

Regarding what actually is a growth hack or not, if it has to be new, none of my 35 hacks are a growth hack. Sharing stuff on social media would be social media marketing, blogging would be content marketing and SEO, and more fundamental "hacks" would be either a part of a business plan or just a marketing strategy.

However, my main goal of many of the things I do is to increase growth, both direct and indirect.

<comment><USER2> Your growth hacks don't have to be new, certainly not. My point is about communicating in an authentic way and how communication defines the user experience. My bicycle example talks about exactly the same thing and I had two completely different feelings DESPITE being aware of the hard facts.

In my opinion, you under-deliver by making false promises. Your goal should be to over-deliver by giving the user more than he expected. Your slide deck stays entirely the same, it's just about the expectations you set beforehand.

If you're open to suggestions, I'd love to see if you performed two A/B tests on userapp.io:

1\. Take different photos of you guys where they look older. You look young. There was once a post on HN about a guy who split tested his profile picture on oDesk or something like that and gave himself an artificial beard in Photoshop. Result: More contacts, more jobs.

I wonder if the photos make a difference in your case and I would be happy to read about the result in one of your slide decks.

2\. IMHO you got your coffee-pizza-beer comparison entirely wrong. 650$ is a lot of pizza. Exactly. So the service must provide a heck of a lot of value – more than if I put two coders of my business on a few night shifts to implement the same functionality (or use frameworks that do the same) and supply them with unlimited pizza for the rest of the year. Your goal is to give a feeling that 650$ is a steal by comparing it to something more expensive, not by comparing it to something that is cheaper and valuable as well. I'd kick the comparison altogether. People have their own mindset for comparing prices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Probably your best growth hack is publishing this deck.

<comment><USER3> Believe it or not, but this whole "stunt" (including this deck) hasn't generated that many signups in the long run. The best of my "hacks" would be creating the AngularJS module ([http://timothy.userapp.io/post/69135125206/day-25-minimizing...](http://timothy.userapp.io/post/69135125206/day-25-minimizing- integration-times)) and then writing about it on Stack Overflow ([http://timothy.userapp.io/post/70136752527/day-31-answering-...](http://timothy.userapp.io/post/70136752527/day-31-answering- questions-on-stack-overflow)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please proofread this and the future presentations. Misspellings such as "Warrenty" and "Origional" really undermine your credibility.

<comment><USER3> At UserApp, Robin Y. is known as "Mr. Typo". He will be performing 100 spell checks in 100 days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is the Math.random() complaint really true?

Great read anyway. I normally dismiss anything labeled "growth hacking" as snake oil but this was really interesting.

<comment><USER7> Math.random() in modern browsers is a pretty good RNG. He would probably be happier with a pseudo-random algorithm or simple rotation, but over time a uniform distribution should be seen if his code is correct: [http://coffeescript.org/#try:alert%20%5B0..300%5D.reduce%20(...](http://coffeescript.org/#try:alert%20%5B0..300%5D.reduce%20\(p%2Cc%2Ci\)%20-%3E%0A%20%20%20%20%2B%2Bp%5BMath.floor\(Math.random\(\)%20*%203\)%5D%3B%20p%0A%2C%20%5B0%2C0%2C0%5D)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Actually "the tweet about us" is the only growth hack for the moment :)

Impatient to see the 90 others. Thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER7> Maybe call the others "retention hacks"? :)

<comment><USER3> Actually most hacks are about user acquisition, but there's also retention hacks :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How much time between the implementation of each of these? 1 day? Variable? I would think you would need longer sampling periods to determine impact.. Not all days of the week are created equal.

<comment><USER10> Bingo - there's no mention of sample size, which makes it hard for me to take the results seriously. I do however think this is good for sparking creative thought on what tests to run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How many signups have there been for UserApp overall?

While I would never recommend optimizing for the top of the funnel first, it seems like it's really hard to measure the effectiveness of growth-hacks when there's not much data to operate off of.

<comment><USER3> Agree! I do actually work on more deeper problems. At the moment I spend a lot of time creating integrations, improving the documentation and the getting- started guides. As we do get new signups every day, I want more of them to get started and really using UserApp. But to learn how I can improve all that I need feedback, and things takes time. Meanwhile I wait for feedback and test results I spend my time trying to improve conversion rates on the website and to drive more traffic, etc.

Here are a few of my more important "hacks":

[How to guarantee continued operation for an SaaS startup]([http://timothy.userapp.io/post/67053194467/how-to- guarantee-...](http://timothy.userapp.io/post/67053194467/how-to-guarantee- continued-operation-for-an-saas))

[Day 25: Minimizing integration times]([http://timothy.userapp.io/post/69135125206/day-25-minimizing...](http://timothy.userapp.io/post/69135125206/day-25-minimizing- integration-times))

[Day 26: Codecademy course]([http://timothy.userapp.io/post/69292858355/day-26-codecademy...](http://timothy.userapp.io/post/69292858355/day-26-codecademy- course))

[Day 30: A/B testing getting-started guides]([http://timothy.userapp.io/post/70034047713/day-30-a-b- testin...](http://timothy.userapp.io/post/70034047713/day-30-a-b-testing- getting-started-guides))

[Day 31: Answering questions on Stack Overflow]([http://timothy.userapp.io/post/70136752527/day-31-answering-...](http://timothy.userapp.io/post/70136752527/day-31-answering- questions-on-stack-overflow))

[Day 32: Customer development survey]([http://timothy.userapp.io/post/70245235839/day-32-customer-d...](http://timothy.userapp.io/post/70245235839/day-32-customer- development-survey))

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love "tweet about us and we'll give you an extra month for free"!

<comment><USER13> I have one pet peeve about this, which is typically my pet peeve on a lot of growth hacking / optimization writeups: lack of longer-term focus. I hate to preach too much because doing things without a proper measurement strategy may be more practical than implementing a proper measurement strategy and is better than doing nothing at all, but....

The results were listed as "very good" because 20% of new signups tweeted. However, you're giving away revenue in hopes of generating more long-term revenue. The success or failure of the experiment should be given in terms of customers who signed up from seeing the tweets and what the lifetime value of those customers are, taking into consideration the initial revenue loss.

<comment><USER2> Agreed. One more thing:

The product is valued at "a tweet for a free month". Does this support the pricing tier? There's something about the perception of price and brand value here.

<comment><USER14> I disagree. I'd say the free month is not for a tweet, but for the number of users who sign up because of your tweet and then how much those users end up paying to use the product. If just one user signs up because of your tweet and pays to use the product for a month, then what's been given away has been earned back. And none of this says how much the product should be valued quantitatively, i.e. how much one month is worth.

On the other hand, you do comment about perception–if the users perceive the product to worth less because of this deal, "a tweet for a free month", the rationale behind why the deal is good for the product might not do anything to offset that loss in perceived value.

<comment><USER2> Your assumption, however, is that people wouldn't tweet about it if they had no incentive. The question now is: Does the tweet incentive help to increase the user base or not? That would actually be interesting data :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can we please begin to penalize the phrase "growth hack" on HN?

</comment><comment><USER16> I joined growthhacker.tv and found it very useful. do check it out for interesting interviews and growth hacks.

[https://www.growthhacker.tv/](https://www.growthhacker.tv/)

ref link ( 25 % off ) [https://www.growthhacker.tv/signup?r=8f745853](https://www.growthhacker.tv/signup?r=8f745853)

</comment><comment><USER17> I feel it's important to measure the impact of a growth hack right from the beginning instead of going back and doing micro a/b tests. I.e. set things up so that it's trivial to A/B test every feature right from the start.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've written about what worked for me here: [https://medium.com/what-i- learned-building/3408064eda35](https://medium.com/what-i-learned- building/3408064eda35)

</comment><comment><USER19> So if you do arbitrary stuff which kind of makes sense to make a webapp more attractive (or not) we call this "growth hack" now? That's just ridiculous.

<comment><USER3> I see your point, and many of my later "hacks" has been improved since my first ten. But it also depends on who's definition we use. Most of my "hacks" includes coding (i.e. hacking) and are meant to increase growth. Are they considered growth hacks then? Or must something be "hacked" for it to be called growth hacking?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How are some of these, namely the help button, hacks?

<comment><USER21> See: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956893](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956893)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> IMO, You should mix these hacks with the impact/time prioritization framework shown here for example

[http://denoyel.com/post/71113783478/the-easiest- prioritizati...](http://denoyel.com/post/71113783478/the-easiest- prioritization-framework)

to calculate the ROI on each hacks of the 100's</comment>


Cosmic crash unmasks dark matter - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7587090.stm <comment><USER2> It's things like galaxies with quadrillions of times the mass of our sun colliding that make me remember just how small a piece of the universe we are. It's awesome that they got to see that... And identify some dark matter in the process!

<comment><USER3> Heck, our caveman brains taught us that size is a significant quality. If Ugg kills a rabbit, and Garr kills an elephant, Garr is definitely the better hunter. But what really matters is organization... Galaxies are a chaotic mess compared with a rabbit.

<comment><USER4> > _what really matters is..._

"I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article seems to suffer from even more than the usual level of "The author has no clue about the science" Syndrome, especially the bits about gravitational lensing.

Now, I thought that galaxies were so sparse that most of the interactions two "colliding" galaxies would have would be gravitational (rather than an actual collision). In this case, the finding would _seem_ to imply that dark matter isn't affected by gravity the same way, which would be _darned weird_.

<comment><USER6> It's true that the stars in colliding galaxies don't actually collide, but they are looking at the collision between two _clusters_ of galaxies. Clusters contain hot, X-ray emitting gas. And gas _does_ collide, whereas the dark matter passes through.</comment></comment>


A Guide to RISC Microprocessors / Register File Management - <AUTHOR> https://books.google.com/books?id=shqJUaKB9RMC&pg=PA37 <comment><AUTHOR> >"To manage the register windows, SPARC has three special instructions and two special registers. The instructions are SAVE. RESTORE, and RETT (return from trap). The registers are the CWP (current window pointer) and the W1M (window invalid mask).

 _The CWP serves the same purpose for the register windows that the stack pointer serves for memory-based stack frames._

The CWP determines which window is current (and, by implication, which windows are previous and next). The WIM determines which of the windows in the register file are "valid" or available. For the register windows scheme to function properly, there must always be one invalid window so that overflow and underflow can be detected. Overflow (trying to allocate a new window when the register file is "full") and underflow (trying to deallocate a window when the register file is "empty") can occur because there are only a few windows on-chip (typically seven or so) that are trying to contain an arbitrarily long run-time stack. By always having at least one window marked invalid, a program is guaranteed to bump into the invalid window as the CWP wraps around the circular window file. When a program tries to use the window marked as invalid, a hardware trap is taken to a routine that either flushes some of the register file contents to memory or restores some of the register file contents from memory.

In essence, only a portion of the top of the memory-based run-time stack is always contained in the register file. Another reason to always have one window marked invalid is to support fast trap processing. SPARC traps automatically decrement the CWP. In the case when all but one of the windows is valid, the trap-handling routine will be guaranteed free access to the window marked as invalid; there is no danger of the trap routine clobbering valid data in the register file. The RETT instruction automatically increments the CWP."</comment>


DNA extracted from ancient African skeleton shows mixing with Eurasians - <AUTHOR> http://news.sciencemag.org/evolution/2015/10/first-dna-extracted-ancient-african-skeleton-shows-widespread-mixing-eurasians <comment><USER2> More support for the "Out of Arabia" scenario [1], the implications of which are enormous and potentially awkward.

[1] [http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2015/08/rethinking-dispersal- of...](http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2015/08/rethinking-dispersal-of-homo- sapiens.html)

<comment><USER3> How so could it be awkward?

<comment><USER2> (as a layman) The original Out of Africa hypothesis had the "happy conclusion" that anatomically modern humans (AMH) evolved in a small group within Africa and then migrated out to populate the rest of the world, displacing (and not interbreeding with) older hominids. And everyone on earth is a descendent of that small first group, so we're all one coherent happy family.

The evolving picture today appears much more likely that some not-quite AMHs migrated from Africa to Arabia where they lived alongside and interbred with already-present Neanderthal culture, became anatomically modern and developed Upper Paleolithic tools/culture (which were perhaps actually an evolution of Neanderthal culture), spent a while fairly isolated and evolving in Arabia, and eventually as AMHs migrated out to displace/interbreed with the planet's other hominids.

So, awkward because it's a much more complex, convoluted story, with a lot more space for different populations of humans to have significant genetic differences. You're also left with Africa potentially having a population of pre-AMH homo sapiens and other hominids, with only quite recent back-migration admixing in "modern human" DNA.

<comment><USER4> Is it fair to say that _anatomically modern_ humans happened after leaving Africa? Sure some more changes happened; change continued in Africa as well. And the Neanderthal 2-6% is probably not that significant.

Another interpretation is, moving to Northern climates with reduced sunlight resulted in decreased melanin (to ensure sufficient vitamin D) which allowed more ultraviolet damage thus increased mutations (blue eyes, red hair and so on). In this view, Africa retains 'modern human anatomy'; the rest of the world is a sort of Galapagos Bird situation.

<comment><USER5> I don't understand percentages used to describe genetic similarity. I mean I heard that humans share 50% with bananas and 96% with chimpanzees.

So if 4% is the difference between humans and chimps then 2-6% can be very significant, right? Or can those numbers even be compared?

<comment><USER6> The percentage difference is calculated using a very odd system which ignores all the actual differences.

For example if Humans and Bananas each have 5000 coding genes in common the difference will be measured only on those genes we actually share (out of 20-25K coding genes in humans, no clue how many coding genes do bananas have), so the difference is actually much greater than the 50%, 4%, 1% or what ever figure you get because the big differences are simply discarded.

These days there's a cartoon for everything :) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbY122CSC5w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbY122CSC5w)

And this is without even going into gene expression and epigentics which play a role which some might even consider to be bigger than what actual genetic data you might happen to carry along with you.

Heck chickens still have the genes to grow teeth and feathered scales like the dinosaurs they've evolved from however these genes are not expressed anymore in nature.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple's retail chief Angela Ahrendts to leave the company in April - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/05/apples-retail-chief-angela-ahrendts-to-leave-the-company-in-april.html <comment><USER2> She is being replaced by an ops person - 'retail and people'.

But she was the CMO, so who on earth is going to be the head of marketing?

It's not Cook.

Someone has to have the credible authority to 'bring it altogether' \- marketing requires the same kind of coherent vision as product, and often it's a lot harder because it's less tangible.

Or maybe they've operationalized it very well and have people to do ABC, which would be amazing.</comment>


Ask HN: I'm 23 and got a contract to write my first book, on HTML5, any advice? - <AUTHOR>

(I asked this a week ago and got very little exposure. I know that discussions on resubmitting Ask/Show topics have been met with wildly different sentiment, but here goes).
I'll be writing a book on HTML5. I signed the contract last week.
I hope for it to be around ~500 pages, give or take, with the largest part being Canvas[1] at ~150 pages. The book will be in full color with syntax highlighting.
I've never written anything of this scale before and certainly never authored a book.
I'm looking to solicit advice in general. Is there anything you'd wish was in an HTML5 book that might not be present in others so far, etc? Do you have any advice for me on the writing process?
I gave my age in case that was relevant, at least to me it seems uncommon for technical books to be written by "young" people. I'm not sure if my age in itself will hinder or help, but its offered in case it changes your advice.
Also, do you have any pet peeves about technical books, or things you wish authors did more or less of?
Thanks for reading!
[1] Canvas is easily the part of HTML5 I'm most knowledgeable about. I've answered about 10% of all questions ever asked for Canvas on
StackOverflow (and am top answerer for both the Canvas and HTML5 tag). Many of the usage examples in the Canvas section will be from real world problems that were solved during my time on SO. <comment><USER3> _I hope for it to be around ~500 pages_

Too long.

It takes more work, but try to make it shorter.

The best value I've gotten from books is being able to avoid the slew of occasionally useful factoids and be told what stuff I should really care about.

The endless details I can find on the Web if I need them; the problem a tech author should solve is in helping the reader know what to care about and when.

<comment><USER4> Seconded. Read "On Writing Well" -- write something, cut it in half, then cut that in half, and then once again cut that in half.

<comment><USER5> When writing for publication, I enjoy pondering this quote: "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." From S. Shchukin, Memoirs

That is to say, if you're going to write something, every word has to have potency. This gets at the cut in half, cut in half, cut in half advice.

In short, good writing is concise.

<comment><USER3> At some techie user group someone had a copy of a pretty brief O'Reilly Rails book. I observed that the book price seemed the same as what O'Reilly charged for "full-length" books.

A friend then said he would be happy to pay even twice as much if the author could have made it half-again as short.

BTW, I could have _sworn_ that quote was from Chekov. Either way, on the money.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, it's Chekhov's gun: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've co-authored a couple of tech books, published by Wrox and Apress. I don't think your age matters at all for this kind of thing, I think I got my first deal when I was your age.

The biggest thing to understand that isn't obvious for a first-time author is that as soon as you sign the dotted line, you'll be on the publisher's schedule. They have to plan out when to release and sell your book months in advance.

All of those chapter deadlines are also for the other people involved - <USER2> reviewers, copy editors, production, etc. So if you run late, it squeezes them. I've done tech reviewing for a couple of programming books, and when the author gets behind, the editor pushes the tech reviewer to get the chapter turned around extremely quickly. Guess what that can do to the quality of your book!

Another thing to know is that the "control" of your book is very strange, especially if its successful and the publisher wants 2nd and 3rd editions - check your contract, but they may have the right to assign another author to the book and release an update if you refuse to do the update. What this means in practice is that you end up having to do the update yourself whether you have the time scheduled or not to keep someone else from doing a crummy job updating your book.

</comment><comment><USER8> Congrats! This is a really cool opportunity.

I would suggest thinking about what kind of a book it's going to be, and who the audience is. Is it more of a reference book for people who know HTML and want a hard copy? Or is it for people who are learning HTML for the first time, and want to learn HTML5? Is it a book that assumes people know what vim and emacs are? Or is it a book that takes 1-2 paragraphs to explain what a text editor is? Is it a book for nerds? Or a book for retired dads looking to make their first website?

I'm not going to say 500 pages is too much or too little, because I don't know what kind of a book you're writing yet.

Also: some hackers here already mentioned that a lot of HTML5 information is available on the internet. I would think carefully about what your book will do that a google search can't.

</comment><comment><USER9> -Sometimes books clutter lessons with too many words. I look for concise books that cover what I need. -It's like laptops...make it big enough to be useful but small enough to carry in your computer bag.

-Make examples as small and concise as possible. I hate paging through example code in a book. -Consider the book a complement to people working through code samples you provide on their computer. -Make a single place to download all of the examples easily.

-Build a good outline and refine it carefully. -Build a way to track your progress through the book. Ex: a jar of candies counted out for each chapter or milestone.

-Write with as much maturity and wisdom as you can muster as that will make an exceptional book. -Plan how to handle every distraction that will come up.

-Smile when you write.

<comment><USER10> "Smile when you write". Excellent advice. I also liked the brevity of the A Book Apart series.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Who is the target audience? beginners, intermediate or advanced?

Something I have found in common with many of the thicker books (400+ pages) that I liked is they are broken up into a couple of very distinct sections. The first part is usually an intro and explanation of the material. The middle is more elaborate examples of how to use the materials. The back is more of a reference section.

Something that drives me crazy is when books skip steps. Don't assume that the reader knows what the middle step is just because it's mentioned in chapter 2 doesn't mean I'll remember it when I get to chapter 9. Or 6 months later when I am looking at the book trying to remember how to do something. It's a book not mysql you can have something in more than one place.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you're thinking 500 pages, consider breaking it into two books. One for the core functionality and one for Canvas and its uses. The audience for one is not necessarily the audience for the other.

</comment><comment><USER13> Emacs, org-mode, and LaTex.

Org-mode is an Emacs mode with a first-rate outliner and a Markdown-like syntax. It easily exports to LaTex and/or to PDF.

</comment><comment><USER14> A good example for you might be the "jQuery: Novice to Ninja" book. It cuts out a lot of the BS that makes other books annoying and cuts straight to the chase of DOING. Think of a group of sample projects, or maybe even think of a single project to build and build upon over the course of the book.

</comment><comment><USER15> Think about the overall tone you want to use. Do you want your writing to read like directions or do you want to do something more "fun," such as using humor and making pop culture references throughout the text? Congrats on the book deal.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think you may want to check out how Maneesh Sethi wrote his programming books when he was a teenager. www.hackthesystem.com

</comment><comment><USER17> good job...which publisher..Orielly? I would like to see more cool examples and tutorials?

</comment><comment><USER18> >> "I hope for it to be around ~500 pages"

Firstly congrats on the contract. You must be an expert in the field to be offered a contract.

The aim of quantity (pages) rather than quality is troublesome. I would be aiming to write something that achieves an objective - like an average web developer will understand how to apply HTML5 after reading; or a complete newbie will be able to start using HTML5....

I recommend going to a bookshop and checking out the current books on programming languages/frameworks. Try and find a style that matches your objective. Look back at books you read and what helped.

Unless this is an extensive reference guide, focus on quality content rather than reams of paper.</comment>


Tesla mitigates car-stealing key fob problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/tesla-model-s-key-fob-encryption-cybersecurity-theft-f5061b8e-d860-4372-a630-12dfae247469.html <comment><USER2> Article is very short. What is the new security that Tesla has? Is it simply more bits or other types of security??

The pin is basically a simple two step authentication</comment>


Apple employees are listening to Siri conversations - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/cbxdaw/comment/etjj59i <comment><AUTHOR> I posted this not to bash on Apple, but to highlight that this is not just a Google issue - any voice recognition will be trained on labeled data, and that labeled data will largely come from users.

This has happened for years, across anyone with a voice recognition model, and will continue to happen until the market or regulations say otherwise.

We can, and should, debate the ethics of voice recognition models in general and the practices around collection and handling of that data. I just want to move the discussion beyond "Google is evil" and towards "this is a cornerstone of building voice recognition software - how do we deal with that?"

<comment> m-p-3 > "this is a cornerstone of building voice recognition software - how do we > deal with that?"

Maybe by using paid employers or volunteers who explicitly agree their voice to be processed for machine learning and voice recognition improvement.

Something like Common Voice¹ by Mozilla?

¹[https://voice.mozilla.org/](https://voice.mozilla.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a really cool project, props to Mozilla for spearheading it. I'm especially a fan of the clear callout about what profile data is public.

My thoughts on why a public dataset like this doesn't seem to have been adopted by the other BigCo's

\- $$$: having a better voice recognition model is moat. I think this is the most obvious answer, but I think there are likely other factors as well.

\- Representation: perhaps users who contribute voice recordings to an open project do not provide a complete model of people who use voice recognition software, leading to tough-to-bridge gaps (especially across languages - <USER2> this project is English-only)

\- Size: I'm not a ML person so I don't have any idea the amount of data needed to accurately train a good voice recognition model, but I'd guess that 2.3k hours of validated content isn't enough to really do the trick. Maybe it's difficult to get people to volunteer for the quantity necessary to build a good model.

\- Quality: Getting representative data might be harder when it's via explicit donation rather than identified error cases.

\- Privacy: I actually think that having the training data available to the public presents an interesting set of privacy challenges. It's available through explicit consent, so that's a big benefit. However, it hugely amplifies the possible exposure of a person's voice which means that you need to have strict controls around the content of the recordings. You also need to be careful about rendering any particular donator vulnerable (could you hijack someone's voice and use it to brute-force other voice-matched assistants, for example?)

I'm curious whether, at the end of the day, it's practical to build a high- quality model from only explicitly donated clips.

Here's something I'm wondering about now as well. In many states in the US, it's legal to record people without their consent in public places. Could there be some sort of public voice data collection, sort of like street view? That would be completely anonymous, and might give more representative data, though I'm sure external noise would be a big challenge.</comment></comment></comment>


iPhone iOS 13 Lockscreen Bypass Flaw Exposes Contacts - <AUTHOR> https://threatpost.com/iphone-ios-13-lockscreen-bypass/148332/ <comment><USER2> "Luckily, the hack would be difficult to launch, as an attacker must have access to the phone in question. "

Well that IS the whole point of having a pass code- isn't it?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I agree but isn't that why it's called a bypass.</comment>


Ask HN: Can there exist a function whose computability is uncomputable? - nicholas-cc We can mathematically prove that certain mathematical functions and constants are computable or incomputable. For example, we know that the Busy Beaver function is uncomputable, but that arithmetic is computable.<p>Are there any functions for which their computability has been proven uncomputable, and if so, what are some examples and is there any term for such a function? <comment><AUTHOR> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem)</comment>


Ditching HubSpot – why we built our CRM from scratch - <AUTHOR> https://volument.com/blog/ditching-hubspot <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN. Here's how we replaced most of our SAAS services with a minimalistic alternative. A prime example of NIH syndrome taking over :) Thanks!</comment>


Gun Threats and Self-Defense Gun Use - <AUTHOR> https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use-2/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Chan-Twitter-General <comment><USER2> A collection of "studies" by an anti-gun-rights author, almost all of which use 20-year-old (and up) data.</comment>


Seriously, why are restaurant websites so terrible? - <AUTHOR> http://shigezo-pdx.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> For a good time click on "Menu" as well... the one menu item kind of runs away from your mouse.

[http://shigezo-pdx.com/index.php?option=com_oziogallery2&...](http://shigezo- pdx.com/index.php?option=com_oziogallery2&view=04carousel&Itemid=4)</comment>


Google Offering 24 Hours of Inbox Invites for All - <AUTHOR> http://www.cyberkendra.com/2015/01/google-offering-24-hours-of-inbox.html

<comment><USER2> Tried it. Got this response:

Thanks for requesting an invite. We'll send you one as soon as possible.

Your friends at Gmail</comment>


Programming Music with Overtone - Clojure/conj presentation - <AUTHOR> http://blip.tv/clojure/sam-aaron-programming-music-with-overtone-5970273 <comment><USER2> This was mind-blowing. In some ways it was also a huge troll, getting a bunch of real geeks and professionals to give a standing ovation to dubstep like that :-).

At the actual conj, it was surreal.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hopefully they weren't applauding the dubstep, rather the compelling notion that with a tool like Overtone they can trade in their programming skills for musicality. That and the other million cool things that simply fall out when your synthesis, composition and performance are all representable in a formal language...

<comment><USER2> yes, half-joking about that. That's definitely what did it for me, as a programmer who's always been pretty good at music. I think that with overtone we can build abstraction layers up and down to enable really cool stuff for people that would just like to think music in its own terms, instead of projecting their thoughts at the inflexible interfaces of the tools they have.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Choo – 5kb framework for creating sturdy front end applications - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/yoshuawuyts/choo <comment><USER3> Loving Choo. Here's basic webpack build. [https://github.com/hew/choo- webpack](https://github.com/hew/choo-webpack)

</comment><comment><USER4> I love the philosophy of libraries over frameworks. How does it compare to knockout?

<comment><USER3> To be clear: Choo is a framework. Just a micro one.

<comment><USER4> What exactly is the difference between a a micro framework and a library?

<comment><AUTHOR> I reckon a library performs one task well, and can be integrated in the rest of the code. A framework, no matter the size, spans multiple concerns and has opinions on how code should be structured. Does that distinction make sense?

<comment><USER4> It's as good as I've heard. But would choo qualify as a framework under this definition? AFAIK it's only concern is glue between UI and everything else, it could be mixed and matched with other frameworks/libraries".

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I think choo is definitely a framework - it has opinions on how views are nested (router), UI is glued to logic (message bus); how logic is structured (models / namespaces), and provides hooks to inspect the whole thing.

Perhaps the word framework has gotten a bit of a negative connotation over the past years, but I think by the sheer scope of the project, choo definitely qualifies as one.

__edit:__ though, as you note, internally it's a bunch of glue code between standalone packages - they could definitely be mixed and matched - <USER2> interface level also leaves a lot of room; we try to only have opinions where we deem them necessary</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>