China's rising tech scene threatens US brain drain as 'sea turtles' return home - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/china-s-rising-tech-scene-threatens-u-s-brain-drain-n1029256 <comment><USER2> The most concerning quote: "About 80 percent of Chinese students who get degrees abroad now go back — up from about 33 percent in 2007, according to China's Ministry of Education. Some 15 percent take jobs in China's booming tech sector."

Attracting top global talent has always been a competitive advance for America, and it's not a good sign for our economy if we can't retain people that we are educating here.

<comment><USER3> I know plenty of really bright, talented and hardworking Chinese grad students who have a preference to stay in the US but the current visa situation is appalling. RFEs (request for evidence) which were once rare have become standard practice, making the wait to start a new job go up by months, with lots of stressful uncertainty as to whether or not you will be allowed to stay in the US.

There's lots of VC money in China right now and most talented Chinese tech people have offers waiting for them in China that are both very high level positions with very high compensations. So even if you want to stay in the US on the one hand you have people back home offering you insane opportunities and trying very hard to incentivize you to return, and you have the US government essentially trolling you to make a point about how unwanted you are (from their perspective).

The fact that the current US policy is effectively working hard to drive away very talented people who want to be here but have plenty of good offers elsewhere will do plenty of long term harm (for the US).

<comment><USER4> Except the article doesn't say anything about visas or better salaries back home. Its whole slant is that apparently Chinese graduates are moving away from Silicon Valley because those darn US labor laws mean they can't work nine hours a day, six days a week, for lower wages.

The article is such a pathetically transparent piece of anti-labor rights astro-turfing: China is going to out-compete the US unless US workers can be forced to accept equally shitty working conditions, that I cannot believe Hacker News is taking it seriously.

<comment><USER5> The article does discuss increasing salaries in China.

The issue with the pace of development bring quicker doesn't just come down to labor rights. Shenzhen is the world's biggest electronics manufacturing hub, so it can be easier to iterate quickly with manufacturers there. The article does indeed interview someone who complains about Americans supposedly not working long enough hours, but that's actually a pretty widespread view in China about Westerners.

<comment><USER4> I'm sure it's a very widespread view, amongst "entrepreneurs" benefitting from a ready mass of overworked and under-compensated workers, and workers one generation past poverty who have been culturally indoctrinated with a belief that accepting extreme workloads is a sign of virtue. That doesn't excuse it being uncritically repeated by others rather than treated as the toxic and exploitative sentiment that it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anybody know how hard it is for non-Chinese citizens to live and work in China?

One of the competitive advantages of the US has been its ability to draw top talent from all over the world and not just its own citizens. Chinese citizens leaving the US is not a good thing, but it is just one nationality. If China manages to draw talent from everywhere, then the US has a real problem ahead of it.

For example, my team in the US only has a few US citizens on it, most of us are foreigners who moved here for the opportunities. While a few are Chinese, the majority are from countries other than China and the US.

<comment><USER7> > Does anybody know how hard it is for non-Chinese citizens to live and work > in China?

It used to be easy... My first work visa to China took just 1 week to get: no criminal check, no work history check, no academic credentials check, you just get it.

Now people are saying it takes from 1 to 3 months.

Dark skinned people have hard time in China. Fat people, even worse.

Shenzhen looks like a totalitarian fairyland — a hard to convey impression. It is one of the best cities by quality of life in Asia, but... you get those 1:00am police visits, ID checks everywhere, and you, being a foreigner, are a magnet for all kinds of "overly ambitious" policemen.

Shenzhen is a pretty international city, but even today it is hard to avoid crowds of onlookers, and unsolicited selfie requests.

Jobs... I'd say better than nothing for a foreigner. It is one of the best places in China where a foreigner can get a meaningful job, but even that doesn't make it a lot. Old links are essential here.

You had to come to the city like 10 years ago, to have a chance to network with local businessmen. Not so much today. Rich businesspeople around are much more insular these days.

A friend of mine once worked for Duan Yongping in nineties, and knew him personally. 20 years later, that link still keep earning him top jobs to this day.

The expat commune here is way smaller than it appears at first glance. I keep bumping into people I met like 10 years ago, when I worked as a translator/interpreter in a Singaporean sourcing company.

Dating scene. Kinda very, very random. Not so many local women will consider a foreigner, and those who will are from two fringes of socioeconomic spectrum. You can date a factory owner today, and a literal village girl tomorrow.

The city is _very_ young by Chinese standards. It was the one and only big city in China with an average age below 30 in recent history. A lot of youngsters still come from all over China, blindly seeking luck. It becomes harder and harder for such types to establish themselves here with each year.

Shenzhen gets more expensive with each year and is about to outrun Shanghai as China's most expensive city. The city turns less and less of a manufacturing hub, and more and more of a "Dubai of the East"

The famed manufacturing industry today is a shadow of its former self. Newcomers to Shenzhen ask me how it could've even been possible for the manufacturing to be bigger than the cyclopic scale it is on now. I say to them that the famous Huaqiang road market sprawl in its best years was spreading for many city blocks, and on some days was reaching the central park. This is how it was during the "Shanzhai" boom of 2008-2012. Since then, the industry has been on the unending downward trend.

Transport, and getting around: much better than any US city, but there are rough corners to the system. Gas scooters are banned, bigger electric scooters are in grey zone. Only electric mopeds are allowed, and even that is not given. Owning a car is more expensive in absolute terms than in US or Canada.

Food — very good, cuisines from all over China. Probably with exception of northeast.

Weather — typical tropical weather. Nothing to add to that.

Now last one, having fun. Very much like Dubai — the place is damn boring. Just like Dubai, a lot of glamour doesn't automatically mean a lot of fun.

<comment><USER8> Hold on. What's the deal with being fat?

They're literally refusing visa because people are fat?

<comment><USER9> Nothing to do with visas, it's just how others treat people that look different there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > China's tech sector has its own shorthand to describe the hours that > employees work in the country: "9-9-6," meaning from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six > days a week.

> "Our factories are still talking to us at 10 p.m. or 11 p.m., sometimes well > into midnight. They're working on weekends, so things get done much faster," > Gui said. "Whereas back in San Francisco, after 5 p.m. people won't respond > to your emails and you can't get anything done until the next day."

If that is the price of fast innovation, I rather be a bit slow.

</comment><comment><USER11> Eh, as a third culture kid with a US passport and 50%+ friends being international/TCK - it's honestly because the VISA process is appalling.

Out of a sample of 10 international students I went to school with at Stanford 20 years ago (I just eyeballed my FB friend list and took 10, totally biased anec-data I know):

• 4 are now citizens - all their green card processes took 7+ years, except the one person who got it via marriage

• 2 are STILL in the green card process

• 1 intentionally went home for opportunity

• 3 left due to VISA expiration issues. 2 went to Europe, 1 went to Canada. 2 are CS grads, 1 has a PhD in ML.

It massively sucks. We're talking about amazingly resourceful people who got raised at whatever sheep farm in Kenya and Uzbekistan, made it all the way to Stanford via merit-based scholarships and what not, and then got ejected from the US because national policy... and now some other country with friendlier VISA policies got 'em.

<comment><USER12> I don't see why this "massively sucks". Obviously, the American people, and the government they elected, don't really want these smart people in their country contributing to their economy, so there's other countries (the ones with friendlier visa policies) where they're more welcome and they should go.

You can claim that Americans are shooting themselves in the foot with these policies, and electing people like Trump, but if that's what they want to do...

<comment><USER13> Trump has said many times that he wants a more meritocratic immigration system. A combination of big business and pandering to minorities keeps Congress from changing immigration from chain-migration to merit-based immigration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > "Wang said the salaries of his 40-person team for two years cost $700,000."

Good luck with that. If you're averaging $10k per employee per year over the long term, I guarantee anyone with the ability to be a good engineer is still going to come to the US where they can make orders of magnitude more.

<comment><USER15> Or maybe US engineer is overpriced.

<comment><USER16> Considering companies will only hire an engineer from a top college, with top scores, with huge student loans the pay should have to match.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> More than that: the US gov't has declared their own tech giants a threat. Meanwhile, the Chinese gov't is supporting theirs as a potential goldmine on all fronts: national security, foreign policy, economic.

<comment><USER18> Good point, I've never thought about it that way. We usually see US tech firms supporting the govt (and the resulting protests from their employees). But I wonder how the climate were to change if the govt was proactive in supporting the local tech firms instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> _" Wang Meng Qiu, a startup founder who graduated from Stanford University with a doctorate in computer science, held jobs at Facebook and Twitter in Silicon Valley before he moved to the outskirts of Shanghai to launch his own drone company, Zero Zero Robotics.

Wang said the salaries of his 40-person team for two years cost $700,000."_

Generously assuming that the full 40-person team didn't onboard until year 2, that's an annual average salary of only 17,500 USD per person. I know the software development labour is cheaper in China, but quick comparisons indicate that something is off with this figure. Maybe most of the 40-person team are on an assembly line?

<comment><USER20> > that's an annual average salary of only 17,500 USD per person.

That is realistic and in line with fresh out of college Computer Science graduate market rate. I know that because I went to an undergraduate CS degree in China.

Developers are working harder in China too. The famous 996 work schedule has been prevalent in Internet software startups in China.[1] Hence the anti-996 movement.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system)

<comment><USER21> Only from a third tier university. You aren't going to get a tsignhua, pku, or even beihang grad for that price.

<comment><USER20> tsignhua CS grads are either going to study abroad or doing investment banking jobs which pays more at entry level. Same with top tier university grads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Silicon Valley has changed a lot in the last 20-30 years.

The ability to physically design and create things has basically disappeared. I'm not only talking about chips, but mechanical, electrical engineering and all the miscellaneous disciplines associated with creating something in one place.

That used to be the strength of the valley.

If you want to do software, ok, but that's arguably less location dependent.

<comment><USER23> I agree but I think this can turn around, we've really only lost the quick- turn PCB manufacturing. The talent is definitely still here.

<comment><USER12> It is? Doing what? The hardware work has mostly left the area, and when that happens, skilled people either leave the area or go into different industries. They don't just sit around waiting for the jobs to come back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Talent will follow opportunity, so this shift in sentiment may reflect the relative outlook on the level of opportunity that US provides relative to China, at least for those who are able to work in China.

As an aside, the American immigration system leaves a lot to be desired in terms of its efficiency, and may be a contributing factor.

<comment><USER25> I think america is putting more money on trying to have natives fill these jobs over making the immigration policy more efficient.

There is tons of potential being wasted in America and we really should focus on our native citizens. Its been a while since america has been dominant in the strength of our workforce and much of our current wealth is because of past generations not the current one.

We should focus on changing that before relying on other nations to provide us with skilled labor. It a national risk short and long term.

<comment><USER24> As a three time immigrant, I have diametrically opposing viewpoints. My view is that immigration mostly benefits nations, and emigration always hurts them. Immigration increases the labour capacity, and nations that utilize this resource in a pragmatic manner are net beneficiaries.

My earlier point was around the fact that US isn't very efficient at managing this resource (letting arbitrary people through the physical border, while holding up highly educated folks in immigration queues for years).

<comment><USER13> I think a majority of voters would like the immigration system to be better enforced and more focused on highly skilled immigrants but there are powerful interests who like the status quo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> We're quite far from the scale tipping in that direction, but it makes me curious about whether the US government has the legal authority to say "educating foreigners is no longer in the national interest, therefore it is no longer a valid reason to remain in the United States" and decimate the foreign student population essentially overnight.

<comment><USER27> The government can do whatever it wants when it comes to setting immigration laws. It's an enumerated power.

F-1 (student) visas are already nonimmigration visas. After you graduate, you have a few months of "optional practical training" (OPT) and then you're expected to go home. Hopefully, you can get an H-1 ( _another_ nonimmigration visa) to stay for at most six years, which is about how long it takes to get a Green Card (permanent residency)[+].

I had heard that the reason why F-1s are nonimmigration is because back in the 1960s it was seen as foreign aid with Cold War benefits. Encourage people from third world counties to come to the United States, see how great it is, and then go back and build up their own countries. A decade or two out, you now have a country friendly to US interests.

Maybe that made sense in the 1960s, but it seems like it stopped making sense sometime in the 1980s, and certainly by the 90s.

We make it too hard to immigrate to the US. If I was king for the day, I'd make F-1 visas immigration visas, or at least be able to fast track F-1s into an immigration visa. The glacial pace, and the difficulty to immigrate is a reason why people go back. I know people that ended up giving up on getting Green Card, so moved to Toronto, and already has gotten Canadian permanent residency.

[+] If you want to fast track your Green Card, marry a US citizen. You get it in a couple of months.

<comment><USER28> > six years, which is about how long it takes to get a Green Card

Ha! Unless you're are an Indian or a Chinese, in which case it's more than 10 years (which is being quite optimistic)!!

<comment><USER29> My research says it is 70+ year for EB3 visas entered this year assuming nothing changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Quality of life (e.g. security, stability, happiness) for the average citizen in the US seems to be on a downward trend. I imagine that is a big factor for foreign tech workers leaving the country. It's not all about money.

<comment><USER31> Even a highly compensated US tech worker can be bankrupted by medical costs. Seen it happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> An interesting tidbit for non-Mandarin Chinese speakers. The sea turtle doesn't refer to analogy of grown sea turtles returning to their home when young, but it's a homonym to 海歸 (same sounds as sea turtle 海龜), that roughly means "return from sea (ie. abroad)".

</comment><comment><USER33> If China can continue this growth, this trend will continue. But China's financial system is a house of cards and it's unclear if they will make it out of the next recession without significant damage. There's serious strategic threats including opaque financial system, improper banking controls massive "market rigging" and government corruption. No one knows the true state of the Chinese economy, including China itself.

I wonder how many of these employees will make it back to the West eventually. Big _if_ obviously as there are many unknowns.

[https://www.scmp.com/economy/china- economy/article/2173461/c...](https://www.scmp.com/economy/china- economy/article/2173461/china-underestimating-its-us3-trillion-dollar-debt- and-could)

[https://www.brookings.edu/blog/ben- bernanke/2016/03/08/china...](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/ben- bernanke/2016/03/08/chinas-transparency-challenges/)

[https://www.ft.com/content/961b4b32-3fce-11e9-b896-fe36ec32a...](https://www.ft.com/content/961b4b32-3fce-11e9-b896-fe36ec32aece)

</comment><comment><USER34> Honestly,

If the Chinese can be prevented from exporting their version of the prison state, this could be a good thing in the near-medium term. (The U.S. imprisons the most per capita)

China needs smart people there to transition the economy. India has been massively slowed down by the brain drain to the U.S.

The more people out of poverty, the better.

</comment><comment><USER35> A lot of these conversations miss two aspects completely:

1\. Smart STEM people are more inclined to having a family. Constant uncertainty is not conducive to family. That will cause a lot of smart people to be sea turtles.

2\. The most significant drawback of smart people congregating elsewhere is that future American companies are fucked. There is just going to be a lot more competition for products globally. Future Apple will have to fight Chinese companies in India. Mariott will have to fight Oyo in China. Future Tesla will have to fight BYD in Europe.

A LOT of our stock wealth is because other companies couldn't innovate as rapidly because the US was draining those countries of this talent pool. With this reversal, American companies will have a smaller pool of talent and will get whacked everywhere. Its super unfortunate.

<comment><USER36> >1\. Smart STEM people are more inclined to having a family. Constant uncertainty is not conducive to family. That will cause a lot of smart people to be sea turtles.

Also, even for the well-compensated, it's financially very difficult to afford the 'ol house & car dream in what I would expect are top locations for immigrants (SF bay area, New York, Boston, Seattle, LA, ...). Certain parts of China also have absurdly expensive real estate (Shanghai, Beijing), but rent tends to be much more affordable and if you have family nearby the whole housing situation becomes much easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Nothing to be surprised about.

Hometown is almost more attractive if other factors considered to be irrelevant. You have your native language, your family around, the food and just familiarity of things, as comparing to be a foreigner in a country that constantly put your status at risk.

Why America if it is hostile? What for?

</comment><comment> dfeojm-zlib As long as people keep coming to the US to get an education, that helps the economics of academia; out-of-state tuition paid for by somebody else (usually, countries or rich families) is $$$$. Maybe the problem is the US isn't as welcoming socially, politically or bureaucratically (visa process) as it once was? That's a PR image problem that the current political climate tarnished through inept and ignorant messaging.

<comment><USER38> Yep, we will have to wait until 2020 but if Trump ends his term, the next president has a huge task of rebuilding the PR and get it back on track.

<comment><USER12> No, Trump is going to be there until 2024. There's very low likelihood that the Democrats will unseat him.

<comment><USER36> Can you also tell me tomorrow's lottery numbers? Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The president is asking the congresswomen to go back.

</comment><comment><USER40> Well of course they're leaving, I'm seeing firsthand how hard it is for them to stay here. Employment authorization takes so long that I've seen students lose the internships and job offers they have lined up. That's on top of all the culture/language differences and whatnot. I don't blame them one bit for going back home.

</comment><comment><USER41> 700,000$ for 40 people for 2 years? 4 ppl here make that much in 1 year, why would they go back other than do startups?

<comment><USER42> It must be that the cost of living in China is less than $0 per year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Baidu's founder was a sea turtle. He worked at Infoseek before returning to China to start Baidu.

<comment><USER44> Probably why Baidu is such a terrible search engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> It doesn't make sense for America to educate its rivals. We should also be wary of Universities turning into backdoor immigration schemes - this has already happened in Australia and lead to a massive reduction in education quality.

The focus should be on training Americans to fill American jobs - and any immigration scheme should be arranged with military, economic, and cultural Allies only (UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea).

<comment><USER46> Is that the full list?

<comment><USER5> For the sake of American cuisine, at least France should be added to the list.

<comment><USER46> Freedom fries? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Sure, Chinese nationals are returning home but who else is following? Living in China is about as attractive as being a character in 1984.

<comment><USER48> And only those who don't value personal freedom. (read Tiananmen square, Uighur camps as your starting examples). Sure the US loses out on some talent, but that will always happen and once we move past the current administration we will pick up talent from elsewhere if need be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Did I read it correctly? Threatened 'brain drain'? So 'brain drain' to US is being viewed as a positive thing?

I think the idea is to send people back to build their countries, not to stay here to build America. This is indeed a good news that we are spreading the talents and knowledge and eventually prosperity more evenly across the globe. US has enjoyed this monopoly over talents for too long, and that is probably not a good thing and definitely shouldn't be taken for granted.</comment>


SolePower: Power by Walking - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/764467377/solepower-power-by-walking-0

<comment><USER2> "This technology really changes everything"

No. It's neat, but why do people insist on ridiculous hyperbole?

</comment><comment><USER3> A true "kick starter."</comment>


Getting Real - <AUTHOR> http://gettingreal.37signals.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome (short) read on the 37Signals team's philosophies.

</comment><comment><USER2> Reality sucks.</comment>


Ask HN:About Software Estimation - <AUTHOR>

Is software estimation relevant in this community? Assuming most of the folks here are working in startup environment, I am curious if software estimation is done and if yes how. I work in a big organization where estimation is done by a gut feeling of someone senior and often outdated with latest technology trends. This result in over estimation of as much as 5 times (sometimes 10 times) the actual effort required.  I wonder if software estimation is an art or science. Please point out to some good resources to learn good software estimation. <comment><USER2> I recently had this discussion with an accountant. We generally have to estimate our times in hours for clients. This is very hard. One can look at all the requirements and have an idea on how long it will take, but one can never be exactly sure.

I made analogy to the accountant by asking him how long it would take him to add two large unknown numbers in his head, down to the millisecond. This is similar to what software developers are asked when they have to estimate the numbers of hours for a project.

BTW - The senior guy is probably over estimating to cover his reputation of delivering early or on time.</comment>


All About Erasure Codes (2004) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~plank/plank/classes/cs560/560/notes/Erasure/2004-ICL.pdf <comment><USER2> Using a general matrix inversion algorithm to decode Reed-Solomon erasures is an atrocity. The only difference between encoding and decoding erasures is that we restore _m=n-k_ code word values at static locations, _k+1..n_ , when encoding, and _m_ code word values at dynamic locations when decoding. In both cases, computing the matrix is _O(mk)_ \- much faster than matrix inversion.

<comment><USER3> Can you elaborate more on the computation of the decoding matrix? Is it basically a special-purpose row reduction, taking advantage of the fact that the matrix to be inverted has a bunch of rows from the identity matrix? (I think it is, but would be curious if there's another algorithm out there!)

<comment><USER2> If _RS(n,k)_ code is defined as _Sum[i=0..n-1] Xi Zi^j = 0, j=0..m-1, m=n-k_ , where {Xi} are codewords and _{Zi}_ are locators, then for any polynomial _P(Z)_ of degree less than _m_ we have _Sum Xi P(Zi) = 0_.

Now, let's erase _m_ values at locations _E={Ej}, j=0..m-1_. For each _Ej_ , we can construct polynomial _Pj(Z)_ of degree _m-1_ that evaluates to 1 at _Ej_ and to 0 at all other locations in _E_. From _Sum Xi Pj(Zi) = 0_ we get _Xj=Sum[i!=j] Xi Pj(Zi)_ (note that the sum is actually over all known _Xi_ ). _{Pj(Zi)}_ is in fact the decoding matrix. Computing it is _O(nm)=O(km^2)_ (not _O(km)_ as I put above).

I have that algorithm implemented in my _ErrorZ_ project on GitHub: [https://github.com/OlegMazurov/ErrorZ/blob/master/src/main/j...](https://github.com/OlegMazurov/ErrorZ/blob/master/src/main/java/org/mazurov/errorz/ReedSolomon.java) More advanced stuff, like decoding up to _m-1_ errors, can also be found there.

<comment><USER3> Ah, okay thanks. My coding theory is a bit weak, but it looks like this algorithm depends on the specific form of RS codes that you mentioned. I think the presentation outlines a form of RS erasure codes which is more general (e.g., allows Cauchy parity matrices instead of Vandermonde-derived ones).

Using a general matrix inversion is indeed inefficient, and becomes impractical for large k. However, the special-purpose row reduction algorithm I mentioned gets to O(n _m^2) which is much better, although worse than the O(n_ m) algorithm you mentioned, which makes sense given that that one handles more specific RS codes.

Thanks for elaborating! It's reminding me that I really should brush up on coding theory, though -- do you have any resources/textbooks you'd recommend for someone familiar with the mathematical background? (Finite fields, etc.)

<comment><USER2> I'm a bit rusty myself (all those small mistakes I made). I'm now more concerned with the engineering side of error correction (elegant implementations and more importantly a totally new class of dynamic error correction I have in another GitHub project). I can't recommend any good up- to-date textbook - haven't read any in long time.

<comment><USER3> No problem. Do you happen to have a source for the algorithm you explained, though? I recognize the parity-check matrix, but the rest I can't seem to find in any of the usual coding theory texts; usually, they treat erasures as part of the full RS decoding process.

<comment><USER2> The source of the algorithm I described is my mind. It's so elementary that I believe it is omnipresent but disguised by more complicated math, usually due to other ways to define RS codes.

<comment><USER3> I agree re. being disguised by complicated math. Although even if you think it's elementary, I encourage you to write it up somewhere, like a blog post. I'm sure there are people out there like me who would find it novel. :)

If I ever do use it or write about it, I'll make sure to cite you. Thanks again!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd like to see FEC used on a TCP/IP replacement to handle lost packets without an extra roundtrip.

When you're downloading a 1MB webpage, splitting it into ~800 1kb ethernet packets, the chance that not a single packet gets lost on the internet where typical packet loss rates are ~0.5% is slim.

<comment><USER5> I think typical packet loss rates are lower than 0.5% in some parts of the internet, and also, not necessarily normally distributed. That said, FEC is already used for very high latency networking. At some (low latency) point retransmit is faster than the hardware computing more FEC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unless I misread, the slides do not touch fountain codes (RaptorQ etc) at all, which serms like a significant omission.

<comment><USER7> "were first published in 2004": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_code)

(OP slidedeck is also 2004)

[ps:]

presentation on Raptor codes 2005: [http://algo.epfl.ch/_media/en/output/presentations/raptor- ba...](http://algo.epfl.ch/_media/en/output/presentations/raptor-ba..).

paper 2006: [https://gnunet.org/sites/default/files/raptor.pdf](https://gnunet.org/sites/default/files/raptor.pdf)

<comment><USER8> LT codes were published in 2002...

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Those who have used Usenet to get binaries will be familiar with these, which work on the same principle: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive)

<comment><USER5> Indeed. I use par2 on my local tar backups, to protect against a few blocks corruption.

People may also be familiar with RAID5/RAID6/RAID-Z, which use erasure codes to protect data from drive loss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How do the schemes laid out here compare with zfec ([https://github.com/tahoe- lafs/zfec](https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/zfec))?

<comment><USER11> zfec is an implementation of Reed-Solomon coding, the class of codes discussed in the first part of the slides.

<comment><USER12> To be precise zfec uses Vandermonde codes and it is derived from my old fec library from 1996-97. See [http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/research.html#fec](http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/research.html#fec) (in 90's web style).</comment></comment></comment>


A Silver Ooze That Could Shrink the iPod - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/a-silver-ooze-that-could-shrink-the-ipod/

<comment><USER2> Do we really need smaller iPods?

<comment><USER3> Do you prefer your iPhone to be thicker?

<comment><USER4> I have a g1 and I find the extra thickness to be justified for the keyboard.

<comment><USER5> You are saying that if the G1 were any thinner, you would like it less. Is this what you intended to say?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Katamari Hack - <AUTHOR> http://www.kathack.com/

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2318076>

</comment><comment><USER3> AWESOME. Katamari Damacy is a great game and this hack is fantastic.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Try the bookmarklet out on <http://news.google.com>. So cool! It even does images

</comment><comment><USER4> Really cool and creative use of webkit!

</comment><comment><USER5> HOLY SHIT! This is fantastic! I had heard of the game but hadn't played it. Gotta get to it now.</comment>


What could be done with used tires? - <AUTHOR> I've seen several photographs of vast piles of used tires, and apparently there is very little that can be done with them.<p>A couple of years ago I read about some process for creating carbon black out of them, and I've seen playgrounds and other surfaces made with chipped up pieces of tires. Is there really nothing better that can be done with them? Is there any promising research about alternative uses? <comment><USER2> I recently changed one of the tires of my old car for only $45, I was told it was a "second hand" tire, but it looked pretty new to me. I used to change tire at the Costco tire center, where I though I got deals. They usually suggest changing at least 2 tires each time and asks for at least $250 after some member discounts.

I also recently purchased an Audi and was told that each tire of an Audi will cause $400. I wonder why it is so expensive and if I could still go to the store and purchase a second hand tire for the Audi.

I don't know what it means for "second hand" tire.

I remember this youtube video about recycling tires [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERDIsONgSCQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERDIsONgSCQ)

I guess tires can be renewed?

I also know they can be used to make shoes.</comment>


Google Has Spent Over $1.1B on Self-Driving Tech - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/google-has-spent-over-11-billion-on-selfdriving-tech <comment> tuna-piano I think by most accounts -

1) Google / Waymo is by far the furthest ahead in self-driving tech.

2) Self-driving is possible in at least certain circumstances in the next decade or two (already is to an extent today).

3) Transportation / automobiles is an absolutely massive industry. Even companies like Dana, Inc (maker of axles) have $4bil valuations. It's easy to see how a self-driving tech maker would be worth far more than an axle maker.

4) Software tends to be a winner-take-most industry.

Given 1-4, $1.1B doesn't seem like much. Even if by chance it doesn't turn out to be a positive ROI, it seems crazy to think the $1.1B was a bad bet.

And given current prices for self-driving startups (example, Gm's acquisition of Cruise for >$1B), the current market value for Waymo would likely be >$10B.

<comment><USER2> How do you come to that first conclusion?

It seems difficult to tell who is the "furthest ahead" because it's a pretty complex race.

For starters, we can't even say with certainty who all of the competitors are. Some are very quiet or at early stages but could be working on a breakthrough problem that turns out to be a pivot point.

Some are specializing. Who is going to scale up the best and most cost efficient solid state lidar? There's a whole list of key problems being worked on.

Do you mean hardware or software? Just the algorithms are a huge piece. Just hardware is a huge pieces.

Beyond price and performance, it's common that unforeseen factors end up being important in determining who becomes the most successful in selling traditional manufacturers components or whole systems. Surely we don't realize all of them yet.

Also there is so much still being held close to the vest. These guys are keeping lots of secrets about how far along they are truly, roadblocks, etc.

<comment><USER3> > How do you come to that first conclusion?

I don't really trust any of the marketing (including videos) or friendly articles about how far along companies are. The best way to judge I've seen is by the mandatory reports companies testing in California must supply. By those, Waymo is far, far ahead as of 2016. They've driven 635,868 miles (two orders of magnitude more miles than their next closest competitor) and their miles driven per disengagement was 5,128 (an order of magnitude higher than the next closest, with many still in single digit miles per disengagement). I'm eager to see 2017 numbers. Perhaps one of the other major companies has caught up but I'm doubtful. That's a wide gap to close in a year.

Sure, the numbers could be gamed a little (just drive on the same road you can do perfectly every time every day all year) but doing that will never let you improve your real world performance (important for the big companies heavily invested in this, not so much for the smaller companies looking to get acquired).

I think it's reasonable to just ignore all the small companies working on this in stealth. It's all about testing for self driving cars. They can't perfect it just sitting in a garage and thinking really hard about what problems they may encounter and maybe a few prototype vehicles. They need as many cars as they can on the road driving and collecting data on real world situations.

<comment><USER4> Isn't Uber testing in Pittsburgh and Phoenix? They wouldn't report those miles to California.

What about R&D outside of the US?

I don't think California reports are an adequate measure of progress. Additionally, I am not sure mileage matters as much -- you even suggest why in the next paragraph.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if this includes the 'Fuck you money' engineers on project Chauffeur received for passing certain milestones. Earlier in the depositions it was disclosed that Levandowski was paid a 120 million dollar bonus, though it wasn't revealed how much was given to others on the project.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-13/one- reaso...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-13/one-reason- staffers-quit-google-s-car-project-the-company-paid-them-so-much)

<comment><USER6> Levandowski's $120M was an earn-out from the acquisition of his startup:

[https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial- intelligence/t...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial- intelligence/the-unknown-startup-that-built-googles-first-selfdriving-car)

(Note the date: this is well before Otto and the Uber/Waymo flap.)

It probably is counted in the $1.1B spent on self-driving tech though.

<comment><USER5> It was disclosed in the depositions that the 510 systems acquisition was worth about $20 million:

[http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/23/how-star- engi...](http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/23/how-star-engineer- sparked-war-between-google-2.html)

The bonuses were paid out at the end of 2015. It was shortly after that that Levandowski revealed Otto to the world. Plus Chris Urmson started Aurora, and Brian Salesky went on to become CEO of Argo, which is Ford's autonomous Driving subsidiary.

They all got some kind of huge bonus. It supposedly amounted to a 14% rise in the aggregated quarterly expenses of Alphabets 'other bets', which lumps together a bunch of Alphabet's moonshot subsidiaries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> $94 billion in cash burning a hole in their pocket. $20x billion in new cash pouring in annually, expanding by 10%-20% per year.

In another two years they'll be net cash richer than Apple is (as unlike Apple they pay no dividend and have almost entirely avoided taking on debt).

There aren't very many large companies they can buy with that money, due to perpetually increasing anti-trust concerns. I suppose they could maul ~$25 billion buying Snap and probably get away with it due to Facebook (but comeon).

So what to do? Burn $1.1 billion on self-driving tech. Will it pan out? Doesn't really matter. Their search monopoly isn't going anywhere near-term (probably) and they'll have $200 billion in net cash in another 4 or 5 years. They could vaporize $11.1 billion on self-driving tech in the next couple of years and it would not matter, either to shareholders (oh, some would pretend to be upset) or to their operations.

<comment><USER8> That's amazing. Would it be fair to say that at this point it's a dollar optimizer with no reasoning beyond it?

<comment><USER9> I can't remember if it was Lazlo Bock or Eric Schmidt, but in one of their books (both?) someone reports a board member opining "You've created the first self-replicating talent machine." Having worked with those cats, that might actually be true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The top German car suppliers and car makers have accrued 10x the patents on autonomous driving Google has [0]. Bosch alone has 3x the number of patents. Yet hardly anybody talks about Bosch and Continental and Mercedes/Audi/BMW etc.

[0] [http://www.businessinsider.in/Whos-in-the-lead-in- developing...](http://www.businessinsider.in/Whos-in-the-lead-in-developing- self-driving-car-technologies-Hint-its-not- Google/amp_articleshow/60284606.cms)

<comment><USER11> They do generally tend to keep things very quiet until they launch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> To put this in context, $1.1b is about 3 weeks of operating profit for Google. Considering the upside for Google if their experiment pays off, this seems like a pretty smart bet.

</comment><comment><USER13> It is not really that much! 1.1 B in 6 years on a moonshot project.

<comment><USER14> It's a lot if it doesn't pay off eventually.

<comment><USER15> The same tech that is being used in self driving cars could be repurposed for autonomous robots, and end up with a market much bigger than that of transportation. SDCs are just the easiest form of autonomous robots.

<comment><USER14> > SDCs are just the easiest form of autonomous robots.

That's a claim I have never heard before and I don't agree with. You have some kind of argument to support that drive-by claim? Since there are no fully autonomous SDCs yet you'd have to explain away any existing autonomous robots.

<comment><USER16> Roads are a fairly structured and rule-based environment already designed with machines operating on them in mind. And those aspects that are not designed for the physical properties of cars are still designed to be easily perceptible by the human operators, e.g. signs, lane markings.

That can't be said for many other environments in which autonomous robots would have to operate.

<comment><USER14> There are literally millions of Roomba cleaner robots sold. They are autonomous.

Simple, but autonomous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Don't know about how it's in the US, but if it's anything like in some European countries, a question is:

How much of that $1.1 are recouped as "investments in research" etc. and thus contributing to tax-deductions (and in some cases even subsidies)?

<comment><USER18> 100% of it would be tax-deductible. Corporations don't pay tax on any money spent on salaries, equipment, expenses, etc. Whether there would be ADDITIONAL subsidies, I do not know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can anyone put this figure in context? I'm inclined to imagine that $1.1B is chicken feed for Google.

<comment><USER20> [https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGOOGL&fstype=i...](https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGOOGL&fstype=ii&ei=BX68WZm5FNT82AbHrI-4AQ)

Google made 3.5 billion in their most recently reported quarter. It would have been even higher, except for a nearly 3 billion dollar 'unusual expense'. It's not exactly chicken feed, but 1.1B isn't an unexpected number given their focus on 'other bets'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> But am I the only one thinking that maybe we are trying to solve the wrong kind of problem?

If we had spent the same amount of money into creating a grid of mini-train I believe that most cities would already have some working prototype...

And mini-train is a control problem that we could solve yesterday...

(With mini train I mean something roughly big as a car but that is constrained to move in some predefined path, it will means that they could move way faster than cars and be more space efficients...)

</comment><comment><USER22> And $120 million of that amount got paid to Anthony Levandovski?

</comment><comment><USER23> Probably more since the end of 2015, since they've been increasing the number of vehicles.

</comment><comment><USER24> They've likely spent way more than that, since the article's number is only through the end of 2015:

"Between Project Chauffeur's inception in 2009 and the end of 2015, Google spent $1.1 billion on developing its self-driving software and hardware"

</comment><comment><USER25> Only $1B? Kind of highlights that they are not that serious yet about the technology yet.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's a lot and yet it somehow seems cheap at the price. DAROA seems to invest on a similar scale.

</comment><comment><USER27> you really trust your family to be in car that doesn't have a steeringwheel and it's controlled by "don't be evil" google ???

Seriously people, wakeup!

</comment><comment><USER28> And over 10% of it went to Anthony Levandowski.

</comment><comment><USER29> With literally nothing to show for it except litigation with Uber.

</comment><comment><USER30> Meh. Less than Hillary's presidential campaign.

</comment><comment><USER31> And Uber won over Google's self-driving tech;

</comment><comment><USER32> Serious question: Why not acquire Tesla and position yourself leaps and bounds ahead of the other tech giants?

<comment><USER9> I rather seriously doubt Elon is selling Tesla.

<comment><USER33> He owns 22% of shares.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Google already has a huge amount of power over where people go on the Internet. It seems having power, however indirect, of where people go in the real world is their next goal, and it is quite deeply unsettling to consider. Imagine self-driving cars that will be cheaper but take you to "sponsored places" before going to your destination, refuse certain destinations "for your safety", and play ads continuously while you're helplessly transported around.

Given that amount of power they will have if they succeed, spending $1B on the (very real) possibility of getting to that situation is definitely expected. And very very scary for everyone else.

<comment><USER18> "Since you uploaded a video which was removed from Youtube, your Google Driving account has been permanently revoked."</comment></comment>


Hey Future Self – Send a Message to Your Future Self - <AUTHOR> https://mauwi.me/heyfutureself/ <comment><USER2> I'd be hesitant to submit all of my current/future contact information to a form on a random site with no further information about the service.

<comment> b-orges Exactly. I left immediately after it requested my last name. But interesting and fun concept!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Launched a new site, what do I do now? - <AUTHOR>

I have launched a new website, a project I have worked on for a few weeks. I find it useful. My girlfriend finds it useful and even my mum understands it.
I submitted to HN last week and got some feedback and you guys said it was cool but needed x,y and z doing to it - I have now made those changes.
So now for the million dollar question, but also an embarrassingly stupid question, what do I do now? I have a site, it works, it's useful (as far as I can tell) so what should my next steps be?
thanks <comment><USER2> You have to start creating customer funnels. This could include writing a blog for your target market, doing a speaking tour for shoppers and getting them to sign up, just a few examples. Make sure to get creative with it. Last but not least, I'd refrain from using the word "cool" when describing your product. You should think about how Ultimate Gift Lists adds value and is more unique than your competitors or how people shop now. If you're to do this through your product and vision, that's when people buy.

</comment><comment><USER3> You need to think who your target group of users is. Create Personas, describe them. How old are they? How much do they earn? Where do they live? Married, kids, divorced, widowed, suicidal etc.?

Once you defined your target group, you need to find the ones who influence this group (the "influencers"). Find 10 of them and engage them socially.

That means different things. Follow them on social networks and engage them in meaningful conversation. Cold-email them with your pitch. Ask them out. Write a guest blog post. Be honest about your intentions.

</comment><comment><USER4> Personally, I'd be OK if someone "refers" me something through an affiliate link, but I wouldn't be so sure that my friends / everyone else thinks the same way. Pinterest got away with it, though.

It sounds a little like <http://refer.ly/> and I'd recommend to take a look at them if you haven't done it already. They have a neat product, although the name can potentially turn off some people (see above).

And don't get me wrong, I think there's always room in the market if you do your job extremely well. :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Is it something people pay for? How much? How much can you acquire new customers for?

You need to test your business model. It's not really clear what you're doing so it's hard to try to be concrete or very constructive.

<comment><AUTHOR> So it is a giftlist creator - but done in a neat way (I think). We make money by using skimlinks and turning links into affiliate links. It's a way of finding neat gift ideas and also bookmarking gifts on the web and saving them to a giftlist.

I think if we had users we could make money - from the affiliate links. But it is not clear to me how I attract users to the site, how I get the site out there..

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How about a link to the site or a link to the other post?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure sorry, I didn't want to spam HN but here it is - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4864978> \- the site is called <http://www.ultimategiftlists.com> and it is a cool way to create a giftlist, but is now also, in my opinion, a real neat way to find gift ideas for people.

We've acted on a lot of the feedback given to us:

\- An About Page \- More Categories \- A better way of saving the list \- Make the giftmark more prominent \- A blog (although not yet published) \- Resizing of images and a general change to the layout.

cheers</comment></comment>


Day 10 is live #100daysofML - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/prakhar21/100-Days-of-ML <comment><USER2> How much time are you devoting to this per day?

<comment><AUTHOR> approx. 2hrs per day apart from 8hrs of office work.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Day 11 is Up! #100daysofML</comment>


I Sold The Magazine, Too - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2013/05/29/sold-the-magazine <comment><USER2> Hope Glenn keeps up the good work. As a journalist The Magazine has been eye- opening to me. Almost non-existing staff (Glenn and Marco), handpicked contributors and you get a excellent magazine running profitable in less then one month.

Shows how much baggage traditional media carries from the past and how convoluted a news organization can get once you start adding sales, advertising, and other departments that can be avoided now with the proper strategy.

<comment><USER3> I think it's unclear how scalable and replicable The Magazine's success is (or even how successful it is).

Marco Arment has a sizable niche following which provided an initial boost when The Magazine launched. His personal connections have allowed him to snag a handful of known names within that same niche circle.

But more importantly, I think there's a different level of burden on a niche, under-the-radar type publication like this as compared to much of traditional media. I don't think Marco has a research staff to vet every article, so it's possible that they have or will eventually publish false information thanks to a lack of due diligence. Will anyone care? I guess it depends what falsehood they publish.

What if the falsehood results in a libel claim? Now you're talking about significant legal involvement (and costs).

Or maybe they end up running a story that has been plagiarized. What happens then?

I think that what Marco has done with the Magazine has been great, but I often find that when you start dissecting "broken industries", you can start to see a method to the madness that led to the current state of affairs, and I question if big media is no different.

Simplified money transfers were (still are?) a booming concept when PayPal launched, providing a simple alternative to the major banking networks that were slow and full of red tape. But as time has gone by, most of these payment services have gotten equally complex (holds on money, automatic reversals, etc...) because they slowly discovered that there was a reason for all the red tape. I find myself wondering if The Magazine's business model will discover a similar situation.

<comment><USER4> There's a huge cottage industry of for-profit political and current-events "blogs" (really, magazines of small-form journalism) that have been coping with whatever these legal risks might be for ~10 years now. The Magazine is cool and all, but it's presumably dwarfed by Talking Points Memo, which has physical offices in multiple cities and full-time technical staff to back it up.

<comment><USER3> Political blogs/sites arguably have less legal exposure because they specifically deal with public figures and legally public figures have less protections (or at least a higher burden of proof) when it comes to things like libel.

That said, I can't really think of a plausible example of something The Magazine could hastily publish that could land them into legal trouble. I suppose a story full of falsehoods could tarnish its reputation, but I'm not sure it has a reputation to tarnish in the firs place.

<comment><USER5> TPM and other political blogs often cover national security, etc. Recent posts on that site indicate that they spend at least some time and money on legal counsel, but not necessarily for libel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, Marco really does hate the idea of having employees. In this case, he accomplished the goal of many small business owners: a successful product where a trusted employee handles the day-to-day operations and the owner can be hands off and take the profits. But his immediate reaction is to sell it because he doesn't want to be a product owner, he wants to be the entire business.

<comment><USER7> I am so confused as to how you came to all these conclusions. To me, it seemed pretty clear that he wants to develop things, and to program as his job, rather than run a business.

"without doing much of the kind of work I actually enjoy."

<comment><USER6> You seem to be saying the same things as I did. My point was that is very unusual for a small business owner, to sell a profitable business because it's not taking up enough of your time.

<comment><USER8> I guess ultimately, Marco's just a good guy.

Under him The Magazine as a product probably would stagnate like Instapaper did. Then he would have sold it anyway.

And, advisory role usually means a decent chunk of shares too. With what Glenn have in mind, this might be a smart financial step.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's great to see someone find success from things they've built. Marco is a solid example of what many of us strive to be: someone who builds things because it's what we love doing (and because at least one person out there needs/wants it).

</comment><comment><USER10> On a recent ATP podcast episode, Marco hinted he had another major project or few in the wings, and from the sound of it, it was going to be unveiled soon.

He recently bought a BMW (a long running joke), and estimates guess he made about $6.2 million from the Tumblr sale. If he puts the BMW up for sale, then worry.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's like the mental version of reducing your possessions to fit in a backpack. Pretty cool if you ask me.

<comment><USER12> Maybe he's just finding that after polishing his yachts and helicopters he doesn't have time to work on all these projects.

<comment><USER13> He should hire people to do that, and then hire people to manage the people he hired.

<comment><USER14> Which brings us back to the root problem: Marco doesn't want to hire people!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I highly recommend everyone to listen to his latest atp.fm podcasts. I found it is easy to misinterpret Marco (as if he wanted to be a public person, ha) but after hearing from the guy, I can only applaud him.

Just a bit from ATP #14: "I'm terrified of doing anything that would make me look like a jerk in front of my family and friends"

<comment><USER16> > _"I'm terrified of doing anything that would make me look like a jerk in > front of my family and friends."_

That just doesn't seem true. He consistently goes out of his way to engage in trivial arguments with people, especially on Twitter. Literally days after the sale, he called out Anil Dash in a needlessly confrontational way about some minute error in his history of Tumblr (<http://dashes.com/anil/2013/05/seven- years-ago-my-wife.html>). Not to mention the time when got in some squabble with a writer for one of the Apple rumor sites, then blacklisted said site from every Instapaper account.

As far as I'm concerned, he's made a jerk of himself in public innumerable times already. He just seems like an abrasive guy. That's not to say that his work is inferior (certainly assholes have created incredible work before), but any fear of looking like a jerk is moot. He has been a jerk forever.

<comment><USER15> Many geeks are too cynical and abrasive over the internet, but good people when you talk to them (or when you can hear them talking). This is the case for most of HN people, most geek websites, and Marco, too. What the heck, I can include myself there.

One thing is to write angry tweets, and in a very different level, would have been shutting it (or Instapaper) down just because he's burned out. He cares about his users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'd imagine now that tumblr made him a pretty penny he'll be working on a personal fun project that's been on the back burner.

</comment><comment><USER18> Assuming the Magazine is successfully pivoted under new leadership, does that give Marco the award for most acquisitions?

Tumblr, co-founder, acquired by Yahoo. Instapaper, founder, acquired by Betaworks. The Magazine, sold to the other founder, so kind of an acquisition?

<comment><USER19> Don't think he was technically a co-founder of Tumblr (but was the first employee), but nevertheless quite the achievements!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> And in case you wondered, the company - Vivisimo - where Marco worked for his first job (before Tumblr) and where he owned stocks was also sold a year ago... So Marco made money from 4 different businesses in one year.

</comment><comment><USER21> Excellent news, no note about what he's doing next though?

<comment><USER22> IIRC, he hinted several times on twitter that he's experimenting with some new iOS apps ideas.

He's often said that his strategy was to do cool stuff with Apple's newer APIs to maximize the chance for his apps to get featured (eg. the magazine with newsstand).

So whatever Apple announced at WWDC could be a nice hint towards his next venture :)

<comment><USER6> Maybe something with Passbook... that's another languishing Apple technology that's had some uptake, but nothing very exciting.

<comment><USER23> I used passbook last time I flew home on Delta. It was really nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I know nothing of the back story. I want to give praise to the Marco for this: "I accidentally built a business that I'm not very well-suited to run." A profound admission, showing real personal insight. I had to realize this about myself recently, and it wasn't easy.

</comment><comment><USER25> When I tried reading this site on my Android phone, I get a blank page I can scroll around, with a) a huge ad banner and b) a "read later" button which leads to Instapaper. Very un-satisfying. :|

</comment><comment><USER26> I really admire Marco as an entrepreneur and as a person. I am already looking forward to his next endeavour already, no doubt it'll be something awesome as usual. Congratulations Marco.

</comment><comment><USER27> As Marco has sold his businesses, I can't help but think of the line from Office Space "What would you say you do here Bob?"

</comment><comment><USER28> Maybe now it'll be ported to other platforms, but they are generous with the platform-agnostic file downloads.

<comment><USER29> I noticed the other day (through an email I received) that it's no longer available through Kindle.

<comment><USER30> You can still download an epub and email it to the kindle free address.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Instapaper. Tumblr. and now The Magazine.

Sounds like Marco is clearing house a bit.

Out with the old, in with the new.

</comment><comment><USER32> How much?

<comment><USER4> Rule of thumb: if they don't say, they're not going to say. Given the situation here, where the business has been "sold" to its key operating employee, it's probably some kind of capped profit share.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I love Glenn. This is in good hands.

</comment><comment><USER34> That dog is so gonna be next to go.

<comment><USER35>
      > Don't worry, Hops isn't for sale.

Don't think so. ;)

<comment><USER36> Everyone has a price.

<comment><USER37> Not everyone - I wish sometimes that Dropbox did. iCloud misery here...

<comment><USER36> My comment was meant as a joke. I don't expect Marco to sell his dog or anyone to offer sizable money for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I like many of Marco's posts, but I find it amusing that this one made it to #1 on the front page

Instagram was a great product, Magazine a good follow-up.

It is marginally interesting that Magazine ownership is being transferred to Marco's partner, but I don't understand why that merits the #1 ranking on HN :)

<comment> k-mcgrady >> "I don't understand why that merits the #1 ranking on HN"

Because enough people upvoted it to get it there. The Magazine, although not focussed on tech, I assume attracts a large tech audience (the people on HN). Marco is a well known person in the development community and I'm sure quite a few people saw the post on his blog and submitted here gaining it upvotes.

<comment><USER39> "Relevance by proximity" is the cousin of "just add internet!" stories.</comment></comment></comment>


The Startup Success Podcast - <AUTHOR> http://startuppodcast.wordpress.com/ <comment><USER2> A "Subscribe via iTunes" link id mentioned in episode 1 of the "The Podcast Success Podcast"

Yeah yeah, bad joke, but a link like that would do a world of good.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good luck,I'd love to be on sometime.</comment>


Why Can't Programmers.. Program? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ <comment><USER2> I was surprised to find that the FizzBuzz program took me a minute of thought. My guess is that it's because it uses concepts that most people writing code today don't use very often; so for me, I had to dust off (simple) ideas that I hadn't really used in years:

\- Doing things in a step by step fashion (almost all iterative code I write these days is in a functional style, not imperative)

\- Thinking in terms of toy number operations (my day job simply doesn't require it very often; it took me maybe 30 seconds to remember that modulus could be used to check if a number is "divisible" by another - my first thought was to divide it and check for an integer, but I knew I'd have to work around making a floating point comparison)

We did tons of this stuff in college, of course, but most people just don't really do it in their actual professional programming lives any more. I would imagine the same goes for a data science PhD.</comment>


Facebook's outmoded Web crypto opens door to NSA spying - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57591560-38/facebooks-outmoded-web-crypto-opens-door-to-nsa-spying/

<comment><USER2> There's another reason to use shorter/smaller keys -> Mobile CPUs are puny. I've overheard people saying as "a good performance trick", but I don't think I'd be joining that camp.

There's also the issue of "where to tap" and if its behind the SSL acceleration boundary, this is moot anyways...

</comment><comment><USER3> Every major service should implement RSA 2048 and forward secrecy soon.</comment>


Start Your Own Uber Like Taxi Service Today - <AUTHOR> http://mowares.com/taxi-script.php

<comment><USER2> Proofreading. If your ad copy has silly spelling mistakes, how can I trust your code? Otherwise, good presentation.</comment>


Ask HN: Should we reduce the restrictions on who can angel invest? - <AUTHOR> http://johnrob.blogspot.com/2010/02/thoughts-on-accredited-investor.html

<comment><USER2> Actually, the securities laws do permit investments by non-accredited investors within limits. For example, California has a so-called limited offering exemption by which a corporation can issue stock to up to 35 non- accredited investors in any given round who have a pre-existing relationship with the company or its founders and who warrant that they are acquiring the stock as an investment and not for resale (federal law also supports investment by non-accredited investors, as for example under Rule 504 of Regulation D). This exemption would generally allow, for example, for a company sale of stock to the employee who saves up $10K and wants to buy in an angel round.

Though the law allows limited avenues for such non-accredited investments, the securities law rules nonetheless operate in practical terms to bar most such opportunities. VCs, for example, are very hesitant to invest in a company along with a lot of non-accredited investors. This means that startups will hesitate to open up such opportunities.

Thus, the essential point of this piece is a good one. Why arbitrarily restrict the ability of individuals to invest in promising opportunities? The theory of the securities laws is that investor protection warrants the restrictions and this impulse, far from being on the decline today, remains strong (there are, for example, current attempts in Congress to _increase_ the requirements for what it takes to qualify as an accredited investor). So the question becomes, in re-evaluating these requirements, should the law take a more, or a less, paternalistic direction. Protection is fine but it does have its costs in limiting choice.

While I have not given much thought to how the restrictions might be eased, I would definitely say that the efforts currently afoot to tighten them would be a horrible mistake for the startup world, for founders and investors alike.

<comment><USER3> The same law that defines "Accredited Investor" (Regulation D) also defines the situations in which the investor does not need to be accredited. There are three categories of exemptions:

<http://www.sec.gov/answers/rule504.htm>

<http://www.sec.gov/answers/rule505.htm>

<http://www.sec.gov/answers/rule506.htm>

I encourage everyone on HN to become familiar with these exemptions, because there is rampant misunderstanding of Regulation D. (For example, I have personally been downvoted several times on HN because people mistakenly think that only Accredited Investors can do angel investments.)

<comment><USER4> I read grellas' comment as pointing out that although there are limited circumstances in which non-accredited investors can invest, it's not a good idea to do so because of the impact it has on financing down the road.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How angel investing is fundamentally more pernicious to personal wealth than casinos, credit cards or time-shares I'll never understand.

Although you have to admire the tenacity with which our congress tries to legislate common sense....

<comment><USER6> _How angel investing is fundamentally more pernicious to personal wealth than casinos, credit cards or time-shares I'll never understand._

It isn't; and there are no restrictions on who can invest in startups... subject to one caveat, of course: The company issuing the stock must satisfy the standard disclosure rules.

Casinos, credit cards, and time shares are all heavily regulated; they don't have exactly the same regulations as stock offerings have, but overall I'd say they're similarly burdensome. The current situation vis-a-vis angel investing isn't an extra regulatory _burden_ ; rather, it's a loophole which allows -- under certain circumstances -- startups to suffer _less_ regulation than other similarly risky enterprises.

<comment><USER7> > It isn't

It is, for two reasons:

1\. The minimums are higher.

2\. You are not _guaranteed_ to lose in angel investing the way you are in a casino. That makes angel investing much more difficult to resist than ordinary gambling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure this would fix the problem.

According to the pg quote in the article "There probably aren't more than a couple hundred serious angels in the whole Valley." There are _tons_ of people in the Valley who make >$200k/year. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of them. If only a couple hundred of those people take the risk of angel investing, what would lead us to believe that a lot of the lower-salaried people would choose to participate?

I agree that the law seems a bit silly, and probably unnecessary, but I'm not sure that removing it would have much of an effect.

Which leaves me thinking about other ways we could encourage more angel investing activity....

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem is that most people earning over 200K/year in salary are not part of the startup community (what kind of startup pays that kind of salary?). They're probably too scared to invest, and rightfully so.

On a side note, your comment made me think of one silver lining in the current law: if nothing changes, inflation should break down this barrier. I wouldn't be surprised if in 10 years time, startups pay over 200K.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here in the UK there are no restrictions at all (that I'm aware of) over investing into private companies. There's also a 30% tax break on doing so through the venture capital trust scheme (with the restrictions that implies) - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_Capital_Trust> \- _and_ there's no capital gains or income tax to be paid on VCT gains! (Note: I am not your financial advisor!)

Despite this, the UK isn't known as a hotbed of angel investment (at least, not in tech) and it hasn't "hurt" us.. so why not?

</comment><comment><USER10> It seems to me that creating an open market for angel investment will cause all the problems the public market went through in the past few hundred years (bubbles of extraordinary proportions, fraud, etc.) That means the government would have to establish more and more regulation to prevent abuse, which would severely limit the ability of startups to operate. Having the market be restricted to a pool of accredited investors instead makes more sense to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> The bubbles seem to exist regardless of what we do; the fact that they've been around for hundreds of years suggests it would take more than a few laws to suppress them.

<comment><USER11> I got the impression that while bubbles still exist they are smaller relative to GDP than they used to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure this law is in place because of the risks of startup investing. It seems rather more likely that it's there to protect the public from outright fraud, "Cash4Gold"-and-"Gold4Cash"-style.

</comment><comment><USER12> How do friends and family rounds get around this angel investment rule?

<comment><USER13> Many don't do official rounds at all--- if your dad wants to donate $10k to you with no strings attached, in return for an informal promise that you'll fund his retirement if you strike it rich, there's nothing standing in the way of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> In theory, angel investors are limited. In practice, that is not the case.

There are many ways for your Uncle Jimmy to give you $10K without needing to be accredited. And if it's not your Uncle Jimmy investing, or they want to give you $100k, they are probably accredited.

The rules around angel investing are a non-issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Show up to YC demo day as a non-accredited investor, and tell us how it goes :)

<comment><USER14> Show me the Angel that shows up at YC demo day wanting to invest $10K.

<comment><AUTHOR> Chicken and egg problem - because of the high barrier to angel investing, you are right that most investments are probably larger. But would they necessarily be so high, if more people were legal (especially hackers who could be good contributors/selectors)?

<comment><USER13> I don't think it's purely that. VC demo days may not be the best place for someone with modest assets to find something they want to spend $10k on. They might have better luck talking to their friends, for example, or friends of their friends. The angel restrictions don't apply to those cases, either: it's only really official solicitations and funding rounds for which there are restrictions. If a few people get together and want to put in $10k each to a business one of their friends is starting, there is no law against that. It long predates tech startups, too; plenty of restaurants, dry-cleaners, and other traditional small businesses get their seed funding that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Your point seems to pass the test for me. Is there a place for people to group up and make these types of investments? Say 10 people each want to make a $2000 investment. Seems like a good idea to me...

</comment><comment><USER16> You're allowed to put your money in public stocks that essentially go to zero (GM, Lehman, Fannie Mae), and you're allowed to gamble all your money away (and then some via borrowing) on negative-expectation government lotteries or licensed casinos.

So it's silly and unfair to then prevent regular people from putting a small portion of their savings in risky -- but possibly positive-expectation -- private investments.

<comment><USER17> The difference is that there is a limit to the number of public stocks and to the number of regulated casinos and lottery schemes that are out there. This makes policing the system for fraud and abuse a somewhat tractable problem. If there were no limits on angel investing then it would, in a heartbeat, become the preferred mechanism for scammers and fraudsters -- instead of getting sucked into a pump and dump scheme that the SEC might eventually find the victims would invest in fraudulent companies that would disappear in a puff of smoke once the checks clear...

<comment><USER16> What's there to 'police'? It was legal for GM to go bankrupt wiping out its stockholders. It's legal for a casino to take all a person's money.

(And even the 'tractable' policing doesn't work so well: see Madoff and many smaller scams.)

What's more, those people willing and able to 'disappear in a puff of smoke once the checks clear' can already do so. They don't care so much about the rules, and if willing to deceive can make their scams appear to fit whatever rules are in effect.

And if this wave of fraud you predict were to appear, people would learn quickly. (Are there that many people who'd race to invest in loosely-attached, no-reputation fraudsters? Moreso than those same marks already gamble or buy snake oil?) And you could still chase down the biggest fraudsters, using the same laws and mechanisms that already exists.

If any rule is necessary, a far more sensible rule would cap private-equity investment at some liberal percentage of net worth -- say 50%. You can easily lose 50% of your money in public stocks, even the stock market as a whole. So even the stupidest non-millionaire private investor wouldn't lose everything before understanding, "Hmm, I may need to do some due diligence on these get- rich-quick schemes!"

<comment><USER4> GM was required to disclose huge amounts of information to the public on a regular basis about its operations and cash flow. The SEC doesn't exist to reduce the risk of bona fide investing. It's there to reduce the instance of out-and-out fraud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> offtopic:

since when do "ask hn" topics link to a frakkin blogpost?</comment>


Why Meritocracy Doesn't Work - <AUTHOR> https://grasshopperherder.com/why-meritocracy-doesnt-work/ <comment><USER2> > _In case you're not familiar, a meritocracy is a political system where > power is allocated to those with the most ability. In the case of Silicon > Valley, this equates to "the best ideas win and the best people get > promoted."_

IMHO the problem is that no-one, not even this article, actually defines what _' merit'_ means — so people fill it with their own (likely biased) opinions. Even in the above quote, 'best' is only defined _after the fact_ — it's literally just the ones that survived (the article does mention this later on).

The meaning of 'merit' will probably be different for different companies, groups, etc. Hence it feels difficult to talk about any kind of 'meritocracy' without clarifying that meaning first. I suspect that would become it's own debate.

Edit: The interactive site called Parable of the Polygons would seem relevant to some of the points this article makes. [http://ncase.me/polygons/](http://ncase.me/polygons/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point. It could be the author of the manifesto thought merit was pure coding ability and others might define it as the ability to work well in a team to achieve a collective goal.

<comment><USER3> When grading based on a metric, it's helpful to know what that metric actually is.

Furthermore, how do you even define grades or metrics for "pure coding ability" or "works well in teams"?

Both have massive subjective components, don't they?

Isn't "works well in teams" really "works well on _my_ team"? Trying to pretend like it's an objective measure of "works well in the platonic ideal of teams" doesn't actually make it an objective measurement.

Same with "pure" in "pure coding ability": adding an objective seeming word like "pure" doesn't excuse that there is no such thing as a platonic ideal of coding ability to measure against. There's "codes well in this problem domain", there's "codes well in this environment", there's "has the baseline experience to code well quickly now", there's "has the learning ability to get up to speed quickly", etc... Where's the objective measurements?

A lot of "meritocracy" talk is built on sandcastles of wish-it-were-objective- metrics without any sort of in depth analysis to how objective the metrics can possibly be, much less actually are in pragmatic, impure reality.

<comment><USER4> I think a meritocracy can exist in the real world. Are personnel decisions made, or do we strive to make them, on the basis of a person's value to the organization? Do we strive to identify and ignore confounding factors? Does a person's productivity depend on things besides skill, work habits, or leadership ability? This would be a difficult undertaking, operating a meritocracy.

Also, it's possible that a meritocracy is doomed to be subverted in any given enterprise.

<comment><USER3> There's no objective system I know of that accurately measures a person's value to an organization. As soon as you try to reduce things to such metrics you lose sight of them as people.

Yes, it's great to strive to eliminate one's own biases and "confounding factors" to make one's organization stronger, but most "meritocracy" thinking is about finding the right magic numbers to describe people and that is its own bias/set of confounding factors.

People are often more than just "value", they are part of relationship webs, and full of complex emotions. You generally can't just assume a person is an interchangeable widget/commodity in your system and you insert paycheck and receive some magic amount of "value" in exchange.

A person's productivity absolutely depends on things besides skill, work habits, and leadership ability, however you define them and however you try to metric their value. A person's productivity might be powered by finding that random coworker's leftover cake baking experiments in the break room on those Wednesdays when they need it most. Another's might be powered by interesting gossip. Other people's are tanked by the extra buzz of the a/c on days in the Summer above 80F. You can't predict when someone might have a huge break-up that ruins their productivity for weeks and you can't predict when someone has just the right sort of vacation that their productivity is amazing for the next year... and so on and so forth.

The very term "culture fit" alone, and how often it is used in "meritocracy" contexts, is a giant neon sign that meritocracy doesn't exist in the real world and people are trying to keep themselves warm at night rationalizing that the decisions they make on semi-random metrics or gut "culture fit" decisions are the best they could make, rather than deal with messy subjective world of dealing with actual people.

<comment><USER4> I don't think you're doing a meritocracy if you use 'culture fit'. I think it's at best a cop-out.

I do share concerns with you about the ideas you are disadvocating. Such as that a person's productivity not a neat weighted sum. Such as that we could systematically find all the numbers that need to be summed. Plus concerns I'm not sure if you're getting at, such as the idea that sort of results from pushing a meritocratic view, which is that a person's value in the world is their value to some small collection of enterprises, their one job or their two jobs.

If you are paying people for their work and also providing some encouraging words, what do you then use to determine the pay packet or the words to say?

<comment><USER3> That's an interesting question and I think the big point here is to differentiate _merit_ from _meritocracy_. There's nothing wrong, and a lot right, by trying to base payment/encouragement upon _perceived_ merit. The disconnect is trying to make it systemic (meritocratic) and forgetting the subjective nature of merit, and that the only merit you reward/punish is that which you perceive.

It's very easy to build a culture based on merit metrics and tautologize that numbers are objective, this merit system is based on numbers, therefore this merit system is objective and thus this is objectively a "meritocracy". There's a number of logical fallacies wound up in that thought process, but that's how a lot of bureaucracies get formed, and a how a lot of them rationalize themselves as objective/benign.

I guess the underlying problem is that merit is great, but the illusion that "merit" scales to form benign meritocracies is something that we need to question a lot more than we do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. Meritocracy is not perfect, but explicit discrimination is so incredibly prone to abuse and corruption that is not even a contest. Society is made of individuals. We can hope they strive towards a phenotype-blind process, and shun the ones that explicitly discriminate. Or we can institutionalize explicit discrimination and raise everyones awareness to phenotype discrimination. For which the rational self-interest response is to discriminate. Trapping us all into an endless prisoner dilemma lose-lose tarpit.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see your point although it's quite depressing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Meritocracy has never worked because the thinkers submit to 'higher authority': in this case $$.

The only real revolution is when the thinkers stop taking orders. That is only practicable when every political|business system fails. There was a time when IT was merit guided and based..it took a long time for the idiots to catch up but they are here now and dictating.

Every thing I deal with this these days is idiot oriented.

<comment><USER7> There's nothing wrong with that, capitalism would even things out, a company that is sexist will make less money than one that isn't. This is because the available talent for a company is more limited if you exclude women.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not an inherent property of capitalism.

Capitalism rewarded the slave trade for generations.

The invisible hand is really human preferences. That's what will determine whether a company is punished for sexism or rewarded.

Humans stopped Apartheid. Not the abstract concept of capitalism.

<comment><USER7> To the contrary, non-slaves produce more value than slaves, therefore slavery is not only unethical, but also un-capitalistic.

Capitalism explains many things, certainly people stopped Apartheid, but it can very well be both, slavery and segregation are unproductive, and therefore anti-capitalistic.

<comment><USER2> > ... _non-slaves produce more value than slaves,_

Probably not to the slave owners, or anyone involved in the slave trade. They had little incentive to change.

Claiming that capitalism somehow spurs these things is the wrong way around. It can certainly benefit, but it's not the driver.

<comment><USER7> To the slave owner yes, but their entire productivity is lower, it's better to have a businessmen rather than someone who can just pick cotton and do basic chores.

I think capitalism has a hand to play, to ignore it is naive. I think there was not one driver that ended slavery, but many things working together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > However, believing that a 90 degree angle is perfect doesn't have much > impact on the job performance of a senior polygon and there are lots of > other questions that don't predict job performance.

So, I think this is not a meritocracy if polygons are being promoted based on non merit related qualities. It feels like they're attacking Meritocracy as being institutionalized, but then claiming that there are other biases not merit related. Ultimately, it's almost like they're defending meritocracy, saying it's not fair that an equally skilled man would be preferred over a woman based on gender.

I am fascinated by this, does anyone know what alternate system is proposed? In their article they make a few merit based judgements of who should be promoted.

Also this seems bit much: > "Successful venture capitalists claim that they have "pattern matching" powers. The evidence for this is that they have been successful." [...] "I am saying that this is a terrible argument. It has the same intellectual rigor of a casino lounge lizard explaining their magical rabbit's foot. "I haven't lost yet!""

<comment><AUTHOR> I probably wasn't clear there.

It's not that the concept of meritocracy is inherently bad. It's just that it's impossible to implement unless all people are perfect, have an exact understanding of what "merit" is, have perfect information etc.

So I'm disagreeing with the idea that Silicon Valley (or Google) is a meritocracy and that the "level playing field" that some people use as an argument against diversity initiatives is actually inherently biased.

Also, I'm not saying all diversity initiatives are great. I know pretty much zero about what makes one initiative better or worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I feel like what is missing from this article is that there are in fact group differences, and just what they imply. The article really tries to be neutral, so let me try to do the same.

There are 2 groups, squares and triangles, and contrary to what the article says, understanding of right angles is in fact important for senior polygons.

Now further assume standard deviations in understanding of right angles between squares and triangles differs by one sigma between the groups. Let's take the same as in the article, squares understand right angles better.

(in reality, in properties that might be important for jobs, speed, IQ, strength, ... standard deviations of 1-2 between groups are very normal between groups. For IQ, when selecting the groups on purpose, you can pick groups with a 3.8 sigma difference)

Given that assumption, what would the expected distribution be, given 50-50 squares vs triangles in the population ? (this is assuming that every time a senior polygon position opens up a square and a triangle face off for it, and the one with the best knowledge of right angles gets the promotion)

1 sigma: ~76% - 24%

2 sigma: ~92% - 8%

3 sigma: ~98% - 2%

4 sigma: ~99.7% - 0.3%

To give one relevant example, one might take the diagnosis of vitamin D insufficiency. If a patient comes in with these symptoms, and they're black, they're about 3 sigma more likely to have that problem. So if a patient comes in complaining that he's been having bone pain for months/years (in other words, the husband/wife/kids dragged them into the emergency room after they've been complaining about it for 10 years), if the patient is black you should probably prescribe a food supplement and 1 hour of sunlight (yes, really). If the patient is white you get them into an MRI and look for bone cancer. Why ? Look at the above numbers to see how often you'd be right. Now of course if the supplement doesn't work after a month you should still get an MRI, but using it as a first stab at the problem is a waste of time.

This is why you can't have meritocracy. Races are different, in ways that society finds important (and literally everything else as well), and "small" differences will result in large imbalances in outcomes. Small is taken here as compared to what one sees in reality for differences society judges as important.

This is also why island species only occur on islands (google island species, and don't take islands too literally). If there is a 1 sigma difference in procreative success between differing island races, the "worse" one's population will halve every generation. It is easy to see that this will not result in a mixed race result, one race will die out. It's harder to see intuitively that this happens at 0.1 sigma as well, but run the math and you'll see it's true, just takes longer.</comment>


Ask HN: Would it be legal if I put my web scraping scripts (lib) on GitHub? - <AUTHOR> Hi, I am using the data for research purposes. How bad it is to show scrappers in my Github account. I am using scrappers to collect data from news sources, analyze them and work on some data analysis tools (recommendation sys, data visualization of aggregated data, .. etc).
I tried to consult with some other people in the field, but most of them gave mixed signals, and recommended articles like [1](https://gijn.org/2015/08/12/on-the-ethics-of-web-scraping-and-data-journalism/).
As far as I know, some big companies like BBC do have some scrapping tools like [Juicer](http://bbcnewslabs.co.uk/projects/juicer/). Any one of you got into troubles by putting such scripts publicly.
Best, <comment><USER2> I wouldn't worry about it, _as long as the code is general_ enough. E.g if it is obvious that the code is about scraping a specific site's stock tickers and that it disregards the site policy and robots.txt, I would think twice about publishing it. Otherwise not. Note that some European countries have much more strict laws wrt scraping than the US has.

</comment><comment><USER3> As long as you obey robots.txt there is nothing wrong with crawling. Your code in GitHub doesn't give any indication of what sites you collect data from so there is no indication that you are scraping instead of using it to crawl in an acceptable manner. Though it wouldn't hurt to label your work as crawler scripts instead of scraping scripts ;)

Why use your own scripts and not Nutch?

Do you know about Common Crawl? [https://aws.amazon.com/public- datasets/common-crawl/](https://aws.amazon.com/public-datasets/common-crawl/) It obeys robots.txt so it may not have everything you want, but it could save you part of the effort of crawling yourself.

</comment><comment><USER4> The word you want is "scrapers". Whereas "scrappers" are people who are good at fighting.

This has to be the no. 1 misspelling I see online among developers.

<comment><USER5> A scrapper is UK colloquial for an old car in bad nick.

Oh and "nick" is UK colloquial for condition. Also can mean jail. And also can mean to steal.

<comment><USER6> maybe a relative of "paddock basher"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am building something along those lines so always interested to see which sources / methods are used - any public links?

<comment><AUTHOR> I removed the project.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: It's Time. Need a developer/team. San Francisco or Boulder?   - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN,
A little background: I'm 32, live in Dallas, and have 'startup' running through my veins.  Most of you are in my same boat - we have ideas all-day, every-day, but somehow find an excuse not to pursue them.  I know, I know.  Ideas don't mean sht - it's the execution.  Well, I can't live with myself if THOSE people keep JUMPING and finding their wings on the way down.  It's OUR time.  It's MY time.
Sure, there are brilliant entrepreneurs with brilliant ideas.  Let them be.  Most companies that survive (and thrive) have iterated, pivoted, changed markets, etc.
So, I HAVE AN IDEA.  Not a reinvent-the-world brilliant idea, but a workable one.  One that would be cool to build, market & spend 90 hours/week working on.  One that I spend every minute obsessing about, talking about, ideating on, wireframing...
My dilemma:  I am not a developer.  I know enough to not get screwed.  I know what the first iteration looks like.  I don't want to outsource - I want people who are obsessed about this idea as I am.  Dallas has plenty of talent, but I want/need to be in an environment where ideas are flowing. Where people understand the game. Where smart people will tell me when my idea sucks.  You get my drift.
I have all the typical bullsht credentials - MBA, Sales/Trading background with 2 'obliviated' Investment Banks.  Experience with Digital Strategy, Consulting and Marketing.
So, San Francisco or Boulder?  Thoughts, ideas, people to talk to???
P.S. If you are a developer or know of one who LOVES building algorithms, aggregators and believes there is ALWAYS A BETTER WAY, please let me know. P.P.S.  I am not opposed to working virtually with my team.
And yes, I do have MONEY to get this off the ground...
Best, Woodward <comment><USER2> Woodward,

SF will beat Boulder by a mile. SF is a "company town" everybody's employed by the "company" (tech industry).

Plus, good news about SF is that these internet co's are always going out of business freeing up the talent at a good rate. Think supernova seeding the universe. So even if Boulder had more CS than SF (doubtful) they'd all be employed by big companies that have great benefits,etc.

But don't take my word for it. Advertise your job on craigslist SF and craigslist Boulder and see what comes back.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. The problem to me is offering these recently unemployed a competitive package when I am just looking to get something 'out the door.'

Have you had much experience finding quality developers who can see the BIG VISION, but are willing to work for 'x' amount to get that first iteration shipped?

I know it's my job as an entrepreneur to sell the idea, the company, and the vision.

Interested in your thoughts...

<comment><USER3> > Have you had much experience finding quality developers who can see the BIG > VISION...

The ones I know have their own companies. You are going to have to compete with developers who also are good at business. Learning a bit of tech will improve your chances of success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here is a possible low-budget, low-risk approach to executing: Crack open a ruby on rails book and learn enough tech to build the prototype. You will likely have questions along the way. Post said questions on message boards and IRC. This is a good way to get to know the developer community and learn who the good coders are. At some point you can start contracting them to implement difficult or time consuming problems.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, a number of folks who come visit Boulder find the town, the developer community and the tech level enjoyable. But I understand that there is a larger pool of people to pull from in SF. Why not go to a few Meet Ups or User Groups, or find some start ups to visit in these areas and go there and see.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hi Woodward,

I've been building a few MVPs to get things off the ground. If you are fine with remote, drop me an email.

support at 99audit.com

</comment><comment><USER6> San Fran is going to have more people, but it really depends on where you'd rather live. I would advise against working virtually if possible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I have heard Boulder has more computer scientists per capita than any other city in America. Truth?

What is your background - if I may ask?

I agree about working virtually, but I feel I need to get some traction with this first iteration.

<comment><USER6> I don't think statistics like what you've just stated are meaningful. The most brilliant people who are the most likely to be interested in a startup are going to be in San Fran.

I'm a software developer who's co-owned a company before.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair point.

What's your advice for incentivising developers to work on a non-VC funded idea? I have funds to pay for a while, but not a full salary/benefits.</comment></comment></comment></comment>