Ask HN: How do I fix the problem of not wanting to know new people? - <AUTHOR> I'm in my mid-late 30's and for my age I don't really know a lot of people very well.
While I've worked on-and-off for 11 years in a career, I'm about as capable as a typical new graduate when it comes to relying on my network for jobs. And I'm just as financially dependent as a typical new grad (aside from the fact I have no college debt, I'm thankful for that).
They say networking is key, but after graduation, I have trouble being genuinely invested or interested in meeting people. This seems like a big problem to me. Other software professionals my age are getting by with steady jobs and a network of people to pass the word along, and I don't have that.
I have a small group of close friends, the ones I'd be fine eating out with, drinking or playing video games together. However, they are clueless about the industry I work in (software development) and do not work in fields related to it. They come up empty-handed for referrals or job leads.
Same goes for my entire family. They're mostly a family of first-gen immigrants who don't really know how the white-collar world works.
And the professionals I work with, or find in tech meetups, they know the industry well, but I have trouble being genuinely interested them as people. So of course they'd be annoyed when I message them out of the blue after years of not talking to ask a favor from them.
So it's a frustrating situation... the friends that I am close with, at the same time, are not people that could put my name out there for jobs and vetting me for interviews.
Why am I disinterested in being friendly with professionals? How can I solve this problem so I don't go struggling through life without a professional support group? <comment><USER2> Do you genuinely want to know more people, or are you just looking to advance your career?

If career advancement is all you're interested in, go to toastmasters, practice presenting, work up a good presentation and get speaking slots at meetups or conventions. Talk to people who come up to you afterwards. If you're so inclined, add them to linkedin/facebook. When you're ready to write another presentation, contact the people you met and ask them what they would find helpful. Wash rinse repeat.

Contributing to a notable open source project on github is also a great way to make contacts, and they'll often know prominent places that use it. If you're going to work with a specific tech, an email from the project lead will look good, as will an active commit log.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to advance my career, but not at the risk of being ingenuine to people. I'm unable to form long-term bonds with other professionals, though. I view colleagues from a more utilitarian point of view, only there to help us carry out the work, that serves a practical need for me, but not necessary for my personal company.

With the suggestions you made, I think there's a misunderstanding. I am not seeking to be exceptional. I am a below-average programmer that just seeks to become average and is fine being average in my career. The average person does not go to Toastmasters, and the average programmer does have to contribute to a major Github project. There are a lot of developers 40 and over that are pretty average and working steady jobs, and they don't do any "extra- professional" work for themselves.

My career goal: to be an average developer without a care in the world. No Toastmasters, no being a leader, no tech evangelism, just want job security and clock out in a timely manner every day.

<comment><USER3> > I'm unable to form long-term bonds with other professionals, though. I view > colleagues from a more utilitarian point of view, only there to help us > carry out the work, that serves a practical need for me, but not necessary > for my personal company.

That's probably what all this is stemming from. Look at your colleagues and coworkers as people, just trying to make a living like you are. You don't need to go to bars with them, but showing a genuine interest in how they're doing in the morning when you both get into work can go a long way. At the end of the day, we're all just people trying to get by. If you have that friendly acquaintanceship then it will be rewarding in its own right for both of you, but could also lead to jobs in the future, not that this should be the reason for it, because like you said, then it would be disingenuous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a condition similar to yours and I deal with it by consultations with psychotherapist. I can discuss a lot of situations with her, and to reflect on what I did and (more importantly) what I didn't. There is some subtle code of friendliness, like asking pointless questions ("how do you do"), saying pointless things (like reflecting your current emotional state), and so on. I need to see when it is time for one more pointless action, and to do it. It is not hard to do, but not so easy to discover what and when to do, so psychotherapist is a real help here. For me it looks not like I'm trying to be ingenuine, it's like I'm trying to look a human being for others, so they see me as the person, not as a coworker.

It is _mine_ condition, and _my_ way to deal with it. Seems plausible for me that your case is like mine, because you are saying that your parents are immigrants and very probable that you just don't have some behavioral reflexes. In any case, you can find cognitive-behavioural psychotherapist and discuss this matters with her. If your case is not like mine, that at least you'll know that it isn't. Hopefully you'll find what you can do. But in any case you start with desire to change yourself.

<comment><USER5> Could you explain to me how immigrant parents correlate with different behavioral reflexes? I don't know about this but it sounds interesting to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sometimes all it takes is just emailing a former coworker to say hi and ask what's new, and let them know you're in the market. I think a lot of us are worried about being too intrusive, but I personally would have always been glad to get an email like this from anyone I've ever worked with in the past. So it seems like maybe we're worrying over nothing when we hesitate to reach out and just say hi in a friendly email.

<comment><AUTHOR> Being direct has not really worked in my experience, and someone even told me that opening with a request for a referral is like asking for sex on the first date.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> try hanging around engineers, or geologists...they tend to have the almost daimetric qualities of intellect and being cut from a coarse crude cloth [dwile rag] perhaps there is a socioeconomic class division at play here...

<comment><USER7> too rowdy to be science geeks</comment></comment>


12 new universities join Coursera - <AUTHOR> http://blog.coursera.org/post/27394575240/12-new-universities-join-coursera <comment><USER2> Interesting. I'm hearing a bunch of stuff from colleagues at these universities, and it sounds like it may be a bit rough starting up, especially once it gets to the 2nd semester after these initial offerings.

It took most professors completely by surprise, and it sounds like there may not be bottom-up buy-in (was completely a management decision). In particular, at at least one university, profs are now being told that they may be _required_ to teach a course via Coursera, or at least strongly requested to. And, the universities don't want to budget this as actual teaching, so it's just extra work on top of the normal class load: since Coursera courses aren't credit-hours, they don't give teaching credit. It's supposed to count under "service" or "outreach", I guess, the way serving on committees or reviewing papers or doing a CNN interview does. (This part may vary by university.)

Not sure that's a good recipe for high-quality courses via this method. The advantage of the first few courses is that it was a bottom-up decision by professors who wanted to do it, and devoted significant time to do it right, rather than having it assigned to them by management.

<comment><USER3> Personally, this is VERY exciting for me. The biggest challenge I have seen with traditional universities getting into "distance learning" is that they are very much focused on delivering a full "classroom" experience rather than tailoring the experience to the medium.

Example: many course videos are of a "live" class and are repeated for every semester regardless of the subject. Next to no re-use of course video is seen from semester to semester. The experience is very much one of time/place- shifting a class experience.

Also, the focus is almost NEVER on interactivity. As a distance student, you're VERY much dependent on your professors willingness to read and answer emails or post in forums.

I was very surprised that MITx had an IRC server set up for the EE class that were offering. I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw they had _hundreds_ of people in the channel.

So, from my point of view, the biggest shift we are seeing is a willingness of the brick-and-mortar universities to consider working with a partner that is going to market their professors and university brand to a very wide audience and yet enough of an arms-length away that there is little risk to the "brand" if things go sour. The fact that there are NO for-credit courses is quite conspicuous and you should expect the universities to attempt to maintain an implicit separation between MOOCs (massive open online courses) and their traditional "residential" offerings.

That said, the writing is on the wall: the traditional model doesn't scale and financial pressure is going to push ALL schools towards this model in some fashion or they will simply become irrelevant. As I drive up and down I-95 in the Northeast, one of the things I've noticed is that there are a massive number of traditional schools advertising on billboards. This NEVER used to happen and most universities (IMHO) considered it a sign of desperation to advertise for students as opposed to recruiting.

What we are witnessing is a race developing. Think back to the early days of Yahoo/Altavista/Google. There are going to be some big winners and some also- rans in this fight. I'm betting on it.

Full Disclosure: I earned my bachelor's degree from Harvard via their Extension School and did the majority of my coursework online using their video delivery platform. I graduated in 2009 at 39 after a LONG absence from school to chase my fortune on the Internet. Best decision I ever made.

<comment><USER2> _That said, the writing is on the wall: the traditional model doesn't scale and financial pressure is going to push ALL schools towards this model in some fashion or they will simply become irrelevant._

I don't disagree there are all kinds of problems. But how does this initiative address any of the financial pressures? It does nothing to reduce the cost structure of universities; in fact it _increases_ the cost structure by adding another thing their professors and administrators must do, not instead of but in addition to everything they currently do. And yet, it does not provide any new revenue streams to pay for that. At least, it doesn't unless there is a payment from Coursera to universities as part of this deal that hasn't been announced yet. My guess is that they're hoping to use it as an advertising loss-leader to attract students and prestige. But that would mean doubling down even more on the traditional high-tuition model, because that's what's going to ultimately subsidize the free courses.

Now if they charged for the online courses, I could see that making a difference in the financial picture. Maybe that's the longer-term plan, for- pay online courses with Coursera and the university splitting the proceeds. That would be closer to the Harvard Extension School model you mention.

<comment> UK-AlasGou It reduces the margin cost for each individual student.

<comment><USER4> How so? You don't get a degree from these online courses.

<comment><USER3> You don't get a degree _now_.

Mark my words: in a few years, you'll be able to certify that you passed each course and you'll get some form of certification for passing a sequence of courses. It might not be called "BS in CS from MIT" but it'll be looked at the same way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Who on HN is taking one or more of these courses?

I signed on for Daphne Koller's Probabilistic Graphical Models and Geoff Hinton's Neural Networks courses. PGM is supposed to be really tough. I am planning to take a couple of months off from work.

This new world, where you can learn for free from _the_ experts, is a dream come true.

I am thinking of blogging my progress (or lack of it, as the case maybe!)

<comment><USER6> _can learn for free from the experts, is a dream come true._

I'm not sure that's what they do though. Learning "from the experts" means they are there to help you, understand where you're coming from, and correct you along the way. Just watching a video of someone with recorded slides is something we could have done 20 years ago.

I was excited about the PGM class, but my interest dropped after the first few videos (100% comic sans slides, poor video quality, poor audio quality).

Just because you are an expert in some field has zero bearing on your ability to teach or convey information. I'm not sure a "let's imitate college lecture formats" site founded by smart people understands that. They fall into the trap of "smart people can do EVERYTHING!" There are a lot of very smart people who have negative presentation skills. There are a lot of very smart people who have excellent presentation skills too.

Solution: have the smart people write the script, but have people excited about presenting show it to the world.

<comment><USER7> udacity has gone too far the other way for me. It seems very slick but I switched off after a couple of minutes because I felt like I was watching a kids tv show.

<comment><USER8> I am taking the udacity statistics 101 course and while I agree with the statement you make, if you visit the forums there are plenty of people having trouble with the current material itself. The last assignment had a fill in the blanks proof of the maximum likelihood estimator. Some people were complaining on the forum that it did not belong to a 101 course. Either ways I am glad that the course is being offered. It may not be the best introduction to statistics I get but it at least pushes me into starting to read about statistics.

<comment><USER7> That wasn't supposed to be a comment on the material, simply the way it's being presented. This was a discrete mathematics course, don't have time to look it up right now. (edit: Relatives are faffing - here it is: <http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs221/CourseRev/1>)

I personally think there's room for many services like coursera and udacity to serve different levels of academic experience and expectations.

<comment><USER8> I realise my initial comment might have come across as more confrontational than I intended. I definitely agree that there's room for services catering to different academic experience and exceptions. What I wanted to highlight was even the hand-holding approach of the udacity instructors might be to cater to absolute beginners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've taken two courses from Coursera. This spring I took Design and Anaysis of Algorithms part 1, and last fall I took Introduction to Databases.

Both were great experiences, and I learnt a lot. However, each course was many hours of work per week for me. There are easily 10 courses I would like to take from the current offering, but for me (have a family, working full time), the biggest constraint is time. Nice though to have the choice once you decide to take one.

I have written in more detail about my experience with Coursera: [http://henrikwarne.com/2012/05/08/coursera-algorithms- course...](http://henrikwarne.com/2012/05/08/coursera-algorithms-course/) and [http://henrikwarne.com/2011/12/18/introduction-to- databases-...](http://henrikwarne.com/2011/12/18/introduction-to-databases-on- line-learning-done-well/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm going to be in classes for the rest of my life. Literally. I love it.

<comment><USER11> Me too! :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great.

I took a Coursera course last month, and despite a couple of weirdnesses, it was a really enjoyable experience. I don't really get Udacity, but I'm definitely going to take a couple more of these courses.

It also appears as though they're starting to figure out how to mark essays, etc without involving huge numbers of lecturers. It's an exciting time for eduction.

<comment><USER13> I'm curious to know how are they marking essays. Can you say more about it? Links are fine, too.

EDIT: Oh, nevermind, I've found it. It seems that student grade each other's essays - one student grades three other students.

Look here, under Peer Evaluation: [http://spark- public.s3.amazonaws.com/fantasysf/Documents/Wor...](http://spark- public.s3.amazonaws.com/fantasysf/Documents/WorkExpectations.html)

<comment><USER10> I'm signed up for that particular class and I've been wondering how it was going to go.

The workload looks reasonably significant, which I'm happy about. I'm a little skeptical of peer grading of essays, but it's something they've got to figure out for the future.

Every class I've done so far has had a tiny minority of forum whining about grades. I'm expecting it to be notably higher in this class, but we'll see how it goes...

</comment></comment></comment><comment> UK-AlasGou One thing UDACITY does better is that it is much more structured. They have courses that build on each other.

Coursera seems like bunch of interesting courses put together, rather than structured degree thing.

I think this is because universities see coursera as way increase its reputation with the public rather an alternative to university lectures.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is great and I'm really excited for the new courses. I'm currently taking Vaccines and Pharmacology from coursera and Statistics from udacity. These courses help me do exactly what no university let me: Learn about interesting topics from different areas. This way I can dive into a topic more deeply if it interests me, and if not I'll just know some basic principles. Jack of all trades, master of none is absolutely fine for me.

</comment><comment><USER15> Looking forward to Odersky's course Functional Programming Principles in Scala.

<https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun>

<comment><USER16> Kinda interesting that SICP is the first book on the suggested reading list. Too bad the start date is months away!

<comment><USER17> Odersky's own Scala book has some large examples that are based on sections of SICP. E.g., the digital circuit simulator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The Coursera website is iterating change faster than it can add new courses. You can feel it going from 0 - 60 with each new visit. OTOH, it's also beginning to feel -- big.

Udacity seems more approachable and familiar. Oddly enough, even with 2000+ episodes, so does Khan Academy.

<comment><USER19> And whoever programmed the "sort by start date" function of the new course overview page that went live yesterday or today should probably take the introduction to algorithms course :-). It looks like it sorts with a comparision function that returns a falsy value both for "no date < some date" and "some date < no date".

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting list. The one surprise is that Caltech choose to go with Coursera rather than the much more open edX.

</comment><comment><USER21> I see that this course teaches rails <https://www.coursera.org/course/saas>

There is one that teaches Django?

<comment><USER22> "Software as a Service" is an architecture paradigm: little of it is Rails or even web specific. In fact, any competent software developer should be able to get the gist of Rails, Django or flavor of the month framework in the proverbial weekend.

<comment> UK-AL Indeed, but the nitty gritty of frameworks can months/years.

<comment><USER22> The online course doesn't take months/years, so the nitty gritty of Rails is neither taught, nor is it a requisite for the course: in complete agreement with my position.

<comment> UK-AL I wasn't disagreeing...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Its great to see my university (Illinois) finally on this list. We already do record the more popular courses and make them available to students (internally its free, but if you're not a student you have to pay for it). However, it seems like the course that would be most useful (Computer Vision by Derek Hoeim <http://www.cs.illinois.edu/~dhoiem/>) is not yet on the list. I wonder whether the university will make that one available because when I took it there were a lot of external students (usually sponsored by their companies) and I'm sure the Uni made a lot of money from it

<comment><USER24> There's a computer vision class offered already: <https://www.coursera.org/course/vision>.

<comment><USER23> I can't believe Jitendra Malik himself is teaching this! He is an extraordinary researcher in computer vision, and I would definitely like to attend this. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The exciting part of this for me is seeing that some of the intro courses are taught by top senior lecturers rather than just professors. I've always found some of the best learning experiences for material that isn't heavily connected to research comes from people who's careers are in teaching rather than research. One of my knocks on Udacity was the whole PhD required approach to teaching intro CS, many of the best lecturers in first year CS don't have PhD's.

</comment><comment><USER26> The Gamification course (<https://www.coursera.org/course/gamification>) seems to be a great resource.

It is one of those topics that there is not too much helpful material online - so I am looking forward to it.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm curious - why isn't UC Berkeley mentioned, but this course, taught by a Berkeley professor is listed on the right? <https://www.coursera.org/course/qcomp>

</comment><comment><USER28> This is awesome! Signed up for Computational Investing and Dan Ariely's class on Behavioral Economics.

</comment><comment><USER29> Anyone knows if such course exists for video game development?

</comment><comment><USER30> Great,that is awesome.</comment>


People who make $250,000 or more a year can afford a tax hike. - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2243529/ <comment><USER2> This is one thing that never fails to irritate me: the stigma against the wealthy. It's almost as if all the energy, effort, time, sacrifice, and risk usually taken by many who are now wealthy are completely overlooked, making them look undeserving of their money as if they were born with golden spoons in their mouths. My father immigrated to America from Egypt in the mid-80s shortly after he graduated medical school in Cairo to find a better living. When he got here, he went to school, took a graveyard shift as a security guard and worked at a gas station to make ends meet. He moved to four or so different states to join various medical programs, etc, and finally settled here in southern California as a fairly successful physician who makes $250,000+ a year. Knowing all the work that he's put into creating this life, my blood boils when I read headlines like these as if someone like my father doesn't/didn't work as hard as others to make a living. He is one example, and there are myriad of foreigners who have done the same, not to mention startuppers who literally put EVERYTHING on the line to increase their chances at success. To say that these types of people can just afford it as if it were some obligation is idiotic and infuriating.

</comment><comment><USER3> Of course they can "afford" it. But so what? Every single billionaire can "afford" to be taxed at a 99% rate.

The bigger question: is it in any way fair, just, or moral to tax society's most successful more heavily just for being more successful?

EDIT: The other salient question that I forgot to mention is: "why do we need more taxes?" Our government already can't manage what they have with any sort of reasonable efficiency. Are we really supposed to believe that they'll do better if we give them more money?

<comment><USER4> Why shouldn't the people who benefit the most from how society is structured be expected to pay the most for its maintenance?

<comment><USER3> Aside from the larger question of why the government has the right to take people's income by force to begin with, I can think of four practical reasons off the top of my head:

1) It is a disincentive to others who might try to reach that level

2) It's hardly clear that the success of the wealthy is due to how society is structured, and not their own effort. Undoubtably some is, but is it 90/10 or 10/90?

3) It encourages relocation of talent, business, and capital to states or countries where the tax situation is more favorable.

4) It's not clear to me that more tax revenue results in a net benefit to society. My opinion is that the rich are better at investing their money for optimum yield than the government, and the end result is more benefit for society.

<comment><USER5> Do you truly believe there's anybody out there who wouldn't work to attain wealth merely because the gov't takes a higher percentage of it? I mean, seriously?

<comment><USER6> The issue isn't "wealth" as much as it's "more wealth". There's a classic example of a secretary who did her job really well so she got a raise only to find it bumped her into a higher tax bracket and she actually made less money. So from that point on Secretaries didn't bother to excel.

This applies equally to the engineer who makes $225,000 and who might be willing to put in extra effort but won't if the reward isn't worth it.

So the issue is shifting the cost/benefit equation over to where there isn't enough benefit for people to put in the effort

<comment><USER5> That story about the secretary? That is completely contrary to the way a marginal income tax actually works.

There is no way, in the American progressive tax system, to get a raise, be moved into a higher tax bracket, and end up taking home less money. It's just not possible.

@ryanwaggoner - correct, ty.

<comment><USER6> It can if you combine a marginal Federal Tax with a State Flat Tax. Not all tax systems are progressive

<comment><USER5> Ok, I'll bite... How?

A state flat tax will tax this new raise at the same flat rate as all the existing pay.

The marginal federal tax will tax the new raise, in your scenario, at the new, higher tax bracket.

But your scenario would have the gov't taxing this new cash into the red, reducing her take home pay. That's not gonna happen. Period.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> People who make $250,000 or more a year can afford to pay more for a lot of things. But if you tried to charge one person more for an identical candy bar or television or movie ticket just because they make more money, everyone would instantly see this as unjust. Why should government services be any different?

I'd be a lot more content with differential tax rates if the money I'm saving to start my next business - and create jobs for Americans - was exempt. Every dollar I give the government is a dollar they're going to spent a whole lot less efficiently than I will.

<comment><USER8> That's called a consumption tax, which has a lot of intellectual advantages over the current regime.

Income = Consumption + Savings. Right now we tax income, but it's possible to tax consumption instead. That would encourage more saving and less consumption, which is probably a good thing for the country (but probably won't happen any time soon because in the short run businesses wouldn't stand for it).

<comment><USER9> Would more saving and less consumption be good for the country? I'm not saying it's a bad idea for individuals--it's what we do personally--but it seems like the economy as a whole would stagnate based on my completely unqualified armchair economist opinion.

<comment><USER10> You are correct. Consumption taxes are, in effect, tariffs on commerce. Theoretically, you should try to push these down as much as possible, so that money flows between economic actors with as little burden as possible. A "solution" to the economic burden of income taxes that increases the overhead cost of transactions and encourages hoarding of money is not a solution at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I make what I consider a middle class salary (around double the household income in my area), and I'm pretty sure I can afford a tax hike. While I would not be terribly happy about it, it's not going to hurt me. I'd say for most of the real middle class, who haven't mortgaged themselves to the hilt, a tax hike of a few percent will cut into their discretionary income, not anything truly needed. I'll have to wait another two weeks to get my 52" big screen television. Oh no.

<comment><USER11> is affordability really the unit-of-analysis that you want to use to design (or make tweaks to) a tax system?

lets assume that $50k per year gives a comfortable lifestyle to a person. anyone earning less than 50k per year cant afford to pay taxes and therefore doesnt have to. anyone earning more than 50k can certainly afford it, so they pay the amount needed to get there income to 50k. so a guy who makes 60k pays 10k per year, and a guy who earns 1MM pays 950k.

do you think entrepreneurs would start businesses in this environment? sure, some would because they are doing what they love... but what about all those boring businesses. do you think the dry cleaner LOVES to wash other people's clothes? do you think the guy who started 1-800-GOT-JUNK loves other people's trash?

among other things, you need to think about incentives (and the killing of those incentives) when you devise a tax system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most people in the US pay no taxes at all. The $250K threshold hits lots of hard working professionals and entrepreneurs who are by no means "rich" and who work extremely hard.

I'd argue that people earning $250K who are paying off loans and working 60+ hour weeks _cannot_ afford it... and that taxing them is a horrible policy idea, no matter how well it resonates with voters who themselves pay no taxes (or people like the author who live in Westport CT).

<comment><USER13> _"Most people in the US pay no taxes at all. The $250K threshold hits lots of hard working professionals and entrepreneurs who are by no means "rich" and who work extremely hard."_

Let's see now... when the median _family_ income in the US is $40,000 per year, an _individual_ making $250,000 per year is undoubtedly rich.

They might not be super rich, or even very rich. But they're rich.

<comment><USER12> Also, a family (two adults, 2 children) earning $40K per year will pay next to nothing in taxes. This is why such people tend to support our oil wars, they are costless to them. Both political parties like to keep it this way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Soak the rich" doesn't work. I recall seeing an interview with Ronald Reagan when he was a movie star. He stopped working after a certain point each year because he was taxed so high that he would rather have the free time than more income. Whenever they create luxury taxes, such as on yachts, the rich just put off getting a new yacht. Who really suffers? The working stiffs who build boats. They get laid off.

I don't know what the answer is. But, as I understand it, punishing people who have the most leeway to make other choices pretty consistently fails to get the desired result.

<comment><USER13> Better to just take their money away rather than tax them on their income or even their consumption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Back-of-the-envelope-calculation.

Given:

\- USA population: 300 million

\- percentage of households that make 250k+ in a year (according to the article): 2.1%

If we assume that we have 2 people per household, that's 150 million * 0.021 = 3.15 million "households" making US$250k+.

Assuming that the average income of the US$ 250k+ group is much larger than the bottom, something close to US$ 1 million, and assuming that there is a tax increase will take 5% of your income from your pocket. In practice, we are saying that we are taking 50 thousand dollars of each household that makes more than US$250k.

Using these values, the government would get 3.15 million times US$ 50 thousand = 157.5 billion dollars from this tax increase.

According to wikipedia ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_United_States_federal_budg...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_United_States_federal_budget_) : the net deficit for the 2009 budget was 407 billion dollars.

I know that are tons of other things in a serious model: flow of money and such. But even so, I wonder if there is any kind of tax increase that would actually be able to fix the deficit.

<comment><USER16> The 2009 deficit is an outlier, because it's being sampled immediately after a sharp fall in revenue. In fact the budget was (briefly, before tax cuts and two wars threw it out of whack again) balanced as recently as 2001. There's no reason to expect that it's an impossibility.

But no, you can't enact a sudden tax increase (or spending cut) in a down year and expect it to close the gap. Budget planning is done over decade-scale timeframes.

Also note that the deficit is bad not because its immediate cost is unbearable but because its current scale is unsustainable. The marginal cost of any extra borrowing is actually quite low; the US Federal Government pays very low interest rates on its debt (check the federal bond rates for current numbers), and no one is suggesting an inability to pay this year's debt -- it's a drop in the bucket. So the goal is a steady reduction of deficit spending to a sustainable level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This reminds me of the article a few years ago that indicated that Warren Buffett had a lower effective tax rate than his secretary, even though he made heaps more. [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/money/tax/article1996735.ec...](http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/money/tax/article1996735.ece)

<comment><USER18> That was because he's counting capital gains. Capital gains are the tax you pay based on the price of a stock, which is based on the net present value of the company's dividends (taxed at 15%), which are paid out of its profits after taxes (35%). So it looks like the taxes he's paying on the extra earnings of Coca-Cola are about 53%.

At least he doesn't pay FICA taxes on that. On the other hand, the capital he invests _does_ allow companies to hire more people, who _do_ pay taxes.

The utility-maximizing way to tax Mr. Buffett is at 0%. He'll invest it effectively, it will grow the economy, more jobs will be created, and we'll end up with more wealth to squander through silly redistributive schemes.

<comment><USER10> Nice try Ronnie, but I highly doubt Mr. Buffet is ignorant enough to take profits he intends to re-invest as income. These likely stay within a holding corporation that re-invests this money and does not pay taxes on the gains. This is the way the system exists now and the way it should work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here is what this author doesn't understand. People who make much more than $250,000 a year rarely let that money touch income taxes. The tax game is all about creating trusts, funneling through shelter companies, long-term capital gains, expensing the heck out of everything, etc.

</comment><comment><USER20> The US federal income tax exists to raise revenue for the federal government. It does not exist to level the playing field, make things fair, or to hinder high-producers.

This whole debate is framed wrong, on both sides.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why does a married couple still have the same 250k threshold? Does marriage immediately cancel out all the expenses one person in a relationship might encounter?

</comment><comment><USER22> <http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Politics_is_the_Mind-Killer>

</comment><comment><USER23> Doctors, lawyers, and other paycheck people making $250k pay around the 35% rate. They get hit hard. Meanwhile, professional investors earning the same amount pay the capital gains rate of 15%, which is less than a paycheck family earning $80k. I don't want paycheck people to pay more taxes, I want the capital gains rate to go up.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, let's disincentive the wealthy to invest in new companies that create jobs during a recession. Excellent.

I much prefer the idea floated to ditch capital gains altogether for small companies.

<comment><USER23> So you should be in favor of dropping capital gains to 0% then for everyone, right? Probably income tax too for that matter, because that discourages people from working, and unemployment is the last thing we want to have.

<comment><USER3> Actually, yes. I prefer a flat tax on consumption.

<comment><USER23> Fair enough. I also prefer a consumption tax, not flat though. But if we're going to have an income-based tax, I'd rather have all types of income treated/taxed equally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> In the words of Betty Draper, Daniel Gross should stop counting other people's money.

</comment><comment><USER25> The question is not "Can they afford a tax hike?" The question is, "Will they continue to gross $250,000 and take home less of it, or will they find a lower-stressed job and make less?"

The answer is probably the latter, for a lot of folks.

<comment><USER26> I'm right there on that line. Honestly I pay a TON of taxes already. Very high rate, lots of taxable income. Cutting back to be under 250k would probably make more sense than making 255k and paying a lot more in taxes.

I don't mind taxes and social programs. I do mind paying for unending wars in the Middle East (not making a political statement, just a budgetary one). Cut some of the crazy expenses, and I'll be happier paying my taxes, and you probably won't even have to jack them up.

<comment><USER27> > Cutting back to be under 250k would probably make more sense than making > 255k and paying a lot more

What kind of job do you have that makes >$250K and doesn't require you to understand how income taxes work? I'm skeptical.

<comment><USER26> My bad. I was confused. Actually I have my companies accountants handle all the taxes, so I don't have to keep much awareness of how income taxes work. I probably should, but I don't need to, since I pay them to do it:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why is Politics such a predominant topic on HN?</comment>


Ask HN: Help with transfering a Wordpress site to a different URL - <AUTHOR>

I am doing an intership and the owner asked me to transfer one of his sites (www.vortexsprayonliner.com) to a Wordpress site. I built this Wordpress site http://granitexfloorcoating.com/ for him. It is done. I changed the DNS server and while changing the settings in Wordpress to the old URL I set it to the vortexsprayonliner.com URL. This broke the Wordpress site I built and now it always forwards to the old site for any updates on settings or pages. Even just trying to log in!!!
I don't know what I can do. Maybe going into the datase and changing the URL on it but I don't know which table holds that information.
Can anyone help me? <comment><USER2> Check wp-config.php, look for $table_prefix =

that is normally wp_

then, in {$table_prefix}options, normally wp_options, two values contain the url:

select * from wp_options where option_name in ('siteurl','home');

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, thanks for your help! I'm really lost here and the site is supposed to be up by the end of this week :/</comment></comment>


How Should Business Schools Prepare Students for Startups? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-should-business-schools-prepare-students-for-startups-jeff-bussgang-and-michael-seibel/ <comment><USER2> As per PG:

 _Two Types: I think you only need two kinds of people to create a technology hub: rich people and nerds. They 're the limiting reagents in the reaction that produces startups, because they're the only ones present when startups get started. Everyone else will move._

I guess that could be a good clue onto what to teach. And I'm not sure this is enough actually. For example, you probably need _rule of law_. My guess, you also need ethics, trust, culture of working handshake agreements. Remove it, have a kind of people to which it doesn't apply, and this would ruin the valley. I would suggest to anyone who is organizing programs of training entrepreneurs to add _business ethics_ as a cornerstone of the program. Please, think long term.

<comment><USER3> You need more than rich people, you need people who are rich and who embrace the kind of risk that startups offer. There's a big difference in the kind of investors you meet in NY compared to SV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At MBA programs with accelerators, committed entrepreneurs often lose funding to polished classmates with Sales skills, but no actual immediate intention or ability to build a business. That is because between VC and high salaries elsewhere, the grind can be too big a leap when you have loans to pay. YC can easily filter that by looking at an applicant's execution experience in the past, or check if their resume shows more blue-chip brands than meaningful growth. For some, the MBA is a tool, for others it's a merit badge.

It felt like 30%-50% of my classmates got enough credits to get an Entrepreneurship major, because they want to build a business one day, after MBA (just not immediately after, and not necessarily VC-worthy stuff). Entrepreneurship through acquisition, running your own fund, joining VCs, leading family businesses, there are a lot more options for MBAs.

The bigger issue is that top 5 tech giants don't help by acquiring or cloning the work of CS MBAs or those who stick it out as Entrepreneurs. With lack of regulation and increasing market power for the giants, fewer people who can make something worthwhile will be wanting to do startups instead of working for 300-700k at a big company. Ironically, of my committed entrepreneur classmates with tech backgrounds, a lot more of those that started hardware, or healthcare, or food-chain, or other distinctly "non-virtual" startups continue today. That's because the virtual/social/saas ones were aqui-hired.

As a techie at a top MBA program (20 years of coding so far), I took VC and Finance classes, Patent Law, and CS Masters classes to round out my skills, while I built my company till 4 am every night. The MBA experience taught me when NOT to raise money. I've been bootstrapping and focusing on users and now run 2 different sites that are growing well. That MBA is actually paying itself back!

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm an MBA and I just don't see the value of business schools preparing students for startups. The MBA skillset is only valuable at a certain maturity level. Before you hit that level focus on engineering/product/sales, not finance and strategy. I don't think MBA programs teach engineering management well and they aren't particularly good at teaching sales.

I kind of agree with the old idea that you deduct $1M off the valuation for each MBA a startup has on board. In all honesty, there's just not going to be a lot for an MBA to do at a startup.

Now to be clear I'm using the word "startup" in a strict sense meaning a company that's come into existence recently. An 8 year old multi-billion dollar behemoth is not a startup in my book.

Think of an MBA as a two year immersion program in the language of the C-suite. If you're just starting out you really don't need to learn that language. Instead focus on product/market fit, good engineering, and sales. Sure, MBA programs claim to teach all those skills - but I just don't think they're good at it.

An MBA program is good at teaching you strategy, finance & accounting, and maybe some types of business analytics (if you take those electives). And it's definitely good at teaching you corporate politics (perhaps it's biggest benefit), but you don't need to know corporate politics -just startup politics, which are a different beast altogether.

</comment><comment><USER6> Business schools might be the wrong place to mint tech entrepreneurs. The number of wannabe tech founders vs those taking coding electives is telling.

And speaking as a technical manager, I'm also deeply skeptical that combing an MBA with a bootcamp/MOOC will make you a proficient technical manager. It might put you on better footing to hire a competent one, though.

</comment><comment><USER7> Excellent back and forth. As someone considering an MBA post a failed startup, the meat, for me, was here:

> Michael: Because I think a lot of people here in the valley would argue ... > spending two years at an early stage startup in the Bay Area might be more > fruitful than spending those two years at an HBS or a like school.

> Jeff: Look, I think there's an argument for that trade off in the short > term. I think the harder question for people is 10 years from now, 20 years > from now, 30 years from now, where am I gonna end up? Because if I spend two > years stepping off the treadmill at a Harvard, or a Stanford, or an MIT, I'm > gonna come back with a network, a set of relationships, and a skillset that > may not be immediately high ROI.

Well worth the listen to / read.

<comment><USER8> If you can't choose a good start up to join then most likely a b school is the better option.

If you choose a good start up, then the start up (and payout) will most likely be much more valuable 10-20 years down the line.

<comment><USER9> the difference is that it's pretty easy to tell a good b school (lots of objective rankings). at an early stage, it's really tough to tell a good startup- as a candidate you are at a significant disadvantage in choosing a startup employer due to the lack of available information. not saying one is better than the other, but that making that choice is far more difficult than the couple of sentences you mentioned.

<comment><USER10> On the other hand startups pay you money, B schools cost you money. With the delta easially being 300+k. So, you can take a fair amount of risk and still have the startup being a better bet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a both a business school graduate and company founder I witnessed this first hand. At my school, the majority of people wanting to do "entrepreneurship" were not really committed to it, but rather dabbling in it. They had an idea and did surveys to "validate" the need and were always looking for random undergraduate engineers to seduce into helping them.

That being said, there was a small handful of people who were serious, committed, and willing to do whatever it took to get their company off the ground. As with all stereotypes, there is some element of truth along with countless counter examples. For MBAs, the core issue is a lot of ambitious, idea-generating, risk-averse people without technical/tactical skills on average, looking to do something risky with technical/tactical requirements.

As someone wanting to start my own company, I hated that I didn't have the technical chops to get even a basic prototype off the ground and didnt want to just another MBA with an idea and no ability to execute. Luckily, my school, Chicago Booth, began offering a Ruby on Rails coding class. From the first class, I got addicted to it and spent all my timing building out an idea, that I didn't even initially think was good, just so I could learn to code better.

When I released the idea, 60% of the school started using it in the first month. There is no substitute for being able to cheaply and easily get a workable prototype onto the market. As a result of having a real product and the ability to iterate on it, we made it much further than any of our competitors in our schools New Venture competition and ended up winning it and raising a seed round.

We are by no means successful and are still in the startup grind for sure, but without bringing the initial ability to get something real onto the market through some technical skills, we would have been dead in the water no matter what. Our product is now used by half of MBAs in the country ( [https://www.transparentcareer.com](https://www.transparentcareer.com) ) and it would have never of happened without at least getting some basic technical skills.

MBAs can start companies and be successful at them, and some companies require way less tech than others. That being said, I think everyone would wind up being better off learning to code no matter who they are. There is nothing more empowering than being able to create something real instead of just a powerpoint presentation.

Now that I have a team of engineers, working with them is way smoother as I more deeply understand the development process and can understand how to spec things out better. Even if i'm not coding on a daily basis, its immensely valuable to at least know the basics.

<comment><USER4> Ha! In 2013-14 I teamed up with another technical and a non-technical Booth student to create a class called Booth Hacks to teach MBAs and other UChicago students how to code in a practical way ( [https://www.facebook.com/groups/boothhacks/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/boothhacks/) ). I have been coding for 20 years, so I co-wrote and co-taught the lectures. It was an 8 week, 3hrs week course and its success allowed us to convince Booth to offer a real RoR class to its students the following year (your year). You started at Booth the year I graduated. We also worked to launch the MBA/CS joint degree program that is now live. I was not allowed to compete in the New Venture competition you won a year or two later, because I created [http://www.doerhub.com/at/uchicago](http://www.doerhub.com/at/uchicago) to bridge the gap Michael is talking about in this podcast, and I was serving the startups that ended up competing (so I wasn't allowed to compete). The year I graduated, both winners of NVC and SNVC were users of the site and had found people or received help for their projects due to DoerHub.

Needless to say, I have a lot to say on this topic, and would love to talk to people who want to connect university brains in different disciplines in productive ways, including YC if they are interested. DoerHub is still running, but I just graduated YC Startup School with [https://DreamList.com](https://DreamList.com) , which feeds off of similar tech, but applies and improves the algorithms by serving much larger and more lucrative problems.

<comment><USER11> Haha this is too funny, definitely participated in Booth hacks, thanks for getting this off the ground for us!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Mildly related, I really appreciate it when someone puts the effort in to transcribe audio interviews.

</comment><comment><USER13> easy: \- get students to drop out of b-school \- encourage them to learn about deep tech field (cs, bio, etc.) \- help them raise $$ for said endeavor

more seriously, I have had numerous people from the b-school world (now VCs) tell me this, more or less. they want people w/ technical know-how, not b-school skills.

<comment><USER14> That's because they have the b-school skills already so they undervalue them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Since startups make things and things are the essence of the economy, gain the skill to make things rather than telling other people to make things.

If you are a master at business administration then you are a master at telling other people to make things, why would I want you to tell me what to do as a partner in a startup? You have to pay me for that kind of stuff.

<comment><USER16> My impression, working for a Fortune 500, is that management is largely an information processing task. They are gathering, analyzing, and communicating information, but typically have to deal with both quantitative and qualitative information of varying quality from disparate sources.

They are also skilled at certain kinds of tasks such as creating business plans, budgets, etc., and serving them up in a recognizable format that other people can use.

Supervision is a different kind of task, some managers are good at it, others aren't.

Hopefully your business grows to the point where you need someone who can perform these tasks for you.

Certainly, the ability to make things was what got my business off the ground. I'm still a one man shop, and my sales don't justify hiring myself full time, much less another worker -- management or otherwise.

<comment><USER17> _management is largely an information processing task. They are gathering, analyzing, and communicating information, but typically have to deal with both quantitative and qualitative information of varying quality from disparate sources_

This layer is going to be utterly destroyed by machine learning when it goes mainstream. The value of an MBA is trending towards zero.

<comment><USER16> Even machine learning isn't necessary. All that's needed is more widespread communication. For instance, my boss doesn't need to communicate the company's strategy to me, because I can figure it out by sharing information with workers at similar companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> These guys are both selling something:

1\. An MBA

2\. YC startups

The question is which do you want to buy? And what can you buy. Both are investments.

An MBA from a top school likely has a higher pay off long term as most startups fail (statistically). But you have to be accepted into the program. You can read about alumni, gather various statistics, where they are and how much they make etc... There are ~80,000 alumni from HBS programs.

For YC, you either join a YC startup then go to YC, or get into YC directly. It may be easier to do the former, prove yourself and then join YC as a founder. If you want this path. You also have to build something.

YC also reduces the risks of "failure" by building out their own network and keeping alumni within the network as partners or as employees in other YC startups.

As to the rise of entrepreneurial programs.. well it's business. MBA programs probably also want to attract entrepreneurial minded types to improve diversity/value but startups are hot and everyone is selling.

</comment><comment><USER18> I can't remember where I saw it, but recently it was pointed out that business schools are there to teach you to run someone else's business, where as startups make you learn to run your own. I think I was looking into the benefit of an MBA at the time and in the end, what do you want to do?

<comment><USER19> I wouldn't necessarily put it that way. The top tier business schools teach a good amount of universally applicable soft skills like negotiation, conflict resolution/deescalation, performance management, etc. You just need to enroll. And those skills are applicable regardless of where you go.

Having seen friends go through business school, the real value is without a question the network you build during those two years. That's also applicable regardless of where you go.

I personally applaud Harvard's new combined major, especially because it supports the thesis that business leaders should also pay more dues than they currently do as technical practitioners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm currently working through this struggle in Hawaii. I'm currently an adult student pursuing concurrent degrees in CS and Entrepreneurship at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and trying to find ways to bring the two programs closer in ways that reflect my self-study on SV-style tech entrepreneurship and my experience in the professional workforce...and it's not easy.

Not mentioned in the video are a couple factors that probably influence the process in invisible and important ways:

1) At UH (and other universities I've checked on), the different departments are run as different business units, so trying to run mixed classes runs into the typical corporate politics of how funds are allocated, who gets credit, etc. We do have a video game design class that combines CS and creative media majors into one crossover class at the undergrad level, so I'm trying to gain insight on how that works at a pedagogical and administrative level.

2) Talking to the curriculum manager of our MBA program, he expressed that he didn't have any professors who would want to teach a multidisciplinary class, and he didn't have anyone he felt comfortable assigning to it anyway. When I asked him why, he said that business academia heavily discouraged multidisciplinary research, and publish-or-die culture has resulted in extremely "pointy" professors who are stellar single business discipline, but essentially worthless outside their skill silo. Because of this, he felt that a silo-breaker class would be either resource-intensive or ineffective.

We do have a couple "entrepreneurship" centers on campus, one oriented around tech (with a former technical SV-type manager), and one oriented around business. Sadly, they seem to be mutually exclusive for the most part, but I've been working on trying to build the connective tissue.

I do completely agree that business and engineering need each other, because I always see product without strategy or strategy that completely misunderstands the magical business properties of pure tech--and that's if the business kids are pitching tech at all. These two disciplines, at least at my school, are utterly ignorant of each other and it shows in the ideas they have. When it comes to preparing students for any kind of entrepreneurship, you need to have practitioners and managers mingling for it to work, and I doubt I'd ever go to a business masters that wasn't multidisciplinary. To this end, very happy I'm seeing things like Harvard's MBA/CS and the Stanford interdisciplinary programs pop up.

I doubt I'll get UH to see the light, but wish me luck. Hopefully the insights I got from administrators help someone look at the problem differently.

</comment><comment><USER21> I thought the Columbia Startup Lab had an interesting approach: if you form a team consisting of one MBA and one Engineering M.S., they will provide $50K and 6 months residency. Networking events, alumni contacts, seminars, city government resources and much more are all available. But for the most part, they get out of the way and let the team figure things out.

<comment><USER22> Why do they require either an MBA or M.S.? Anytime you put restriction on something or force a combination, you don't allow it to breathe for possibilities.

<comment><USER23> They're bureaucrats. Restricting things is their job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How about b-schools working with creditors to establish a new kind of student loan where first payment isn't due until 5 years following graduation? Financial constraints are life limiting. If a student attends a top-tier program, student loan debt could easily reach mid-$100k

</comment><comment><USER25> Same way engineering colleges should prepare students of startups: promote co- ops and internships. Forge ties with industry to ensure that such gigs are actually substantiative, i.e. the intern works on something that's more than drudge work.

</comment><comment><USER26> [https://twitter.com/mwseibel/status/851509298521944064](https://twitter.com/mwseibel/status/851509298521944064)

</comment><comment><USER27> Make them work excessively hard for no reward and leave them worse off when they ex... oh.

</comment><comment><USER28> A: Tell them to drop out.

</comment><comment><USER29> I seem to agree with a lot of points in the discussion. As a recent MBA graduate from India, I noticed that most people who join B School, just want a comfortable life with a high pay. They just want to boost their salary from say 6 Lakhs to 15 Lakhs and believe slogging in industry isn't worth it... Why do I point this out? Because this fundamental assumption will explain the following.

1) If someone has a startup idea, they always wants others to work on it. Often times, put 5-10x more effort than themselves. I am yet to see someone who learned coding so that he can get his idea out of ground. Everyone is busy coaxing engineers from nearby colleges.

2) On the knowledge part, most people don't care and its not necessarily bad. B School curriculum is evolving, albeit a bit slow. Subjects like Digital marketing, Data analytics are being offered more now than ever (obviously). However, when people work for a grade rather than the knowledge, they are seriously limiting themselves. People who got A's in analytics are afraid of a simple regression. I don't want to hire them for their knowledge, I would be hiring them for their potential. But then undergrads from top engineering colleges are cheaper (.3-.5x) with even greater potential from my experience. Knowing some technical things, can actually help them bridge the fear of starting up.

3) Education Loan of 20 Lakhs. This makes sure that you work at least for a few years, before you get married and get a house loan and work to pay that off. The fees for most B Schools MBA program increased more than 10x in last 10 years. I am pretty sure the value add remained almost stagnant in all these years. This is a huge hindrance for people to even pursue their idea.

4) CV point mongers blocking some important positions. The Entrepreneurship cell in my college has not registered the incubator from 3 years despite having a check ready which can be en cashed. Why? They are not interested in start ups or anything, they just want a line in their CV (for extra curriculars/club activities) which companies, especially FMCG & consulting ones value. This noise, if separated can help a lot.

How should B Schools prepare? The first thing is try to change the selection process. I dont know in what way, but a few experiments here can help. Second is to change the loan payback policies, offer deferred placement for people who want to try their startup and failed. Third is to actually have a working incubator, recruit people full time, maybe a couple of developers who help students create their MVP (Viability validation required). Last but not the least, the placement process is one of the culprit in this ecosystem. Maybe a course or workshop on the "business side" of things such as "How to start a startup?" which actually gives them information on India specific resources or others which can help students think "Why India needs startups now?" (Seriously, current market can only employ ~30% of graduates).

Honestly, I think an MBA grad has quite a significant advantage in identifying the opportunity gaps purely because of the mindset, its just that not a lot of them (including me) do it actively.

PS:- Sorry for the round about rant.

</comment><comment><USER30> By explaining to them what start-up options are really worth, what the hours really look like, what the office "culture" is, etc. All this so they can make an educated decision about joining one.

Ever wonder why startups prey on mostly young naive people?

Because they do not YET know better.

<comment><USER17> In other words: an engineer should never take career advice from a VC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> s/How //

</comment><comment><USER32> By forcing them for half a year into a diffrent job and mindeset with difficult task on a weekly basis. Give them taks that force them to bump into engineering troubles, force them to communicate tech debt, show them there beloved numbers and have another team fabricate them from thin air, by gaming the systems. Show them that a good CEO needs to know all the details.

</comment><comment><USER33> "Fail" 90% of the students.</comment>


We made $1,052,000 in 2018 selling UI Tools. Here is what we learned - <AUTHOR> https://medium.freecodecamp.org/we-made-1-052-000-in-2018-selling-ui-tools-here-is-what-we-learned-38920d86a296 <comment><USER2> Compare and contrast with this: [https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1121382480303407106](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1121382480303407106)

Just goes to show there's no right answer.

What works for one person doesn't necessarily work for another.

I'm curious about anyone else who successfully scaled through partnerships.

<comment><USER3> pg is naturally opposed to any business model that isn't the one he promotes through YC. It's not particularly interesting to here the details of that.

<comment><USER4> If it worked, he or YC would have every reason to favor it. So if you're right, this supports what pg said.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Every time I read one of these things I feel dumber. Who buys stuff like Bootstrap templates? I feel like most of that kind of stuff is free or not hard to replicate and I don't get why people spend money on it.

<comment><USER6> >> Who buys stuff like Bootstrap templates?

If you are a mid range developer, your per-hour consulting fee could be $200 to $300. A typical Bootstrap template for purchase is ~$30 in my experience, so effectively 10 to 15min of your time.

If you can mark up a good template that quickly (all the various pages, color combos, etc you get) -- you're really good and your bill rate should be much higher :-)

If not, it is better to purchase than waste precious time.

If you want to learn or enjoy the art, that is a separate story, and you should absolutely do it yourself.

For me, i'm primary a back-end and algo developer, so I like to find something that works well, buy it, and move onto working the engines.

<comment><USER7> $200-$300/hr? Everything I've ever seen on freelance sites comes close to $100/hr

<comment><USER8> Even if it is 10$/hour, and a template is 40$, you will spend more than 4 hours just to choose colors/fonts and design ideas. Then you will spend days/weeks to plan, implement and test on tens of devices (phones, tablets, tvs, desktops etc).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Can we count users without uniquely identifying them? - <AUTHOR> http://theravingrick.blogspot.com/2010/08/can-we-count-users-without-uniquely.html <comment><USER2> can this technique be used also to anonymously track unique users of a given web site?

It the browser implements an autoincrement cookie could that solve the anonymousness issues for end users while providing meaningful statistics for site owners?

Or the web scenario imposes some other requirements?</comment>


Microsoft Project Oxford emotion recognition demo - <AUTHOR> https://www.projectoxford.ai/demo/emotion#detection <comment><USER2> My friend told me about this demo. They had to smack the volunteer pretty hard to register the anger emotion.</comment>


Wow, How Did Cuil Get So Much Publicity on Day 1? - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cuil_publicity.php <comment><USER2> I think a lot of people are eager to see someone encroach Google the way Google-circa-1998 threatened the then giants of its time. The fact they are ex-Google search employees implies they know what they are doing, so out of all the possible search engines Cuil seems the most promising.

But of course, the only _real_ reason they all wrote about it was because the other guy was doing a story on them. How silly would they look in 5 years if they didn't cover the next Google?

</comment><comment><USER3> The comments turned sharply negative once people had a chance to play with cuil. At the moment, the top story that comes up for 'cuil' on Google News is Time's front-page article trashing them.

I can understand the temptation to make a big splash, but they're following a familiar trajectory for aspiring search engines: overpromise, disappoint, disappear.

</comment><comment><USER4> _"... I still don't get it though - how come this startup got blanket coverage from tech news heavyweights, some of whom should know better than to buy into the hype? ..."_

with USD$33m VC money, that buys a lot of PR ~ <http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> I was wondering the same thing you are.

I think connections may have helped, too. Ex-googlers n' all.</comment>


Erlang OTP Tutorial For Beginners - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bot.co.za/en/article/349/an-erlang-otp-tutorial-for-beginners

<comment><USER2> "OTP in Action" is an excellent book for learning OTP.

The following reading will take you a long way with Erlang:

Learn you some Erlang <http://learnyousomeerlang.com/>

OTP In Action [http://www.amazon.com/Erlang-OTP-Action-Martin- Logan/dp/1933...](http://www.amazon.com/Erlang-OTP-Action-Martin- Logan/dp/1933988789)

On Erlang, State and Crashes [http://jlouisramblings.blogspot.com/2010/11/on- erlang-state-...](http://jlouisramblings.blogspot.com/2010/11/on-erlang-state- and-crashes.html)

"Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors" <http://www.erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf>

The last two links are "Erlang propaganda" describing the hows and whys of Erlang.

<comment><USER3> And, for those desiring augmentation/enhancement of their own self-directed text-based learning of OTP and Erlang, two of the "Erlang and OTP in Action" authors, Martin Logan and Eric Merrit, with Jordan Wilberding and Ram C Singh (full disclosure: that's me), teach ErlangCamp, an intensive two-day course in building large-scale Erlang applications using OTP.

The class is suitable for those with some experience with programming, though Erlang expertise is not required. It is based on the book, but structured differently. The class starts with the teaching of the essential aspects of Erlang required for one to become functional with OTP, then moves quickly into an introduction of OTP. The remainder of the class is spent building on these foundational Erlang and OTP concepts.

Two ErlangCamps are in the planning for this year. One will likely be in the Europe (date/location TBD), and the other in the US, targeting "Music City", Nashville, TN, in October. If interested, monitor the ErlangCamp website (<http://www.erlangcamp.com>), which will be updated with details, as we lock them down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Those interested in this topic may find [http://learnyousomeerlang.com/what- is-otp#the-common-process...](http://learnyousomeerlang.com/what-is-otp#the- common-process-abstracted) of interest. It has similar aims but doesn't take detours for rebar, emacs and such (things you don't _need_ for Erlang/OTP).

</comment><comment><USER5> I never understood why you have to take Erlang-the-language to get the distributed systems platform. It seems like the whole node management/serialization/"process" management and whatnot could apply to other languages and runtimes.

That way you could get Erlang's distributed platform, which is highly lauded, but mix it with a faster or more preferable language.

<comment><USER6> > I never understood why you have to take Erlang-the-language to get the > distributed systems platform.

That is a very good observation. And I used to have the exact same question. It took a while to realize why Erlang is they way it is, and it makes sense to me now. I don't mean the parsed syntax, see Reia and Elixir, but its main features.

You have to go back to the roots and see why was Erlang created. Its primary focus was fault tolerance and secondary was concurrency. Everything else fell out of those.

For example:

* Actor model : it provides isolation in a large system so only a single actor process crashes on failure and it can be restarted. This means no large pool of pointers, shared data, etc. It means message passing. There is an anecdote that some systems written in Erlang are sold with contract that stipulate that any downtime longer than 4 minutes / year will be billed at $10K/minute. With these kind of goal everything has to change. Segfaults are not something that can crash the system. Too expensive. Stopping the system to upgrade and get a bugfix in -- no can do, too expensive. Also concurrency fits in here. Actors work concurrently and are responsive, their are designed to have responsiveness (low latency) over raw throughput.

* Hot Code Reloading : falls out of needing to have high uptime and fault tolerance. This means system gets updated while it runs.

* Functional Syntax : functional syntax encourages creation of referentially transparent pieces of code. This helps with hot code reloading as there is less state modified in place, rather it is passed throw the function calls.

* Single Assignment : pure torture for those coming from imperative programming. But necessary if values are to be passed between processes or if the code is upgraded on the fly. You gain a large amount of safety know that the variable X you just instantiated won't change behind your back.

* Multi-node (multi process and multi machines) distribution: for real world reliability you can't just rely on one machine, you need to have hot spares for fail-over. What takes complicated messaging and sync protocols, haproxy, message queues, zookeepers and other tools comes bundled in Erlang's standard library.

[http://learnyousomeerlang.com/distributed-otp- applications#a...](http://learnyousomeerlang.com/distributed-otp- applications#adding-more-to-otp)

As a bonus, it has one of the best pattern matching syntax I have seen. Once you start using it and get the hang of it you'll miss Erlang's pattern matching in every other language you use.

There are downsides to Erlang in terms of pure numerical performance. This is the other coin of fault tolerance and latency reduction. You can't have both there are some trade-offs involved.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the response. It seems that if you go for full message passing and enforce immutability, then you're already a good way on the path to being able to do hot reloading (just load the new code, and point messages at the new address) and so on. Erlang doesn't _magically_ make this stuff go away, you still have to be aware that you're sending messages cross-machine.

I've spent a couple of days playing with Prolog, so if Erlang has matching similar to Prolog it'd be a step up from ML-style. Although I'm not really sold on not being able to _rebind_ a variable name (not mutate the value). I can't see any reason for restricting that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm very happy to see more OTP tutorials as of lately. I believe OTP can be one of the most powerful tools in an Erlanger's arsenal.

<comment><USER8> Stronger: If you are using Erlang for anything real and you aren't using OTP you are almost certainly doing it wrong.

<comment><USER9> Good point. About the only thing I've found is the lack of pooling gen_server's built-in and limitations of using atoms for process registration as things I have design a solution for in OTP. Otherwise, architecturally, I'm amazed at how much ground is already designed in OTP.

<comment><USER10> From R15B01 you can actually use "plugins" for process registering using the {via, Mod, Key} syntax.

Gproc supports this and using it you can do stuff like:

      gen_server:start_link({via, gproc, {Your, "very", <<"complex">>, key}, [...])

you can also roll your own.

Docs: <http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/gen_server.html#start_link-3></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Vs Graphs. Visually compare products and more - <AUTHOR> https://vsgraphs.ritza.co/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for putting this together. If possible, would you make searches case insensitive? Search for "Kafka" returns nothing, but "kafka" works. Especially annoying because OS tries to autocapitalize.

<comment><USER3> Yeah it wasn't working at all for me until I realised it was case sensitive</comment></comment>


This Startup Reminds Us Why The Best Don't Need Pitch Decks - <AUTHOR> http://startupstats.com/this-startup-reminds-us-why-the-best-dont-need-pitch-decks-2012-02/

<comment><USER3> Isn't this a little misleading? If you have a million users and not a single chance of ever monetizing, your userbase isn't as valuable as those with say, 10k users who are already collecting money from them all.

</comment><comment><USER4> Meanwhile, Edmodo has (according to their website) almost six million users in four years. I haven't used it, but it appears to offer the same texting features as remind101 and lot more - while being inexplicably free. (Can someone explain how they plan to be sustainable?)

<http://www.edmodo.com/>

<comment><USER5> Hey thanks for pointing this out we will update the post with a reference to them

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why does the figure have no x (time) axis? Did they triple over a week or 3 years?

<comment><USER7> The period is 5 months.

The OP copied the image directly, instead of pick the complete one in angel.co (click in the link in the graph).

[https://s3.amazonaws.com/screenshots.angel.co/84/25312/9f19d...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/screenshots.angel.co/84/25312/9f19d405be073572f560c61d327bb71d-original.png)

<comment><USER5> We've updated the image ... Thanks!

<comment><USER6> No, thank you both!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> According to the website, "They hope to monetize their product by selling their simple communication system to school administrators".

So this chart shows an increasing number of non-monetizable members... and doesn't show growth in their core product / revenue stream: a paid communication system for school administrators.

This situation is very similar to the whole Groupon subscribers issue - <USER2> has proven subscribers aren't necessarily monetizable, or a very small / disproportionate members are...

Thoughts on reporting growth of 'users' vs. growth of 'monetizable users'?

Are any users worth anything, even if they aren't related to the core product?

<comment><USER9> They're demonstrating that users are getting value out of it.

School administrators will pay for this system if they can demonstrate teachers want to use it and are able to get better performance out of their students by using it.

These users are also monetizable - if the system is entrenched in a school or district and they announce free + paid plans they can convert at least some of these to paying users - paid for by the school itself or school district.</comment></comment>


Programming and Scaling - <AUTHOR> http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4325 <comment><USER2> Alan Kay's praise of Bob Barton in this talk inspired me to do some googling, and I ran across an extraordinary thing: a transcript of an oral history conference from 1985 that reunited Barton and the team that built the Burroughs B5000. Here is what Kay says about Barton and the B5000 in his talk: "In history you can find really incredible geniuses like this man, who anticipated so strongly that we can only emulate his ideas in software today. Intel hasn't gotten around to understanding them yet." "The hardware of today is not as advanced as this machine was."

When not only Alan Kay but Chuck Moore as well describe your work as an epochal influence, it must really be something.

In 1985, some wise people got the B5000 team together and recorded them talking about it at length. The transcript exists online, and it is a remarkable document. Among many gems, Barton says: "I just thought of this morning a way of characterizing what I've been doing for 30-some years. I'm an industrial saboteur." Also: "I have never been able to work with devil's advocates". And here is something that is reminiscent of Kay:

"I was interested in small machines. In my view, the machine got too big too soon. All the experience we had from working with very small machines, particularly the 650, only indirectly with 205s, was in the direction of simplicity and operating systems and engineering out as much as possible all the incidental red tape that was very common in those days."

Also, it's noteworthy how frequently [Laughter] annotations appear in the transcript. I've long felt that the best teams are also the most fun ones.

<http://special.lib.umn.edu/cbi/oh/pdf.phtml?id=21>

Edit: it deserves its own post, so I put it up at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2855508>.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dr. Kay is a genius of the highest order. He not only understands that we're not at the Promise Land, he understands why we're not and gives valid advice on how to get there, including working on it himself.

This is not to say the he doesn't get many things wrong. VPRI's COLA, for example, and the IQ/Knowledge/Outlook portion of this presentation is horribly off-base. I won't go into it here, the margins are too small and it doesn't matter. The main point is that he's still the bright torch in a dark night.

<comment><USER4> Can you explain more about the knowledge / IQ thing - even briefly? In my experience, I've seen many misguided intelligent people not much helped by it, some even worse off as they use their smarts to muddle through where the terrain should have dissuaded them long ago; think eg over-complicated under- abstracted code. And reading Mensa newsgroups will disabuse you very quickly of the idea IQ alone is even a positive, rather than neutral at best, trait. You need intelligence to make a leap of insight, but knowing that a leap of insight is possible, that any particular problem deserves a novel solution rather than an existing one, requires perspective or foreknowledge, or knowledge of the history of solutions that didn't quite make it. So I'd agree with Kay here; smarts alone are almost useless.

Or to make an analogy: IQ is like strength, but knowing where to push needs perspective (literally a different point of view) or a map (knowledge). Applying that strength to gain perspective instead of just pushing requires some self-awareness, particularly if just pushing even harder always worked for you in the past.

<comment><USER3> Sure. It's a big subject but here's my take: IQ, first off, does not measure intelligence. Intelligence is qualititative, like beauty, not quantitative like height. While you can be one inch taller than someone else, you can't be one point prettier. You can measure cheekbones in women, and higher cheekbones will on average indicate "more beautiful". You can say, Czech women have higher cheekbones on average than other nationalities and as a country, it tends to produce more super models per capita, and draw some correlation. IQ can be used this way too, but it's measuring aspect associatied with intelligence, not intelligence. Worse, for years there was an understanding that IQ can't be changed per person, leading us to believe we are 'this' smart and can't get smarter. What a fiasco because we now know that it's like fitness in this regard: The more you work at it, the smarter you can become.

Dr. Kay mentions outlook and that does apply. This beauty analogy is important, so let's keep using it. My wife and I were in Monaco yesterday, and two women passed us who had clearly undergone tremendous amounts of plastic surgery; and we agreed that it made them look hideous. If there was a Beauty Quotient (BQ), they would proudly declare themselves to have "a high BQ". It simply doesn't work that way. Take any public figure you find beautiful and look at their feature set. You'll find it's not a simple addition of beauty features that makes them beautiful. It's about the mix of features -- for that time and culture. In other words, it's partly about "character" (what Kay calls "outlook"). But while that's where it ends for beauty, that's only where it starts for intelligence. Because your character, how you define yourself, will block your ability to make the right connections. If you think of yourself as a patriot, you will block information that will run contrary to that belief. If you define yourself as being smart, you won't be able to accept conclusions that might be contraversial and place that image in doubt, and so you will be less intelligent for it.

Dr. Kay calls knowledge important. It is, but not as much as he thinks. If we consider Graph Theory, we can say "knowledge" is like the vertices -- the dots. When learning you group dots and break apart dots: ascern (my word) and discern. Ascern means finding common properties in group of data points: wine and water are both part of the set of liquids. Discern means distinguishing differences: wine can be red or white, and red wine can be from different grapes such as merlot, pinot noir, etc.

"Understanding" is the equivalent of the edges -- the lines connecting the dots (of various abstraction levels). You can't understand what you don't know, so you need knowledge, but that alone won't get you there. In fact, too much knowledge in any particular space can inhibit your ability to draw inferences and truly 'understand' the subject (making relations amount the data points) because you're dealing with information in terms of too small of data points; you're not abstracting high enough. The edges are not as simple as I'm making them out to be. The edges actually say, this applies to that 'usually' and 'in certain cases'. Water belongs to the set of liquids, but only when the temperature is right. So these data points are abstracted via edges, and so, in conditional ways.

Understanding also means knowing at a comfort level that allows you to play with the information at the right abstraction level. Let's say you are air- dropped into New York City. All you know is what you've heard about Central Park and the Empire State Building. So what you do, initially, is to abstract around those landmarks. Where is the really good Thai restaurant? A bit to the South-West of Central Park. But as you learn more about NYC, you get more detailed: the place is next to the Roxy on Lex and 23rd. You're able to talk in terms of greater granualarity: What are the bad areas? At first they will be big swaths of areas of NYC, but later more and more like little bubbles throughout the city. Sorry, that's not a good explanation at all -- I'll try to come up with something better. The main thing is that "understanding" lets you create verticies when you don't have them (via approximation to other edges and vertices), and use unknowns with more ease. If you don't "understand", you will cling more tightly to your landmarks, but when you understand, you don't have to anymore.

We often call understanding about life "wisdom". We don't have a word for understand about cars and microbiology. And it's this understanding combined with character, where true intelligence or genius arises.

<comment><USER4> I think you've redefined the words intelligence and knowledge to mean things other than what Kay and others use them to mean. If you use a private language, it's easy to win any argument. I don't disagree that there are useful distinctions to be made between facts, concepts and wisdom; but I used the word knowledge to encompass all three.

I strongly disagree with you that "true intelligence" (a true Scotsman?) is a synonym for genius; both words would be hopelessly ambiguous in meaning if that were the case; and I also disagree that understanding is required for intelligence. Rather, some intelligence is a prerequisite for understanding, and to some degree intelligence is a measure of the rate of change of understanding when presented with novel situations - the first derivative, if you will.

If you meet someone who is quick on the uptake, who learns quickly; and contrast them with someone a bit slow; what are you to call that quality of them if not intelligence? This quality is not reliant on character or understanding, but rather the reverse.

And I still think that if you use the words as Kay meant them, you would not disagree with him. All the more so, since you emphasize the synergy between understanding and smarts.

<comment><USER3> Wait -- no one is trying to win an argument. I must not be communicating my point well, so I apologize.

 _If you meet someone who is quick on the uptake, who learns quickly; and contrast them with someone a bit slow; what are you to call that quality of them if not intelligence?_

I would call that "quick uptake" and "a bit slow." That's it. Einstein learned to talk at 5. So he was stupid? This is a poor way to define intelligence.

When Dr. Kay says IQ, he also means this "innate cleverness." And my response is that if two people lift weights, one has to work at it more than the other, but both can lift the same weight, which one is stronger? Neither. They're equally strong. Mental acuity is very much like physical strength: it is what you make it. So, I say, it makes no sense to define a predisposition to mental acuity, since that is impossible to define, is easily misunderstood and doesn't reflect the end reality. I'm not switching terms on this: it's a useless, and potentially harmful, distinction.

 _And I still think that if you use the words as Kay meant them, you would not disagree with him._

I think that knowledge is a basis for intelligence but not as important as Dr. Kay asserts. For me, knowledge, in-and-of-itself is only the vertices upon which to build the graph of true understanding. How that graph is built is fascinating and I think deserves more examination, which is why we can't leave it a single term called "outlook," in my opinion. But that's just my opinion; I'm not trying to win points or arguments.

Further, Dr. Kay's goal was not to give a lecture on intelligence, but to get the audience to think harder about what they value. Which is incredibly important and is just one of the reasons he's a hero of mine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Link to the paper he mentions as one of the best papers ever at the start of his talk for your convenience: <http://www.bottomup.co.nz/mirror/Barton-B5000.pdf>

The paper describes a CPU architecture. It has a lot of similarity with Chuck Moore's Forth hardware in that it is stack based instead of register based.

<comment><USER2> Chuck Moore has cited his encounter with that work as a fateful inspiration for Forth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This was a breath of fresh air. I think someone could do great good to take, say, 15 or 20 seminal papers in computer science over the last 60 years and turn them into a book that teaches history and its discarded ideas.

I still think one of the biggest pieces missing from the puzzle here is the problem of notation. Kay's examples seemed to largely still be stuck in the ASCII paradigm, and I think we need to raise the abstraction so appropriate notation can be used without any restrictions.

To quote Whitehead: "By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race."

<comment><USER7> For processor architecture that book is [http://books.google.com/books/about/Readings_in_computer_arc...](http://books.google.com/books/about/Readings_in_computer_architecture.html?id=I7o8teBhz5wC)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Direct links to the four parts of the video, in MP4 format:

[http://stream.hpi.uni- potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_...](http://stream.hpi.uni- potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_SS11/HPIK_2011_07_21_01_part_1_podcast.mp4)

[http://stream.hpi.uni- potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_...](http://stream.hpi.uni- potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_SS11/HPIK_2011_07_21_01_part_2_podcast.mp4)

[http://stream.hpi.uni- potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_...](http://stream.hpi.uni- potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_SS11/HPIK_2011_07_21_01_part_3_podcast.mp4)

[http://stream.hpi.uni- potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_...](http://stream.hpi.uni- potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_SS11/HPIK_2011_07_21_01_part_4_podcast.mp4)

</comment><comment><USER9> I think his point about the language-oriented approach is interesting. My fear is that the create-an-appropriate-DSL-and-your-problem-takes-little-code approach would actually be disastrous if used by mediocre programmers. Instead of having to read their bad code, we'd be stuck trying to read their bad code in their shitty DSLs.

Object-oriented programming probably wouldn't suck so bad if it had stuck to his vision. Objects are _great_ in some circumstances (the biological metaphor of complexity encapsulated behind a simple interface applies) but they've utterly failed as the default means of abstraction. The default abstractions should be (1) pure functions, and (2) simple and sound mutable state primitives (STM, Agents, etc.)

<comment><USER2> This objection -- "but bad programmers will make a mess of it" -- is the stock objection everybody makes to every unorthodox programming construct. Since it is an objection to everything, it is an objection to nothing.

<comment><USER10> Just because people overuse it doesn't mean it isn't true sometimes. I don't know if there's a name for that fallacy, but it definitely is one.

<comment><USER2> That what isn't true? That bad programmers will make a mess? Of course that's true. But if you can't show how and why it's more true of construct X than in general, you've said nothing. Meanwhile, it sounds like you've made a serious objection to X when you haven't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What I've seen is fascinating— I wish the video were faster, or available in a format that didn't completely shit the bed every time the stream hiccups. (The "other formats" available are Real and... Real HQ.)

Edit: As I discovered elsewhere, there is MP4 available for individual segments of the talk, just not the whole thing. I'm set.

</comment><comment><USER12> The LtU post makes it sound quite interesting, but what browser do I need to view the video itself?

<comment><AUTHOR> It worked with my Chrome on Mac.

<comment><USER12> I've tried Chrome, Safari, and Firefox on mine. The page loads, and the player loads, but the video does not.

<comment><USER13> The talk is also provided in other formats:

<http://tele-task.de/archive/lecture/overview/5819/>

<comment><USER11> Did you check that link yourself? The only other format for this talk is Real— not all of us consider that an alternative.

<comment><USER13> There's also MP4 for the four individual sections of the talk (see phone icon).

<comment><USER11> Ah, I didn't see that. Well, that's much less of a hassle than Real— thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


T-mobile: Free Unlimited Data for Pokemon GO - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/JohnLegere/status/753673528981884928 <comment><AUTHOR> Isn't it illegal to "zero-rate" a service in the US?

<comment><USER2> It's debatable: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/zero-rating-what-it- is...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/zero-rating-what-it-is-why-you- should-care) (scroll down)</comment></comment>