Ask HN: Can drones be a solution to dealing with higher level talent shortage? - <AUTHOR>

There's a lot of new startups.  Most startups want the best and the brightest to continue on.  There's only so many best and brightest.  Without pillaging another company, anyone have any simple ideas on how to fix this?
Corporations answers to this is to hire a ton of "drone" programmers and throw lots of them at a problem.  That hasn't worked so well for them.  Then again, most mega corporations aren't the prime site of innovative thinking.
So I've been wondering, instead of hiring let's say 5 best of brightest, has anyone innovated a way that we could use 50 "drone" programmers to do the same thing?  The difference?  An innovative founder who wants to do something new.
Has any startup made this bet yet?  If so, how did they do? <comment><USER2> So, as someone who works at a giant drone-filled corporation, my guess is that the answer to your question is no. My experience, based on the state of our own codebase, is that mediocre programmers tend to write code that's brittle, unmaintainable, untestable, etc... such that you end up with some classic anti-pattern like big ball of mud. The more people you have, the more you exacerbate this problem (see: Brooks' Mythical Man Month). Plus, with more programmers likely you have more churn, thus more who are relatively new to the codebase and liable to make mistakes, etc...

There are probably unique situations where the above doesn't apply. Perhaps something where you can parcel out relatively routine chunks of code that would otherwise be difficult to automate. Say, an ETL system that has different file formats, where each format requires a custom module. Still, even in such a case I could envision a template system or gui tool that a non- programmer could use instead. So I'm hard pressed to come up with a good example.

Perhaps a craftsman/artist metaphor is apt here: could 50 drone painters pool their talents to create a Mona Lisa?

That said, sometimes folks rise to the occasion. Perhaps some drones are only drones because they've been given boring work. I feel like there's a fair amount of stymied talent in the enterprise.

<comment><USER3> I used to work in a company where the drone approach did work out well. We wrote screen scrapers for insurance websites that ran in a framework that would kill them if they went off the rails, handled serious errors, and was the major interface between our component and the front end products the company actually sold. The scrapers weren't terribly technically challenging, and at the time I left, I could crank one out in roughly 3 days which was a pretty good pace.

When I left, I mentioned in the exit interview that, for my salary and benefits, the company could hire 4 interns and put them to work. Even if they were twice as slow as I was, which was unlikely given all the work that went into the framework, the company would have a net productivity win, not to mention the benefits that come with having interns around to recruit from. Last I heard, they took me up on that suggestion and picked up 10 interns who are all writing and maintaining scrapers and freeing up full-timers to work on less routine work.

It can work, but you need a steady supply of relatively routine work that's set up in such a way that nobody can break the system with a simple bug or logic error.

<comment><AUTHOR> What kind of framework was this? Who designed it? So it sounds like if I build a big enough fence, it can work out pretty well?

<comment><USER3> It wasn't an off the shelf framework. "Scraping engine" may be a better phrase to describe what it actually did. External components would make a call, saying something like "I need the data for this particular patient from this particular hospital". The engine would then spawn off a thread containing the scraping code for that particular hospital, and it would run off, scrape the website and then return a well formatted version of that data or one of a series of error messages. If the thread got hung up, the engine killed it and returned an error.

We built the engine when we realized that these scrapers were a competitive advantage for the company and we'd be writing a lot of them (when I left, we had around 250 of them with a backlog of near 1000 to be written). It became worth the investment to write the framework because there were features we wanted that would have been hell to integrate any other way - for instance, killing long-running scrapers that may have been hung up. The engine bought us lots of other niceties too - for instance, centralized error reporting. If one particular scraper returned lots of errors, odds are that the site changed and we knew to give the code some attention.

When you describe it as a "big enough fence", that's only partially true. It's more about a series of independent tasks that don't depend on each other. When you have that and those tasks have only minimal impact to the system as a whole that you have a scenario which suggests drone programming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I could see this working, but my concern is with the "drone" part. When you have a few of the best and brightest they usually build off a very general idea using their own ideas ans creativity, and since there are so few they can work with each other. However, when it comes to the drones they would have to be given very detailed instructions for each step, they would need programming if you will.

If you already have an idea and want drones to do the work they would need a lot of guidance so everyone's work flows together.

Then of course the good side of having some many drones is if you do allow them to run away with their creativity; even if someone can't build upon their own idea(s) there are 49 other minds there to throw thoughts at it.

So depending on how you approach it, having 50 drones can be a very good thing or possibly a huge pain in the butt.

</comment><comment><USER5> Just think about the overhead of hiring 50 drone programmers, vs hiring 5 brilliant ones.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you are taking the drone approach, I recommend that you hire in mexico. for the price of a drone you can hire great devs, and for the price of drones in mexico you can hire -lots-.

i can give you advice on this

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure about "drone", but Zoho comes to mind. They've built a workforce by hiring young kids out of high school/college and training them on the job. I suspect they turn out to be pretty good programmers.</comment>


Growth cannot be manufactured - <AUTHOR> https://open.bufferapp.com/stopped-trying-create-growth-startup/

<comment><USER2> I was just listening to the audiobook from Peter Thiel this weekend Zero-to- One and have been rethinking myself this whole growth-hacker mindset that some of us have. It is mostly like focusing on short-term wins to gain a particular goal (profits, traction, something to show investors, etc) rather than focusing on the long term benefits you are building toward, and the decisions we make everyday to achieve the hockey-stick growth numbers could very well hinder the long term impact our products have in the world.

This was a good read in general. I appreciate their candor.</comment>


Is the Angular Decline a Myth? - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/is-the-angular-decline-a-myth-e4cf563b72d6 <comment><USER2> It seems like Google gets more use out of Polymer. Last I read, Polymer is used for the Google I/O site, the YouTube interface, and some other projects. The list of Google projects built with Angular seems shorter or less important. Does anyone else get that impression?

[http://todomvc.com](http://todomvc.com) is a nice way to compare different approaches to a simple To Do list app, which is a nice reference for lots of small user base internal web apps businesses make. Not everyone needs to make Facebook, YouTube, or Gmail.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for share</comment>


Innovating on Gun Safety - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dozba/innovating-on-gun-safety-ff7e8cf66798 <comment><USER2> "A weapon like this example would make guns obsolete. Criminals would prefer it, because they could use it on people with a much lighter consequence."

This is naive in the extreme.

Criminals most often fire guns to _kill their enemies and rivals_ , not as part of robbery or any other task that could, in theory, be completed as well with any nonlethal mechanism.</comment>


Trello Launches Business Class premium plan - <AUTHOR> https://trello.com/business-class

<comment><USER2> Nothing to see here, move along ...

These features are still in beta; the linked page is only going to work if you've applied and the features have been made available to your organization.

The signup for the beta is on Trello's public development board: <https://trello.com/c/2A9OEGta></comment>


Ask HN: About Working on Saturday(IT, Day Job)? - <AUTHOR>

Context: Software development
Recently I have been offered a Job as Technical Lead in one of the growing indian startup. Work is good along with nice pay. But they work on Saturdays as well. Mostly in India or anywhere else it is always 5 days working not 6.
I am more of a 5 day guy as 2 days off(sat & sunday) gives me enough time to think about problems/solutions and relax?
What does HN think about it? Not the suggestion that I should join or not but what is the general consensus?
1) 5 day
2) 6 day
3) Work all week
4) Work from home all the time <comment><USER2> 6 days a week at, on average, 8 hours a day is just not sustainable. You'd have to scale that back to about 6 hours a day, and that's still pushing it because you're not giving yourself enough time to unwind and work on you and yours. I cannot stress this enough: you need time away from work, whether or not you think you need it

Anything over 40 hours is not sustainable in most professions, but in technology it's even more evident, whether it's ops, dev, networking, or even management. Overextending yourself will lead to careless mistakes, leading to increased work throughout the team just to clean up the fallout, leading to burnout because you and your peers have simply taken on too much, resulting in an eventual disgust of the profession altogether. Sure you can do it for a while, and money definitely smooths over some bullshit, but it's just not sustainable.

My point is: work to live, don't live to work

</comment><comment><USER3> The target is 0 days. The target is that I don't have to have a job.

</comment><comment><USER4> 5) 4 days

Though I'm leaving my currect job that is 6 days a week.

</comment><comment><USER5> Solo founder, doing 4) now.</comment>


Ask HN: Software Engineering Jobs in Zürich - <AUTHOR>

Hi all, I am a graduating senior in Computer Science at the University of California. I have experience with software engineering and bioinformatics, having worked on several independent software engineering projects and having worked with some really great people in bioinformatics. I am very interested in the possibility of working in Zürich after graduation and am wondering if anyone might have any tips.<p>Thank you! <comment><USER2> Start-up jobs at <http://jobooh.ch> Other jobs at <https://www.jobagent.ch/login.html>

Switzerland is great, so good luck. Although, Basel might have more bioinformatics jobs than Zurich.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hint: Google Zürich is hiring :) But you have to be really good to pass, of course.

</comment><comment> M-L try it!</comment>


Which companies are using Erlang, and why? - <AUTHOR> https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/which-companies-are-using-erlang-and-why-mytopdogstatus.html <comment><USER2> We developed Online Charging System in Erlang that served couple million subscribers for close to three years. I found the whole experience fairly terrible.

Erlang is nice enough language and I don't mind the syntax but it's also kinda cumbersome and verbose at times. For example, adding `true -> ok` to every if statement gets old fast. Similarly, Erlang/OPT is a nice platform but some parts are fairly bad. Looking at you `inets/httpc`.

But the really big problem was the whole ecosystem. Build process was needlessly complicated. Surprisingly enough multicore support was not great. Performance was not that great. It seemed like a lot of libraries were abandoned after 2013. I could go on.

We ended up rewriting the whole thing in Java and, so far, it worked out great. And after Java 8, Java the language is not so bad. I still have somewhat found memories of Erlang but I don't miss it.

<comment><USER3> Not to refute your experience, but "adding true -> ok to every if statement" sounds like an anti-pattern. A couple of notes to elaborate:

1\. If-statementes should rarely be used in Erlang because case is preferred

2\. If you're returning ok everywhere, you could also just let it crash by doing something akin to true = function(). Always go for let it crash first, unless you really know you can handle the error sensibly (and then use a case- statement)

3\. httpc is kind of known to not be the most formidable HTTP client. Hackney is a more modern and better choice. The good thing with httpc is that it is included with OTP, otherwise there are better choices (scalability- and feature-wise)

4\. When someone says "multicore support" and "performance" support is not great it's usually one of two things: (a) they're developing a use case that is not fit for Erlang (e.g. compute heavy) or (b) they don't know how to use Erlang properly (e.g. too complex process setups)

Now, many of these things are not obvious to people new to Erlang and takes some experience to know about. This I would say is the bigger problem with the Erlang eco-system.

<comment><USER2> Agreed. Couple of clarifications/observations.

(1) there are situations like this:

        if
        DeductCreditInRatingGroup ->
          log("deducting credit...");
        end;

unfortunately you cannot write it this way. You have to write it as:

        if
        DeductCreditInRatingGroup ->
          log("deducting credit...");
        true -> ok
        end;

Not a huge deal but it's annoying.

(2) Let it crash attitude is something I never understood. It's just not something you can do most of the time. If subscriber consumed 2MB and you let it crash in the middle of rating function you just "lost" 2MB. With couple of million subscribers on LTE that turns into very expensive error handling very fast.

(3) We actually ended up using hackney.

(4) We were not doing anything compute heavy. I think our application was well architected and we had no problem fitting it into OTP "framework". Comparing CPU and memory usage to our Java implementation, Java is more performant.

edit: fixed code formatting.

<comment><USER3> 1\. Here I would do something like this:

      log("deducting credit...", DeductCreditInRatingGroup),

      ...

      log(Msg, true) -> do_the_logging();
      log(Msg, false) -> ok.

Nowadays though, you should really use the new logger introduced in Erlang 21. There you can do run-time filtering on many different parameters, or even write your own handlers. Using if-statements is usually considered an anti- pattern in Erlang, and I think very common coming from languages where only if-statements exist. Problems are almost always better solved by using case, or even better, pattern matching in function heads.

2\. Sounds like one of the rare cases where you care about the error and can also handle it. In the use case you mentioned, I would buffer the data outside of the loop that produces it and wrap the loop in a try-catch statement. That way, you don't loose the data if one iteration crashes.

4\. Erlang usually ends up being good at latency and concurrency (scalability over cores), together with a smaller and easier to read code base. I'm curious about your case, and what would have made Java a better fit. If you share a lot of global objects, Java might be faster for some things (at the cost of concurrency usually). Erlang has tools for that as well though (e.g. ETS and recently persistent_term).

<comment><USER2> (1) was not about logging. I was trying to illustrate a valid use case for `if` statement that requires `true` guard expression. We used lager[1] for logging. I understand that new logger was inspired or loosely based on lager.

(2) I would argue that it's a rare case you don't care about errors.

(4) Multicore support in Erlang was not always great and you would run into all kinds of problems after 2-4 cores. Than for a while it was 12-16 cores. Not sure what the limit is these days.

Again, I am not arguing Java over Erlang. There is no lack of great examples of large successful project running on Erlang. For me and my team Erlang was just too much hassle for not much gain. Your milage may vary.

[1][https://github.com/erlang-lager/lager](https://github.com/erlang- lager/lager)

<comment><USER4> Can't comment on your other issues (I'll say I have noticed the complete opposite in practice, where the same team working with Java vs Erlang led to far more reliable, performant systems in Erlang, but I obviously can't speak to your experience), but for (2) -

You always care about exceptions/errors. The thing is, most you won't predict/can't handle. Those you do predict, and know how to handle, you should, because they're not really errors/exceptions at that point; they're just edge cases.

The point of Erlang is not to make it so you just throw instead of addressing an edge case; it's to make it so you reason about how, if something you don't predict and don't know how to handle happens, you can get back into a known good state. It's actually phenomenal at doing that. I've had complicated user facing production systems work without noticeable issue for years (even while under active development) in Erlang. I've never seen that in any other language. Not to say it can't happen, I just haven't seen it, and the operational lift to achieve that was no different for us than just "make it work"; we were spending the same amount of time thinking about failure cases with the Erlang system as other languages. The difference was a better approach to handling the things we didn't think of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Although not in Erlang, Discord uses Elixir which runs on the BEAM VM to much success as well for our real time distributed system as well as VOIP signaling components. Looking back years later - it's safe to say we wouldn't have chosen anything else.

<comment><USER6> What was the reason to choose Elixir over Erlang? Just familiarity with the language?

<comment><USER7> Not OP, but have used Elixir pretty extensively; the major selling points for me are the friendlier syntax and more active community support, plus with rebar3 + Elixir's seamless Erlang interop you really don't give up anything, you can use any existing Erlang/Elixir libraries with a single syntax. It's pretty great.

<comment><USER8> Haven't touched Erlang but has an entry level knowledge on Elixir. I often heard how easy it is to write macros on Elixir. Can you elaborate on this?

<comment><USER9> One of the big differences between Erlang and Elixir is indeed that Elixir allows you to write macros in the language itself, using quote / unquote constructs just like lisps.

This makes it easy to generate code on compile time, which is then executed in runtime without any performance penalty.

A large part of Elixir itself is actually implemented as macros. For instance, the "unless" construct:

      defmacro unless(condition, do: do_clause, else: else_clause) do
        quote do
          if(unquote(condition), do: unquote(else_clause), else: unquote(do_clause))
        end
      end

(code simplified for clarity)

<comment><USER10> And the if-else construct is also a macro. The whole thing ends up being a case I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Having worked extensively with both Erlang and Elixir in the last 7 years, the main advantage for me has always been the smaller code base that those projects tend to produce when compared to other languages. Especially for projects that have some long-running components to them the Erlang built-in features allow writing really short yet fault resistant systems.

The Supervisor system, the per process garbage collection (no stop the world), 'start_link', "Let it crash", and pattern matching are for me the superpowers of beam. Elixir is contributing a great package ecosystem, 'mix format', and better features for the new live web of websockets

<comment><USER12> Interesting. Any input on erlang vs elixir debate? Which so you prefer as your primary tool personally?

<comment><USER13> You can easily drop into erlang from elixir, so you can have you cake and eat it too.

<comment><USER14> Unfortunately the opposite way is not possible,yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> At least some of those examples are highly misleading:

> There is no better example of Erlang's reliability than the English National > Health Service (NHS). [...] Using Riak (written in Erlang), the NHS has > managed 99.999% availability for over five years.

From what I could find out, NHS's Spine2 is mostly Python, with "a bit" of Erlang and Javascript. They do use Riak, but they also use Redis, RabbitMQ, Python/Tornado, Ubuntu and lots of other components.

This sentence could have said "Using redis (written in C)", or "Using Tornado (written in Python)", and still be fully correct.

<comment><USER16> > the NHS has managed 99.999% availability

Really? I am not sure I trust this claim.

<comment><USER17> The claim relates specifically to the spine 2 project, and is as measured over the 5 years since it went live. There are a lot of systems which depend on Spine 2 for their own availability, it is not the sort of thing that can go down at any time without a lot of people noticing.

I'm biased in that I've been heavily involved in the project, but I will stand by the five years of five nines availability claim.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have never programmed Erlang but it feels like it is the currently only language that is some kind of secret weapon. It has similar aura than Lisp had before that with Erlang you can do stuff beyond "normal" languages.

<comment><USER16> > It has similar aura than Lisp had before that with Erlang you can do stuff > beyond "normal" languages.

Like what ?

<comment><USER19> Erlang's advantage is being able to build a featureful, secure, scalable and performant enough communication backend in very little time and effort. This is a niche in which it can not be beaten.

<comment><USER20> > ...in very little time and effort.

You have a very naive view of large-scale distributed systems. For companies that truly need them, "time" and "effort" are never a consideration. Furthermore, the challenges facing these companies in battling project delays and cost overruns are the 100% organizational and political, _not_ technical.

<comment><USER19> Where did I mention "large-scale distributed systems"?

My entire intention was to say Erlang is easy to get off the ground with quickly.

Most companies outside of the Silicon valley bubble are resource limited.

<comment><USER20> Let me unpack my way comment:

a) Erlang (as opposed to something else) is only useful for large distributed systems.

b) If your organization is at the scale where you need a large distributed system, then the problems in your project aren't related to code or to coding speed.

<comment><USER19> a) But it is not. Erlang is a very productive language and works great even for small projects.

b) Needing a large distributed system is a requirement that one can get to from lots of situations. You are making way too large of a generalization.

<comment><USER20> a) _Every_ programming language is a "very productive language" that "works great". Nobody ever thought to themselves "let's make a programming language that's hard to use and wastes time". (And even if they did, they would have never convinced other people to use it.)

b) No. Large distributed systems is not something you stumble onto, it's a result of many years of organic growth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> FWIW, wechat's messaging server is in erlang. In terms of scale, it's probably bigger than whatsapp.

<comment><USER22> The opposite is true by a non trivial margin. (It doesn't change the fact that WeChat is massive scale.)

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/258749/most-popular- glob...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/258749/most-popular-global- mobile-messenger-apps/)

<comment><USER23> The Discord number is inflated - 250mm is registered users, not MAUs. When they announced 250mm registered, they had 56mm MAUs.

Telegram's 200mm is MAUs, and that number is over 1 year older than Discord's information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Awesome write-up, Francesco! To add to the success stories, our team's previous startup (Bugsense) was a huge user of Erlang, which allowed to scale to hundreds of thousands of concurrent devices with just a handful of servers [1]. It was a no brainer that we would now use Elixir for our current startup (AgentRisk [2,3]) and we wouldn't have been happier with our choice, especially paired with Phoenix, which is hands-down the best web framework we've ever worked with.

[1] [http://www.erlang- factory.com/static/upload/media/1394234889...](http://www.erlang- factory.com/static/upload/media/1394234889981861bugsenseldbefsf2014.pdf)

[2] [https://agentrisk.com](https://agentrisk.com)

[3] [https://blog.agentrisk.com](https://blog.agentrisk.com)

<comment><USER25> What would be a good resource to get started with Phoenix / Elixir, coming from Node/EJS/React it seems very daunting

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Fairly blind question: does Erlang|Elixir and BEAM make any sense in a pseudo- embedded, edge compute or IoT environment with constrained resources (CPU and memory), or even ARM architecture? Aside from the developer-side things, if AMQP were to the centralized communications hub (e.g. RabbitMQ) does using Nerves on devices make any performance benefit - meaning BEAM and app(s) there?

The intent would be pre-process data and stream inward, or simply be a command-and-control interface -> process and provide response.

<comment><USER27> Yes, take a look at nerves : [https://nerves-project.org/](https://nerves- project.org/)

<comment><USER26> Yep, know Nerves. Like the toolset and the model. Really asking about the underlying Erlang/Elixir that Nerves provides. The delivery flow (think image to SD card) fits the more tradition embedded/realtime model - versus OS, and installing app.

<comment><USER27> Well a Nerves image is a Unix Kernel + Erlang/Elixir & BEAM and whatever else you need, so its a completely stripped down image. It uses the Whitelist model so you add what you need instead of removing what you don't need. This is both more secure and more performant since you don't have 100's of apps/services running in the background, you only run what you need.

You can control everything remotely with nerves-hub, push update, debug etc. Remember you only have to burn the image once, then its all update from here.

You can build a poncho application where everything is side-by-side, lets say you have your app-firmware (you build image from this), then you build separate app-ui, app-logic, app-whatever etc. and simply hard code the path as dependencies in app-firmware and each app has their own configuration.

Everything will be bundled into a single image and protects you from things leaking in from the sides rather than from above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> worked with Erlang lately in a side project, I think the actor model is really cool (and the FP style), but the error messages are not helpful at all (at least for a beginner), I wonder how other people manage.

<comment><USER29> Elixir gives you much more friendly error messages at runtime (I believe part of this feature was contributed to the Erlang VM, so improved it for all languages):

      10:21:21.525 mid=1 [error] GenServer {Registry.WatcherManagerRegistry, 1} terminating
      ** (CaseClauseError) no case clause matching: {:ok, <snip>}
          (core) lib/core/http.ex:64: Core.Http.request/7
          (core) lib/core/monitors/built_in_monitor.ex:99: Core.Monitors.BuiltInMonitor.perform_request/1
          (core) lib/core/monitors/built_in_monitor.ex:76: Core.Monitors.BuiltInMonitor.perform/1
          (core) lib/core/watcher.ex:40: Core.Watcher.perform_check/1
          (core) lib/core/watcher_server.ex:91: Core.WatcherServer.handle_info/2

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have been building grouper.ai to integrate voice ai systems with 2600hz's kazoo apis, and have enjoyed doing it as a Greenfield side project. Nerves for hardware on embedded Linux, c/c++ for the voice apis, ports in erlang/elixir to talk the low level calls, using elixir Phoenix in the cloud on the beam. Have used erlang also in day job for custom industrial M2M protocol translation (serial / Ethernet) very successfully also.

</comment><comment><USER31> I have seen that Erlang is used in RabbitMQ, if I recall right their argument was that Erlang is particularily well suited for that kind of asynchonous message queue stuff. I donlt know all too much about Erlang, so I cannot judge if that claim makes sense.

<comment><USER32> I'm an Erlang novice, so take this with a grain of salt: Erlang's use in RMQ seems to have helped them immensely through the first few years of the system's life. They got an "all in one box" performant message broker off the ground, and relatively reliable, quite quickly.

However, RMQ did hit numerous issues that they had to work around on the Erlang platform. They had to engineer what was effectively their own scheduler on top of parts of the native Erlang one in order to prevent some starvation cases [1], and I have also heard that issues with Mnesia are at the root of some of the pathological behaviors (data loss) of some versions of RabbitMQ when restarting from a crash (this is admittedly anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt).

[1] [http://alvaro-videla.com/2013/09/rabbitmq-internals- credit-f...](http://alvaro-videla.com/2013/09/rabbitmq-internals-credit-flow- for-erlang-processes.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> My only exposure to Erlang has been through RabbitMQ and while I can't comment much on the language itself, managing the packages is a dependency nightmare. Like some twisted, mutant, supervillain version of Python, a given version of RabbitMQ will only work with a certain version of Erlang (with horrible, hard- to-understand error messages on incorrect versions), and on RedHat/CentOS, the Erlang packages all misadvertise what exact versions they supply, necessitating awkward forcing of the dependencies or else Yum screws everything up.

<comment><USER34> why wouldn't you just use rabbit rpms that depend on the exact correct versions of erlang? aka els-erlang

[https://www.erlang-solutions.com/resources/download.html](https://www.erlang- solutions.com/resources/download.html)

Linux distros have always been terrible places to find reliable packages.

<comment><USER35> He he. And then you have people complaining that you're a "bad OSS citizen"...

<comment><USER34> me, ELS, or redhat?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > Many countries rely on Erlang for their immediate payment switches, allowing > instant bank transfers

Just wondering if such a system used in Poland, actually called Elixir[1], has a line of Erlang/Elixir in its codebase.

[1] [https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_(system_rozliczeń_międz...](https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_\(system_rozliczeń_międzybankowych\))

</comment><comment><USER37> We're happily plugging along on KAZOO [0] since 2010 at 2600Hz. Erlang is a force-multiplier for us. Approaching 300K LOC and ~10 Erlang engineers (depends if Karl is writing code or CTO-ing that day) today.

[0] [https://github.com/2600hz/kazoo/](https://github.com/2600hz/kazoo/)

</comment><comment><USER38> IIRC a clearing co. CLS used erlang a few years ago. LinkedIn still has the erlang architect JDs somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER39> Something I find interesting is that the tech stack is often chosen by non- engineers/founders. So languages and frameworks are marketed to business people. Freelance work is often weak on the requirements, but they have strong opinions on what language and framework to use.

<comment><USER40> That's often because most clients will already have some sort of environment set up, running some OS and with certain features installed and most importantly: they don't want to have 5 different projects working on 5 different frameworks because that'd be a nightmare to maintain. Once a company gets into a tech stack, they'll want to stay within it as much as possible and that makes plenty of sense.

<comment><USER39> You dont want to put all your eggs in the same basket, not in this age when a framework can become obsolete in just two years. It only make sense if you already have a small team - you want to use what they know best. But if you are growing you can have many small teams. You will also exhaust the talent supply if you lock yourself down to only one platform/language/framework.

<comment><USER35> Yeah, tell that to Java/Spring or C#/ASP :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> What would be a good use case to learn erlang/elixir with that is not just a chat app?

Online gaming?

Collaborative tools?

<comment><USER42> A Bittorrent client is a pretty good one. The protocol is fairly well- documented, and the domain is very well-suited to the language.

<comment><USER43> I'd use this if someone made a good one! I'm currently using Transmission on Mac, which has more than its own fair share of issues, most notably the UI freezes in any action that takes time, like moving a file across hard disks or to a network drive, but IIRC all the others I have tried (Deluge, qBittorrent) also have multiple similar issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Is there any official source which talks about the number of servers or total CPU cores used in production by the companies mentioned in the article?

</comment><comment><USER45> Observed facts of Google Trends:

1\. Erlang/Elixir are less than 1% of programming languages market.

2\. Erlang/Elixir popularity is trending down.

<comment><USER46> Elixirforums have reported year on years increased traffic, so I'm surprised to hear that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> teamweek.com uses Elixir

</comment><comment><USER48> Telecom companies

<comment><USER49> So you think gaming, online bets, financial institutions or NHS are telecom companies?

<comment><USER50> I'm fairly certain he/she refers to Ericsson, the creator of Erlang.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> WhatsApp used to use Erlang, not anymore. Facebook rewrote it completely in C++.

[https://www.quora.com/When-did-Facebook-switch-away-from- usi...](https://www.quora.com/When-did-Facebook-switch-away-from-using-Erlang- for-Facebook-Chat-What-was-the-reason-for-it-What-did-they-replace-it-with)

<comment><USER52> This isn't true at all.

Major functions of WhatsApp are implemented in Erlang and they're actively worked on.

Source: Self. Engineer at FB.

<comment><USER53> They (you) had to modify beam vm heavily though.

<comment><USER19> At that scale you are generally modifying your entire stack or building it from scratch no mater what you are using. Also they were on a pretty old version and a number of their fixes are in Erlang itself now.

WhatsApp engineers have been quite clear that using Erlang was a great choice.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Confluent Reaches $2.5B Valuation Three Years After Hiring Its First Sales Rep - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2019/01/23/open-source-unicorn-confluent-reaches-25-billion-valuation-three-years-after-hiring-its-first-sales-rep/#73a7921915e2 <comment><USER2> As data velocity and volume increases so too does the need to tap into it and extract value as soon as possible. This, I believe, is what is driving the rise of technologies such as Apache Kafka and AWS Kinesis. Though, to be pedantic Kafka is more batch processing than real time streaming.

The article doesn't mention Apache Flink.</comment>


Ask HN: What's fair equity for early employees? - <AUTHOR>

Dear HN,
I'm in a position of negotiating compensation with a startup, and I'm curious what kinds of formulas people use to figure this stuff out, both from a founder's and employee's point of view. I feel ill-equipped to even judge the fairness of a given offer without more information about how such things are done elsewhere.
I've looked at ackwire.com, and that is helpful, but I'd still be interested in commentary directly on method. Under what circumstances is someone offered 0.1%? What about 1%? 2%? 5%?
As I see it, an offer of equity in the form of options vesting over time is essentially going to be some function of the following inputs:
- Salary: How much less than market rate has this person agreed to be paid?
- Benefits: Are there any? If not, is there a timeline in place for when there will be?
- Hire date: What was the value of the business at time of hire?
How much do you weight each of them? What kinds of scale factors apply to each? Are there other factors I'm not considering here?
Thanks very much! <comment><USER2> Important things to consider:

Vesting Schedule. Do you plan to be there long enough to get the whole allotment? If not, figure how much you'll _really_ get.

Tax Consequences. There are very real situations in which you can wind up with a tax bill and a bunch of illiquid stock. If you get a significant equity or options grant, run it by a tax accountant so you can avoid gotachas that may be coming in the future. The strike price can be a significant amount of money - make sure there's a way to handle that. This is especially troublesome for contractors (as opposed to employees).

Salary. The more you want, the less you'll get in equity. Note that it is not automatically bad to ask for money. Equity is often worth more to founders than to employees.

Transparency. How open is the company about their cap table, bank account, and income statement?. The less info you have, the less you'll be able evaluate your equity, which makes it less valuable to you.

Investment. Who has invested and what are the goals? Long term cash flow? Flip? IPO? This has a big impact on liquidity, its timing, and the form it might take.

But the real answer to your question is "get as much as you can, and make sure you cross the t's and dot the i's" there is no magic formula.

</comment><comment><USER3> It obviously should be a term both parties should be happy with regardless of what that may look like. If neither party are happy, it won't matter. Do you believe in the company and founders?

Having said that, more details would actually help people here give better feedback. How early is early, aka employee number 1, 10, 20? Has the company raise funding? Profitable? How long has the company been around? What position. These factors and others, can influence a lot.

Generally speaking, depending on what stage of funding and how early a startup employee you are, it can vary between 0.5 pt to 5 pts. Of course there are ranges outside of this as well. Salary can vary a lot too. I've seen engineers do as low as $24k/yr to at least $50k/yr.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the difficulty is that I don't really know if I'm happy. I _think_ I am, but I feel like I have insufficient information to really know, hence the post.

Is the $50k number you're citing the upperbound of what an early-hire should expect to be paid? Looking at ackwire, I see the vast majority of the engineering lead positions are for cash compensation amounts much higher than that. (viz. <http://www.ackwire.com/level/lead> )

<comment><USER3> It varies significantly depending on the info I mentioned above including your experience as well. Re-read what I wrote carefully, I said AT LEAST $50k. It depends on where you're located as well. Too many unknown factors to give you any valid advice at this point.</comment></comment></comment>


If software acts like a brain–will we treat it like one? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/02/if-software-looks-like-a-brain-and-acts-like-a-brain-will-we-treat-it-like-one/ <comment><USER2> I am afraid people on this will have disagreement with me, but as Searle pointed out, whole brain emulation is just an emulation and most likely won't have qualia, consciousness, even if the behavior will be a perfect copy.Especially if Penrose is right.</comment>


The Revenge Porn Fixers - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/meet-the-women-you-call-when-your-most-intimate-photos-wind

<comment><USER2> Awesome, more unenforceable laws.

Normally, when you criminalize something like this, it goes underground. The difference here is that it's already underground!

And of course, these kinds of laws will probably be abused so that politicians and such can have embarrassing photos removed under threat of fines or inprisonment.

<comment><USER3> What is unenforceable about it? Seems enforceable to me. I think they should just make the punishment stiffer.

<comment><USER2> >What is unenforceable about it? Seems enforceable to me.

How do you propose punishing people who leak nudes over Tor?

Many of (perhaps all of) the recent celebrity nudes were leaked/sold on onion sites first.

<comment><USER3> I suspect most people don't use Tor. Today at least this would be fairly easy to enforce.

<comment><USER2> >I suspect most people don't use Tor.

We're not talking about "most people". We're talking about the people to whom this law might apply.

And even in the absence of Tor, do you condone ubiquitous internet surveillance to make this law generally enforceable?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Surely there wont be any unintended consequences.</comment>


Why False Claims About Covid-19 Refuse to Die - <AUTHOR> http://m.nautil.us/issue/84/outbreak/why-false-claims-about-covid_19-refuse-to-die <comment><USER2> What's ironic is the amount of distrust and bickering below the article in the comments section.</comment>


Linux Challenge Blackbox #1 - <AUTHOR> http://www.iodigitalsec.com/linux-challenge-blackbox-1/

<comment><USER2> I reached a point where I have no idea on how to move on. I hope after this is "done" that there will be a mini how-to on how you get to the solution :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Solution has been posted :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The challenge covers some Linux file manipulation, C/ASM, GDB and filesystem. Please post questions or feedback in the comments

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't see a link to the challenge at the above site page.

<comment><USER4> The link is in the page, that's part of the challenge. Keep trying.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Keep trying!</comment>


Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html <comment><USER2> Here's a link to the Artix website (RTM & PG's first startup):

[http://web.archive.org/web/19961226071744/http://www.artix.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/19961226071744/http://www.artix.com/)

This is apparently a year into their venture, but I think they'd already abandoned the idea at this point. Notice the ad on the top for Viaweb.

<comment><USER3> Holy shit. I had no idea that was still around. Pretty spiffy for 1995. That was before tables.

I notice our pitch to galleries

[http://web.archive.org/web/19961227091110/www.artix.com/how....](http://web.archive.org/web/19961227091110/www.artix.com/how.a.html)

has a lot in common with Viaweb's

<http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/bugbear/how.html>

<comment><USER4> Paul, you were on the internet for 13 years before your sold your first startup? And you have _five_ degrees? Yet you want 20-year-olds to succeed in 6 months if possible, even without a degree? That's insane (in a good way.)

<comment><USER3> We'd actually prefer if it took longer. If you succeed in 6 months, it was probably an early acquisition, and YC doesn't make very much from those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is most interesting to me;

"This is a controversial view. One expert on "entrepreneurship" told me that any startup had to include business people, because only they could focus on what customers wanted. I'll probably alienate this guy forever by quoting him, but I have to risk it, because his email was such a perfect example of this view:

"80% of MIT spinoffs succeed provided they have at least one management person in the team at the start. The business person represents the "voice of the customer" and that's what keeps the engineers and product development on track."

This is, in my opinion, a crock. Hackers are perfectly capable of hearing the voice of the customer without a business person to amplify the signal for them. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were grad students in computer science, which presumably makes them "engineers." Do you suppose Google is only good because they had some business guy whispering in their ears what customers wanted? It seems to me the business guys who did the most for Google were the ones who obligingly flew Altavista into a hillside just as Google was getting started."

<comment><USER5> This is a simple case of specialization of labor. While a hacker may be able to hear the voice of the customer, it probably makes sense to have some folks that do more hacking and some more customer hearing. If you have two co- founders, it makes sense to have one on each side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Whee, let's resubmit the entire PG archive. Free points!

<comment><USER3> You ought to let them have this one. I had no idea this existed myself.

<comment><USER7> He's talking about the 2005 article, but it seems you're talking about the artix site. Wrong thread. :)

<comment><USER3> Oops, yes. No need to submit stuff already on the Library link at the bottom of the site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In a sense, pg, don't you think that you are perhaps still funding ideas that are in fringe markets?

In the future can we expect to see a fund for a) a standard search engine and b) a standard social network....

<comment><USER9> a) To beat Google will take a clever new technology/algorithm. I'm sure if someone came to YC with an idea for a fundamentally better search engine they would get funding.

b) Same thing here. It's hard to beat facebook as far as a general interest social network. There needs to be something unique.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Lazy people have the best ideas. Lazy people always try to cut the process short and find the easiest way to do things. Now this is a gift and a curse as they never act. This is how we all get to hear stories of someone saying "Oh I had this idea n months ago. They stole my idea"

</comment><comment><USER11> pg, have you found that those accepted into the SFP are increasingly able to get past the bad idea stage?

<comment><USER3> They're usually pretty flexible, but that's because we try really hard to screen out inflexible people in the interview.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What software products do you find expensive? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I have a feeling that you are asking this question to find a product idea to work on and compete with cheaper price, I would advise against using lower pricing as the first strategy because it might become a race to the bottom.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, you're right. But let's be fair, if you're a software engineer who downright doesn't want to take a job and doesn't want to do down the VC route and doesn't want to be a freelancer. What options does he/she have to make a living?

Start a sustainable business that reaches profitably quickly. And one of the ways of doing so, without much capital, is to provide a competent product a lot cheaper than some company exploiting their customer's is doing.

<comment><USER2> Same here, your description fits me exactly lol.

I have several apps/books making me little money every month (few hundred ish, not enough to cover living expenses yet, I am still working on it), it's okay to take the route of competing on price, but you will eventually lose to VC backed company which can provide their app for free or below operating costs as they have a lot money to burn. And offering lower than market price might make potential audience feel that your offering quality might not on par (eg: Walmart).

My advice would be to provide more value than existing offering or just downright give more shit/care about customers, you would be surprised how many software companies out there doesn't give a shit about customers / uses automated chat bot to reply support ticket (Google, I am looking at you). Replying to customer as a genuine person has a lot more impact than using the generic PR-ish polite sentences.

This is just my advice, of course you can try to compete with price, no harm trying it first!

<comment><AUTHOR> Fore sure soulchild, I agree with you. Being from India, I think it's my first instinct to just try and compete on the price. I'm gonna keep what you said it mind, it also reminds me of SmugMug's story.

I'm gonna try and find your apps too from the link in your profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Amazon Web Services and other cloud vendors. The amount of traffic and processing power a single dedicated server can provide is astonishingly cheaper than the cloud.

I understand that the cloud provides additional software products, services and flexibility to scale quick, but you pay for it.

<comment><USER4> Yeah. The only thing I miss from bare metal server setups is the managed redundancy some clouds offer (massive RAID cabinets, etc).

But on most projects, if you plan for contingencies you can do well on bare metal using HAProxy for Load Balancing, database replication, lsyncd for some filesystems, etc. AWS is really a good commodity but more and more people complain on price ;P

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Alteryx - limited functionality, doesn't scale, can't debug properly. But they have a great sales team I suppose.

Also SAS.

It amazes me how much money some companies are willing to spend on products that are worse than their open source alternatives.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for these two answers, I was hoping this would get more upvotes!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Matlab

<comment><USER7> To add to this: Simulink and select other matlab toolboxes (Which btw cost extra). I think base matlab can be supplanted very well with scientific python these days.

<comment><USER6> Basically every additional module costs extra (lot extra). What Python modules would you suggest?

<comment><USER5> Depending on your use case - numpy, pandas, scipy, matplotlib, statsmodels. Also check out R - you may or may not prefer it to Python, especially if you're coming from Matlab.

<comment><USER7> And to add on, octave is a good open source replacement for base matlab with near identical syntax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Database software?such as Oracle.

</comment><comment><USER9> AutoCAD and other products from Autodesk

</comment><comment><USER10> Splunk

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't know about them, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> IDA Pro</comment>


Wealthfront: Silicon Valley Tech at Wall Street Prices - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@blakeross/wealthfront-silicon-valley-tech-at-wall-street-prices-fdd2e5f54905 <comment><USER2> the short of it: Wealthfront markets itself as cheaper than vanguard etfs, but they actually charge 0.25% + ETF fees on top of that.

one of my favorite quotes:

"Here it is: If you open a retirement account, and you invest some of your paycheck each month into a Vanguard Target Retirement Fund, and you just…leave it…you just leave it right there until retirement…

…you don't do anything when the folks on CNBC announce that the sky is falling; you don't do anything when Cousin Eddy calls from a secure underground bunker in the badlands and says that the fed is printing money and it's time to liquidate and ammo up; you don't think it's a sign that your parrot said "fuhgeddaboutit" but you thought she said "get a nugget" and surely that must mean a gold nugget? and you looked online and noticed that the price of shiny yellow metal was crashing and wait your parrot is also yellow and I'll be damned if that isn't a sign to buy…

… no, if you just leave it there to compound over decades…"

<comment><USER3> Buy and hold forever is generally great advice, until it isn't.

I'd much rather not have 30%+ of my life savings wiped out in a single recession with the rest of the market.

In my humble opinion, thoroughly backtested trading algorithms based on hard statistics is the only rational way to participate in the market. The market is fundamentally an irrational entity, and investors should be looking for ways to systematically protect themselves from the market's irrational mood swings.

Check out Quantopian:

[https://www.quantopian.com/home](https://www.quantopian.com/home)

Even a trivial moving average crossover algorithm like the one I currently have deployed can give you surprisingly robust protection against severe downswings, and outperform the overall market significantly over the long term despite the small losses caused by false positives.

[http://i.imgur.com/ZhN0QIp.png](http://i.imgur.com/ZhN0QIp.png)

<comment><USER4> Your overall point is not a bad one, but investors don't need "thoroughly backtested trading algorithms" to protect themselves. Frankly, many of the people who use "thoroughly backtested trading algorithms" don't do as well as they supposedly should.

It is, on the other hand, entirely possible for an average investor to learn basic technical analysis concepts and apply them _visually_ to charts. At a minimum, for instance, if you can draw a trend line on a price chart and identify when price breaks important trend lines, you can easily avoid losses from major declines without having to write a single line of code or spend more than 5-10 minutes a day checking on your portfolio.

A decent book in this vein is _The Visual Investor_ [1].

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Visual-Investor-Market- Trends/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Visual-Investor-Market- Trends/dp/0470382058/)

<comment><USER5> There's not a shred of evidence that technical analysis is anything but a charlatan's tool - same as trying to time the market. Technical analysis is bound to yield only losses for the investor and fees for the broker. The evidence points strongly against technical analysis as a method for building wealth - . And buying during upswings / selling during declines guarantees you lose.

Long-term value investing performs best, low cost index funds perform well, Wealthfront will underperform due to fees, and technical analysis will turn even a billionaire into a millionaire.

<comment><USER4> There is plenty of charlatanism in the world of technical analysis, just as there is in the world of fundamental analysis. But you're missing a key point: "technical analysis" is not monolithic. There isn't a single set of rules and indicators, all applied the same way over the same time periods. Most investors (and traders) lose money because of lack of discipline, poor money management, etc. This is true whether technical analysis is used or not.

Instead of creating a straw man argument, let's discuss something simple: trend lines. And let's discuss the most fundamental truth about trend lines: it is absolutely impossible for the current trend to reverse without key trend lines being broken.

Don't take my word for it. Pull up a chart of the S&P 500. The bull market that ended in late 2007 was easily identified by the breaking of long-term trend lines. And the bear market that ended in 2009 was easily identified by the breaking of trend lines as well. Just by use of trend lines alone (and no other technical indicators) you could have identified key turning points in the market.

How you act upon this information, if at all, is your choice. But that has nothing to do with technical analysis. That's investment/trading strategy.

<comment><USER6> > _The bull market that ended in late 2007 was easily identified by the > breaking of long-term trend lines. And the bear market that ended in 2009 > was easily identified by the breaking of trend lines as well._

Trends are broken in periods surrounding major market corrections, indeed. How many false positives are there in between, in which you're turning over your portfolio for no reason?

<comment><USER4> Not all trend lines are created equal. Some are more important than others. You too are confusing technical analysis with investment/trading strategy. The breaking of a short or intermediate term trend line does not inherently call for "turning over your portfolio."

Depending on where you are in a trend, the breaking of a short-term trend line, for instance, could set up an opportunity to add to an existing position when the trend resumes.

<comment><USER5> Ahh, you can't have it both ways. Does a simple trend line, e.g. 12 month moving average, suffice to tell you to get in or out of a stock ("the bear market that ended in 2009 was easily identified by the breaking of trend lines")? Or does it have to be the right trend line? Moreover, how do I know what trend line to choose? I can choose great trend lines with the benefit of hindsight.

Also, forgetusername's point on false positives remains critical. Breaking trend lines is only a useful if it's right most of the time.

My advice to anyone who wants to be an enterprising investor (i.e. put more time into investing and try to achieve higher returns) is to read Ben Graham's The Intelligent Investor. Instead of trading based on the emotions in the market, invest by choosing great companies that are bargains.

<comment><USER4> A moving average is _not_ a trend line. It's difficult to have a meaningful discussion if we are talking about two different things.

As for false positives, nobody reasonable will tell you that they don't exist. But again, there's a difference between short, intermediate and long-term trend lines. Even under the most unfavorable scenarios, anybody with a modicum of knowledge of trend lines would have been out of the market before the 2008 crash and back in the market by early 2010 because major trend lines were broken. Incidentally, I was one of those people.

As for your advice: there's nothing wrong with fundamental analysis. Although many people fail to make money using it (just like technical analysis), it's worth noting that quite a few savvy professionals use fundamental and technical analysis together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As much as I think the article makes great points (tax-loss harvesting seems oversold, and Vanguard is a much cheaper way to get a target date fund than Wealthfront), I gotta raise my hand here and point out the absurdity of this argument against proportional fees. Wealth management is like any business-- a combination of fixed and variable costs. And like many businesses, it amortizes those fixed costs against basically a variable fee structure because the value of the service to the customer (debatable as it may be for some investment products) is proportional to the account size. It's not an SV vs WS thing. Nobody charges according to the marginal cost of the service. Why does Airbnb charge a percentage of the rental cost? Why does Uber get a percentage of the fare? Why does the restaurant charge me the same for a burger at 10pm as a burger at 7pm (after all, the staff are already being paid for the day and ingredients already purchased)? It might sound good to say "hey, the software's not working any harder so the marginal cost is zero", but that doesn't work in almost any business.

<comment><USER8> _> Why does the restaurant charge me the same for a burger at 10pm as a burger at 7pm (after all, the staff are already being paid for the day and ingredients already purchased)?_

Actually, it's not uncommon for a food vendor to drop its prices at the end of the day, e.g. [https://www.itsu.com/about/sale](https://www.itsu.com/about/sale)

That doesn't invalidate your point, though.

I'd also suggest that the risk associated with a transaction should also be factored in. The cost of processing small (e.g. $100) and large ($100,000) transactions may be the same but the potential cost to me if I drop the ball is several orders of magnitude larger.

<comment><USER9> Yeah good points.

Additionally, Vanguard is making money through securities lending which is also proportional and can offset much or all of the expense ratio.

"In 2012 securities lending enhanced annual fund returns by more than 1 basis point for over 60% of Vanguard's participating funds, by more than 5 basis points for nearly a third of funds, and by more than 10 basis points for over 15% of funds."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From The little book of common sense investing by John Bogle.

"Thus, the recent era not only has failed to erode, but has nicely enhanced the lifetime record of the world's first index fund—now known as Vanguard 500 Index Fund. Let me be specific: at a dinner on September 20, 2006, celebrating the 30th anniversary of the fund's initial public offering, the counsel for the fund's underwriters reported that he had purchased 1,000 shares at the original offering price of $15.00 per share—a $15,000 investment. He proudly announced that the value of his holding that evening (including shares acquired through reinvesting the fund's dividends and distributions over the years) was $461,771. "

<comment><USER11> For some absolutely insane reason I sometimes get the feeling that I can outpick a fund with individual stocks, because "Hey, I follow this whole tech world really closely! Surely I can pick some big winners!"

It has been a somewhat expensive lesson that I have absolutely no clue what's going on, but every once in a while I just can't help but try. I keep a little fun money in individual equities, and the rest now sits safely in funds. My aggregate individual funds always lose out to what has been relatively steady fund performance.

<comment><USER12> I suggest doing what I do: invest your time in speculative bets (startups), and invest your take-home pay in index funds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A father, who is a banker shows his son "This is our Yacht and those are our brokers''". Son asks "Dad, where are the customers' yachts?".

A book, written in 1930s, based on this quip still remains one of my favourite books about Wall street. Link: [http://www.amazon.com/Where-Are-Customers- Yachts-Street/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Where-Are-Customers-Yachts- Street/dp/0471770892)

</comment><comment><USER14> Wealthfront is indeed a ripoff for the well-informed.

For most folks, though, something that makes saving simple is something that will lead to HUGE gains over not having that thing in the first place.

Without Wealthfront, most people would simply let that money sit in a checking account or in a user-made nondiversified portfolio (most people don't understand the incredible benefits of diversification, including myself most days, which is why we work at startups :) ).

Therefore, I still believe the value of Wealthfront is positive, and likewise, I believe the value of most financial planners is positive.

<comment><USER15> > Wealthfront is indeed a ripoff for the well-informed.

Do you feel that this is universally true or situation-dependent? I consider myself reasonably informed and Wealthfront appears to be a strong, if not the strongest, option for my financial situation (young, most of my net worth is in a taxable account, direct indexing, regular expected capital gains to pair with tax losses).

<comment><USER12> First of all, you are probably not taking full advantage of tax-efficient accounts. Are you contributing your maximums, including back door strategies?

Second, you can do substantially better than Wealthfront with even an extremely lazy portfolio. Heck, put all of your funds into a Vanguard target- date fund (the laziest of the laziest) and you will do better than Wealthfront, with only 15 min of effort per year to rebalance.

The kind of tax loss harvesting Wealthfront does is usually a pseudo-benefit. You're usually in a better position just holding until you need distributions for retirement. On paper it sometimes works out, but only when you make assumptions that generally involve timing the market to harvest without loss while avoiding wash sale rules.

That said, if you can't be trusted or can't trust yourself to buy a simple lazy portfolio and hold for decades, then by all means pay the 0.25% annual fee to have someone else take the management keys away from you. As one of my coworkers said, Wealthfront is lazy advice -- telling someone to use Wealthfront is easy to do and usually gets that person into a better position than they otherwise would be, and requires minimal effort from me in advising them. But it is not the optimal solution out there and anyone can easily do better if they are willing to learn and capable of exerting self control.

<comment><USER16> Just for my understanding, if all your investments are in a "Vanguard target- date fund" then why would you have to spend _any_ time per year rebalancing? Isn't that what the target date funds do for you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't understand the three first paragraphs (about A/B testing). I install an app costing me 1 dollar and then the developer use this profit to install an app ruining him/her? What?

<comment><USER18> He's noting the irony of how punishing "your" (the developer's) margins are, vs how easily you hand your hard-fought cash over to the high-margin wealthfront.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you do want financial advice as an hourly service, it exists. In the US, look at the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors: [https://www.napfa.org/](https://www.napfa.org/).

Many provide hourly consulting, just like you'd pay an attorney or accountant.

By far the biggest risk of doing this is not having a constant presence during bear markets to coach you to stay the course. If you're actually comfortable enough in the amount of risk you've taken, this is less of an issue.

The best doc I found on where or how wealth managers can add value was written for wealth managers (by Vanguard, which provides custodial services): [http://www.vanguard.com/pdf/ISGQVAA.pdf](http://www.vanguard.com/pdf/ISGQVAA.pdf)

Page 4 has the table. The biggest benefit - in their analysis, up to 1.5% of possible value added - is coaching. Deciding what's right for you depends on understanding what parts of planning and executing you're actually comfortable taking primary responsibility for.

</comment><comment><USER20> Here's my understanding: if you use Wealthfront direct indexing, you mostly hold stocks, so you pay a minimal amount in ETF fees. This means your expense ratio is pretty close to the Wealthfront fee of 0.25%.

If you put everything in a Vanguard target retirement fund, your expense ratio is something like 0.18%. [1]

So as long as tax loss harvesting adds a tiny fraction of a percent (~0.07%) to your returns, it seems optimal to use Wealthfront, no?

[1] [https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0699&...](https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0699&FundIntExt=INT)

<comment><USER21> This is correct. Also, tax-loss harvesting isn't the only benefit of direct indexing. Charitable gifting of highly appreciated securities is a potentially huge benefit that direct indexing has over ETFs (even better given that it doesn't ratchet down your basis like TLH or create wash sale issues).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wealthfront markets itself as an innovative fintech startup, but I see it as nothing but an asset mgt company that hired some developers to "prop it up".

Not to commit an ad hominem, but I don't see tech-driven founders and/or a very strong engineering culture.

[https://www.wealthfront.com/management](https://www.wealthfront.com/management)

<comment><USER23> I work in the finance industry and only today found out about both Wealthfront and Betterment.

Betterment is utterly awesome. Truly a product I'd expect to see from an innovative fintech startup.

Wealthfront is... not.

<comment><USER4> So you just learned about Wealthfront and Betterment today and somehow you've determined that Betterment is "utterly awesome" and Wealthfront isn't? I hope that whatever your role in finance, it isn't related to due diligence.

<comment><USER23> I might've been a bit too black-and-white with my comment, let me clarify...

Betterment _seems_ utterly awesome. Truly a product I'd expect to see from an innovative fintech startup. Wealthfront did not.

It was clear that Betterment cared about making a beautiful _consumer-driven_ product. It was also clear that they've spent some time reimagining how personal finance works. Simplifying it.

I also can't help but note that the fact that Betterment made me so excited (it really did) so quickly probably speaks very well of it. But then again, I'm a sample of 1.

(Incidentally, I read your HN profile and rather liked the story in your 'about')

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So about a month ago I inherited just short of $30k. I don't need it right now, and don't plan on using it until either I buy a house (maybe 5 years away?) or retire.

My plan was to invest it with Betterment, because I felt like that was the easiest and cheapest "set and forget" solution. But would there be substantial upside in going directly with a Vanguard fund instead? I'm really new to this and the convenience of a dedicated interface like Wealthfront/Betterment feels valuable to me, but if I'm leaving substantial money on the table doing that I'd rather go to the extra effort of figuring something else out.

<comment><USER25> If you plan to use the money in less than 5 years, put it in a savings account t. I like capital one 360 (formerly Ing Direct), but any one will do.

The most important part of investing is knowing your time horizon--stocks or stocks and bonds are just too risky for any time.hirozion less than 5 years.

<comment><USER26> If you plan to use the money in less than 5 years _and know you will need about 30k_ then put it in a savings account or something of the kind.

On the other hand, if you have no specific plans for that money, and you would just like as much money as possible in 5 years' time, on average you are likely (on past performance) to have more in 5 years if you put it into the stock market than if you put it into a savings account.

(And if you know that in 5 years' time you will desperately need about 100k and have no other way of getting that money, go to a casino or something. Fortunately, that's a rather uncommon situation.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> OK I don't know shit about investing/financing and would like to change that. Where do I start? I read the article and nod my head and go, "OK ETFs!" But then I go and there are tons of them. Is the one he suggested the one I'm suppose to go with regardless?

<comment><USER28> My favorite is _A Random Walk Down Wall Street_ by Burton G. Malkiel, the cofounder of Vanguard. Dispels a tremendous number of myths; at the end of the day you'll learn to KISS.

[http://amzn.com/0393340740](http://amzn.com/0393340740)

<comment><USER29> Incidentally, Malkiel is currently the Chief Investment Officer of Wealthfront.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Let's say we kill proportional fee and replace it with a fixed fee. Well, then people with lower balances will end up most likely paying more than they do now. Another issue, it is proportionally harder to execute a larger portfolio than a smaller one. So, proportional fee makes sense. Having said that, yes, it is true that it is not clear to me why as a Vanguard customer I should switch part of my portfolio to Wealthfront.

<comment><USER31> The only thing any investor can control with any certainty is fees and taxes, so you might as well focus your effort on minimizing these. For the most part, Vanguard funds are the best at this that I know of.

<comment><USER32> Vanguard definitely led the way, but Fidelity (maybe others) has low fee funds similar to Vanguard. Last time I checked, Fidelity looked like they priced their funds by doing Vanguard price minus .01 point.

<comment><USER33> Really? This is quite new and contradicts that: [http://www.marketwatch.com/story/best-target-date-funds- fide...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/best-target-date-funds-fidelity-vs- vanguard-2015-04-15)

<comment><USER32> Not all funds obviously. I also use a boggle head portfolio so the target date funds are not much interest. For example, the total stock market index from Fidelity and Vanguard.

FSTMX .10% [http://financials.morningstar.com/fund/expense.html?t=FSTMX&...](http://financials.morningstar.com/fund/expense.html?t=FSTMX&region=usa&culture=en_US)

VTSMX .17% [http://financials.morningstar.com/fund/expense.html?t=VTSMX&...](http://financials.morningstar.com/fund/expense.html?t=VTSMX&region=usa&culture=en_US)

<comment><USER34> Why not the ETF version (VTI) of VTSMX that has only 5bp ER?

<comment><USER32> Also a great choice if in an account that allows ETF purchases. The point was VG forced much of the industry to at least try to offer lower cost index funds, and others have reluctantly followed.

Schwab has one with a .04%. [http://etfdb.com/etf/SCHB/](http://etfdb.com/etf/SCHB/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Key point: 99.9% of US individual investors would be wise to make a Vanguard Life Strategy or Target Retirement fund a core holding.

Otherwise, the screed was a little nasty (a bit nastier than the Wealthfront post).

</comment><comment><USER36> Here is a shot at a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the sum of fees paid in his first example. I hope I haven't misunderstood.

      var gain = 1.08; var fee = 0.0025; var feeSum = 0; var s = 100000;
      for (var i = 0; i < 35; i++) { s *= (gain - fee); feeSum *= gain; feeSum += s * fee; if ((i + 1) % 5 == 0) console.log('year: ' + (i + 1) + ', saved: ' + s + ', fees: ' + feeSum);};

      year: 5, saved: 145240.0514760841, fees: 1823.9448097195082
      year: 10, saved: 210946.72552775557, fees: 5329.071699986484
      year: 15, saved: 306379.13274362596, fees: 11677.706523607205
      year: 20, saved: 444985.2101088223, fees: 22746.568357507604
      year: 25, saved: 646296.7482230144, fees: 41538.4561823357
      year: 30, saved: 938681.7298073637, fees: 72821.71593023202
      year: 35, saved: 1363341.8275688116, fees: 124120.0285076505

</comment><comment><USER37> Has anyone seen actual performance of Weathfront portfolios? You would think people would publish their results, but they've been hard to find.

<comment><USER38> Here you go - with risk level 6: [http://i.imgur.com/5nchgSq.png](http://i.imgur.com/5nchgSq.png)

This compares to 14.4% for VFIAX (Vanguard 500) in the same time period.

In addition to the lower return, it's 0.37% in fees compared to 0.05%.

<comment><USER12> And the 500 index has a lower return from being top heavy. You would have gotten even better ROI with a broad market index like VTI.

<comment><USER38> These are not my only two investment vehicles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> So Wealthfront is for people who can't open their own Vanguard account and set up automated transfers/investments?

</comment><comment><USER40> There's a PBS video about this. It also talk about Vanguard being a very good mutual fund and every other mutual funds are making bank off of you through fees.

The video also advocate either Vanguard mutual funds or ETF.

<comment><USER41> Yes, Vanguard is way ahead in this. However, if you're not American, it's not always the best choice, as your returns may be lower because of tax issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> This post kind of misses the main point of services like Wealthfront. You're paying 0.25% in exchange for automatic rebalancing, asset class diversification, and tax optimization. If the combination of those factors is going to increase your yearly return by 0.25% or more (say, from 6.8% to 7.2%), it's worth it. If they won't, it's not.

It's silly to focus entirely on the fee aspect: the point of using Wealthfront is not because it's lower-cost, it's because you expect it to be better- performing from a total-return perspective. They may oversell themselves, and that's a valid criticism, but the OP fails to really analyze the raison d'etre of Wealthfront as a service. Comparing it to a single Vanguard ETF is not a proper comparison.

The Vanguard target retirement fund for 2035, for example, includes four underlying ETFs (US stock, international stock, US bonds, international bonds), whereas Wealthfront portfolios typically have more like six or seven asset classes (differentiating between developed and emerging international markets, and adding in natural resources and real estate). Left to my own devices, I don't have the time or inclination to do the research necessary to do that sort of additional asset diversification myself, determining the ideal allocation and then avoiding too much drift while not incurring too much tax. I also don't have the time to deal with tax loss harvesting, which might not matter for retirement accounts, but does make a difference for taxable accounts: you're likely incurring some taxation issues when it comes to portfolio rebalances, for example, since that necessarily involves asset sales. If you have $100k in wealthfront, you're paying $250/year in fees. If tax loss harvesting can only harvest $1k in losses during the year that offset (or at least avoid) $1k in capital gains, that still pays for the wealthfront fees by itself (if you assume 15% federal and 10% CA state tax on long-term capital gains). So, sure, the fees you pay wealthfront compound over time, but so does the money you pay in taxes. (You do eventually pay the taxes on that gain, of course, but the money you save now compounds over time, so you still come out significantly ahead).

So the question is: does additional asset class diversification plus tax optimization yield at least a 0.25% increase in your total return (net of taxes and fees) in an average year? I believe it does in my case, hence why I have my money with them. It's not because I'm some idiot taken in by slick marketing who can't do math and doesn't know about Vanguard ETFs: Wealthfront's core market is really people who _can_ do math and understand what they're getting for their 0.25%.

Similarly, you can quibble over asset-based fees over fixed fees, but that also misses the point: as long as they make me more money than I pay them, I come out ahead. If I come out ahead, why would I be complaining? If I don't come out ahead, then there's still no point in complaining: just don't use the service. Capitalism at its finest.

Again, it's sad that the OP and most of the comments in this thread don't even attempt to tackle the real value proposition here. Just saying "Stick it in a Vanguard ETF and you'll pay less in fees" is not at all addressing whether or not the core value proposition is valid.

<comment><USER34> > whereas Wealthfront portfolios typically have more like six or seven asset > classes

Why does increasing the number of asset classes guarantee a higher overall return? Is there any proof or intuition? Will increasing the number to 10 asset classes guarantee that you will consistently outperform VOO or VTI or VUG?

<comment><USER43> Because to some extent the asset classes are uncorrelated. This is the basis of Modern Portfolio Theory, and the reason you don't just dump everything into the highest-return class (e.g., stocks).

For a simplified model, check out Kelly gambling

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

<comment><USER34> Interesting, I did not know about that.

So with that logic, shouldn't Betterment with its 12 asset classes and 0.15% fees for >$100k invested be more optimal?

<comment><USER43> Maybe. More asset classes shouldn't hurt, although at some point they may not help much (new ones may be highly correlated to some combination of the previous ones) and lower fees are nice. For bigger portfolios WF's single- stock approach may add enough value to compensate for these. I'm sure both companies have simulations proving they're better...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've often wondered about precisely the author's issue – why do wealthfront, betterment, et. al. charge a percentage of assets under management? Is it just that no competitor has offered a flat rate yet, or is there intrinsically more work involved in trading larger sums?

To this one point:

> All these cases neglect to mention that you will probably only see the > maximal gain if you are maximally messing up already, by needlessly churning > your account to generate capital gains. As Vanguard's founder advises: Don't > just do something; stand there.

The author is listed as "Former Director of Product @ Facebook". If he received a portion of his compensation in Facebook stock, he needed to sell out of that position regularly to avoid being over invested. That should have had generated more in capital gains than tax loss harvesting could offset.

<comment><USER44> > That should have had generated more in capital gains than tax loss > harvesting could offset.

only in the year he sold after the IPO.

RSU vests are taxed as ordinary income.

<comment><USER45> Yes, but employee stock purchase plans (~50% of the time) result in large capital gains.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> > the financial advisor who treats his esteemed clients to FREE! luxury box > seats at the big game ( __* when you pay him $10,000 a year).

Always be suspicious of lavish gifts from someone who's services you employ... often means you're overpaying. We see this in real estate all the time. A broker who just made $80k on a week's work will often send their client a $200 gift card or take them out to a fancy dinner to "celebrate" (and alleviate guilt?).

</comment><comment><USER47> The author's points about advertising and hidden fees are well-taken.

Regarding "Stop charging proportional fees": if Vanguard, who charges proportional fees, is operating "at cost" as the author claims, then what is all that extra money paying for? The implication is that technology could be a game-changer because it unlinks the size of the effort from the size of the effect, but surely that is already happening with Vanguard's 12-digit funds.

</comment><comment><USER34> Does anyone here use wisebanyan? They claim $0 fees and still do the robo advising (i.e., solving the portfolio allocation problem).

</comment><comment><USER30> Wealthfront should compete not just on trying to execute the same old indices, but on creating new indices on the fly. For example, REIT Index Sans Illinois, Emerging Markets Sans Russia, etc. Infinite number of possible index portfolios. Anyone want to build that? send me a message

<comment><USER48> I believe that's what Motif is doing.

<comment><USER30> Yes. But with absolutely insane commission levels. I would like a Vanguard like product that lets me do it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I ran some numbers and Blake's idea could bring the cost down by 40-60%

[https://medium.com/@bluf/the-robotraders-versus-blake- ross-a...](https://medium.com/@bluf/the-robotraders-versus-blake- ross-a51ce36a8ae4)

</comment><comment><USER44> > the kindly rabbi who performed your bris

mohel performs a bris, not a rabbi

> It's why you're receiving 2% cash back on your credit card while your > neighbor pays 12% on his.

This is mostly because merchants pay a fee, and the CC company kicks it back to you.

> I'm not asking why Wealthfront helps itself to such margins, which is > obvious and perfectly normal, but rather why the market bears it

AirBnB and Uber and real estate agents do the same thing [price-proportional fees, not cost-proportional fees or flat fees]...

Anyway, it's not as bad Blake rants about. Flat fees hurt the least-wealthy customers.

1\. It's progressive. Wealthier customers pay more. That's good for sociery.

2\. It's not inherently a scam, anymore than airline tickets or home sales. Ultimately, they compete in the market, and have to price competitively. Companies will lower prices to attract customers (if competition arrives), but maintain their profit to stay in business.

<comment><USER25> Where are the lower prices alternatives to AirBnB and Uber? If they existed, would you be using them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Has someone created a web site that uploads your portfolio and makes tax loss harvesting suggestions for a fixed fee?Competition is what brings prices down.

</comment><comment><USER25> I would love to see the proportional fee killed. Even Vanguard charges this (though their fees are smaller, they are still a percentage). But the fact is the effort required to manage $10M is not 10x the effort required to manage $1M (especially with software). So why do we pay 10x as much? Because we always have!

That's the opportunity in front of Silicon Valley with regards to wealth management.

<comment><USER51> Vanguard does reduce the fee in many of its funds as the investment amount becomes larger. The tiers are Investor, Admiral, Institutional, and Institutional Plus. Some of these you can get in a 401k plan negotiated by your employer. VIIIX for example is an S&P fund with a 0.02% expense ratio.

<comment><USER25> Yes, I know about this.

I realized after posting the comment that the way to get a fixed price index fund (where the fee is not tied to the asset size) is just to buy stocks directly. Once you pay the one time commission, you own the stock forever with no yearly management fee.

Of course, that comes with other costs (you have to adjust yourself when the index changes, commission when you sell, etc).

<comment><USER51> Which index? If it's an S&P500 one that's 500 stocks to buy. What happens when companies enter the S&P500 or exit it? You would need to trade again which means more commission fees.

What if one company in the index grows considerably while another one falls in value? Do you rebalance between those two? More commissions. Index funds hide all of this and I would guess it winds up cheaper particularly if you include effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Not sure that 100,000k account for $20 a month is that good a deal. I have about that in my UK TD ISA and don't pay any account charges

</comment><comment><USER53> >There are other options available that would enable you to stop working years earlier

The only real option that enables people, on average, to stop working is automation.</comment>


Google Steps Where Many Have Stumbled: Sidewiki - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/23/google-steps-where-many-have-stumbled-sidewiki/ <comment><USER2> By having a large enough install base, they just might be the first to actually execute the idea successfully enough to really make it useful. I guess the major problem that's always been there with this kinda stuff in the past is that its just so inconvenient. But having it integrated directly into the browser (by default?) kind of axes that qualm -- plus the whole "age of twitter" thing, with our growing habit of blasting updates back and forth about your every moment helps a lot. Allowing your friends to easily join in the conversation can really help you feel like you aren't just shouting into the abyss.

The only thing that I still question whenever I see this stuff (including one of my own projects, so maybe I'm biased), is whether or not it meshes with the way we really communicate, and if it fits with the way we'd best want to leave our marks when annotating the web.

I mean, its obvious that we'd want to be able to see what's out there in the universe of all available conversations for what we're looking at, but does that mean its best to keep them all in a single stream, which is what it looks like sidewiki wants? And moreover, does that really just boil down into a triviality in implementation details? Or is it something more? Do we need to start re-examining the nature of how we comment? Maybe the single page collection idea works well for blogs and stuff like that because we're more or less being co-ordinated by the original author (and the conversation that grows out of the seed they planted), but when we start annotating, we aren't necessarily going to be discussing things in nearly the same frame as the meme generated by a page at large.

Maybe I don't want to talk about missiles on a link dedicated missiles. Maybe there was something in the article that sparked off something tangental (I can't spell, or even tell if that's a real word, sorry) about transportation, or energy, or something that would just be lost if I just let it drip into the chaotic conversation that 4chan drove towards jihad on its sidewiki page. The "implementation detail" way of resolving the issue is just to silo up conversations, but still allow people to find the common root that links them all together, so you don't always start at zero. And that's fine, a page can very easily have a 1-N relationship with its impending streams of thought, just like bit.ly lets links have 1-N shortlinks that pad our individual egos, but still tracks the traffic generated to the destination in aggregate.

But what about N-1? N-N? Things start getting really interesting. To me, its interesting on the scale of pagerank.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're going to annotate the web, please do it properly and have different layers. As in, let me select whose annotations I'd like to see. Order of importance of the annotations for me is: mine, site owner's, friends'/favourites'/bookmarked-peoples', everyone else's.

I don't understand why they flatten out the annotations and toss them into a universal dump.

<comment><USER4> That's not necessarily the right way to do it.

To formalize the problems, assume that Wikipedia was intended to be subjective and that editors are potentially malicious. So some edits in the middle of a changeset might be malicious, but children edits are legitimate. So you want to delete the malicious edits but preserve the dangling child edit. What is the correct way to reconcile this changeset?

Once you answer the above question, you can soften the intepretation of malicious to: Users that I would rather filter, because their opinions are stupid to me or because I consider them spammers.

<comment><USER3> Well see, the right way to do it is to have a single original document that represents a single version so that the annotation only applies to it. Of course this requires changing the whole web because there's no such thing as version control on it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting, but I stopped reading at "Sidewiki is part of Google Toolbar".

</comment><comment><USER6> Many sites already provide (1) a _HUGE_ number of "share" buttons to post to facebook, reddit etc, and (2) the ability to comment and have it appear below the article.

If you want to comment to your immediate circle use option (1). To comment to the whole world use (2).

I don't understand the motivation behind this app. Remember Third Voice came before (1) and (2) were popular.

Google needs it's content partners for Adsense, and I'm not sure how they're going to feel about random annotations on their content.

</comment><comment><USER7> "It's unlikely that websites will have the same visceral reaction today that they did to Third Voice a decade ago."

Yes, because IP issues (which I'm using as a catchall term, not as a commentary on the validity of any particular issue) on the Internet sure have cooled down since 2001.

Wanna bet nobody will react?

</comment><comment><USER8> i read a sci fi story recently in Asimov's in which every activity was rankable. it tracked a young man's attempts to "become somebody". he got to 124,425th in yoyo, 513,130th in honey making, 23,098th in blah. you get the point.

the story was a bit cliche in its ending: the young man, in his latest quest to become the world's best lover, is befriended by a young woman who avoids public recordings and doesn't give a damn about ranks. he finds enjoyment in learning how to juggle even though he is terrible.

the story is neither here nor there; i'm just thinking about the future.

note: if the real future, the rankings will be broken down by age, ethnicity, and some much particulars. why stop at 3 billion categories when you can slice it into 30 billion?

</comment><comment><USER9> My friend has been working on startup with a similar idea for sometime and they launched couple of months back. <http://www.tiseme.com/></comment>