There's Plenty of Space for One Trillion More Trees - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/theres-plenty-of-space-for-one-trillion-more-trees <comment><USER2> So the count of how many trees there are _now_ was off by an order of magnitude.

And we are supposed to give credence to an estimate of how many there were 10,000 years ago? What makes you think that's any more accurate?

This kind of sloppy science is ruining people's confidence in science. I know it's supposed to be an iterative process, always getting better, but there should be some self awareness built in that early iterations should not be relied on in any way!

<comment><USER3> I'm not able to read the actual research paper, but the article refers to the "United Nations estimates of global forests." I'd assume they used the model they developed for forests and applied it to this estimate to get a number of trees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So the article says that there are currently about 3 trillion trees, down from about 6 trillion when humans started with agriculture, and then cites an ecologist about how insane this is. But, if you go back even further, wouldn't there be less trees again? I watched the documentary "The Green Planet" a while ago. If I remember correctly, it said that before humans greatly reduced the number of grazing animals in Europe by hunting, the forests in Europe were not dense like today. They were more like parks, with many grassy fields, since obviously many trees did not get the chance to grow tall before being eaten by those grazing animals.

</comment><comment><USER5> I am not an expert on this but I assume the total amount of carbon on the earth is essentially constant. I am guessing for the most part it exists on earth as (1) plants and other life forms (2) fossil fuels and (3) other non- living stored carbon, in things like plastics and lumber. In the air it is mainly carbon dioxide. The more we store on earth the less there will be in the air.

Maybe we need a plant and trade system rather than cap and trade. Whenever fossil fuels are sold, a corresponding amount of carbon must be stored, either through new plants of in other sequestered carbon.

<comment><USER6> You're describing one form of carbon offsets. A cap & trade system is pretty much what you're suggesting, depending on the specific implementation of a cap&trade system.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offset#Land_use.2C_land...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offset#Land_use.2C_land- use_change_and_forestry)

<comment><USER5> I did not realize cap and trade systems were backed by actual carbon storage. That makes more sense then. Thanks for the link.

<comment><USER7> they don't have to be.. but most cap and trade proposals include carbon offsets... so a polluter can complete an offset project OR purchase credits to pollute more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Look here: [https://www.google.com.au/maps/@-33.0362291,118.4896355,5465...](https://www.google.com.au/maps/@-33.0362291,118.4896355,546561m/data=!3m1!1e3)

Can you figure out where there used to be trees ? That's now wheat farms mostly. Due to the tree removal salination has ruined 2 million hectares of what is now essential wasteland. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salinity_in_Australia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salinity_in_Australia)

<comment><USER9> Don't know why you couldn't replant trees then. There are many types trees that do well in saltier soil. For example, White Ash, Red Cedar, Black Walnut, Japanese Black Pine, Pin Oak and Red Oak. Doubt it'd take much to get something estabilshed, and it'd probably take over on it's own gradually.

<comment><USER10> Not sure that you'd want to plant a bunch of European trees to replace native Australian forests.

<comment><USER11> Why?

<comment><USER8> It would be futile. Native Samphire, melaleucas and casuarinas can live in saline soil conditions that would kill most anything non-native. There may be exceptions of course.

Its when the Samphire starts to die that you know your in shit street.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interestingly, planting 1 trillion trees all at once would decrease the albedo of the earth ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo)), increasing warming in the short term. I wonder how long the trees would have to exist before the scrubbing effect on carbon dioxide would outweigh the albedo change?

<comment><USER13> Geez, albedo is a topic I didn't know existed until just now, but which is clearly a complex enough topic for hundreds of people to spend their entire lives studying it. Super cool.

<comment><USER14> The fantastic SimEarth had a great daisyworld simulator that illustrated the concept well. You had two species of daisies, light and dark, and their balance had a huge effect on the world.

Of all the Sim games, that's the one I'd most like to see get an update (though "Planet melting? pay $29.99 for in-game carbon credits!" would be an off-putting business model).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you planted a tree every second, it would take you 31 thousand ish years to plant them all.

That said, if you had 100k people planting them itd take under a year. Can a machine plant 1 tree per second? Id be interested to learn that

<comment><USER16> That's an interesting thought. It immediately made me think of some fast moving contraption that buried seeds into the ground. Obvious difficulties would be navigating, and being small while being able to force something into the ground.

<comment><USER17> There are people who get paid to manually plant trees. They're called Tree planters. Seeds seem more scalable but the industry appears to use saplings. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9wPTwlGGJs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9wPTwlGGJs)

Maybe a drone could complete the two actions instead. 1\. Jam rod thing into ground, pull it out, dump dirt 2\. Stuff in tree

A guy on Reddit claimed to have planted 1.25mm trees this way: [https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/24jgsy/ive_planted_12...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/24jgsy/ive_planted_125_million_trees_across_canada_in)

Young trees need water until they're established, so I wonder how many little trees actually survive.

<comment><USER18> You can wrap their bases with a porous bag of hydrated gel--like a yolk sac for saplings.

Logically, it would be best to use industrial processes to factory-assemble a package that results in the lowest cost per established new tree when it is left in the wild with no further maintenance.

Existing tree seeds are cheap and stupid, and limited by the state or the art in tree-seed technology, which is essentially to coax an animal into eating a fruit and crapping out the seed elsewhere in a nice, fertile pile of dung.

Humans can do better, by sprouting the seeds in a controlled, indoor facility, culling any unsuitable saplings, and granting the sapling additional resources that the parent trees could not provide before planting it in a location distant from the parents that is already known to be suitable for the adult tree.

~Alternately, leave Robo on tree-planting detail, and skip ahead 1000 years in the Epoch to pick him up.~

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I read that the great plains were naturally forests, not grasslands. The theory is they are grasslands because long ago the forests were burned to provide habitat for the buffalo.

This theory is supported by the Kansas farmers having planted trees, and the trees do quite well.

I would imagine that a great deal of forest could be created by replanting the great plains.

<comment><USER20> You may be remembering incorrectly, the great plains were grasslands many millions of years before humans arrived on the scene. Remember we only left Africa ~100,000 years ago.

<comment><USER21> Yeah the grasslands are 25 million years old. Humans have only been in America for 15,000 years:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plains#Paleontology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plains#Paleontology)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm reminded of _Anna Karenina_

> "I wouldn't attempt to teach you what you write about in your office," said > he, "and if need arose, I should come to you to ask about it. But you're so > positive you know all the lore of the forest. It's difficult. Have you > counted the trees?"

> "How count the trees?" said Stepan Arkadyevitch, laughing, still trying to > draw his friend out of his ill-temper. "Count the sands of the sea, number > the stars. Some higher power might do it."

> "Oh, well, the higher power of Ryabinin can. Not a single merchant ever buys > a forest without counting the trees, unless they get it given them for > nothing, as you're doing now.

</comment><comment><USER23> An article here a couple of weeks ago claimed that sea weed is more effective than tree fighting carbon dioxide, and it seems cheaper to plant and manage... Shouldn't we focus on it instead of trees ?

<comment><USER24> I wonder which would be more effective at countering ocean acidification, since sea plants need the carbon dioxide in the water in order to create oxygen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I really think the answer is to switch to wood fuled biomass generators for electricity. It would be an incentive to plant more trees, and the charcoal waste could be burried as fertilizer, placing excess carbon back in the ground.

<comment><USER26> The amount of solid carbon left as waste is inversely proportional to how efficiently the wood is burned. In high-heat combustion, virtually all of the carbon is consumed and released as CO2, rather than remaining in the ashes.

<comment><USER25> What if it were purposely inefficient, and stopped once the wood is reduced to charcoal?

<comment><USER27> So we basically go back to using fireplaces for heat.

<comment><USER25> No. The idea would be to never actually burn the wood, just heat it up enough to release gases, and burn the gases in a generator. These could be (are?) run at power plants.

willismichael pointed out that efficient biomass gasifiers will then burn the resulting charcoal, which releases quite a bit of CO2. I suggested using the charcoal as fertilizer, instead of burning it.

<comment><USER27> Wouldn't heating it up to release the gas use more energy than results from burning the gas?

<comment><USER25> As far as I understand it once you get it going you can use the gas to keep the temperature up, and still have excess. Of course, this is only until the fuel runs out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Could satellite/drone imagery with computer vision could get an accurate count?

<comment><USER29> Given half the trees are already gone, not sure how useful a more detailed count would offer.

<comment><USER30> Actually there are more trees in the US now than in the 1800s [1]. However, the downside is that there is relatively little age difference in them, since they were planted in the last 50 years or more. This means less diversity of habitat, and it takes a while for the critters to build up biosystems in them. Still, I'll take the positive away from it. The quick effect of actually warming the Earth was surprising to me, because if we plant so many new trees we lower the albedo, and it takes a while for the trees to scrub the CO2 to make it a net win.

      [1] http://www.greenoptimistic.com/united-states-trees/#.VwxsqybSqHs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Maybe we should just plant hemp, the most useful plant on this planet.

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't understand the argument. We needed to know how many trees there are to know whether we physically have space available for more?

<comment><USER33> We need to know the density of trees in various environments to understand how many more we can plant. And when you have that, you also know how many trees already exist.

It's also useful to know how many trees have been lost to development, which is closely related to how many currently exist. And all of that is based on knowledge of tree density in various environments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> 10^12 trees for anyone wondering

</comment><comment><USER35> Makes little sense because trees die and decay, releasing their stored carbon. We released the carbon from liquid fuels and thats how we should reset, back to liquid carbon that wont go anywhere.

<comment><USER36> Isn't that how ecosystem should work? Tree dies, new one grows on the spot. X amount of carbon should be locked in a Forrest ecosystem as long as it lives; trees, other vegetation and organisms. Some of it will eventually fossilize for good.</comment></comment>


4 Online Business ideas that don't need any funding - <AUTHOR> http://www.elegant-tec.com/online-business/4-online-business-ideas-that-dont-need-any-funding/

<comment><USER2> They don't require funding agreed, but I would be more interested in evaluating my time at say even minimum wage or some dollar amount, and then evaluating the roi of these ideas vs some other idea where I invest time as well as money. Not everyone can fund, but for people who can, it would be interesting to see which has higher revenue potential.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> you're right, I never thought about it actually, funding is always helpful I guess, on can use money for ads and marketing expenses which can accelerate the growth process. But sometimes the availability of funding leads to uncontrolled spending and waste.</comment>


School experiment finds cress won't germinate near router (Danish) - <AUTHOR> http://www.dr.dk/Nyheder/Indland/2013/05/16/131324.htm <comment><USER3> One suspicion I've always have is that high frequency radio waves can induce microcurrents in supercoiled DNA. It's been speculated by the Barton lab¹ that the base excision repair error-correction mechanism actively surveys DNA by injecting electrical current into the DNA and 'searching' for lesions which disrupt the conductivity of DNA. Some circumstantial evidence for this is that a major "base excision repair" component has a redox-active iron-sulfur cluster, and at least one study shows that the oxidation state of this iron- sulfur cluster can change how well it attaches to DNA.

The mantra that we always hear is that if the radiation isn't ionizing it's harmless. While this mechanism for worrying about non-ionizing radiation doesn't _directly_ cause harm, it's not quite 'harmless' either.

This mechanism would render quite a few results not surprising. Biologically, there are many stages where not having DNA error correction could be more catastrophic than usual. It makes sense that seed germination is one of these; temporarily decreased sperm count in human males would be another.

The experiment to check this hypothesis is pretty obvious, and I'll probably be doing it sometime in the next few years, especially if I can get my nonprofit research org. up and running.

Edit: Footnote [1]<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_Barton>

<comment><USER4> I find this pretty unlikely, for the same reason that nanobots have difficulty communicating: it's hard to make an antenna at those size scales that can receive a signal, much less contribute to chemical-level energy changes.

At the point where the wavelength of the EM radiation is small enough to get detected by DNA-scale antennas, it's probably already classified as ionizing radiation.

<comment><USER3> DNA molecules are pretty long. And this isn't a Nyquist law issue (I don't think) because there isn't a need to transmit coherent information. You just need to apply enough of a voltage to kick over the redox state of two iron atoms (midpoint potential ~ -20 mV) every so often.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I was in 8th grade I did an experiment that found that mold grew _better_ nearer a cathode ray tube computer monitor. I had, however, in retrospect, failed to control for the CRT monitor being a source of heat and light (if not much). I also did not verify it wasn't just due to the one side if the table being closer to something unrelated in my basement. I did very well in the science fair anyway (I have a plaque somewhere, and I think I had gotten it for the state-wide level), as for a "school experiment" the competition bar is quite low, and there are a ton of other factors on which you are being judged than "scientific accuracy". This kind of research is really no better than the people reporting homemade experiments constantly whom we often label "crackpots".

<comment><USER6> Here's a crazy thought. What if they use this opportunity to teach kids about the processes of scientific discovery and how it is sometimes based on pure chance. What if they then teach those kids about the scientific method and how to conduct a controlled experiment. Even if the story turns out to be a dud I guarantee the experience would make the students much more excited about science than growing some cress in a window sill.

Or we could explain how a bunch of scientists are crackpots for even thinking such a thing.

<comment><USER5> I feel like you are arguing with me. I am saying this because a some people are commenting here about what the ramifications of this discovery is; others, asking "serious" questions about the quality of the research, as if they should have taken certain things into account. I am pointing out that this isn't the right context for that analysis.

Also, that education is not news to post here in the first place. This is not a website where children are learning about science. There are tons of "discoveries" made as school experiments: I don't expect to see them on the front page of Hacker News (unless, like, there is some kind of serious interest in the larger science community). ;P

<comment><USER7> > This is not a website where children are learning about science.

On a website this size such assumptions are almost invariably false.

<comment><USER8> Nevertheless, HN is not a highschool science fair. The reason this story is making the rounds on the internet is very plainly not to get children interested in the scientific process, but rather because wifi somehow being dangerous is a provocative concept and therefore a good way to get pageviews.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is pretty off topic, but this reminds me of a weird thing that happened to me:

Over the weekend, I rearranged the furniture in my computer room in my home, and had just settled in to this new layout. Everything was working fine: my computer and my internet connection were all good to go. I booted up Counter- strike to play some rounds. However, the in-game server browser failed to find any servers. I closed the game and checked my internet connection: everything was fine. Maybe the master server was down? I went to bed.

The next day, I tried it again, and the same thing happened. No one else reported an issue. I tried playing TF2, and the same thing happened: all online functionality was nonexistent. It seemed like it must be a router configuration issue, but I hadn't messed with that in a while, and my games all worked fine last week.

I was able to play the same games on other computers without any issue. But as soon as I loaded up a game on my primary computer, I noticed the internet would go out for every system in my room. Maybe it was something with Source engine games? I tried a completely different game (some 2D indie puzzle game), and the same thing happened. Every game! The internet would go out, and turn back on as soon as I closed the game. It wasn't Steam either: non-Steam games did the same.

And it ONLY happened with games. Almost every other application worked fine. I was about to reformat, but I first tried booting into a separate OS on my computer and the SAME THING happened.

Finally, I noticed it failed with Unity and also with Photoshop. These programs all had one thing in common: they were GPU accelerated. How did that affect anything? Well, it only started happening after I rearranged my furniture. I had moved my router to sit on top of my computer. I moved it away by 1 foot, and then everything worked fine. It turns out, my laptop has Nvidia Optimus, which toggles between the discrete GPU and integrated graphics chip. When I launched a GPU accelerated program, my GPU would kick in, and I guess its operation emitted some electromagnetic field that interfered with my router.

<comment><USER10> Back when I lived in the dorms in college, I had a metal loft bed. My desk, with computer and monitor, was underneath it.

At the end of the year, I gave back the loft. The next time I turned on my monitor, the screen was _messed up_. Distorted with purple waves. I stared at my monitor for a few moments, baffled.

Then I hit the degauss button, and everything was fine. My monitor had been normalized to the presence of a metal frame around it, distorting the magnetic field.

<comment><USER11> Sometimes even in a room made of wood no large metal objects nearby and then moving a CRT monitor 90 degrees is enough to mess it up requiring it be degaussed.

I'd say the metal frame had ferrous metal in it which is magnetic your monitor was affected by it, I can't see if fixing it. Once removed the source caused your monitor to require degaussing because a large source of nearby magnetism was removed.

As to why it wasn't affected right away when it was new my guess is a lot of monitors have built-in degaussing each time it is powered on, so gradually the metal nearby was affected by the degausing coil in the CRT monitor. When metal bed frame was removed the loss of such a large piece of nearby magnetism was too much for the normal start-up automatic degaussing to handle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How did they control for factors other than the router? Did they again attempt germination when the 2 devices were completely off? I'm not convinced when entirely separate rooms were used.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, I'm sure school experiments have found all kinds of crazy things. Can we wait to post this until someone replicates the results?

<comment><USER14> Why should we only discuss replicated/confirmed results of scientific experiments?

<comment><USER15> Because it's extremely easy to make mistakes during experiments, and people usually underestimate that. Bad experiment design. Uncontroled variables. Strange statistical results dew to small numbers. I'm probably guilty of all of them! Go and find out any physics student/graduate and ask about his/her stranger laboratory "result".

To analyze a completely different example, to proclaim that a new elementary particle has been discovered, the community ask for a 5-sigma (i.e. if they are only measuring noise, the probability that the noise generate a similar signal is only 1/2000000.) The problem is that there are many many many running experiments and a 1-sigma and 2-sigma "discoveries of particles" are usual, but most of the just disappear when more data is collected. And that is done by experts, so the probability of a mistake or error in the design is smaller, but not 0 (remember to check the wires.)

The problem to give too much importance to a not reproduced, not peer review result is that many times it's interesting and feed the people's fears. Probably someone will propose to ban the wifi near the botanical garden and kindergarten because everybody knows that they kill seeds!

It could be good to discuss about these preliminary results, but with a very big warning signal that sais "STILL UNCONFIRMED". The problem is that in most of the press releasses and discussions the warning is just dropped.

<comment><USER16> "Go and find out any physics student/graduate and ask about his/her stranger laboratory "result"."

As a high school junior, I conclusively proved the strength of Earth's gravity field was ~6.1m/s^2, give or take .2m/s^2. Or at least, if you're willing to take this story and the experiments of high school students at face value, I conclusively proved it.

This isn't a science story. It's a human interest story with delusions of being a science story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Adverse Influence of Radio Frequency Background on Trembling Aspen Seedlings: Preliminary Observations

<http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijfr/2010/836278/>

<comment><USER18> Google "Hindawi journal scam". These guys regularly send me spam soliciting publications, and are most likely a thinly veiled paper factory. I wouldn't trust a thing I read in a Hindawi "journal".

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Google translate:

[http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=da&tl=en&js...](http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=da&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dr.dk%2FNyheder%2FIndland%2F2013%2F05%2F16%2F131324.htm)

<comment><USER20> there's an English version:

[http://www.dr.dk/Nyheder/Andre_sprog/English/2013/05/17/1309...](http://www.dr.dk/Nyheder/Andre_sprog/English/2013/05/17/130946.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> A friend of mine did his duty service at an old radar site. When they were bored they'd send a pulse through antenna and the birds sitting on it would flip dead.

Granted the energies involved are not comparable, but a router is active much of the time. Also remember you deal with inverse square law here, the effect likely fades out quickly with distance.

</comment><comment><USER22> Yeah, just like that experiment with the 'evil' microwaved water I bet.

</comment><comment><USER23> I find it hard to believe that the school built a faraday cage for this experiment :)

<comment><USER24> Relevance? You, plants and animals don't live in a Faraday cage, so this would distort the results. But I agree that if they were not school children, but grown up, then they should do the same test but additionally try it again using a faraday cage.

<comment><USER8> It wouldn't "distort" the results. It would enable you to get results at all. The number of likely uncontrolled results in this "experiment" means that it was worthless for anything other than getting children excited about science.

<comment><USER24> As said I agree that an "additional" test with a faraday cage should have been done, but not by the children. I expect the scientists to come up with that idea. Having too high expectations from children is counterproductive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I accidentally developed a new kind of polymer when I was in the 7th class. It becomes thin as skin when wet and hard as hard-plastic when dry plus it smelled like menthol.

The interesting part was that I didn't use oil or something else, but only minerals available in a cheap chemistry-kit. My chemistry teacher was excited to find that out, showed it to my class, but didn't understand how it worked.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is very interesting, but I would wait for some confirmations. If I read correctly, they didn't even repeat the experiment themselves.

</comment><comment><USER26> It could be as simple as the plastics in the router enclosure giving off fumes :-)

(No reason to get your panties in a bunch before the results can be reproduced and a cause has been isolated)

</comment><comment><USER27> The articles don't say if the experimenters knew which router was powered, for one thing. There is way too much scope for bogusness here.

</comment><comment><USER28> Every time my aunt's back hurts the Dow Jones average drops 3.7 points! Is she a stock genius?

</comment><comment><USER29> Any suggestion about relatively cheap equipment to measure the RF field with some degree of accuracy? I found many companies selling this stuff but can't judge easily what's good and what not. I'm interested in the 900mhz - <USER2> range.

<comment><USER24> There was some research in Visualizing WiFi with Light. Here are the results: [http://www.openculture.com/2011/03/visualizing_wifi_signals_...](http://www.openculture.com/2011/03/visualizing_wifi_signals_with_light.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> "two routers emitting roughly the same type of radiation as an ordinary mobile phone." Wait, what?

</comment><comment><USER31> A fun experiment if you use an USB WiFi stick - put it on an USB extender cable and lay on any plant in your home. After few days the plant will most probably die in this place.

<comment><USER32> Why?

<comment><USER31> Because it's basically a small microwave, at 2.4Ghz. Its harmless from a distance, but if it's very near the antenna, it will toast the flower.

<comment><USER33> I objected to this statement at first, as frequency plays a big part in what electromagnetic radiation does, but then I discovered many microwave ovens do operate at 2.45GHz

Though, before you freak out that you are cooking your family, consider that a microwave oven outputs 600-1200 watts, while a WiFi antenna is typically 0.5-1 watt.

<comment><USER34> The reason microwaves use 2.4 GHz is that water and fat molecules begin to resonate at that frequency, absorbing energy from the waves.

It's also one reason why 2.4GHz systems can have problems outdoors.

During rainstorms, the range drops to nothing as the water grabs all the energy.

Also any foliage (leaves w/ moisture inside) blocks the signals more than at other frequencies.

<comment><USER35> The "resonating" explanation is wrong. Please stop propagating this mistake.

From Wikipedia: "Sometimes, microwave heating is explained as a resonance of water molecules, but this is incorrect; such resonances occur only at above 1 terahertz (THz)."</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Age Old Question: Can A Non-Technical Founder Run A Startup? - <AUTHOR> http://futurephilanthropreneur.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/the-age-old-question-can-a-non-technical-founder-run-a-startup/

<comment><USER2> I know someone who is non-technical and does startup Internet businesses. His lack of knowledge concerning software development is a real problem, but he guts through it. The biggest problem is one of trust: if you are not yourself a developer you don't appreciate why on rare occasion it can take a while to track down a bug, and other normal software development scenarios. A friend of mine has a way of explaining this to non-techs: "You are going fishing. Tell me exactly when you will catch a fish." :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Mark,

First of all, I must say, your website is very impressive. I would love to chat with you about AI at some point. You are correct about the non-techs understanding and empathizing with the developers. I am a non-technical founder myself, that's why I wrote the post. I try my best to understand the processes and problems that the tech team goes through. I try and learn as much as possible in order to not be in the dark.

I also like the fish analogy :D

<comment><USER2> Thanks. BTW, my telephone number is on my web site - I'm available to talk, preferably in the morning (Arizona time)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think a domain expert can be a stronger founder than a programmer, if it's the right kind of domain. You either need to know what needs to be built, or how to build it, to have a chance (ideally, you'd know both)

I'll bet with 99% certainty a non-programmer cannot run a successful programming tool startup, though :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Peter Thiel (Paypal), Mark Pincus (Zynga)

I mean is this even a serious question?

<comment><USER5> These guys can't. They're over 40 and we all know that unless you're 20-something you cannot do anything startup-related.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think non-technical founders have a harder time building a profit-based company (like 37signals or Plenty of Fish, his examples) because how do you get a programmer on board to build the thing if you can't pay them?

Imagine the job ad: "Wanted: Engineering Bitch."

[http://www.metamorphblog.com/2010/02/startup-lessons-for- the...](http://www.metamorphblog.com/2010/02/startup-lessons-for-the- protofounder.html)

<comment><USER7> In my harsh experience in trying to recruit programmers for companies or units run by a non-technical types, the pay is a trivial detail. Most of the really good people just don't want that scene, most especially if he's their direct report.

There also tends to be a really big issue with finding the first techie for the company, in most cases in my experience it was done through networking or the good type of nepotism (e.g. a brilliant younger brother who was just graduating from EECS at MIT and who turned down a good offer (IE when it was the very best browser, something he'd worked on in summer internships) to work for the startup).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's a better test: if you listen to people who tell you what you can't do you probably won't be a good founder.

<comment><USER7> What do you do when a programmer tells you "this can't be done" (perhaps "... with these resources", including time)?

You're sure to find _many_ others who say "no big problem!"

Which do you believe? The wrong answer can be very expensive either way.

There's a reason why _very_ few '7-80s superminicomputer companies survived the advent of multiprocessors and trying to get their operating system(s) to work reliably with them.

In that case, it was "this will be hard" vs. "not too hard". In most cases, the B team got the nod, and all was well ... until customers with machines in the field started complaining how their shiny new systems would sporadically crash. And the B team couldn't find the problems (or at least very quickly), since among other things they hadn't invested enough in instrumentation and so on. Some companies were lucky enough to get a chance to hire third team who could do it, but I think in most if not all of those cases the company was too injured and too late with a good solution to survive.

ADDED: I should probably qualify this with "it depends a lot on how hard the problem is". I'm used to the domain of hard technical problems because that's mostly how I made my living before retiring. And one advantage of them is the barrier to entry they pose to competitors.

After all, we're here because the problem of developing a really good (easy to use and so on) web shop development system is _hard_ , something where using secret alien technology (<http://lispers.org/>) can make a big difference, and did.

<comment><USER8> There's a difference between asking someone else to do something and doing it yourself. Don't listen to people who tell you what _you_ can't do.

<comment><USER7> Do you mean what " _you_ can't do" as "you are not capable of this but others are/might be"?

Yeah, that has much less weight, although you might want to drill down and see why they have that opinion. E.g. Edison could not do in a practical way electronic distribution because he didn't have the math (calculus) needed for polyphase AC, which is why we're all using Tesla's inventions (with a modern special case exception of _very_ high voltage DC interconnect lines).

I.e. a "you can't do this unless and until you master X" is worth listening to. On the other hand, the founder of Motorola didn't know or pay attention to the conventional wisdom that coils? (inductors) had to be big, so he went ahead and made the first really practical car radios.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If it's an "age old question", then it must mean no one has come up with a satisfactory answer despite a lot of data? That would seem to indicate that if the answer is not a firm yes or no, then it is possible. The post, however, says "no".

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems as if there is always a debate as to whether this is a yes or no question. In the post, I say "no" to startups and yes to scalable startups. I think that this topic is subjective and hard to define as yes or no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why was Plenty of Fish used as the sole example in this article? It makes $10 million in profits a year and would take 100 years to make the $1 billion in profits that he require for a startup to be considered as a "scalable startup."

<comment><USER11> \+ PoF is no longer adsense based, he is running his own advertising and selling premium accounts.

Actually I've recently read an article that basically questions PoFs claims. It was a few years old, from when he was still running adsense...but basically it raised one question..."if plenty of fish is as successful as the guy claims(still had that 10mm/yr number back then)...why isn't he an adsense premium publisher?"

Basically it implied that the only reason Plenty of Fish took off, was because the guy lied his ass off early on when he was making a few grand a month, saying that he was making millions, which got him a ton of coverage which in turn eventually got him more users, which in turn led to the $1mm/yr number.

And that even now the numbers he is putting out for consumption are nowhere close to reality, and is just a way for him to get more free marketing.

<comment><AUTHOR> You never know, that is a distinct possibility. If the numbers are relatively correct, then it is a different way of doing business. If not, then it is another case of trying to get marketing any way he can.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Of course a non-technical founder can run a startup. Just look at Richard Branson. Or some of the many startups in greentech, biotech or anything else not directly related to the internets.

However, I don't recall any startups without a founder that has some flair for sales and marketing succeed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I agree 100%, that is why I wrote the post. I didn't reveal it too much in there, but as a non-technical founder, there are ways to make it work.

<comment><USER12> Absolutely.

The way I see it is that there are a number of ingredients involved in successfully doing a startup: Marketing, sales, finance, people, luck, ambition, domain knowledge, etc. You can be weak in one area but then you'll have to compensate in other areas to make it up.

I know a very successful founder of a tech company (yearly turnover 8 figures), and he has no idea how to hack. But he does have acute people skills, and he's brilliant at sales. He was also lucky that he got into a domain that had a lot of possibility.

I also know a guy that's a brilliant programmer, but his projects never go anywhere. He doesn't know how to sell his product, and he's afraid of giving up control. The inevitable result is that noone has ever heard of him or his company.

<comment><AUTHOR> Those are great examples. There are a multitude of things to do in a company, and everything has to work in unison. I also think you write a very good blog, the posts are great.

<comment><USER12> Hey thanks :-) It's not updated as as often as I'd like though...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Norway Becomes World's First Country to Ban Deforestation - <AUTHOR> https://www.ecowatch.com/norway-becomes-worlds-first-country-to-ban-deforestation-1891166989.html?__twitter_impression=true <comment><USER2> It may seem ironic that the ecological policy is enabled by riches derived from extraction of their sizable oil reserves.

Nonetheless this is the pattern we've seen repeat time and time again through history: the more surplus (energy, power, human effort, etc.) is available, the more people can improve their living conditions. And people indeed show strong preference to have nature in healthy, beautiful state. It's all matter of having strong, efficient economy.

<comment><USER3> Norway's Sovereign fund is very much the exception from surplus. Most countries have achieved far less future proofing. The pattern we see again and again is using a surplus in a very short-term, short-sighted manner.

Round about the same time as Norway was setting up their fund, the UK was deciding not to. UK's dividend from similarly sized oil reserves was _nothing._ It was all given away in tax cuts, realistically not much noticed. Effectively all spent on people buying a 26" CRT TV, a holiday, maybe a Sony Walkman etc.

<comment><USER4> The population of the UK is considerably larger while they had less oil reserves and their oil is more costly to extract.

<comment><USER3> We'd have potentially ended up with a similarly sized fund but around a tenth per-capita. That would have been around $20k or $30k for every man woman and child - hardly trivial.

Certainly not a reason not to bother or feel we got anything resembling a benefit from the resource dividend.

<comment><USER4> Hindsight is always 20/20, the Norwegian fund was setup because the country went bankrupt and needed to save its pensions a similar fund in the UK would've been about half of the total endowment the Norwegians had with 12 times the population it's not that clear if it would've made any difference in the long term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is about a Norwegian government policy to not procure the products of deforestation.

Some countries limit the actual deforestation directly: for example, Article 5 of the Bhutanese constitution from 2008 provides broad environmental protection and mandates that at least 60% of the country shall be forest at all times.

<comment><USER6> Clickbait titles...

Limmiting procurement should incentivize non-deforistation where as a simple ban would likely just shift deforestation to other countries. But alas, the current title is more sensational.

<comment><USER7> [https://qz.com/504370/norway-rewards-brazil- with-1-billion-f...](https://qz.com/504370/norway-rewards-brazil- with-1-billion-for-keeping-the-amazon-full-of-trees/)

Like giving them a billion dollars, too?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good for them. Currently in my country they are actively cutting trees thanks to a EU renewable energy policy that counts biomass as renewable energy, resulting in a lot of "sick" and "dangerous" trees getting cut.

[https://www.princeton.edu/news/2018/09/12/europes-policy- tre...](https://www.princeton.edu/news/2018/09/12/europes-policy-treat-wood- low-carbon-fuel-poised-harm-global-forests)

</comment><comment><USER9> Hopefully this will also apply to fodder for the farmed fish that is produced with soy from the rain forest but I highly doubt it. The farmed fish lobby here is strong.

Edit: Yeah I see this is from 2016. They are indeed still using soy from the rain forest while the government pumps out billions to "protect" the rain forest.

<comment><USER10> Soybean production can potentially continue without rainforest destruction, and fish farms are far from being the largest consumers of soya.

Legislation and expenditure to protect forest directly targets the heart of the matter while indirectly stifling all of its causal factors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Need to put (2016) in the title. This is an old article.

None the less, good for us. Even though our valleys are becoming more filled with trees now that there is no livestock to keep it down.

</comment><comment><USER12> Did they also ban buying timber from abroad, or did they only ban deforestation within their own borders? I hope it's not like US recycling that ended up sending most of the garbage abroad.

<comment><USER13> I'd think that timber planted for that purpose would not be counted as deforestation. Just like paper is made from Eucalypti which is rare to grow naturally or with other species.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> China is paying big bucks right now for timber and buys more European wood since the trade conflict with the US. There are forests to protect.

</comment><comment><USER15> The idea of banning logging of any kind to the average American might seem stupid, their thought process being "well, what else are we going to get wood to build new houses??". However, steel / aluminum construction is dropping in price every year and although concrete isn't much better, buildings constructed from it last one hell of a lot longer. IMO forests are far too precious to humanity to just cut down for housing materials. DISCLAIMER - I'm going to come off as some hippie-dippie tree hugger here, but I am NOT. Just your average developer with some weird hobbies, maybe I happen to like plants a bit more than some since I got into plant science / algae while doing research at UT Austin's plant science dept. in high school? I digress...

My biggest reason to support this kind of legislation comes from an experience I had while taking time off from college to work in the Bay Area. One weekend I decided to take a day trip to Big Basin National Park. This was in 2017 after almost two weeks of heavy rain, I was lucky I didn't get my shrimpy VW Jetta stuck in a washed out part of the road during the drive over the foothills on my way to the park.

When I arrived, the forest floor was surging with life, trees had fallen but new rivers had formed. I saw endangered species of mushroom, salamander and all kinds of other life that otherwise wouldn't have emerged from the duff covering the forest floor. I spent 7 hours in that park, eventually realizing a deer had been silently following me. For a while I was actually lost and although I'm not a religious person consider this three hour period taking in the forest as the closest thing to a "religious experience" I've ever had.

In simply terms I though, "how on earth could anyone experience this incredible place, trees higher than I could see, life surging from every orifice and think 'we should cut this down to build housing complexes'??"

I had a long reflective drive back, feeling refreshed in a way I'd never experienced going to any other national park. It killed me to pass logging trucks and signs for "active logging" as I made my way back over the foothills and actually almost ran out of gas because my expected route had washed out while I was hiking that day.

Forests are sacred. Why we cut them down is beyond me, if you're in the Bay Area please join a reforestation cause!

I'm going to get back to programming now...

<comment><USER16> >steel / aluminum construction is dropping in price every year

I'm not sure this is any better. Steel and aluminum production are both incredibly stressful on the environment. Brazil, for example, mines massive amounts of iron ore (for steel) and bauxite (for aluminum) in the Amazon, contributing significantly to the deforestation there. I don't know much about the process for steel production, but aluminum smelting is incredibly energy intensive. The result is large energy projects which themselves impact the environment. Hydroelectric dams are commonly used to supply the energy needs and can result in massive environmental side effects in places like Brazil. A common alternative to smelting near mining operations is shipping to countries like Iceland, which has exceptional energy production capacity thanks to its many renewable sources (like hydro) and offers cheap energy. While dams in Iceland have significantly less flora and fauna to disrupt, you're adding the emissions cost of shipping.</comment></comment>


The Ecological Limits of Work [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://autonomy.work/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/The-Ecological-Limits-of-Work-final.pdf <comment><USER2> The same author that wrote "Debt: The First 5000 years" has a brilliant book called "Bullshit Jobs". After reading, it's hard to not frame any labor discussion from the book's perspective.

There are two thoughts that came to me while reading this article that I think were a result of reading Bullshit jobs:

1\. Not all labor is productive labor. We should be focusing on efficiency. By reducing hours I think this will cut down on the amount of 'unproductive' work.

2\. A cultural change is needed, why do we automatically associate time with productivity?

<comment><USER3> I finally read that book a few weeks ago, and one idea Graeber raises in it is something that'd been bugging me for a while: it seems like adding computers to a large proportion of activities and processes makes them _less_ efficient, and increases the load of bullshit jobs to deal with making everything compatible with computer monitoring and computer-"aided" business processes, for gains that may be illusory and which surely do not make up for all the added layers (and cost) of bullshit.

The stuff about the rise of the influence of finance folks and practices on (previously) traditional management staff was interesting, too. I'm not sure his timeline works out, as I'm aware of (fictional) books that treated of precisely this sort of thing (bullshit office jobs, in particular) as an entrenched phenomenon at least as far back as 1961, but I think both ideas are getting at _something_ worth further examination.

<comment><USER4> _" adding computers to a large proportion of activities and processes makes them less efficient"_

Young technophilic me didn't distinguish between _digitization_ and _automation_. I've since seen this mistake over and over.

Automation is the removal of judgement. Automate before you digitize.

Older technoskeptic me now assumes that whenever a big bang project fails (eg new payroll system for big org), it's because they tried to faithfully reimplement some legacy "processes" dependent on humans, in the form of social cognition and tribal knowledge, sometimes also called "culture".

Also, automate after you digitize. In fact, redesign and reengineer to support automation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a kid, one of the biggest benefits of technology I heard was freeing up our time from mundane labor. But with our phones making us available almost 24/7 it seems the joke is on us.

A three hour work day is something I could get behind 100%.

<comment><USER6> To me 3 hours isnt enough, i need at least an hour to warm up before jumping into the zone. Im thinking what would work out for me: 4 hour work days with the ability to squeeze 2 days in one and being able to do 2.5 days of 8 hours a week, no more no less. I'd be as productive as I am now, maybe even more. During the time off I'd still have work ideas popping up in my mind while doing things like being with family, playing with my kid, etc.. Currently thats what i do in terms of productivity but the dead time is spent sitting in a chair in an office 1.5 hour away from home.

<comment><USER7> 6-8h a day is fine by me, just not 5 days a week and/or on a rigid schedule.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How does a three-hour work day make sense for anyone who isn't wealthy?

In a lot of the world we have what are, in the short term at least, zero sum games.

An example would be housing in a place like SF or London (and seemingly creeping down the scale as time goes on).

If Person A works three hours a day, Person B is going to work six and end up with twice as much as you. If they can't do it at one job, they'll take two.

Low paid individuals already do this, they'll have multiple jobs because they don't get enough hours at any of them.

In the current situation - A will be living in student-like conditions, or homeless, and the B that works six hours will have a flat or house to themselves.

Forecast that out a few years or decades and A is in poverty whilst B has established wealth via savings and investments.

It feels like one of those ideas that would work if there were less scarcity in the environment.

<comment><USER9> I imagine that if we all worked 3-hour-days the price of housing would massively reduce, as rent and purchase prices can only be what the market can pay, and that goes for the land they're built on too. I doubt this would be a perfect 1-to-1 match to income changes, even if it happened in every country at the same time.

<comment><USER10> We have a housing cartel ensuring the supply of homes remains lower than demand in areas with decent jobs. So the person who wants to work a 3 hour day can't compete with the person who says "well, I'm willing to work a 5 hour day to afford a home, at least for now".

Of course, in reality it often comes down to the person who wants to work a 40 hour week competing with the workaholic who works all weekend on a regular basis.

Similarly, a lot of couples might prefer to have one partner stay at home and do childcare, but this is impossible (except for the rich) with a housing shortage, because homes will always go to the wealthiest (usually those willing to be two income full-time households).

Once you have 100 households seeking 101 homes instead of 90 homes (etc.) it _does_ become possible. When you're competing with "I'd like a bigger home" vs. "I need any home at all" it gets easier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This makes no sense. Moving emphasis from Production (work) to Consumption (leisure) increases carbon usage, and halts progress towards more sustainable technologies and conservative behaviours. Climate progress takes effort not entertainment.

<comment><USER12> Why does leisure have to mean consumption? And isn't consumption necessarily limited to the amount produced?

I wasn't particularly impressed by TFA, but I don't understand this criticism of it.

<comment><USER11> Well, you still need to consume, eat, house yourself etc. Any situation where you're not paying for that without a productive output is one where you're increasing the ratio of consumption to production. Of course not all work is productive, but solving inefficiencies is _work_ not leisure

<comment><USER13> Most work isn't aimed at making technological progress towards a more ecological or otherwise better future.

Most work is also not aimed at food production or housing anymore because of technology.

<comment><USER12> A large proportion of work is aimed at housing, but for entirely the wrong reasons. Housing costs in first world countries these days generally expand to consume available income, via land price inflation. Actual build cost - "production" \- is a minor piece of the pie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "I would thus argue that the climate crisis calls for (...) us to adapt Paul Lafargue's phrase, the 'necessity to be lazy'"

I didn't know it, but my laziness has been saving the world from global warming.

</comment><comment><USER15> As a personal anecdote, I've been working between 4 and 2 days a week for more then 5 years already. I am never going back to 5 days. Never.

<comment><USER16> did you have to take pay cut?

<comment><USER15> Yes, but I guess the cut is not linear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder about how distribution would play a role in yields vs pollution - especially when accounting for training costs and logistics.

Would it be more efficient to have one person working 80 hours a week and thirty nine unemployed or 80 working half an hour a week or anywhere in between? Of course this is a very multivariable problem and that is ignoring the many sociological issues that would occur with such a system.

</comment><comment><USER18> If you're lucky enough to be earning a decent amount, you can simulate this (kinda) for yourself. Following the Mr Money Mustache approach, save a good portion of all your income (>50%), invest it, and work towards an early retirement. Instead of a work week that's 1/4 the hours of everyone else, you'll have a career that's 1/4 the years of everyone else.

</comment><comment><USER15> > As early as the 1880s, Paul Lafargue, a son-in-law of Karl Marx, put forth > the demand for a three-hour work day...

If three-hour work day seemed feasible back then it must be even more so today.

I think shorter working time is one of the most overlooked solutions to the climate catastrophe. And before you object by bringing up adverse economic effects, please consider that introducing 40-hour workweek did not collapse the economy.

"For example, in the U.S in the late 19th century it was estimated that the average work week was over 60 hours per week..." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time)

<comment><USER3> I think three eights or four sixes (24 worked hours a week, either way) is a good goal to aim for, since it's the tipping point at which something other than paid work might dominate one's waking hours, while still leaving time for other normal activities and necessities.

<comment><USER19> I would rather work less longer days than more shorter days, under any scheme. Maybe in a world where I was working fully remote, it wouldn't matter, but the overhead of getting ready, commuting, and getting wound down again is a constant that doesn't vary significantly whether I work 12 hours or one.</comment></comment></comment>


You might find your next home on Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1383672/you-might-find-your-next-home-on-amazon/ <comment><USER2> And dare I say it would be a good thing, just like when Sears Catalog sold decent quality houses too.

I still have yet to buy a house, and it isn't because I haven't tried. Here's some of the major issues I encountered with buying a house.

1) Dangerous hidden problems with the house

I once visited a house advertised for $120,000. It was old but fixable. 3 days after I visited, the clogged oil burner and tank blew up and burned the whole house down.

2) High property taxes

On Long Island NY or in New Jersey, property tax bills of $800-1000 _per month_ are the norm, regardless of house quality or school district.

3) High housing prices, period

Everyone can bet on a house with the banks money, so in a seller's market, buyers have worse odds of winning the right house

4) More technical expertise requied

K factor on a boiler. 5/2 ARM loans. Denim insulation. 110v fuse boxes. Forced air. Closing costs. Tenant's rights. Setback codes.

All of these technical terms are just some of the things that will pop up whenever a homeowner wants to do something to their house to save a little money, like taking in tenants or upgrading to more efficient appliances or adding storage to their house via a shed.

Basically, when something goes wrong in a house, you're on the hook.

If Amazon can fix most of these problems for a cheap and easy price, then sign me up.</comment>


Ask HN: How important is install #s vs. usage/retention in funding right now? - <AUTHOR> I know it's a buyer's market at the moment but I have a project I've been working on for awhile that is starting to show some pretty impressive stats on the usage/retention front, although our actual growth has been slow and steady. It's self-funded right now, so to stop treating it like a side project and take things to the next level I'll need to raise $150,000-$200,000.
My question is, is anyone finding that good usage/retention stats and a detailed plan to get to the next milestone is enough to raise that amount from angels right now or is it a fool's errand to start reaching out to people without crazy install numbers? Feeling a little stuck without being able to hire some help.
Average user/device/day is higher than Twitter right now and closing in on Instagram and SC, clocking in at about 15.2 min/day.
Retention is a little noisy with only a few thousand users but stays between 50-75% day 1 and 15-33% day 30. Fall off is nearly non-existant after day 30.
It's a B2C "social photography game" on iOS only right now with a small but friendly and totally engaged community with active users in over 50 countries. <comment><USER2> So you have an app with users. How much money does it make? What would 200k let you do?

<comment><AUTHOR> It makes $0. It's a social app just getting its legs so we're focused on growth right now. We do have some outside the box ideas for monetization down the road though.

We've reached a manpower ceiling with just two of us working on it daily so the 200k is about double what we need for a few hires that would allow us to build out the desktop experience, some general design/UI updates, get off of Parse and onto our own backend and complete two large features that will make the overall experience a more shareable and viral experience. It should also be enough to take us to our first 1mil users.

The other half is a buffer against the 1000s of things that can go wrong and to give us a little runway while we raise a real round if things go right.

<comment><USER3> > We've reached a manpower ceiling with just two of us working on it daily so > the 200k is about double what we need for a few hires that would allow us to > build out the desktop experience, some general design/UI updates, get off of > Parse and onto our own backend and complete two large features that will > make the overall experience a more shareable and viral experience. It should > also be enough to take us to our first 1mil users.

An investor would certainly prefer investing if it was the case that you were growing so fast that you couldn't handle the growth. The skeptical investor in me would ask: why can't you two get it growing faster without other people? How much longer would it take you to build these two large features with just you two? Which other things are you spending time on right now that you could stop using time for?

I feel these are valid questions given you are building a social application that makes money from advertisements, where to make large amounts of revenue requires extreme scale -- therefore why would an investor want to invest unless they believed you were excellent at growth?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good questions. We could certainly build the features ourselves, one of the time constraints we're trying to battle is a self-imposed deadline to relaunch before the end of the year. We saw a large bump at the end of last year, before we had started working on telling anyone we exist, from users looking for interesting ways to do 365 Projects for New Year's resolutions. This year, knowing that's coming and a proven use case, we'd like to amplify that effect as much as possible.

The other piece of the puzzle is that we know we're pretty good at what we do but I'm a former theme park designer and that doesn't necessarily translate to UI and graphics 1:1 so it would be nice to bring someone in to up our design game there, likely on a short-term contract.

And finally, we'd be learning a completely new skill to rebuild the backend and get us off Parse by the end of January when they fold. There are bandaids available for that situation but if we're going to go through the time and expense, we'd prefer to do it right.

So ultimately, my original question plays into your last question, "Why would an investor want to invest unless they believed you were at excellent growth?" I'm hoping the answer is something like, "because these other metrics and circumstances point to a high enough likelihood of excellent growth being right around the corner." But I don't know if that's how the funding market thinks right now even if I can convince someone to believe that to be the truth as much as I believe it to be, so I'm hoping to gain a little insight there.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Heat Storage Hypocausts: Air Heating in the Middle Ages (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/03/heat-storage-hypocausts-air-heating-middle-ages.html <comment><USER2> If you want to learn about an ancient solution to the opposite problem, air conditioning, I recommend this:

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

<comment><USER3> Thanks for posting this, the gallery section left me speechless. I hope tensions die down so I can go visit Iran one day; i'm always impressed by the historical architecture that is present in the Middle East.

<comment><USER4> You can go there now as an American, and it may be even safer than going there as a non-American, because you will have a government minder spend every waking moment with you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In some rural areas of Spain where access to wood used to be limited hypocausts still exist, work great and are heavily used because they are very efficient. I've seen lots of them and their construction is practically the same described by Romans

</comment><comment><USER6> The podcast 99% Invisible had an episode[1] earlier this year that featured some of these passive innovations like India's stepwells[2]

[1] [https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thermal- delight/](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thermal-delight/) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepwell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepwell)

</comment><comment><USER7> If you're in the UK or visiting the UK the Roman Baths in Bath, UK offer an amazing experience to see saunas heated with hypocausts.

[https://www.romanbaths.co.uk/](https://www.romanbaths.co.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER8> >A furnace's dimensions would depend on the size of the room to be heated. In private homes, where only the bedroom was heated, it would be one to two metres long, a little more than a metre wide and 50 to 60 cm high. In public buildings and monasteries, where large halls and rooms had to be heated, the furnaces would be much larger.

This is massive compared to the size of a wood stove. It's amazing what a thousand years of incremental refinement will do.

<comment><AUTHOR> These systems do predate mass production of steel, so no surprise there.

It is interesting to contemplate what solar or geothermal variants of this system could do. Nearly every home has a crawlspace of those dimensions underneath the ground floor.

<comment><USER8> Nitpick:

I think you mean cast iron. Steel is kind of tricky to cast and we've only been casting it for ~100yr and even then not for large things in high volume. The largest high volume production (i.e. consumer item sold by the thousands) cast steel thing I know of is steering knuckles on the newest Ford trucks. In contrast we've been casting things of all sizes and shapes our of iron since the 1800s. Considering the mechanical requirements of a wood stove it doesn't make sense to cast it out of steel.

<comment><AUTHOR> You know, I thought that specific parts being switched to steel was a reason for the uptake of popularity in a wood burning stove, but I see this is only a case in a very specific market of wood burning stoves. Thanks for the correction!

<comment><USER8> Which parts switched to steel? Other than fasteners and misc. hardware that has to be strong and fairly malleable to withstand owner abuse (hinges, handles, latches, etc) I don't see much of a need for steel in a wood stove.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> These are a fore-bearer of the masonry heater. Very similar to what some off- grid types have built and called a rocket mass heater. Very interesting principle but unfortunately (or fortunately if you are so inclined) they will never compete with the ease of operation of a gas (or oil) central heating system.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, what's an interesting question about these systems is, "In a modern context where we understand science much better and have much more sophisticated materials available, could we use these principles?"

The real trick here is using available materials for heat storage, using air convection to circulate heat but not waste gas, and tightly limiting oxygen flow to make the most of minimal materials.

It's definitely not bad, from an efficiency standpoint, to be compared to rocket heaters. They're still some of the most efficient systems we have.

<comment><USER10> We could probably improve the dimensions quite a bit if we used something other than granite for heat storage. Something that changes phase, like in those pocket warmers, would probably be more effective.

<comment><USER11> There is fireclay [1], and I have fireplace with several bricks made from it. When fired in the evening for 2-3h, will keep warm until morning.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> More info on existing and still in use hypocausts in Spain [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_(heating_system)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_\(heating_system\))

</comment><comment><USER12> Fun fact: even modern Korean condominiums have a modern equivalent of an ondol.

<comment><USER13> I wish more housing in cold-winter North America (like here in Minneapolis) had something like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> primitive technology dude built himself a hut with some form of hypocaust (fire tunnel beneath clay tiles)</comment>


Here's How to Make Climate Change Extra Scary - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/-heres-how-to-make-climate-change-extra-scary <comment><USER2> > Jean-Michel Claverie, a microbiologist [..] could have caused this scenario > twice. In 2014, Claverie thawed a small sample of Siberian permafrost in a > petri dish and discovered a dormant virus that [..] could infect amoebas.

Wait, it looks like we should stop scientists from experimenting with permafrost in the first place.</comment>


The ultimate guide to deploying your node app on Linux - <AUTHOR> https://certsimple.com/blog/deploy-node-on-linux <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, author here. This has been running for five years now and been on HN previously, but the fifth addition contains significant changes: as well as yarn and better deploy key instructions, there's now a Cloud Init generator to instantly create instances for your project.

People have consistently asked for a repeatable version but the issue has always been picking a format: there's Ansible, Chef, Puppet already. Kubernetes / Docker has its own files. The reason I picked CloudInit was because it's widely suopported, most folks are running cloud VM instances. You can easily fork [https://github.com/certsimple/deploy-node-on- linux](https://github.com/certsimple/deploy-node-on-linux) though to generate other output formats and I encourage you to do so!</comment>